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

some closing comments 333
be willing, even eager, to challenge its own presuppositions: “There must be
critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives
to be fought for. . . . Criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and
constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse.” 4
Taylor and Said base their embrace of criticism and their belief in its lifeaffirming
qualities on a fundamental aspect of cultural theory—hierarchy,
power, and repression can reside in unexpected places. Derrida contended
that in the process of building our social structures and moral norms something
or someone is inevitably excluded. As Taylor put it, “Every structure—be
it literary, psychological, social, economic, political or religious—
that organizes our experience is constituted and maintained through acts of
exclusion. In the process of creating something, something else inevitably
gets left out.” 5 If we fail to recognize this, or choose to ignore it, we are likely
to suffer because acts of exclusion have the possibility, if not the likelihood,
of becoming repressive; and ignored repression fi ghts back, like a wounded
animal trapped in a corner. “In a manner reminiscent of Freud,” Taylor
warns, “what is repressed does not disappear but always returns to unsettle
every construction, no matter how secure it seems.” 6 Only when we adopt
a stance of constant criticism are we in a position to accept that what might
seem so right, true, and moral in fact has the potential to be proven wrong,
false, and immoral. Acts of liberation might, in fact, be acts of repression.
Arguments about justice might, in fact, be arguments for tyranny. Actions
and arguments based upon notions of unyielding and inalienable truths are
likely to be incapable of realizing this paradoxical possibility.
If taken to an extreme, this position of constant questioning and continual
revision could lend itself to a sort of passive nihilism. But cultural theorists
reject that position. They take stands; they declare things to be right
or wrong; they fi ght and die for causes. Said said that criticism should exist
“even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side
against another.” 7 Indeed, throughout his life, Said constantly combined
activism and academics. Cultural theorists do take stands from positions of
temporality.
Stuart Hall argued in Chapter 5 that most cultural theorists realize that
we can’t enter into the free fl ow of discourse or adopt a position of criticism
without coming from some place, without fi rst staking out a position
as a starting point, be it a cultural identity, a political stance, or a judicial
verdict. This position becomes our identity at that moment, the point at
which we locate our temporal selves, and the starting point for our entry
into the fl ow of social construction and political action. This process of
identifi cation recognizes difference, both individual and collective, but it