Appropriation and Explosion in Reforming Language-Games: A Model for Discursive Change

Abstract

The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand PlateausWith the linguistic turn came an ever-increasing tendency to see language as the locus where truths are born, passed along, or modified. As such, postmodern theories have proved highly compatible with postcolonial studies, which have inspired studies of modern Iran as a country that was colonized, only not officially. However, the latter seem to have fallen for extreme abstraction where metaphysical claims abound: presuming constructivist views of language but failing to present a tangible framework, these studies discuss “discursive change” without giving a clue as to what either discourse or change is. Convinced as such, we have adopted Wittgenstein's idea of language-games to present a tangible model for discursive change.