Page 197 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

suggested that understanding culture cannot take the form of an economic
explanation alone because culture has its own specific forms and it own particular
mechanisms of operation. These specific features of culture cannot be reduced to
174 (that is, explained in terms of) the activities of wealth production and distribution
(though these are important facets of any culture).
Cultural studies has also been opposed to biological reductionism by which
human behaviour is grasped in terms of invariant features of human genetic
endowment that are resistant to change. A reductionist argument suggests that
genetics alone can provide a sufficient explanation for features of human culture
such as aggression no matter what other factors are present. Thus a biological
reductionist claim might involve saying that all men are more aggressive by nature,
whatever the environment, than are women. However, we need to ‘deconstruct’ the
opposition of nature and culture that is inherent in such arguments. On the one
hand culture is an outgrowth of human beings learning and adapting within their
natural ancestral environment, but on the other hand nature is already a concept
in language (and not a pure state of being beyond signs). Further, the natural world
has come under the sway of human knowledge and institutions so that we speak of
the ‘socialization of nature’ and through the investigations of genetic science we are
learning to intrude even further into the ‘natural’ human body.
Since we are complex biological and cultural creatures, any plausible attempt to
understand ourselves must embrace the idea of holism and complex system analysis
where objects of analysis are considered not only in isolation but also within their
systemic context. Indeed, the human and physical worlds are so interconnected
both within themselves and between each other that everything can be said to
affect everything else. As such reductionism is in general an unacceptable form of
analysis and explanation of human behaviour. Nevertheless, it may be useful to
adopt a distinction put forward by the philosopher Daniel Dennett between ‘greedy
reductionism’ and ‘good reductionism’.
Greedy reductionism seeks to reduce all human behaviour to one phenomenon
without recourse to intermediate causal steps, while good reductionism attempts to
explain phenomena through causal chains without resort to mysteries or miracles.
While greedy reductionism is unacceptable the adoption of ‘good reductionism’ is
merely to suggest that we can discover causal chains and explanations for human
behaviour. Traditional science disciplines are reductionist in the sense that they
break down objects of analysis into smaller and smaller parts that are subsequently
related to each other in an explanatory causal chain. In terms of the relationship
between culture and economy we can see something of this in the ‘circuit of
culture’ approach that is focused on the articulation of production and text rather
than on one-way determination.

Links Circuit of culture, cultural materialism, deconstruction, determinism, evolutionary
psychology.

Reflexivity At one level reflexivity can be understood as a process of continuous self-
monitoring including the use of knowledge about personal and social life as a