Page 175 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

individuals as subjects. This argument is an aspect of Althusser’s anti-humanism in
that the subject is not grasped as a self-constituting agent but rather as the ‘effect’
of the structures of ideology.
152 The poststructuralist work of Derrida and Foucault can also be understood as
post-humanist. Thus Foucault asserts that discourse constructs subject positions that
we are obliged to take up so that subjects are the ‘effects’ of discourse. Here being
a person is constituted by those positions that discourse obliges us to take up and
not by our own individual acts of self-grounding agency. Discourse constitutes the
‘I’ through the processes of signification and the speaking subject is dependent on
the prior existence of discursive positions. Thus, what it is to be a person is held to
be wholly and only the product of language, culture and history.
Derrida’s critique of what he calls ‘logocentrism’ and ‘phonocentrism’ in Western
philosophy is also a form of post-humanism because he is undermining the idea
that the individual human being is the source of stable meanings. For Derrida any
reliance on fixed a priori transcendental meanings (logocentricism) or on the
priority given to sounds and speech over writing (phonocentricism) is an untenable
attempt to find truth and subjectivity through reason unmediated by signification.
The privileging of speech, argues Derrida, allows philosophers to regard the
formation of subjectivity as unmediated agency in a way that would involve the
unique experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously from within itself.
Finally, psychoanalysis is post-humanist in that the self is conceived of in terms
of an ego, superego and the unconscious. This view of personhood immediately
fractures the unified humanist subject and suggests that what we do and what we
think are the outcome not of a rational integrated self but of the workings of the
unconscious that is normally unavailable to the conscious mind in any
straightforward fashion. Here the humanist unified narrative of the self is
understood to be something we acquire over time through entry into the symbolic
order of language and culture.

Links Agency, humanism, identity, ideology, logocentricism, subject position, subjectivity

Post-industrial society This is a concept that emerged in the early 1970s and has
gained ground ever since. It suggests that contemporary Western societies are
shifting their central processes from industrial manufacturing to service industries
and information exchange. The pre-eminence of information technology to the
social formation, along with a relative shift of emphasis from production to
consumption, is said to mark the post-industrial society. Pivotal to conceptions of
the post-industrial society are (a) the critical place of knowledge in the economy
and culture, (b) the shifts taking place in the kinds of work people do and (c) the
related changes in the occupational structure.
Theorists of the post-industrial society give a key role in their schema to
knowledge production and planning. In particular, information exchange and
cultural production are seen to displace heavy industry at the heart of the economy.
This, together with the emergence of new production processes, makes information
technology and communications the industries of the future. Central to these