Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

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Thirdly, we must consider Saussure and his model of language and linguistics
which has so transformed theoretical work. Saussurian linguistics
suggests that speech—discourse, enunciation itself—is always placed
within the relationships of language. In order to speak, in order to say anything
new, we must fi rst place ourselves within the existing relations of
language. There is no utterance so novel and so creative that it does not
already bear on it the traces of how that language has been spoken before we
opened our mouths. Thus we are always within language. To say something
new is fi rst of all to reaffirm the traces of the past that are inscribed in the
words we use. In part, to say something new is fi rst of all to displace all the
old things that the words mean—to fi ght an entire system of meanings. For
example, think of how profound it has been in our world to say the word
“Black” in a new way. In order to say “Black” in a new way, we have to
fi ght off everything else that Black has always meant—all its connotations,
all its negative and positive fi gurations, the entire metaphorical structure
of Christian thought, for example. The whole history of Western imperial
thought is condensed in the struggle to dislocate what Black used to
mean in order to make it mean something new, in order to say “Black is
Beautiful.” I’m not talking about Saussure’s specifi c theories of language
only. I’m talking about what happens to one’s conception of identity
when one suddenly understands that one is always inside a system of languages
that partly speak us, which we are always positioned within and
against.
These are the great fi gures of modernism. We might say that if modernity
unleashes the logic of identity I was talking about earlier, modernism
is modernity experienced as trouble. In the face of modernity’s promise of
the great future: “I am, I am Western man, therefore I know everything.
Everything begins with me,” modernism says, “Hold on. What about the
past? What about the languages you speak? What about the unconscious
life you don’t know about? What about all those other things that are speaking
you?”
However, there’s a fourth force of destabilization. This could be given
a variety of names. If you wanted to stay within the episteme of Western
knowledge, you could say Nietzsche. But I want to say something else. I
want to talk about the de-centering of identity that arises as a consequence
of the end of the notion of truth as having something directly to do with
Western discourses of rationality. This is the great de-centering of identity
that is a consequence of the relativization of the Western world—of the discovery
of other worlds, other peoples, other cultures, and other languages.
Western rational thought, despite its imperializing claim to be the form