Page 134 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

LOGOCENTRICISM

the creation of justifiable forms of life involving less emphasis on economic
accumulation and more on the need to re-moralize social life and adopt new
lifestyles. The account given below is essentially that of Anthony Giddens in the
early 1990s. 111
The ‘emancipatory’ politics of modernity is concerned with liberation from the
constraints that limit life-chances. That is, ‘emancipatory’ politics directs its
attention to the exploitative relations of class and the freeing of social life from the
fixities of tradition. This includes an ethics of justice, equality and participation. In
contrast, given a degree of release from material deprivation, ‘life-politics’ is more
concerned with self-actualization, choice and lifestyle. Life-politics revolves around
the creation of justifiable forms of life that will promote self-actualization in a global
context. They are centred on the ethics of ‘How shall we live?’.
The more we ‘make ourselves’, the more the questions of ‘what a person is’ and
‘who I want to be’ are raised. This takes place in the context of global circumstances
that no one can escape. For example, the recognition of the finite character of
global resources and the limits of science and technology may lead to a de-emphasis
on economic accumulation and to the need to adopt new lifestyles. Likewise,
developments in biological science lead us to ask questions about how to
understand the nature of life, the rights of the unborn, and the ethics of genetic
research.
Links Cultural politics, identity, identity politics, New Social Movements, politics

Logocentricism The concept of logocentricism entered the vocabulary of cultural
studies courtesy of Derrida, who critiques its pre-eminence within Western
philosophy. By logocentricism Derrida means the reliance on fixed a priori
transcendental meanings. That is, universal meanings, concepts and forms of logic
that exist within human reason before any other kinds of thinking can occur. This
would include a universal conception of reason or beauty. The idea is closely tied
to the notion of phonocentrism by which Derrida means the priority given to
sounds and speech over writing in explaining the generation of meaning. This is so
because it is in the directness of speech rather than in the metaphorical nature of
writing that Western philosophy is said by Derrida to find transcendental meaning.
According to Derrida, Socrates held speech to come directly from the heart of
truth and the self whereas writing was regarded as a form of sophistry and rhetoric.
For Derrida this signals Socrates’ attempt to find wisdom and truth through reason
unmediated by signification. That is, the priority given to speech as a form of
unmediated meaning is the search for a universal transcendental truth that grounds
itself. The idea that there is direct access to truth and stable meaning is untenable
because in representing a truth that ‘exists’ outside of representation one must be
re-representing it. That is, there can be no truth or meaning outside of
representation. There is nothing but signs and writing is a permanent trace that
exists always already before perception is aware or conscious of itself. Thus, Derrida
deconstructs the idea that speech provides an identity between signs and meaning.
This argument is a part of the wider anti-representationalist point that signs do