Article
Cultural Criticism: A Reading in The Dialectic of Patterns and References
Contemporary critical studies in the second half of the twentieth century witnessed a set of radical transformations that touched the fields of scholarly knowledge. These transformations led to the emergence and spread of new currents and tendencies that called for the consolidation of postmodern concepts, concepts that arose against the background of a critique of Western modernity and its philosophical premises and rationalist inclinations, and against the background of a dismantling of the great central categories, which they sought to shatter and liberate themselves from their constraints that had held sway over a long stretch of time.
Postmodernity celebrated popular culture and the marginal and the profane, the strange and the different, and devoted its attention to studies of gender and Blackness, and reconsidered the axioms on which modernity had rested, whose theories and systems of thought were all subject to the principle of closure and alienation. That principle then became merely one mechanism among the mechanisms of modernity, from the ruins of which other principles were generated, founded on openness and emancipation and the dismantling of everything orderly and coherent.
Amid these transformations, which encompassed a number of sciences and fields of knowledge, there appeared what came to be termed "cultural criticism." This latter fell within the current of postmodernity, and it succeeded in taking criticism out of the circle of the closed structure and out of the circle of rhetorical-aesthetic values; it likewise succeeded in freeing itself from the culture of the elite and its literature and from the authority of the dominant cultural institutions, working to expose and lay them bare, and to celebrate non-official discourses such as the discourses of opposition and the texts of popular literature and others, its fundamental aim being the uncovering of the unsaid and of the patterned defects implicit within the non-official and non-institutional discourse.
Cultural criticism drew its subject from culture, which in its turn nourished its intellectual and critical orientations and worked to relay its patterns and its forms and its formulas within texts and discourses, so that it might thereby carry out its task, which consists in dismantling those discourses and analyzing them and approaching them from a cultural standpoint, and uncovering the patterns implicit and concealed within them.
