REPRESENTATION28 RIPRI SENTATION, CUI TURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SICNIEYING FRAC ICES: When the yellow light is showing, Now add an instruction allowing pedestrians and cyclists only to cross, using Pink. Provided the code tells us clearly how to read or interpret each colour, and overyone agrees to interpret them in this way, any colour will do. These are just colours, just as the word SHEEP is just a jumble of letters, In French the same animal is referred to using the very different linguistic sign MOUTON. Signs are arbitrary. Their meanings are fixed by codes. As we said earlier, traffic lights are machines, and colours are the material effect of light-waves on the retina of the eye. But objects ~ things ~ can also function as signs, provided they have boen assigned a concept and meaning within our cultural and linguistic codes, As signs, they work symbolically — they represent concepts, and signify. Their effects, however, are felt in the material and social world, Red and Greon function in the language of traffic: Jights as signs, but they have real material and social effects. They regulate the social behaviour of drivers and, without them, there would be many more traffic accidents at road intersections. ‘We have some a long way in exploring the nature of representation. It is time to summanze what we have learned about the constructionist approach to representation through language. Representation is the production of meaning through language. In representation, constructionists argue, we use signs, organized into languages of different kinds, to communicate meaningfully with others. Languages can use signs to symbolize, stand for or reference objects, people and events in the so-called ‘real’ world. But they can also reference imaginary things and fantasy worlds or abstract icteas which are not in any obvious sense part of our material world. There is ao simple relationship of reflection, imitation 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 oes not work like a mirror, Meaning is produced within language, in and through various representational systems which. for convenience, we call ‘languages’ Meaning is produced by the practice, the ‘work’, of representation. It is constructed through signifying ~ i.e. meaning-producing ~ practices How does this take plac? 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 classifies and organizes the world into meaningful catugories. If we have a concept for something, wo can say we know its ‘meaning’ Bat we cannot commanicate this meaning without a second system of representation, a language. Language consists of signs organized into various relationships. But signs can only convey meaningHAL WORK —RIPEESENIAHON —6F in the place of the Sovereign! You can imagine what fun Foucault had with this substitution, Foucault argues that it is clear from the way the discourse of reprosentation works in the pajnting 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-viow from which a camora would have to be positioned in order to film the scene. And, lo and behold. the person whom ‘Velasquez chooses to ‘represent’ sitting 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, simultanvously, 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 siguifying system) to produce meaning. Already, this definition carries the important premise thal things ~ objects, people, events, in the world ~ do not have in themsolves any fixed. final or true meaning. i 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 cniture will have an equivalent meaning in another, precisely because cultures differ, sometumes 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, theo 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.94 REPRESENT ATION: CULTURAL REPRESENT ONS AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICES fraternal, consensus on the role of the state. but absence of a more precise vision of the society to be reconstructed. The social futuro defined itself negatively, against the overcautious bourgeoisie of the Third Republic, against the ruralist society of Pétain. {is, from Borne, 1992, p. 22) A consensus founded more on a sontimental than an ideological terrain, a ‘goneral humanism, the desire for a society more just and fraternal, consensus on the role of the state, but absence of a more precise vision of the society to be reconstructed’: such could be the general definition of what constitutes the social vision uf the photographers whose work we consider here. Their humanism is most evident in the ‘universal’ character of many of their themes: family, community, comradeship, love, childhood, popular pleasures. However, the foregrounding of the classe onvriére in the post-war consensus meant that the humanist photographers tended to focus their cameras un this group of rather included workers within a slightly less clear-cut social order, the classe populaire, which encompassed social categories normally placed outside the classe ouvriare, such as small shopkeepers and self-employed artis ‘The torm class populaire requires a little explanation, as when literally translated into English as ‘popular class’ it completely loses the meaning it has within a French context, Dictionaries often simply translate it as ‘working class’ which is too limiting. for in Freach the term evokes the idea of the popular masses, whe aight inchicle a wide range of economic or occupational groups in addition to manual workers ~ office workers, teachers, nurses. retired people, even agricultural workers and peasant smallholder. etc. The term has political connotations, too, for there is constantly presont the idea that the classe popauire is a potentially revolutionary social grouping. We might in English describe the sorts of people it includes as ‘the common people’ but this is both vaguer and less indicative of the values or culture of the classe populaire, which for French society of the mid-twentieth century was a term quite clearly redolent of a whole range of associations: a revolutionary history (whose most recent outburst bad been the Popular Front in 1936 and the Liberation of Paris in 1944); and particular forms of leisure anil entertainment which revolved around the bistrot or guinguette, the bal tusette, music hall and the lyrical ballads of an Edith Piaf or Maurice Chevalier ‘The emphasis on universal humanity, in this context, means the representation of major issues and concerns through their impact on specific, individuals who are shown as the agents of their own destinies. {is a reaction agaist those totalitarian ideologies and impersonal economic forces which tend to treat people as 4 monolithic and de-individualized mass. Although this approach is most characteristically and dynamically displayed in the magazines and books of the period 1945~60, its roots are clearly visible in the now wave of reportage photography for the mass-market illustrated magazines which had appeared earlier, in the 1930s. This was the period inCHAPIIR 2 FRANC ANID FRENCHNISS IN POST WAKIIUMANIS! PHOFOGRARHY 127 The idea that the photographs of Ronis and other humanists are concerned with a ‘poetic realism’ is aptly expressed by Mac Orlan, But it is also closely connected to the existing demand within the publishing trade for books about Paris and its sights. There was a strong market in France for album books ~ well-zoproduced collections of photographs on a given theme, supplomented with a text usually presented in the forin of a preface weitten by a prominent author. In the late 19405 and early 1950s, several of Ronis’s confrores had produced such works: Robert Doisaeau with Blaise Cendrars in La Banlieue de Paris (1949) and Instantanés de Paris (1955); Henri Cartier-Bresson with ‘Vériade in Images a la Sauvette (1952): Izis with Jean Cocteau in Paris des Reves (1980); Izis with Jacques Prévert in Grand Bal du Printemps (1951) and Charmes de Londres (1952); and Izis with Colette in Paradis Tercestre (1953). There were also several compilations FIGURE 2.15 where many of the humanists were represented, such as Francois Cali's Wily Ronis, Place Sortileges de Paris (1952). All of these publications encapsulated one or other Vendime, 1947 aspect of the poetic realism of humanist photography. Interestingly, they could contain more oblique references to Parisian monuments. as in Willy Ronis's Place Vendénw, 1947 (see Figuze 215) and Robert Doisneau’s Place de la Bastille, 1947 (see Figure 2.16) ‘The symbolic: role of Paris as the representation of a new France in which past and present intermingle thus combined with a demand for touristic images consumed as much if not more in France than abroad (many of the photographic albwuns of Paris published in this era with images by the humanists have only French toxts)160 REPRESENTATION: CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNIFYING PRACIICES display objects, artefacts or works of arts of various kinds’, we find that the Musacum Tradescantianum fits this description as easily asa contemporary museum might, Yet the manner and spirit in which the Musaeum Tradescantianum undertook those activities was clearly quite different. ‘This is particularly evident in its mode of classification, The way in which the Musaeum Tradescantianum acquired, safeguarded, conserved, and displayed was in accordance with a distinat world-view which saw sense in what might be termed a hodge-podge of marvellous objects, a logical vision which had abandoned theological principles of classification, but had yet to adopt scientific ones (Pomian, 1996, p. 64). So, unexpectedly perhaps, we find that uur preliminary definition still holds; but, more importantly, we have established that a museum does not deal solely with objects but. more importantly, with what we could call, for the moment, ideas — notions of what the world is, o should be. Museums do not simply issue objective descriptions or form logical assemblages; they {generate representations and attribute value and meaning in line with certain perspectives or classificatory schernas which are historically specific. They do not so nnuch reflect the world through objects as use them to mobilize representations of the world past and present. I this is true of all museums, what kind of classificatory schema might an “ethnographic” museum employ and what kinds of representations might it mobilize? “To answer this we must know what the word ‘ethnography’ means. Ethnography comes from ethnos meaning ‘people/race/nation’, and graphein meaning ‘writing/description’ Su a common definition might state that cllnography seeks ‘to describe nations of people with their customs, habits and points of difference’ We are confronted by the knowledge that a definition of ethnography seeks to include notions of science and difference, In fact ethnography is a word which has acquired a range of meanings. Contemporary usage frequently invokes ‘ethnography’ to describe in-depth empirical research and a variety of data collection techniques which rely on. prolonged and intensive interaction between the researcher and her/his subjects of research, which usually results in the production of an ‘ethnographic text’ But, historically. the definition has been far mote specific. In the British context, ‘ethnography’ refers to the research methods and texts that were linked most particularly with the human sciences of anthropology (the science of tnan or mankind, in the widest sense) and ethnology (the science which considers races and people and their relationship to one another, their distinctive physical and other characteristics). So when one refers to ethnographic museums today, one is placing them within « discrete discipline and theoretical framework ~CHAPTER 3 TUL POETICS AND THE POUIKCS OF PXLIBITING OIA 19 ‘history’ (Coombes, 1994a, p. 121, 123). So the Pitt Rivers Museum mobilized an evaluative discourse concerning the civilizing effect of culturo on the ass of the population. The museum was expected to bring social benefit by shaping the intellect and transforming social behaviour (Bennett, 1994, p. 26). In the late nineteeuth century, bids for anthropology to be recognized as a science of humanity coincided with the rapid expansion of the ‘museum idea’ ‘The ‘musoum idea’, simply put, was the belief that museums were an ideal vehicle for pubtic instruction: by contemplating cultural artefacts on display, the common man/woman could become receptive to ‘their improving influence’ (Bennett, 1994, p. 23). The belief in the ‘multiplication of culture’s utility’ was not restricted to museums but extended to art golleries and libraries fibid.). The rise of anthropology as a discipline coincided with and was supported by the ferment in exhibiting activity, either in the shape of the great exhibitions or in the shape of museums which arose int great numbers all over Britain between 1890-1920 (Greenhalgh, 1993, p. 88). Su one can argue that the Pitt Rivers Museum was implicated in other discourses of ‘self’ and “uther’ which produced a division betwoen geographically distanced cultures, but also between the cultures of the different classes of British society. To conclude, it has been shown that both the Tradescant and the Pitt Rivers collections/museums are historical products. But it hus equally been stated that what distinguishes the Pitt Rivers collection is the particular articulation between the evolutionary discourse and the method of display which it implemented. The Pitt Rivers Museum, it can be argued, at this historical juncture (the late mneteenth century) promoted and legitimized the reduction of cultures to ubjacts. so that they could be judged and ranked in a hierarchical relationship with each other. This anthropological - or more properly, ethnographic — discourse did not reflect the ‘real’ state of the cultures it exhibited so much as the power relationship between those subjected to such classification and those promoting it. As we have shown in the previous section, a Foucauldian interpretation of exhibiting would state that ethnographic objects are defined and classified according to the frameworks of knowledge that allow them to be understood We have considered the representations that museums produced and how these are linked to discourse, Bul, as was hinted in the last section and as you saw in Chapter 1, Foucault also argues that discourses do not operate in isolation, they occur in formations ~ discursive formations. The term discursive formation, refers to the systematic operation of several discourses or statements constituting a ‘body of knowledge’, which work together to construct a specific object/topic of analysis in a particular way, and to limit the other ways in which that object/topic may be constituted. In the case of museum displays, such a formation might include anthropological, aesthetic,na READING C: Sander Gilman, ‘The deep structure of stereotypes’ READING D: Kobena Mercer, ‘Reading racial fetishism’ 284 288OTH 257 of the Dust) or John Singleton (Boys ’n’ the Hood) — to put their own interpretations on the way blacks figure within ‘the American experience’ ‘This has broadened the regime of racial representation ~ the result of a historic ‘struggle around the image’ — a polities of representation ~ whose strategies we need to examine more carefully. Before we pursue this argument, however, we need to reflect further on how this racialized regime of representation actually works. Essentially, this involves examining more deeply the set of representational practices known as stereotyping. So far, we have considered the essentializing, reductionist and naturalizing effects of stereotyping. Stereotyping reduces people to a fow, simple, essential characteristics, which are represented as fixed by Nature Here, we examine four further aspects: (a) the construction of ‘otherness’ and exclusion; (b) stereotyping and power; (c) the role of fantasy; and (d) fetishism. Stereotyping as a signifying practice is central to the representation of racial difference. But what is a stereotype? How does it actually work? In his essay ‘on ‘Stereotyping’, Richard Dyer (1977) makes an important distinction between typing and stereotyping. He argues that, without the use of types, would be difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of the world. We understand the world by referring individual objects, people or events in our head's to the general classificatory schemes into which ~ according te our culture ~ they fit. Thus we ‘decode’ a flat object un legs on which we place things as a ‘table’ We may never have seen that kind of ‘table’ before, but we have a general concept or category of ‘table’ in our heads. into which we ‘fit” the particular objects we perceive or encounter, In other words, we understand ‘the particular’ in terms of its ‘type’ We deploy what Allred Schutz called typifications. In this sense. ‘typing’ is essontial to the production of meoning (an argument we made earlier in Chapter 1). Richard Dyer argues that we are always ‘making sense’ of things in terms of some wider categories. Thus, for example, we come to "know" something about person by thinking of the roles which he or she performs. is he/she a parent, a child, a worker, a lover, boss, or an old ago pensioner? We assign him/her to the membership of different groups, according to class, gender, age group, nationality, ‘race’, linguistic group, sexual preference and so on. We order him/her in terms of personality (ype — is he/she a happy, serious, depressed, scatter-bruined, over-active kind of person? Our picture of who tho person ‘is’ is built up out of the information we accumulate from positioning him/her within these different orders of typification. In broad terms, then, ‘a type is any simple, vivid, memorable, easily grasped and widely recognized characterization in which a few traits are foregrounded and change or “development” is kept to a mininvam’ (Dyer, 1977. p. 28).sto show, by the documentary evidence of photography, the inherent ‘inferiority’ of the Other This is overlaid with deeper ambivalence in the portrait of Teszel, whose grotesque gritaave calls up the happy/sad mask of tho nigger minstrel: pumanized by racial pathos, the Sambs stexeotype haunts the scone, evoking the black man’s supposedly childlike dependency on ole Mass, which in tum fixes bis soctal, legal and existential ‘emasculation’ at the hands of the white master. Finally, two codes togethor ~ of erpping and lighting ~ interponetrate the flesh and mortify it into a racial sex fetish, a juju doll from the dark side of the white man’s imaginary ‘The body-wholo is fragmented into microscope details ~ chest, arms, torsv, buttocks, penis ~ inviting a scopophitic dissection of the parts thet make up the whole Indeed, like a talisman, each part is invested the power to evoke the ‘mystique’ of black male sexuality with more perfection than: empirically umified whole. The came ats away, like a knife, allowing the spectator to inspect the ‘goods’ In such fetishistic attention to detail, tiny scars and blemishes on the surfaco of black skin serve only to heighten the lechnical perfectinnisin of the photographie print. The cropping and fragmentation of bodies = often decapitated, so to spoak — is a saliont feature of pornography, and has boon seon from cortain feminist pasitinns as a form of male violence, a literal inscription ol a sedistic impulse in the male gaze, whose pleasuse thes consists of cutting up womon's budies into vista bits and pieces. Whether or not this view is tenable, the effect of the technique hore is to suggest aggression in the act of looking, but not as racial violence ot racism-as-hate; on the contiary, aggrossion as the frustration of the eyo who finds the object of his desires out of reach, inaccussible, ‘The cropping is analogous to striptease in this sense, as the exposure of successive body parts distances the erntagenic object, making i untouchable so as to tantalize the drive to look, which reaches its aim in the denaument by which the woman's sex is unveiled Except here the ‘unveiling that reduces the woman from angel to whore fs substituted by the unconcealing of the Diack man’s private parts, with tbe pins as the forbidden totem of colenial fantasy As each fragment seduces the eye into ever mute intonse fascination, we ghimpsa the dilation of a ADINGS FOR CHAPIL 289 libidinal way of looking that spreads itself across, tho surface of black skin, Harsh contrasts of shadow and light draw the eye to focus and fix attention on the texture of the black man’s skin. According to Bhabha unlike the soxual fetish pe se, whose meanings are usually hidden as a hermeneutic secret, skin color functions as ‘the most visible of fetishes’ (Babbha, 1983, p. 30} Whether itis devalorized in the signifying chain of ‘negrophobia’ or hypervalorized as a desirable attribute in ‘negrophilia’, the fotish of skin color in the codes uf racial discourse constitutes the mast visible olamont in the articulation of what Stuart Hall (1977) calls the othnic signifier’ The shining surfice of black skin serves severul functions in its ropresontation. it suggests the physical exestinn of poworful bodies, as black boxers always glisten like ‘bronzo in the suininated squaro of the boxing, ring, or, in pornography. i suggests intense sexual activity ‘just before” the photograph was taken, a donymic stimulus to arouse spectatoriat participation in the imagined mise-eu-scene In Mapplethorpe's picturvs the spacular brilliance of black skio is bound in a double articulation as + fixing agent for tho Fotishistic structure of tho photogtaphs, ‘There 1s a sublle slippage between represonter and represented. as the shiny. polished, sheen of black sksn becomes consubstantial with the luxurious allure of the high-quality photographic print, As Victor Burgin has remarked (1980, p_ 100), sexual fetishism dovetails with sommodity-fetishism to inflate the economic value ‘of the print in art photography as much as in fashion photography, the ‘gtossies’ Here. black skin and print surface are bound together to enhance the pleasure of the white spectator as much as the profitability of those art-world commodities exchanged among the artist and his doale collectors and curators. In overyday discourse fetishism probably connotes coviant or ‘kinky’ sexuality. and calls up images of lather smd nubberwoar as signs of sexual perversity. This is not a fortuitous example, as Joather fashion has a sensuous appeal as a kind of ‘second skin’ When one considers that such clothes are invariably black, vathor th any ether color, such fashion-fetishism suggests a desire to simulate or imitate black skin On the other hand, Froud's thoorization of fetishism as a clinical phenomenon of sexual pathology and patversion is problematic in many ways, but the central notion ofHINTING MaSCMUNITY 321 is fundamentally at odds with the Foucauldian account which I set out in section 3, with ~ in my view ~ its very proper eumphasis on the historical character of identities. Let me explain why | think it is oxtromely difficult to square the differences between a psychoanalytic and a Foucauldian account of identity. Lacan and Freud are both explicitly concemed with the primary processes that constitute identity; that is, those processes that forge [in Juliet Mitchell's phrase) ‘the burnan in culture’ (Mitchell, 1984, p. 237). These processes are, for psychoanalysis, universal ~ that is, they have a transhistorical status. fn addition, they follow a developmental pattern involving a number of phases: they are secured unconsciously and are fixed by the parameters of Ocdipal order- the underlying universal structuring of human relations which Freud and Lacan posit. Itis this universal account of the formation of identity, however, that is so problematic in relation to Foucautt’s deeply historical emphasis. The psychosexual structures of the Oedipal order are given the privileged position in accounting for (almost) all there is to say about the formation of identity. ‘The arguments of Mulvey and Neale do attempt, certainly, to moderate this universal account of identity. In considering the interplay between psychic structures and historically specific forms of representation (Hollywood cinema), they do suggest that these representations can carry real force. However, in deseribing the articulation of the social/historical with psychic structures, the psychic is privileged as providing the fundamental parameters of identity. In analysis of the look and the gendered positioning of individuals, there is a search for the positions of looking given by particular visual texts in terms of the fundamental tropes of sexual difference ~ active/passive: masculine/feminine; mother/son; father/daughter. Subjectivization, then, is conceptualized in these accounts as being secured through the reactivation of the fundamental positions of identity which Froud posits ~ ultimately, always in the terms of the Oedipal order. Historical and social factors which determine identity are — in the ond ~ reduced to the calculus of psychosexual structures. In addition, the emphasis on psychosexuel structures produces a reductive account of identity conceived fundamentally in terms of sexual difference. in other words, psychoanalysis privileges the acquisition of gender and sexual identity as the bedrock of identity, Other determinants upon identity (such as class) are effectively sidelined. While psychoanalysis can give clear account of the articulation of individuals with fields of represontation, and cortainly poses some important questions ubout the unconscious and about desize and the look, this is in the end too ahistorical and totalizing. It pitches ‘secondary’ processes of identification only at the level of primary processes and sees identity only in terms of sexual difference (Morley, 1980). Where, then, does this leave our account of subjectivization? The attention to the organization of spectatorship as a way of conceptuslizing subjectivization does point to important ptocesses. want to hold on to this concern with spectatorship, but not in itsCHAPTER 6 GLNRE AND GENDER, HA 353 connotation, its main function being to reinforce normative meanings and values. Genre theory was developed as a means of countering this deterministic conception by seeking to understand the productive work of convention in the context of three interconnected but distinct ‘moments’ or ‘stages’ in the cultural work of the media industries 1 Production and distribution: financiers, studios, TV companies, producers and controllers, censors, script-writers, directors, stars, festivals and awards, advertising and publicity, trade press, etc. 2. The product or text: genres and programme formats, conventions, narrative structures. styles, iconography, performances, stars, ele 3. Reception: going to the cinema, the TV schedule, ‘girls’ night out’ the family audience, the kitchen TY, the gaze at the cinema scteen, the glance at the TV screen, pin-ups, reviews and reviewers, etc ‘The approach from the perspective of ‘media domination’ argues that it is the iron control of stage 1 ~ Production — over the processes going on in stages 2 and 3 which produces formulaic conventions and stereotypes as part of a cultural agsembly line and as a means of maintaining dominant ideologies. However, the variety of procedures and practices involved in the production and consumption of genre fiction undertaken at each stage suggests the complexity of the relations between production, product and reception ot ‘consumption’ and thus the difficulty of imposing economic, ideological and cultural control, even at the Jevel ol production ‘Tho alternative approach, developed by genre theory, is useful because it enables us to define the relationship between these three stages, not as the imposition of ‘media domination’ but rather as a struggle over which meanings, which definitions of reality, will win the consent of the audionce and thus establish themselves as the privileged reading of an episode (hegemony). Hegemony is established and contested in the interaction and negotiation between (1) industrial production, (2) the semiotic work of the text. aud (3) audience reception. Moreover, each stage contains within itself potential tensions and contradictions between the different economic, professional aesthetic and personal practices and cultural traditions involved First Jet us examine the genre system at the level of production, focusing on the repeatability of genre conventions as a key to the mass prodaction of fictions. The economic rationale for genre production is. perhaps, most vividly illustrated by the Hollywood studio system. As is frequently asserted, filin-inaking is a hugely costly affair requiring capital investmont both in plant ~ studio buildings, technological hardware, laboratories, cinemas ~ and in individual productions, Economies of scale require standardization of production and the emergence of popular genres — which began with the growth of nineteenth-century mass fiction and syndicated theatrical entertainments ~ served this need. The elaborate sets, costume