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

48 reframing latin america
graph 2.5
text, and all of us—scientists, observers, critics, and so forth—become the
readers.
The essentialist model insists that truth about nature precedes human
interpretation. So any signifi er would have the signifi ed (meaning) contained
within it. In this model, the task for humanity is to receive nature’s meanings
through observation, discover nature’s original code through the
modernist exercise of scientifi c inquiry, and then, as modernists, structure
our social world according to those truths.
In contrast, the semiotic model contends that nature does not contain
ontological truths because those so-called truths can only be read through
the discursively constituted lens of human interpretation. The physical
world is only a signifi er and its meaning (signifi ed) is to be found in the
realm of discourse (see Graph 2.5). Our exercise as semiotic observers is to
study those discourses to better understand how physical manifestations
are being interpreted. In Graph 2.5 we have removed the discourse obstacle
between nature and the world, unlike Graph 2.3 in which a second box of
discourse stands between the author and the text or between the critic and
the text. This is because discourse does not “write” the world through nature
in the same way that it writes these texts through authors and critics.
But discourse does dictate how we as readers interpret nature and the material
world, in the same way that it affects how we interpret texts.
This discussion of nature as author can be applied to our current exercise
of identity construction, and in particular to the issue of race, or the
variations in human physical appearance that we have come to understand
as racial traits—hair texture, skin color, and facial features. Our author is
once again nature (or, in this case, genetics), and skin color is our physical
example (see Graph 2.6).