Page 142 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

MEANING

meaning by reference to items in an independent object world. That is, the meaning
of the word chair derives from an object that contains the essence of chair or that
the word love refers to an identifiable quality that is essential love or that meaning
is a thing that is represented by the sign ‘meaning’. Philosophically speaking, this 119
form of explanation is known as nomenclaturism whose basic idea is that the
meaning of a name is the object that it stands for. To ask the question ‘what does
meaning mean’ indicates the absurdity and non-workability of nomenclaturism
since the essence of meaning – what meaning means – cannot be found.
Cultural studies has adopted, at least ostensibly, anti-essentialist theories of
language that are designated with terms like ‘holism’ and ‘nominalism’. Linguistic
holism suggests that the meaning of words depends on their place in the entire
whole of language or at least on their place in a specific language-game. Likewise,
nominalism argues that concepts cannot be conceived as having ‘existence’ in the
way that objects do but are instead part of a system of names whose significance lies
in the relations between themselves.
The most influential theories of meaning within cultural studies have been those
of Saussure (structuralism) and Derrida (poststructuralism) and to some extent
Wittgenstein and Bakhtin. Both Saussure and Derrida hold that meaning is
generated through the differences between signs rather than by reference to objects.
However, structuralism is concerned with the stable ‘systems of relations’ that form
an underlying structure of sign systems and the grammar that makes meaning
possible. By contrast, Derrida undermines the notion of the stable structures of
language when he argues that meaning cannot be confined to single words,
sentences or particular texts but is the outcome of relationships between texts, that
is, intertextuality.
For Derrida, meaning can never be ‘fixed’, but rather is continually
supplemented by other words including the echoes or traces of meanings from
related words in different contexts. For Derrida, there is no original meaning
circulating outside of ‘representation’, that is, there is no primary source of
signification and no self-present transparent meaning. Rather, meaning slides down
a chain of signifiers abolishing a stable signified. Thus does Derrida seek to expose
the undecidability of meaning.
For Wittgenstein the ‘undecidability’ of meaning is put in the context of the
pragmatic activities of human beings. He argues that language is best understood as
a tool used by human animals to coordinate their actions in the context of social
relationships. For Wittgenstein meaning is not a matter of ‘representationalism’ (i.e.
the assumption that words mirror objects) but rather the use of words in the context
of a language-game. Thus, a meaningful expression is one that can be given a use by
living human beings and the rules of language constitute our pragmatic
understandings of ‘how to go on’ in society. Here, to ask what meaning means is like
asking ‘how big is the colour blue’? It makes no sense. Instead we must inquire about
the complex of uses to which we put the word meaning.
Links Culture, deconstruction, dialogic, language-game, poststructuralism, representation,
semiotics, structuralism