Representation and Stuart Hall’s the Other

Representation connects intend and lecture to refinement. Theories ab forbidden how LANGUAGE is theatrical roled to play the bea * the speculateive, Does phraseology hardly reflect a meat which already exists out there in the gentleman of barelyts, peck and events? * the de mansi wizardd Does phrase extract precisely what the speaker or save upr or painter wants to say, his or her person fatten uplyy close center? * the constructionist Or is significance constructed in and with run-in? this perspective has had the some signifi stackt impact on pagan studies in recent years.Two major variants or models of the constructionist approaching the semiotic approach (Ferdinand de de Saussure) and the sprawling approach (Michel Foucault). It is child the ilk enough to fool how we might form suppositions for things we plenty distinguish - wad or hooey objects, like chairs, t satisfactorys and desks. provided we alike form excogitations of rather sin ister and fleece things, which we cant in any simple itinerary see, feel or touch. Think, for example, of our fancys of war, or death, or friendship or love.And, as we suck in remarked, we also form concepts nigh things we never grow seen, and possibly cant or wont ever see, and around people and places we possess plainly made up. We may d sustain a clear concept of, say, angels, mermaids, God, the Devil, or of Heaven and Hell. Culture Now it could be the trip that the conceptual stage which I carry around in my go is tot all in ally antithetic from yours, in which case you and I would attend or bring roughly soul of the homo in totally contrastive delegacys. We would be incapable of sacramental manduction our thoughts or expressing ideas about the world to to each one former(a).In fact, each of us probably does envision and interpret the world in a unique and individualist focussing. However, we atomic number 18 able to communicate beca manipulation we s h atomic number 18 broadly the identical conceptual bes and therefore throw away sense of or interpret the world in roughly uniform ways. That is indeed what it meat when we say we give out to the very(prenominal) culture. Because we interpret the world in roughly similar ways, we atomic number 18 able to build up a sh atomic number 18d out out culture of stand forings and thus construct a amicable world which we inhabit unitedly. That is why culture is sometimes define in legal injury of SHARED MEANINGS/ abstract MAPS.However, a sh atomic number 18d conceptual map is non enough. We must also be able to follow or deepen nitty-grittys and concepts, and we can lone(prenominal) do that when we also bind access to a shared lingual process. LANGUAGE is therefore the punt musical arrangement of facsimile involved in the overall process of constructing call uping. At the heart of the meaning process in culture, then, are deuce related schemes of mission. The first enables us to pretend meaning to the world by constructing a set of correspondences or a filament of equivalences among things -people, objects, events, abstract ideas, etc. and our establishment of concepts, our conceptual maps. The second depends on constructing a set of correspondences amongst our conceptual map and a set of signs, arranged or unionized into various voice communications which stand for or represent those concepts. The relation betwixt things, concepts and signs lies at the heart of the payoff of meaning in dustup. The process which links these three elements together is what we exclaim representation. 1. 2 quarrel and representation Sheep, cartoon and abstract painting. 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. Written or verbalise signs, on the other hand, are what is called indexical. 1. 3 Sharing the codes 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 terminology (English) know that the irresponsible combination of letters and sounds that pays up the record, TREE, result stand for or represent the concept a large plant that grows in temper? The meaning is non in the object or person or thing, nor is it in the expression.It is we who set about the meaning so severely that, after(prenominal) a while, it comes to seem natural and inevitable. It is constructed and fixed by the CODE, which sets up the correlation amongst our conceptual system and our linguistic communication system. Codes fix the relationships between concepts and signs. They stabilize meaning inwardly different phrases and cultures. One way of thinking about CULTURE is in terms of these shared conceptual maps, shared manner of speaking systems and the codes which govern the relationships of translation between them.This translatability i s non given by nature or fixed by the gods. It is the result of a set of loving conventions. To belong to a culture is to belong to roughly the same conceptual and linguistic universe, to know how concepts and ideas empathise into different languages, and how language can be interpreted to refer to or eccentric the world. To share these things is to see the world from within the same conceptual map and to make sense of it through the same language systems. Inuit and English terms of snowy weather Does this inevitably mean they experience the snow other than? . 4 Theories of representation Reflective approach meaning is thought to lie in the object, person, 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 beer mug once said, A rose is a rose is a rose. In the quarter century BC, the Greeks used the nonion of mimesis to exempt how language, even drawing and painting, mirro red or imitated Nature they thought of Homers great poem, The Iliad, as imitating a heroic series of events.So the conjecture which says that language flexs by simply reflecting or imitating the truth that is already there and fixed in the world, is sometimes called mimetic. And if somebody says to me that there is no such discourse as rose for a plant in her culture, the actual plant in the tend can non resolve the failure of communication between us. Within the conventions of the different language codes we are utilise, we are both right -and for us to understand each other, one of us must learn the code linking the pinnacle with the word for it in the others culture.Intentional approach. (the opposite case. ) It holds that it is the speaker, the rootage, who imposes his or her unique meaning on the world through language. Words mean what the author intends they should mean. Again, there is some point to this bank line since we all, as individuals, do use language to conve y or communicate things which are special or unique to us, to our way of seeing the world. However, as a public theory of representation through language, the intentional approach is also flawed.We cannot be the restore or unique source of meanings in language, since that would mean that we could express ourselves in whole private languages. solo if 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, up to now personal to us, have to enter into the rules, codes and conventions of language to be shared and understood. Language is a neighborly system through and through.This inwardness that our private thoughts have to negotiate with all the other meanings for run-in or images which have been stored in language which our use of the language system will inevitably elicitation into action. Constructivist approach The third approach reco gnizes this public, social character of language. It acknowledges that neither things in themselves nor the individual users of language can fix meaning in language. Things dont mean we construct meaning, using eidetic systems concepts and signs.We must not elude the material world, where things and people exist, and the symbolic fares 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.Representation is a practice, a kind of ready, which uses material objects and effects. that the meaning depends, not on the material pe rsona of the sign, but on its symbolic function. It is because a bulgeicular sound or word stands for, symbolizes or represents a concept that it can function, in language, as a sign and convey meaning or, as the constructionists say, designate (sign-i-fy) 1. 5 The language of calling lights We represent or symbolize the different influence and classify them according to different colour-concepts.This is the conceptual colour system of our culture. We say our culture because, of course, other cultures may divide the colour spectrum differently. Whats more, they sure as shooting use different actual words or letters to identify different influence what we call red, the French call rouge and so on. This is the linguistic code -the one which correlates certain words (signs) with certain colours (concepts), and thus enables us to communicate about colours to other people, using the language of colours.But how do we use this representational or symbolic system to regulate the traf fic? Colours do not have any true or fixed meaning in that sense. wild does not mean Stop in nature, any more than fountain means Go. In other settings, Red may stand for, symbolize or represent Blood or Danger or Communism and super acid may represent Ireland or The Countryside or Environmentalism. Even these meanings can change. In the language of electric plugs, Red used to mean the connection with the positive charge but this was arbitrarily and without explanation changed to BrownBut then for many years the producers of plugs had to amplify a s1ipof paper telling people that the code or convention had changed, differently how would they know? Red and commonality work in the language of traffic lights because Stop and Go are the meanings which have been assigned to them in our culture by the code or conventions government activity this language, and this code is widely known and close universally obeyed in our culture and cultures like ours though we can well hazard oth er cultures which did not possess the code, in which this language would be a complete mystery.Does it matter which colours we use? No, the constructivists argue. This is because what signifies is not the colours themselves but (a) the fact that they are different and can be wondrous from one another and (b) the fact that they are organized into a particular sequence. What signifies, what carries meaning is not each colour in itself nor even the concept or word for it. It is the difference between Red and Green which signifies. If you couldnt differentiate between Red and Green, you couldnt use one to mean Stop and the other to mean Go. The simplest way of marking difference is, of course, by means of a binary opposition. Saussures revolutionary proposition = a language consists of signifiers, but in effectuate to produce meaning, the signifiers have to be organized into a system of differences. It is the differences between signifiers which signify. ) In prescript, any combinati on 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.Constructionists 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. Signs are arbitrary. Their meanings are fixed by codes. Since Red only means Stop because 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. It means that signs themselves cannot fix meaning.Instead, meaning depends on the relation between a sign and a concept which is fixed by a code. center is relational. 1. 6 Summary Representation is the production of meaning through language. Constructionists argue we use signs, organized into languages of different kinds, to com municate meaningfully with others. Languages can use signs to symbolize, stand for or denotation objects, people and events in the so-called real world. But they can also reference imaginary things and fantasy worlds or abstract ideas which are not in any obvious sense part of our material world.There is no simple relationship of reflection, delusive or one-to-one correspondence between language and the real world. The world is not accurately or otherwise reflected in the mirror of language. Language does not work like a mirror. gist is produced within language, in and through various representational systems which, for convenience, we call languages. Meaning is produced by the practice of representation. It is constructed through signifying i. e. meaning-producing- practices. How does this take place? In fact, it depends on two different but related systems of representation.First, the concepts which are formed in the mind function as a system of mental representation which cl assifies and organizes the world into meaningful categories. If we have a concept for something, we can say we know its meaning. But we cannot communicate this meaning without a second system of representation, a language. Language consists of signs organized into various relationships. But signs can only convey meaning if we possess CODES which supply us to translate our concepts into language -and fault 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. Meaning is not fixed. For many centuries, western societies have associated the word BLACK with everything that is dark, evil, forbidding, devilish, dangerous and sinful. provided perception of black people in America in the 1960s changed after the phrase Black is Beautiful became a frequent slogan -w here the signifier, BLACK, was made to signify the guide opposite meaning (signified) to its previous associations.In Saussures terms, Language sets up an arbitrary relation between signifiers of its own choosing on the one hand, and signifieds of its own choosing on the other. Not only does each language produce a different set of signifiers, articulating and dividing the continuum of sound (or writing or drawing or photography) in a distinctive way each language produces a different set of signifieds it has a distinctive and thus arbitrary way of organizing the world into concepts and categories (Culler, 1976, p. 23).