Section reading week 1: Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest”: Discourse and Power
(56-64) – Isis Meeuwissen, 6943667
Where and what is “the West”? (56-60)
- Nowadays societies aspire to be “Western”, meaning that they want to achieve western
standards of living
- In Columbus’s days it was important to be in the west because it was a quick route to the
wealthy East. Even though Columbus never made it to the East he always believed he had.
- The ideas about the “East” and the “West” are not only about place and geography, they are
also based on myth and fantasy.
- The west used to refer to Europe, being geographically placed in the West of the world. Now
it is more often used to refer to a type of society, and not all of Europe is seen as “the West”
- Nowadays the US and Japan are also part of the “west”, whereas Latin America and/or
Eastern Europe are not. But they are both geographically still in the west. “The West” is as
much an idea as a fact of geography.
- The “West” is a historical, not geographical construct
- By western we mean a society that is developed, industrialized, urbanized, capitalist, secular
and modern.
- These societies arose in the 16th century (after the Middle Ages) and were the result of a
specific set of historical processes. Any society that shares these characteristics can belong
to the West western/west is in meaning almost equal to modern it is a concept
- The concept of “the West” can be seen to function in the following ways:
1. It allows us to characterize and classify societies into different categories sets a
certain structure of thought and knowledge in motion
2. It is an image, it condenses a set of different characteristics into one picture
3. It provides a model or standard of comparison. it helps to explain difference
4. It functions as an ideology, i.e. it provides criteria of evaluation against which other
societies are ranked and around which powerful positive and negative feelings cluster.
- The idea of the west is also produced by historical processes
- The idea of the west enabled people to know or speak of certain things in certain ways it
became an organizing factor in a system of global power relations and the organizing concept
or term in a whole way of thinking and speaking.
- Emergence of the idea of the west, is central to the Enlightenment, it treated the West as the
result of forces largely internal to Europe’s history
- Argued: the rise of the west is a global story.
- The uniqueness of the west was profuced by Europe’s contact and self-comparison with other
non-western societies, very different in their histories, ecologies, patterns of development, and
cultures from the European model.
1. Difference: the west’s achievement was measured against different standard than the
non-west, and it is within this context of these relationships that the idea of “the west”
took on shape and meaning.
- Modern language theory: meaning always depends on the relations that exist between the
different terms or words within a meaning system night and day mean nothing, it is the
difference between them that gives them meaning.
1. This is also to be seen in the way national cultures acquire their identity by
differentiating from other cultures.
2. The West’s sense of itself was formed not only through internal processes, but
also through Europe’s sense of difference from other worlds.
- Binary systems (night vs. day, British vs. Scottish) seem to be fundamental to the production
of meaning itself.
1
, - At a certain moment the separate worlds, harnessed together in the same historical time-frame.
They became related elements in the same discourse and different parts of one global social,
economic and cultural system.
- The term “the west” makes the west appear unified and homogeneous one plaxe, with one
view about other cultures and one way of speaking about them not true.
- As well as treating non-European cultures as different and inferior, the west had its own
internal others: Jews, Eastern Europeans, and even women.
- Simplification represents what is in fact very differentiated as homogenous. It asserts that
these different European cultures ar united by one thing: they are different from the Rest
1. Same goes for the Rest, they are different from the West
- The discourse, as “a system of representation”, represents the world as divided according to a
simple dichotomy the west and the rest. this is what makes it destructive: it draws crude
and simplistic distinctions and constructs and an oversimplified conception of “difference”.
What is a Discourse? (60-61)
- Discourse: a coherent or rational body of speech or writing; a speech or a sermon (preek)
- Here discourse means: a particular way of representing the west, the rest and the relations
between them. It is a group of statements which provide a language for talking about a
particular kind of knowledge topic.
- When statements are made within a discourse, this discourse makes it possible to construct a
topic a certain way and limits the ways in which the topic can be constructed.
- A discourse does not consist of one statement.
- Important note about this notion of discourse: it is not based on the conventional distinction
between thought and action, language and practice. It is about the production of knowledge
through language. but itself is produced by “discursive practice”: the practice of producing
meaning.
1. How did the west behave towards the rest?
- Foucaults theory of discourse:
1. Discourse can be produced by many individuals in different institutional settings. But
anyone deploying a discourse must position themselves as if they were the subject of
the discourse. (Ex. Even if you don’t believe in the superiority of the West, using the
terms “the west and the rest” places you in a position that holds the West as superior.
2. Discourses are not closed systems. It draws on elements in other discourses, binding
them into its own network of meanings.
3. The statements within a discursive formation don’t all need to be the same, but the
relationships between them must be regular and systematic system of dispersion. It
is not a prescription of what it should be, but it should be in agreement.
Discourse and Ideology (61-62)
- Discourse is similar to an ideology. But we prefer discourse, why?
- Ideology is based on the distinction between true statements (science) and false statements
(ideology) about the world. With this comes the believe that the facts about the world help us
decide between false and true statements. But statements about the social, political or moral
world are never completely true or false.
- Language we use to describe the facts that determine false or true, interferes with the
processes of defining what is true and what is false.
Can a discourse be “innocent”? (62-64)
- Foucault is very reluctant to reduce discourse to statements that simply mirror the interests of
a particular class. The same discourse can be used on different groups, but this does not mean
it is ideologically neutral or “innocent”.
1. Example: the West encountering with the new world
2
,- The Spanish believed in their own ideology, so while it would be wrong to attempt to reduce
their statements to naked self-interest, it is clear that their discourse was molded and
influenced by the interests across their language.
- Motives and interests are almost never wholly conscious or rational. So the desires from
Europeans were powerful but not all that rational.
- The discourse of the west and the rest can not be innocent because it isn’t an encounter
between equals: the Europeans exploited, discovered and explored people, that didn’t want to
be any of those things. The Europeans were in a dominant power position, this influenced
what they saw and how they saw it and also what they didn’t see.
- Foucault sums it up accordingly:
“Not only is discourse always implicated in power; discourse is one of the "systems"
through which power circulates. The knowledge which a discourse produces
constitutes a kind of power, exercised over those who are "known." When that
knowledge is exercised in practice, those who are "known" in a particular way will be
subject (i.e., subjected) to it. This is always a power-relation.” (p. 63)
- Foucault also states that those who produce the discourse have the power to make it true. But
this undermines the distinction between true and false statements (science and ideology) to
which many sociologists have subscribed.
- The most important idea from Foucault is about the relationship he establishes between
discourse, knowledge and power. As he states that when a power operates in a way that
enforces a truth of any set of statement, such a discursive formation produces a regime of
truth.
3
, Lecture 2 – background reading - The defender of differences on Franz Boas and his
critics
Boas was, in 1877, renowned as the father of American cultural anthropology and the scholar
who taught generations how to think about human diversity without hierarchy. “Culture” was
once regarded as something that one group might have more of than another. Boas and his
students demonstrated how to use the word in the plural: different peoples had different
cultures, and while the idiosyncrasies of a foreign culture were patent to us, we’d do well to
recognize the arbitrary aspects of our own. For Boas, the contingencies of culture were
written on his face. When, two decades after his dueling days, he detailed the techniques of
face painting among Indian villagers in British Columbia, he must have been conscious that
his own features bore the marks of similarly community-bound customs.
In 1889 he finally landed an academic position, when the freshly founded Clark University, in
Worcester, Massachusetts, appointed him to head a department of anthropology. He also had
a taste of local notoriety when he decided to take measurements of the local schoolchildren, in
the hopes of conducting a longitudinal study of their growth. (He may have been inspired by a
vast study of German schoolchildren that Virchow had launched in the 1870s.) The Worcester
Daily Telegraph conjured a macabre image of the man—“his scalp scarred with saber cuts,
and slashes over his eye, on his nose, and on one cheek”—who was setting his craniometer to
the town’s youngsters.
that school is most easily defined by what it wasn’t, the way a clan may be defined by its
taboos. Boas favored induction, by which he meant an attention to particulars that wouldn’t be
deformed by grand theories. He was skeptical, in particular, about doctrines of racial
superiority. He had, more slowly, become a skeptic of social evolutionism: the notion that
peoples progress through stages (in one crude formulation, from savagery to barbarism to
civilization), each of which could be distinguished by certain shared characteristics. He was
vigilant, too, concerning ethnocentrism. “Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to
definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners,
and ethical standards is not universal,” he later wrote.
Because Boas is so associated with “cultural anthropology” (a term that his students
popularized), it’s easy to forget how much time he spent calculating cephalic indexes,
determining who was long-headed and who short. He meant to defeat race science by turning
its methods against its claims. In 1908 the Dillingham Commission—a group of senators and
congressmen who worried that inferior arrivals from Italy and Eastern Europe were polluting
the American stock—asked Boas to produce a report on the effects of “the immigration of
different races into this country.” Under his supervision, measurements were taken of nearly
18,000 subjects. “The adaptability of the immigrant seems to be very much greater than we
had a right to suppose before our investigations were instituted,” Boas’s study concluded.
“While heretofore we had the right to assume that human types are stable, all the evidence is
now in favor of a great plasticity of human types.”
However closely Boas followed Virchow in emphasizing mutability, mistrusting invidious
racial claims, and recognizing that (as Boas later wrote of him) “it is dangerous to classify
data that are imperfectly known under the point of view of general theories,” he had not yet
followed Virchow in becoming publicly outspoken in defense of his convictions. As Douglas
Cole put it, “Boas’s political views remained personal.”
(56-64) – Isis Meeuwissen, 6943667
Where and what is “the West”? (56-60)
- Nowadays societies aspire to be “Western”, meaning that they want to achieve western
standards of living
- In Columbus’s days it was important to be in the west because it was a quick route to the
wealthy East. Even though Columbus never made it to the East he always believed he had.
- The ideas about the “East” and the “West” are not only about place and geography, they are
also based on myth and fantasy.
- The west used to refer to Europe, being geographically placed in the West of the world. Now
it is more often used to refer to a type of society, and not all of Europe is seen as “the West”
- Nowadays the US and Japan are also part of the “west”, whereas Latin America and/or
Eastern Europe are not. But they are both geographically still in the west. “The West” is as
much an idea as a fact of geography.
- The “West” is a historical, not geographical construct
- By western we mean a society that is developed, industrialized, urbanized, capitalist, secular
and modern.
- These societies arose in the 16th century (after the Middle Ages) and were the result of a
specific set of historical processes. Any society that shares these characteristics can belong
to the West western/west is in meaning almost equal to modern it is a concept
- The concept of “the West” can be seen to function in the following ways:
1. It allows us to characterize and classify societies into different categories sets a
certain structure of thought and knowledge in motion
2. It is an image, it condenses a set of different characteristics into one picture
3. It provides a model or standard of comparison. it helps to explain difference
4. It functions as an ideology, i.e. it provides criteria of evaluation against which other
societies are ranked and around which powerful positive and negative feelings cluster.
- The idea of the west is also produced by historical processes
- The idea of the west enabled people to know or speak of certain things in certain ways it
became an organizing factor in a system of global power relations and the organizing concept
or term in a whole way of thinking and speaking.
- Emergence of the idea of the west, is central to the Enlightenment, it treated the West as the
result of forces largely internal to Europe’s history
- Argued: the rise of the west is a global story.
- The uniqueness of the west was profuced by Europe’s contact and self-comparison with other
non-western societies, very different in their histories, ecologies, patterns of development, and
cultures from the European model.
1. Difference: the west’s achievement was measured against different standard than the
non-west, and it is within this context of these relationships that the idea of “the west”
took on shape and meaning.
- Modern language theory: meaning always depends on the relations that exist between the
different terms or words within a meaning system night and day mean nothing, it is the
difference between them that gives them meaning.
1. This is also to be seen in the way national cultures acquire their identity by
differentiating from other cultures.
2. The West’s sense of itself was formed not only through internal processes, but
also through Europe’s sense of difference from other worlds.
- Binary systems (night vs. day, British vs. Scottish) seem to be fundamental to the production
of meaning itself.
1
, - At a certain moment the separate worlds, harnessed together in the same historical time-frame.
They became related elements in the same discourse and different parts of one global social,
economic and cultural system.
- The term “the west” makes the west appear unified and homogeneous one plaxe, with one
view about other cultures and one way of speaking about them not true.
- As well as treating non-European cultures as different and inferior, the west had its own
internal others: Jews, Eastern Europeans, and even women.
- Simplification represents what is in fact very differentiated as homogenous. It asserts that
these different European cultures ar united by one thing: they are different from the Rest
1. Same goes for the Rest, they are different from the West
- The discourse, as “a system of representation”, represents the world as divided according to a
simple dichotomy the west and the rest. this is what makes it destructive: it draws crude
and simplistic distinctions and constructs and an oversimplified conception of “difference”.
What is a Discourse? (60-61)
- Discourse: a coherent or rational body of speech or writing; a speech or a sermon (preek)
- Here discourse means: a particular way of representing the west, the rest and the relations
between them. It is a group of statements which provide a language for talking about a
particular kind of knowledge topic.
- When statements are made within a discourse, this discourse makes it possible to construct a
topic a certain way and limits the ways in which the topic can be constructed.
- A discourse does not consist of one statement.
- Important note about this notion of discourse: it is not based on the conventional distinction
between thought and action, language and practice. It is about the production of knowledge
through language. but itself is produced by “discursive practice”: the practice of producing
meaning.
1. How did the west behave towards the rest?
- Foucaults theory of discourse:
1. Discourse can be produced by many individuals in different institutional settings. But
anyone deploying a discourse must position themselves as if they were the subject of
the discourse. (Ex. Even if you don’t believe in the superiority of the West, using the
terms “the west and the rest” places you in a position that holds the West as superior.
2. Discourses are not closed systems. It draws on elements in other discourses, binding
them into its own network of meanings.
3. The statements within a discursive formation don’t all need to be the same, but the
relationships between them must be regular and systematic system of dispersion. It
is not a prescription of what it should be, but it should be in agreement.
Discourse and Ideology (61-62)
- Discourse is similar to an ideology. But we prefer discourse, why?
- Ideology is based on the distinction between true statements (science) and false statements
(ideology) about the world. With this comes the believe that the facts about the world help us
decide between false and true statements. But statements about the social, political or moral
world are never completely true or false.
- Language we use to describe the facts that determine false or true, interferes with the
processes of defining what is true and what is false.
Can a discourse be “innocent”? (62-64)
- Foucault is very reluctant to reduce discourse to statements that simply mirror the interests of
a particular class. The same discourse can be used on different groups, but this does not mean
it is ideologically neutral or “innocent”.
1. Example: the West encountering with the new world
2
,- The Spanish believed in their own ideology, so while it would be wrong to attempt to reduce
their statements to naked self-interest, it is clear that their discourse was molded and
influenced by the interests across their language.
- Motives and interests are almost never wholly conscious or rational. So the desires from
Europeans were powerful but not all that rational.
- The discourse of the west and the rest can not be innocent because it isn’t an encounter
between equals: the Europeans exploited, discovered and explored people, that didn’t want to
be any of those things. The Europeans were in a dominant power position, this influenced
what they saw and how they saw it and also what they didn’t see.
- Foucault sums it up accordingly:
“Not only is discourse always implicated in power; discourse is one of the "systems"
through which power circulates. The knowledge which a discourse produces
constitutes a kind of power, exercised over those who are "known." When that
knowledge is exercised in practice, those who are "known" in a particular way will be
subject (i.e., subjected) to it. This is always a power-relation.” (p. 63)
- Foucault also states that those who produce the discourse have the power to make it true. But
this undermines the distinction between true and false statements (science and ideology) to
which many sociologists have subscribed.
- The most important idea from Foucault is about the relationship he establishes between
discourse, knowledge and power. As he states that when a power operates in a way that
enforces a truth of any set of statement, such a discursive formation produces a regime of
truth.
3
, Lecture 2 – background reading - The defender of differences on Franz Boas and his
critics
Boas was, in 1877, renowned as the father of American cultural anthropology and the scholar
who taught generations how to think about human diversity without hierarchy. “Culture” was
once regarded as something that one group might have more of than another. Boas and his
students demonstrated how to use the word in the plural: different peoples had different
cultures, and while the idiosyncrasies of a foreign culture were patent to us, we’d do well to
recognize the arbitrary aspects of our own. For Boas, the contingencies of culture were
written on his face. When, two decades after his dueling days, he detailed the techniques of
face painting among Indian villagers in British Columbia, he must have been conscious that
his own features bore the marks of similarly community-bound customs.
In 1889 he finally landed an academic position, when the freshly founded Clark University, in
Worcester, Massachusetts, appointed him to head a department of anthropology. He also had
a taste of local notoriety when he decided to take measurements of the local schoolchildren, in
the hopes of conducting a longitudinal study of their growth. (He may have been inspired by a
vast study of German schoolchildren that Virchow had launched in the 1870s.) The Worcester
Daily Telegraph conjured a macabre image of the man—“his scalp scarred with saber cuts,
and slashes over his eye, on his nose, and on one cheek”—who was setting his craniometer to
the town’s youngsters.
that school is most easily defined by what it wasn’t, the way a clan may be defined by its
taboos. Boas favored induction, by which he meant an attention to particulars that wouldn’t be
deformed by grand theories. He was skeptical, in particular, about doctrines of racial
superiority. He had, more slowly, become a skeptic of social evolutionism: the notion that
peoples progress through stages (in one crude formulation, from savagery to barbarism to
civilization), each of which could be distinguished by certain shared characteristics. He was
vigilant, too, concerning ethnocentrism. “Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to
definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners,
and ethical standards is not universal,” he later wrote.
Because Boas is so associated with “cultural anthropology” (a term that his students
popularized), it’s easy to forget how much time he spent calculating cephalic indexes,
determining who was long-headed and who short. He meant to defeat race science by turning
its methods against its claims. In 1908 the Dillingham Commission—a group of senators and
congressmen who worried that inferior arrivals from Italy and Eastern Europe were polluting
the American stock—asked Boas to produce a report on the effects of “the immigration of
different races into this country.” Under his supervision, measurements were taken of nearly
18,000 subjects. “The adaptability of the immigrant seems to be very much greater than we
had a right to suppose before our investigations were instituted,” Boas’s study concluded.
“While heretofore we had the right to assume that human types are stable, all the evidence is
now in favor of a great plasticity of human types.”
However closely Boas followed Virchow in emphasizing mutability, mistrusting invidious
racial claims, and recognizing that (as Boas later wrote of him) “it is dangerous to classify
data that are imperfectly known under the point of view of general theories,” he had not yet
followed Virchow in becoming publicly outspoken in defense of his convictions. As Douglas
Cole put it, “Boas’s political views remained personal.”
