Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Representation/Stuart Hall/Birmingham School
General introduction on the centrality of representation to Cultural Studies, and the connection between global culture and representation.
I. Representation
An Old View (which Stuart Hall will subvert): Representation as re–presenting
Represent is defined as “present” or “depicted.”
Re–present means “there already,” and presented through the media. Media re–present—this notion suggests the idea of media giving meaning
For example, political figures represent us, or stands in for us
Still there is a “gap of representation”: the difference is between “true” meaning and how that “true” meaning is represented
Reflective approach
Intentional approach
Contructionist approach
A New View: Representation as constitutive
Question: “Do events in the world have one essential, fixed, true meaning? Or, are events distorted in some way that we can measure?” Meaning here includes an events history and context, as well as expectations for the future.
For example, there will never be one interpretation of Northern Ireland—there is no “true,” fixed, single meaning for the meaning of the events surrounding Northern Ireland.
What is the “true” meaning of something depends on what people make of it.
There is no real meaning until something has been represented and the representation is different with each audience (each listener).
The process of re–presentation enters into the event itself, and helps constitute it.
Representation is part of the object—is constitutive of it.
Culture as Primacy
Culture is the way we make sense of or give meaning to things.
How do meanings constitute the events of experience?
If we shared no concepts with others we could not build a social world.
Cultures consist of maps of meaning. They are frameworks of intelligibility, things that allow us to make sense of our experience and a world that is ambiguous until we make meaning of it. So Culture is ways of making meaning without which we would find the world unintelligible.
(Culture is not just the values we were born into?)
Conceptual Maps—are a matter of classifying the world—they are the basis of culture (shared conceptual maps).
How are things and experiences classified and conceptualized differently? Example: “chair” belongs to category because similar to other chairs, but also different—this is complex.
“The capacity to classify is a basic genetic fact of being human.”
The particular system of classification used in society is a learned behavior
To become human is to internalize the shared conceptual maps of one’s culture. Culture, then, is a system of representations, part of our shared maps.
Concepts allow us to store, refer to and think about objects not “out there” in the world or not available to our senses any longer.
Concepts are not just mirror images of what is out there but are interpreted through who we are as an individual in society.
Language and Communication—Suppose we share the same conceptual maps and have the same systems in our head—how do we know we share these meanings? We can only know if we confirm it through communication through language.
Communication and language complete the circle of representation.
1. Shared conceptual maps (=cultures)
2. The way different languages (digital, music, nonverbal/gestures, or any sign/symbol “system”) gives sign to the meanings we share, in a form to communicate
Language externalizes the meanings and makes them available and accessible (which closes the circle of representation).
Reality and Discourse
Discourse and Foucault
Group of statements which provide a language for talking about – a way of representing the knowledge about – a particular topic at a particular historical moment.
Discourse is exclusionary and generative. It defines spaces and the ways in which these spaces are discussed. Relate to academic and professional realities.
Discursive formation.
Knowledge/power. Power as circulatory not as static object.
Regimes of truth. As opposed to absolute truth.
Question: Does this mean there is no existence outside of language?
Answer: No. There are lots of “things” besides meaning.
Consider two statements, which sound the same but are very different:
1. Nothing meaningful exists outside of discourse (T)
2. Nothing exists outside of discourse—there are no objects outside of discourse (F).
As far as meaning is concerned, you/we need discourse to make meaningful sense of it.
Ex: A football only exists within a set of rules of a game. The football as object is meaningful only within a specific (language) game.
The question of discourse and framework of intelligibility is about people giving meaning to things.
If meaning is constitutive then you have absorbed the whole world into language. Without language meaning could not be exchanged. Language in the broadest sense includes the different media and other sign/symbol systems.
IDEOLOGY—Foucault’s critique—marxist assumption that prevailing ideas reflect the economic base and the ruling class. For Foucault power/knowledge formations are contested and in flux, and don’t correspond to class interests in simple ways.
HEGEMONY—Gramsci notion that particular social groups struggle in many different ways, including ideologically, to win the consent of other groups and achieve a kind of ascendancy in both thought and practice over them. Hegemony assumes both contestation as well as dominance.
II. IV Ideology and Power Fixes Meaning
Does that mean that meanings are just floating around, that everything means a 1,000 different things? You get a proliferation of meaning—jouissance—an excess—to the pleasure of the image. Yes and no. The meaning can never be fixed, but if you want to say, even provisionally, “I sort of think it means this,” you have fixed it. You have privileged the meaning (given privilege to a certain meaning) for the time being, but not forever.
Meaning depends on a certain kind of fixing (using power). On the other hand, meaning can never be fixed permanently. We are looking at a practice, which is always subverted. The purpose of power when it intervenes in language is precisely to absolutely fix an interpretation. That what we used to call ideology does to meaning: I can tell you what the meeting in Northern Ireland means . . . .” Ideology means to fix meanings.
Power and ideology attempts to fix the meaning
of images and language
Because the fixing of meaning cannot be guaranteed it can be unfixed, it can be loosened and fray.
The relative openness of the meaning makes change possible.
This is a postmodern playfulness, which insists on a relative openness for meaning.
Meaning can only be changed because it cannot be finally fixed.
You bet your life. The attempt to fix meaning is why power intervenes in representations at all. That is what THEY want it to do. They want the relationship between the image and a powerful definition of it to become naturalized. So that that meaning is the only one it can possibly have. When you see the image you will assume a certain meaning, certain characteristics, you will assume certain political consequences: black man = violent = criminal = barbaric.
That is what ideology tries to do, that is what power in signification is intended to do—to close the interpretation of language, to close meaning, to stop the flow of meaning.
Contesting Stereotypes: Positive Images
There is an enormous amount of work to be done in media studies in the area of stereotyping.
Stereotyping fixes the meanings that are given to groups.
Every time you see this image (of a Blackman), these are the limited range of characteristics, which will be assumed and be implicated in the image. That is how a stereotype works. People have assumed what this is doing. Actually, it is a powerful way of circulating in the world a very limited range of definitions of who people can be, what they can do, the possibilities in life—these are the nature of the constraints on them.
The limited images of Black men affect how the society perceives Black men in the “real world.”
Images produce knowledge about the world. The image (text) is producing, not only identification, it is producing knowledge–what we know about the world is how re–represent it.
So the struggle to open up stereotypes is the struggle to increase the diversity of things—what subjects (people) can be—of the possibilities and identities, which people have not seen, represented before.
Converting stereotypes means increasing the diversity of images in the media [and outside the media].
Diversity opens up new possibilities of identity.
The Politics of the Image.
As you may know, there have been a number of different strategies with respect to the fixing of the image by ideology and power. The most common is the positive image. You have a field of stereotypes which you try to intervene in. You intervene to re–present the negative image of the group in a more positive way, to reverse the stereotype. However, there is a problem to reversing stereotypes. If it were as simple as putting positive images (of Blacks and women) in the place where negative images were before—if you could somehow maintain a positive regime of re–presentation in place of the stereotype you had before. But our actual practice suggests to us that it is just as impossible to fix bad representations and almost impossible to fix good ones.
Contesting Stereotypes: Taking images apart.
The politics of the image has to take a very different and much less guaranteed route; it has to go inside the image, because stereotypes are actually very complex things. It has to occupy the terrain, which has been saturated by fixed and closed representations. It has to try to use the stereotype and turn the stereotype against itself. To open up the practice of representation itself, as a practice, because what closure in representation does most of all is it naturalizes the representation (hides it) so you cannot see that anybody ever produced it—this is just the way the world is, how it looks—it is what reality is.
The very act of opening the practice of representation poses questions like:
Where do images come from?
Who produces images?
How is meaning closed down in images?
Who is silenced in the production of images?
We have to go into the power of the stereotype and subvert it, open it up, and expose it from the inside. We have to shift the disposition within which is circulates. There is no way that is guaranteed—there is no guarantee the image won’t be pulled back to its stereotypical form. We have to open stereotype by integrating them and making them uninhabitable—we have to destroy their naturalness and normality.
A type of stereotype—fetishism—is a fixing of sexual imagery regarding race and gender, a feature of negative stereotyping. You have to ask if you really want to intervene or whether you want to leave the stereotype alone when it is so contaminated by stereotypical uses. Or whether you want to go in the natural fetishism itself because of the secret power it has. Stereotypes get stabilized for a reason, not just a joke, but because it has very powerful powers of identification and fantasy.
If you want to change the reality of the viewer of the image you have to intervene in the powerful exchange between the image and its psychic meaning, the depths of the fantasy—the collective and social fantasies— We invest images with in order to expose and deconstruct the work of representation which stereotypes are doing.
(Summary)
What is at stake in representation?
New knowledge, new identities, new meanings. To attempt to keep representation open is a way of constantly wanting new kinds of knowledge, new identities, and a new diversity of meanings which have not been foreclosed by the systems of power which are in operation in the world. So there is no other way of thinking than by what is represented.
I. Representation
An Old View (which Stuart Hall will subvert): Representation as re–presenting
Represent is defined as “present” or “depicted.”
Re–present means “there already,” and presented through the media. Media re–present—this notion suggests the idea of media giving meaning
For example, political figures represent us, or stands in for us
Still there is a “gap of representation”: the difference is between “true” meaning and how that “true” meaning is represented
Reflective approach
Intentional approach
Contructionist approach
A New View: Representation as constitutive
Question: “Do events in the world have one essential, fixed, true meaning? Or, are events distorted in some way that we can measure?” Meaning here includes an events history and context, as well as expectations for the future.
For example, there will never be one interpretation of Northern Ireland—there is no “true,” fixed, single meaning for the meaning of the events surrounding Northern Ireland.
What is the “true” meaning of something depends on what people make of it.
There is no real meaning until something has been represented and the representation is different with each audience (each listener).
The process of re–presentation enters into the event itself, and helps constitute it.
Representation is part of the object—is constitutive of it.
Culture as Primacy
Culture is the way we make sense of or give meaning to things.
How do meanings constitute the events of experience?
If we shared no concepts with others we could not build a social world.
Cultures consist of maps of meaning. They are frameworks of intelligibility, things that allow us to make sense of our experience and a world that is ambiguous until we make meaning of it. So Culture is ways of making meaning without which we would find the world unintelligible.
(Culture is not just the values we were born into?)
Conceptual Maps—are a matter of classifying the world—they are the basis of culture (shared conceptual maps).
How are things and experiences classified and conceptualized differently? Example: “chair” belongs to category because similar to other chairs, but also different—this is complex.
“The capacity to classify is a basic genetic fact of being human.”
The particular system of classification used in society is a learned behavior
To become human is to internalize the shared conceptual maps of one’s culture. Culture, then, is a system of representations, part of our shared maps.
Concepts allow us to store, refer to and think about objects not “out there” in the world or not available to our senses any longer.
Concepts are not just mirror images of what is out there but are interpreted through who we are as an individual in society.
Language and Communication—Suppose we share the same conceptual maps and have the same systems in our head—how do we know we share these meanings? We can only know if we confirm it through communication through language.
Communication and language complete the circle of representation.
1. Shared conceptual maps (=cultures)
2. The way different languages (digital, music, nonverbal/gestures, or any sign/symbol “system”) gives sign to the meanings we share, in a form to communicate
Language externalizes the meanings and makes them available and accessible (which closes the circle of representation).
Reality and Discourse
Discourse and Foucault
Group of statements which provide a language for talking about – a way of representing the knowledge about – a particular topic at a particular historical moment.
Discourse is exclusionary and generative. It defines spaces and the ways in which these spaces are discussed. Relate to academic and professional realities.
Discursive formation.
Knowledge/power. Power as circulatory not as static object.
Regimes of truth. As opposed to absolute truth.
Question: Does this mean there is no existence outside of language?
Answer: No. There are lots of “things” besides meaning.
Consider two statements, which sound the same but are very different:
1. Nothing meaningful exists outside of discourse (T)
2. Nothing exists outside of discourse—there are no objects outside of discourse (F).
As far as meaning is concerned, you/we need discourse to make meaningful sense of it.
Ex: A football only exists within a set of rules of a game. The football as object is meaningful only within a specific (language) game.
The question of discourse and framework of intelligibility is about people giving meaning to things.
If meaning is constitutive then you have absorbed the whole world into language. Without language meaning could not be exchanged. Language in the broadest sense includes the different media and other sign/symbol systems.
IDEOLOGY—Foucault’s critique—marxist assumption that prevailing ideas reflect the economic base and the ruling class. For Foucault power/knowledge formations are contested and in flux, and don’t correspond to class interests in simple ways.
HEGEMONY—Gramsci notion that particular social groups struggle in many different ways, including ideologically, to win the consent of other groups and achieve a kind of ascendancy in both thought and practice over them. Hegemony assumes both contestation as well as dominance.
II. IV Ideology and Power Fixes Meaning
Does that mean that meanings are just floating around, that everything means a 1,000 different things? You get a proliferation of meaning—jouissance—an excess—to the pleasure of the image. Yes and no. The meaning can never be fixed, but if you want to say, even provisionally, “I sort of think it means this,” you have fixed it. You have privileged the meaning (given privilege to a certain meaning) for the time being, but not forever.
Meaning depends on a certain kind of fixing (using power). On the other hand, meaning can never be fixed permanently. We are looking at a practice, which is always subverted. The purpose of power when it intervenes in language is precisely to absolutely fix an interpretation. That what we used to call ideology does to meaning: I can tell you what the meeting in Northern Ireland means . . . .” Ideology means to fix meanings.
Power and ideology attempts to fix the meaning
of images and language
Because the fixing of meaning cannot be guaranteed it can be unfixed, it can be loosened and fray.
The relative openness of the meaning makes change possible.
This is a postmodern playfulness, which insists on a relative openness for meaning.
Meaning can only be changed because it cannot be finally fixed.
You bet your life. The attempt to fix meaning is why power intervenes in representations at all. That is what THEY want it to do. They want the relationship between the image and a powerful definition of it to become naturalized. So that that meaning is the only one it can possibly have. When you see the image you will assume a certain meaning, certain characteristics, you will assume certain political consequences: black man = violent = criminal = barbaric.
That is what ideology tries to do, that is what power in signification is intended to do—to close the interpretation of language, to close meaning, to stop the flow of meaning.
Contesting Stereotypes: Positive Images
There is an enormous amount of work to be done in media studies in the area of stereotyping.
Stereotyping fixes the meanings that are given to groups.
Every time you see this image (of a Blackman), these are the limited range of characteristics, which will be assumed and be implicated in the image. That is how a stereotype works. People have assumed what this is doing. Actually, it is a powerful way of circulating in the world a very limited range of definitions of who people can be, what they can do, the possibilities in life—these are the nature of the constraints on them.
The limited images of Black men affect how the society perceives Black men in the “real world.”
Images produce knowledge about the world. The image (text) is producing, not only identification, it is producing knowledge–what we know about the world is how re–represent it.
So the struggle to open up stereotypes is the struggle to increase the diversity of things—what subjects (people) can be—of the possibilities and identities, which people have not seen, represented before.
Converting stereotypes means increasing the diversity of images in the media [and outside the media].
Diversity opens up new possibilities of identity.
The Politics of the Image.
As you may know, there have been a number of different strategies with respect to the fixing of the image by ideology and power. The most common is the positive image. You have a field of stereotypes which you try to intervene in. You intervene to re–present the negative image of the group in a more positive way, to reverse the stereotype. However, there is a problem to reversing stereotypes. If it were as simple as putting positive images (of Blacks and women) in the place where negative images were before—if you could somehow maintain a positive regime of re–presentation in place of the stereotype you had before. But our actual practice suggests to us that it is just as impossible to fix bad representations and almost impossible to fix good ones.
Contesting Stereotypes: Taking images apart.
The politics of the image has to take a very different and much less guaranteed route; it has to go inside the image, because stereotypes are actually very complex things. It has to occupy the terrain, which has been saturated by fixed and closed representations. It has to try to use the stereotype and turn the stereotype against itself. To open up the practice of representation itself, as a practice, because what closure in representation does most of all is it naturalizes the representation (hides it) so you cannot see that anybody ever produced it—this is just the way the world is, how it looks—it is what reality is.
The very act of opening the practice of representation poses questions like:
Where do images come from?
Who produces images?
How is meaning closed down in images?
Who is silenced in the production of images?
We have to go into the power of the stereotype and subvert it, open it up, and expose it from the inside. We have to shift the disposition within which is circulates. There is no way that is guaranteed—there is no guarantee the image won’t be pulled back to its stereotypical form. We have to open stereotype by integrating them and making them uninhabitable—we have to destroy their naturalness and normality.
A type of stereotype—fetishism—is a fixing of sexual imagery regarding race and gender, a feature of negative stereotyping. You have to ask if you really want to intervene or whether you want to leave the stereotype alone when it is so contaminated by stereotypical uses. Or whether you want to go in the natural fetishism itself because of the secret power it has. Stereotypes get stabilized for a reason, not just a joke, but because it has very powerful powers of identification and fantasy.
If you want to change the reality of the viewer of the image you have to intervene in the powerful exchange between the image and its psychic meaning, the depths of the fantasy—the collective and social fantasies— We invest images with in order to expose and deconstruct the work of representation which stereotypes are doing.
(Summary)
What is at stake in representation?
New knowledge, new identities, new meanings. To attempt to keep representation open is a way of constantly wanting new kinds of knowledge, new identities, and a new diversity of meanings which have not been foreclosed by the systems of power which are in operation in the world. So there is no other way of thinking than by what is represented.
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