Preface

9
What chance does the ordinary person in the street have, if the cunning of
culture requires the wits of the world’s finest thinkers to reveal its secrets
and displacements?
Now an aim of cultural studies is often ‘intervention analysis’, that is it
sets out not just to explicate of how culture and media work, but to change
people’s understanding and so make them more active subjects. That is the
constitutive presupposition, which justifies the existence of cultural studies
in the first place. There are problems however. Who decides the
conditions under which readers, viewers, participants in culture become –
or are identifiable as – active? And how do you know? We are back to the
impenetrable question of how you know what people, as readers or
audiences, are making of what is going on? The implicit assumption is that
the emancipated subject of culture will look very like the enlightened
analyst. There is also an implicit realist premise at work here. What sense
does it made to speak of television or films distorting or deceiving without
a presupposition that there is a reality there to be truly and accurately
represented in whatever medium? 7
Anthropologists and cultural studies’ specialists tend equally to fall into
the trap of representationism (Goodman 1968) with their stress on culture
as semiotic or symbolic (e.g. Geertz 1980; Milner 1994). The problem is
not simply splitting the world (matter) and its representation (mind), and
then worrying about how they correspond (Hall 1997; cf. Hobart 1982a).
As problematic is the idea that culture consists of messages to be decoded –
inadequately by viewers, correctly by intellectuals – a theme made famous
by Hall (1980). We are back to the very old and tired model of
communication, which glorifies and universalizes practices introduced with
the telegraph wire. It is as if nothing had happened before or since. As
Bakhtin noted however,
semiotics deals primarily with the transmission of ready-made
communication using a ready-made code. But in live speech, strictly
speaking, communication is first created in the process of transmission
and there is, in essence, no code... Context and code. A context is
7 One aim of this book is to argue against the kinds of realism and idealism, which set up
a dichotomy between the world and mind. A key issue then becomes how mind is able
accurately to represent the world (in realism) or to understand itself (in idealism). By
contrast I take it that such a (Cartesian) hierarchization of the knower over the known is
unhelpful in the human sciences, where ‘reality transcends the knower’ (Inden 1986: 402,
cited in Chapter 5 below). Some of the problems of idealism I address below. My
objections to realism and objectivism owe much the work of Collingwood (1939, 1945,
1992); Quine 1953a, 1953b, 1960; Goodman (1972, 1978); as well as Bernstein 1983;
Bhaskar 1979; Fabian 1991b; and Rorty 1980.