Page 14 - Critical and Cultural Theory

GENERAL INTRODUCTION
lized words are meant to foreground the titles of the chapters in
which specific issues are addressed.)
The MEANING we attribute to a living creature, object or idea
does not result from their intrinsic properties but rather from the
ways in which we read them. READING is not exclusively the act
in which we engage when we peruse a written text. In fact, it is a
process in which human beings are unremittingly involved as they
go about the world trying to account for both their physical and
their mental situations. Nor does reading consist of unearthing
stable truths inherent in reality, for truths, like meanings them-
selves, are only ever a product of the cultural tools we employ to
give shapes and names to otherwise amorphous experiences.
Furthermore, the strategies which people adopt in order to inter-
pret the world are neither timeless nor universal. They are, in fact,
inevitably bound to specific social, political and economic
contexts. Such contexts are predicated upon an IDEOLOGY:
namely, a set of cultural practices, discourses, beliefs and rituals
that aim at fashioning both single individuals and entire commu-
nities on the basis of dominant world views. In instructing us to
interpret the world in certain ways, ideology concurrently
constructs our SUBJECTIVITY: our social identities as compo-
nents of interrelated structures of power and knowledge. The poli-
tical and psychological socialization of individual subjects is
instrumental to the maintenance of an ideology, to the perpetua-
tion of its ways of reading and seeing the world, and to the attri-
bution of particular meanings to the things we read and see.
The procedures through which ideologies and their world views
are preserved are not uniform. In fact, they rely on multifarious
SIGN systems: the written word, the spoken word, the visual arts,
the media, codes of behaviour and ritualized conventions. What
these diverse systems share is a desire to give a culture a distinctive
identity, and a parallel determination to protect it against anything
OTHER. The Other is anyone and anything deemed capable of
disrupting the social fabric and the integrity of its imaginary
identity: strangers, foreigners, intruders and so-called racial and
ethnic minorities, for example. Strategies meant to keep the Other
under control (by either repressing or incorporating it) have often
targeted the areas of GENDER AND SEXUALITY. Sexual
desire has insistently been associated with humanity's most unruly
and transgressive drives. Accordingly, the regulation of people's

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