#poststructuralism

The intersection of environment and technology does make a difference, often a huge difference, and to some degree, cultural difference really is just an arbitrary roll of the dice: there’s no ‘explanation’ for why Chinese is a tonal language and Finnish an agglutinative one; that’s just the way things happened to turn out. Still, if one treats the arbitrariness of linguistic difference as the foundation of all social theory – which is basically what structuralism did, and post-structuralism continues to do – the result is just as mechanically deterministic as the most extreme form of environmental determination. ‘Language speaks us.’ We are doomed to endlessly enact patterns of behaviour not of our own creation; not of anyone’s creation really, until some seismic shift in the cultural equivalent of tectonic plates lands us somehow in a new, equally inexplicable arrangement.