《REPRESENTATION: CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICES》书摘

Stuart Holl

introduction

To put it simply, culture is about “shared meanings”. Now, language is the privileged médium 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.

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 productioe and circulation of meaning through language’ in different ways…

Our partners must speak enough of the same language to be able to ’translate’ what ‘you’ say into what I understand, and vice versa.

languages work through representation, … These elements - sounds, words, notes, gestures, expressions, clothes - are part of our natural and material world; but their importanee 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 meamngs we wish to commuunicate. … Language, in this sense, is a signifying practice.

One important difference is that the semiotic approach is concerned with the how of representation, with how language produces meaning - what has been called its ‘poetics’; whereas the discursive approach is more concerned with the effects and consequece of representation - its “politics”.

chapter 1

1 Representation, meaning and language

Representation is the production of meaning through language.

At the heart of the meaning process in culture, then, are two related ‘systems of representatton’, The first enables us to give meaning to the world by constructing a set of correspondences or a chain of equivalence between things — people, objects, events, abstract ideas, etc. - and our system of concepts, our conceptual maps. The second 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.

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. … They bear no obvious relationship at all to the things to which they refer.

One way of thinking about ‘culture’, then, is in in terms of these shared conceptual maps, shared language systems and the codes which govern the relationships of translation between them.

But how far is our experience actually bounded by our linguistic and conceptual universe?

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.

2 Saussures’s legacy

Saussure analysed the sign into two further elements. There was, he argued, the form (the actual word, imnage, photo, etc.), and thers was the idea or concept in your head wtth 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.

3 From language to culture: linguistics to semiotics

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, where consensus is wide and most people would agree on the meaning (‘dress’, ‘jeans’). At the second level - connotation ~ these sigmfiers which we have been able to ‘decode’ at a simple level by using our conventional conceptual classifications of dress to read their meaning, enter a wider, second kind of code - ’the language of fashion’ - which connects them to broader themes and meanings, linking them with what, we may call the wider semantic fields of our culture: ideas of ’elegance’, ‘formality’, ‘casualness’ and ‘romance’. This second, wider meaning is no longer a descriptive level of obvious interpretation. Here we are beginning to interpret the completed signs in terms of the wider realms of 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].

4 Discourse, power and subject

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.

By “discourse”, Foucault meant ‘a group of statements which provide a language for talking about - a way of representing the knowledge about — a particular topic at a particular historical moment,… Discourse is about the production of knowledge through language. But… since all social practices entail meaning, and meanings shape and influence what we do — our conduct — all practices have a discursive aspect’.

Foucauit argued that not only is knowledge always a form of power, but power is kaplicated in the questtons of whether and in what circumstances knowledge is to be applied or not

For Foucault, however, power does not ‘function in the form of a chain’ - it circulates. It is never monopolized by one centre. It ‘is deployed and exereised through a net-like organizalion’.