ANTROPOLOGI

Chapter 4

DI SUSUN OLEH :
SAGITA HUSLIANI.HUSEN.
NIM : 41033734172006
JURUSAN : PERPUSTAKAAN
FAKULTAS ILMU KOMUNIKASI UNINUS
UNIVERSITAS ISLAM NUSANTARA
Chapter 4
Subjectivity and address

Theories deriving from both structuralism and Marxism require us to replace the notion of the
individual with that of the subject. This is not to deny that we are all individuals. That is, that we
inhabit different bodies with different and unique genetic structures, but it is to say that that
part of us which forms our individuality is essentially biological, part of nature, and does not,
therefore, form a major part of the study of culture.
Cultural studies are concerned with it, of course, is the sense that various cultures make of the
individual and the sense of self as individuals, experience.
According to OSullivan et al. (1983: 231-2)
the constructed sense of the individual in a network of social relations is referred to as the
subject trace to three main: subject as in political theory, subject as in idealist philosophy,
subject as in grammar.
But, According to theories of Freud and Lacan that have produced a relation between the
individual and subjectivity that stresses the social and linguistic dimensions, and thus contrasts
with the individualism of idealist philosophy.

The social subject

Hartley (1983) lists seven types of subjectivity (which he defines as a structure of accessed
identifications): self, gender,age-group, family, class, nation, ethnicity. The unity of this subject
position is what makes it so acceptable in an individualist ideology (in which the individual is
seen as both unique and unified) and this unity is the inevitable effect of realism.
MacCabe (1981a) explains, is incapable of handling contradictions. This unified subject position
denies any possible contradictions among these seven social agencies, and brings them
together in a coherent whole within which each supports the others. So, for instance, there are
no contradictions between types of subjectivity. Hartleys list of seven is provocative and
illustrative rather than exhaustive: he could well have added social agencies such as education,
religion, political allegiance, region, urban or rural, and so on. All of these, because of the
unifying, mutually supporting way in which these agencies work.

To make here is that these social agencies are not confined to television: indeed they work so
easily in television realism only because they are representations of agencies actively at work in
society. Television is able to construct a subject position for us only because these social
agencies have been working all our lives to construct our subjectivities in equivalent ways.

The discursive subject

Language does not represent the world, but makes sense of it, for the world is not already
divided up into neat categories that language names. But if language makes sense of the world,
it makes that sense from a particular point of view.
Like all categorizations, our division of the constructors of subjectivity into the social, the
linguistic, and the psychological is useful for analysis only: in practice the categories leak into
each other, so that language and society are remarkably hard to separate out.

According to Althusser (1971) interpellation and which corresponds roughly with what
linguists call mode of address Both these terms refer to the fact that any discourse is
necessarily part of a relationship between addresser and addressee, and that any such
interpersonal relationship is.
Interpellation refers to the way that any use of discourse hails the addressee. In responding
to the call, in recognizing that it is being spoken to, we implicitly accept the discourses
definition of us or to put it another way, adopt to the subject position proposed for us by the
discourse.
Linguistic recognition of the viewers presence has its visual counterpart in the way that
television personalities (news readers, hosts and hostesses, etc.) look at the camera and
address it directly.
This nonverbal direct address works through eyes, tone of voice, facial expression, and gesture
in the same way as direct verbal address to construct an intimate, explicit viewing relationship.

The relationships are established between program and audience.

Relation of identity and complicity are sustained in the mechanisms and strategies of the
discourses of popular television, but also by the presenters, who have a key role in anchoring
those positions and in impersonating - personifying - them.

Addressing the subject

As the presenters embody the unity of the program are interpellated as unified subjects
repressing any discomforting contradictions in the sense that we make of the program and of
ourselves.

Psychoanalysis and the subject

The interaction between languages, their mode of address, and other social agencies is the one
that best accounts for the role of the subject in the television viewing: however, we must not
ignore the relationship between language and psychoanalysis in the construction of meanings,
and in the formation of the subjectivity which is the site of the meaning making process. This
has been particularly influential in the development of screen theory, but less helpful in
developing a theory of television and television criticism.