Page 187 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

According to Wittgenstein, we learn language as an integral part of learning how
to do things so that language is not necessarily best described as a coherent system
or set of structural relations. Rather language is ‘action’ and meanings are
164 temporarily stabilized by social convention for practical purposes in the context of
their usage. Signification does not occur in a separate domain from other practices;
all practices signify, and meaning is the product of the indistinguishability of signs
and social practice. The ‘propositions’ or world-views that constitute culture and
guide us are not made up simply of words, sentences and discourses but also of
practices.
Much of our bedrock of convictions is a part of what Giddens calls our ‘practical
consciousness’, that is, a condition of being that is rarely made discursively explicit
but which is embedded in the practical conduct of social life. This involves the
intertwining of language as a social institution and the taken-for-granted stocks of
knowledge/practices of everyday life. Conversely, we also undertake a number of
practices that are productive of ourselves, those which Foucault describes as
‘techniques of the self’, that is, the practices that generate the self.

Links Discourse, language, language-game, meaning, semiotics

Pragmatism A philosophical tradition of US origin that includes the work of William
James, John Dewey and, more recently, Richard Rorty. Pragmatism has a radically
contingent view of the world where truth ends with social practice and progress is
a retrospective value judgement based on trial and error experimentalism. Here all
problems are problems of conduct and all judgements are implicitly judgements of
value.
Pragmatism is a form of anti-representationalism whereby language is not
thought able to represent the world in ways that correspond to an independent
object world. This is to argue that there are no pieces of language that line up with
or correspond to chunks of reality. Above all, there is no Archimedean vantage point
from which one could verify the universal ‘truth’ of any correspondence between
the world and representation. The anti-foundationalism that follows from this
argument suggests that we cannot ground or justify our actions and beliefs by
means of universal truths. We can describe this or that discourse, chunk of
language, as being more or less useful and as having more or less desirable
consequences. However, we cannot claim it to be true in the sense of
correspondence with an independent object world.
For Rorty, the contingency of language leads us into irony where this concept
means holding to beliefs and attitudes which one knows are contingent and could
be otherwise, that is, they have no universal foundations. This in turn leads us to
ask about what kind of human being we want to be since no transcendental truth
and no transcendental God can answer this question for us. This includes questions
about us as individuals – who we want to be – and questions about our relations to
fellow human beings – how shall we treat others? These are pragmatic questions
requiring political-value responses and not metaphysical or epistemological issues.
These arguments turn our attention away from the search for universal truth and