Power and Truth of Social Institutions: ‘Otherizing' Media
For Foucault, it is a mechanism of 'truth'-giving, defining what those truths are by ascribing a value systems based on the current beliefs about how a society should exist, which defines the outcomes of power dynamics. These outcomes have usually been in the form a clear dichotomy matrix because the mode of thought has centered on a historically predisposed psychology of the "Western mentality”
An example would be the use of visual media, such as daguerreotypes used during slavery to ‘scientifically’ analyze for objective purposes, thus objectifying them. The images were used as data to assign a certain Truth to them, while simultaneously dehumanizing them.
The Daguerreotypes do not have the same sort of power in these times but are important nonetheless. Daguerreotypes, as a commercially successful silver photographic emulsion process, are perfect examples of the linear semiotic relationship between a visual representation and epistemological truth’ during modernity. In conjunction with this function, the application was used to ingrain a world-view into the minds of ‘modern’ people, Westerns, Americans, and Europeans. Specifically, when applying this ‘truth’-giving semiotic relationship, these ‘modern’ people would apply certain ‘truths’ about African slave. To develop Whiteness as the visible/normalized identity of America, scientific and psychological studies used Daguerreotypes of African slaves as a medium to ascribe ‘truth’s. Daguerreotypes help to ‘prove’ that Africans were in their proper place on the social hierarchy. This is how media was constructed during modernity as mass-producible ‘truths’ that can be commodified, which, whether intended or not, resulted extreme ‘otherizing’ of non-Western ethnicities.
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