Page 15 - Critical and Cultural Theory

GENERAL INTRODUCTION
sexual behaviour has repeatedly provided a model for keeping at
bay all potentially subversive activities.
Dominant ideologies are also committed to the promotion of a
culture's AESTHETIC values as a guarentee of its excellence.
Indeed, a culture's appreciation of beauty, its notions of taste and
refinement, and its attitudes to art are supposed to mirror its
ethical and moral worth. These agendas are never neutral or
innocent. They actually conform to social and political impera-
tives, and are intended to govern the REPRESENTATION of our
cultural existence. Everything, ultimately, is of the order of a
representation, because we can never know things and ideas
except insofar as they are encoded through accepted systems of
signification. Concomitantly, human subjects and their experiences
become functions of TEXTUALITY: what we are and how we act
is inevitably affected (or indeed determined) by endless chains of
narratives told both by us and about us. The validity of the
messages conveyed by these narratives is hard to ascertain. This is
because they are structured through language, and language
always contains a figurative dimension, RHETORIC, which tends
to distort and displace even the apparently most straightforward
messages. The statements proffered by any narrative may - but
equally well may not - conform to an actual state of affairs.
Hence, the representations and texts that make up our worlds tend
to undermine conventional distinctions between the real and the
unreal, the natural and the simulated, the world and its SIMULA-
CRUM.
Neither the MIND nor the BODY are in a position to supply
incontrovertible proof of the world's existence. This is largely due
to the fact that both the mind and the body are themselves elusive
entities, which refer simultaneously to a material and physical
reality, and to abstract concepts. Mind and body give us the coor-
dinates - most notably, SPACE and TIME - within which we
may map out our experiences. However, the maps we draw,
guided by both psychological and biological processes, are always
open to redefinition. In giving shape to their surroundings, mind
and body follow supposedly natural laws. However, they are also
governed by mechanical principles. The rapid expansion of tech-
nology (especially in its electronic applications) has thrown this
into relief by showing that the dividing-line between the organic
and the artificial is becoming more and more uncertain. In any

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