Page 196 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

REDUCTIONISM

Links Discourse, Enlightenment, epistemology, language-game, representation, truth

(b) Realism is a form of artistic representation commonly found in novels, films, plays,
paintings and so forth that make claims to be picturing an independent object 173
world as if looking through an unmediated ‘window’ onto it. Realism purports to
show us ‘things as they really are’ and in doing so disguises its own status as an
artifice. Realism also constructs narratives that have rationally ordered connections
between events and characters. The narrative of realism sets its self up in a position
of knowledge as an overarching ‘metanarrative’ of truth in the form of the narration
of events. This metalanguage privileges and disguises the editorial position. Given
that cultural studies deconstructs or takes apart texts in order to show how they are
put together, then it is necessarily critical of the epistemological claims of realism.
Thus cultural studies understands realism to be a set of aesthetic conventions by
which texts create ‘reality effects’.
For many writers from within cultural studies realism is a politically conservative
and authoritarian mode of representation. Thus, anti-realists forge aesthetic
practices that reveal their own techniques and allow for reflection upon the
processes of signification. Historically, such work has been identified with the
‘alienation effects’ of Brechtian theatre, for example direct address to the audience
or the disruption of the pretence of realism by the spectacle of singing. Later, similar
effects are said to have been achieved through the modernist techniques of directors
like Jean-Luc Godard which show the operation of cameras and refuse the smooth
flow of realist narrative by jumping without ‘motivation’ from place to place or time
to time. In this vein, stories do not follow the established convention of linear
causality or the ‘ordinary’ flow of everyday time. More recently, it has been claimed
that postmodernism challenges the domination of realism in television, but unlike
modernism, does this through accessible popular culture.
However, the deconstructive work is itself a construction, a language of its own,
which can be a problem where large numbers of people do not speak that language.
Thus non-realist transgressive performances may not be read as such by audiences
who do not already understand the ‘rules’ being violated and the purposes of the
performance. Since the success of styles of cultural intervention is closely connected
to the context of their occurrence, realist and naturalist modes of representation are
not always politically mistaken because realism may be the only possible language
of communication for a particular audience.
Links Aesthetics, avant-garde, modernism, narrative, representation, soap opera

Reductionism Reductionism is a form of explanation by which one category or
phenomenon is likened to and explained solely in terms of another category or
phenomenon. Here, to reduce means to lessen, contract and diminish since one
component of human endeavour is deemed to have no specificity of its own but
rather is the product of another form of activity. In particular, many cultural studies
writers have argued against forms of economic reductionism by which the
meanings of cultural texts are accounted for in terms of political economy. It is