Page 90 - Critical and Cultural Theory

INTRODUCTION

Part I argues that human beings and their environments gain
meaning from their association with symbolic constructs. This
Part suggests that physical, psychological, political, ideological,
sexual and racial elements play a key role in the construction of
our identities. Saying that people and their worlds are constructs
is not tantamount to denying their existence as parts of nature. It
is, rather, a means of showing that natural forms and functions
are not in themselves meaningful but only become so when they
are ascribed certain social identities on the basis of factors such as
the ones mentioned above. The human body, for example, does
not derive meaning from its existence as a natural entity. It
acquires significance only insofar as it may be shaped and under-
stood as a cultural product or an object of cultural knowledge (see
Part III).
In arguing that people and their environments are constructs,
various strands of critical and cultural theory have radically chal-
lenged the doctrines of humanism and realism. Humanism's belief
in the unity and stability of identity has been undermined by the
claim that identity is actually the transient effect of multifarious
cultural practices. Identity is not an immutable essence or
substance so much as an image or series of images. Images, in
turn, do not reflect the world but rather mould it according to
specific requirements. While realism maintains that images mirror
reality and offer a keyhole view on a solid world, there for
everyone to share, the anti-humanist approach stresses that images
are contingent cultural fabrications.
Images sustain a culture's ideology: namely, the image of reality
created by that culture to legitimate itself and to produce certain

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