Worldmaking via Construction of Language Acts

Date

2020-07-01

Author

Doğan, Buket

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In 1978, Nelson Goodman coined the term “worldmaking” to show that several other “worlds” mayexist along with the single “world” that most think they know. To be after a single absolute meaning of the“world” in the post-Derridean and post-Saussurean world may already sound anachronistic. With the help of newways of reading in the post-modern world, we can get help from creative works of popular culture inreinscribing, revisiting and having a critical eye over their working mechanisms. In the face of globalizingtrends, meaning can be traced within the cross-cultural relationships between natural, political, cultural andlinguistic worlds. At the same time, the constantly deferred meaning can be analysed by laying the workingprinciples of logocentric thought bare, which is a long running organizing principle of Western thought. Paul deMan defines it as a mode of thought as follows: logos “divides the world into a binary system of oppositionsorganised along an inside/outside axis and then proceeds to exchange the properties on both sides of this axis onthe basis of analogies and potential identities” (qtd. in McQuillan 10). This paper aims to decipher “the uncannyability” of logocentric thought in McQuillan‟s wording and to lay the working mechanisms of this thought barein undoing its logic and its system of thought by putting popular texts under close scrutiny (McQuillan 11). Thisanalysis, first of all, tries to pinpoint the binary oppositions, then to deconstruct the hierarchy between thesebinaries; and finally, it will display how the work undermines its own working mechanisms by focusing on theimpasses of meaning. In the end, it is discovered that the popular text in question seems to build itself on thehierarchical play between primary vs secondary legs of the binary oppositions; however, the constructed worldfalls into the trap of logical fallacies such as sweeping generalization and appealing to the popular assumptions.Keywords: Globalization, Worldmaking, Deconstructive Reading, Logocentric Thinking, Hierarchy.

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https://dergi.modernizm.org/index.php/journal/article/view/71/22
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/111930

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Department of Foreign Language Education, Article