Alex Perez offers a sympathetic and elegant account of Eagleton's thesis. I'm still not sure though why he thinks that anti-essentialism and post-modernism are either synonymous or can be usefully linked. He's right though to attribute this view to Eagleton and if its granted, the comparison between a mono-perspectival (God's eye) view and non-critical (anything goes) view is a reasonable and useful one.

BUT no anti-essentialist worth her salt thinks that one view is as good as another. The dominance of successive historical world pictures should show that.Human communities create comprehensible meaning and those meanings are changed by further, innovative human intervention. This (his misreading of anti-essentialism notwithstanding) sounds something like the interpretation of Eagleton that Perez offers. I don't think though that Eagleton would feel vindicated by this interpretations. To Eagleton (a critic deeply embedded in Marxism) human communities are always entangled in ideologies that they are unaware of. This, to Eagleton, invalidates the meanings they produce. Because he can't envisage that meaning is inevitably a product of power he turns back to theism and relativism and berates them for failing to produce a convincing alternative. Why should there be one? Ideology should simply stand for 'bad' rather than 'undetectable' idea. After all if an ideology is all-pervasive how can it be discussed? We social democrats must simply hope to win the argument over the way our societies and ambitions should look, while realising that nothing innate to human society or 'self' will aid us in that argument.

I agree with other contributors that this is a very interesting discussion, which is to Salon's and Laura Miller's credit!

I applaud Eagleton for addressing meaning. No-one seems to want to touch it these days. It's like when illustration or narrative were dirty words in the art world and everyone just parrot-like repeated how "awful illustration is" to sound cool. Also, a lot of people don't want to deal with meaning because they wrongly assume it has already been resolved although it clearly hasn't.

Meaning is utterly bound to language and more specifically text. The most basic difference (still needs pointing out because otherwise it is assumed, presumptious knowledge) between text and images is that like fridge magnet poetry, text relies on sequential relationships to generate coherency (or fixed meaning), but can be arranged in endless sequences that can attribute any number of meanings so to speak. Fixed visual images, let's say a painting, does not operate in this way. A curator of images, cannot manipulate a room full of canvases, the way a child can arrange fridge magnet poetry to generate random meaning. It is possible to fix meaning. Meaning is real.

Can a pistol only have meaning when it is loaded? Before it's loaded can it only have potential as a sculptural object? Perhaps when it's not loaded it's meaning is potential. Another example might be that at one point in England, the length of one's shoe indicated social rank - they're are obvious contemporary equivalences. The reason that has meaning, is because it affects behaviour and also carries consequences if falsified. If you wore shoes that falsified your social rank one could be whipped or fined. Meaning can only exist where there are direct consequences either positive or negative, and it is also, never a singular activity. Meaning is plural - it can only be generated (and enforced) by more than one entity: in a social, biological, and physical capacity. A red stop sign has meaning because more than one entity has agreed on its function, and its function is maintained through repetition.

Meaning is often invisibly enforced today. A good example of that is the famous Nancy Reagan slogan "Just Say No". On it's own, it can be taken to mean anything you like: "Just say no to government", or "Just say no to slogans", or "Just say no to candy". Why do we all know that the slogan means just say no to drugs? Because meaning has been established through the coordination of separate entities to transmit a singular message, that is consumed by plural entities. Meaning is also often established through forceful domination of one entity over another.

Text and images deal with meaning differently (they almost always exist alongside one another in an attempt to control meaning) because language is a more successful vehicle for embedding a command function. Although images on their own absolutely contain meaning and directly affect behaviour every second of every day, language seems to have a wider range to carry specific commands.

Morality is never as complicated as people assume. If someone sloshes coca-cola around in their mouth 3 times a day every day without ever brushing, pretty soon they will have no teeth. This the basic premise of morality. One can either accept the coca-cola's affect on the teeth, or take measures to prevent it from rotting one's teeth. Morality gets tricky when, to extend the crude analogy further, someone's teeth are resilient to coca-cola. In this instance the person needn't concede to the same laws. Is that a dangerous thing to say?

Blackie Brasher

With great respect, Laura Miller is either misrepresenting Eagleton or Eagleton is misunderstanding anti-essentialism. The best account of the doctrine is given by the late Richard Rorty.

Rorty is anxious to emphasise that our versions of the world are a matter of justified assertion - they are dependent for their comprehensibility on the historically contingent language game we happen to be playing. Solipsism is meaningless in as much as meaning is social.The credibility of a particular world picture can never be granted by the external world since what that world consists of is precisely what is at stake in the putative world picture being offered. Power in its guise as persuasive argument is all pervasive as what is comprehensible and assertible is hammered out. This is regretable as Eagleton laments but could hardly be otherwise. Another 'persuasive argument'would be required to forge a social-democratic consensus - nothing about 'reality' or 'human nature'would do it. Both are historically contingent.

Rorty continually replied to the charge of relativism by saying 'relative to what?' which is to say what non-contingent view of the world is a socially contingent account of it relative to? Anti-essentialism insists that nothing has a conceptual existence prior to description. The very notion of an essential reality that might verify our conceptual scheme is one more human project.

Ironically, since Eagleton seems a long way from grasping the potential of pragmatism (with his tired notion of the essential nature of human beings), he seems (according to Miller) to have dovetailed with a point that Rorty made in the early 90s. Rorty suggested that non-human objects, rather than being less malleable due to their essential nature were prime candidates for experimental human description, since those descriptions could cause no emotional pain (which redescriptions of other -less persuasively powerful - people could do). Eagleton apparently talks of a Catholic problem with the notion of an all powerful God that does not allow the notion of fixed essences because of his power to redescribe. Perhaps Eagleton's journey from Catholicism might have taken this paradox as a starting point. He might then be closer to catching up with Rortian pragmatism.