Page 232 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

WRITING

achieving both cultural and legislative change and it was during this period that the
description ‘feminism’ was given greater prominence. Finally, the third wave of the
women’s movement refers to contemporary feminism during a period in which a
number of women’s rights have been enshrined in the legislation of leading 209
Western societies. Here there has been a greater theoretical concern with what is
meant by the very concept of a woman and the place of women within culture, as
well as with the possibilities for a global women’s movement. For some
commentators this represents not so much a third wave of feminism as the
condition of post-feminism.

Links Cultural politics, feminism, men’s movement, New Social Movements, patriarchy,
post-feminism

Writing A commitment to writing is important to cultural studies because this is the
prime activity of most of its practitioners and also the form in which most of what
we call cultural studies actually appears. As such, there is something of a tension
within cultural studies between its populist rhetoric of cultural politics and the fact
that in practice most of the published work in the field reaches a very limited
readership.
Cultural studies writers have commonly justified themselves with the argument
that cultural criticism is a demystifying aspect of cultural politics and yet for the vast
majority of people cultural studies writing appears to be obscure. This is not to say
that the most ‘obscure’ and convoluted piece of writing possible is not valid in its
own terms, for writing is obscure to the degree that it enacts a language used by a
limited number of people. However, this does raise the question of the purposes of
intellectual activity and of cultural studies in particular.
The work of Derrida has had a significant influence within cultural studies and
he uses the idea of writing in a rather more technical way to raise philosophical
questions about the nature of meaning. The idea of writing plays an important part
in Derrida’s work, by which he means not simply text on a page but what he calls
arche-writing, a concept intended to remind us that there is no ‘outside’ of the text.
Writing is always already part of the outside of texts so that texts form the outside
of other texts in a process of intertextuality. It is this sense that Derrida has in mind
when he argues that there is nothing but texts.
For Derrida, writing is not held to be secondary to speech (as self-present
meaning) but rather is a necessary part of speech and meaning. That is, there is no
meaning that is outside of or free from writing or that writing gives expression to.
Rather, meaning and truth-claims are always already dependent on writing and are
subject to its rhetorical claims and metaphors. Thus the strategies of writing are
constitutive of any truth-claims and can be deconstructed in terms of those
strategies. Further, since writing is ‘a sign of a sign’, then the meaning of words
cannot be stable and identical with a fixed concept. Rather, as Derrida indicates
with his concept of différance, meaning is deferred by dint of supplement of
meaning by the traces of other words.

Links Deconstruction, différance, intellectuals, intertextuality, poststructuralism, text