Culture is Not Representation
Cultural phenomenology would benefit from scepticism about the unexamined
contemporary assumption that the way in which collective life gets into or
bears upon individual life is through powerful (powerfully seductive, or
coercive, or delusive) representations. It would see this as attracting
the same kind of criticism as Cartesian accounts of the epistemological self
- the self who comes to know the world only through abstract picturings of
it. We know `the world' (one of the irritating phenomenological turns of
phrase on which a cultural phenomenology would want to avoid becoming dependent),
in fact, in the manner in which we live it. Contemporary critical theory
has become as clever as it has at describing the kinds of things that
representations do to us, at the cost of surrendering curiosity about what
we do to representations. Modes of life - collective as well as individual
modes - are more important and interesting (to cultural phenomenologists,
that is, or to those wittingly or unwittingly engaged at the time in question
in being cultural phenomenologists) than styles, texts, images, discourses,
and other modes of collective representation, which become interesting and
significant in the ways in which they are used, to make up the worldhood
of our worlds.
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| Steve Connor | English and Humanities | Birkbeck College |