Page 208 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Conclusion 197

O’Donnell’s qualification, “to get at pure, raw truth,” which I have italicized,
is of momentous importance, but that qualification is usually ignored in post-
structuralist literature: both Baudrillard and Poster, for example, proposed
that language and discourse are “all there is,” that there is simply no way to
escape language, tout court, never mind getting at “pure, raw truth.” To agree
with Poster and Baudrillard on this, however, is to subvert any and all quest
for social justice simply because social justice pertains to lived conditions and
our knowledge of lived conditions. Harold Innis, by contrast, while certainly
agreeing that “pure, raw truth” is difficult if not impossible to attain on ac-
count of “biases” in our ways of perceiving and understanding, also insisted
that we must continually strive through reflexivity to stand outside the biases
of media and discourse sufficiently to at least glimpse truth, even if but
as through a glass darkly, and that for him is precisely what the task and duty
of scholarship is. Poststructuralism’s allegation that there is no truth to
seek ought be judged by poststructuralism’s own standard, namely that all-
encompassing statements cannot be true.
Consider as well the environmental implications of the strict poststruc-
turalist insistence that we are forever trapped in language. A poststructuralist
would be inclined to say that in principle the environment may impinge upon
the life of each individual, community, society, and country. But all that is
completely unknowable, for we live within language and cannot escape lan-
guage. Environmental discourses for poststructuralists, therefore, are simply
that—verbal structures concocted and engaged in by groups of people; and
one such discourse is no better than any other. “This group over here speaks
about global warming,” a poststructuralist might remark, “and that group over
there about species’ extinctions. May they enjoy their dialogues! Only let us
be sure there are other groups with their discourses to neutralize them. If there
are not, then we run the risk of constructing ‘grand narratives,’ which means
OPPRESSION, and the only way out of that deleterious situation would be to
‘deconstruct’ the discourses—certainly not to weigh their claims and predic-
tions against observations in the material world because, as Baudrillard says,
5
‘truth, reference and objective causes have ceased to exist.’ Everything is
simulation nowadays, and everything is interpretation, and one person’s in-
terpretation of a simulation is no better or no worse than any other.”
At the turn of the last century, there were two founding fathers of semi-
otics/semiology. The more influential was Ferdinand de Saussure. According
to de Saussure, “signs,” or words, are unmotivated, by which he meant there
is nothing but convention or social agreement that gives a word its meaning.
The meaning of signs (words), and of sentences (“syntagms”), de Saussure
insisted, can be comprehended by studying the structure of language as it
exists at present, without referring to either the history of the language