Page 108 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

HERMENEUTICS

meaning. Rather, culture is heterogeneous both in terms of the different kinds of
texts produced and the different meanings that compete within texts. Right across
the Western world, it is argued, we have been witnessing the end of anything
remotely resembling a ‘common culture’. In particular, the past thirty years have 85
seen the fragmentation of lifestyle cultures through the impact of migration, the ‘re-
emergence’ of ethnicity, the rise and segmentation of youth cultures and the impact
of gender politics. Above all, the restructuring of global capitalism, niche marketing
and the aestheticization of daily life through the creation of an array of lifestyles
centred on the consumption of aesthetic objects and signs has fragmented the
cultures of class blocs.
In their post-Marxist revision of the concept of hegemony Laclau and Mouffe put
aside the final determination of social and cultural relations by class, which for
them does not determine cultural meanings. That is, ideology has no ‘class-
belonging’. They stress that history has no prime agents of social change and a
social formation has no one central point of antagonism. Instead, hegemonic and
counter-hegemonic blocs are formed through temporary and strategic alliances of
a range of discursively constructed subjects and groups of interest. Here, the ‘social’
is not understood to be an object but rather a field of contestation in which
multiple descriptions of the self and others compete for ascendancy. For Laclau and
Mouffe, it is the role of hegemonic practices to try to fix difference, to put closure
around the unstable meanings of signifiers in the discursive field.

Links Class, cultural politics, culture, ideology, Marxism, post-Marxism

Hermeneutics A philosophical endeavour concerned with textual meaning and
theories that explain interpretation as a process. It is associated in particular with
a German philosophical tradition that includes Heidegger, Iser and Gadamer. A
central issue for hermeneutics has been the generation of meaning and the degree
to which this can be said to reside in texts and/or is produced by readers. For
contemporary hermeneutic theory, understanding and meaning are realized by
actual readers in a process of textual interpretation that depends on the meanings
inscribed in a text and the activity of readers. The interplay that occurs between
texts and readers is known as ‘the hermeneutic circle’.
The influence of hermeneutics within cultural studies has largely been through
a reader-reception theory that challenges the idea that there is one textual meaning
associated with authorial intent. It also contests the notion that textual meanings
are able to police meanings created by readers/audiences but instead stresses the
interactive relationship between the text and the audience. Thus the reader
approaches the text with certain expectations and anticipations which are modified
in the course of reading to be replaced by new ‘projections’. Understanding is
always from the position and point of view of the person who understands. This
involves not merely reproduction of textual meaning but the production of new
meaning by the readers. The text may structure aspects of meaning by guiding the
reader but it cannot fix meanings that are the outcome of the oscillations between
the text and the imagination of the reader.