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

post what?! (not) an abbreviated introduction 23
Discoursing about Discourse:
The Foundation of Cultural Theory
Discourse is a difficult concept, but it is critical to understanding cultural
theory. In brief, a discourse is a set of rules or organizing principles we use
to structure meaning and determine value. It is our interpretive framework,
the lens through which we view everything in the world. Cultural theorists
contend that discourses come from all of us and that they constitute us; yet,
none of us necessarily controls them, nor for that matter are we even aware
of them. If we can set aside the modernist pretenses in The Matrix for a moment,
the description by Morpheus of the computer program at the center
of the fi lm sounds a lot like discourse: “The Matrix is everywhere. It is all
around us. Even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out
your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you
go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes.” Said’s Orientalism
is a classic example of a discourse. It was the interpretive framework
that nineteenth-century Britons used to view the Orient, and especially the
region we now call the Middle East. Nobody in nineteenth-century Britain,
however, was necessarily aware of its existence; they did not talk about an
Orientalist perspective. But as Said has since shown us, that perspective
did nevertheless exist and shaped the way successive generations of Britons
defi ned the Orient. 24
Some people more than others have the capacity to infl uence discourse.
For example, one sentence uttered by the president of the United States on
national television probably infl uences discourse more than all the words in
this book. But this doesn’t mean the president controls discourse any more
than we do, or that he is any more aware of it than we are. The same principle
applies to people in history. They, too, were governed by discourses,
although they had no idea of their existence. The only advantage we have
today, thanks to the studies of people like Barthes and Said, is our knowledge
that discourses exist. We are like Neo awakening from our captivity
in the modernist Matrix. We cannot know all the discourses affecting us at
any given moment; nor, for that matter, can we gain control over the ones
we do recognize. But at least we can see them for the constructs they are,
and this gives us a chance to be more involved in their transmission and
transformation.
Discourses exist as a result of social interaction. They originate in our
efforts to make sense of the world and communicate our ideas. Discourses
are constructed during any conceivable form of human com munication—
in writing, speech, gesture (such as body language), image (such as