maybe the relationship to "relativism" -- in the panic-swamp-of-hostility sense we're discussing -- comes when the specific discourses relevant to discourse-dependence are at war with one another over the rights to dependency in relation to a given meaning (but of course there's an element of circularity here, isn't there? i think political cleavages intensify the problematisation of definition, where differences in definition may contribute to the initial fact of cleavage...)

(haha there was a window tax levied in queen anne's reign, during which era i bet definitions of window became a lively political and/or legal issue!

i think within the critical community (writers and readers) there's absolutely a small-p politics of "who gets taken seriously", much less negotiable now than it was 40 years ago: i somewhat assume this would map onto wider politics over the same span but i don't clearly see how -- i DO think it relates to the huge debate over who gets into higher ed (and what they do there) which has raged over the same timespan... but i think the link is intricate and complex