Borrowing from French philosopher Michel Foucault’s understanding of language and power as being intimately influential on one another; redeployment refers to the degree to which the intended purpose of one’s language is often irrelevant to the ways that language gets used. Instead, ideas that are so loaded with meaning, also known as ideographs, like democracy, freedom, heroism, etc., are attached to political positions that are broadly accepted. For instance, calls for democracy have effectively been deployed for the purposes of Marxist revolutions and capitalist expansion. The Cold War was a conflict between two national ideologies that, at the level of explicit discursive form, disagreed about nothing. As Foucault writes in Politics and the Study of Discourse:

… discourse is constituted by the difference between what one could say correctly at one period (under the rules of grammar and logic) and what is actually said.  The discursive field is, at a specific moment the law of this difference.”

In The Fray Contributor