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"Mother, I am your song, your lips. Your fingers trace
curves of my speech. I am your echo.
Carry your song beyond me, daughter. It is ours. I will hear." (Gillett 287)
Clearly, The Piano is a political film, and it is a film about politics, It is a film about the politics and the politicalization of sexuality, feminism, colonialism, and environmentalism.1 Clearly, too, The Piano is a powerful film, and it is a film about power. As Campion herself has said about the sexual politics between Ada and Stewart, "It becomes a relationship of power, the power of those that care and those that don't care" (qtd. in Jacobs 776). And finally, The Piano is a film about muteness and silence; but for all its emphasis on the absence of sound, it is also a film that foregrounds the presence of discourse. Indeed, perhaps because of the very profound nature of silence does the very nature of discourse become so powerful, and vice versa. In fact, in order to constitute legitimate discourse, the elements of discourse can be neither fixed and polarized nor ostracized and annihilated. As Foucault correctly points out, authentic discourse involves the distribution of its elements, their exchange and interchange, and their play and interplay in a dialectic of strategies. In Foucault's words:
... we must conceive discourse as a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is neither uniform nor stable. To be more precise, we must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies. It is the distribution that we must reconstruct, with the things said and those concealed, the enunciations required and those forbidden, that it comprises. (100)
Discourse involves, as Foucault notes, complex variables. One must consider who speaks, his or her position of power, the institutional context in which enunciations or events occur, and the implications coincident with such a matrix. As Foucault warns, we must be cognizant of "the shifts and reutilizations of identical formulas for contrary objectives" that discourses include (100). Rather than a hypostatized condition, then, discourse can be an instrument of power and it...