Page 72 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DETERMINISM

commercial in principle. In contrast, the ‘new order’ involves the co-existence of
public and commercial broadcasting. In particular the deregulation of commercial
television has fuelled the increasing power of multimedia transnational
companies whose influence adds to the pressure on public service television to 49
operate within a commercial logic. These are the world-wide trends that underpin
the emergence of a global electronic culture.
Links Convergence, globalization, multimedia corporation, public sphere, synergy

Derrida, Jacques (1930– ) Derrida is an Algerian-born French-speaking philosopher
whose work has been influential within cultural studies and who is associated with
the themes of deconstruction and poststructuralism. The main influence that
Derrida has had on cultural studies is his anti-essentialism, by which words do not
refer to objects that possess essential qualities. Derrida undoes the structuralist trope
of the stable binary structures of language, arguing that meaning slides down a
chain of signifiers and is thus continually deferred and supplemented. Derrida seeks
to deconstruct the epistemological base of Western philosophy, including the idea
that there can be any self-present transparent meaning outside of ‘representation’.
He also deconstructs the hierarchical conceptual oppositions of philosophy such as
speech/writing, reality/appearance, and argues for the ‘undecidability’ of binary
oppositions.
• Associated concepts Anti-essentialism, deconstruction, différance, logocentricism,
under erasure, writing.
• Tradition(s) Postmodernism, poststructuralism.
• Reading Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.

Determinism Determinism is a form of analysis that explains one kind of
phenomenon in terms of another. In its weaker form, determinism simply amounts
to the attribution of a chain of cause and effect to occurrences. To point to causal
links between items, for example between material conditions and human actions,
is not to deny the specificity of the other term. That phenomena have material
causes does not reduce their significance to the causal agent nor take away their
specificities. For example, each of us can trace biological, historical and cultural
explanations for our own being, yet, at no time are we anything less than unique
persons who are capable of action.
In its stronger formulation the designation and ascription of causes appears to
deny human beings ‘free will’ or agency. That is, human actions are understood to
be the consequence of the structures of society. This is the problem of structure and
agency explored by Giddens’s structuration theory (amongst others). Where an
account is determinist in excluding the creative power of human action it is a
sibling of reductionism. Paradoxically, the strong form of determinism faces the
problem of including its own production in the explanatory account of human
behaviour.
Another way of considering the question of determinism revolves around the