Page 73 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

issue of predictability. That is, determinism would appear to make the objects of
analysis subject to predictable outcomes and indeed some aspects of human action
do seem to be relatively predictable and thus open to structural explanations. Yet
50 an explanation that includes human motives, meanings, reasons, emotions etc.
cannot assume predictability because of the instability of human intent and the
unintended consequences of action. The complexity and overdetermination of
human behaviour makes entirely reliable prediction impossible to achieve.
Since there is no Archimedean place outside of ourselves from which to ascertain
the conditions of our own being we cannot answer the metaphysical question as to
whether people are ‘really’ free or ‘really’ determined in any absolute
metaphysical sense. Rather, discourses of freedom and discourses of determination
are socially produced narratives that have different purposes and are applicable in
different ways. The languages of freedom and determination are socially produced
for different purposes in different realms. For example, the language of agency
encourages us to act, to seek improvement of the human condition and to take
responsibility for our actions. The language of determination might help us to
understand and empathize with others or to make policy recommendations that
would change social conditions outside of a given person. Paradoxically agency is
itself determined yet it is also a culturally intelligible way of understanding the
existential experience of facing and making choices.
A more substantive application of debates about determinism within cultural
studies can be seen in relation to discussions about cultural materialism where the
Marxist model of the base and superstructure has been understood as
economically determinist. The general direction of cultural studies has been to
move away from economic determinism by which cultural products and practices
are explicable simply in terms of the production process. Cultural studies has also
been opposed to biological determinism (for example, the early forms of
sociobiology) by which human behaviour is said to be explicable solely by recourse
to genetics.
Links Agency, base and superstructure, cultural materialism, structuration

Dialogic The concept of the dialogic is drawn from the work of Bakhtin and refers to the
idea of the ‘two-directionality’ or ‘multi-accentuality’ of signs and meaning. Here
words are directed simultaneously towards another speaking subject and towards
another word. Thus the meaning of signs is an aspect of the relationship between
one sign and another as well as between a speaker and the audience to whom an
utterance is addressed. The concept of the dialogic draws our attention to the
inherent ambiguities of language and to the means by which subjects create
meaning dialogically through the socially derived and shared medium of language.
Dialogism involves the continuous state of dialogue into which every word is
placed.
Bakhtin argues that all meaning is essentially dialogic; it has been passed from
mouth to mouth, as well as been used in different contexts and with different
intentions. Here meaning is the outcome of the relations between signs and the