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INTRODUCTION

Introduction Stuart Hall

The chapters in this volume all deal, in different ways, with the question of representation. This is one of the central practices which produce culture and a key 'moment' in what has been called the 'circuit of culture' (see du Gay, Hall et al., 1997*). But what does representation have to do with 'culture': what is the connection between them? Toput it simply, culture is

j about 'shared meanings'. Now, language is the privileged medium in which we 'make sense' of things, in which meaning is produced and exchanged. Meanings can only be shared through our common access to language. So language is central to meaning and culture and has always been regarded as the key repository of cultural values and meanings.

The circuit of culture

But how does language construct meanings? How does it sustain the dialogue between participants which enables them to build up a culture of shared understandings and so interpret the world in roughly the same ways? Language is able to do this because it operates as a representational system. In language, we use signs and symbols - whether they are saunds, written words, electronically produced images, musical notes, even objects -to stand for or represent to other people our concepts, ideas and feelings. Language is one of the 'media' through which.thoughts. ideas and feelings are represented in a culture. Representation through language is therefore central to the processes by which meaning is produced. This is the basic, underlying idea which underpins all six chapters in this book. Each chapter examines 'the production and circulation of meaning through language' in different ways, in relation to different examples, different areas of social

I< A reference in bold indicates another book, or another chapter in another book, in the series.

INTRODUCTION 3

message', and even if the other person couldn't give a very logical account of how s/he came to understand what! was 'saying'. Above all, cultural meanin s are n 'in the head'. The or anize and reulate social practices. influence our conduct and consequently have real, practica effects.

The emphasis on cultural practices is important. lt is participants in a culture who give meaning to people, objects and events. Things 'in themselves' rarely if ever have anyone, single, fixed and unchanging meaning. Even something as obvious as a stone can be a stone I a boundary marker or a piece of sculpture, depending on what it means - that is, within a certain context of use, within what the philosophers call different 'language games' (i.e. the language of boundaries, the language of sculpture, and so on). It is by our use of things, and what we say, think and feel about them - how we represent them - that we give them a meaning. Inpart, we give objects, people and events meaning by the frameworks of interpretation which we bring to them. In part, we give things meaning by how we use them, or integrate them into our everyday practices. It is our use of a pile of bricks and mortar which makes it a 'house'; and what we feel, think or say about it that makes a 'house' a 'horne'. In part, we give things meaning by how we represent them - the words we use about them, the stories we tell about them, the images of them we produce, the emotions we associate with them, the ways we classify and conceptualize them, the values we place on them. Culture, we may say, is involved in all those practices which are not simply genetically programmed into us - like the jerk of the knee when tapped - but which carry meaning and value for us, which need to be meaningfully interpreted by others, or which depend on meaning for their effective operation. Culture, in this sense, permeates all of society. It is what distinguishes the 'human' element in social life from what is simply biologically driven. Its study underlines the crucial role of the symbolic domain at the very heart of social life.

Where is meaning produced? Our 'circuit of culture' suggests that, in fact, meanings are produced at several different sites and circulated through several different processes or practices [the cultural circuit). Meaning is what gives us a sense of our own identity, of who we are and with whom we 'belong' - so it is tied up with questions of how culture is used to mark out and maintain identity within and difference between groups (which is the main focus of Woodward, ed., 1997). Meaning is constantly being produced and exchanged in every personal and social interaction in which we take part. In a sense, this is the most privileged, though often the most neglected, site of culture and meaning. It is also produced in a variety of different media; especially, these days, in the modern mass media, the means of global communication, by complex technologies, which circulate meanings between different cultures on a scale and with a speed hitherto unknown in history. (This is the focus of du Gay, ed., 1997.) Meaning is also produced whenever we express ourselves in, make use of, consume or appropriate cultural 'things'; that is, when we incorporate them in different ways into the everyday rituals and practices of daily life and in this way give them value or

AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICES4 REPRESENTATIONCULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS

. tori s and fantasies - around. ifi ce Orwhen we weave narratives, s one - :~~: 1~~iS is the focus of Mackay, ed., 1997.) Meanings also regulate an~ or anize our conduct and practices - they help to set the rules, norms an co~ventions by which social life is ordered and governed. They are also: therefore, what those who wish to govern and regulate the conduct and Ideas of others seek to structure and shape. (This is the focus of Thompson, ed., 1997.) In other words, the question of meaning arises ~n relation to all the different moments or practices in our 'cultur~l CIrCUit - in the conSlru~tlOn of identity and the marking of difference, in production and consumption, a well as in the regulation of social conduct. However, In all these Instances, and at all these different institutional sites, one of the privileged 'media'

, through which meaning is produced and circulated is language.

So, in this book, where we take up in depth the first element in our 'circuit of culture', we start with this question of meaning, language and representation. Members of the same culture must share sets of concepts, images and ideas which enable them to think and feel about the world, and thus to interpret the world, in roughly similar ways. They musjishare, broadly speaking, the same 'cultural codes'. In this sense, thinking and feeling are them elves 'systems ofrepresen!f-tion', in which our concepts, images and emotions 'stand for' or represent, in our mental life, things which are or may be 'out there' in the world. Similarly, in order to communicate these meanings to other people, the participants ll}any meaningful exchange must also be able to lise the same linguistic codes - they must, in a very broad sense, 'speak the same language'. This does not mean that they must all, literally, speak German or French or Chinese. Nor does it mean that they understand perfectly what anyone who speaks the same language is saying. We mean 'language' here in a much wider sense. Our partners must speak enough of the same language to be able to 'translate' what 'you' say into what 'I' understand, and vice versa. They must also be able to read visual images in roughly similar ways. They must be familiar with broadly the same ways of producing sounds to make what they would both recognize as 'music'. They must all interpret body language and facial expressions in broadly similar ways. And they must know how to translate their feelings and ideas into these various languages. Meaning is a dialogue - always only partially understood, always an unequal exchange.

Why do we refer to all these different ways of producing and communicating meaning as 'languages' or as 'working like languages' ? How do languages work? The simple answer is that languages work through re t ti

presen a Ion.They are 'systems of representation'. Essentially, we can sa th tall th ti , k lik I' Y a eseprac Ices wor 1 e anguages, not because they are all written Orspoken

(they are not), but because they all Use some element to t d t: s an lor Or representwhat we want to say, to express or communicate a thou ht id

I· g ,concept, I ea orfee mg. Spoken language uses sounds written langua d' ' ge uses War s rnustcallanguage uses notes on a scale, the 'language of the b d ' hvsi '

. . a y uses p ysicalgesture, the fashion mdustry Uses items of clothing th I . . , e anguage of facialexpression uses ways of arranging one's features tel '. . .

, evtaion uses digitally or

£

INTRODUCTION 5

electronicall y produced dots on a screen, traffic lights use red, green and amber - to 'say something'. These elements - sounds, words, notes, gestures, expressions, clothes - are part of our natural and material world-but their importance for language is not what they are but what they do, their function. They construct meaning and transmit it. They signify. They don't have any clear meaning in themselves. Rather, they are the vehicles or media which carry meaning because they operate as symbols, which stand for or represent (i.e. symbolize] the meanings we wish to communicate. Touse another metaphor, they function as signs. Signs stand for or represent our concepts, ideas and feelings in such a way as to enable others to 'read', decode or interpret their meaning in roughly the same way that we do.

Language, in this sense, is a mgDifyingp.I:iJ£!ice.Any representational system which functions in this way can be thought of as working, broadly speaking, according to the principles of representation through language. Thus photography is a representational system, using images on light-sensitive paper to communicate photographic meaning about a particular person, event or scene. Exhibition or display in a museum or gallery can also be thought of as 'like a language', since it uses objects on display to produce certain meanings about the subject-matter of the exhibition. Music is 'like a language' in so far as it uses musical notes to communicate feelings and ideas, even if these are very abstract, and do not refer in any obvious way to the 'real world'. (Music has been called 'the most noise conveying the least information'.) But turning up at football matches with banners and slogans, with faces and bodies painted in certain colours or inscribed with certain symbols, can also be thought of as 'like a language' - in so far as it is a symbolic practice which gives meaning or expression to the idea of belonging to a national culture, or identification with one's local community. It is part of the language of national identity, a discourse of national belongingness. Repres~ntation, here, is closely tied up with both identity and knowledge. Indeed, it is difficult to know what 'being English', or indeed French, German, South African or Japanese, means outside of all the ways in which our ideas and images of national identity or national cultures have been represented. Without these 'signifying' systems, we could not take on such identities (or indeed reject them) and consequently could not build up or sustain that common 'life-world' which we call a culture.

So it is through culture and language in this sense that the production and circulation of meaning takes place. The conventional view used to be that 'things' exist in the material and natural world; that their material or natural characteristics are what determines or constitutes them; and that they have a perfectly clear meaning, outside of how they are represented. Representation, in this view, is a process of secondary importance, which enters into the field only after things have been fully formed and their meaning constituted. But since the 'cultural turn' in the human and social sciences, meaning is thought to be produced - constructed -rather than simply 'found'. Consequently, in what has come to be called a 'social constructionist approach', representation is conceived as entering into the very constitution of things; and thus culture

I I

,

6 CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICESREPRESENTATION

, " ess as im portant as theis conce tualized as a primary or 'constitutive pr?c, ., _ economic or material 'base' in shaping social subjects and historical events not merely a reflection of the world after the event.

'Language' therefore provides one general model of how culture and " representation work, especially in what has come to be ~own as the semiotic approach - semiotics being the study or 'science of signs and their general role as vehicles of meaning in culture. In more recent years, this preoccupation with meaning has taken a different turn, being more concerned, not with the detail of how 'language' works, but with the broader role of discourse in culture. Discourses are ways of referring to or constructing knowledge about a particular topic of practice: a cluster (or formation) of ideas, images and practices, which provide ways of talking about, forms of knowledge and conduct associated with, a particular tOPIC, social activity or institutional site in society. These discursive formations, as they are known, define what is and is not appropriate in am formulation of, and our practices in relation to, a particular subject or site of social activity; what knowledge is considered useful, relevant and 'true' in that context; and what sorts of persons or 'subjects.' embody its characteristics, 'Discursive' has become the general term used to refer to any approach in which meaning, representation and culture are considered to be constitutive.

There are some similarities, but also some major differences, between the semiotic and the discursive approaches, which are developed in the chapters which follow, One important difference is that the semiotic approach is concerned with the how ofrepresentation, with how language produces meaning - what has been called its 'poetics'; whereas the discursive approach is more concerned with the effects and consequences of representation _ its 'politics', It examines not only how language and representation produce meaning, but how the knowledge which a particular discourse produces connects with power, regulates conduct, makes up or constructs identities and subjectivities, and defines the way certain things are represented, thought about, practised and studied, The emphasis in the discursive approach is always on the historical specificity of a particular form or 'regime' of representation: not on 'language' as a general concern, but on specific languages or meanings, and how they are deployed at particular times, in particular places, It p~ints us towards greater historical specificity _ the way representational practices operate in concrete historical situations. in actual practice.

The general use of language and discourse as models of ho It . . W Cli are. rnean mgand representation work, and the 'discmsive turn' in the 'I d I j

. SOcia an eli tura sciences which has followed, is one of the most signift ant hift f di , . e SiS 0 Irectionin our knowledge of society which has OCcurred in recent Th di d h years, e

ISCliSSlOn aroun t ese two versions of 'constructio' , th " ". nism - e semiotic anddiscursive approaches - IS threaded through and dId' th '

. eve ope In e SIXchapters which follow, The 'discursive turn ' has t f ' , no , a COUMe,goneuncontested, You Will find questions raised ahout thi h ' ,

ff d II di f IS approac and cnhquesa ere ,as we as If erent variants of the positio I d b . n exp are , y the dIfferent

INTRODUCTION 7

authors in this volume. Elsewhere in this series (in Mackay, ed., 1997, for example) alternative approaches are explored, which adopt a more 'creative', expressive or performative approach to meaning, questioning, for example, whether it makes sense to think of music as 'working like a language'. However, by and large, with some variations, the chapters in this book adopt a broadly 'constructionist' approach to representation and meaning.

In Chapter 1 on 'The work of representation', Stuart Hall fills out in greater depth the theoretical argument about meaning, language and representation briefly summarized here. What do we mean by saying that 'meaning is produced through language'? Using a range of examples - which it is important to work through for yourself - the chapter takes us through the argument of exactly what this entails. Do things - objects, people, events in the world - carry their own, one, true meaning, fixed like number plates on their backs, which it is the task of language to reflect accurately? Or are meanings constantly shifting as we move from one culture to another, one language to another, one historical context, one community, group or sub- culture, to another? Is it through our systems of representation, rather than 'in the world', that meaning is fixed? It is clear that representation is neither as simple nor transparent a practice as it first appears and that, in order to unpack the idea, we need to do some work on a range of examples, and bring to bear certain concepts and theories, in order to explore and clarify its complexities.

The question - 'Does visual language reflect a truth about the world which is already there or does it produce meanings about the world through representing it?' - forms the basis of Chapter 2, 'Representing the social: France and Frenchness in post-war humanist photography' by Peter Hamilton. Hamilton examines the work of a group of documentary photographers in France in the fifteen years following World War II, all of whom, he argues, adopted the representational approach, subject-matter, values and aesthetic forms of a particular practice - what he calls the 'humanist paradigm' - in French photography. This distinctive body of work produced a very specific image and definition of 'what it meant to be French' in this period, and thus helped to give a particular meaning to the idea of belonging to French culture and to 'Frenchness' as a national identity. What, then, is the status, the 'truth-claims', which these documentary photographic images are making? What are they 'documenting'? Are they to be judged by the authenticity of their representation or by the depth and subtlety of the feelings which the photographers put into their images? Do they reflect 'the truth' about French society at that time - or was there more than one kind of truth, more than one kind of 'Frenchness', depending on how it was represented? How did the image of France which emerges from this work relate to the rapid social changes sweeping through France in that period and to our (very different?) image of 'Frenchness' today?

Chapter 3, 'The poetics and the politics of exhibiting other cultures' by Henrietta Lidchi, takes up some of the same questions about representation, but in relation to a different subject-matter and a different set of signifying

II

practices. Whereas Chapter 2 deals with the practice of photography -:-the production of meaning through images - Chapter 3 deals with exhibition - the production of meaning through the display of objects and artefacts from 'other cultures' within the context of the modern museum. Here. the elements exhibited are often 'things' rather than 'words or images' and th signifying practice involved is that of arrangement and display within a physical space, rather than layout on the page of an illustrated magazine or journal. Nevertheless, as this chapter argues, exhibition too is a 'system' or 'practice of representation' - and therefore works 'like a language'. Every choice - to show this rather than that, to show this in relation to that. to say this about that - is a choice about how to represent 'other cultures; and cach choice has consequences both for what meanings are produccd and for how meaning is produced. Henrietta Lidchi shows how those meanings are inevitably implicated in relations of power>- especially between tho e who are doing the exhibiting and those who are being exhibited.

The introduction of qu~stionsof power into the argument about representation is one orihe ways in which the book consistently sceks to probe, expand and complexify our understanding of the process of representation. In Chapter 4, 'The spectacle of the "Other'", Stuart Iiall takes up this theme of 'representing difference' from Chapter 3. but now in the context of more contemporary popular cultural forms (news photos. advertising, film and popular illustration). It looks at how 'racial', ethnic and sexual difference has been 'represented' in a range of visual oxamplcs acros a number of historical archives. Central questions about how 'difference' i represented as 'Other', and the essentializing of 'differencc' thr h stereotyping are addressed. However as the argument de I QUt,g h tak the wider nuesti ve ops. te c apter

es up, e ';'" er que.stlOn of how signifying practices actually structure the way we look - how different modes of 'looking' are being l ib d l h. . Inser! c n' lese representational practices; and how violence fant dtdesi -· " ' asy an es tre also play into representational practices making them I -, muc 1 more complcx a d th . meanings more ambivalent. The chapter ends b c .d . n I'll strategies in the 'politics of representation' _ th Y onsi errng some counter-

Ide way meaning can be strugg e over, and whether a particular regi f . challenged, contested and transformed. me a representation can be

The question of how the spectator or the c .· I' db onsumer IS drawn int dlmp icate y certain practices of represent ti . a an Chapter 5, 'Exhibiting masculinity' th a ion returns In Sean Nixon's id .. . ,on e construction of 1 entitles In contemporary advertisi . new gendered dd d

ng, magaZines and . a resse especially to men. Nixon k h consumer induatrie · h di as s wether rep .In t e me ia In recent years have b resentahonal practic · ' een construct" identities'. Are the different langua f Ing new 'masculine di I ges a consumer IlSP ay developing new 'subject-post' ,. cu ture. retailing and · '. I mons , with who hmcreasmg y invited to identify? A d if IC young men are b h . n, I so, what do thaso i .a out ow the meanings ofmasculinit '. ese Images tell us It ? 'M I'" Yare shifting i I tcu ure. ascu mity -Nixon argues f fr . n a e-modern visual

bi I . all ,ar am bemg f' d 10 OglC y, accretes a variety of diff . ixe and given

erent meanmgs d'ff - 1 erentwavsof'\.--_ .... lD

8 REPRESENTATION,CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONSAND SIGNIFYING PRACTICES

\

INTRODUCTION 9

or 'becoming masculine' - in different historical contexts. Toaddress these questions, Nixon not only expands and applies some of the theoretical perspectives from earlier chapters, but adds new ones, including a psychoanalytically informed cultural analysis and film theory.

In the final Chapter 6, 'Genre and gender: the case of soap opera', Christine Gledhill takes us into the rich, narrative world of popular culture and its genres, with an examination of how representation is working in television soap opera. These are enormously popular sources of fictional narrative in modern life, circulating meanings throughout popular culture - and increasingly worldwide - which have been traditionally defined as 'feminine' in their appeal, reference and mode of operation. Gledhill unpacks the way this gendered identification of a TV genre has been constructed. She considers how and why such a 'space of representation' should have opened up within popular culture; how genre and gender elements interact in the narrative structures and representational forms; and how these popular forms have been ideologically shaped and inflected. She examines how the meanings circulated in soap operas - so frequently dismissed as stereotypical and manufactured - nevertheless enter into the discursive arena where the meaning of masculine and feminine identifications are being contested and transformed.

The book uses a wide range of examples from different cultural media and discourses, mainly concentrating on visual language. These examples are a key part of your work on the book - they are not simply 'illustrative'. Representation can only be properly analysed in relation to the actual concrete forms which meaning assumes, in the concrete practices of signifying, 'reading' and interpretation; and these require analysis of the actual signs, symbols, figures, images, narratives, words and sounds - the material forms - in which symbolic meaning is circulated. The examples provide an opportunity to practise these skills of analysis and to apply them to many other similar instances which surround us in daily cultural life.

It is worth emphasizing that there is no single or 'correct' answer to the question, 'What does this image mean?' or 'What is this ad saying?' Since there is no law which can guarantee that things will have 'one, true meaning', or that meanings won't change over time, work in this area in bound to be interpretative - a debate between, not who is 'right' and who is 'wrong', but between equally plausible, though sometimes competing and contested, meanings and interpretations. The best way to 'settle' such contested readings is to look again at the concrete example and to try to justify one's 'reading' in detail in relation to the actual practices and forms of signification used, and what meanings they seem to you to be producing.

One soon discovers that meaning is not straightforward or transparent, and does not survive intact the passage through representation. It is a slippery customer, changing and shifting with context, usage and historical circumstances. It is therefore never finally fixed. It is always putting off or 'deferring' its rendezvous with Absolute Truth. It is always being negotiated

CULTURAl REPRESENTATIONS AI'JD 510- II~nr lC pR,Ar T rs10 REPRESENTATION

. t ith new situations. It is often contested. andand Inflected, to resona e WI . f ° 0. bitt I f ught over There are always different circuit 0 mean! gsometimes 1 er yo. . . .

circulating in any culture at the same time. overlapping discursive formations, from which we draw to create meaning or to express what w think.

Moreover. we do not have a straightforward, rational or in I'llmenial relationship to meanings. They mobilize powerful feelings and mOll~n. of both a positive and negative kind. We feel their contradictory pull, th ir ambivalence. They sometimes call our very identities into question \ e struggle over them because they matter - and these arc contests from which serious consequences can flow. They define what is 'normal'. who belon and therefore, who is excluded. They arc deeply inscribed in relations of power. Think of how profoundly our lives arc shaped, depending on which meanings of male/female. black/white, rich/poor. gay/stra ight. voung/old, citizen/alien. are in play in which circumstances. Meanings arc often organized into sharply opposed binaries or opposites. However. these binaries are constantly being undermined, as representations intern Iwith one another, substituting for each other. displacing one another along an unending chain. Our material interests and Our bodies can be called 10 account. and differently implicated. depending on how meaning is giv nand taken, constructed and interpreted in different situations. But cquallv engaged are our fears and fantasies, the sentiments of desire and revul ion, of ambivalence and aggression. The more we look into this process of representation the more com 1 't b I'

. .'. p ex 1 ecornes to ( escribo adoquat lv or explain >. which ISwhy the various chapters enlist a variety of theorie and concepts, to help us unlock its secrets. .

The embodying of concepts .d d . , . . . I cas an emotions In a symbolic form whichcan be transmitted and . full . _

'th· mealllng y l11terpreted is what we mean b" e pracllces of representation'. Meaning must enter the domain of th

pracllces, if it ISto circulate effectively w th i I . considered to have com leted its ' I, In a cu ture And It cannot be has been 'decoded' or i';;elli Ibl :assage around the cultural circuit until il Language then is the g Yf ecei var] at another point in the chain.

' , property a neither tl e I meanings. It is the shared It I 1 sene er nor lhe rr-ceivar of

cu ura 'space' in wh I II dur-timeaning through language th t . IC1 1e pro ucnon of receiver of messages and - a IS, repreSentation - ta~es place. The

meanIngs IS not a . original meaning ISaccurat I d passive Screen on which the

. e y an transpare tImeanmg' is as much a sign'fy' . n Y proJC'cted. The 'ta ing of Ski 1I1gpeactIce as the'pea er and hearer Orwrits d putting into meaning I· h r an reader are at'WHC - smce they often h ac l\'e participants 10 8 proc. t· exc ange roles - IS I

in eraclIve. Representation fu t' a Ways double-Sided. al\\'a, tr . nc lOns less like tl dansmltter and more like the d I re rna el of a one-w \ What sustains this 'dialogue' mOthe of a dialogue - it is. 8 the\ a\ dml

IS e prese f .'cannot guarantee that meanings'lI nce a shared cultural cod - \ hich attempting to fix meaning is Wli remain stable fore\'er _ though . even h exact y why pm .

W en pOwer 15 cirCUlating throu h ver intervene in dl>cou""". B I. g meanIng and 1v10\\ ledge, the

INTRODUCTION I I

only work if they are to some degree shared, at least to the extent that they make effective 'translation' between 'speakers' possible. We should perhaps learn to think of meaning less in terms of' accuracy' and 'truth' and more in terms of effective exchange - a process of translation, which facilitates cultural communication while always recognizing the persistence of difference and power between different 'speakers' within the same cultural circuit.

References DU GAY, P. (ed.) (1997) Production of Cult urel Cultures of Production, London, Sage/The Open University (Book 4 in this series). DU GAY, P., HALL, S., JANES, L., MACKAY, H. and NEGUS, K. (1997)Doing Cultural Studies: the story of the Sony Walkman, London, Sage/The Open University (Book 1 in this series). HALL, S. (ed.) (1977) Representation: cultural representations and signifying practices, London, Sage/The Open University (Book 2 in this series). MACKAY, H. (ed.) (1997) Consumption and Everyday Life, London, Sage/The Open University (Book 5 in this series). THOMPSON, K. (ed.) (1997) Media and Cultural Regulation, London, Sage/The Open University (Book 6 in this series). WOODWARD, K.(ed.) (1997) Identity and Difference, London, SagelThe Open University (Book 3 in this series).

14

63 REFERENCES

READINGS FOR CHAPTER ONE

READING A: Norman Bryson, 'Language, reflection and still life' 6S

READING B: Roland Barthes, 'The world of wrestling' 66 READING C: Roland Barthes, 'Myth today' 68 READING D: Roland Barthes, 'Rhetoric of the image' 69 READING E: Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, 'New reflections on the revolution of our time' 70 READING F: Elaine Showalter, 'The performance of hysteria' 71

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 15

Representation, meaning and language In this chapter we will be concentrating on one of the key processes in the 'cultural circuit' (see du Gay, Hall et al., 1997, and the Iotroduction to this volume) - the practices of representation.' The aim of this chapter is to introduce you to this topic, and to explain what it is about and why we give it such importance in cultural studies.

The concept of representation has come to occupy a new and important place in the study of culture. Representation connects meaning and language to culture. But what exactly do people mean by it? What does representation have to do with culture and meaning? One common-sense usage of the term is as follows: 'Representation means using language to say something meaningful about, or to represent, the world meaningfully, to other people.' You may well ask, 'Is that all?' Well, yes and no. Representation is an essential part of the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a cultur~es involve.the use of language, of signs and images which stand for or represent thinvut this is a far from simple or straightforward process, as you will soon discover.

How does the concept of representation connect meaning and language to culture? In order to explore this connection further, we will look at a number of different theories about how language is used to represent the world. Here we will be drawing a distinction between three different accounts or theories: the reflective, the intentional and the constructionist approaches to representation. Does language simply reflect a meaning which already exists out there in the world of objects, people and events (reflective)? Does language express only what the speaker or writer or painter wants to say, his or her personally intended meaning (intentional)? Or is meaning constructed in and through language (constructionist)? You 'will learn more in a moment about these three approaches.

Most of the chapter will be spent exploring the constructionist approach, because it is this perspective which has had the most significant impact on cultural studies in recent years. This chapter chooses to examine two major variants or models of the constructionist approach - the semiotic approach, greatly influenced by the great Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, and the discursive approach, associated with the French philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault. Later chapters in this book will take up these two theories again, among others, so you will have an opportunity to consolidate your understanding of them, and to apply them to different areas of analysis. Other chapters will introduce theoretical paradigms which apply constructionist approaches in different ways to that of semiotics and Foucault. All, however, put in question the very nature of representation. We turn to this question first.

J

16 REPRESENTATION CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICES

1.1 Making meaning, representing things What does the word representation really mean, in this context? What does the process of representation involve? How does representation work?

Toput it briefly, representation is the production of meaning through language. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary suggests two relevant meanings for the word:

1 To represent something is to describe or depict it, to call it up in the mind by description or portrayal or imagination; to place a likeness of it before us in our mind or in the senses; as, for example, in the sentence, "Thi picture represents the murder of Abel by Cain.'

2 To represent also means to symbolize, stand for, to be a specimen of. or to substitute for; as in the sentence, 'In Christianity, the cross represents the suffering and crucifixion of Christ.'

The figures in the painting stand in the place of, and at the same time, stand for the story of Cain and Abel. Likewise, the cross simply consists of two wooden planks nailed together; but in the context of Christian belief and teaching, it takes on, symbolizes or comes to stand for a wider set of meanings about the crucifixion of the Son of God, and this is a concept we can put into words and pictures.

ACTIVITY 1

Here is a simple exercise about representation. Look at any familiar object In the room. You will immediately recognize what it is. But hov do you know what the object is? What does 'recognize' mean?

Now try to make yourself conscious of what you are d . b h . '. Ding - 0 serve w at ISgOIngon as you do It. You recognize what it is because your thought- processes decode your visual perception of the obi t i f. . . Jec In terms 0 a concept of It winch you have in your head T'hi b b .

1 . . IS must e so ecausa If you oak away,from the object, you can still think about it by conjuring it up, as we say, In your mind's eye' Go on t f II happens: There is the object ... and there i~ t~~ ~~no ow the process as it which tells you what it is, what your visual I' cfept III your head

mage 0 It means. Now, tell me what it is. Say it aloud: 'It's a lam ' the phone or whatever. The concept f th bi P - or a table or a book or mental representation of it to me via °the ::r~ect has passed through your used. The word stands for or repres t th for It which you have just

en s e concept d breference or designate either a 'real' bi ,an can e used to a jeer III the world . d dsome imaginary object like angel d . or III ee even, s anclllg on the h d f .no one has ever actually seen. ea 0 a pm, which

This is how you give meaning to things th h 1 'make sense of' the world of people bi roug anguage. This is how vou

,0 Jects and event d h -to express a complex thought about th hi s, an ow you are ahleose t mgs to tho er people. or

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 17

communicate about them through language in ways which other people are able to understand.

r('pre ntanon Why do we have to go through this complex process to represent our thoughts? If you put down a glass you are holding and walk out of the room, you can still think about the glass, even though it is no longer physically there. Actually, you can't think with a glass. You can only think with the concept of the glass. As the linguists are fond of saying, 'Dogs bark. But the concept of "dog" cannot bark or bite.' You can't speak with the actual glass, either. You can only speak with the word for glass - GLASS- which is the linguistic sign which we use in English to refer to obje~iGh.-J(Qu drink water out of. This is where representation comes iQepres.entatio) is the production of the meaning of the concepts in our miiids through language. It is the link between concepts and language which enables us to refer to either the 'real' world of objects, people or events, or indeed to imaginary worlds of fictional objects, people and events."

\ ·(I'm..; Ilf

r JlfI'sl'IJlalirm

So there are two processes, two systems of representation, involved. First, there is the 'system' by which all sorts of objects, people and events are correlated with a set of concepts or mental representations which we carry around in our heads. Without them, we could not interpret the world meaningfully at all. In the first place, then, meaning depends on the system of concepts and images formed in our thoughts which can stand for or 'represent' the world, enabling us to refer to things both inside and outside our heads.

Before we move on to look at the second 'system ofrepresentation', we should observe that what we have just said is a very simple version of a rather complex process. It is simple enough to see how we might form concepts for things we can perceive - people or material objects, like chairs, tables and desks. But we also form concepts of rather obscure and abstract things, which we can't in any simple way see, feel or touch. Think, for example, of our concepts of war, or death, or friendship or love. And, as we have remarked, we also form concepts about things we never have seen, and possibly can't or won't ever see, and about people and places we have plainly made up. We may have a clear concept of, say, angels, mermaids, God, the Devil, or of Heaven and Hell, or of Middlemarch (the fictional provincial town in George Eliot's novel), or Elizabeth (the heroine of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice).

We have called this a 'system of representation'. That is because it consists, not of individual concepts, but of different ways of organizing, clustering, arranging and classifying concepts, and of establishing compleXJe~ns between them. For example, we use-tbe-principles of similarity and difference to establish relationships between concepts or to distinguish them from one another. Thus I have an idea that in some respects birds are like planes in the sky. based on the fact that they are similar because they both fly _ but I also have an idea that in other respects they are different, because one is part of nature whilst the other is man-made. This mixing and matching of

18 REPRESENTATION CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICES

relations between concepts to form complex ideas and thoughts is possible because our concepts are arranged into different classifying syste~s. In this example, the first is based on a distinction between flying/not flying and the second is based on the distinction between natural/man-made. There are other principles of organization like this at work in all conceptual systems: for example, classifying according to sequence - which concept follows which - or causality - what causes what - and so on. The point here is that we are talking about, not just a random collection of concepts, but concepts organized, arranged and classified into complex relations with one another, That is what our conceptual system actually is like. However. this does not undermine the basic point. Meaning depends on the relationship between things in the world - people, objects and events, real or fictional - and the conceptual system, which can operate as mental representatians of them.

Now it could be the case that the conceptual map which I carry around in my head is totally different from yours, in which case you and I would interpret or make sense of the world in totally different ways. We would be incapable of sharing our thoughts or expressing ideas about the world to each other. In fact, each of us probably does understand and interpret the world in a unique and individual way. However, we are able to communicate because we share broadly the same conceptual maps and thus make sense of or interpret the world in roughly similar ways. That is indeed what it means when we say we 'belong to the same culture'. Because we interpret the world in roughly similar ways, we are able to build up a shared culture of meanings and thus construct a social world which we inhabit together. That is why 'culture' is sometimes defmed m terms of 'shared meanings or shared conceptual maps' (see du Gay, Hall et aI., 1997).

However, a shared conceptual map is not enough. We must also he able to represent or exchange meanings and concepts and I d th h1 ' we can on y 0 at w en we a so have access to a shared language. Language is therefore the second system of representation involved in the overall p f ', 0 h rocess 0 constructing meaning. ur s ared conceptual map must be tran ltd' Is a e into a commonanguage, so that we can correlate .

\ words, spoken sounds or visual. our concepts and Ideas with certain written sounds or images which carry m~:;~=;'i~~~ ~:n~~l term we use for words. represent the concepts and the cone g.. ese stgns stand for or carry around in our heads and toget~Pt~~1 relatlkons between them which we our culture. er ey rna e up the meaning-system of

Signs are organized into languages and it is . languages which enable us to tr I the eXIstence of common

ans ate our thought ( ) .sounds or images and then to u th s concepts into words,, se ese operafmeanings and communicate th h' mg as a language, to expre _ term 'language' is being used h

oug .ts to other people. Remember that the

, . ere in a very broad d i 1 .writing system or the spoken syst f an inc usive way, The obviously 'languages'. But so em a a particular language are both

. are VIsual Image h thmechanIcal, electronic digital s, weer produced by hand, or some other m . express meaning. And so are oth thir eans, when they are used to

er ngs which 'Iaren t ' inguistic' in any

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 19

ordinary sense: the 'language' of facial expressions or of gesture, for example, or the 'language' of fashion, of clothes, or of traffic lights. Even music is a 'language', with complex relations between different sounds and chords, though it is a very special case since it can't easily be used to reference actual things or objects in the world (a point further elaborated in du Gay, ed., 1997, and Mackay, ed., 1997). Any sound, word, image or object which functions ¥ as a sign, and is organized with other signs into a system which is capable of carrying and expressing meaning is, from this point of view, 'a language'. It is in this sense that the model of meaning which I have been analysing here is often described as a 'linguistic' one; and that all the theories of meaning which follow this basic model are described as belonging to 'the linguistic turn' in the social sciences and cultural studies.

At the heart of the meaning process in culture, then, are two related 'systems of representation'. The first enables us to give meaning to the world by constructing a set of correspondences or a chain of equivalences between things - people, objects, events, abstract ideas, etc. - and our system of concepts, our conceptual maps. The s~ond depends on constructing a set of correspondences between our conceptual map and a set of signs, arranged or organized into various languages which stand for or represent those concepts. The relation between 'things', concepts and signs lies at the heart of the production of meaning in language. The process which links these three elements together is what we call 'representation'.

1.2 Language and representation

Just as people who belong to the same culture must share a broadly similar conceptual map, so they must also share the same way of interpreting the signs of a language, for only in this way can meanings be effectively exchanged between people. But how do we' know which concept stands for which thing? Or which word effectively represents which concept? How do I know which sounds or images will carry, through language, the meaning of my concepts and what I want to say with them to you? This may seem relatively simple in the case of visual signs, because the drawing, painting, camera or TV image of a sheep bears a resemblance to the animal with a woolly coat grazing in a field to which I want to refer. Even so, we need to remind ourselves that a drawn or painted or digital version of a sheep is not exactly like a 'real' sheep. For one thing, most images are in two dimensions whereas the 'real' sheep exists in three dimensions.

-¥- Visual signs and images, even when they bear a close resemblance to the things to which they refer, are still signs: they carry meaning and thus have to be interpreted. In order to interpret them, we must have access to the two systems of representation discussed earlier: to a conceptual map which correlates the sheep in the field with the concept of a 'sheep'; and a language system which in visual language, bears some resemblance to the real thing or 'looks like it' in some way. This argument is clearest if we think of a cartoon drawing or an abstract painting of a 'sheep', where we need a very

20 AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICESREPRESENTATION,CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS

sophisticated conceptual and shared linguistic system to be certain that we are all 'reading' the sign in the same way. Even then we may find ourselves wondering whether it really is a picture of a sheep at all. As the r lationship between the sign and its referent becomes less clear-cut, the meaning begins to slip and slide away from us into uncertainty. Meaning is no longer transparently passing from one person to another ...

So, even in the case of visual language, where the relationship bel ween the concept and the sign seems fairly straightforward, the matter is far from simple. It is even more difficult with written or spoken language. where words don't look or sound anything like the things to which thev refer. In part, this is because there are - different kinds of signs. Visual signs are what are called iconic signs. That is, they bear, in their form, a certain resemblance to the object, person or event to which they refer. A photograph of a tree reproduces some of the actual conditions of our visual perception in the visual sign. Written or spoken signs, on the other hand, are what is called uidexicot.

FIGURE 1.2 Q: When is a sheep not a sheep? A: When it's a work of art. (Damien Hirst, Away from the Flock, 1994).

FIGURE 1.1 Wilham Holman Hunt, Our Engish Coosts rs. Sheep), 1851

o

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 21

They bear no obvious relationship at all to the things to which they refer. The letters T,R,E,E, do not look anything like trees in Nature, nor does the word 'tree' in English sound like 'real' trees (if indeed they make any sound at alll). The relationship in these systems of representation between the sign, the concept and the object to which they might be used to refer is entirely arbitrary. By 'arbitrary' we mean that in principle any collection of letters or any sound in any order would do the trick equally well. Trees would not mind if we used the word SEERT - 'trees' written backwards - to represent the concept of them. This is clear from the fact that, in French, quite different letters and a quite different sound is used to refer to what, to all appearances, is the same thing - a 'real' tree - and, as far as we can tell, to the same concept _ a large plant that grows in nature. The French and English seem to be using the same concept. But the concept which in English is represented by the word, TREE, is represented in French by the word, ARBRE.

1.3 Sharing the codes

o

The question, then, is: how do people who belong to the same culture, who share the same conceptual map and who speak or write the same language (English) know that the arbitrary combination of letters and sounds that makes up the word, TREE, will stand for or represent the concept 'a large plant that grows in nature'? One possibility would be that the objects in the world themselves embody and fix in some way their 'true' meaning. But it is not at all clear that real trees know that they are trees, and even less clear that they know that the word in English which represents the concept of themselves is written TREE whereas in French it is written ARBRE! As far as they are concerned, it could just as well be written COW or VACHE or indeed XYZ. The meaning is not in the object or person or thing, nor is it in the word. It is we who fix the meaning so firmly that, after a while, it comes to seem natural and inevitable. The meaning is constructed by the system of representation. It is constructed and fixed by the code, which sets up the correlation between our conceptual system and our language system in such a way that, every time we think of a tree, the code tells us to use the English word TREE, or the French word ARBRE. The code tells us that, in our culture _ that is, in our conceptual and language codes - the concept 'tree' is represented by the letters T,R,E,E, arranged in a certain sequence, just as in Morse code, the sign for V (which in World War II Churchill made 'stand for' or represent 'Victory') is Dot, Dot, Dot, Dash, and in the 'language of traffic lights', Green = Go! and Red = Stop!

One way of thinking about 'culture', then, is in terms of these shared conceptual maps, shared language systems and the codes which govern the relationships of translation between them. Codes fix the relationships between concepts and signs. They stabilize meaning within different languages and cultures. They tell us which language to use to convey which idea. The reverse is also true. Codes tell us which concepts are being referred to when we hear or read which signs. By arbitrarily fixing the relationships

22 REPRESENTATION,CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICES

between our conceptual system and our linguistic systems (remember. 'linguistic' in a broad sense), codes make it possible for us to speak and to hear intelligibly, and establish the translatability between our concepts and our languages which enables meaning to pass from speaker to h~arer and be effectively communicated within a culture. This translatability IS not given by nature or fixed by the gods.Gt is the result of a set of social conventions. It is fixed socially, fixed in culture)English or French or Hindi speakers have, over time, and without conscious decision or choice, come to an unwritten agreement, a sort of unwritten cultural covenant that, in their various languages, certain signs will stand for or represent certain concepts. This is what children learn, and how they become, not simply biological individual but cultural subjects. They learn the system and conventions of representation, the codes of their language and culture, which equip them with cultural 'know-how' enabling them to function as culturally competent subjects. Not because such knowledge is imprinted in their genes. but because they learn its conventions and so gradually become 'cultured persons' - i.e. members of their culture. They unconsciously internalize the codes which allow them to express certain concepts and ideas through their systems of representation - writing, speech, gesture, visualization. and 0 on - and to interpret ideas which are communicated to them using the same systems.

You may find it easier to understand, now, why meaning, language and representation are such critical elements in the study of culture. To belong to a culture is to belong to roughly the same conceptual and linguistic universe, to know how concepts and ideas translate into different languages. and how language can be interpreted to refer to or reference the world T h th things is to see the world from within the same concept I . 0 sdare eke. ua map an to rna e sense of it through the same language systems Earlyanth I' f language, like Sapir and Whorf took this insi~ht to its I roPlo ogists 0 h they argued that we are all, as i; were locked into ou oglt,catx:w en , . d t' d h ' r ell ura perspectives ormm -se s ,an t at language is the best clue We h t h

. Thi b . ave 0 t at conceptualuniverse. IS 0 servatirm , when applied to III . t f h d a luman cultures lies at theroo 0 w at, to ay, we may think of as cultural or I' " I'"inguisuc re ativism. ACTIVITY 2

You might like to think further about thi . cultures conceptually classify the Id's questIOn of how different

wor and what' 1" .for meaning and representation. Imp rcationj, this ha

The English make a rather simple di sti ti Th . . mc IOn betwee I de Inuit (Eskimos) who have to '. n s eet an snow.

SurVIve III a very di ffextreme and hostile climate a I ha I erent, more, pparent y ave man and snowy weather. Consider th I' f . y more words for now

e 1St0 Inullterm fScott Polar Research Institute in T bl . s or snow from the '. 1 a e1.1.TheEnglish, makmg much finer and re are many more than in

h more complex di .ave a complex classificatory Istmctions. The Inuit conceptual syste f hcompared with the English Th . m or t e weather

. e novehst Peter H f oeg, or example. writing

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 23

about Greenland in his novel, Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow (1994, pp. 5-6), graphically describes 'frazzil ice' which is 'kneaded together into a soapy mash called porridge ice, which gradually forms free-floating plates, pancake ice, which one, cold, noonday hour, on a Sunday, freezes into a single solid sheet'. Such distinctions are too fine and elaborate even for the English who are always talking about the weather! The question, however, is - do the Inuit actually experience snow differently from the English? Their language system suggests they conceptualize the weather differently. But how far is our experience actually bounded by our linguistic and conceptual universe?

Table 1.1 Inuit terms for snow and ice

snow

blowing-

is snowstorming

falling -

- is falling; - is snowing

light falling -

light - is falling

first layer of - in fall

deep soft-

packed - to make water

light soft-

sugar- waterlogged. mushy -

- is tuming into mosak

watery-

wet- wet faJling-

wet - is falling

_ drifting along a surface

_ is drifting along a surface

- lying on a surface

snowflake

is being drifted over with -

piqtuluk

piqtuluktuq

qanik

qaniktuq

qaniaraq

qaniaraqtuq

apilraun

ice siku

- pan. broken - siqumniq

- ice water imrruugaq

melts - to make water immiuqtuaq

candle - illauyiniq

f1at- qaimiq

glare - quasaq

piled- ivunrit

rough - ivvuit

shore - tugiu

shcrefast - tuvaq

slush - quna

young - sikuliaq

mauya

aniu

aquluraq

pukak

masak

masaguqtuaq

maqayak

misak

qanikkuk

qanikkuktuq

natiruvik

natiruviktuaq

apun

qanik

aplyuaq

• One implication of this argument about cultural codes is that, if meaning is the result, not of something fixed out there, in nature, but of our social, cultural and linguistic conventions, then meaning can never be finally fixed. We can all 'agree' to allow words to carry somewhat different meanings - as we have for example, with the word 'gay', or the use, by young people, of the word 'wicked!' as a term of approval. Of course, there must be some fixing of

GNIFYING PRAC nessREPRESENTATIONS AND SI24 REPRESENTATION: CULTURAL

b ble to understand one another.auld never eat ofmeaning in language, or ,;e w ddenl decide to represent the oncep We can't get up one rnormng and ~u YXZ Yandexpect people to follow what a 'tree' with the letters or the war hV .' absolute or final fixing f

. h th hand t ere ISno we are saying. On teo er , . do change over time. In thed I· ti conventions . meaning, Social an mguis lC h sed to call 'students'. 'client. lisrn w atweu language of modern managena 1 II b' 'customers' Linguistic codes vary. , d ' gers' have a ecome h 'patients an passen d th r Many cultures do not avebe language an ana e. significantly etween on I d id ly acceptable to u . Wordshi h are norma an Wl e words for concepts w lC d phrases are coined: think. for1 t f common usage, an new . constant y go au a f'd sizing' to represen t the process of firms layingxample of the use a own- I , e I f'f a k Even when the actual words remain stable. their .peop eo w r . TI blem I

~~~':c~~~~~O~~,~t~i:~:~::ia~~~u~~ra e~i:~~el:~~~:;~:~ di~~:r:~ce in EngtliS~be between know and understand correspond exactly to and capture exac y same conceptual distinction as the French make between suvo.r and connaitre? Perhaps; but can we be sure?

The main point is that meaning does not inhere in things, in the world. It is constructed, produced. It is the result of a signifying practice _ a practice that produces meaning, that makes things mean,

r ,I-ut ion, 11 )'fI)'lll!

1.4 Theories of representation

There are broadly speaking three approaches to explaining how representation ofmeaning through language works. We may call these the reflective. the intentional and the constructionist or constructivist approaches. You might think of each as an attempt to answer the questions, 'where do meanings come from?' and 'how can we tell the "true" meaning of a word or image?'

In the reflective approach, meaning is thought to lie in the object. per on. idea or event in the real world, and language functions like a mirror. to reflect the true meaning as it already exists in the world, As the poet Gertrude Stein once said, 'A rose is a rase is a rose', In the fourth century BC. the Greeks used the notion ofmimesis to explain how language, even drawing and painting. mirrored or imitated Nature; they thought of Homer's great poem. The Iliad. as 'imitating' a heroic series of events. So the theory which says that language works by simply reflecting or imitating the truth that is alreadv there and fixed in the world, is sometimes called 'mimetic', "

.. nodi" "--" IIC P.. -

(Ill ~1rur Iinn lst JlPfO,!( h

Of course there is a certain obvious truth to mimetic theories of representation and language, As we've pointed out, visual signs do bear some relationship to the shape and texture of the objects which they represent. But. as was also pointed out earlier, a two-dimensional visual image of a rose is a sign _ it should not be confused WIth the real plant wi th thorns and blooms groWing in thegarden. Remember also that there are many Words, sounds and image which we fully well understand but which are entirely fictional or fantasy and refer to worlds which are wholly imaginary _ includl'ng mi'

, any peop e nov

r u-uuon.r! /1)1[l1.\lh

on-a nn.tinui st ,ql\lnJdI h

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 25

think, most of The Iliad' Of course, I can use the word 'rose' to refer to real, actual plants growing in a garden, as we have said before. But this is because I know the code which links the concept with a particular word or image. I cannot think or speak or draw with an actual rose. And if someone says to me that there is no such word as 'rose' for a plant in her culture, the actual plant in the garden cannot resolve the failure of communication between us. Within the conventions of the different language codes we are using, we are both right - and for us to understand each other, one of us must learn the code linking the flower with the word for it in the other's culture.

The second approach to meaning in representation argues the opposite case. It holds that it is the speaker, the author, who imposes his or her unique meaning on the world through language. Words mean what the author intends they should mean. This is the intentional approach. Again, there is some point to this argument since we all, as individuals, do use language to conveyor communicate things which are special or unique to us, to our way of seeing the world. However, as a general theory of representation through language, the intentional approach is also flawed. We cannot be the sole or unique source of meanings in language, since that would mean that we could express ourselves in entirely private languages. But the essence of language is communication and that, in turn, depends on shared linguistic conventions and shared codes. Language can never be wholly a private game. Our private intended meanings, however personal to us, have to enter into the rules, codes and conventions of language to be shared and understand. Language is a - social system through and through. This means that our private thoughts have to negotiate with all the other meanings for words or images which have been stored in language which our use of the language system will inevitably trigger into action.

The third approach recognizes this public, social character oflanguage. It acknowledges that neither things in themselves nor the individual users of language can fix meaning in language. Things don't mean: we construct meaning, using representational systems - concepts and signs. Hence it is called the constructivist or constructionist approach to meaning in language. According to this approach, we must not confuse the material world, where things and people exist, and the symbolic practices and processes through which representation, meaning and language operate. Constructivists do not deny the existence of the material world. However, it is not the material world which conveys meaning: it is the language system or whatever system we are using to represent our concepts. It is social actors who use the conceptual systems of their culture and the linguistic and other representational systems to construct meaning, to make the world meaningful and to communicate about that world meaningfully to others.

Of course, signs may also have a material dimension. Representational systems consist of the actual sounds we make with our vocal chords, the images we make on light-sensitive paper with cameras, the marks we make with paint on canvas, the digital impulses we transmit electronically. Representation is a practice, a kind of 'work', which uses material objects and

I I

S D IGI'IIf'r'lt~r,PRl~( r f26 REPRESENTATION CULTURAL REPRESENl A liON MI

. nds not on the material quality of the ign, bUI effects. BubtIhlemfeantw

g ~:~: bec~use a particular sound or word stond f~r. on Its sym 0 lC unc ron, . . I a a ign

bolizes or represents a concept that it can function,. In. anguago, symd eaning _ or as the constructionists say, signify (sign-i-fy].an convey m ,

1,5 The language of traffic lights The simplest example of this point, which is critical for an undors.tandJng of how languages function as representational systems, IS tho famnus traffic lights example, A traffic light is a machine which produces (lIff"ront coloured lights in sequence. The effect of light of difforent wavelength n the eye - which is a nat mal and materia! phenomenon - produc s th sensation of different colours. Now these things certainly do exist in tb material world. But it is our culture which breaks the spectrum of light into different colours, distinguishes them from one another and attaches nam Red, Green, Yellow, Blue - to them, We use a way of closs,fl"flg th colour spectrum to create colours which are different from one another We represent or symbolize the different colours and classify th ..m according 10 different colour-concepts. This is the conceptual colour svstern of our culture, We say 'our culture' because, of course, other cultures mav divid tb colour spectrum differently. What's more, they certainly use different 8 ual words or letters to identify differenl colours: what we call 'red', the French call 'rouge' and so on. This is the linguistic codo - the one which correlate 118m words (signs) with certain colours (conGepts), and thus enabl ..s us to communicate about colours to other people, using 'the language of col ours'.

But how do we use this representational or symbolic system to regul Ie th traffic? Colours do not have any 'true' or fixed meaning in that sense. Red does not mean 'Stop' in nature, any more than Groen means 'Go' In oth r ~ettings, Red ?,ay stand for, symbolize or represent 'Blood' or 'Dang r' or ,Corr:mumsm; and Green may represent 'Ireland' or 'The Countrv id 'or Envlronmentahsm', Even these meanings can change. In the 'Iangua of

belectrlcplugs', Red used to mean 'the connection with the posinv .. charge'ut this was arbllranly and .tl I' f WI lout exp anatlOn changed to Brow n! BUItb 0 Po:Ompla;~~~:sthedProducers ofplugs had to attach a slip of paper telline co e or ConventIon bad h I h know? Red d G . c angee, ot erwi 0 how would tb y. an reen work III the la f 'Go' are th . hi nguage 0 traffic lights because' top' de meamngs w ich have be . d code or conventions g . th en asslgne to them 111Our culture b\ tb

oVernlug is language d h i d d .and almost uni versall b' ' an I IS co e i WI eh 1\'11 we can well imagine~: eyedI In our culture and ultures likt>ours _ Ibo h· er cu tures which did t h L't IS language would be I no possess t 0 ode, In \\ lU

a camp ete mystery, Let us stay with the exampl f • according to the construct' e or a moment, to explore a little furth r bo 'I Ion 1Stapproach to 'anguage of traffic lights' k _ repreSentatIOn. colours nd thR War as a Signify'ecall the two represeutat' I lllg Or representational: \'

lOua systems We I f -conceptual map of colours' spo ...e 0 earlit'<. First, lh . 111 OUrculture - the Way colours ar,' di tin

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 27

from oue another, classified and arranged in OUf mental universe. Secondly, there are the ways words or images are correlated with colours in our language - our linguistic colour-codes. Actually, of course, a languoge of colours consists of more than just the individual words for different points on the colour spectrum. It also depends on how they function in relation to one another - the sorts of things which are governed by grammar and syntax in written or spoken languages, which allow us to express rather complex ideas. In the language of traffic lights, it is the sequence and position of the colours, as well as the colours themselves, which enable them to carry meaning and thus function as signs.

Does it matter which colours we use? No, the constructionists argue. This is because what signifies is not the colours themselves but (a) the fact that they are different and can be distinguished from one another; and (b) the fact that they are organized into a particular seqnence - Red followed by Green, with sometimes a warning Amber in between which says, in effect, 'Cet ready! Lights about to change.' Constructionists put this point in the following way. What signifies, what carries meaning - they argue - is not each colour in itself nor even the concept or word for it. It is the difference between Red and ./£ Green which signifies. This is a very important principle, in general, about representation and meaning, and we shall return to it on more than one occasion in the chapters which follow. Think about it in these terms. lf you· couldn't differentiate between Red and Green, you couldn't use one to mean 'Stop' and the other to mean 'Go'. In the same way, it is only the difference between the letters P and T which enable the word SHEEPto be linked, in the English language code, to the concept of 'the animal with four legs and a woolly coat', and the word SHEETto 'the material we use to cover ourselves in bed at night'.

In principle, any combination of colours -like any collection of letters in written language or of sounds in spoken language - would do, provided they are sufficiently different not to be confused. Constrnctionists express this idea by saying that all signs are 'arbitrary'. 'Arbitrary' means that there is no natural relationship between the sign and its meaning or concept. Since Red only means 'Stop' becanse that is how the code works, in principle any colour would do, including Green. It is the code that fixes the meaning, not the colour itself. This also has wider implications for the theory of representation and meaning in language. Itmeans that signs themselves cannot fix meaning. lnstead, meaning depends on the relation between a sign and a concept which is fixed by a code. Meaning, the constructionists would say, is 'relational'.

ACTIVITY 3 Why not test this point about the arbitrary nature of the sign and the importance of the code for yourself? Construct a code to govern the movement of traffic using two different colours - Yellow and Blue - as in the following:

PfPRE',frJ!r.!REPRESENTATION CUL T jR/'1

II light is showing, . When the ye ow 1 . . 111<1, ,dlSts onlv 10cr

. Ilowing peclcslfldllS c .Now add an instruction a

using Pink , I H intl'fl)nll P.t( h colour, nd I ' I how to rent C ThProvided the code tells us c car Y this "''IV ""V I nl our \\ III rill •

everyone agrees to interp~~'~III~~~~~'I:IS ,'lIst 'a ;lIl11bl" lIf 1"11t.,, III Ftr~ch Ib just colours, just as the w " II vorv ,IIIIl'f"111 1111).\111'11< "lin 10' I s referred to uSIng 1C ' I same aruma 1 S are fj xed hv ( (IC p~S e arbitrary. ThOIr meaning . Igns ar I I "'. Ih,' mate. 11 I hts arc rnur hint's, <lI1C r.o our". I

As we said earlter, Ira IC Ig I thu "VI' Hut lIb)pII' IhlOM' _ , .. II effect of light-waves, on ~h~ ;~~~~I~VI' b'''1'11,1"').\111'<1 ,I I lIllll'pl .'IIr1 m' 7: _ function as signs, PIOVI e - _, .' \s si I1S,th .., wor], '\ mbol« within our cultural and IJnglll:t:'~i~~Jd;'I~I':r' ..rrI7fIs, lmwovor. lor.' f••11 10 be they represent concepts. and s g - '. I t III Ih •• l.tnMIl.IIlI'of lram material and social world Red and Crcen 11Il! '"11 ,. I' Th.'\ "'I(II I . b t they have real rnatur ial al1r1"" "tI. rrl'lights as signs, u I • rld ",. m n\ the social behaviour or drivers and, without t hr-rn. t ll'n \\0\ traffic accidents at road intersections.

, . 28

1.6 Summary

We have come a long way in exploring thl' nutun I1f"'p"''''nl.t1lCJlI 11 ~ /lIlIe to summarize what we have learned about thr- COllslrue tmm I ilppfl representation through language.

Representation is the production 01 meaning IhrtHlllh 1.1I11l I UlIl" In

representation, constructionists argue. we uso siRns. o~.\nl.l.f'fl mto I!an~&gl!ll of different kinds, to communicate meal1inglull\ wilh "Ih"" l~1nRII use signs to symbolize, stand for Or reference ohJPrts. Pf>Oplfl dncl .~\ n n the so-called 'real' world. But Ihey can also rl'fNl'n". Im.IIl"M" Ihm' fantasy worlds or abstract ideas which arc nol In illl\' ohnnll"\ pn our material World. There is no simple rl'lationship "f , ..0", h'm, .m,1 one-to-one correspondence between langllage ane! Ih •• 1'... 11 world Th is not accurately Or otherwise reOecled in the mirror of la"Rll,I!!' l.dn does not work like a mirror. Meaning is proe!uc"e! "Ithm l"nllu.\ '. In through various representational systems \\ hich_ 10' lClll\enlt'nn'. 'languages'. Meaning is produced by th., praeticl', Ih" '"or -, of representation. It is constructed Ihrough signifying _ I I' m"anm -prorlua.\,- practices.

How does this take place? In fact, it depends on Iwo .lInN,."t hUI ",I systems of repreSentation, Pirst. the concepts" huh ar •• fnrm"d III Ih function as a system of menial representation which d.lS"fi., nJ! ort.a:lllltrs the world into meaningful categories. If We han' a con .... pl for m hi can say We know its 'meaning'. But we cannol ,ommunl ...<lt Ihl m..,..nill8 Without a second system of representat'lon a I 1 ' '. . anguage.an IIsigns organized Illto Various relationshi ps But . I

. Signs can on \ ron\

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 29

if we possess codes which allow us to translate our concepts into language- and vice versa. These codes are crucial for meaning and representation. They do not exist in nature but are the result of social conventions, They are a crucial part of our culture - our shared 'maps of meaning' - which we learn and unconsciously internalize as we become members of our culture. This constructionist approach to language thus introduces the symbolic domain of life, where words and things function as signs, into the very heart of social life itself.

ACTIVITY 4

FIGURE 1.3 Juan Count QUince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber, c. 1602.

All this may seem rather abstract. But we can quickly demonstrate its relevance by an example from painting.

Look at the painting of a still life by the Spanish painter, juan Sanchez Cotan (1521-1627), entitled Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber (Figure 1.3). It seems as if the painter has made every effort to use the 'language of painting' accurately to reflect these four objects, to capture or 'imitate nature'. Is this, then, an example of a reflective or mimetic form of representation - a painting reflecting the 'true meaning' of what already exists in Cotari's kitchen? Or can we find the operation of certain codes,

30 REPRESENTATION: CULTURAl REPRESEr II A r ( )i I r•.

.. ed to roduco a certain OlPtlIllJl"fi Start wr h the language of paintmg uhs 'Pt' g m~',n to vou Wh.ll" II ....'nng·1 It' what does t e paul 111 c _ . t 18ques ion, ..." _ how dot-s rt'iJrP:>'ltnt.lll0rl \\or 10Then go on to ask, how IS It saying I this painting'!

h ht tall that corm- to vou on loo~lnl; .,1 theWrite down any t aug s a (. _ I rh \ " WI t do these objects say tu VUlI'! \Vltal I11P.UlIUJ(' t ()painting. 1a _

trigger off'

READINC A

Now read the edited extract from an una lvs is or tlw st i ll hI',' I", Ih., r critic and theorist, Norman Bryson. i ru.ludcd as }{,p.HlanJ.:.\ .It th •••-nd this chapter. Don't be concerned. at Ih is slagt', I r tilt' l«ln~U«lR" '>em little difficult and you don't understand a ll t ho tl'fIlIS I'll out the nuun points about the way representation wurk s ill t lu- pall1tln~••1f (uuhn (0 Bryson,

Bryson is by no means the only critic of Cotil 11\; ptllntlrlJ.;. HlIII ( rtolol doesn't provide the only 'correct' reading or II Th.it« nol Ih,. POIOI Tb point of the example is that he helps us to ,"'I' h,,,,, 1'\ I'n In II slill hIll. the 'language of painting' does not function simph In n.nl'll or imu Ie meaning which is already there in nature. but to produn. """fln,n The act of painting is a signifying practice. Take nnll', III partu \I11l1.01 what Bryson says about the following points'

1 the way the painting invites you. the vie-wer. 10 look _ \\ h I h its 'mode of seeing'; in part. the runction of Ihp 1.,nRlh'RI" 10 11100 you, the viewer, in a certain relation to Ol{'«ninR.

2 the relationship to food which is posed bv til!' p.lIntlnR 3 how, according to Brysnn, 'mathematical form IS ",,'t! It, CoOl 0

d~stortthe painting so as to bring out a particular mnarun Csn dIstorted meaning in painting be 'truc'?

4 the meaning of the difference hetween 'crealural' "nd 'Rl!(}m n space: the language of painting creales its O"n ~lnd 01 'pol e

If necessary, work through th ' , e extract again. Pic:~InR "I' th,' 16pomts,

2 Saussure's legacy The social constructionist view of l b.een discussino owes a great d I t anhguage and repn's,'nlalinn \ hi h I', b ea 0 t e worl.. ,. nmglilst, Saussure, who was b 'c anr In "I'nc,' 01 Ih ., I P . orn 111 eneva in 185- I Iarls, and died in 1913 He' kn I. (II m"ch nfhl

' IS OWn as th 'f hFor Our purposes, his importan I' e at or of mod"rn Itn 11h t' h' ce les, not inh' I "u In 18general view of repre . I (ptal f'd \\ or In h 1 sentatlon and th

e "a" hi, mod 'I of 1'lU\!;lI:~

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 31

shaped the semiotic approach to the problem of representation in a wide variety of cultural fields. You will recognize much about Saussure's thinking from what we have already said about the constructionist approach.

For Saussure, according to Jonathan Culler (1976, p. 19), the production of meaning depends on language: 'Language is a system of signs.' Sounds, images, written words, paintings, photographs, etc. function as signs within language 'only when they serve to express or communicate ideas [To] communicate ideas, they must be part of a system of conventions ' (ibid.). Material objects can function as signs and communicate meaning too, as we saw from the 'language of traffic lights' example. In an important move, Saussure analysed the sign into two further elements. There was, he argued, the form (the actual word, image, photo, etc.), and there was the idea or concept in your head with which the form was associated. Saussure called the first element, the signifier, and the second element - the corresponding concept it triggered off in your head - the signified. Every time you hear or read or see the signifier (e.g. the word or image of a Wolkman, for example), it correlates with the signified (the concept of a portable cassette-player in your head). Both are required to produce meaning but it is the relation between them, fixed by our cultural and linguistic codes, which sustains representation. Thus 'the sign is the union of a form which signifies (signifier) .. , and an idea signified (signified). Though we may speak as if they are separate entities, they exist only as components of the sign (which is) the central fact oflanguage' (Culler, 1976, p. 19).

Saussure also insisted on what in section 1 we called the arbitrary nature of the sign: 'There is no natural or inevitable link between the signifier and the signified' (ibid.). Signs do not possess a fixed or essential meaning. What signifies, according to Saussure, is not REDor the essence of 'red-ness', but the difference between RED and GREEN. Signs, Saussure argued 'are members of a system and are defined in relation to the other members of that system.' For example, it is hard to define the meaning of FATHERexcept in relation to, and in terms of its difference from, other kinship terms, like MOTHER, DAUGHTER, SON and so on.

This marking of difference within language is fundamental to the roduction of meaning, according to Saussure. Even at a simp e evel (to repeat an earlier example), we must be able to distinguish, within language, between SHEEP and SHEET,before we can link one of those words to the concept of an animal that produces wool, and the other to the concept of a cloth that

, covers a bed. The simplest way of marking difference is, of course, by means of a binary opposition - in this example, all the letters are the same except P and T. Similarly, the meaning of a concept or word is often defined in relation to its direct opposite - as in night/ day. Later critics of Saussure were to observe that binaries (e.g. black/white) are only one, rather simplistic, way of establishing difference. As well as the stark difference between black and white, there are also the many other, subtler differences between black and dark grey, dark grey and light grey, grey and cream and off-white, off-white and brilliant white, just as there are between night, dawn, daylight, noon, dusk,

I RfPRESEN1/\ llor I .. ' II32 REPRESENTATIONCULTUf'A

. . n to binary oppusitiolls brought Saus ur 10 and so on. However, his attentlho t I nguage consist» of SIIo\Olfi",.", !JUlIO

. oposrt ion t a a a . I' I 'u \.,1 m fthe revolutlonary pr . .f have to he OrK~1111Ze( III 0'no the slgnl iers forder to produce mearn 0' b t ~ 1 'ignificr~ wh n.h s!&!!..!.!l differences'. It is the differences e weel , '. .

. etween the sigl1lfier and till' '''IIt1/fIN/, which I Furthermore, the relation b . SrI' aruur-d _ IJl'rnhllwnlll fi Il<I

I d IS nol - aussu - < n f fixed by our cu!tura co es. TI pts (signifir-ds) to which Ih,.\' r r Words shift their meanmgs'

d re cOlllceft.'Ite·rs the conr.optua] map of thehi t . ally an everv sru <I . I If

also change, IS oric , I . t d ifferunt historu.al moments. 10 C!t leading different cu tures, a . I , ell ure, th old different ly. Fur many ceuturu-s. \\"IUihtm "\OCand think about e WOI I .: I l.. '\'11

. h .d BLACK with cvorything that 1S'.Ir • I •have associated t e WOl . I l.. f I "Ih,' forbidding, devilish, dangerous and sinful. And vr-t • tllll O,~ h

. fbI k people in America in ttu- I !Hi()s ,:h,llllll.d ..fll r rh pperception 0 ac I f BI 'BI k i Beautiful' became a popular slogan - whore I II' ".~'" wr.

ac IS . (. f /) I ,t_ P"'\IOUde to signify the exact opposite meurung ~l~lll If'( U was rna . t 'tl lionassociations. In Saussure's terms. 'Langungn sets lip ~1I1ar ntrarv Tt. R between signifiers of its own choosing on t he 0111' hand. ,Illel "Iln,f, ..,l of II own choosing on the other. Not only docs each l<luIlU,'/1"produr .. ,thff r 01 set ofsignifiers, articulating and dividing thp euntllluum of "",mllor wnl1lll or drawing or photography) in a distinctive wa\,: I'a,h I;lnll\"'~f' protlu different set of signifieds; it has a distinCliv!' anelthus MllIlr.,n \\,1\ of organizing the world into concepts and cat"!lori"s' ((;ull",. 1'lif;o p 2.1)

The implications of this argument are very far-rl'al hinll for., tlwon of representation and for our understanding of cultun' If Ih .. r.. lnl,on hlP between a signifier and its signified is the result of a SvSlem of 'ot i I conventions specific to each society and to speCific hi"lon< ~11mom.'nl _ then all meanings are produced within histury nnd cuItU«' Thl'\ ~...n n 'r be finally fixed but are always subject to change. hoth from on .. cultural context and from one period to another. There is Ihus no sinlll.,. \lilt h n

• universal 'true meaning'. 'Because it is arbitrary. thp silln IS tol ..lh ub history and the combination allhe particular mompnl of a Il,\' ..n 'Ilnlfi"r signified is a contingent result of the historical prot ..,,' (CuIlN. l'lili. P l- This opens up meaning and representation. in a radie.,1 \\.1\. 10 h, ton and change. It is true that Saussure himself focused e'\c1usi\'l'1\ on the I I f the language system at one moment of lime ralhN th<ln 100 Ill~ .'1 lin Ul change Over time. However, for Our purpOses. thl' Impon~nl pOllll' Ih \

" th,s approach to language unfixes meaning. breal..ing <In\ n,lluml .tnd mevltable tIe between signifier and signified. This "pen, r"pr .. f'nt han I the constant 'play' or slippag f . h r

. . eo meaning. to t e constant production 0meanIngs, new mterpretations.

However, if meaning cbanges, historically, and is nl'vl'r fin<llh hfollows that 'taking the mean" . . . 'lOg must lTlvolvc an actin" proo"mterpretation. Meaning bas to be actively 'r j'. j C I th eac or lOh'rpreteonsequent y, ere is a necessary and inevitabl,' . . . bo language Th . . Imprt'CISIO.n ul

. e meanmg we take, as viewers. readNS Or aud"'nt n exactly the meanmg whlcb has been given bv th • I

- e spea ~r or \\Tlter r

l. Ih of

01

I"

·Ir \\Hollis!

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 33

viewers. And since, in order to say something meaningful, we have to 'enter language', where all sorts of older meanings which pre-date us, are already stored from previous eras, we can never cleanse language completely, screening out all the other, hidden meanings which might modify or distort what we want to say. For example, we can't entirely prevent some of the negative connotations of the word BLACKfrom returning to mind when we read a headline like, 'WEDNESDAY- A BLACKDAYON THE STOCK EXCHANGE', even if this was not intended. There is a constant sliding of meaning in all interpretation, a margin - something in excess of what we intend to say - in which other meanings overshadow the statement or the text, where other associations are awakened to life, giving what we say a different twist. So interpretation becomes an essential aspect of the process by which meaning is given and taken. The reader is as important as the k writer in the production of meaning. Every signifier given or encoded with meaning has to be meaningfully interpreted or decoded by the receiver (Hall, 1980). Signs which have not been intelligibly received and interpreted are -, not, in any useful sense, 'meaningful'.

2. I The social part of language

I"

Saussure divided language into two parts. The first consisted of the general rules and codes of the linguistic system, which all its users must share, if it is to be of use as a means of communication. The rules are the principles which we learn when we learn a language and they enable us to use language to say whatever we want. For example, in English, the preferred word order is subject-verb--object ('the cat sat on the mat'), whereas in Latin, the verb usually comes at the end. Saussure called this underlying rule-governed structure of language, which enables us to produce well-formed sentences, the langue (the language system). The second part consisted of the particular acts of speaking or writing or drawing, which - using the structure and rules of the langue - are produced by an actual speaker or writer. He called this parale. 'La langue is the system of language, the language as a system of forms, whereas parole is actual speech [or writing], the speech acts which are made possible by the language' (Culler, 1976, P- 29).

For Saussure, the underlying structure of rules and codes (langue) was the social part of language, the part which could be studied with the law-like precision of a science because of its closed, limited nature. It was his preference for studying language at this level of its 'deep structure' which made people call Saussure and his model of language, structuralist. The second part of language, the individual speech-act or utterance (parole), he regarded as the 'surface' of language. There were an infinite number of such possible utterances. Hence, parole inevitably lacked those structural properties _ forming a closed and limited set - which would have enabled us to study it 'scientifically'. What made Saussure's model appeal to many later scholars was the fact that the closed, structured character of language at the level of its rules and laws, which, according to Saussure, enabled it to be

-Ir tor.ilist

34 REPRESENTATION: CULTURAL REPRESENT A TIONC, N IlJ ,II .r jl~•Ir" I

studied scientifically, was combined with the capacity to b~ fr and unpredictably creative in our actual speech acts, They h?hevod ho h d offered them, at last, a scientific approach to that least scientific object of inquiry - culture.

fn separating the social part of language (IangUf'j from the individuul a lof communication (parole), Saussure broke wit hour common-sense nouon or how language works. OUf common-sense intuition is that lnnguage com from within us - from the individual speaker or writer: that it IS this Sptld 'og or writing subject who is the author or originator of meaning, This IS wh I we called, earlier, the intentional model of representation, But according 10 Saussure's schema, each authored statement only becomes possrblu becau the 'author' shares with other language-users the common ru l..s and cod of the language system - the langue - which allows them to communi .....le .nth each other meaningfully, The author decides what she wants to vav Bul 'h cannot 'decide' whether or not to use the rules of languag ... if sill' wants 10 understood, We are born into a language. its codes and its meanings. Language is therefore, for Saussure, a social phenomenon, It cannot 00 an individual matter because we cannot make up the rules of langoag" individually, for ourselves. Their source lies in socii-tv. In the culture, to our shared cultural codes, in the language system - not in nature or 111 rho individual subject.

We will move on in section 3 to consider how the con struct mn rst appr b 10 representation and in part icula S ' I' "" r aussure s mgu rst!c model. was apphed 10 a WIder set of cultural obJ'ects and t i Iprac Ices. a nc evo Ived Into the spnl;otIc method which so influenced the field, First we ought 10 take account of me of the criticisms levelled at his position,

2.2 Critique of Saussure's model Saussure's great achievement wa t f social fact' on the pro f S a orce us to focus on languag" itself.

. cess a representar it If works and the role it pi in th 'on I se : on how langu.ag" actually

ays in t e prod uct ion of ' I Isaved language from the t t f meanmp n noing o, he s a us 0 a mere tran diand meaning, He showed' t d tl 'Sparent m.. turn between thl , Ins ea rat represent t iHowever, in hIS own work h t d d a IOn Was a practtce , e en e to focus al Iaspects of the sign - signifier d ' most PX( USI\ ph on the h 0

how rh: 0 an SIgnifIed H . I' Iow this relation between si '[i e ga\e III e or no all"ntlnn to I, Igm ler/Slgnifled co I I hear ler we called referenc _' f' u ( serw t p purpo,,, of hal deLe re errIng us t than events outside langu ' h' , a e world of thIl18" pt pIe

d" , age In t e real worl I L I'IstmctlOn between say th ' (alcr II1glllsl' mad", , e meanll1g of th word to refer to a specifIC book I' b e Word BOOK and the USt! of Ih Charles Sanders Pierce wh'l t Ydll1gefore us on the table Thp 1111UI I, I S a optmg a ' 'I • greater attentIOn to the reI t' h' S'm, ar approach to u urn d II' a Ions Ip betw '. 'ca ed theIr referents, What S een Slglllfiers/s,gnifi"ds dnd \I b t b

rn d ausSure called ' 'IIeamng an reference but h f slgnl Icatlon r alh lI1\oh ' e ocused mainly On the former .

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 35

Another prohlem is that Saussure tended to focus on the formal aspects of language - how language actually works. This has the great advantage of making us examine representation as a practice worthy of detailed study in its own right. It forces us to look at language for itself, and not just as an empty, transparent, 'window on the world'. However, Saussure's focus on language may have heen too exclusive. The attention to its formal aspects did divert attention away from the more interactive and dialogic features of language - language as it is actually used, as it functions in actual situations, in dialogue between different kinds of speakers. It is thus not surprising that, for Saussure, questions of poweI' in language - for example, between speakers of different status and positions - did not arise.

As has often been the case, the 'scientific' dream which lay behind the structuralist impulse of his work, though influential in alerting us to certain aspects of how language works, proved to be illusory. Language is not an object which can he studied with the law-like precision of a science. Later cultural theorists learned from Saussure's 'structuralism' but abandoned its scientific premise. Language remains rule-governed. But it is not a 'closed' system which can be reduced to its formal elements. Since it is constantly changing, it is by definition open-ended. Meaning continues to be produced through language in forms which can never be predicted beforehand and its 'sliding', as we described it above, cannot be halted. Saussure may have been tempted to the former view because, like a good structuralist, he tended to study the state of the language system at one moment, as if it had stood still, and he could halt the flow of language-change. Nevertheless it is the case that many of those who have been most influenced by Saussure's radical break with all reflective and intentional models of representation, have built on his work, not by imitating his scientific and 'structuralist' approach, but hy applying his model in a much looser, more open-ended - i.e. 'post- structuralist' - way.

2.3 Summary How far, then, have we come in our discussion of theories of representation? We began by contrasting three different approaches. The I'eflective or mimetic approach proposed a direct and transparent relationship of imitation or reflection between words (signs) and things. The intentional theory reduced representation to the intentions of its author or subject. The constructionist theory proposed a complex and mediated relationship between things in the world, our concepts in thought and language. Wehave focused at greatest length on this approach. The correlations between these levels _ the material, the conceptual and the signifying - are governed by our cultural and linguistic codes and it is this set of interconnections which produces meaning. We then showed how much this general model of how systems of representation work in the production of meaning owed to the work of Ferdinand de Sanssure. Here, the key point was the link provided by the codes hetween the forms of expression used by language (whether speech,

I

rJlill.. ,.- .. --------------------~~~~r..«."f r~.WO\ [PRESENT A nor l' /\ I36 REPRESENTATIONCUl rURAL R·

f esentation) - which Saussure II,. d . or other types 0 repr I~'" writing, rawmg, iatcd with thorn -Ihl' SllIm,''''' ,. '[i rd the mental concepts assocI ~... . slgnl tets - ~ h t 0 systems of representariun produ uu IThe connection between t ese wild u

. . d i to languages produced meaniugs. ane CUlland sIgns, organize In , . . , I I reference objects, people and events In the real wor ( .

l

3 From languageto culture: linguistics to semiotics

I·

Sanssure's main contribution was to the study of linHuistlC:s in n narrow n e. However, since his death. his theories have been widr-lv dl'plo"l'(~, o. a foundation for a general approach to Jangllagl' and mr-aning pro\'ldmR model of representation which has been appl ied tn it wid" ranll'- of cultural objects and practices. Saussure himself fore-saw th is possdllllt" in hi fom lecture-notes, collected posthumously by his students as th" Cou",' In General Linguistics (1960), where he looked forward 10 'A "i'-nn- th ••• ludi the life of signs within society ... I shaJi call it s"minlollv, from th .. Gr semeion "signs" .. .' [I" 16). This general approach to the stud" of SlRn ID culture, and of culture as a sort of' language', wh ich Sau""r,, for ....hacio\\ !d. is now generally known by the term semiotics.

The underlying argument behind the semiotic approach is rhnt, me" nil cultural objects convey meaning, and all cultural practir."s dr-p ..nd on meaning, they must make use of signs: and in so far as thev do, thn mu • \"Of like language works, and be amenable to an analysis which basrcallv m use of Saussure's lingUistic concepts [e.g. the sig;,ifiPr/signafil'd ond langu parole distinctions, his idea of underlying codes and structurns, and Ih arbitrary nature of the sign). Thus, when in his coJinelinn of "."'v . Mythologies [1972), the French critic, Roland Barth"s. sh"lI"d 'Th .. \\orld of wrestling', 'Soap POwders and detergents', 'Th" fac" of Greta Garbo' or'Tb Blue Guides to Europe', he brought a semiotic approa"h to bvar on 'n> dlDl!'popular culture, treating these activities and objects as signs, as a language through which meaning is communicated. For exam pIe. most of us would think of a wrestling match as a competitive game Or sport designed for One wrestler to gain Victory over an ~pponent. Barthes, however, asks, not Who Won?' but 'What is the meaning of thIS event?' He treats it as a text to be read, He 'reads' the exaggerated gestures of wrestlers as a grandil I oquentanguage of what he calls the pure Spectacle of excess.

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 37

READING B

You should now read the brief extract from Barthes's 'reading' of 'The world of wrestling', provided as Reading B at the end ofthis chapter.

In much the same way, the French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, studied the customs, rituals, totemic objects, designs, myths and folk-tales of so-called 'primitive' peoples in Brazil, not by analysing how these things were produced and used in the context of daily life amongst the Amazonian peoples, but in terms of what they were trying to 'say', what messages about the culture they communicated. He analysed their meaning, not by interpreting their content, but by looking at the underlying rules and codes through which such objects or practices produced meaning and, in doing so, he was making a classic Saussurean or structuralist 'move', from the paroles of a culture to the underlying structure, its langue. To undertake this kind of work, in studying the meaning of a television progranune like Eastenders, for example, we would have to treat the pictures on the screen as signifiers, and use the code of the television soap opera as a genre, to discover how each image on the screen made use of these rules to 'say something' (signifieds) which the viewer could 'read' or interpret within the formal framework of a particular kind of television narrative (see the discussion and analysis of TV soap operas in Chapter 6).

In the semiotic approach, not only words and images but objects themselves can function as signifiers in the production of meaning. Clothes, for example, may have a simple physical function - to cover the body and protect it from the weather. But clothes also double up as signs. They construct a meaning and carry a message. An evening dress may signify 'elegance'; a bow tie and tails, 'formality'; jeans and trainers, 'casual dress'; a certain kind of sweater in the right setting, 'a long, romantic, autumn walk in the wood' (Barthes, 1967). These signs enable clothes to convey meaning and to function like a language _ 'the language of fashion'. How do they do this?

ACTIVITY 5 Look at the example of clothes in a magazine fashion spread (Figure 1.5). Apply Saussure's model to analyse what the clothes are 'saying'? How would you decode their message? In particular, which elements are operating as signifiers and what concepts - signifieds - are you applying to them? Don't just get an overall impression - work it out in detail. How is the 'language of fashion' working in this example?

The clothes themselves are the signifiers. The fashion code in western consumer cultures like ours correlates particular kinds or combinations of clothing with certain concepts ('elegance', 'formality', 'casual-ness', 'romance'). These are the signifieds. This coding converts the clothes into signs, which can then be read as a language. In the language of fashion, the signifiers are arranged in a certain sequence, in certain relations to one another. Relations may be of similarity - certain items 'go together'

38 TONS AND SIGJ',JlfYlr-SC PPj\( TK.f-5REPRESENTATION CULTURAL REPRESENT A I

(e g casual shoes with jeans). Differences .. I k d -no leather belts withare a so mar e

. ear Some signs actually createevenIng w . , . g by exploiting 'difference: e.g.rneanm ki

DocMarten boots with flowing long s, rrt. These bits of clothing 'say something - they convey meaning. Of course, not everybody reads fashion in the same way. There are differences of gender, age, class, 'race'. But all those who share the same fashion code will interpret the signs 10 roughly the same ways. 'Oh, jeans don't look right for that event. It's a formal occasion - it demands something more elegant.'

Youmay have noticed that, in this example, we have moved from the very narrow linguistic level from which we drew examples in the first section, to a wider, cultural level. Note, also, that two linked operations are required to complete the representation process by which meaning is produced. First, we need a basic code which links a particular piece of material which is cut and sewn in a particular way (signifier) to our mental concept of it (signified) _ say a particular cut of material to our concept of 'a dress' or 'jeans'. (Remember that only some cultures would 'read' the signifier in this way, or indeed po se the concept of (i.e. have classified clothes into) 'a dress'. as different from 'jeans'.) The combination of signifier and signified is what Saussure called a sign. Then, having recognized the material as a dress. or as jeans. and produced a sign, we can progress to a second. wider level. which links thes signs to broader, cultural themes, concepts or meanings _ for example, an .cvening dress to 'formality' or 'elegance', jeans to 'casualness', Barthes called the first, descriptive level, the level of denotation: the second level. that of connotation. Both, of course, require the use of codes.

Denotation is the simple, basic, descriptive level, wh re can ensu is wid and most people would agree on the meaning ('dress', 'jeans). At the second level- connotation - these signifiers which we have been able to 'decode' at a simple level by using our conventional conceptual clas ifications of eire to read their meaning, enter a wider, second kind of code _ 'the languag of fashion' - which connects them to broader themes and meanings. linking them with what, we may call the Wider semantic fields of Our cultur : id of 'elegance', 'formality', 'casualness' and 'romance', This econd. wid r me~i~g is n~ longer a descriptive level of obVious interpretation. H re we are begmmng to mterpret the completed signs in term of the Wider realm of

FIGURE I.S AcfverUs<lTI"" ... GUCCl, " VIlfJ" September 1!'iS.

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 39

social ideology - the general beliefs, conceptual frameworks and value systems of society. This second level of signification, Barthes suggests, is more 'general, global and diffuse .. .'. It deals with 'fragments of an ideology ... These signifieds have a very close communication with culture, knowledge, history and it is through them, so to speak, that the environmental world [of the culture] invades the system [of representation]' (Barthes, 1967, pp.91-2).

3.1 Myth today In his essay 'Myth today', in Mythologies, Barthes gives another example which helps us to see exactly how representation is working at this second, broader cultural level. Visiting the barbers' one day, Barthes is shown a copy of the French magazine Paris Match, which has on its cover a picture of 'a young Negro in a French uniform saluting with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on the fold of the tricolour' (the French flag) (1972b, p. 116). At the first level, to get any meaning at all, we need to decode each of the signifiers in the image into their appropriate concepts: e.g. a soldier, a uniform, an arm raised, eyes lifted, a French flag. This yields a set of signs with a simple, literal message or meaning: a black soldier is giving the French flag a salute (denotation). However, Barthes argues that this image also has a wider, cultural meaning. If we ask, 'What is Paris Match telling us by using this picture of a black soldier saluting a French flag?', Barthes suggests that we may come up with the message: 'that France is a great Empire, and that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors' (connotation) (ibid.).

Whatever you think of the actual 'message' which Barthes finds, for a proper semiotic analysis you must be able to outline precisely the different steps by which this broader meaning has been produced. Barthes argues that here representation takes place through two separate but linked processes. In the first, the signifiers (the elements of the image) and the signifieds (the concepts _ soldier, flag and so on) unite to form a sign with a simple denoted message: a black soldier is giving the French flag a salute. At the second stage, this completed message or sign is linked to a second set of signifieds - a broad, ideological theme about French colonialism. The first, completed meaning functions as the signifier in the second stage of the representation process, and when linked with a wider theme by a reader, yields a second, more elaborate and ideologically framed message or meaning. Barthes gives this second concept or theme a name - he calls it 'a purposeful mixture of "French imperiality" and "militariness"'. This, he says, adds up to a 'message' about French colonialism and her faithful Negro soldier-sons. Barthes calls this second level of signification the level of myth. In this reading, he adds, 'French imperiality is the very drive behind the myth. The concept reconstitutes a chain of causes and effects, motives and intentions ...

40 REPRESENTATION,CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNIFYING PRACTlCf<

Through the concept ... a whole new history ... is implanted in the myth ... the concept of French imperiality ... is again tied to the totality of the world: to the general history of France, to its colonial adventures. to its present difficulties' (Barthes, 1972b, p. 119].

READING C

Turn to the short extract from 'Myth today' (Reading C at thc cnd of thi chapter], and read Barthes's account of how myth functions as a y tern of representation. Make sure you understand what Barthes mcans by 'two staggered systems' and by the idea that myth is a 'mota-language' (a second-order language].

For another example of this two-stage process of signification, we can turn now to another of Barthes's famous essays.

ACTIVITY 6

Now, look carefully at the advertisement for Panzani products (Figure 1.6] and, with Barthes's analysis in mind, do the following exercise: 1 What signifiers can you

identify in the ad? 2 What do they mean? What

are their signifieds? 3 Now, look at the ad as a

whole, at the level of 'myth'. What is its wider, cultural message or theme? Can you construct one?

READING D

Now read the second extract from Barthes, in which he offers an interpretation of the Ponzani ad for spaghetti and vegetables in a string bag as a 'myth' about Italian national culture. The extract from 'Rhetoric of the image', in [mage---Music-Text (1977], is included as Reading D at the end of this chapter.

FIGURE 1.6 'Italian-ness' and the Panzani ad.

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 41

WI roo" IHI MO~T~OI'IIl~llCAIID:,'~T1"'\:' or OCUH'A T PROII cuo-i.

l-..:r1l;Ollll( INC IHI Nl\\ l<\l,UAIl. '(I ~tRll~.

.... ......• "n' ...... " ...

,l: ............. _, ...... "ro ............ ·-." .. ,,,· ..... ,· ...... ",., . i. , 1" ... _~,_",.J

..._ ............_,-", ...""......... ..

.. __ 01 •• -... ,_ _ , -. •-_ _ "' .., ~_""-, _ ~-..."'-'_ ....-" ~..._._-- -..................._.-- ,- ,..,,..,.,. ,,, .........,......_ ... ,_ " """"", I '.~ "'" ....." ......, ··.,...•"" '" , o,J .. __ ' .. H~ ,

"'" ""~,"~" Io''"' ..... '"''"'' ..~nl ,.'''...._ '''-~~ -"-",,"'"" "", ,,,,. ,"". .................". JAGUA IllH,'! UIt,.\, II. P~I"[ II

..... _4_.....-.""'_" .............._._ u_..-...._ _--_ ... ...... ", _.., ..."'- _-"" ..,... _,..-.1 -...."""' _.,--- ....... ,.., FIGURE 1.7 An image of 'Englishness' - advertisement for Jaguar.

Barthes suggests that we can read the Panzani ad as a 'myth' by linking its completed message (this is a picture of some packets of pasta, a tin, a sachet, some tomatoes, onions, peppers, a mushroom, all emerging from a half-open string bag) with the cultural theme or concept of 'Italianicity' (or as we would say, 'italian-ness'). Then, at the level of the myth or meta-language, the Panzani ad becomes a message about the essential meaning of Italian-ness as a national culture. Can commodities really become the signifiers for myths of nationality? Can you think of ads, in magazines or television, which work in the same way, drawing on the myth of 'Englishness'? Or 'Frenchness'? Or 'American-ness'? Or 'Indian-ness'? Try to apply the idea of 'Englishness' to the ad reproduced as Figure 1.7.

4 Discourse, power and the subject What the examples above show is that the semiotic approach provides a method for analysing how visual representations convey meaning. Already, in Roland Barthes's work in the 1960s, as we have seen, Saussure's 'linguistic' model is developed through its application to a much wider field of signs and representations (advertising, photography, popular culture, travel, fashion, etc.), Also, there is less concern with how individual words function as signs in language, mare about the application of the language model to a

REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGtJll (I~lG f)P,AC fl fC42 REPRESENTATION,CULTURAL

h Id out the promise thatlhef I I practices Saussure e B hmuch broader set a cu tura I . t b systematically mapped. art e , . f . could at as, e I dwhole domain a meamng, h is much more loose yan

too, had a 'method', but his semiotic approa;(fOr example. The Pleasure of the 1 li d: and In his later war desi 0interpretive yapp ieu: , d ith th 'play' of meaning and esiro acr

Text, 1975), he is more concerne w~ e:ning by a scientific analysis of texts than he is with the allemptto x rn language's rules and laws. . ,

b d the project of a 'science of meaning has Subsequently, as we a untenable Meaning and representation seem to appeared increasingly h

unte t ~tati ve side of the human and culturalbIng irrevocably to t em erpr I . '

e, a h biect mailer _ society, culture, the hu man su lJect _ IS :~;:e:~~I:~~ :~~SitiViStiC approach (i.e. one which seeks to discover scientific laws about society). Later developments have recognized the, necessarily interpretative nature of culture and the fact that mterpretatron

d a final moment of absolute truth, Instead. mtcrpretauon are never pro uce d I I' A the Fr ncbalways followed by other interpretations, in an en ess c rain. s " philosopher, Jacques Derrida, put it, writing always leadsto rnore wnnng. Difference, he argued, can never be wholly captured within any binary I system [Derrida, 1981), So any notion of a final meaning IS always endle y put off, deferred. Cultural studies of this interpretative kind. like other qualitative forms of sociological inquiry, are inevitably caught up In thi 'circle of meaning'.

In the semiotic approach, representation was understood on the ba is of the way words functioned as signs within language. But. for a start. in a culture, meaning often depends on larger units of analysis _ narratives. statements, groups of images, whole discourses which operate across a variety of texts, areas of knowledge about a subject which have acquired widespread authority. Semiotics seemed to confine the process of representation to language, and to treat it as a closed, rather static, system. Subsequent developments became more concerned with representation as a source for the production of social knowledge - a more open system, connected in more intimate ways with social practices and questions of power. In the emiotic approach, the subject was displaced from the centre of language. Later theorists returned to the question of the subject, Or at least to the empty pa which Saussure's theory had left; without, of Course, putting him/her hac in the centre, as the author or Source of meaning. Even if language, in some sense, 'spoke us' (as Saussure tended to argue) it was also important that in certain historical moments, some people had more power to speak about Some subjects than others (male doctors about mad female patients in the late nineteenth century, for example, to take one of the key example developed mthe work of Michel Foucault). Models of representation, these critic argued, ought to focus On these broader issues of knowledge and power.

Foucault used the word 'representation' in a narrower sense than we are using it here, but he is considered to have contrt'b t d tid . .. u e 0 a nove anslgmflcant general approach to the problem of t ti \Vh

. repre en a Ion. atconcerned him was the production of knowledg ( th th iust . e ra er an [us mearnn

.hecoursc

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 43

rsroursc through what he called discourse [rather than just language). His project, he said, was to analyse 'how human beings understand themselves in our culture' and how our knowledge about 'the social, the embodied individual and shared meanings' comes to be produced in different periods. With its emphasis on cultural understanding and shared meanings, you can see that Foucault's project was still to some degree indehted to Saussure and Barthes (see Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982, p. 17)while in other ways departing radically from them. Foucault's work was much more historically grounded, more attentive to historical specificities, than the semiotic approach. As he said, 'relations of power, not relations of meaning' were his main concern. The particular objects of Foucault's attention were the various disciplines of knowledge in the human and social sciences - what he called 'the subjectifying social sciences'. These had acquired an increasingly prominent and influential role in modern culture and were, in many instances, considered to be the discourses which, like religion in earlier times, could give us the 'truth' about knowledge.

We will return to Foucault's work in some of the subsequent chapters in this book (for example, Chapter 5). Here, we want to introduce Foucault and the discursive approach to representation by outlining three of his major ideas: his concept of discourse; the issue of power and knowledge; and the question of the subject. It might be useful, however, to start by giving you a general flavour, in Foucault's graphic (and somewhat over-stated) terms, of how he saw his project differing from that of the semiotic approach to representation. He moved away from an approach like that of Saussure and Barthes, based on 'the domain of signifying structure', towards one based on analysing what he called 'relations of force, strategic developments and tactics':

Here I believe one's point of reference should not be to the great model of .language (langue) and signs, but to that of war and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power not relations of meaning ...

[Foucault, 1980, pp. 114-5]

Rejecting both Hegelian Marxism (what he calls 'the dialectic') and semiotics, Foucault argued that:

Neither the dialectic, as logic of contradictions, nor semiotics, as the structure of communication, can account for the intrinsic intelligibility of conflicts. 'Dialectic' is a way of evading the always open and hazardous reality of conflict by reducing it to a Hegelian skeleton, and 'semiology' is a way of avoiding its violent, bloody and lethal character by reducing it to the calm Platonic form of language and dialogue.

(ibid.)

44 REPRESENTATION CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNIFYING PRAQIGS

4.1 From languageto discourse . the shift of attention in Foucault from

The first point to note, ~hen, IS di d t language, but discourse as a system 'language' to 'discourse. He stu t~erm~~iscourse' is used as a linguistic of representation. Normally, the es of connected writing or speech. Michel concept. It simply means passag 'What interested him were the Foucault, however, gave It a different meamng. d rules and practices that produced meaningful statements and regulate . discourse in different historical periods. By 'discourse', Foucault meant t group of statements which provide a language for talking about - a way a

resenting the knowledge about - a particular topic at a particular historical moment .. " Discourse is about the production of knowl dgo through language, But ... since all social practices entail meaning. and meanings shape and influence what we do - our conduct - all practice have a discursive aspect' (Hall, 1992, p. 291). It is important to note that the. concept of discourse in this usage is not purely a 'linguistic' concept. It IS about language and practice. It attempts to overcome the traditional . distinction between what one says (language) and what one does (practice). Discourse, Foucault argues, constructs the topic. It defines and produces the objects of our knowledge. It governs the way that a topic can be meaningfully talked about and reasoned about. It also influences how ideas are put into practice and used to regulate the conduct of others. lust as a discourse 'rules in' certain ways of talking about a topic, defining an acceptable and intelligible way to talk, write, or conduct oneself, so also, by definition, it 'rules out', limits and restricts other ways of talking, of conducting ourselve in relation to the topic or constructing knowledge about it. Discour e. Foucault argusrl, never consists of one statement, one text, one action or ooe source. The sarne discourse, characteristic of the way of thinking or the tate of knowledge at anyone time (what Foucault called the episteme). will appear across a range of texts, and as forms of conduct. at a number of different institutional sites within society, However, whenever the e discursive events 'refer to the same object, share the same style and ... support a strategy ... a common institutional, administrative or political drift and pattern' (Cousins and Hussain, 1984, pp. 84-5). then they are said by Foucault to belong to the same discursive formation. ....

Meaning and meaningful practice is therefore constructed within discour e. Like the semioticians, Foucault was a 'constructionist". However. unlike them, he was concerned with the production of knOWledge and meaning, not through language but through discollfse. There were therefore similarities. but also substantive differences between these two versions.

Th: idea that 'discourse produces the objects of knOWledge' and that nothing which IS.meanmgful exists outSide discourse, is at first sight a rlisconcerting proposllton, which seems to run right against the ' f hinki . gram a common-sense t I nr· It I.Sworth spending a moment to explore this idea further. Is Foucau t saymg - as some of his critics have charged _ that nothin exist outside of discourse? In fact, Foucault do t d th . g

es no eny at things Can hava a

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 45

real, material existence in the world. What he does argue is that 'nothing hos any meaning outside of discourse' (Foucault, 1972). As Laclau and Mouffe put it, 'we use [the term discourse] to emphasize the fact that every social configuration is meaningful' (1990, p. 100). The concept of discourse is not about whether things exist but about where meaning comes from.

READING E

Turn now to Reading E, by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, a short extract from New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time (1990), from which we have just quoted, and read it carefully. What they argue is that physical objects do exist, but they have no fixed meaning; they only take on meaning and become objects of knowledge within discourse. Make sure you follow their argument before reading further. 1 In terms of the discourse about 'building a wall', the distinction

between the linguistic part [asking for a brick) and the physical act (putting the brick in place) does not matter. The first is linguistic, the second is physical. But both are 'discursive' - meaningful within discourse.

2 The round leather object which you kick is a physical object - a ball. But it only becomes 'a football' within the context of the rules of the game, which are socially constructed.

3 It is impossible to determine the meaning of an objectoutside of its context of use. A stone thrown in a fight is a different thing ('a projectile') from a stone displayed in a museum ['a piece ofsculpture').

This idea that physical things and actions exist, but they only take on

( meaning and become objects of knowledge within discourse, is at the heart of the constructionist theory of meaning and representation. Foucault argues that since we can only have a knowledge of things if they have a meaning, it is discourse - not the things-in-themselves - which produces knowledge. Subjects like 'madness', 'punishment' and 'sexuality' only exist meaningfully within the discourses about them. Thus, the study of the discourses of madness, punishment or sexuality would have to include the following elements: 1 statements about 'madness', 'punishment' or 'sexuality' which give us a

certain kind of knowledge about these things; 2 the rules which prescribe certain ways of talking about these topics and

exclude other ways - which govern what is 'sayable' or 'thinkable' about insanity, punishment or sexuality, at a particular historical moment;

3 'subjects' who in some ways personify the discourse - the madman, the hysterical woman, the criminal, the deviant, the sexually perverse person; with the attributes we would expect these subjects to have, given the way knowledge about the topic was constructed at that time;

4 how this knowledge about the topic acquires authority, a sense of embodying the 'truth' about it; constituting the 'truth of the matter', at a historical moment;

5

T ONS AND SIGNIFYI~ JG PAA( r r t cRAL REPRESENTA IREPRESENTATION, CUL TU .

1· it h the subjects - medical. . . it tions for dea Ing WI Ithe practices within insti u I . . s for the guilty. mora . unishment regime ltdtreatment for the insane, p . _ whose conduct is being regu a e

discipline for the sexually deviant . . d di g to those Ideas,

and organIze aceor In . pisterne wi II arise at a h different discourse or e

acknowledgement t at a I I ti g the existing one, opening up a new later historical m~ment, supp an ~~o in its turn, new conceptions of discursive [ormation, and produc °l"t' ew discourses with the power' , ishment' or 'sexua I y , n 'madness or PW} 1 ial practiccs in ncw ways.and authority, the 'truth', to regu ate SOCI

46

6

Historicizing discourse: discursive practices4.2

" hold of here is the way discourse. rcpres ntation, kT he ~a~, ::~n: '\~:t~~'are radically his/oricized by Foucault. in co~trast tdo

nowe g " Th i gs mcant something anthe rather ahistorical tendency in serruoncs. 11l., F It did 'tr 'he argued only within a specific historical context. -oucauwere ue , , l i ff t

not believe that the same phenomena would be found across (I oren historical periods. He thought that, in each period, discourse prod~ced forms of knowledge, objects, subjects and practices of knowl dge, which differed radically from period to period, with no necessary conttnu itv between them.

Thus, for Foucault, for example, mental illness was not an objectiva fact. . which remained the same in all historical periods. and meant the same thing in all cultures. It was only within a definite discursive formation that the object, 'madness', could appear at all as a meaningful or intelligible construct. It was 'constituted by all that was said. in all the statements that named it, divided it up, described it, explained it. traced its development. indicated its various correlations, judged it, and possibly gave it speech by articulating, in its name, discourses that were to bc taken as its own' (1972, p.32). And it was only after a certain definition of 'madness' was put into practice, that the appropriate subject - 'the madman' as current medical and psychiatric knowledge defined 'him' - could appear.

Or, take some other examples of discursive practices from his work. There have always been sexual relations. But 'sexuality'. as a specific way of talking about, studying and regulating sexual desire, its secrets and it fantasias, Foucault argued, only appeared in western societies at a particular historical moment (Foucault, 1978). There may always have been what we now call homosexual forms ofhehaviour. But 'tile homosexual' as a specific kind of social subject, was produced, and could only make its appearance. within the moral, legal, medical and psychiatric discourses, practice and institutional apparatuses of the late nineteenili century, with their particular theories of sexual perversity (Weeks, 1981, 1985). Similarlv. it make nonsense to talk of the 'hysterical woman' outside of the nineteenth-eentun view of hysteria as a very Widespread female malady. In The Birth of the • Clinic (1973), Foucault charted how 'in less than half a century, the medical understanding of disease was transformed' from a classical notion that

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 47

disease existed separate from the body, to the modern idea that disease arose within and could be mapped directly by its course through the human body (McNay, 1994). This discursive shift changed medical practice. It gave greater importance to the doctor's 'gaze' which could now 'read' the course of disease simply by a powerful look at what Foucault called 'the visible body' of the patient - following the 'routes ... laid down in accordance with a now familiar geometry ... the anatomical atlas' (Foucault, 1973, pp. 3-4). This greater knowledge increased the doctor's power of surveillance vis-a-vis the patient.

Knowledge about and practices around all these subjects, Foucault argued, were historically and culturally specific. They did not and could not meaningfully exist outside specific discourses, i.e. outside the ways they were represented in discourse, produced in knowledge and regulated by the discursive practices and disciplinary techniques of a particular society and time. Far from accepting the trans-historical continuities of which historians are so fond, Foucault believed that more significant were the radical breaks, ruptures and discontinuities between one period and another, between one discursive formation and another.

4.3 From discourse to power/knowledge In his later work Foucault became even more concerned with how knowledge was put to work through discursive practices in specific institutional settings to regulate the conduct of others. He focused on the relationship between knowledge and power, and how power operated within what he called an institutional apparatus and its technologies (techniques). Foucault's conception of the apparatus of punishment, for example, included a variety of diverse elements, linguistic and non-linguistic - 'discourses, institutions, architectural arrangements, regulations, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophic propositions, morality, philanthropy, etc. ... The apparatus is thus always inscribed in a play of power, but it is also always linked to certain co-ordinates of knowledge .... This is what the apparatus consists in: strategies of relations of forces supporting and supported by types of knowledge' (Foucault, 1980b, pp. 194,196).

This approach took as one of its key subjects of investigation the relations between knowledge, power and the body in modern society. It saw knowledge as always inextricably enmeshed in relations of power because it was always being applied to the regulation of social conduct in practice [i.e. to particular 'bodies'). This foregrounding of the relation between discourse, knowledge and power marked a significant development in the constructionist approach to representation which we have been outlining. It rescued representation from the clutches of a purely formal theory and gave it a historical, practical and 'worldly' context of operation.

You may wonder to what extent this concern with discourse, knowledge and power brought Foucault's interests closer to those of the classical sociological

48 REPRESENTATION, CULTUAAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNIFYING PAAC liCE5

theories of ideology. especially Marxism with its concern to identify the cla s positions and class interests concealed within particular forms of knowl dge. Foucault. indeed, does corne closer to addressing some of these questions about ideology than. perhaps. formal semiotics did (though Roland Barth was also concerned with questions of ideology and myth, as we saw carli r]. But Foucault had quite specific and cogent reasons why he reje tod tho classical Marxist problematic of 'ideology'. Marx had argued that, in every epoch. ideas reflect the economic basis of society, and thus the 'ruling idea' are those of the ruling class which governs a capitalist economy, and correspond to its .dominant interests. Foucault's main argument against the classical Marxist theory of ideology was that it tended to reduce all the relation between knowledge and power to a question of class power and class interests. Foucault did not deny the existence of classes. but he was strongly opposed to this powerful element of economic or class reductionism in the Marxist theory of ideology. Secondly, he argued that Marxism tended to contrast the 'distortions' of bourgeois knowledge, against its own claim to 'truth' - Marxist science. But Foucault did not bel ieve that any form of thought could claim an absolute 'truth' of this kind. outside the play of discourse. All political and social forms of thought, he believed. were in~vitably caught up in the interplay of knowledge and power. So, his work rejects the traditional Marxist question, 'in whose class interest does language, representation and power operate?'

Later theorists. like the Italian. Antonio Gramsci, who was influenced by Marx but rejected class reductionism, advanced a definition of 'ideology' which is considerably closer to Foucault's position, though still too preoccupied WIth class questions to be acceptable to him. Gram ci's notion ~as :hat P~tlcular social groups struggle in many different ways. including I eo oglca y, to win the consent of other groups and achieve a kind of ascendancy III both thought and practice over them Th i f f Gramsci called hegemon H . . IS orrn a power

. . . y. egemony IS never permanent. and is not reducible to economic lIlterests or to a simple class d . , has some similarities to Foucault's " rno el of SOCI ty, ThIS differ radically. (The question of h~osltlOn, though on some key issues the Chapter 4,) gemony IS briefly addressed again in

What distinguished Foucault's posit: diI ion on ISCours kn I d dfrom the Marxist theory of clas ' t e, ow e ge an power Sill erests and ideol ' I'd' "Foucault advanced at least two di II oglca rstorf inn ? ,ra ica y nnve l , propositions.

1 Knowledge, power and truth

The first concerns the way Fouc It . len I d au conceived th link bow e ge and power. Hithert h e I age etween

0, we ave tended t th i k hoperates in a direct and brutall ' 0 III t at power hi Iik Y represSIve fash] d't mgs 1 e culture and know led h ion, rspensing with polite

d I f ge, tough Grams ' , Imo e 0 power. Foucault argued th CI certain y broke with that b ' . at not only' knpower, ut power IS Implicated' th . IS owledge alwavs a form of

, ill e questIOn f h -Clfcumstances knowledge is to b I' sow ether and in what e app led or not, Tht question of the

power/knowledge

regime of truth

h ,

power/knowledge

regime of (ruth

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 49

application and effectiveness of power/knowledge was more important, he thought, than the question ofits 'truth'.

Knowledge linked to power, not only assumes the authority of 'the truth' but has the power to make itself true. All koowledge, once applied in the real world, has real effects, and in that sense at least, 'becomes true'. Knowledge, once used to regulate the conduct of others, entails constraint, regulation and the disciplining of practices. Thus, 'There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of koowledge, nor any koowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time, power relations' (Foucault, 1977a, p. 27).

According to Foucault, what we think we 'koow' in a particular period about, say, crime has a bearing on how we regulate, control and punish criminals. Knowledge does not operate in a void. It is put to work, through certain technologies and strategies of application, in specific situations, historical contexts and institutional regimes. To study puoishment, you must study how the combination of discourse and power - power/koowledge - has produced a certain conception of crime and the criminal, has had certain real effects both for criminal and for the punisher, and how these have been set into practice in certain historically specific prison regimes.

This led Foucault to speak, not of the 'Truth' of koowledge in the absolute sense - a Truth which remained so, whatever the period, setting, context- but of a discursive formation sustaining a regime of truth. Thus, it mayor may not be true that single parenting inevitably leads to delinquency and crime. But if everyone believes it to be so, and punishes single parents accordingly, this will have real consequences for both parents and children and will become 'true' in terms of its real effects, even if in some absolute sense it has never been conclusively proven. In the human and social sciences, Foucault argued:

Truth isn't outside power .... Truth is a thing of this world; it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its 'general politics' of truth; that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes fuoction as true, the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned ... the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Foucault, 1980, p. 131)

2 New conceptions of power

Secondly, Foucault advanced an altogether novel conception of power. We tend to think of power as always radiating in a single direction - from top to bottom _ and coming from a specific source - the sovereign, the state, the ruling class and so on. For Foucault, however, power does not 'fuoction in the form of a chain' - it circulates. It is never monopolized by one centre. It 'is

IONS AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICESSO REPRESENTATION CULTURAL REPRESENTAT

ik izat ion ' (Foucault, 19aO,deployed and exercised through a net-l i e orgaruza I h in it ' that we are all to some degree, ca ug t up In I s

p,9a), This suggests d 'd It does not radiate downwards, either circnlation - oppresfrsorsan °IPpres~eo~er relations permeate all levels of fr ne source or om one pace. . f . I sooc:~existence and are therefore to be found operating at every site 0 hsocla

f 'I d ality as much as In t elife - in the private spheres oflhe ami yan sexu , ublic s heres of politics, the economy and the law, What's more, power I

p t onlyPnegative, repressing what it seeks to control. It is also productive. It "doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but", it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be thought of as a productive network which runs through the whole social body' (Foucault, 19aO, p, 119),

Tbe punishment system, for example, produces books, treatises, regulations, new strategies of control and resistance, debates In Parltament. conversations, confessions, legal briefs and appeals, training regimes for prison officers, and so on, The efforts to control sexuality produce a veritable explosion of discourse - talk about sex, television and radio programmes, sermons and legislation, novels, stories and magazine features, medical and counselling advice, essays and articles, learned theses and research programmes, as well as new sexual practices (e.g. 'safe' sex) and the pornography industry, Without denying that the state, the law, the sovereign or the dominant class may have positions of dominance, Foucault shifts our attention away from the grand, overall strategies of power, towards the many, localized circuits, tactics, mechanisms and effects through which power circulates - what Foucault calls the 'meticulous rituals' or the 'micro- physics' of power, These power relations 'go right down to the depth of society' (Foucault, 1977a, p, 27). They connect the way power is actually working on the ground to the great pyramids of power by what he calls a capillary movement (capillaries being the thin-walled vessels that aid the exchange of oxygen between the blood in our bodies and the surrounding tissues), Not because power at these lower levels merely rel1ects or 'reproduces, at the level of individuals, bodies, gestures and behaviour, the general form of the law or government' (Foucault, 1977a, p. 27) but, on the contrary, because such an approach 'roots [power] in forms of behaviour, bodies and local relations of power which should not at all be seen as a simple projection of the central power' (Foucault, 19aO, p, 201).

To what object are the micro-physics of power primarily applied, in Foucault's model? To the body, He places the body at the centre of the struggles between different formations of pOwer/kn I I Th L'

" ow ee ge. e techniquesof regulation are applied to the body Differellt d' ive f ' d . . . rscur-s iva ormations anapparatuses dtvidc, claSSify and inscribe the bod di ff I' hei

' , Y I erentylnt elrrespective regimes of power and 'truth' In D' . I' d ' h . ISClP lne all PUllJS for

example,F~ucault analyses the very different ways in which the bod of the criminal is produced' and disciplined in diff ' h ' Y , F 1', I erent purus ment regime IIIranee. In ear ier peflods, punishment was h h d ' . hi h h bli ap azar .jinsons were placesinto w IC t e pu IC could wander and th It' .

e u Imate PUfllshment was

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 51

inscribed violently on the body by means of instruments of torture and execution, etc. - a practice the essence of which is that it should be public, visible to everyone. The modern form of disciplinary regulation and power, by contrast, is private, individualized; prisoners are shut away from the public and often from one another, though continually under surveillance from the authorities; and punishment is individualized. Here, the body has become the site of a new kind of disciplinary regime.

Of course this 'body' is not simply the natural body which all human beings possess at all times. This body is produced within discourse, according to the different discursive formations - the state of knowledge about crime and the criminal, what counts as 'true' about how to change or deter criminal behaviour, the specific apparatus and technologies of punishment prevailing at the time. This is a radically historicized conception of the body - a sort of surface on which different regimes of power/knowledge write their meanings and effects. It thinks of the body as 'totally imprinted by history and the processes of history's deconstruction of the body' (Foucault, 1977a, p. 63).

4.4 Summary: Foucault and representation

Foucault's approach to representation is not easy to summarize. He is concerned with the production of knowledge and meaning through discourse. Foucault does indeed analyse particular texts and representations, as the semioticians did. But he is more inclined to analyse the whole discursive formation to which a text or a practice belongs. His concern is with knowledge provided by the human and social sciences, which organizes conduct, understanding, practice and belief, the regulation of bodies as well as whole populations. Although his work is clearly done in the wake of, and profoundly influenced by, the 'turn to language' which marked the constructionist approach to representation, his definition of discourse is much broader than language, and includes many other elements of practice and institutional regulation which Saussure's approach, with its linguistic focus, excluded. Foucault is always much more historically specific, seeing forms of power/knowledge as always rooted in particular contexts and histories. Above all, for Foucault, the production of knowledge is always crossed with questions of power and the body; and this greatly expands the scope of what is involved in representation.

The major critique levelled against his work is that he tends to absorb too much into 'discourse', and this has the effect of encouraging his followers to neglect the influence of the material, economic and structural factors in the operation of power/knowledge. Some critics also find his rejection of any criterion of 'truth' in the human sciences in favour of the idea of a 'regime of truth' and the will-to-power (the will to make things 'true') vulnerable to the charge of relativism. Nevertheless, there is little doubt about the major impact which his work has had on contemporary theories of representation

and meaning.

ND SIGNIFYING PRACTICES50 REPRESENTATION, CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS A

Ilk or anization' (Foucault, 1980, deployed and exercised through al~~~ ~o:e ~egree, caught up in its p,98). This suggests that we are a , d It d not radiate downwards, either. nd oppresse. oes circulation - oppressors a P 1 tions permeate all levels of

fr ne place ower re a . I from one source or am a . b f d operating at every site of sOCIa.. d are therefore to e ou n social existence an . d sexualit as mu h as in theIif . the private spheres of the family an y . ne v m d th law What's more, power IS

public spheres, of politics, the e~o~~t::e~: to c~ntr~l. It is also productive, Itnot only negative, repressmg w a I ' , onl wei h on us as a force that says no, but ,_. it traverses an~ ~~~:c:s things, ft induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces dis our e.it needs to be thought of as a productive network which runs through the whole social body' (Foucault, 1980, p, 119).

The punishment system, for example, produces books, treatises, regulation new strategies of control and resistance, debates 10 Parl~a~cnt. . conversations, confessions, legal briefs and appeals, tratn ing regimes for prison officers, and so on. The efforts to control sexuality produce a veritable explosion of discourse - talk about sex, television and radio programme, sermons and legislation, novels, stories and magazine features, medical and counselling advice, essays and articles, learned theses and research programmes, as well as new sexual practices (e.g. 'safe' sex) and the . pornography industry. Without denying that the state. the law. the sovereign or the dominant class may have positions of dominance, Foucault shifts our attention away from the grand, overall strategies of power. towards the many, localized circuits, tactics, mechanisms and effects through which power circulates - what Foucault calls the 'meticulous rituals' or the 'micro- physics' of power. These power relations 'go right down to the depth of society' (Foucault, 1977a, p, 27). They connect the way power is actually working on the ground to the great pyramids of powar by what he calls a capillary movement (capillaries being the thin-walled vessels that aid the exchange of oxygen between the blood in Our bodies and the surrounding tissues). Not because power at these lower levels merely reflects or 'reproduces, at the level of indiViduals, bodies, gestures and behaviour, the general form of the law or government' (Foucault, 1977a, p. 27) but, on the contrary, because such an approach 'roots [powel'l in forms of behaviour, bodies and local relations of power which should not at all be seen as a simple projection of the central power' (Foucault, 1980. p. 201).

Towhat object are the micro-physics of power primarily applied, in Foucault's model? To the body. He places the body at the centre of the struggles between different formations of power/knowledge. The techniques of regulation are apphed to the body. Different discursive formations and apparatuses divide, classify and inscribe the body differently in their respective regimes of power and 'truth'. In DiscipJine and Punish, for example, Foucault analyses the very different ways in which the bodv of the criminal is 'produced' and disciplined in different pu . h t . _ .

. nIS men regImes inFrance. In earlier periods, punishment was haphaz d' I ". ar ,prIsons were paceinto which the public could wander and the ultirn t . h

a e punts rnent was

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 51

inscribed violently on the body by means of instruments of torture and execution, etc. - a practice the essence of which is that it should be public, visible to everyone. The modern form of disciplinary regulation and power, by contrast, is private, individualized; prisoners are shut away from the public and often from one another, though continually under surveillance from the authorities; and punishment is individualized. Here, the body has become the site of a new kind of disciplinary regime.

Of course this 'body' is not simply the natural body which all human beings possess at all times. This body is produced within discourse, according to the different discursive formations - the state of knowledge about crime and the criminal, what counts as 'true' about how to change or deter criminal behaviour, the specific apparatus and technologies of punishment prevailing at the time. This is a radically historicized conception of the body - a sort of surface on which different regimes of power/knowledge write their meanings and effects. It thinks of the body as 'totally imprinted by history and the processes of history's deconstruction of the body' (Foucault, 1977a, p. 63).

4.4 Summary: Foucault and representation

Foucault's approach to representation is not easy to summarize. He is concerned with the production of knowledge and meaning through discourse. Foucault does indeed analyse particular texts and representations, as the semioticians did. But he is more inclined to analyse the whole discursive formation to which a text or a practice belongs. His concern is with knowledge provided by the human and social sciences, which organizes conduct, understanding, practice and belief, the regulation of bodies as well as whole populations. Although his work is clearly done in the wake of, and profoundly influenced by, the 'turn to language' which marked the constructionist approach to representation, his definition of discourse is much broader than language, and includes many other elements of practice and institutional regulation which Saussure's approach, with its linguistic focus, excluded. Foucault is always much more historically specific, seeing forms of power/knowledge as always rooted in particular contexts and histories. Above all, for Foucault, the production of knowledge is always crossed with questions of power and the body; and this greatly expands the scope of what is involved in representation.

The major critique levelled against his work is that he tends to absorb too much into 'discourse', and this has the effect of encouraging his followers to neglect the influence of the material, economic and structural factors in the operation of power/knowledge. Some critics also find his rejection of any criterion of 'truth' in the human sciences in favour of the idea of a 'regime of truth' and the will-to-power (the will to make things 'true') vulnerable to the charge of relativism. Nevertheless, there is little doubt about the major impact which his work has had on contemporary theories of representation

and meaning.

52 N CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNI~ Ylt' JG PPJ\C r Ie l )REPRESENT ATIO ,

4.5 Charcot and the performance of hysteria In the following example, we will try to apply Foucault's method to a particular example. Figure 1.8 shows a painting by Andre Brouillet of the famous French psychiatrist and neurologist, [ean-Mart in harcot (1825-93). lecturing on the subject of female hysteria to students in the loctur th atro of his famous Paris clinic at La Salpetriere.

ACTIVITY 7

Look at Brouillet's painting (Figure 1.8). What does it reveal as a representation of the study of hysteria?

Brouillet shows a hysterical patient being supported by an assi rant and attended by two women. For many years. hysteria had been traditionally identified as a female malady and although Charcot demonstrated conclusively that many hysterical symptoms were to be found in men. and a significant proportion of his patients were diagnosed male hysterics. Elain Showalter observes that 'for Charcot, too. hysteria remains symbolically. if not medically, a female malady' (1987. p. 148). Charcot was a very humane man who took his patients' suffering seriously and treated them with dignity. He diagnosed hysteria as a genuine ailment rather than a malingerer's xcu (much as has happened, in our time, after many struggles. with other illnesses, like anorexia and ME). This painting represents a regular feature of Charcot's treatment regime, where hysterical female patients displayed before an audience of medical staff and students the symptoms of their malady, ending often with a full hysterical seizure.

FIGURE 18 Ad' B . . n re rouillet, A clinical/essan at La Sal"';'~' ( b rL-

r-u.ere g""'n y '-""'Oot). 1887

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 53

The painting could be said to capture and represent, visually, a discursive 'event' - the emergence of a new regime of knowledge. Charcot's great distinction, which drew students from far and wide to study with him (including, in 1885, the young Sigmund Freud from Vienna), was his demonstration 'that hysterical symptoms such as paralysis could be produced and relieved by hypnotic suggestion' (Showalter, 1987, p. 148). Here we see the practice of hypnosis being applied in practice.

Indeed, the image seems to capture two such moments of knowledge production. Charcot did not pay much attention to what the patients said (though he observed their actions and gestures meticulously). But Freud and his friend Breuer did. At first, in their work when they returned home, they used Charcot's hypnosis method, which had attracted such wide attention as a novel approach to treatment of hysteria at La Salpetriere. But some years later they treated a young woman called Bertha Pappenheim for hysteria, and she, under the pseudonym' Anna 0', became the first case study written up in Freud and Breuer's path-breaking Studies in Hysteria (1974/1895). Itwas the 'loss of words', her failing grasp of the syntax of her own language (German), the silences and meaningless babble of this brilliantly intellectual, poetic and imaginative but rebellious young woman, which gave Breuer and Freud the first clue that her linguistic disturbance was related to her resentment at her 'place' as dutiful daughter of a decidedly patriarchal father, and thus deeply connected with her illness. After hypnosis, her capacity to speak coherently returned, and she spoke fluently in three other languages, though not in her native German. Through her dialogue with Breuer, and her ability to 'work through' her difficult relationship in relation to language, 'Anna 0' gave the first example of the 'talking cure' which, of course, then provided the whole basis for Freud's subsequent development of the psychoanalytic method. So we are looking, in this image, at the 'birth' of two new psychiatric epistemes: Charcot's method of hypnosis, and the conditions which later produced psychoanalysis.

The example also has many connections with the question of representation. In the picture, the patient is performing or 'representing' with her body the hysterical symptoms from which she is 'suffering'. But these symptoms are also being 're-presented' - in the very different medical language of diagnosis and analysis - to her (his?) audience by the Professor: a relationship which involves power. Showalter notes that, in general, 'the representation of female hysteria was a central aspect of Charcot's work' (p.148). Indeed, the clinic was filled with lithographs and paintings. He had his assistants assemble a photographic album of nervous patients, a sort of visual inventory of the various 'types' of hysterical patient. He later employed a professional photographer to take charge of the service. His analysis of the displayed symptoms, which seems to be what is happening in the painting, accompanied the hysterical 'performance'. He did not flinch from the spectacular and theatrical aspects associated with his demonstrations of hypnosis as a treatment regime. Freud thought that 'Everyone of his "fascinating lectures'" was 'a little work of art in construction and

RAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICES54 REPRESENTATION, CULTU

ared greater to his listenersd d 'he never appe f hicomposition'. Indeed, Freu note, ., the most detailed account a IS ft he had made the effort, by giving hi d ubts and hesi tat ions, tothan a er th t st frankness about IS a

train of thought, by e grea e d upil' (Gay, 1988, p. 49). d the gulf between teacher an pre lice

ACTIVITY 8 . db' g in mind what we have11 th icture agaIn an , earin Now look carefu yat e pi d ch to representation, answersaid about Foucault's method of an approa the following questions: 1 Who commands the centre of the picture?

2 Who or what is its 'subject? Are (1) and (2) the sam:? ? Can you tell that knowledge is being prod uced here. How.

3 . f wer in the picture? How are4 What do you notice about relations a po . I It' h 'ps of the they represented? How does the form and spatia re a IOns I picture represent this? . .

5 Describe the 'gaze' of the people in the image: who IS looking at whom? What does that tell us?

6 What do the age and gender of the participant tell us? 7 What message does the patient's body convey?

Is there a sexual meaning in the image? If so, what? What is the relationship of you, the viewer, to the image?

. d?10 Do you notice anything else about the image which we have rrusse .

8

9

READING F

Now read the account of Charcot and La Sa lpetr-iera offered by Elaine Showalter in 'The performance of hysteria' from The Female /'v(alady, reproduced as Reading F at the end of this chapter. Look carefully at the two photographs of Charcot's hysterical women patient. What do you make of their captions?

5 Where is 'the subject'? We have traced the shift in Foucault's work from language to discourse and knowledge, and their relation to questions of power. But where in all this. you might ask, is the subject? Saussure tended to abolish the subject from the question of representation. Language, he argued, speaks us. The subject appears in Saussure's schema as the author of individual speech-act (paroles). But, as we have seen, Saussure did not think that the level of the paroles was one at which a 'scientific' analysis of language could be conducted. In one sense, Foucault shares this position. For him. it is discourse, not the Subject, Which produces knowledge. Discourse is lenmeshed with power, but it is not necessary to find 'a suhject' _ the king. the [ruling class, the bourgeoisie, the state, etc. - for power/knolVledge to operate.

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 55

On the other hand, Foucault did include the subject in his theorizing, though he did not restore the subject to its position as the centre and author of representation. Indeed, as his work developed, he became more and more concerned with questions about 'the subject', and in his very late and unfinished work, he even went so far as to give the suhject a certain reflexive awareness of his or her own conduct, though this still stopped short of restoring the suhject to his/her full sovereignty.

Foucault was certainly deeply critical ofwhat we might call the traditional conception of the subject. The conventional notion thinks of 'the subject' as an individual who is fully endowed with consciousness; an autonomous and stable entity, the 'core' of the self, and the independent, authentic source of action and meaning. According to this conception, when we hear ourselves speak, we feel we are identical with what has been said. And this identity of the subject with what is said gives him/her a privileged position in relation to meaning. It suggests that, although other people may misunderstand us, we always understand ourselves because we were the source of meaning in the first place.

However, as we have seen, the shift towards a constructionist conception of language and representation did a great deal to displace the subject from a privileged position in relation to knowledge and meaning. The same is true \ of Foucault's discursive approach. It is discourse, not the subjects who speak it, which produces knowledge. Subjects may produce particular texts, but they are operating within the limits of the episteine, the discursive formation, the regime of truth, of a particular period and culture. Indeed, this is one of Foucault's most radical propositions: the 'subject' is produced within discourse. This subject of discourse cannot be outside discourse, because it must be subjected to discourse. It must submit to its rules and conventions, to its dispositions of power/knowledge. The subject can become the bearer of the kind of knowledge which discourse produces. It can become the object through which power is relayed. But it cannot stand outside power/ knowledge as its source and author. In 'The subject and power' (1982), Foucault writes that 'My objective ... has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects ... It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else's control and dependence, and tied to his (sic) own identity by a conscience and self- knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to' (Foucault, 1982, pp. 208, 212).Making discourse and representation more historical has therefore been matched, in Foucault, by an equally radical historicization of the subject. 'One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that's to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework' (Foucault, 1980, p. 115).

Where, then, is 'the subject' in this more discursive approach to meaning, representation and power?

56 REPRESENTATION, CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICES

Foucault's 'subject' seems to be produced through discourse il~two different senses or places. First, the discourse itself produces 'subjects - figures who personify the particular forms of knowledge which the discourse produces. These subjects have the attributes we would expect as these are defined by the discourse: the madman, the hysterical woman, the homosexual, the individualized criminal, and so on. These figures are specific to specific discursive regimes and historical periods. But the discourse also produce a place for the subject (i.e. the reader or viewer, who is also 'subjected to' discourse) from which its particular knowledge and m aning rno t mak sense. It is not inevitable that all individuals in a particular period will become the subjects of a particular discourse in this sense. and thus the bearers of its power/knowledge. But for them - us - to do so. they - we - must locate themselves/ourselves in the position from which the dis ours makes most sense, and thus become its 'subjects' by 'subjecting' ourselves to its meanings, power and regulation. All discourses, then, construct subject. positions, from which alone they make sense.

This approach has radical implications for a theory of representation. For it suggests that discourses themselves construct the subjoct-positions from which they become meaningful and have effects. Individuals mav differ as to their social class, gendered, 'racial' and ethnic characteristics (among other factors), but they will not be able to take meaning until they have identified with those positions which the discourse constructs. subjected themselves to lis rules, and hence become the subjects of its power/knowledge. For example, pornography produced for men will only 'work' for women. according to this theory, ifin some sense women put themselves in the position ofthe 'desiring male voyeur' - which is the ideal subject-position which the discourse of male pornography constructs _ and look at the models from this 'masculine' discursive position. This may seem, and is. a highly contestable propOSitIOn. But let us consider an example which illustrates the argument.

5.1 How to make sense of Velasquez' Las Meninas Foucault's The Order of Thin as (1970) . . . by the famous Spanish painte~ Vela opens with a diSCUSSIOnof a painting topic of considerable scholl' d b squez, called Las Meninas. It has been a

ar y e ate and Contro Thusing it here is because as all th " versy. e reason I am , e crItIcs agree the . ti . If dcertain questions about the n t f ' pam IIlg use oes rai e

a ure a representatio I Fuses it to talk about these wi d . n, ane oucault himself I er ISsues of the sub)' t I' hwhich interest us here not th' ec. t IS t ese argument

, e quest ion of whethe Fl' .correct or even tbe definitive di r oucau t S IS the 'true',. . rea Illg of the pai ti .pallltlllg has no one fixed or fi I . Il mg s meamllg. That the, na meanmg i . dpowerful arguments. s, III eed, one of Foucault's mo t

The painting is unique in Velasquez' k royal collection and hung in th I w~r . It was part of the Spani h court' d tr db epa ace Ul a room who hes aye y fire. It was dated '1656' b V ,IC was subsequenUy

y elasquez successor as court

FIGURE 1,9 Diego Velasquez, Las Meninas, 1656.

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 57

painter. It was originally called 'The Empress with her Ladies and a Dwarf'; but by the inventory of 1666, it had acquired the title of' A Portrait of the Infanta of Spain with her Ladies In Waiting and Servants, by the Court Painter and Palace Chamberlain DiegoVelasquez'. It was subsequently called Las Meninas - 'The Maids of Honour'. Some argue that the painting shows Velasquez working on Las Metiinas itself and was painted with the aid of a mirror - but this now seems unlikely. The most widely held and convincing explanation is that Velasquez was working on a full-length portrait of the King and Queen, and that it is tbe royal couple who are reflected in the mirror on the back wall. It is at the couple that the princess and her attendants are looking and on them that the artist's gaze appears to rest as he steps back from his canvas. The reflection artfully includes the royal couple in the picture. This is essentially the account which Foucault accepts.

ACTIVITY 9

Look at the picture carefully, while we summarize Foucault's argument.

58 REPRESENTATION CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AM

Las Meninas shows the interior of a room - perhaps_the painter's studio or other room in the Spanish Royal Palace. the Escor ial. Tho sc .n •

though in its deeper recesses rather dark. is bathed in light f~om a wlOdo~' on the right. 'We are looking at a picture 111 which the painter IS In tum looking out at us,' says Foucault (1970, p. 4). To the left. looking for--:ards. is ~h painter himself, Velasquez. He is in the act of painting and his brush t raised, 'perhaps ... considering whether to add some finishing touch to the canvas' (p. 3). He is looking at his model. who is silting in th pia from which we are looking, but we cannot see who the model is because the canvas on which Velasquez is painting has its back 10 us. its faco rosolut turned away from our gaze. In the centre of the painting stands what tradition recognizes as the little princess, tho Infanla Maragar ita. who h come to watch the proceedings. She is tho centro of the picture we are looking at, but she is not the 'subject' of Velasqunz canvas. The Infanta b with her an 'entourage of duennas, maids of honour. r.unrtir-rs and dw rfs' and her dog (p. 9). The courtiers stand behind, towards the bad ..on tb right. Her maids of honour stand on either side of her. frnm ing her. To the right at the front are two dwarfs, one a famous court [ester. The eyes of many of th figures, like that of the painter himself, are looking alit towards the front of the picture at the sitters.

Who are they - the figures at whom everyone is looking but whom w cannol look at and whose portraits on the canvas we are forbidden 10 ee? In ~ t, though at first we think we cannet see Ihem. the picture tells us who tb ' are because, behind the Infanta's head and a littlo to the left of the centre of th picture, surrounded by a heavy wooden frame. is a mirror; and in th mirror- at last - are reflected the sitters, who are in fact seated in the position from whiclt we are looking: 'a reflection that shows us quite sim lv what i I III everyone's gaze' (p 15) T'h fi fl . . p . . . '.' e igures re ected in the mirror are, in fact. the

Kmg, Philip IV, and his wife, Mariana. Beside the mirror. to the right of iI. io the back wall, ISanother' fram ' b t th i . . d . e, u IS IS not a mirror reflecting fo.. \ .• II IS a .oorway leadl~g backwards out of the room. On the stair, hi fila on different steps, a man stands out in fUll-length silhouette' He ba ~t entered or IS Just leaving the scene and is lookin' ' . '. what is going on in it b I' g at It from behind, 0 "'Il8I U content to surpr! th '" ,himself' (p. 10). rise oso within Without bein 0

5,2 The subject of/in repreSentation Who or what is the Subject of this painlin ? . Las Meninas to make some ge I . g. In his comments, Foucault u:

nera pOmts ab t h· hand specifically about the role f th . au IS I eory of repre< nt liooa e subject; 1 'Foucault reads the painting in I (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982 2) erms of repreSentation and tbe ub' t'

' ,p.o. As well b' ..us (represents) a scene in who h . as emg a pamlmg which 'ho b '. IC a portra.Jt of th K'emg pamted, it is also a pa' t' . e Ing and Queen of ""in .

In mg whIch t 11 ,..-'representation and the subie t k e s Us something about hOh, c War . It pd. ro uces ItS own !Jnd of 0\\ I

CHAPTER. I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 59

Representation and the subject are the painting's underlying message - what it is about, its sub-text.

2 Clearly, representation here is not about a 'true' reflection or imitation of reality. Of course, the people in the painting may 'look like' the actual people in the Spanish court. But the discourse of painting in the picture is doing a great deal more than simply trying to mirror accurately what exists.

3 Everything in a sense is visible in the painting. And yet, what it is 'about' _ its meaning - depends on how we 'read' it. It is as much constructed around what you can't see as what you can. You can't see what is being painted on the canvas, though this seems to be the point of the whole exercise. You can't see what everyone is looking at, which is the sitters, unless we assume it is a reflection of them in the mirror. They are both in and not in the picture. Or rather, they are present through a kind of substitution. We cannot see them because they are not directly represented: but their 'absence' is represented - mirrored through their reflection in the mirror at the back. The meaning of the picture is produced, Foucault argues, through this complex inter-play between presence (what you see, the visible] and absence (what you can't see, what has displaced it within the frame). Representation works as much through what is not shown, as through what is.

4 In fact, a number of substitutions or displacements seem to be going on here. For example, the 'subject' and centre of the painting we are looking at seems to be the Infanta. But the 'subject' or centre is also, of course, the sitters - the King and Queen - whom we can't see but whom the others are looking at. You can tell this from the fact that the mirror on the wall in which the King and Queen are reflected is also almost exactly at the centre of the field of vision of the picture. So the Infanta and the Royal Couple, in a sense, share the place of the centre as the principal 'subjects' of the painting. It all depends on where you are looking from - in towards the scene from where you, the spectator, is sitting or outwards from the scene, from the position of the people in the picture. If you accept Foucault's argument, then there are two subjects to the painting and two centres. And the composition of the picture _ its discourse - forces us to osciIIate between these two 'subjects' without ever finally deciding which one to identify with. Representation in the painting seems firm and clear - everything in place. But our vision, the way we look at the picture, oscillates between two centres, two subjects, two positions of looking, two meanings. Far from being finally resolved into some absolute truth which is the meaning of the picture, the discourse of the painting quite deliberately keeps us in this state of suspended attention, in

\ this osciIIating process of looking. Its meaning is always in the process of emerging, yet any final meamng IS constantly deferred.

5 You can tell a great deal about how the picture works as a discourse, and what it means, by following the orchestration of looking - who is looking at what or whom. OUf look - the eyes of the person looking at the picture, the spectator _ follows the relationships of looking as represented in the picture.

60 REPRESENTATION CULTURAL RfPRf SEN I A r ror : ',r .1

tl f , fthe Infanta is important because her attendants areWe know le IgUle 0 " " • , h B t know thaI someone even morn unportant rs sitting 10looking at er, u we I I f th

I tt see because rna 11V figures - t lC II anta.front of the scene W j.om we cal ", _ . ' he nai t hi elf-arelookingatthcml So thospectatur Iwho i 610Jester, t e paIn 8T lIDS ... _ f l' 'subjected' to the discourse of the painungl is dOing two ~'lIds 0 ,Iou ,lOg, L ki t the scene from the position outsido. III fronlof. thr- picture. And I 00 111ga I I I k' be

the same time, looking out of the scene, I;y ir/"lIlifl'iIlM wit , I 11' uu 109 109 done by the figures in the painting, Projecting 011 rsr- ,,"I'S into tho subject ofth painting help us as spectators to sec, to 'rnako St'J1SP' of it \Vtt t •• l .. up the positions indicated by the discourse, identify with thotu . slIbJl!c! ourselve to its meanings, and become its 'subjects',

6 It is critical for Foucault's argumcnllhat till' painting dlJl'., Itot h.l\"P • completed meaning. It only means something in rl'latiol1 to IIlP vprx.tutor who is looking at it. The spectator complutus tlw mouniug of IItt"' pir.tur». ~ "'dOlO i therefure constructed in the dialogue belwl'l'nllw pai"lln~ ,IIHlthl' 'I",clalor. Velasquez, of course, could not know who wuuld sllh~Pqllt'llth oc Clip' lb. position ofthe spectator, Nevertheless, thn wholr- 'Sf ("H" IIf Ihl' IMlIllinR had 10 be laid out in relation to tha t idea 1 poi n tin frnn t 0 f Ih I' 1'" iIII1II1l from \\ hieh on, spectator must look if the painting is to rnakr- se nsr-. Tho spl',t,llnr. wr- might say, is painted into position in front or the p k-t IIre. In tills sp", .. , thfl das( curse produces a subject-position for the spcctator-subjpc;t For ItlP IMlntinR to ''tor. the spectator, whoever he or she may be, mllsl firsl 'suhJl',t' h,m,clf/hcr.; Iflo the painting's discourse and, in this way. hecOtl1p tilt' JlaintinJfs idpdl nc\'t r. the producer of its meanings - its 'subjecl', This is "hill IS mC.llIt Ina\ ingthal the discourse constructs the spectator as a suhjl'ct -In \\ hi,h wc mean Ihal.1 constructs a place for the subject-spectator whu is lookin/( .11anel ma lOR 'of it.

7 Representation therefore occ 'r t 1 h ' , , . 1I1S rom <J cast I rp(' posItions In the pdlnllDgFIrst of all there is us the spectat I 'I I' . 'or, Wlose 00 .... puts logell1flr and unifie thdifferent elements and relatio 1 I' , h' ,

. • f S lIpS In l e plCturp Into ~lll on'fell! mfldninThIS subject must be there fa ' tI " , . I le pall1tlllg Lo l11akp seIlSf'. hut hf' sill" I.' notrepresented 111 the painting,

Then there is the painter wh ' d I ' h opamte t 1C Scene, HI' is 'prcspnt' 1111\\0 pionce, SUlce e must at aile time hav b .

in order to pal'nt tl b e een standlllg \\"hef(~ \\0 .up 00\\ ithnle scene ut he has th h' himself in) the pictu I 'k' b ' en pUI lInscif into (repr" 'pnled

re, 00 Jl1g ack towa I t h ' , spectator have tak h' ! rc s al pOlnl of \'IC\\ \\ h.'rp \\ .th' en IS p aCe We I I and is pulled togethe' I' ' nay a so sav thai th" SCptll' rna C . n'r 111re atlOn to tI r back, since he too surveys 't II b le court Igllrl' stand,ng nn thO' slair Ithe

I a ut-ltkeus II" Isomewhat outside it. ane h..e t le painter _ from

8 Finally, consider the mirror On the h ' should now be representing fl' ack wall. If Jl Wl'rl' a ',..'al' m.ICTor, il.. . or re ectillo Us . . POSJtlOn 111 front of the sce t h' " ,Since we arc slanchng mlhd!

' ne 0 w Ich everv 'I 'everyth111g makes sense B t' d - one IS OOk1l1g and from whichK' , u Jt oes not m' , 111gand Queen of Spain S h Jrror US, II shows in our place lh' orne ow the d'

!ScoursI' of Ihp p.1inl1l1g pos,li n'

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 61

in the place ofthe Sovereign! You can imagine what fun Foucault had with this substitution.

6 Conclusion: representation, meaning and language reconsidered

Foucault argues that it is clear from the way the discourse of representation works in the painting that it must be looked at and made sense of from that one subject-position in front of it from which we, the spectators, are looking. This is also the point-of-view from which a camera would have to be positioned in order to film the scene. And, 10and behold, the person whom Velasquez chooses to 'represent' silting in this position is The Sovereign- 'master of all he surveys' - who is both the 'subject of' the painting (what it is about) and the 'subject in' the painting - the one whom the discourse sets in place, but who, simultaneously, makes sense of it and understands it all by a look of supreme mastery.

We started with a fairly simple definition of representation. Representation is the process by which members of a culture use language (broadly defined as any system which deploys signs, any signifying system) to produce meaning. Already, this definition carries the important premise that things- objects, people, events, in the world - do not have in themselves any fixed, final or true meaning. lt is us - in society, within human cultures - who make things mean, who signify. Meanings, consequently, will always change, from one culture or period to another. There is no guarantee that every object in one culture will have an equivalent meaning in another, precisely because cultures differ, sometimes radically, from one another in their codes - the ways they carve up, classify and assign meaning to the world. So one important idea about representation is the acceptance of a degree of cultural relativism between one culture and another, a certain lack of equivalence, and hence the need for translation as we move from the mind-set or conceptual universe of one culture or another.

We call this the constructionist approach to representation, contrasting it with both the reflective and the intentional approaches. Now, if culture is a process, a practice. how does it work? In the constructionist perspective, representation involves making meaning by forging links between three different orders of things: what we might broadly call the world of things, people, events and experiences; the conceptual world - the mental concepts we carry around in our heads; and the signs, arranged into languages, which 'stand for' or communicate these concepts. Now, if you have to make a link between systems which are not the same, and fix these at least for a time so that other people know what, in one system, corresponds to what in another system, then there must be something which allows us to translate between them _ telling us what word to use for what concept, and so on. Hence the notion of codes.

REPRESENTATIONS AND 5ICrJlfYIN( PfJA( r« f62 REPRESENTATION CULTURAL

, the ractice of interpretation, and , Producing meamng depends on P I sing the code _ encoding, putting, , tained by us active y U , interpretation ISsus t the other end interpreting or things into the code - and by the p)er~o~ a te that because meanings ar decoding the meaning (Hall, 1980, u no t' o'e like social cony ntions

d Ii ' codes opera e rn r always changing an s IpplOg, bl I As meanings shift and slide, 0' f d I unbreaka e ru es. than Iike ixe aws or , t ibl change The great advantagbl h d s of a culture Impercep 1 y , ' d ith inevita y t e co e ", ns of the culture which we carry aroun WI of the concepts and classlflcatl~1 t think about things, whether they are in our heads is that they ena e us a Th ar

us t: deed whether they ever existed ur not. erethere present or no , III , II failed ' 'f tasi desires and imaginings as we as or so-cconcepts for our an aSIeS, . fl' that ' , h t ial world And the advantage 0 anguage IS'real' objects Il1 t e rna en, , I 'I

our thou hts about the world need not remain cxcluSI\'{: to us, ane 51 cnt. We can translate them into language, make them 'speak , through the u: e of signs which stand for them - and thus talk, write, communicate about th m to others,

Gradually, then, we complexified what we meant by representation, It carne to be less and less the straightforward thing we assumed It to be at fir t- which is why we need theories to explain it. We looked at two versions of constructionism - that which concentrated on how language and signification (the use of signs in language) works to produce meanings. which after Saussure and Barthss we called semiotics: and that. following Foucault, which concentrated on how discourse and discursive pract ire« produce knowledge, I won't run through the finer points in these two approache again, since you can go back to them in the main body of the chaptcr and refresh your memory, In semiotics, you will recall the importance of signifierl signified, langue/parole and 'myth', and how the marking of difference and binary oppositions are crucial for meaning, In the discursive approach, vou will recall discursive formations, power/knowledge, the idea of a 'regime of truth', the way discourse also produces the subject and defines the subject- positions from which knOWledge proceeds and indeed, the return of que tion about 'the subject' to the field of representation, In several examples, we tried to get you to work with these theories and to apply them, There will be furtber debate about them in subsequent chapters,

Notice that the chapter does not argue that the discursi,'p approach overturned everything in the semiotic approach, Theoretical devclopment doos not usually proceed in this linear way, There was much to learn from Sau sure and Barthes" and we are still discovering ways of frUitfully applying their mSlghts - withour necessarily swallOWing everything they said, We offered you some cnlIcal thoughts on the subject. There is a great deal to learn from Foucault and the discursive approach, but by no means evervthing it claim i correct and the theory is open to and bas attractecl itt , Agai

, . many en lClsm. am. IDlater chapters, as We encounter further developm t ' 'th th f ' cnSln e eorvorepresentatIOn, and see the strengths and weakn f h _, ,

I"· '. esses 0 t esc POSItionsapp led in practIce, we WIll come to appreciate more ful! th t Ih b ' , , , v a we are on \t e egmnmg ofthe excltmg task of exploring th i - f ' _ IS process 0 meaning

CHAPTER I THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION 63

construction, which is at the heart of culture, to its full depths. What we have offered here is, we hope, a relatively clear account of a set of complex, and as yet tentative, ideas in an unfinished project.

References BARTHES, R. (1967) The Elements of Semiology, London, Cape.

BARTHES, R. (1972) Mythologies, London, Cape. BARTHES, R. (1972a) 'The world of wrestling' in Mythologies, London, Cape.

BARTHES, R. (1972b) 'Myth today' in Mythologies, London, Cape. BARTHES, R. (1975) The Pleasure of the Text, New York, Hall and Wang.

BARTHES, R. (1977) lmage-Music-Text, Glasgow, Fontana. BRYSON, N. (1990) Loaking at the Overlooked: four essays on still life painting, London, Reaktion Books.

COUSINS, M. and HUSSAIN, A. (1984) Michel Foucault, Basingstoke, Macmillan.

CULLER, J. (1976) Saussure, London, Fontana. DERRIDA, J. (1981) Positions, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press. DREYFUS, H. and RABINOW, P. (eds) (1982) Beyond Stucturalism and Hermeneutics, Brighton. Harvester. DU GAY, P. (ed.) (1997) Production of Culture/Cultures of Production, London, Sage/The Open University [Baok 4 in this series).

DU GAY, P., HALL, S., JANES, L., MACKAY, H. and NEGUS, K.(1997) Doing Cultural Studies: the story of the Sony Walkman, London, Sage/The Open University [Book 1 in this series).

FOUCAULT, M. (1970) The Order of Things, London, Tavistock. FOUCAULT, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, London, Tavistock.

FOUCAULT, M. (1973) The Birth of the Clinic, London, Tavistock. FOUCAULT, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality, Harmondsworth, Allen Lane/ Penguin Books. FOUCAULT, M. [1977a) Discipline and Punish, London, Tavistock. FOUCAULT, M. (1977b) 'Nietzsche, genealogy, history', in Language, Counter- Memory, Practice, Oxford, Blackwell. FOUCAULT, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge, Brighton, Harvester. FOUCAULT, M. (1982) 'The subject and power' in Dreyfus and Rabinow (eds).

FREUD, S. and BREUER, J. (1974) Studies on Hysteria, Harmondsworth, Pelican. First published 1895. GAY, P. (1988) Freud: a life for our time, London, Macmillan. HALL, S. (1980) 'Encoding and decoding' in Hall, S. et al. (eds) Culture, Media, Language, London, Hutchinson.

64 REPRESENTATION· CULTURAL REPRESFr-Jr Allor) -,r j[ ~I •" ,

HALL, S.(1992) 'The West and the Rest'. in Hall. S. and Ciebcn. B, tedsl Formations of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press/The Open Umversity,

HOEC, P. (1994) Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snoll', London, Flamingo

LACLAU, E, and MOUFFE, C. (1990) 'Post-Marxism without apologies in Laclau, E., New Reflections on the Revolution of OUf Tiinr, London, ver McNAY, L. (1994) Foucault: a critical introduction. Carnhridg«. I'olrt\· Pr

MACKAY, 'I, (ed.) (1997) Consumption and Evervdriv UF', London, Sag rrb Open University (Book 5 in this series),

SAUSSURE, F. DE (1960) Course in General Linguistics, London, 1', IN 0\\ D.

SHOWALTER, E, (1987) The Female Malady. London, Virugo.

WEEKS, t, (1981) Sex, Politics and Society. London, Longman

WEEKS, J, (1985) Sexuality and its Discontents, London, Routh-d!!l-

READINGA: Norman Bryson, 'Language, reflection and still life'

With Colan, too, the images have as their immediate funclion the separation of the viewer from the previous mode of seeing [... J: they decondition the habitual and abolish the endless eclipsing and fatigue of worldly vision, replacing these with brilliance. The enemy is a mode of seeing which thinks it knows in advance what is worth looking at and what is not: against that, the image presents the constant surprise of things seen for the first time. Sight is taken back to a [primal] stage before it learned bow to scotornise [break. upl divldel the visual field. how to screen out the unimportant and not see, but scan. In place of the abbreviated forms for which the world scans, Cotan supplies forms that are articulated at immense length, forms so copious or prolix that one cannot see where or how to begin to simplify them. They offer no inroads for reduction because they omit nothing. Just at the point where the eye thinks it knows the form and can afford to skip, the image proves that in fact the eye had not understood at all what it was about to discard.

The relation proposed in Cotan between the viewer and the foodstuffs so meticulously displayed seems to involve, paradoxically, no reference to appetite or to the function of sustenance which becomes coincidental; it might be described as anorexic, taking this word in its literal and Greek sense as meaning 'without desire'. All Cotan's stilllifes are rooted in the outlook of monasticism, specifically the monasticism of the Carthusians [monks], whose order Cotan jointed as a lay brother ill Toledo in 1603. What distinguishes the Carthusian rule is its stress on solitude over communal life: the monks live in individual cells, where they pray. study- and eat - alone. meeting only for the night office, morning mass and afternoon vespers. There is total abstention from meat, and on Fridays and other fast days the diet is bread and water. Absent from Colan's work is any conception of nourishment as involving the conviviality of the meal- the sharing of hospitality] ... 1.The unvarying stage of his paintings is never the kitchen but always the comarero, a cooling-space where for preservation the foods are often hung on strings (piled together,

or in contact with a surface, they would decay more quickly). Placed in a kitchen, next to plates and knives, bowls and pitchers, the objects would inevitably point towards their consumption at table, but the cantarero maintains the idea of the objects as separable from, dissociated from, their function as food. In Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber [Figure 1.3] no-one can touch the suspended quince or cabbage without disturbing them and setting them rocking in space: their motionlessness is the mark of human absence, distance from the hand that reaches to eat; and it renders them immaculate. Hanging on strings, the quince and the cabbage lack the weight known to the hand. Their weightlessness disowns such intimate knowledge. Having none of the familiarity that comes from touch, and divorced from the idea of consumption, the objects take on a value that is nothing to do with their role as nourishment.

What replaces their interest as sustenance is their interest as mathematical form. Like many painters of his period in Spain, Cotan has a highly developed sense of geometrical order; but whereas the ideas of sphere, ellipse and cone are used for example in EI Greco to assist in organising pictorial composition, here they are explored almost for their own sake. One can think. of Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber as an experiment in the kind of transformations that are explored in the branch of mathematics know as topology. We begin on the left with the quince, a pure sphere revolving on its axis. Moving to the right, the sphere seems to peel off its boundary and disintegrate into a ball of concentric shells revolving around the same vertical axis. Moving to the melon the sphere becomes an ellipse, from which a segment has been cut; a part of the segment is independently shown. At the right the segmented shapes recover their continuous boundary in the corrugated form of the cucumber. The curve described by all these objects taken together is not at all informal but precisely logarithmic: it follows a series of harmonic or musical proportions with the vertical co-ordinates of the curve exactly marked by the strings. And it is a complex curve, not just the arc of a graph on a two-dimensional surface. ill relation to the quince, the cabbage appears to come forward slightly; the melon is further forward than the quince. the melon slice projects out beyond the ledge, and the cucumber overhangs it still further. The arc is

65

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n I» ~m ;::0

o Z m

66 CULTURAL REPREScNl A nor Je:; Ar HREPRESENTATION,

READING B: Roland Barthes. 'The worldof wrestling'

ITIIH' function of Ih. ller i IIOIIDW\D;d HOox.u.rlv rhrnugh lh~ mollolU which... of hun It j"i , .. id that ludo nlalDslhidds svrnbohc .ISP'l(:l, m,en In th mi of ,"wsturos oro mfl.l~lIrod. p but nl5 drawn .rccunuolv but b . withoal \Vrpstlln~. on the cunlf8r). offers 'ft HPs'u,P, ",pIOl\l'd 10 Ih IImlloftheu judo. .j man who 1!Ii down .. hardI) doWDIl rolls ovvr, hi' drav v· b..l • he elud d .. lattor IS obvious. h" nom I I I)" d p~ \\'n'stllO~ .•1 man who i d 't) ..nd r.omplntnlv fill the ohMs ,IH' intolor ..hlp pt'<:,ad of hi poWlll"'_ Ttu s funruon of grandiloqueace i inde!ddlllr .1S th .. t of dTUlflnllhf"alre. whose pnnople. la nguagr- and prnp Im d bwhno)~ III the ",.IAAPr;'h·dh- n fbi I..l. The v.lIlqul<th,"d wrr- ..tlrr 11801.6 Itothewt1cld1 dp["", whIch. folf from dugui tng, be ... .md holds Iil,' .1p"u p '0 mu Ie I...~rnusu f111'dnt to <>IKllIh" thr lragIc modfloftbe

- lO ....In wrr'stlm~.a on Ih t ananbqw,bow;: tlsh.lmr'd of onr' uffenng. OM Ont~ h.ls a II IOJ( for lear'"

EM:h si~nm \\--n'sthn I lh IDdo~ tal ....".In .1hso!ulr cI~trih-. 10 one m '.

IIndrrst.md flvrrythm on the pot, As sooD dch'flr:"i.trlf·"dN> in thr. olll' the public'. -w.

h ..oftilt .....oVf'rwh£'lmf"ti \ ..-ith t e , S ~ .bJ in ,hI' 'h"alr". <'ach ph, I l}'P" lilt

h.... .. ..£'xrf'SS Ihf' p.a.rt whir llQ 0 _ IJ' cnn'p" ..nl_ Thau\'Io .• Iilt,- -old1I1th .. <md saAAIII~ Ix"h w h l}1't' of hld£'ousnr,",s tlh",1\ t~·p fl!'guAlOt ~" dlSpl.lVS III hIS nt' -h (h ofdis> [Hlis part \. '0 II'p"", ol '.lII the concpp' of 'ht'salaud. the 'weI- ttllt CCIII"'pl of ..m WT't' Ihng- I - I, P~ orgamcalh mpul{fl nl The "" promlpd b\ Thau\'In b • - ('xtf'ndf.'d u. c' of 'I n n h('n~ tn ordf.'r to 'l~mf\ bo. ... ,"", u~lin£'~s is wholh, th N-"pulsi\'f! qu.tlih· of m

th Plane as its co-ordinates .therefore not on e same . it curves in three dimensions: it is a true hyperbola [ ...]

The mathematical engagement of these forms shows every sign of exact calculation, as though Ih(' scene were being viewed with scientific. but nut with creaturely, interest. Geometric space ropla.cf's creatural space, the space around the body that IS known by touch and is created by familiar movements of the hands and arms. Cotan's play with geometric and volumetric ideas replaces this cocoon-like space, defined by habitual gestures. with an abstracted and homogeneous space which has broken with the matrix of the body. This is t ho point: to suppress the body as a source of space. That bodily or tactile space is profoundly u nvisu.il: the things we find there are things we reach for _ d knife, a plate, a bit of food - instinctively and almost without looking. It is this space, the trur- home of blurred and hazy vision, that Colan's rigours aim to abcljsh. And the tendency to geometrise fulfils another aim, no less severe: to disavow the painter's work as the Source of tho composition and to re-assign responsibility for its forms elsewhere - to mathematics, nol creativitv. In much of still life, the painter first arrays thl! objects into a satisfactory configuration. and Ih£'11 uses that arrangement as the basis for the composition. But to organise the world pictoriallv in this fashion is to impose upon it an order lhal is infinitely inferior to the order already revealed to the soul through the contemplation of geometric form: Cotan's renunciation of composition is a h~th~r, p.rivate act of self-negation. He approaches pamtlng m terms of a discipline, or ritual- .11 .th .• W8\S e same cantarero, which Ooe must aSSume has

been painted in fjrst, as a blank template: alwavs the sarone recurring elements, the light raking al- forty-five degrees, the same alternation of bright greens and yellows against the grey ground, lhe same scale, the same size of frame 'I' I h . oateranvuft ese would be to allow too much [ .

rOom orpersonal self-assertion and lhe 'd f d' ' pn eo creativity.own to Its last details the pain'l' b . . ng must cpresented as the result of d' . a picture of tbe work of G ISCOvery, not Invention, the hand of man (in Cota odthal comple'ely effacps be like blasphemy). n VISible brushwork would

Source: Bryson. 1990. pp. 65-70.

dead flesh [the public calls Thauvin 10borboque, r 'stinking meat'}, so that the passionate condemnation of the crowd no longer stems from Its judgement, but instead from the very depth of its

_ humours. It will thereafter let itself be frenetically embroiled in an idea of Thauvin which will conform entirely with this physical origin: his actions will perfectly correspond to the essential viscosity of his personage.

It is therefore in the body of the wrestler that we find the first key to the contest. I know from the start that all of Thauvin's actions, his treacheries, cruelties and acts of cowardice, will not fail to measure up to the first image of ignobility he gave me: I can trust him to carry out intelligently and to the last detail all the gestures of a kind of amorphous baseness, and thus fill to the brim the image of the most repugnant bastard there is: the bastard-octopus. Wrest.lers therefore have a physique as peremptory as those of the characters of the Commedia dellAne, who display in advance. in their costumes and attitudes, the future contents of their parts: just as Pantaloon can never be anything but a ridiculous cuckold, Harlequin an astute servant and the Doctor a stupid pedant, in the same way Thauvin will never be anything but an ignoble traitor. Rainieres (a tall blond fellow with a limp body and unkempt hair) the moving image of passivity, Mazaud (short and arrogant like a cock) that of grotesque conceit, and Orsano (an effeminate teddy-boy first seen in a blue-and-pink dressing-gown) that, doubly humorous, of a vindictive sa/ope, or bitch (for I do not think that the public of the Elysee-Montmartre, like Littre, believes the word sa/ope to be a masculine).

The physique of the wrestlers therefore constitutes a basic sign, which like a seed contains the whole fight. But this seed proliferates, for it is at every tum during the fight, in each new situation, that the body of the wrestler casts to the public the magical entertainment of a temperament which finds its natural expression in a gesture. The different strata of meaning throw light on each other. and form the most intelligible of spectacles. Wrestling is like a diacritic writing: above the fundamental meaning of his body, the wrestler arranges comments which are episodic but always opportune, and constantly help the reading of the fight by means of gestures, attitudes and mimicry which make the intention utterly obvious.

READINGS FOR CHAPTER ONE 67

Sometimes the wrestler triumphs with a repulsive sneer while kneeling on the good sportsman; sometimes he gives the crowd a conceited smile which forebodes an early revenge; sometimes, pinned to the ground, he hits the floor ostentatiously to make evident to all the intolerable nature of his situation; and sometimes he erects a complicated set of signs meant to make the public understand that he legitimately personifies the ever-entertaining image of the grumbler, endlessly confabulating about his displeasure.

We are therefore dealing with a real Human Comedy, where the most socially-inspired nuances of passion (conceit, rightfulness, refined cruelty, a sense of 'paying one's debts') always felicitously find the clearest sign which can receive them, express them and triumphantly carry them to the confines of the hall. It is obvious that at such a pitch, it DO longer matters whether the passion is genuine or not. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private. This emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its exterior signs, this exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle of triumphant classical art. [...]

Source: Barthes, 1972" pp. 16-1B.

REPRESENTATION: CUL TUf!.AL REPRfSEN rA r lor J<:' 1\( H) If r Ilf f r ,

sornlologrst no longer noods to quosuons about the composition or the nhjor.t. hr- no longer h to t eointolCtDlUlt deunls of lh,.lml\UI lie bema;h .. iUlII!T to k.nnw ils total term. or global 19u.and inasruur.h tiS this rerm I n ilseUlomyth. win till' Sftrtuol()~_1 t' ntidedtotrelliatbe W,IV wriuug and prctu . wbal ~I!tiin:s IIH'IH IS tllt' r.ICI thulth botb~ IhaI both n-ar.h lh,. thn-vheld of m)1b elIdowol S.II1H'sl~nifY1llK funchon. that thf?) coost: just ,IS l11\IC:h lIS Ihlt other .• 1'lIIjtUil~bj!C

68

READING C: Roland Barthes. 'Myth today'

In myth, we find again the tri-dimensional pattern which Ihave just described: the signifier, the signified and the sign. But myth is a pcculi.ar , system, in that it is constructed from a scrntclogir:al chain which existed before it: it is a secood-ordor semiological system, That which is a sign (namel v the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second, We must here recall that the materials or mythical speech (the language itself. photograph v. painting, posters, rituals. objects. etc.]. hnwovr-r different at the start, are reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they arc caught hv myth. Myth sees in them only the sarnn raw material; their unity is that they all come down to the status of a mere language. Whether it duals with alphabetical or pictorial writing, myth wants to see in them only a sum of signs. a global sign. tho final term of a first semiological chain, And il is precisely this final term which will bocumo the firsl term of the greater system which it builds and of which it is only a part. Everything happens as if myth shifted the formal system of tho first significations sideways, As this lateral shift is ~s~ential for the analysis of myth, I shall ff'pff~Sf'nt It to the following way, it being understood. of course, that the spatialization of the pattern is ht'rf' only a metaphor:

Locgu'ge f f MYTH II

I Signifier 12 Signified 3 Sign

I SIGNIFIER II SIGNIFIED

III SIGN

It can be seen that in myth th ' ~ ere arc two

semIOlogical systems one of h i , relation to the oth .' I' . ~ ich IS slaggf'rpd in I er: a mgutsu- SYstem the anguage (or the modes of r '.' assimilated to it) whi h I ehPresentatlOn which <Iff'

, 1C S all [I th Iobject, because it is th I ca e anglla~w_ e anguaoe wh' h hhold of in order to bUild 't 0 Ie myt gPls

itself, whieh 1 shall [\ I S OWn system: and I1lvth ea rnetalanou ba second language' h' 0 agp. ('calls(' it IS

, In w Ich one k first. When he ren spca s abollt thp

eets on a l Ime a anguagC'. thf'

E

READING D: Roland Barthes, 'Rhetoric of the Image'

Here we have a Panzani advertisement: some packets of pasta, a tin, a sachet, some tomatoes, onions. peppers, a mushroom, all emerging from a half-open string bag, in yellows and greens on a red background. Let us try to 'skim off' the different messages it contains.

The image immediately yields a first message whose substance is linguistic; its supports are the caption, which is marginal, and the labels, these being inserted into the natural disposition of the scene [... ]. The code from which this message has been taken is none other than that of the French language; the only knowledge required to decipher it is a knowledge of writing and French. In fact, this message can itself be further broken down, for the sign Panzani gives not simply the name of the firm but also. by its assonance, an additional signified. that of 'ttaltantctry'. The linguistic message is thus twofold (at least in this particular image): denotauonal and connotational. Since, however, we have here only a single typical sign, namely that of articulated {written} language, it will be counted as one message.

Putting aside the linguistic message, we are left with the pure image (even if the labels are part of it, anecdotally). This image straightaway provides a series of discontinuous signs. First (the order is unimportant as these signs are not linear), the idea that what we have in the scene represented is a return from the market. A signified which itself implies two euphoric values: that of the freshness of the products and that of the essentially domestic preparation for which they are destined. Its Signifier is the half-open bag which lets the provisions spill out over the table, 'unpacked'. To read this first sign requires only a knowledge which is in some sort implanted as part of the habits of a very widespread culture where 'shopping around for oneself is opposed to the hasty stocking up [preserves, refrigerators) of a more 'mechanical' civilization. A second sign is more or less equally evident: its signifier is the bringing together of the tomato. the pepper and the tricoloured hues [yellow. green. red) of the poster; its signified is Italy or rather Italianicity- This sign stands in a

READINGS FORCHAPTERONE 69

relation of redundancy with the connoted sign of the linguistic message (the Italian assonance of the name Panzani) and the knowledge it draws upon is already more particular; it is a specifically 'French' knowledge (an Italian would barely perceive the connotation of the name, no more probably than he would the Ilalianicity of tomato and pepper), based on a familiarity with certain tourist stereotypes. Continuing to explore the image (which is not to say that it is not entirely clear at the first glance), there is no difficulty in discovering at least two other signs: in the first, the serried collection of different objects transmits the idea of a total culinary service, on the one hand as though Panzani furnished everything necessary for a carefully balanced dish and on the other as though the concentrate in the tin were equivalent to the natural produce surrounding it; in the other sign, the composition of the image, evoking the memory of innumerable alimentary paintings, sends us to an aesthetic signified: the 'nature morte' or, as it is better expressed in other languages, the 'still life'; the knowledge on which this sign depends is heavily cultural. [... J

Source: Barthes, 1977, pp. 33-5.

70 REPRESENTATION: CULTURAL REPRESENTA 1IOt'J') M JI I(",t jII llf I( f-I..... r fS

READING E: Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, 'New reflections on the revolution of our time'

Discourse

[ ... J Let us suppose that J am building a wall with another bricklayer. At a certain moment 1 ask m v workmate to pass me a brick and then I add it to "111(' wall. The first act - asking for the brick - is linguistic; the second - adding the brick to the wall -is extralinguistic, Do Iexhaust the realitv of hoth acts by drawing the distinction between thorn in terms of the linguistic/extralingui~lic opposition? Evidently not, because, despite their differenti.uion in those terms, the two actions share something that allows them to be compared, namely the f,I(:1 that they are both part of a total operation which is the building of the wall. So, then, how could Wf' characte,r~ze ~his totality of which asking for a brick. and ,posItlOlling it are, both, partial moments? ObvIOusl~, if ~i~totality includes both linguistir: a~d nO~l-hngUlsliC elements. it cannot jt~clf hI' elthe.r l1~g~isti~ or extralinguistic; it has to Iw prior to thlS dIstinctIOn, This totality whl'ch' I I'h' . Inc lIC ~s w~ In Itselfth.e linguistic and the non.lingui~t~c, is ":" ~t we :all dIScourse, In a moment we will JustIfy thiS denomination' but who t I

:::r,:~:t~::toi: that by d;'scourse :;~~'tll~~~::::::l" speech and 't~peech and wntlng, but rather thrlt Com wn I~g are themselves but internal

ponents of dIscursive totalities.

Now, turning to the term d' . to emphasize the fact th t lsc~urse I,tselr, Wp liSp it

'0 '. a evelY social Co~fiouratlOn IS meaningful, If I kick as' object in the street or if Ikick . pllf'rJcal match th 1 ' a ball In a football, e p 1yslcal fact is the s b' meaning is different Th b' ~le, lit Its to the extent that it ~st beloh jeCl IS a football onl\" 'th a IS es a svstc f IWI other objects d h . m 0 n' <IlJons

b th ,an t. ese relationsy e mere referent' I .. are nol gi\'ell b la mateflahty f th 'ut are rather so ' II 0 C obwcts, ,Cla y can t d .. systemat.ic set of r I t' .s ructe , This

. e a IOns IS wh 1 dISCourse. The rd' a we callea er wJi I no d b showed in OUr book th d' au t sec that. as WP object does not by' e 1SClIrsive character of an

. ,any means' I eXIstence into question Th ,Imp Y PUlling its only a football as Ion ' , e fact that a football is

gas 1t IS Integrated Within d

svstcrn or soci.rllv con trueted rulesdoesntt that it therobv ccuso 10 bo ph} italob;o.:t stone r-xi st s independently or an}" $\ lemof rr-Lulons. but It is. for instance. eilbl'ra an ohject or aostheuc coni mplation onlJ spocifir: discursive c:onfiguralioo_ A di t hr- market or .il tho bonom or. mine i.s the phvsical ubinrl. but, gain. 'I IS only. within <l dntormmate . I m ohociaJrelaticm th.u same reason rt itO Ih dlJcoutSewhich constltull'S the sub)f po$itionoftbt lind not. th,·rp(on-. Ihl OCI I oJ wlUch tb! (ln~ill or disCOllf'Sf'1 -the m tl'tDofrules IIhlll'''i tll.lt sph11ricdl objt.! t into I footbalL 1111' ,I plol\"l'f Tb« f. i"tf'n of objectS u indepondr-nt or thuir di u"i\'vaniculition

I Ttus. however. h· v two problf'IIU The first I" lhi .. is u not n toe:st.1bIish -r dtvunr.non bt·hn ....n m run andlctJOD? £ Wfl an:"pl tlMt thfl' m dOlO of IdlOD ,I disc:ursl,,"f' (:onfiRuraIIOD. n t lbeldicll "irHlll'lhin~ chrrf'rf'nt Frum tlwl m 'lAta r:on<;,df'r thp problem from two fi rrom lll£' .IURI" of mraning He Iht dlstillctlon I" tHth"'N>n emanlJ -d.~ IlW,lT1l1ll( or words. "\"TlI.td.t - df1'llin8witblld ornPf clnd Its r.onsrqurn rorDlfiIllll8·~ pr,IKn1.ltin. - df',l1mR \'Idlh the ~1I~'1 wurdLS dt:flltllh- u"ircl In r.prtam peech con nb Tbt point is to whitt (' l('nl ill nKld paratiOllCIDIt r·st.lhll ..hrcl lwtwf'f'n f'm nh d ~ th,H is. lwtwf'f>n nm,lnm iWd from \\'ittl'wnslf'1Tl on\\'drd It I p h tIu.i which h<ls ~mwn f'\'I'r roo blurred. It . lIlc-n'olslll~I\' \ICTf'pll'd Ih t the meaWn80h-- t'ntlrrol\ nmh''\t.df'J>f'nd~nl. t{.I.DIWfen:d1d Pltlin points nut

\Vitl~f'n_"'lf'in dfRUf" lIltim.ltf'lv inr'\tri bh- h,'lps to dt'h'rmlnt- m from. omd Sh.lpt'd m. I Il"lrnin~ .lnd its rnnfi pri-l~m.1tIr.:o;, • "manll ["ompollndt-.d out of lIldudinJot ,111thr m n\ gamt'" lhOlt ol", pl.n much tho pmdUl'l ofp1'lllllD"'ue

11'1:

[... ] That is to say, in OUI terminology, every identity or discursive object is constituted in the context of an action. [... ]

The other problem to be considered is the following: even if we assume that there is a strict equation between the social and the discursive. what can we say about the natural world, about the facts of physics, biology or astronomy that are not apparently integrated in meaningful totalities constructed by men? The answer is that natural facts are also discursive facts. And they are so for the simple reason that the idea of nature is not something that is already there, to be read from the appearances of things, but is itself the result of a slow and complex historical and social construction. To call something a natural object is a way of conceiving it that depends upon a classificatory system. Again, this does not put into question the fact that this entity which we call a stone exists, in the sense of being present here and now. independently of my will; nevertheless the fact of its being a stone depends on a way of classifying objects that is historical and contingent. If there were no human beings on earth, those objects that we call stones would be there nonetheless; but they would not be 'stones', because there would be neither mineralogy nor a language capable of classifying them and distinguishing them from other objects. We need not stop for long on this point. The entire development of contemporary epistemolo~ has established that there is no fact that allows Its meaning to be read transparently.

Reference Pitkin, H.F. (1972) Witlgenstein and Justice, Berkeley, CA, University of Californa Press.

Source: Laclau and Mouffe, 1990, pp.l00-l03.

READINGS FORCHAPTERONE 71

READING F: Elaine Showalter, 'The performance of hysteria'

The first of the great European theorists of hysteria was Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893). who carried out his work in the Paris clinic at the Salpstriere. Charcot had begun his work on hysteria in 1870. While he believed that hysterics suffered from a hereditary taint that weakened their nervous system, he also developed a theory that hysteria had psychological origins. Experimenting with hypnosis, Charcot demonstrated that hysterical symptoms such as paralysis could be produced and relieved by hypnotic suggestion. Through careful observation, physical examination, and the use of hypnosis, Charcot was able to prove that hysterical symptoms, while produced by emotions rather than by physical injury, were genuine, and not under the conscious control of the patient. Freud, who studied at the Salpetnere from October 1885 to February 1886, gave Charcot the credit for establishing the legitimacy of hysteria as a disorder. According to Freud, 'Charcot's work restored dignity to the subject; gradually the sneering attitude which the hysteric could reckon meeting with when she told her story, was given up; she was no longer a malingerer, since Charcot had thrown the whole weight of his authority on the side of the reality and objectivity of hysterical phenomena.' Furthermore, Charcot demonstrated that hysterical symptoms also occurred in men, and were not simply related to the vagaries of the female reproductive system. At the Salpetriere there was even a special wing for male hysterics, who were frequently the victims of trauma from railway accidents. In restoring the credibility of the hysteric, Freud believed, Charcot had joined other psychiatric saviors of women and had 'repeated on a small scale the act of liberation commemorated in the picture of Pinel which adorned the lecture hall of the Salpetriere' (Freud, 1948, p. 18).

Yet for Charcot, too, hysteria remained symbolically, if not medically, a female malady. By far the majority of his hysterical patients were women, and several, such as Blanche Wittmann, known as the 'Queen of the Hysterics,' became celebrities who were regularly featured in his books, the main attractions at the Salpetnere's Bal des Foiles, and bypnotized and exhibited at his

72 REPRESENTATION: CULTURAL RCPRESENl A r tor JS M H c : jl r .' >U •

Albert Londo. h,rd beon breught m In iI ful l-Fledgud phutogrdpbic ",ce. 1~1lldillll iru.l udud nut onlv rhe m t adunced ..md ilppclr<lllls. ,,1I{ h d laboraton ,I tudio platforrns. iI Iwd, sen-,-n • bl _ddrl-gray hght-gr.rv helt lJ;twund CUTh1ins. b I iron support for foe-hle pdhen .bo'also adminstrutivo n-r hniquf of 0 n: bon of modr-Is .• lOtI n1uu'd·" pang The WOIIWIl WI'W pubhsh,"d in three \olUJDtS /collo!:n1I'III.- l'!wlngroph''1ue d 10 SiJIp#tnil! Thus Ch.ircot: .. hO~rHI~1 mel.OlD~ lWhi(:h f,",lll.tll' hyslf>nd \\ perpecu.illy n·prl' ....n! ..d and n-produ ed

popular public lectures. Axel Mu nthe. a doctor practicing in Paris, wrote a vivid description of Charcot's Tuesday lectures at the Salpetricrc: 'TIl(' huge amphitheatre was filled to the last place wit.h a multicoloured audience drawn from tout Paris. authors, journalists, leading actors and actresses. fashionable demimondaines.' The hypnotized women patients put on a spectacular show before this crowd of curiosity seekers.

Some of them smelt with delight a boule of ammonia when told it was rose water. others would eat a piece of charcoal when presented 10 them as chocolate. Another would crawl 011 all fours on the floor, barking furiously when told she was a dog, flap her arms as if trying to fl v when turned into a pigeon, lift her skirts wiih;j shriek of terror when a glove was thrown at her feet with a suggestion of being a snake. Annt hr-r would walk with a top hal in her arms rocking it to an.d fro and kissing it tenderly when she "vas told It was her baby.

(Munthe, 1930, pp, zss. 302-;1)

The grand finale would b thh I

' I . e e performance of II hall ys enca seizure.

Furthermore, the representation of fcmaln hvsteri.. was a central aspect of Charcot's work H' r: , hysterical women ti . IS i pa tents were surrounded bv mages of female hysteria. In the lecturn hall Freud noted, was Robert-rlcur' " ( . as freeing th d Y S palI1llI1g of Pi nel

e rna women. On the ' famous lithooraph f eh opposite wall was <1 lectul'ing ab 0 t 0 ~rcot. holding and

au a SWoomng d h I young woman bef ' an a f~undrnssl'd

olearoom of sob Imen, yet another' . or ane allpntivp . IepresentatlOn th t ' mstructino the h t ' I a sC!emNI 10 hf'

b ys enca worn . h[Figure 1.8}. an In er acl

Finally, Charcol's use of ph I extensive in ninete lh a ography was thp most

en -century h'practice. As one f h' psyc Iatrico IS admicamera . rers remarked '1'1was as crucIal to th ' lP. microscope was to histolo e ,stUdy of hysteria dS lhfl 1982, p, 215). In 1875 gy (quoled in Colds!e'n, R' d One of hIS as . tegnar , had assembl d SIS ants, Pall I of female nervous t.

e an albllm of photographs

h'b' , pa lenIs, The ' 'ex 1 lUng various h pIctures of wonwn d d P ases ofhysl ' Ieeme so interesting th t Cflca attacks Wprf' workshop or ate I' a a photographic h ter was inst II d ' ospital. By the 1880 a e Within Ihe

s a professional phol ographC'f n....t .HI",~ lhf1 behcJ\ 1 r \\,ls '0 thf1.Unt ell

FIGURE 1.10 Two portraits of Augustine: (top) Amorous supplication. (bottom) Ecstasy.

READINGS FORCHAPTERONE 73

observed outside of the Parisian clinical setting, many of his contemporaries, as well as subsequent medical historians, have suspected that the women's performances were the result of suggestion, imitation, or even fraud. In Charcot's own lifetime, one of his assistants admitted that some of the women had been coached in order to produce attacks that would please the maitre (discussed in Drinker, 1984, pp. 144-8). Furthermore, there was a dramatic increase in the incidence of hysteria during Charcot's tenure at the Salpetnere. From only 1 percent in 1845, it rose to 17.3 percent of all diagnoses in 1883, at the height of his experimentation with hysterical patients (see Goldstein, 1982, pp. 209-10).

When challenged about the legitimacy of hystero- epilepsy, however, Charcot vigorously defended the objectivity of his vision. 'It seems that hystero- epilepsy only exists in France,' he declared in a lecture of 1887, 'and r could even say, as it has sometimes been said, that it only exists at the Salpetriere. as if I had created it by the force of my will. It would be truly marvellous if I were thus able to create illnesses at the pleasure of my whim and my caprice. But as for the truth. I am absolutely only the photographer; I register what I see' (quoted in Didi-Huberman, 1982, p. 32). Like Hugh Diamond at the Surrey Asylum, Charcot and his followers had absolute faith in the scientific neutrality of the photographic image; Londe boasted: 'La plaque photographique est la vraie retine du savant' ('The photographic plate is the true retina of the scientist') [ibid., p. 35).

But Charcot's photographs were even more elaborately framed and staged than Diamond's Victorian asylum pictures. Women were not simply photographed once, but again and again, so that they became used to the camera and to the special status they received as photogenic subjects. Some made a sort of career out of modeling for the iconographies. Among the most frequently photographed was a fifteen-year-old girl named Augustine, who had entered the hospital in 1875. Her hysterical attacks had begun at the age of thirteen when, according to her testimony, she had been raped by her employer, a man who was also her mother's lover. Intelligent, coquettish, and eager to please, Augustine was an apt pupil of the atelier. All of her poses suggest the exaggerated gestures of the French classical acting style. or stilts

74 REPRESENTATION: CULTURAL REPRES~Nl ArlOI' J(" /l.r ll) 11.·)1 orr I IS

from silent movies. Some photographs of Augustine with flowing locks and while hospital gown also seem to imitate poses in nineteenth-century paintings, as Stephen Heath points out: 'a young girl composed on her bed, something of the Pre- Raphaelite Millais's painting Ophelia' (Heal h. 1982. pp.36-7). Among her gifts was her ability to tim!' and divide her hysterical performances into scenns. acts, tableaux, and intermissions. to perform on ClI!' and on schedule with the click of the camera.

But Augustine's cheerful willingness to assume whatever poses her audience desiredtook its loll on her psyche. During the period when she was being repeatedly photographed, she dnvclopod u curious hysterical symptom: she began to SIH' everything in black and white. In 1880, she' began to rebel against the hospital regime: she had periods of violence in which she lore her clothes and broke windows, During these angry outbreaks she was anaesthetized with ether or chloroform, In June of that year, the doctors gave up their efforts with her case, and she was put in a locked c(!11. BUI Augustine was able to use in her Own behalf ttl!' histrionic abilities that for a ti me had made hor a star of the asylum. Disguising hersol f as a man. shr' managed to escape from the Salpetricre. Nothing further was ever discovered about her whernahout s

References

!lilli-III IIt.H\I.\ •(•. ( 1«)82) In\'PntJon de J'H..,.,st Churcot ('1 l' Icooographic Photogropluqued,f. Solp{'tncrc'. Pans. I cui

D""' ....., (1984) The B,rth ofl'''.urosu'lllj! mntudv end the l',ctot'ian _ I W York.SimoD Schuster

'.'.1 D. ,. ( 1948)'Cho1rcol' to 100 . E.led.! CdJo::< POI''''''' \ '01 I. london" Harth"""'.

"""""".1. (t982)"Th hy.lrn diagJlOS" t> pohtics of <mlldl'ricali m in late nine! tho cunf urv Fr,lIIn.',/oumo!ojMoot'mHJsItX'J,

"""'.' (19HZ) Tbr ',1101 Fto i.nodod \11 "1If. \. [19.10) "(h" lon·ofSon.1fi(htlt. John turruv

Source: howaller, 198;.pp If'