Page 189 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

word for ‘action that shapes the world’, seeks to dissolve the distinction between
theory and practice.
The concept of praxis involves a deconstruction of the binary pair of theory and
166 practice involving recognition that each belongs to and in the other. For example,
theory is not an unproblematic reflection or discovery of objective truth about an
independent object world but a culturally situated practice. Equally, the meaning
of a practice does not inhere within the action itself and no amount of stacking up
of empirical data about practice can produce a meaningful story outside of the
structures of language and theory. This overcoming of the divide between theory
and practice is the meaning of praxis that has most concerned modern users of the
concept.
The development of Marxism proved to be a significant moment in the modern
extension of the use of the concept of praxis into the social and cultural domain.
Thus Marx is critical of all previous forms of materialism for conceiving of ‘reality’
only as an object of contemplation rather than as a practice. However, as Marx
argued, while humans are practical beings the ground on which they act has already
be determined for them. Thus, on the one hand the consciousness of human beings
is the product of particular historical material conditions, but on the other hand we
are able to change those conditions, which by implication, leads to further
alterations in human thinking. Thus the very knowledge produced by people under
specific historical conditions enables them to bring about material change and as
a consequence to change themselves. Thus does the circle of praxis keep turning.
As well as dissolving the distinction between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’, the notion
of praxis can also be understood as overcoming the binary divide between ‘thought’
and ‘action’ as well as between ‘agency’ and ‘determination’. The concept of praxis
helps us to grasp the actor as simultaneously culturally situated, that is, determined,
and as a choice-making actor. Theoretical knowledge and practice can never be
separated so that culture can be understood as the embodied praxis of
performances. For example, the creative, expressive and symbolic work of youth
subcultures is constituted by a situated creative doing – the praxis of performativity.
Thus, according to Hebdige, British Punk was a ‘revolting style’ that was not simply
responding to the crisis of British decline manifested in joblessness, poverty and
changing moral standards but performed and dramatized it in an angry, dislocated,
but self-aware and ironic mode of signification.

Links Agency, determinism, Marxism, practice, performativity, structuration, structure

Psychoanalysis Psychoanalysis is a body of thought and therapeutic practice developed
from the nineteenth-century writings of Sigmund Freud and which has been further
refined and modified by subsequent thinkers. It has been the version of
psychoanalysis developed by Lacan in the 1970s and interpreted by Judith Butler
and Julia Kristeva amongst others that has been the most influential stream within
cultural studies. For its supporters, the great strength of psychoanalysis lies in its
rejection of the fixed nature of subjects and sexuality in favour of exploring the
construction and formation of subjectivity.