Page 145 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

condition is invisible to us in the normal day-to-day conduct of life. By contrast, the
power and value of a new metaphor lies in its strangeness and thus in the ability to
help us look at the world in new ways. Ultimately, argues Derrida, the very idea of
122 literal meaning is based on the idea of the ‘letter’, that is, writing, and as such, literal
meaning is always underpinned by its apparent opposite – metaphor.

Links Language, meaning, poststructuralism, pragmatism, truth, writing

Methodology There are two ways in which to grasp the concept of methodology. The
first and technically more sound route is to understand the term as referring to the
philosophical investigation of the techniques of inquiry adopted by any given
discipline. As such, methodology is a branch of epistemology. However, it is
common place, if somewhat misguided, to also use the term methodology to refer
to the specific techniques employed by a discipline to acquire and manage data.
Here, the concept is being used to refer to research methods.
The main methodological/epistemological debate within cultural studies has
been between representationalism (realism) and anti-representationalism
(poststructuralism, postmodernism and pragmatism). The realist argument is that
a degree of certain knowledge about an independent object world (a real world) is
possible even though methodological vigilance and reflexivity need to be
maintained. In contrast, writers influenced by poststructuralism, postmodernism
and pragmatism do not think that an objective and accurate picture of an
independent object world is possible. Here, knowledge is not a question of
discovering objective and accurate truth but of the construction of interpretations
about the world which are ‘taken to be true’.
The standard methodological distinction regarding research methods is between
quantitative and qualitative approaches. That is, between, respectively, methods
that centre on numbers and the counting of things (for example, statistics and
surveys) and those that concentrate on the meanings generated by actors gathered
through participant observation, interviews, focus groups and textual analysis.
Cultural studies has not paid much attention to the classical questions of research
methods but has for practical purposes favoured qualitative methods with their
focus on cultural meaning. Thus, work in cultural studies has centred on three kinds
of research methods:

(a) Ethnography, which has often been linked with culturalism and a stress on the
investigation of ‘lived experience’.
(b) A range of textual approaches which have tended to draw from semiotics,
poststructuralism and deconstructionism.
(c) A series of audience reception studies which are eclectic in their theoretical roots
but for whom hermeneutic theory has been of significance.
Links Deconstruction, epistemology, ethnography, hermeneutics, signs, truth

Mirror phase A term connected to the psychoanalytic work of Lacan for whom the
resolution of the Oedipus complex marks the formation of the unconscious as the