Page 22 - Culture and Cultural Studies

AN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES 21

Anti-essentialism does not mean that we cannot speak of truth or identity. Rather, it
points to them as being not universals of nature but productions of culture in specific
times and places. The speaking subject is dependent on the prior existence of discursive
positions. Truth is not so much found as made and identities are discursive constructions.
That is, truth and identity are not fixed objects but are regulated ways that we speak about
the world or ourselves. Instead of the scientific certainty of structuralism, poststructural-
ism offers us irony – that is, an awareness of the contingent, constructed character of our
beliefs and understandings that lack firm universal foundations.

Postmodernism

There is no straightforward equation of poststructuralism with postmodernism, and the
sharing of the prefix ‘post’ can lead to an unwarranted conflation of the two. However,
they do share a common approach to epistemology, namely the rejection of truth as a
fixed eternal object. Derrida’s assertion of the instability of meaning and Foucault’s
awareness of the historically contingent character of truth are echoed in Jean-François
Lyotard’s postmodern ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. Lyotard (1984) rejects the
idea of grand narratives or stories that can give us certain knowledge of the direction,
meaning and moral path of human ‘development’. Lyotard has in mind the teleology of
Marxism, the certainty of science and the morality of Christianity.
Postmodern writers like Lyotard (1984) or Rorty (1989) share with Foucault the idea
that knowledge is not metaphysical, transcendental or universal but specific to particular
times and spaces. For postmodernism, knowledge is perspectival in character – that is,
there can be no one totalizing knowledge that is able to grasp the ‘objective’ character of
the world. Rather, we have and require multiple viewpoints or truths by which to inter-
pret a complex, heterogeneous human existence. Thus, postmodernism argues that
knowledge is:

v specific to language-games;

v local, plural and diverse.

One strand of postmodernism is concerned with these questions of epistemology, that is,
questions of truth and knowledge. However, an equally significant body of work is cen-
tred on important cultural changes in contemporary life. Postmodern culture is said to
be marked by a sense of the fragmentary, ambiguous and uncertain quality of the world,
along with high levels of personal and social reflexivity. This goes hand in hand with a
stress on contingency, irony and the blurring of cultural boundaries. Cultural texts are
said to be typified by self-consciousness, bricolage and intertextuality. For some thinkers,
postmodern culture heralds the collapse of the modern distinction between the real and
simulations (see Chapter 6).

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