4. The analytical/empirical in the analysis of discourses from decoloniality perspective

Due to this decolonial turn could be interiorized to the analysis of discourses; in this part of the chapter, some examples will be presented.

In spaces of intersubjective communication exchange between the subject that investigates and the subject of the research, sensations and perceptions are enunciated and interpreted by each one. For example, when a space for interviews with people in a situation of disability is generated for the understanding of the reality that this population lives in Uruguay, the researcher must understand the social historical totality of these subjects, who materialize in expressions, gestures, looks, silences, etc. Who investigates from a decolonial perspective, is a constitutive part of the interview as a network shared with the subject of the investigation, where the knowledge of both sides is as valid as it is substantial for the subsequent discursive analysis. In this process, the naturalized hierarchies of knowledge and the asymmetry and inequality relations are overcome. The reality that is presented through the language that is handled is understood. The analysis becomes here in “other” ways, without truths as generic absolutes posited by coloniality.

In colonial modernity, the symbolic status of the researcher is produced and reproduced by the socially shared representations that place him as subject of knowledge. The domain of the latter on the subject of the research (in the present example, people with disabilities) is naturalized by the internalized ideological components of this colonial modernity. Thus, inequalities and asymmetries are the externalization of hierarchies imposed by the coloniality of knowledge that, in its processuality, also results in the coloniality of being. From this perspective, everything that happens in the instances of joint discourses are materialized and later analyzed from a pattern of domination. In the words of Pereira Lázaro: “Coloniality and modernity within the context we intend to present arise as rhetoric about the lives of the populations that have been placed at the margins of the development project; these subjects enter the modernizing and globalizing plan of the world in the middle of ethnocentric justifications, once the West assumes control of the politics of identification of being” ([4], p. 1).

When located from this perspective, where modernity is part of a civilizatory project, the subject who investigates is positioned as a subject of domination, generating “a space, and therefore, an exterior and an interior to it” (Restrepo and Rojas, [5], p. 15). The interruption in communication thus becomes a constant in the course of the interviews that take place between the subject that investigates and the subject of the investigation, constituting a dialogue between “foreigners.” In this dialog, some are inside (subject that investigates) and others are outside (subject of the investigation). The relationship we-others is mediated by the interruption in communication by corporeizing subjectivities and practices that are analyzed by the subject that investigates (from the colonial perspective) as disruptive alterities of normality (subject of research, in this example, people in disability situation). In this case, the disability will be deconstructed through the classification of these others as “abnormal” subjects, mediated by differentiations around the appropriation of knowledge and social inclusion potentialities from the “normality” that they fail to reach. Classical categories of modernity such as economy, politics, society, social class, among others, reproduced in the analytical discourse by the subject, who investigates, are delimited in the plane of thinking an object understood from the point of departure as foreign, external, and inferior in the framework of a “universal truth” (Eurocentric, modern, colonial). From this positioning, any space of real encounter between the subject that investigates and the subject of the investigation is destined to the mismatch, being “the written language, the systematization of the observation, the taxonomy, etc., which will act as devices of the coloniality of power” (Restrepo and Rojas, [5], p. 20).

Restrepo and Rojas [5] argue that to overcome this colonial difference of being and knowledge is necessary to make a decolonial inflection, which “is a tool to understand what happens in a country or region, tied to a globalized system of power in geopolitical terms. To the extent that modernity has spread through political and economic forms resulting from the European experience and that … are the result of colonial expansion and have had repercussions in all areas of life up to the present” (p. 19). This decolonial inflection enables the conjunction of looks, where the pluriversality, antagonistic of universality (unique and modern), becomes essence. For the analysis of discourses from this perspective, the ethics and policies of decoloniality are opposed to universalist and Eurocentric global models, generating the encounter based on multiple interpretations of knowledge with “other ways of being and other aspirations about the world … (where) many worlds fit” (Restrepo and Rojas, [5], p. 21).

As stated in the previous point, Mignolo [6] proposes the decoloniality of being and knowledge, overcoming the traditional conception of the coloniality of power. This allows us to understand and interpret the forms of domination imposed by the colonial power in the epistemic frameworks that produce, naturalize, and legitimize knowledge anchored in the distinction of the we-others that make any attempt at dialog and discourse analysis impossible without colonial premonitions and interpretations. Language enters into this discursive logic materializing the coloniality. The decolonial perspective in the analysis of discourses demystifies this created alterity and proposes the recognition and power found in cultural, ethnic, identity, age, disability, etc. distinctions for the delimitation of the research object that overcomes the “scientific objectivity” typical of the Global North.

The rhetoric becomes very important to complete the discourse analysis scheme, where the coloniality of being and of knowledge cross the language materialized in the dialogues that are generated in the framework of the interviews. The “art of good saying”, as rhetoric is defined in the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, preconfigure valuations of “good” and “bad” sayings, depending on the subject of the enunciation. In this way, in the example of people in a situation of disability, who are interviewed by the subject who investigates, they are relegated to a “bad saying” of their feelings, emotions, perceptions, and approaches regarding what disability policies would be in Uruguay. This “bad saying” will be corrected, reformulated, and metamorphosed by the subject that investigates from the colonial perspective to a “good to say”. Thus, the rhetoric is imbued with pre-notional charges that distinguish between the plane of being and thinking of one and another subject.

The ideological components for these impositions have been (and are) centered on the Eurocentric idea of modernity of a Global North (civilized) superior to the Global South (barbarian), which unfolds in these binary logics in the various societal and intersubjective frameworks when they find subjects understood as diverse. These “others” will be both the subjects of the Global South in relation to the Global North, the subjects of the investigation in relation to the subject who investigates, the subjects who learn in relation to the subject who teaches, and so on. These “others,” as proposed by Dussel ([7], p. 50), receive the “cursed inheritance of the fallacy developed from the process of hegemonic modernization that has defined them as persons denied the benefits of modernity”. Beyond modernity is not only a European phenomenon and linked to the colonies, it continues to reproduce the rhetoric of modernity as a European story, displayed by the elites, who have narrated and hidden issues for the generation of their metanarratives. The “official history” is thus presented as the only truth, which spreads in the West as an absolute to reproduce.

If this rhetoric is posed from the decolonial perspective, the logic of coloniality is revealed in its political fabric of modernity, globalization, and capitalism: “A logic not interested in hiding the brazenness of the project developed in the long history of disinterest for human life has always been reinvented in the sense of maintaining the order of things … in the colonial matrix of power, where power remains in the hands of the imperial subject and submission on the shoulders of subjects destined for the eternal process of colonization of their lives” ([8], p. 1). In the example of people in a situation of disability, the discourses and their analyzes no longer place these subjects as guilty of their misfortunes and consequent problems of disability, and therefore, subjects that make up a “nonbeing” of modernity colonial. On the other hand, they are a constitutive and substantial part of all language, rhetoric and discursivity developed in processes shared with the subject that investigates. This population will no longer be constructed and located as an “other” colonial subject, where its precarious subjectivity is what allows the subject, who investigates to be an accomplice of that task, but as a constituent part of decoloniality of being and knowledge. From this decolonial turn, the “subject of the West” ceases to be the “only subject and theme” [9].

The analysis of discourses from decolonial perspective invites to unlearn the internalized, imposed, assumed, and externalized of coloniality, in order to reconstitute being in an emancipatory process. These standardized and modern institutes, just as they were created and scattered by the imperialist logic of the colonizers, are now being deconstructed by the colonized. Just as colonial logics have been imposed, there is no reason for their overcoming, which generates ways of thinking and being emancipated from decolonized subjects.

5. Conclusions

The ideological imperative of knowledge of the Global North has been imposed on the knowledge of the Global South from a unidirectionality that has truncated ways of being, living, and thinking proper to the peoples who have been colonized. The knowledge generated by this unidirectional way turns with the decolonial perspective, giving its power and recognition.

The Latin American social and human sciences converge in a constant reproduction of power relations, where on the one hand, it is exercised, and at the same time, on the other hand, it is experienced in the coloniality of power. Realizing these contradictions would be a first step to delineate a path with as few paradoxes as possible. In this context, discourse analysis is essential to produce knowledge that is not only demarcated by the researcher but also by who is the subject of the research. This means a substantial turn of the screw toward what Mignolo referred to as “the colonization of being through the colonization of knowledge” (in [1], p. 39).

After the discovery of America, the creation and consolidation of a modern Europe with hegemonic ways of being and thinking in the understanding of the demarcation of “some” civilized and “other” barbarians to colonize were materialized. Thus arises the conviction from this Global North that everything that is “outside” of its territoriality and episteme is noncivilized, nonpolitical, and therefore, nonhuman. In this framework, these “barbarians” are required to think of themselves as responsible for their own misfortunes, and forced to reproduce the logic of modernity in favor of their dignity. According to Dussel [7], an “irrational process that is hidden to their own eyes” is generated. From the decolonial perspective, these colonized “others” account for having been “the innocent victim of ritual sacrifice, who upon discovering himself as innocent, judges modernity as guilty of sacrificing, conquering, original, constitutive, essential violence” (p. 49). In its overcoming, and betting on the emancipation of the colonized, it aims to “discover the dignity of the Other (of the other culture, of the other sex and gender, etc.); when the victims are declared innocent from the affirmation of their otherness as identity in exteriority as people who have been denied by modernity” (p. 50) [8].

Transposing this to the analysis of discourses, in the relation subject that investigates—subject of the investigation, the process to be realized must be a double movement in the decoloniality of the being and of the knowledge. In this way, “must be made from critical and reflective positions that encourage the construction of reality from different perspectives, open, human and tolerant” ([3], p. 7). This implies the critical look of the subject who investigates as enunciator of themes recovered from the discourses of the subjects of the research, which are deconstructed from “other” epistemologies. In this way, it is possible to overcome the coloniality of Eurocentric and modern knowledge, reproducers of cultural/imperial domain, which controls knowledge according to the global geopolitics of the coloniality of power [3].

In turn, this naturalization and discursive legitimation that adorns modern knowledge, generates a concrete link between knowledge and power that, according to Coronil [10], is characterized by the following components: “(A) the operation of separating/splitting the “real”(dualism); (b) the exercise of dividing the components of the world into isolated units, denying their relations (atomism) and making it impossible to approach them in terms of historical-social totality; (c) the exercise of converting differences into hierarchies, and the exercise of naturalizing those representations” (p. 8). In the field of academia, where the analysis of discourses finds its reason for being, this is imbued in logics such as: the evaluation of scientific production under the meritocratic-quantifiable criterion, on the one hand, and the hierarchy of the circuits of distribution of scientific texts according to privileged enunciation locus, on the other.

The discourse analysis from decolonial perspective invites the real encounter between the subject that investigates and the subject of the investigation, in a transfer that surpasses the predicted logics and sinks its roots in the decoloniality of being and thinking. The relations of asymmetry characterized by the Global North, where colonizers and colonized are located as civilized and barbarian, respectively, find other correlates mediated by the fundamental knowledge of both parties for the process of research.

It is considered that decolonial perspective provides a theoretical-methodological frame of reference to transcend imposed by a “must be” hegemonic own the Global North. The power that the social and human sciences have in the analysis of a convoluted and chaotic reality is the engine that nourishes the collections of knowledge and objective social research. That is the decoloniality of power and knowledge that invades the being for the deployment of the encounter with “the others” in relations of expansion of the “field of the possible” [11] of those who make up this researcher subject-subject of the research.

Notes

• The translations of the texts of the authors of the decoloniality that appear from here at the end in the present chapter, are of own authorship.
• By “phenomenal” is understood the apparent, to what emerges as the first way of understanding reality.
• The reference of the “social question” in the framework of the research processes of social and human sciences remains a constant. Such expression has been brought to account for the ways in which the “unfortunate consequences” of coloniality materialize today. From the decolonial position, the form of naming a “social question” does not appear in the jargon and writings of its various authors.

References

[1] Castro-Gómez S, Grosfoguel R. El giro decolonial. Reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores; 2007

[2] Maldonado Torres N. La descolonización y el giro des-colonial. Bogotá: Tabula Rasa, No. 9; 2008. pp. 61-72

[3] Zimmermann L. Lectura y pensamiento decolonial: aportes del análisis del discurso para la lectura de textos. In: Actas Congreso Nacional Subsede Cátedra Unesco UNR. Santa Fé: Universidad Nacional del Litoral; 2015

[4] Castro-Gómez S. La hybris del punto cero: ciencia, raza e Ilustración en la Nueva Granada (1750-1816). Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana; 2007

[5] Restrepo E, Rojas A. La inflexión decolonial: Pensamiento crítico desde América Latina. Popayán: Instituto Pensar. 2010

[6] Mignolo W. La idea de América Latina. La herida colonial y la opción decolonial. Barcelona: Gedisa; 2007

[7] Dussel E. Europa, modernidad y eurocentrismo. En: Lander, E. (comp.). La colonialidad del saber: Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas Latinoamericanas. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales. 2000

[8] Pereira Lázaro JP. La retórica de la modernidad, la lógica de la colonialidad y la globalización en el ámbito de las migraciones transnacionales: formación de subjetividades negadas y cotidianidad del migrante del sur. Ciudad de México: Pacarina del Sur-Revista de Pensamiento Crítico Latinoamericano; 2017, año 8, N°31

[9] Spivak GC. ¿Puede hablar el sujeto subalterno? Nueva York: Orbis Tertius. 1998;III(6):175-235

[10] Coronil F. Más allá del Occidentalismo: Hacia categorías geohistóricas no imperiales. La Habana: Casa de las Américas, No. 206; 1999. pp. 21-49

[11] Sartre JP. Crítica de la razón dialéctica. Buenos Aires: Eudeba; 2000

Contact

María Noel Míguez Passada
Universidad de la República, Uruguay
[email protected]

Citation

María Noel Míguez Passada (April 3rd 2019). Discourses Analysis by a Decolonial Perspective, Advances in Discourse Analysis, Lavinia Suciu, IntechOpen, DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.81612. Available from: https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/65832

Copyright

• Title: “Discourses Analysis by a Decolonial Perspective”
• Authors: “María Noel Míguez Passada”
• Source: “https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/65832”
• License: “CC BY 3.0”