The Dynamic Dimension of Language: From a Comparison of Discourse Theories as a Basis for Considerations to the Expansion of Vocabularies Theory
摘要
In this chapter, we continue our efforts to promote the integration (or redescription) of more-than-representationalist approaches, seeing that “Rorty wants to overcome many of the passionately debated philosophical distinctions and exclusions in order to highlight the one decisive boundary, namely that of fundamentalist philosophy. Therefore, he attempts to unite the various anti-fundamentalist approaches into a polyphonic and pluralistic group of good guys” (Deines, 2023, p. 382, transl.) in order to position them against representationalists. With this in mind, he engaged intensively with poststructuralist thinking (initially Foucault, Laclau, and Mouffe, later Derrida), which was strongly anti-representationalist and influenced by linguistic philosophy, with ambivalent results (Deines, 2023), as will become clear below. However, the similarities between poststructuralism and Rorty’s neopragmatism are clearly limited, “especially in political thinking: While Rorty regards political theory and the academic left as limited by their entanglement in unproductive ‘over-philosophizing’ […], which can be escaped through courageous liberal ethnocentrism and the nonchalant acceptance of the separation of private and public, postmodern and deconstructive-inspired theory consider Rorty to be ideologically blind [for] the power-laden and limiting conditions that also shape his own position and his own distinctions“(Deines, 2023, p. 395, transl.). What makes post-structuralist considerations interesting for operationalizing Rorty’s thinking (and that of other neopragmatists) for social and spatial research—despite this ambivalent result—is not least the implementation of post-structuralist theory in empirical research in these disciplinary contexts (e.g., Diaz-Bone, 2010; Glasze & Mattissek, 2009; Leibenath & Otto, 2013; Weber, 2018).