L
Language
Late Capitalism
Logocentrism

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LANGUAGE

The psychology of language is an area of critical theory approached by, among others, Freud and Jacques Lacan.

The Structuralist approach to language ultimately presents and accepts the impossibility of using language to study language, of examining culture while one is a part of that culture. Its adherents include, among others, Claude Levi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky, as well as post-structuralists such as Jacques Derrida.

Meanwhile, the institutional approach to language and culture places language in a framework of power, institutions, and systems of politics and economics. This theory presents individuals "as simultaneous makers and consumers of culture, participating in that culture according to their place in economic and political structures. This area emphasizes the role of institutions -- governments, churches, states -- in making culture." (Boylan, MA thesis, University of Washington, 1992). Advocates include Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, Gaye Tuchman, and Stuart Hall. See also Barthes.

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LATE CAPITALISM

Contemporary capital in our globalized economy is hypermobile and hyperflexible. Now, nothing is forever, speed of capital leads to "deterritorialization" - no connection between an area and where things are made (e.g., as was the case with Glasgow and shipbuilding). See, e.g., Kevin Robins.

Commodification and Late Capitalism: see Jameson.

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LOGOCENTRISM

Logocentrism - being absessed with the word, or the 'big explanation' of everything, cf phonocentrism. It is the privileging of the speech over the written word. Logocentrism, one of Derrida's concepts, has been defined as "the illusion that the meaning of a word has its origin in the structure of reality itself and hence makes the truth about that structure seem directly present to the mind" (John M. Ellis, Against Deconstruction 36-37, 1989).

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CT. Subject Index