Repository | Book | Chapter
(2011) Cultural theory after the contemporary, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
In his influential essay "The Centrality of Culture," Stuart Hall writes that our time is one of "" cultural revolution" in the substantive, empirical and material senses of the word. Substantively, the domain constituted by the activities, institutions and practices we call "culture" has expanded out of all recognition" (209). Never before has "culture" been as conspicuous as the present. Everythingincluding, as Fredric Jameson argues, nature and the unconscious (Postmodernism)—is seen as "cultural" now, and the older sense of culture—as the opposite of natural and singular because created/creative—loses its meaning. Everything from diseases and genetics to happiness and war is now made a matter of social construction, and its workings are analyzed in terms of signifying practices and differences. Such a highly reflexive understanding of culture assumes that "language is constitutive of that which it names' (Barker, Making Sense of Cultural Studies 3). Culture is made into a rhetorical figure of Derridcan undecidability as it "can be both a descriptive and evaluative term," as Terry Eagleton argues, and is taken as a sign that the world has moved beyond the binaries of history, such as naturalism and idealism, freedom and necessity, consciousness and spontaneity, contingency and necessity (The Idea of Culture 5).
Publication details
Full citation:
Tumino, S. (2011). Introduction, in Cultural theory after the contemporary, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1-15.
This document is unfortunately not available for download at the moment.