Page 31 - Culture and Cultural Studies

30 CULTURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Indeed, there is little evidence of popular support for radical political change in the
west at all, let alone ‘cultural revolution’. Reform seems to be the only possible way to
move forward within western liberal democracies. This does not mean that we have to
accept liberal democracy as it stands. On the contrary, one of our aims must be to push
for the extension of democratic practices within the liberal democratic framework. This
has led some in the field to argue for cultural policy that is specifically and carefully tar-
geted with a clear sense of the intended outcomes and mechanisms of transformation.

Rationality and its limits
Western cultures mostly assume that human life is explicable in terms of the rational
choices of individual actors. Rational action is that which can be justified within a specific
cultural context. Cultural studies would not want to adopt the notion of the rational actor
who calculates the means to maximize his or her interests. Nevertheless, there has been
an implicit assumption that rationality could provide logical explanations for cultural
phenomena. For example, a common assumption has been that racism and sexism would
dwindle in the face of rational argument.
Often absent from cultural studies are the non-linear, non-rational and emotionally
driven aspects of human behaviour. The exception to this observation is the import of
psychoanalysis into the field. For example, Hall (1990, 1992b, 1996a) and Butler (1993)
have profitably explored Lacanian psychoanalysis and the processes by which our psychic
identifications, or emotional investments, are attached to disciplinary discourses. Yet psy-
choanalysis has its own problems, not least its phallocentrism and spurious claims to
being an objective science (see Chapters 2 and 9). But still, there are very good reasons
why cultural studies as a discipline needs to further develop issues of affect and emotion.
Many of the horrors of our world are driven by emotional responses and social change is
never going to be a simple matter of argument and analysis.
A range of postmodern thinkers has criticized the impulses of modern rationality.
They argue that it brings us not so much progress as domination and oppression. The
very impulse to control nature through science and rationality is, it is argued, an impulse
to control and dominate human beings. This is an instrumental rationality whose logic
leads not only to industrialization but also to concentration camps.
Foucault, for example, argues that:

v knowledge is not metaphysical, transcendental or universal;

v knowledge is a matter of perspective;
v knowledge is not pure or neutral but is always from a point of view;
v knowledge is itself implicated in regimes of power.

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