Blog for p.20, #3 in TT

Any discourse can be "powerful", depending on the sense of the word. If "powerful" is taken to mean "moving" or "emotional", then a romantic film like Love Story can be a powerful discourse. But if "powerful" means "having control or influence over people and events", then much fewer discourses can be deemed "powerful". A powerful discourse (in the latter sense) is one that has the ability to change large numbers of minds. If a piece has power, it can cause a great number of people to take a certain opinion, to modify their beliefs, to even take action, as suggested by the author. For example, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech, "I Have a Dream", is an incredibly powerful discourse because it asks, and causes, many people to change their minds about race issues and to take action against segregation and racism. This however, is not a dangerous discourse. Dangerous discourses are those with power that ask its audiences to believe in or do something that is harmful to others, or goes against the moral status quo of a society.

As Foucault stated, society does its part to inhibit powerful and even dangerous discourses, such as Hitler's Mein Kampf or Powell's The Anarchist Cookbook. While both of these publications are in great circulation and are easily accessed, society does its part to hinder their negative effects, such as the indoctrination of children to know that Hitler was a terrible man and that genocide is wrong, and to know that building bombs is something that normal people just don't do. But besides labeling discourses, and teaching children that "dangerous discourses" should be ignored, society can take more drastic measures to inhibit the effects of discourses. In Germany, for example, Mein Kampf is banned in most places. Because that dangerous discourse has such a strong relationship with that country, society has taken upon itself the task of breaking that bond and attempting to sever itself from such a dangerous discourse. Banning books and other discourses is just one way that a society can protect itself from the ravages of dangerous discourses.

As the book suggests, another way of containing the effects of a discourse is to have an "expert" declare it void of social value. An "expert" is a person that society declares to have sufficient knowledge of a subject to make decisions for the rest of society. A doctor is an expert in medicine, and can therefore tell society to take daily vitamins and the public will take it as truth. But an academic expert is slightly harder to pin down. In my opinion, a single person cannot make such a drastic decision as to declare a novel worthy or unworthy of study in the undergraduate curricula. It takes a consensus among "experts" to make such a decision. And society allows experts to make these decisions for them because the majority of people are not well educated and believe that since they lack the education of the experts, they are not qualified to have a say in these matters. Therefore, society allows its educated experts to declare what is fit for study and what is worthwhile.

Other labels besides "dangerous" and "powerful" put onto discourses can also control their effects. When words like "political", "unpatriotic" and "emotional" are connected to a discourse, society reads certain connotations, depending on one's own opinions and beliefs. To a veteran, "unpatriotic" may mean uninformed and anarchistic, while to an antiwar protester it can mean truthful and honest. An "emotional" film may sound like a sappy chick flick to a teenage boy, but middle-aged women may flock to the theatre because of its title as "emotional". Discourses are "sold" to certain audiences or kept confined from society completely by the tags that experts put on them.