Page 195 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

a universal metaphysics. Here rationality is understood to be a form of social
agreement and praise founded on cultural procedures rather than a universal given.
That is, rational action is that which can be justified within a specific cultural
172 context. This way of thinking understands the rationality of the physical sciences
to be a set of specialized languages that form a cultural classification system. That
is, the sciences consist of sets of conceptual tools that are the achievement of agreed
procedures rather than the revelation of objective truth.

Links Enlightenment, epistemology, modernism, postmodernism, poststructuralism,
pragmatism, truth

Reading The idea of ‘the reader’ and of ‘reading’ is a widely deployed metaphor in
cultural studies that is frequently used as an expansive synonym for the practices
associated with the interpretation of texts. Within cultural studies a text is taken to
be any term of signification generated through the organization of signs into
meaningful representations. Thus, just as a text is a literary metaphor for the products
of signifying practices so a reader is a metaphor for the reception or decoding of texts.
There is something of a tension between ‘democratic’ and ‘elite’ meanings of the
concept of reader when it is used within cultural studies. On the one hand reading
is understood to be an activity undertaken by all competent actors, while on the
other hand it is sometimes attributed to the critics’ particularly insightful act of
interpretation armed as they are with the tools of semiotics, discourse analysis or
literary theory. Further, textual analysis will commonly ascribe a ‘reading position’
to a textual structure; that is, the text is said to position empirical readers into a
particular way of understanding it. However, and by way of contrast, reception-
oriented cultural studies have stressed the need to explore the actual grounded
readings of culturally situated actors whose production of meanings may depart
from those of the critic. In this view, the critic is just another kind of reader and not
one with any particularly privileged access to its meanings.
A central issue for hermeneutics, a philosophical endeavour concerned with
textual interpretation, has been the degree to which the generation of meaning
resides in texts and/or is produced by readers. Likewise, the ‘encoding–decoding
model’ of the text–audience relationship explores the congruence and/or divergence
of ‘readings’ developed by the producers of texts and their readers/audiences. In
general terms, whatever analysis of textual meanings a critic may undertake, it is far
from certain which of the identified meanings, if any, will be activated by actual
readers/audiences/consumers. Thus it is clear that audiences bring previously
acquired cultural competencies to bear on texts in order to be active creators of
meaning.
Links Active audience, encoding–decoding, hermeneutics, subject position, text

Realism (a) An epistemological claim that the truth is identifiable as that which
corresponds to or pictures the real. As such, realism is another name for
representationalism and readers interested in this understanding of the concept of
realism should explore the links below.