Theorizing Culture

An Interdisciplinary Critique After Postmodernism

Barbara Adam, Stuart Allan, Barbara Adam, Stuart Allan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135366810
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This highly original and timely volume engages scholars from the breadth of social science and the humanities to provide a critical perspective on cultural forms, practices and identities. It looks beyond the postmodern debate to reinstate the critical dimension in cultural analysis, providing a "student-friendly" introduction to key contemporary issues such as the body, AIDS, race, the environment and virtual reality.
Theorizing Culture is essential reading for undergraduate courses in cultural and media studies and sociology, and will have considerable appeal for students and scholars of critical theory, gender studies and the history of ideas.

PART I
Truth, reality and cultural critique

Introduction to Part I

The contributors to this first section of the book approach the problematic of cultural critique in the context of postmodernist debates about “truth” and “reality”. The emphases of their discussions range from the use of rhetorical devices in the construction of narratives to the practice of reflexivity in academic culture, from inscriptions of the body in fiction and notions of “the Real” in Lacanian psychoanalysis to poetry as source of the critical Utopian moment, from representations of AIDS in public health documents to the “will to facticity” inflected in news discourse. Despite these diverse interests and perspectives, the chapters nevertheless cohere around a shared concern with the capacity of contemporary cultural theory for retaining a critical edge, for prioritizing the dynamic politics of truth-claims about reality and the necessity for engaging with matters of ethics.

Christopher Norris, in the opening chapter entitled “Culture, criticism and communal values: on the ethics of enquiry”, sets the scene for several of the key debates taking place across the pages of this book. At issue is the need to critique certain relativist trends in recent cultural theory within the specific context of postmodernism, particularly what he calls “the fashionable rhetoric of ‘otherness’–of alterity, radical difference, heterogeneity and so forth–that has gone along with this relativizing drift across various disciplines of thought”. Norris makes the case (via a reading of Derrida on Levinas) that such notions are both philosophically untenable and a source of much confusion in present-day thinking about questions of ethics and politics. Postmodernist thinkers like Lyotard have worsened matters, in his view, through their skewed understanding of history, their rejection of a typecast “Enlightenment” metanarrative, their misreading of precursors such as Kant and their failure to perceive the disabling consequences of a relativism pushed to this dogmatic extreme.

In the next chapter, “Realism and its discontents: on the crisis of cultural representation in ethnographic texts”, Paul Atkinson and Amanda Coffey proceed to elaborate upon several of these issues through an examination of the ethnography of culture and the culture of ethnography. They begin by pointing out that a number of theoretical developments–including postmodernism, feminist research and the “rediscovery” of rhetoric–are being blamed by some researchers for plunging ethnography into an exigent “crisis of representation”. It is Atkinson and Coffey’s contention, however, that this perception of a “crisis” has been an unnecessarily exaggerated response. Accordingly, they suggest that a renewed interest in the rhetoric of inquiry offers a series of positive opportunities for the contemporary ethnographer who is attempting to look beyond the epistemological and theoretical upheavals characteristically associated with postmodernism.

This concern with questions of rhetoric and the construction of ethnographic narratives is followed by “Reflexivity in academic culture”, Simon Hopper’s discussion of the reflexive turn in theory. He identifies the need for a reflexivity that turns on the self without ending up in the futile reflexive regress associated by some critics with postmodernism. He argues that critical accounts of academic culture should move beyond the rather abstract discussions of the writer–text–reader relationship so as to explore the wider cultural contexts of knowledge. In his view, we need to take account of the issues surrounding the production, reception and reproduction of academic culture, issues that tend to be displaced by an exclusively textual approach. By placing the emphasis on reflexivity, Hopper contends, we stand to gain a potentially powerful, collective project that poses a political challenge to the taken-for-granted framework of the human sciences.

In “Theorizing the body’s fictions”, Jane Moore takes a feminist literary perspective on the issues of truth, cultural representation and political practice. She examines the contemporary feminist debate on essentialism that has arisen in the context of, and partly to counter, a postmodern scepticism towards truth. Specifically, Moore is concerned with the implications for feminist theory of the return of the body as the referent of sexual difference. Without minimizing the importance of the materiality of the body for identity and action, she problematizes the contention that the anatomical body yields the truth or reality of sexual difference. In order to articulate and theorize these issues, she engages with Jeanette Winterson’s short novel, Written on the body. By focusing on what literature has to say about the reality of the body, and what postmodern theory has to say about literature, Moore explores the conditions of contemporary meanings of the sexed body.

From an engagement with cultural constructions of the body we move to a psychoanalytic encounter with the radical potential of the subconscious. In “Culture, subjectivity and the real; or, psychoanalysis reading postmodernity”, Fred Botting argues that, in these “postmodern times”, reality is not what it used to be. This chapter, in seeking to address the issue of who claims the right to define reality, centres on the problem of subjectivity. Specifically, Botting argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis provides a framework for examining postmodern culture and its effects on identity and psychic wellbeing. He proceeds, in turn, to identify cultural responses to postmodernity in terms of particular states of mourning and psychosis, thereby raising intriguing questions about the necessary function and possibility of a unifying, regulating cultural principle. Indeed, it is the desire for this “paternal metaphor”, Botting suggests, that escapes both the metanarratives of Enlightenment thought and the radical relativist position typically associated with postmodernism.

Andrew Edgar and Peter Sedgwick, in their chapter entitled “Adorno, Oakeshott and the voice of poetry”, are concerned with postmodernist criticism of Enlightenment thought and, in particular, with the “manifestation of reason” in a culture dominated by science. The authors focus on the work of the neo-Hegelian philosophers Adorno and Oakeshott in order to demonstrate that it is possible to take a sceptical approach to reason without, at the same time, collapsing into an uncritical celebration of pluralism and diversity. Oakeshott’s concept of a “voice of poetry”, they suggest, opens up the possibility of articulating a critical Utopian moment in all social relations. Edgar and Sedgwick then proceed to demonstrate how Adorno’s account of “tradition” focuses this mode of argument in an analysis of past and present mundane social practice, one that is antithetical to both Enlightenment science and postmodernism.

“Representing AIDS: the textual politics of health discourse” is the title of Karen Atkinson and Rob Middlehurst’s contribution to this section’s discussion. This chapter highlights the degree to which postmodern cultural theory has neglected linguistic specificity in its accounts of discourse. Having first foregrounded a series of issues regarding how discourses may be theorized as being indicative of the wider organization of power relations within society, this chapter proceeds to consider recent work specifically dealing with language, AIDS and cultural activism. Atkinson and Middlehurst then seek to explore, by integrating critical and literary theory with a form of close textual analysis, how the politicization of HIV and AIDS is discursively constituted through health promotion materials. Their analysis of both “mainstream” and “alternative” documents explicates several points of ideological contestation in the conceptualization and framing of HIV and AIDS issues, thereby underscoring how the very materiality of the cultural meanings in play is itself a “linguistic battlefield”.

Finally, this section of the book ends with Stuart Allan’s chapter “News, truth and postmodernity: unravelling the will to facticity”, in which he seeks to extend a number of the themes raised above in the context of researching news discourse. It is his contention that some researchers of news media culture, anxious to retain notions of “objectivity” and “bias”, are relying upon certain modernist notions of “reality” to support their claims that are untenable. Specifically, where these researchers implicitly assume that journalists possess the capacity to symbolically translate “the world out there” (the world beyond our immediate experience) in an “impartial” manner, the ensuing critique of “news bias” is frequently restricted to considering the degree to which this “reality” has been distorted in the resultant news narrative. Consequently, Allan suggests that we need to render analytically visible the very invisibility of the truth-claims embedded in these “factual” accounts of reality by unravelling what he terms “the will to facticity” as it is implicated in the news text’s regulation of truth.

CHAPTER 1
Culture, criticism and communal values: on the ethics of enquiry

Christopher Norris

Introduction

“What is truth?” asked Pontius Pilate, jesting–or so the tale goes–and did not stay for an answer. If the question comes up at all nowadays in the context of cultural theory then it is likely to receive little more by way of serious or reasoned response. For many–poststructuralists in particular–the very mention of “truth” is enough to evoke first a sceptical, then a mildly pitying, and then–if one persists in raising the matter–a downright contemptuous response. After all, don’t we know (after Saussure) that language is a system of relationships and differences “without positive terms”; that the link between signifier and signified is strictly “arbitrary”; that signs are caught up in an endless process of intertextual differing–deferral; and therefore (QED) that notions like reference, reality and truth simply drop out of the picture, mere remnants of an old “metaphysical” (or logocentric) prejudice that has now been deconstructed once and for all (Saussure 1974). And if this is not enough to convince the stubborn party then they had best be advised–on no lesser an authority than Foucault–that such talk is always and everywhere a product of power/knowledge interests, an effect of that domineering drive within discourse whose operations are masked behind a specious rhetoric of reason, enlightenment and truth (see Foucault 1977, 1980). At this point–if not before–the arguments tend to run out.

I trust I am not alone in thinking this to be a lamentable state of affairs. For there is something to worry about when a movement of thought gets so far out of touch with the standards and values–not to mention the common decencies–of open argumentative debate. All the more so when its followers make a habit of denouncing those bad old dogmatic (“Enlightenment”) notions of truth, reason, critique, etc., while effectively placing their own ideas beyond reach of criticism or counter-argument. Of course this might be seen as just another version of the self-refuting paradox built into all relativist doctrines. That is to say, if such arguments are valid then there must be at least one truth-claim exempted from the general (relativist) rule, i.e. the claim that “all truths are relative”, or again, that all arguments in the end come down to a matter of consensus belief. In the case of poststructuralism the truths that enjoy this privileged status are those having to do with language (or “discourse”) as the ultimate horizon of intelligibility. Thus one simply has to accept–on pain of exclusion from the right-thinking fold–that language is a network of differential signs, that these signs refer to nothing outside or beyond their own structural economy, that “reality” is a construct out of this or that language-game, discourse, signifying practice, or whatever. If it is asked what reason the poststructuralists can offer for advancing these (surely) less than self-evident claims, then the answer is most often: thus spake Saussure. And it is always the same few talismanic passages that are cited by way of scriptural warrant. Chief among them are Saussure’s now famous remarks on the “arbitrary” nature of the sign, on the absence of so-called “positive” terms, and on the fact that different languages have a different range of semantic, conceptual or categorical distinctions.

What these theorists tend to ignore–and for obvious reasons–is the following series of awkward points about Saussure’s much-vaunted “revolution” in linguistics. First: his project was a relatively specialized affair, designed to counterbalance the prevalent stress on historical (diachronic) aspects of language, and adopted for the mainly heuristic purpose of excluding those other dimensions (e.g. reference) that could not be theorized in structural–synchronic terms. Saussure is clear enough–though in passages that scarcely rate a mention on the standard (poststructuralist) account–that these concerns were set aside for the sake of achieving an adequate degree of conceptual rigour from his own methodological standpoint, and not because he thought them otiose, wrongheaded or simply beside the point. A more attentive perusal will discover nothing in the Cours de linguistique générale that can possibly be read as lending support to such a wholesale dismissive attitude. Nor, for that matter, would the case be much strengthened had Saussure indeed made the kinds of exorbitant claim that are nowadays attributed to him. For there is something decidedly suspect–a throwback to the pre-Enlightenment age of faith–in the notion that arguments can be made good simply by appealing to the wisdom enshrined in some canonical text. This is perhaps the most retrograde aspect of much that currently passes for “advanced” theoretical thinking in the human and social sciences. Hence the second main objection to poststructuralism’s use of Saussure: that it treats his text with the same kind of piecemeal but dogmatic fixation on a few sacred points that has characterized the wranglings of theological discourse down through the ages. That is to say, it exploits the Cours as a convenient sounding-board for its own doctrinal preconceptions, and thus ignores Saussure’s claim to have brought about a specific theoretical advance in certain well-defined areas of structural–linguistic enquiry. (For further arguments to this effect see Anderson 1983, Tallis 1988, Eagleton 1991, Cunningham 1993.)

This claim was not lost upon an earlier generation of theorists, those (like Althusser, Macherey and Goldmann) who understood more of the intellectual background–especially in philosophy of science–that went along with the promotion of Saussurean linguistics as a pilot discipline for other fields of research (see especially Althusser 1990; also Gutting 1989 and Norris 1991). But such is the turnover rate in present-day intellectual fashion that these are considered mere name-antiquities, honoured (if at all) with nostalgic fondness for that age of high theoreticist illusion. What price theoretical rigour, consistency, truth-conditions and so forth when it is known for a fact–or with presumptive warrant from Saussure–that all such ideas are “constructed in language”, have meaning only by virtue of their role within some localized interpretive community, or exist solely as figments of an epistemic will-to-power vested in the discourse of logocentric reason? No matter that Saussure, on all the evidence to hand, would have regarded this doctrine as utterly foreign to the nature and ambitions of his own undertaking. No matter that the claims of structural linguistics–and its relevance to other fields of thought–were staked upon a strong version of the argument from conditions of possibility, that is, the a priori criteria that a theory must satisfy in order to count as a valid contribution to knowledge. As I say, these aspects of Saussure’s work were precisely what appealed to thinkers in other fields–anthropology, poetics, political theory–who welcomed the prospect of a radical break (an epistemological coupure) with prevailing explanatory norms. Structural linguistics could thus be seen as converging with that movement in philosophy of science, represented most notably by Bachelard and Canguilhem, which likewise sought to define the conditions under which a discipline could properly assert some claim to theoretical validity. But this is now treated as a bygone episode in the history of thought, a distant prelude to the dawning awareness that science–like philosophy–is just one “discourse” among others, a language-game with its own favoured idioms and metaphors, but without any privilege in point of epistemological rigour or truth.

Relative truths

If Bachelard is remembered nowadays it is chiefly for works like The psychoanalysis of fire, his essays in reflection on those modes of metaphoric or creative reverie that stand, so to speak, at the opposite pole from the scientific language of concept and logical inference (Bachelard 1964; also 1969, 1971). What is thereby forgotten–one might say repressed–is the fact that these writings were themselves a part of his epistemological project, his attempt to distinguish more clearly between the two realms of thought. It is a plain misreading of Bachelard’s work to extract from it the modish (quasi-Derridean) doctrine that “all truth-claims are fictions”, “all concepts just sublimated metaphors” or “‘science’ merely the name we attach to some currently prestigious language-game”. On the contrary: Bachelard’s aim was to prevent such promiscuous levelling of the difference–the more than contingent, linguistic or localized (culture-specific) difference–between sc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Theorizing Culture: An Introduction
• PART I: Truth, Reality and Cultural Critique
• PART II: Recasting Cultural Politics