Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction

by Christopher Butler

Derrideans insisted that all words must be explained only in terms of their relationships to the various systems in which they take part. It follows that we are at best relativists, caught within (incommensurable) conceptual systems. We can only ‘know’ what they permit us to know about reality. Whatever we say, we are caught within a linguistic system that does not relate to external reality in the way we expect, because every term within each system also alludes to, or depends upon, the existence (or, as Derrida put it, the ‘trace’) of other terms within the system that are absent. For example, English has a family of words for degrees of anger – from ‘irritated’ to ‘furious’. And French has its own, different, family for this area of our experience. All the terms within each language’s family rely upon one another to divide up the field of ‘anger’ for native speakers. But neither system, English or French, different as they clearly are, can fairly claim to finally encode the ‘truth’ about states of anger in the world.