Page 85 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

By contrast, poststructuralism seeks to deconstruct the very notion of the stable
structures of language. Meaning, it is argued, cannot be confined to single words,
sentences or particular texts but is the outcome of relationships between texts. Thus,
62 signs do not make sense by virtue of reference to entities in an independent object
world, but rather, they generate meaning by reference to each other. Meaning is
understood to be a social convention organized through the relations between
signs. Consequently, social categories do not have universal, essential characteristics
or qualities but are constituted by the way we speak about them. It is this anti-
essentialism that leads cultural studies to describe identity as a becoming, a never-
to-be-fixed category that derives its meaning from a ‘cut’ or temporary stabilization
of otherwise endlessly unfolding meanings of language. Thus, what it means to be
a man or a woman, black or white, old or young is an ever-changing construction
of language.
A stress on the practical value of conventionalized meaning has given rise to the
notion of strategic essentialism, by which we act as if identities were stable entities
for specific political and practical purposes. Thus it has been suggested that while
we can deconstruct the notion of ‘woman’ this does not stop people from
mobilizing around the idea of ‘woman’ for political purposes. This argument has
some merit for practical purposes and may be what happens in practice. However,
strategic essentialism is open to the criticism that at some point certain voices have
been excluded. Thus, the strategic essentialism of feminism, that it takes women to
be an essential category for tactical reasons, may lead to some women, for example
black or Hispanic women, saying to white women they have not taken account of
our differences as well as our similarities. As such, strategic essentialism tends
towards ethnic or gender ‘absolutism’.
What is required is a certain oscillation between a theoretical objectivism that
tries to offer an independent description of language, and which in doing so
illuminates the fact that meaning cannot be fixed in the abstract, and linguistic
practices themselves in which meaning becomes temporally fixed for practical
purposes. Thus, for Wittgenstein, while the meanings of language do derive from
relations of difference (that is, there are no fixed essences), they are given a degree
of regulated stability through pragmatic narratives. For example, in so far as the
meaning of the word ‘friend’ is generated through the relationship of signifiers –
colleague, companion, acquaintance, associate, confidant, etc. – it is volatile and
undecidable. Nevertheless, in practice its meaning is stabilized by social knowledge
of the word friend, of what it is used for, when, under what circumstances and so
forth. Thus, words do not have stable meanings but rather have diverse functions.

Links Anti-essentialism, identity, language-game, poststructuralism, pragmatism,
structuralism

Ethnicity A term that suggests cultural boundary formation between groups of people
who have been discursively constructed as sharing values, norms, practices, symbols
and artefacts and are seen as such by themselves and others. The concept of
ethnicity is connected to the concept of race but is more cultural in its