The West and the Rest became two sides of a single coin. The so-called uniqueness of the west was, in part, produced by Europe’s contact and self-comparison with other, non-western societies (the Rest). The difference of these other societies and cultures from the west was the standard against which the West’s achievement was measured.
Europe breaks out.
Broadly speaking, European expansion coincides with the end of what we call ‘the Middle Ages’ and the beginning of the ‘modern age’. Feudalism was already in decline in Western Europe, while trade, commerce and the market were expanding.
The age of exploration began in 1430 with the Portuguese’s explorations of the west coast of Africa. The exploration of the New World (America) was at first largely a Spanish affair. In 1492 Columbus set off to find a westerly route to the treasures of the East. In 4 voyages he became the first European to land on most of the islands of the Caribbean and on Central America mainland. He never relinquished his belief that he was in Japan and China. The misnamed ‘West Indies’ is a permanent reminder that the Old World ‘discovered’ the New by accident
The early Spanish explorers of the New World opened the way to the ruthless band of soldier-adventurers, the Conquistadors, who completed the conquest of Central and South America, effecting the transition from exploration to conquest and colonisation.
By the 18th Century, the main European world players – Portugal, Spain, England, France and Holland were in place. The serious business of bringing the far-flung civilisations they had discovered into the orbit of western trade and commerce and exploiting their wealth, land, labour and natural resources for European development had become a major enterprise.
The notion of ‘discourse’ comes into it when Europe began to describe and represent the difference between itself and these ‘others’ it encountered in the course of its expansion.
What is a discourse?
A discourse is a way of talking, thinking or representing a particular subject or topic. They produce meaningful knowledge about that subject and this knowledge influences social practices.
A discourse is similar to an ideology, we use the term discourse as according to Foucault, ideology is based on a distinction between true statements about the world (science) and false statements (ideology) and the belief that the facts about the world help us to decide between true and false statements. However, The very language we use to describe things interferes in the process of deciding what is true and false. For example: Palestinians fighting to regain land on the West Bank from Israel may be described either as ‘freedom fighters’ or ‘terrorists’. Whether they are terrorists or not, if we think they are and act on that knowledge they in effect become terrorists because we treat them as such. The language (discourse) has real effects in practice: the description becomes true.
Foucaults’s use of discourse is an attempt to side-step what seems an unresolvable dilemma – deciding which social discourses are true or scientific and which false or ideological. What Foucault would say is that knowledge of the Palestinian problem is produced by competing discourses – those, of ‘freedom fighter’ and ‘terrorist’ – and that each is linked to a contestation over power. It is the outcome of this struggle which will decide the truth of the situation.
Discourses always operate in relation to power. When it is effective in organising and regulating relations of power (say, between the west and the rest) – it is called a ‘regime of truth’.
Hugh Honour, who studied European images of American from the period of discovery onwards, has remarked that ‘Europeans increasingly tended to see in America an idealised or distorted image of their own countries, on to which they could project their own aspiration and fears.’ Some of these discursive strategies include:
1) IDEALISATION: That is, the way the Rest becomes the subject of language of dream and utopia, the object of a powerful fantasy.
For example, John White produced some sketches in 1587 of the Algonquian Indians which he had observed in Virginia. Later they were altered by Theodor de Bry, according to more classical European styles.
2) FAILURE TO RECOGNISE & RESPECT DIFFERENCE: The Europeans were immediately struck by what they interpreted as the absence of government and civil society among the peoples of the New World. But in fact these peoples did have several, very different highly elaborated social structures. Some were hunter-gatherers others were village people. And there were the high civilisations of the Aztecs in Mexico and the Inca’s in Peru, which both had a complex social structure. They were all functioning societies. What they were not was European. What disturbed western expectations was their difference. Even as the Europeans came to know more about the characteristics of the different ‘native American’ peoples they still persisted in describing them ALL as Indians, lumping all distinctions together into one inaccurate stereotype.
Theses strategies are all underpinned by stereotyping, and in particular ‘stereotypical dualism. Meaning that the stereotype is split into 2 opposing elements. Far from the discourse of the West and the Rest being unified, ‘splitting’ is a regular feature of it. The world is divided into good-bad, us-them, civilised-uncivilised, the west-the rest. By this strategy, the Rest becomes defined as everything that the west is not.
