Page 84 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

ESSENTIALISM

the idea of discourse (regulated ways of speaking), ‘regime of truth’ (that is, what
counts as truth) and discursive formation (the repeated motifs or clusters of ideas,
practices and forms of knowledge across a range of sites of activity). According to
Foucault, the modern episteme is most obviously marked by a humanism that 61
underpins paradigms such as psychology and sociology as well as governing what
counts as truth or knowledge in contemporary life.
Links Discourse, epistemology, humanism, post-humanism, poststructuralism, truth

Epistemology Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the
source and status of knowledge. Thus, the question of what constitutes truth is an
epistemological issue. The most significant debate concerning epistemology within
cultural studies has been between representationalism (realism) and those opposed
to it (poststructuralism, postmodernism and pragmatism). Thinkers who maintain
a realist stance argue that a degree of certain knowledge about an independent
object world (a real world) is possible even though methodological vigilance and
reflexivity need to be maintained. In contrast, poststructuralism and
postmodernism adopt Nietzsche’s characterization of truth as a ‘mobile army of
metaphors and metonyms’. That is, sentences are the only things that can be true
or false. Knowledge is not a question of true discovery but of the construction of
interpretations about the world that are taken to be true. In so far as the idea of
truth has an historical purchase, it is the consequence of power, that is, of whose
interpretations come to count as truth.
Modern realist truth-claims exhibit contradictory tendencies. On the one hand,
they are universalizing and assert their truths for all people in all places. On the other
hand, they also embody the methodological principle of doubt by which knowledge
is subject to chronic and continual revision. Poststructuralism and postmodernism
emphasize the production of truths within the language-games in which such truths
are founded and as such they accept the legitimacy of a range of truth-claims,
discourses and representations of ‘reality’. This postmodern understanding of
knowledge is on the ascendant within cultural studies but remains disputed.
Links Pragmatism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, representation, realism, truth

Essentialism The concept of essentialism, along with its partner anti-essentialism,
derives its meaning from an understanding of the way language functions in
relation to an independent object world (reality). Thus, essentialism assumes that
signs have stable meanings that derive from their equally stable referents in the real.
In that way, words refer to the essence of an object or category which they are said
to reflect. Or, to put it another way, words and their referents are identical. Posed
in this way, it is easy to see why, in the context of cultural studies, debates about
essentialism and anti-essentialism have focused on questions of cultural identity. In
that context, the concept of essentialism refers to the argument that there are fixed
truths to be found about identity categories so that there exists an essence of, for
example, women, Australians, the working class and Asians. Here words refer to
fixed essences and thus identities are regarded as being stable entities.