Response to Discourse Analysis 1 + Andrea Fraser’s Museum Highlights
From my understanding of things, discourse analysis is just about not taking information for granted. It takes a deeper look at the way we talk about the world around us and the way we produce facts. Discourse analysis brings awareness to the way cultures are constructed not just visually but also based on the relationship between power and knowledge. This philosophy of perception takes factors such as race, gender, religion, socioeconomic status, and time into consideration, thus providing a flexible and theoretically universal lens through which to observe, question and understand society. Discourse analysis seems to serve as a more conscious way for everyone to move through the world and take things in.
In Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk 1989, Jane Castleton (a fictional character played and created by American artist Andrea Fraser) gives a video tour of the Philadelphia Art Museum. Speaking directly to the camera she guides the viewer through the building, elaborating on the history of the museum and its collection and discussing the social time in which it exists. She presents every aspect of the museum as honorable and remarkable, even the water fountain and the men’s bathroom. In doing so, Castleton destabilizes the discourse surrounding museums, including their collections, social impacts, and inner workings. She brings attention to how a set of ideals determines which objects are assigned value in an institution and how these ideals affect behavior in a society. She highlights the honor it is to, for example, be a member or have the gift shop named after you, then offers the viewer an opportunity to buy that honor for increasingly absurd amounts of money. People begin to associate that honor with the amount of money people are able to make. The lower your income the less respectable you must be because you’re not a member of this elite intellectual society. But who says that society is so intellectual and elite? Why? Who cares?
In Museum Highlights, Andrea Fraser provokes the viewer to these same questions in a constructive way. She uses the culture of the museum as a tool to critique the culture of the museum. Her critique is thus presented in a language that anyone engaged in the discourse can understand and finds compelling. She also uses the customs of the discourse to call attention to how the museum engages in other discourses. This, hopefully, contributes to a meaningful shift in the practices of the institution and maybe even society as a whole.
I guess what discourse analysis is really empowering us to do is express ourselves in the most effective and conscious way possible. I really appreciate this specific method because it accounts much more intentionally for different perspectives. This allows a shift from the hegemonic viewpoint of things and makes room for other stories to be told. Or even for the same stories to be told from different perspectives. Foucault rejected the idea of absolute truth and so do I. I think everyone has their own understanding of reality. We’re all living different lives. Who am I to say someone else’s understanding is invalid just because I haven’t lived it? There are a lot of things I haven’t experienced and may never experience. I’ve never seen a water molecule, but through life in a society with compulsory schooling which entails discipline in the sciences including chemistry, I’ve come to believe in and understand them. (Except science was really hard so I don’t really understand molecules. Nevertheless, the discourse deemed an understanding of molecules necessary for college readiness, so I had to pretend I grasped the concept in order to graduate (which I wouldn’t have been able to do without a thorough comprehension of the educational discourse in my country and at my particular institution). That’s a discourse that needs to be destabilized because I’ve been fine in college for two years and have not had to talk at all about molecules up until this point.) From my understanding, Discourse analysis gives me the tools necessary to 1. understand how exactly I became convinced of the existence of water molecules (or anything) and to 2. convince others of whatever I want.
