266 The Nature of Political Theory
relations between an existing system of signs. A linguistic sign was viewed as a structural
relation between a word (signifier) and concept (signified). Meaning was thus (as emphas-
ized) dependent on therelationsbetween signs—many of which functioned in terms
of basic binary contrasts. It followed that different languages entailed different relations
of signs and different conceptual distinctions. The structuralist idea was deeply influ-
ential on a number of anthropologically inclined theorists such as Claude Levi-Strauss
and Roland Barthes during the 1950s and 1960s. The common theme was that under-
lying structures had to be uncovered to reveal meanings. Since linguistic signs do not
work on their own, but only in the context of a network of contrasts, oppositions, or
differences (which constitute a language), these need to be unpicked for a real anthro-
pological grasp of that culture. Thus, kinship structures and myths could be treated
as the deep level structures of that society. They form a kind of genetic code for that
society.
- ‘The genealogist needs history to dispel the chimeras of origin’, Foucault (1986a: 80).
- Another thing that separates historians from genealogists, is that the latter have acknow-
ledged their own implicit perspectivism. Foucault comments ‘Historians take unusual
pains to erase the element in their work which reveals their grounding in a particular
time and place, their preferences in a controversy—the unavoidable obstacles of passion’,
Foucault (1986a: 90).
- In a similar way words to Foucault do not correspond with things, rather words are
aspects of a network of texts, a network that involves practices which constitute the
object.
- As Foucault puts it ‘The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and
dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopted in the illusion of a substantial
unity)...Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of
the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the
process of history’s destruction of the body’, see Foucault (1986a: 83).
- This is not an attempt to do justice to their considerable range and output.
- Or, as Rorty maintains, a postmodern open-mindedness undermines liberal foundation-
alism, see Rorty (1989: 52).
- The earlier book, although ground breaking, ended more on a hermeneutic than a
postmodern position.
- Connolly, however, has no sympathies (like Derrida) with Heidegger’s arguments about
Being.
- See also ‘Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism’, see Rorty 1982.
- ‘Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent upon vocabularies, and
since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths’, Rorty (1989: 21).
- This might be another—more radical way—of expressing Thomas Kuhn’s thesis about
science and paradigms.
- One point of origin for this idea lay in the Kantian focus on the self-legislating self, which
so affected the Romantics.
- The most interesting and resonant chapter in Connolly’s book,The Ethos of Pluralization,
is entitled ‘Nothing is Fundamental’, chapter 1, (Connolly 1995).
- Lyotard’s later books, such asThe Differend, tend to be critical of the earlier work.
- In one sense, Lyotard is immediately open to the charge here of a performative contra-
diction, that is he appears to be doing (providing an overarching account of language)
what he claims is impossible.
