Page 109 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

The premises of hermeneutics have been questioned since the rise of
poststructuralism which has challenged the idea that authors and readers as unified
subjects are the source of meaning. In other words, poststructuralism has disputed
86 the implicit humanism of hermeneutics and its association of meaning with the
intentionality of persons. Thus Foucault argued against interpretative or
hermeneutic methods that seek to disclose the ‘hidden’ meanings of language,
suggesting instead that we be concerned with the description and analysis of the
surfaces of discourse and their effects. Further, Barthes famously declared ‘the death
of the author’ in the whirlpool of intertextuality.

Links Active audience, author, encoding–decoding, intertextuality, meaning, reading

Hoggart,Richard (1918– ) As Professor of English at Birmingham University (UK) in
1964, Richard Hoggart was instrumental in the formation of the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) and became its first Director. His influential
book The Uses of Literacy explores the character of English working class culture as
it developed and changed from the 1930s through to the 1950s. In the first part of
his book Hoggart gives a sympathetic, humanist and detailed account of the lived
culture of the working class before going on to give a rather more acid account of
the development of ‘commercial culture’.
Hoggart’s central legacy to cultural studies is the legitimacy he accorded to the
detailed study of working class culture, that is, to the meanings and practices of
ordinary people as they seek to live their lives and make their own history. As such,
he has often been associated with culturalism, and, though this may not be
warranted, it does at least distinguish him from the Marxist and Left-leaning turn
taken by cultural studies after he handed over the Directorship of CCCS to Stuart
Hall.
• Associated concepts Capitalism, class, commodification, mass culture, popular
culture.
• Tradition(s) Cultural studies, culturalism.
• Reading Hoggart, R. (1957) The Uses of Literacy. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Holism A methodological approach that insists on the non-separability of the parts of
any domain of analysis from the whole in which it rests. Further, the properties of
the whole are not fully determined by the properties of its parts. The whole is
always more than the sum of its parts and the designation of levels is a device for
understanding that can only be used in the context of a well-defined analytic
arrangement or metaphor designed to achieve particular purposes.
Methodological holism argues that the best way to study a complex system is to
treat it as a whole rather than be content with analysis of the structure and
‘behaviour’ of its component parts. Indeed, the non-separability inherent to holism
suggests that the properties of the whole are not fully determined by the properties
of its parts. In this view, a society or culture always adds up to more than is stated
by a description of the relationships of the parts or levels. While a methodological
individualist maintains that to study society is to investigate the behaviour of