“Recontextualizing ‘Equality’ in The Constitution of the USA, or, A tale of the inadequacy of the grammar of equality: One constitutional instance”.

In this paper I attempt to trace, at least in part, the semantic ontogenesis that the recurring notion of ‘equality’ of all men has undergone in the American cultural paradigm: from its solemn Declaration of Independence to its Constitutional legislation and its judicial interpretation. Thus we seeits definition as ‘self-evident’ ‘truth’, follow its more concretely, if inadequately, codified legal realizations, and then its socially biased reading in Plessy v. Ferguson, which needed to wait more than 50 years to be reversed. Diachronically tracing these few intertextual instantiations of the notion reveals the modification and (re)contexualization that this ‘truth’ has been subject to diachronically, depending on the purpose(s) the text was serving as well as on the dominant world view of the times it was written in. It allows us to see that the cultural paradigm is vital to the linguistic performance of independence, and the framing of a Constitution, but also to its reading, its interpretation, and amendment, over time. And I would like to go one step further, as no humanities research can, or should, be ‘neutral’ or value-free and all analysts are products of their own cultural paradigms. As I maintain, the US Constitution, as any Constitution, is a world view construed, institutionalized, and legitimated linguistically, but it is also one that needs to be constantly monitored in its application, and in how it is upheld, or not, by the Courts – if, that is, its language is to be made to function in a ‘democratic’ way. And this is where one’s own belief and value system can be made active rather than passive. Language is verbal behaviour, a way of meaning, a vital part of a social subject’s way of being. But there is also acting; there is also, in other words, the social agent. So then, ‘equality‘ is undoubtedly ‘a question of language’, but most certainly not of language alone.