Discourse as Cultural Struggle

Foreword

Foreword Shi-xu’s edited volume, $ISCOURSE AS #ULTURAL 3TRUGGLE, is a significant contribution to discourse studies. Many of the essays gathered in this volume address important issues that advance our thinking on discourse, power, and imperatives of culture. Shi-xu has a good and clear understanding of where discourse studies are currently at, and it is his intention to move beyond this place, to open up newer pathways of inquiry. The concept of discourse is pivotal to the entire endeavor of this book. This concept has had an interesting intellectual biography. It first emerged as a vital formulation in linguistics, where research focused on how stretches of language regarded in their total textual, cultural, and social contexts came to assume meaning and unity for their respective users. Linguists, interested in discourse analysis, chose to call attention to such features as cohesion, substation, ellipsis, conjunction, information structures, and rhetorical patterns. Linguists bent on discourse analysis differentiated themselves from sentence linguists, who focused on isolated and decontextualized sentences; discourse-oriented linguists, in contrast, were interested in exploring how language achieved meaning in special locations and contexts. The second discipline that exerted a profound influence on foregrounding the concept of discourse is narratology. Narratologists sought to focus on narration and the linguistic environment of a text in contradiction to the sequential arrangement of events. In the hands of theorists such as Tvezan Todorov, Seymor Chatman, and Hayden White, this notion of discourse received insightful inflection. The third discipline that invested the concept of discourse with great measure of new meaning is post-structuralism. Michel Foucault, in particular, made it a central concept in his analyses, and many of the chapters in this book display the influence of Foucault. For Michel Foucault, discourses are cohesive and self-referential statements that seek to generate descriptions of reality by viii Foreword producing knowledge, regarding objects, concepts, and practices. In addition, discourses are responsible for coming up with rules regarding what can be said about those objects, concepts, and practices. Foucault’s concept of discourse has had a profound impact on the work of subsequent humanists and on the social sciences. While recognizing the pioneering influence of Foucault in reinvigorating the concept of discourse, it seems to me that there are two central deficiencies in his formulation. First, he overemphasizes the point that “discourse is not the majestically unfolding of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a totality in which the disappearance of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined”(1972, 55). In other words, Foucault seems to demonstrate the notion that discourse is not the articulation of a speaker, but rather the speaker is an element in the system of discursive practices. For him, the more significant question is from where does a given discourse emanate rather than the question of who is the author of a given text. This has had the unfortunate consequence of devaluing agency. Shi-xu is deeply aware of this flaw in Foucault’s formulation and is keen to rectify it. Second, Foucault, in his theorizations of discourse, does not pay adequate attention to issues of semiotics. We live in a world saturated with signs, images disseminated by mass media. Jean Baudrillard employs the term “hyper-reality” to characterize this phenomenon. If we are to attain a deeper understanding of the nature and significance of discourse, we need to pay closer attention to the field of media semiotics. Shi-xu is fully cognizant of this desideratum. In exploring the ways in which discourse functions in modern society, we need to engage the concept of globalization. It needs to be stressed that we are living at a moment in history when the local and the global are co-implicated in complex and unanticipated ways (Wilson and Dissanayake 1996). How does research in Asia conceptualize and respond to this phenomenon? As Mike Featherstone rightly points out, “rather than the emergence of a unified global culture there is a strong tendency for the process of globalization to provide a stage for global difference not only to open up a world showcase of cultures in which the examples of the distant exotic are brought directly into the home, but to provide a field for more discordant clashing of cultures” (1995, 13). In this context, the cultural fashioning of discourse, as Shi-xu rightly demonstrates, takes on the dimensions of a significant phenomenon. In examining the notion of discourse as a cultural struggle, Shi-xu has foregrounded a notion...