Feminists use language to construct identities and reality

[Elspeth688]

In a book by colin leslie dean called
A PROLEGOMENON TO THE STUDY OF THE MYSTICAL ELEMENTS IN the ANTI-ESSENTIALISM IN POST-STRUCTURALISM, POSTMODERNISM, FEMINISM AND QUEER THEORY



http://gamahucherpress.yellowgum.com/books/literary/prolog2.pdf


Dean shows how language is used by ideologists to construct identities
Language does not mirror or reflect the world it in fact constructs it -without language there would be no meaningfull world -from the linguist Saussure . Modern ideologists use language for brainwashing and alltering reality so as to fit their ideological agendas Dean helps you to protect yourserlves from language manipulators and reality shifters who play with your minds and reality via langauge

Modern theory takes this idea of Saussure and extends it by coupling it with the idea that because we can only know the world through language then and language does not reflect the world but constructs it

The whole edifice of anti-essentialism in post-structuralism, postmodernism, feminism and queer theory it will be seen is built upon the ideas, implicitly or explicitly, of the linguist Saussure who argues as Barry notes

“… for Saussure the signifiers which make up a language refer only to one another and interact with one another but do not figure forth a world.[FONT=&quot][1][/FONT].

Saussure’s thinking stressed the way language is arbitrary, relational and constructive and this way of thinking about language greatly influenced the structualists because it gave them a model of a system which is self-contained in which individual items relate to other items and thus create larger structures.”[FONT=&quot][2][/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]
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This is a prolegomenon to the study of the mystical elements in anti-essentialism in post-structuralism, postmodernism, feminism and queer theory. The mystical element have so much in common with Buddhist notions on the non-self, the illusory nature of the phenomenal world and the conventional nature of reality. Where Buddhist use these insights to liberate the person from the conventional world, the anti-essentialism in post-structuralism, postmodernism, feminism and queer theory use them to infact bury the person deeper into it via their political ideologies and power politics’. Where Buddhists create a salivation theory - a soteriology - the anti-essentialism in post-structuralism, postmodernism, feminism and queer theory create more ideological prisons and straight jackets which keep people buried in the illusionary world, the theorists acknowledge, rather than helping the people to disentangle themselves from it via the eradicating of conventional ideologies which imprison them and which these theories consciously manufacture. It is as if the theorists have discovered the Buddhist insights but rather than help release people from conventional reality they infact create propaganda and mind control techniques to keep people from the realizations that will free them from the conventional realities these theorist acknowledge themselves. These theorists from a Buddhist point of view are trying to construct identities based on their ideologies rather than deconstruct identities based upon their insight of dencentered selves and reality. They turn around their insights to use for political and power politics against the people as no more than ideological propaganda to control -a fairly typical western preoccupation- and infact camouflage the illusory conventional world via their manufactured constructions of truth

[FONT=&quot][1][/FONT] . P, Barry, Beginning theory, Manchester university press, 2002 p 113.

[FONT=&quot][2][/FONT] Ibid,. p. 44.

 

[quatona]

Dean shows how language is used by ideologists to construct identities
Language does not mirror or reflect the world it in fact constructs it -without language there would be no meaningfull world -from the linguist Saussure . Modern ideologists use language for brainwashing and alltering reality so as to fit their ideological agendas Dean helps you to protect yourserlves from language manipulators and reality shifters who play with your minds and reality via langauge

Does he, by any chance, use language in order to do that?
I personally agree that language creates identities and realities, but I fail to see how this is a modern phenomenon and applies only to those concepts you disagree with.

 

[Elspeth688]

Does he, by any chance, use language in order to do that?

he just puts the facts before your eyes to let you form your own truths
yes the facts are in language which just shows the paradox of language showing language is illusionary
go read the thread on meaninglessness of all views

 

[quatona]

he just puts the facts before your eyes to let you form your own truths

That´s all fine and dandy - what strikes me as a tad ironic is that he uses his argument selectively.

go read the thread on meaninglessness of all views

I do have read it (I even wrote a response to which you responded) - it just is so, err, meaningless.