Wise Words: Things Are Meaning

The cheerful term postcolonial, which I often hear on campuses these days, might suggest that the age of destruction is over. In fact, the colonization is still at fever pitch. The great transformation of gold into lead and of forests into shopping malls continues. Some analogous transformations can be seen in the university itself. One of the reagents used for this purpose is the acid of postmodernism: the thesis that nothing has meaning because everything is language. It works especially well in parallel with the acid of unrestrained commerce: that nothing has meaning because everything is for sale. Repeated exposure to these ideological acids produces human beings who cannot wonder at the world because they are not at all sure the world exists, though they can wonder all the more at social power and reputation. When you take the world away from a human being, something less than a human being is left. That is the inverse of education.

To me it is clear that things have meaning because they are meaning, and that language has meaning – or can have meaning – because it can speak, poorly but truly, of some of the things that language is not. For me, these facts have a practical outcome: because things have meaning and I want them to continue to have meaning, not everything is for sale. In a healthy economy, only the surplus and the precipitate are for sale, because those are the only things in actual need of recirculation. 

(Robert Bringhurst, ‘The Vocation of Being, the Text of the Whole’ in The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology, Counterpoint: Berkeley, 2006/2008, pp. 62–63; my emphasis in bold)