The crucial in between: the centrality of mediation in cultural studies

Abstract

This essay argues against trends in cultural studies to avoid textuality and mediation in favour of a presumably direct access to reality, materiality or lived experience. Grand gestures of stepping out of modern thinking in toto might be rhetorically effective, but turn out to be expressions of a critical self-reflexivity on the productive contradictions within modernity. The centrality of the concept of mediation is defended in two opposite directions. Against reductionisms of absence that reify and totalize textual structures, communication is understood as a dialectic tension between subjects, texts and contexts. Against reductionisms of presence or immediacy, textual interpretations provide necessary mediations for all experience. Problematic formulations by Lawrence Grossberg and others are discussed, where material relations or histories and ethnographies of lived experience are believed to render textual interpretations superfluous. On the basis of Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics, a communicative model for culture and cultural studies is outlined.