299 Chapter 19 The Politics of the Prefix: From “Post” to “Trans” (and Back)? Nico Carpentier and Sofie Van Bauwel Capturing Change and Critique The development of concepts is a human activity which is obviously situated at the core of humanity but also finds itself at the heart of the academic enterprise. Concepts structure and capture the ever-fluid knowledge and realities and offer tools for reflection and analysis. They grant access to think about and compre- hend the multitude of practices and events, situations and processes, inner and outer worlds. But at the same time, they are always doomed to fail, partially because the knowledge producing systems are less self-evident. To use John Hartley’s 1 words in relation to the study of media: “we, modernist intellectuals working in barely post-medieval institutions, are no longer self-evidently the source, the ‘provider’ of knowledge. One complication of the emergence of the new economy, creativity, and consumption is that now ‘we’ have serious com- petition. We’ve dissolved into our other, but so has our value.” But there is more, as these concepts’ implicit assumption of universal access to reality is also permanently frustrated by the sliding of the signifiers, at both the temporal and spatial level. Derrida’s notion of différance 2 is one of the intellectual projects that allow capturing the inherent problems of the concept, as it theorizes the permanent deferral of meaning, which has to face an endless chain of signifiers. Also Ernesto Laclau’s 3 use of the notion of the floating signifier, in combination with his universalism/particularism discussion, is helpful to exemplify the struc- tural contingency of concepts. The floating signifier, a signifier that is “over- flowed with meaning,” 4 assumes different meanings in different con- texts/discourses. In other words, the floating signifier shows us that concepts can take on different meanings, depending on their positions in distinct discourses.