Global Journal of Human-Social Science, A: Arts and Humanities, Volume 22 Issue 8

© 2022 Global Journals Volume XXII Issue VIII Version I 21 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 A Locating Media in Cultural Theories Media's power to formulate a new modality of performative derives primarily from the necessity to signify. Media’s incessant search for the novel predicates media practice irrespective of genre. Media thus justify the self-practice of media, sometimes even for a topic not suitable for such justification. Then, how do the performative effects of speech acts in media recitation (or reproduction) lead to a social reality? Media generate new forms of performativity by transplanting localized speech acts in a new modality of recitations. In doing so, media exhibit a set of problematic aspects in relation to philosophical reflections on the speed act. In one sense, media support the claim that the immediacy of the context of a speech act is not necessarily the ultimate requirement for the realization of a speech act. On the other hand, media also depart from the philosophical arguments about the speech act, leading to questions about the historic formation of performativity and its consequences. V. C onclusion This article addressed recent reformulations, which seem innovative both theoretically and empirically, for alternative explications of media. The primary target in doing so is in the heuristic value of social theories for clarifying their problematic relation with media, a topic that tends to resist prescribed modes of explications. Based on semiotics, practice, and, to a much lesser degree, speech act theory, analysts generate constructs, or generalizations, that often deviate unexpectedly from the conceptual horizons inherent in respective schemes. The hiatus between the semiotic discussion about the semantic contents of media and the accountability of collectivity is exemplary. The emergence of imagined communities, though an ingenuous formulation that relies on a semiotic perspective, unexpectedly sheds light on the materiality of signs. Benedict Anderson skillfully mobilizes his insights into literary works as a type of media with the power to go beyond textual meaning. In this case, theory and practice in ethnographic research exhibit a characteristically contentious dialectic of conceptual synthesis and revaluation vis-a-vis empirical data. The latter reveals unfamiliar facades in an often unexpected fashion, revealing the shortcomings of prior formulations. The dialectic brings forward an unheeded hiatus in the horizons and also forces amendations to exonerate hasty application of theories. I argue that this dialectic is particularly acute in dealing with media, primarily because the topic has not been endowed with recognition of a problematic in need of a theory for the positivity of meaning. In a similar vein, the seemingly innocuous question of how media can be appropriated by groups of actors at first sight appears valid with regard to the introduction of practice theory for a new socially oriented approach to media. However, insofar as the theory that Bourdieu offered is concerned, practice necessitates an established social institution or habitus within which acts are embedded. Media can be a constitutive agent independent of stable institutionalizations (such as class) but, as mentioned, this would trigger a problem of accountability. Media tendentiously elude any search for the causality inherent in conventional social theories. Then, how should we conceptualize media as a constitution of social practice if the cultural consequence of practice in this case may be substantiated by reference to an objectified social order? If a reply to the question presupposes dissociation of practice from habitus, what analytic purchase can we expect of the breach? I argued, on the one hand, that reflection on the question of accountability in practice theory serves to draw attention to the increasing fluidity of reality in media-saturated society and the contrastive sense of constitutive power not captured by conventional analytic tools for interpretation of culture. Media engage subjects in a particular modality of existence . By intervening in the topology of daily life, media frame tempo-spatially orchestrated normalcy with an additional order not immediately apparent from the particularity of the information conveyed. How can we conceive this engagement? If Hepp is right in claiming that media “mould”, what is the actual process to materialize the consequence? If the expression predicates some act, what type of action is at issue? The limitation of space available prevents a summary of case studies on media with a focus on constitutive acts via speech practice grafted in media. However, the paucity of research based on speech act theory suggests that the notion of acts, as applied to media, remains metaphorical. This seems to be a natural consequence if the non-referential aspect of communication is not sufficiently captured. Reading Derrida’s views on speech act theory suggests that such an endeavor demands decomposition of core concepts of the theory. Just as Anderson’s formulation casts a delicate light on the use of theory in media research, media prefigured through the lenses of the performative force us to rethink the presence of media in everyday occurrence as a problematic unthought.