Page 46 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

32 Changing Definitions of Politics and Power

Foucault ’ s theory of “ discourse, ” whilst it certainly helped sociologists
to understand the importance of language to social life, is something of
a limitation with regard to understanding the importance of meanings .
As we have seen, Foucault was concerned with what discourses do, with
the effects they have on bodies and minds as a result of the authoritative
way they are put into practice in institutions formed around knowledges.
He was not concerned with how situated social actors interpret what
discourses mean to them; only with how they are circulated and with
what effects in practice. For Foucault, signs are functions , organized not
on the basis of meaning but of use (see Oswell, 2006 : 33). It is for this
reason that his understanding of politics is limited to resistance to author-
ity, rather than enabling anything more creative. Foucault literally does
not see politics as meaningful activity.
What do contemporary sociologists mean by “ meaning ” ? As we noted
in the introduction to this section, many answers to this question have
been proposed in the history of social thought. The most infl uential on
contemporary political sociology is that of the linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure. According to Saussure, meaning in language is produced in a
differential play of signs, rather than by representing objects in the world.
Words are symbols of the world, not pictures or mirrors. There is no
intrinsic link between objects and words; what joins them is the way in
which words are linked together in chains of meaning that are learned as
social conventions. In fact, without language, we would be unable to
identify objects and concepts with any degree of consistency (Saussure,
1966 ). Language does not simply name the world; it makes sense of it
and orders it for us. Jonathan Culler gives a good example of Saussure ’ s
analysis of language as a “ system of differences without positive terms. ”
He asks us to imagine teaching a non - English speaker what the word
“ brown ” means. To show him or her nothing but brown objects would
be useless; he or she would have to learn to distinguish brown from other
colors. The word “ brown ” does not simply label objects that are already
given; it constructs “ brown ” things as different from gray, orange, red,
and so on (Culler, 1976 : 246). Furthermore, it is entirely possible to
imagine a world in which such “ brown ” things were not distinguished at
all. They are only meaningful for us because we have learned through
social interactions with others to recognize them in this way. Meaning
structures the world for us, then, through classifi cations; it exists only for
us insofar as we make distinctions that have value and interest to us, and
we are continually learning how others make and use socially relevant
classifi cations.