WORLDMAKING VIA CONSTRUCTION OF LANGUAGE ACTS

Abstract

In 1978, Nelson Goodman coined the term “worldmaking” to show that several other “worlds” may exist 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 new ways of reading in the post-modern world, we can get help from creative works of popular culture in reinscribing, revisiting and having a critical eye over their working mechanisms. In the face of globalizing trends, meaning can be traced within the cross-cultural relationships between natural, political, cultural and linguistic worlds. At the same time, the constantly deferred meaning can be analysed by laying the working principles of logocentric thought bare, which is a long running organizing principle of Western thought. Paul de Man defines it as a mode of thought as follows: logos “divides the world into a binary system of oppositions organised along an inside/outside axis and then proceeds to exchange the properties on both sides of this axis on the basis of analogies and potential identities” (qtd. in McQuillan 10). This paper aims to decipher “the uncanny ability” of logocentric thought in McQuillan’s wording and to lay the working mechanisms of this thought bare in undoing its logic and its system of thought by putting popular texts under close scrutiny (McQuillan 11). This analysis, first of all, tries to pinpoint the binary oppositions, then to deconstruct the hierarchy between these binaries; and finally, it will display how the work undermines its own working mechanisms by focusing on the impasses of meaning. In the end, it is discovered that the popular text in question seems to build itself on the hierarchical play between primary vs secondary legs of the binary oppositions; however, the constructed world falls into the trap of logical fallacies such as sweeping generalization and appealing to the popular assumptions.