Page 32 - Culture and Cultural Studies

AN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES 31

However, Foucault also questions the idea of a clear and final break between enlighten-
ment and post-enlightenment thought, or between the modern and postmodern
(Foucault, 1984c: 249).

The character of truth
How can we ground or justify cultural theory and cultural politics? This is one of the central
problems of cultural studies. For modernists, the adoption of a realist epistemology has
allowed writers and researchers to make universal truth claims. It follows that once we know
the truth about the workings of the social world, then we can intervene strategically in
human affairs with confidence. All the social sciences, from sociology to economics and psy-
chology, were founded on the premise that conceptual and empirical truth can be discovered.
However, realist epistemologies have largely been displaced within cultural studies.
This is a consequence of the influence of poststructuralism, postmodernism and other
anti-representationalist paradigms. These widely accepted (within cultural studies)
strands of thinking have undermined the notion of objective and universal truth.
For the philosopher Nietzsche (1968) truth is expressed in language so that sentences
are the only things that can be true or false. Truth is a ‘mobile army of metaphors and
metonyms’. An acculturated authority arbitrates between these sentences. Thus ‘truth’ is
a question of whose interpretations count as truth. Truth is embroiled in power. Foucault
(1972, 1973), whose work was greatly informed by Nietzsche, argues that different epis-
temes, or configurations of knowledge, shape the practices and social order of specific
historical periods. In place of Truth, Foucault speaks instead about particular ‘regimes of
truth’. Similarly, Rorty (1980, 1989) argues that all truth is culture-bound and specific to
times and places. Knowledge and values are located in time, space and social power. To
argue that all knowledge is positional or culture-bound is not to embrace relativism.
Relativism would imply the ability to see across different forms of knowledge and to con-
clude that they are of equal value. Instead, as Rorty argues, we are always positioned
within acculturated knowledge. There is no final vocabulary of language that is ‘true’ in
the sense of accurately picturing an independent object world called reality. Our vocabu-
laries are only final in the sense of currently being without a tenable challenge. Thus, our
best bet is to go on telling stories about ourselves that aim to achieve the most valued
description and arrangement of human actions and institutions.

QUESTIONS OF METHODOLOGY

Cultural studies has not paid much attention to the classical questions of research meth-
ods and methodology. Thus, methodological texts by Alasuutari (1995), McGuigan
(1997b) and Gray (2003) are exceptions to the rule. Further, most of the debates in cultural

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