In multiple, fragmentary and often contradictory ways we struggle to achieve some sort of understanding of AIDS, a reality that is frightening, widely publicized, and yet finally neither directly nor fully knowable. AIDS is no different in this respect from other linguistic constructions which, in the commonsense view of language, are thought to transmit pre-existing ideas and represent real- world entities and yet in fact do neither. For the nature of the relationship between language ahd reality is highly problematic; and AIDS is not merely an invented label, provided to us by science and scientific naming practices, for a clear-cut disease entity caused by a virus. Rather, the very nature of AIDS is constructed through language and in particular through the discourses of medicine and science; this construction is true or real only in certain specific ways - for example, in so far as it successfully guides research or facilitates clinical control over the illness. 2 The name AIDS in part constructs the disease and helps make it intelligible. We cannot therefore look through language to determine what AIDS really is. Rather we must explore the sitewhere such determinations really occur and intervene at the point where meaning is created: in language. penelopeironstone/Treichlersignification.pdf
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 13:49:49 +0000
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