Building on the notion of differance, deconstruction sees social life as a series of texts that can be read in a variety of ways. Because of this multiplicity of readings there is, therefore, a range of meanings that can be invoked. Moreover, through each reading we are producing another text to the extent that we can view the social world as the emanations of a whole array of intertextual weavings. While there is this variety, as we have seen, texts contain hierarchical concepts organized as binaries. Deconstruction does not seek to overturn the binary through a reversal of dominance. This would simply maintain hierarchization. Deconstruction is concerned to illustrate how language is used to frame meaning. Politically its purpose is to lead to ‘an appreciation of hierarchy as illusion sustained by power. It may be a necessary illusion, at our stage in history. We do not know. But there is no rational warrant for assuming that other imaginary structures would not be possible’ (Boyne, 1990: 124).
To achieve this deconstruction involves three phases (Grosz, 1990a). The first two of these are the reversal and displacement of the hierarchy. In terms of reversal we might, for example, seek to reclaim the terms Queer or Black for more positive interpretations of their meaning. However, it is insufficient simply to try to reverse the hierarchical status of any binary. At best, this simply keeps hierarchical organization in place. At worst, such attempts will be ignored because the dominant meanings of a hierarchical pairing are so strongly in place. This is why it is necessary to displace common hierarchized meanings. This is achieved by displacing the ‘negative term, moving it from its oppositional role into the very heart of the dominant term’ (ibid.: 97). The purpose of this is to make clear how the subordinated term is subordinated. This requires a third phase. This is the creation of a new term. Grosz notes that Derrida called the new term a ‘hinge’ word. She offers the following examples:
such as ‘trace’ (simultaneously present and absent), ‘supplement’ (simultaneously plenitude and excess); ‘differance’ (sameness and difference); ‘pharmakon’ (simultaneously poison and cure); ‘hymen’ (simultaneously virgin and bride, rupture and totality), etc. . . These ‘hinge words’ (in Irigaray, the two lips, fluidity, maternal desire, a genealogy of women, in Kristeva, semanalysis, the semiotic, polyphony, etc.) function as undecidable, vacillating between two oppositional terms, occupying the ground of their ‘excluded middle’. If strategically harnessed, these terms rupture the systems from which they ‘originate’ and in which they function. (ibid.)
Grosz comments that this is both an impossible and necessary project. It is impossible because we have to use the terms of any dominant discourse to challenge that discourse. It is necessary because such a process illustrates how so much of what is said is bound up with what cannot be, and is not, said.
In this respect, Plumwood’s analysis illustrates the systematization of power relations that operate through networks of conceptual dualisms. She refers to the five features she has identified as a family and thereby indicates that they each have complex kinships with each other. Finlayson (1999) denotes the attention given to issues of power relations within poststructuralist analyses of language in terms of the turn to discourse. Accordingly, Finlayson defines discourse as referring both ‘to the way language systematically organizes concepts, knowledge and experience and to the way in which it excludes alternative forms of organization. Thus, the boundaries between language, social action, knowledge and power are blurred’ (ibid.: 62). Foucault (1972: 25) also illustrates how the meanings of discourse rely on what is left in the background. He comments that
all manifest discourse is secretly based on an ‘already-said’; and. . . this ‘already-said’ is not merely a phrase that has already been spoken, or a text that has already been written, but a ‘never-said’, an incorporeal discourse, a voice as silent as a breath, a writing that is merely the hollow of its own mark.
Gee (1996) comments on how dominant discourses are intimately related to the distribution of social power and hierarchical structure in society. Thus, control over certain discourses can lead to the acquisition of social goods such as money, power and status in a society.
The significance of this focus on discourse is that it directs our attention to the constellations of language. Language is not free-standing and nor are dualistic frameworks but part of what Wittgenstein defined as language games.
Language Games
Of course language in general and concepts in particular often carry ideological implications. But as Wittgenstein puts it, in most cases the meaning of a word is its use. Used in different situations by different speakers, the word ‘woman’ takes on very different implications. If we want to combat sexism and heterosexism, we should examine what work words are made to do in different speech acts, not leap to the conclusion that the same word must mean the same oppressive thing every time it occurs, or that words oppress us simply by having determinate meanings, regardless of what those meanings are.
(Moi, 1999: 45)
Moi is concerned to indicate that arguments that suggest that every usage of the term ‘woman’ is exclusionary are misplaced. Here she draws on Wittgenstein’s (1958, s 43) dictum that ‘For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word ‘‘meaning’’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.’ Thus, Moi comments, ‘In my view, all the cases in which feminists discuss the meaning of the words woman, sex and gender belong to the ‘‘large class of cases’’ Wittgenstein has in mind’ (1999: 7). Her argument is that Wittgenstein proposes some convincing philosophical alternatives to certain post-Saussurean views of language.
Wittgenstein was concerned that any analysis of language should not be abstracted from the context of its usage. In this Wittgenstein was concerned that ‘philosophy should not provide a theory of meaning at all: one should look at how words are actually used and explained, rather than construct elaborate fictions about how they must work’ (Stern, 1995: 41). In this respect Wittgenstein’s later concerns opposed his earlier work in the Tractatus that argued that language had a uniform logical structure that can be disclosed through philosophical analysis. Rather, in his Philosophical Investigations he thought that ‘Language has no common essence, or at least, if it has one, it is a minimal one.. . connected… in a more elusive way, like games, or like the faces of people belonging to the same family’ (Pears, 1971: 14).
For example, although a word may have a uniform appearance this does not mean that its meaning will be similarly uniform and from which we can make generalizations. Wittgenstein illustrated this point through an analysis of the word ‘games’. When we use the word ‘games’ we might refer to board games, card games, ball games, Olympic games, and so forth. He comments that instead of saying because they are all games there must be something common to them we should ‘look and see whether there is anything common to all. . . To repeat: don’t think, but look!’ (Wittgenstein, 1958: s 66). For example, some ball games, such as tennis, involve winning and losing whereas some ball games, such as when a child throws a ball against a wall, do not. If we extend the analysis to games that do not use a ball we will find that again some are about winners and losers and others are not. For example, games such as ring-a-ring-a-roses are amusing but not competitive. Chess games are competitive. Overall ‘the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail’ (ibid.). Wittgenstein called these relationships ‘family resemblances’ and argued that ‘the line between what we are and are not prepared to call a game is likely (a) to be fuzzy and (b) to depend on our purposes in seeking such a definition’ (Winch and Gingell, 1999: 58).
McGinn (1997: 43) comments that the conceptualization of language games brings ‘into prominence the fact that language functions within the active, practical lives of speakers, that its use is inextricably bound up with the non-linguistic behaviour which constitutes its natural environment’. Thus an analysis of meaning has to be considered in relation to its usage rather than as an abstraction from its context. In this way Wittgenstein asks us to think through the taken-for-granted of everyday speech and to begin to notice that which we never notice. This includes both linguistic and non-linguistic features. As McGinn comments:
Wittgenstein’s concept of a language-game is clearly to be set over and against the idea of language as a system of meaningful signs that can be considered in abstraction from its actual employment. Instead of approaching language as a system of signs with meaning, we are prompted to think about it in situ, embedded in the lives of those who speak it. The tendency to isolate language, or abstract it from the context in which it ordinarily lives, is connected with our adopting a theoretical attitude towards it, and with our urge to explain how these mere signs (mere marks) can acquire their extraordinary power to mean or represent something. (1997: 44)
Thus Wittgenstein argued that we should look at the spatial and temporal phenomena of language rather than assuming ‘a pure intermediary between the propositional signs and the facts’ (McGinn, 1997: 94). In this way we would see that ‘our forms of expression prevent us in all sorts of ways from seeing that nothing out of the ordinary is involved’ (ibid.) and that ‘everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain’ (Wittgenstein, 1958: s 126).
In taking up these perspectives from Wittgenstein Moi applies this to the tendency within some poststructuralist writings to avoid any reference to biological facts because it would imply some form of essentialism. In order to avoid biological determinism some feminists ‘go to the other extreme, placing biological facts under a kind of mental erasure’ (Moi, 1999: 42). The theoretical reasons given for this are that ‘political exclusion is coded into the very concepts we use to make sense of the world’ (ibid.: 43, emphasis in original). Thus it is argued that the word ‘woman’ is always ideological and ‘‘‘woman’’ must mean “heterosexual, feminine and female’’’ (ibid., emphasis in original). When such terms such as ‘woman’ are used, poststructuralists take recourse in the slippery nature of meaning in order to construct an armoury of defence against accusations of essentialism. As Moi comments, this is to soften any implication of exclusion but such a position is misplaced and is based on the incorrect view that the term ‘woman’ actually does have only one meaning and that meaning is independent from the context of its use. If this were the case, we would be unable to envisage any alternative kind of meaning for ‘woman’. Thus, Moi comments:
The incessant poststructuralist invocations of the slippage, instability, and non-fixity of meaning are clearly intended as a way to soften the exclusionary blow of concepts, but unfortunately even concepts such as ‘slippage’ and ‘instability’ have fairly stable meanings in most contexts. It follows from the poststructuralists’ own logic that if we were all mired in exclusionary politics just by having concepts, we would not be able to perceive the world in terms other than the ones laid out by our contaminated concepts. If oppressive social norms are embedded in our concepts, just because they are concepts, we would all be striving to preserve existing social norms. (ibid.: 44)
Moi is clear that her appeal that we should focus on the ordinary, everyday usage of terms is not to argue all meaning is neutral and devoid of power relations. Rather, she is indicating that any analysis of meaning has to take account of the speech acts within which it is placed. In different locations and used by different speakers the term ‘woman’ has a range of different meanings. One has to understand such location and to understand the world from the perspective of the speaker. Or as Luke (1996: 1) reminds us ‘concepts and meanings. . . are products of historically and culturally situated social formations’.
In addition, in taking up Wittgenstein, Moi is not arguing for a defence of the status quo, the commonsensical or the dominant ideology. Rather, she is directing our attention to the everyday as a place of struggle over meaning. In this she comments, ‘The very fact that there is continuous struggle over meaning (think of words such as queer, woman, democracy, equality, freedom) shows that different uses not only exist but sometimes give rise to violently conflicting meanings. If the meaning of a word is its use, such conflicts are part of the meaning of the word’ (1999: 210). It is to the political struggle over meaning that I now turn.