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

22 reframing latin america
this fanciful idea. When reading, modernist literary critics commonly ask,
What is the true meaning of this text? What was the author trying to say?
In response, a cultural theorist might ask, What does it say about the interpreter
that her or his interpretation depends upon authorial intention? Cultural
theorists want to know which discourses were operating at the time
and place the author wrote and what these discourses reveal to us through
the words on the page. Even thoughts that seem completely original come
from some place and this place is in some way familiar, however unconscious
that familiarity might be. To the question of what leads authors to
make their selections, cultural theorists respond by citing convention or
discourse.
Cultural theorists often investigate authorial intention. But they interrogate
that intention by seeking out the broader historical and discursive
context in which it operates. Conventions and discourses come from some
place: they have a history, and cultural theorists are in search of it. By this
logic, cultural theorists should welcome a similar interrogation when it
is directed at them by other scholars. After all, they, as authors, cannot
possibly be aware of every discourse that informs their selective process.
One example of that is the microfi eld that has emerged around Orientalism,
including analyses of Said and his original work, and analyses of the
analyses.
Consider the words before you. How could the three of us writing these
words have been aware of what governs our selections? Why, for example,
did we choose The Matrix to introduce our concepts of modernity and cultural
theory? To modernists, asking such questions is tangential, even irrelevant.
It strikes them as a downward spiral of endless interrogation that
never provides answers—a sort of secular literary hell. As one critic put it,
“[Postmodernists] tangle themselves up in a perpetual regression of qualifi
cation.” 22 But to cultural theorists, such ongoing interrogation is the purpose
of intellectual inquiry. They want to constantly draw out connections
and question truth claims, exposing them as temporal and transitory. The
moment we stop doing so, they argue, we begin falling back into modernist
traps. In the words of Edward Said, “I take criticism so seriously as to
believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on
one side against another, there should be criticism, because 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; its
social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human
freedom.” 23