The Poetics and Politics of Curriculum As Representation

Pedagogy, Culture and Society
ISSN: 1468-1366 (Print) 1747-5104 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpcs20
The poetics and politics of curriculum as

representation
Tomaz Tadeu Da Silva
To cite this article: Tomaz Tadeu Da Silva (1999) The poetics and politics of curriculum as
representation, Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 7:1, 7-33, DOI: 10.1080/14681369900200055
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CURRICULUM AS REPRESENTATION
Pedagogy, Culture & Society, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1999
The Poetics and Politics of

Curriculum as Representation
TOMAZ TADEU DA SILVA

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul,
Porto Alegre, Brasil
ABSTRACT The notion of knowledge that is expressed in current notions of

curriculum is fundamentally realist. Curriculum is not, however, as the realist
notion implies, a site of transmission of knowledge conceived as a mere
revelation of the ‘real’. Curriculum is itself a representation: not only a site in
which signs that are produced in other places circulate, but also a place of
production of signs in its own right. To conceive of curriculum as
representation means to highlight the work of its production. There is a place
here for a poetics of curriculum. However, to understand the curriculum as
representation means also to emphasise its political effects. Representation
is always authorised representation: the text that constitutes curriculum is
not simply a text; it is a text of power. To conceive of curriculum as
representation implies to see it simultaneously, inseparably, as a poetics and
as a politics.
There is much discussion these days about a supposed ‘crisis of

representation’. This expression condenses the broader idea of the
existence of a fissure, of instability, of an uncertainty in the very centre of
the epistemologies that once governed with such confidence the modern
project of domination: of nature, of the world, of society. This insecurity is
not so new: it permeates, in a way, a large part of this century now coming
to an end. It becomes more intense, more urgent, more uneasy, during
these last decades.
The grand narratives, anchors of certainty in a drifting world,
become distrusted, as their premises, their descriptions, their
explanations and their promises find themselves increasingly at odds with
daily life. If there is any dialectics, it is a dialectics that inevitably
transforms its inflated ideas into their opposite: progress becomes
degradation and destruction; emancipation becomes dependency and
7
subjugation; Utopia becomes horror and nightmare; reason becomes

irrationality and domination. The problem is not that these ideals have
simply been betrayed or unfulfilled: it is suspected that, in a way, they are
implicated in the very processes that made the world become what it is.
A process of epistemological destabilisation is, therefore, underway.
In the context of the so called ‘linguistic turn,’ epistemology has to do
fundamentally with representation: with the relationship between, on the
one hand, the ‘real’ and ‘reality’, and, on the other, the forms through
which this ‘real’ and this ‘reality’ become ‘present’ for us – re-presented. In
the post-structuralist perspective, to know and to represent are
inseparable processes. Representation – understood here as inscription,
mark, trace, signifier, and not as a mental process – is the material, visible,
palpable face of knowledge. The ‘crisis’ of legitimisation that is at the
centre of our forms of knowing the world is, therefore, incontestably
linked to the ‘crisis’ in the statute of representation – our forms of
representing the world. Questions about who is authorised to know the
world translate into questions about who is authorised to represent it. To
pose these types of questions means, in turn, to recognise a link between
knowing and representing, on one hand, and relationships of power on the
other.
There are those, like Baudrillard (1991), for example, who make a
more radical assertion: what we are witnessing is not simply a crisis, but a
true implosion of representation. In a post-modern scenario of
uncontrollable proliferation of signs and images, representation came to
an end. There are no more referents at the end of the chain of
signification: only signs and images that simulate the ‘real.’ With any
connection of signs and their referents being lost, the contemporary
landscape is populated by simulacra: representations of representations.
Simulation is the last phase of a process that has as its earlier phases:
realism (‘the image is the reflex of reality’); ideology (‘the image masks
and deform reality’); and dissimulation (‘the image masks the absence of
reality’; Baudrillard, 1991, p. 13). In simulacra there no longer is any
representation. We find ourselves in the realm of pure hyper-reality.
While some authors announce the end of representation, other
people and groups, however, demand the right to representation. The
questioning of canonical epistemologies, of dominant aesthetics, of official
cultural codes comes precisely from those social groups that do not see
themselves represented by them. There is a revolt of the subjugated
identities against the dominant regimes of representation. It is this revolt
that defines so called ‘identity politics’. The ‘universals’ of culture are
systems of signification whose claim consists in expressing the human and
the social in its totality. They are, nevertheless, always and inevitably,
systems of representation. That is, particular social and discursive
constructions that are partial to those groups that are in a position to
define the process of representation. Thus, ‘representation is to be
understood as a social relation enacted and performed via specific appeals
to vision, specific management of imaginary spaces and bodies for a gaze’
8
(Pollock, 1994, p. 14). ‘Identity politics’ situates itself, therefore, in the

intersection between representation – as a form of knowledge – and
power.
The so-called ‘identity politics’ combines two central dimensions of
the concept of ‘representation’: representation as ‘delegation’ and
representation as ‘description’ (Julien & Mercer, 1996, p. 197). In the case
of representation as delegation, we have the question of who has the right
to represent whom, in instances in which it is considered necessary to
delegate to a reduced number of ‘representers’ the voice and power of
decision of an entire group. This idea of representation constitutes
precisely the basis of the political regimes described as ‘representative
democracies.’ In the case of representation as description, we ask how
different cultural and social groups are portrayed in the different forms of
cultural inscription: in the discourse and images through which a culture
represents the social world. The two dimensions of representation are, of
course, inescapably linked. Those who are delegated to speak and act in
name of an other (representation as delegation) govern, in a way, the
process of presentation and description of the other (representation as
description). He who speaks for the other controls the forms of speaking
about the other.
◆◆◆
Vignette 1
David Hevey is a photographer who analyses photographs from the
perspective of people with physical handicaps – he, himself, is physically
handicapped. In his book, The Creatures Time Forgot: photography and
disability imagery, he analyses two types of photographs of handicapped
people: the photographs that accompany fundraising publicity campaigns
from welfare institutions linked with the care of the handicapped and the
artistic photographs of handicapped people taken by famous
photographers such as Diane Arbus.[1] Among the photographs
reproduced and analysed in the book, Anne Finger, who reviewed the
book points out two. In one black-and-white photograph, a white person in
a manual wheelchair is shown in an elevator reaching for the top button,
just out of reach. ‘Everyone assumes I won’t want to get to the top’, the
text reads, adding underneath, ‘Our biggest handicap is other people’s
attitudes.’ The name of the British charity that ran the ad, ‘The Spastics
Society’, appears underneath, in print larger and darker than any of the
rest of the text.
In another photograph, this one in colour, an Asian girl in an
elaborate dress-up costume of silver, magenta, purple and white rests her
chin in her hands, and looks frankly and warmly at the camera. There is no
outer sign of the girl’s disability; only the photo’s inclusion in an
exhibition commissioned by the all-disabled Graeae Theatre Company
marks her as disabled.
9
The first photograph is exemplary of the way in which handicapped

people are represented in publicity by welfare agencies. Even though they
appear in many ways to be progressive and are a change from the tragic
faces and find-a-cure mentality that activists both in the USA and Britain
have protested so vigorously, the visual image (almost invariably in black
and white) used in charity advertisements is frequently one of
dependency, strangeness and isolation. These images, in their
construction of alterity of handicapped people through the gaze of
‘normal’ people, are not very different from the colonial images, ‘where the
“blacks” stand frozen and curious, while “whitey” lounges confident and
sure’ (Hevey, 1997, p. 332). The second photograph, in contrast, presents
an image of a handicapped person in which this person is in control of the
form through which she is represented. David Hevey (1997, p. 346)
comments that Diane Arbus, the famous American photographer who
dedicated herself to photographing ‘strange’ people, ‘was extremely upset
when she received a reply from “The Little People’s convention” to her
request to photograph them. They wrote that ‘We have our own little
person to photograph us’.
◆◆◆
Representation and Signification

Representation is a system of signification. Using the terms of structuralist
linguistics, this means: within representation we find a relation between a
signified (concept, idea) and a signifier (an inscription, a material mark:
sound, letter, image, hand signals). In this formulation, it is not necessary
to go back to the existence of a referent (a ‘thing’ in itself): the ‘things’
only enter into a system of signification at the moment in which we
attribute them with a signified – in this exact moment, they are not
anymore simply ‘things in themselves’. Of course, the ‘things’ themselves
can function as signifiers. In the classic example given by Barthes, the
signified ‘rose’ (the idea of the rose) has its material expression in the
signifier ‘rose’ (in the letters that form the word – written or spoken –
‘rose’ or alternatively, in a drawing, photograph, etc., of a rose). The thing
in itself, the rose, as a referent, has no importance in the characterisation
of the process of signification unless it functions, in turn, as a signifier of
another signified, different from the ‘original’: if, for example, the rose, as
an object, is used to signify ‘love.’ It is this, as a matter of fact, that makes
possible a semiotics of ‘objects.’ The referent ‘rose’ does not have,
therefore, for semiotics, the same interest it has, for example, for
gardening.
The process of signification is therefore fundamentally social. A
semiotics – as a practice of description and an analysis of signification – is
preoccupied with those objects that result from a process of social
construction, that is, precisely those objects that within the formulation of
Saussure, may be characterised through the relationship
‘signifier/signified’ signs.
10
As we know, Saussure, having language as his focus, emphasised the

arbitrary character of the sign. There is no intrinsic ‘natural’ relationship
between signifier and signified: a determined signifier owes its form and its
connection to a determined signified exclusively to social convention.
There is nothing that ‘naturally’ determines that the signifier ‘rose’
(spoken or written) has, in the English language, this form and that it
should be linked to the signified ‘rose’. In the absence of this ‘natural’ link,
a determined sign can only distinguish itself in its singularity and identity
by being different from other signs in a chain of signification. What a sign
is becomes established only through this chain of differences. Its identity
is always dependent on difference.
Post-Saussurian semiotics, by extending the terrain of signification to
signs that extrapolate the domain of language, becomes concerned with
signs in which the relationship between signifier and signified is not purely
arbitrary, as, for example, in the photograph and in other types of images
(analogic systems of signification). This amplified description of the
process of signification had already been foreseen by Peirce, with his
distinction between index, icon and symbol. In ‘index’, there is a ‘natural’
relationship, not a purely conventional one, between signifier and what it
represents: smoke indicates fire. In ‘icon’, there is a similarity between
signifier and that which it represents: it is the case of the traffic signs, for
example, or if we wish of the photograph. In ‘symbol’, finally, the
relationship between signifier and that which it represents is entirely
conventional: it is the case of oral or written language. What is important,
however, is that, with the exception of the case of the ‘index’, the link that
is established between signifier and signified is always the result of a
social construction, that is, this link is never ‘natural’. Moreover, as far as
our understanding of representation is concerned, the signs are what they
are and signify what they signify because we made them thus.
In this amplification of the process of signification, structuralist
semiotics ended up characterising, perhaps in a rather rigid and closed
form, processes and practices that constitute signification. By describing
and analysing codes, conventions, stylistics, artifices and structures that
govern the practices of signification, post-Saussurian semiotics puts too
much emphasis on the pole of the production of systems of signification,
such as literature, publicity, fashion, cinema, photography and television,
making it a hostage of artifices and codes of its construction. The systems
of signification are described as being so dependent on codes,
conventions, stylistics and structures that direct their production, that
they can only mean one thing: that which precisely at the moment and act
of its production is defined through these semiotic resources. Here is, for
example, Barthes at his best, analysing an advertisement of pasta (Panzani
pasta):
A second sign is almost as evident as the first: its signifier is a group
formed by the tomato and pepper, and the corresponding tricolor
combination (yellow, green, red) of the poster; its signified is Italy, or
more importantly, Italianness ... Continuing to explore the image
11
(which does not mean that it is not transparent from the first moment),
we discover, easily, at least two or three other signs. One of them, the
compact presence of different objects transmits the idea of a complete
culinary service, as if, on the one hand, Panzani furnishes all of the
ingredients necessary of a varied dish, and on the other hand, the
concentrated tomato sauce in the can equal in quality and freshness
the natural products that surround it ... (Barthes, 1990, p. 22)
The arrangement, the structure, the proximity between certain signifiers
can only mean one thing – in the above case: ‘Italianness’, ‘complete
service’, ‘quality,’ ‘freshness’. These signifiers are so forcibly determined
by the structure of the image that they become ‘transparent’. By affirming
that the image is ‘transparent from the first moment’, Barthes practically
suggests that his analysis is not necessary. Without denying the brilliance
of the Barthesian analysis, the process of signification is portrayed here as
univocal and closed. It becomes definitively fixed by the structure of its
construction.
Barthes himself will anticipate, in the last stage of his work, the
post-structuralist perspective in which signification would become more
uncertain, unstable, and more open. Although he limited the concept of
this open character to certain and rare literary works, calling them
‘writerly’,[2] in opposition to those that are merely ‘readerly’, Barthes
broke here with some of the structuralist presuppositions that gave to
signification its rigid, closed and determined character. With the concept
of ‘writerly’, Barthes opened signification to productivity:
The writerly text is a perpetual present ... ; the writerly text is the hand
writing, before the infinite game of the world (the world as game) may
be crossed, cut, interrupted, made plastic by a singular system
(Ideology, Gender, Criticism) that may come to impede, in the plurality
of accesses, the opening of nets, the infinity of language ... In this ideal
text, the nets are multiple and interlace without anyone being able to
dominate the others; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of
signifieds: it does not have a beginning; it is reversible, in it we
penetrate through several entries, without any of them being
considered the main one ... (Barthes, 1992, p. 39)
Through its opening and indetermination, the writerly text permits the
reader to become a producer. The merely ‘readerly’ text, in contrast, does
not permit more than the reading: only one reading. The readerly text
cannot be ‘written’, but only ‘read.’ For Barthes, the readerly text remains
limited to the domain of representation, here understood, strictly as a
simple mimesis, imitation, reflex, reproduction. Barthes refers here,
evidently to the classical literary texts called ‘realist’. The basic principle
of construction of these texts is that of a non-mediated relationship with
‘reality.’ They function to produce an ‘effect of reality’, making the reader
forget the codes and artifices of representation through which ‘reality’ is
transmuted into ‘signifier/signified’. The realist text ‘hides’ this work: this
is precisely what constitutes its trick.
12
This proto-post-structuralist moment of Barthes would have been

more radical if he had not confused the ‘intention’ of the realist text with
its realisation. The realist code wants us to believe that there is a
superimposition between the plane of ‘reality’ and the plane of
representation. The ‘intention’, however, does not obliterate the character
of representation of the realist text: it still is a sign. Moreover, its effect of
reality is only one possibility that may be very probable, but that being
still a sign will never be guaranteed. In the more radical post-structuralist
terms that would follow later, we can say that all texts are considered
‘writerly.’
It would be left to Derrida to bring about one of the more radical
transformations in the characterisation of the process of signification.
Derrida would expurgate definitively from the Saussurian formulation of
sign any trace of the separation between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’. The
‘signified’ does not exist as a separate mental entity, anterior and
independently of its material and visible/audible expression: it does not
exist, but as a mark, as a trace, as an inscription. However, neither does
the signified coincide with the signifier: the signified is not present in the
signifier – to suppose the contrary is a fundamental metaphysical illusion.
There is no one-to-one relationship between signified and signifier: not
because to a signified there may correspond more than one signifier and
vice-versa, but simply because the signified does not exist as a separate
domain from the signifier. There being no separation, there cannot be any
correspondence.
There being no independent form, the signified will not ever free
itself of the signifier. Its connection with a determined signified is always
temporary and precarious. It never coincides with the signifier: not being
plainly present in the signifier but also not existing independently, its
‘definition’, its ‘determination’ can only be made through other signifiers,
in an infinite chain that never leaves the domain of the signifier. The
signified can only be present in the signifier as a trace, as a mark, as much
of that which it is as that which it is not. The process of signification is
never, therefore, an operation of correspondence (between signifiers and
signified), but always a process of differentiation. Contrary to the
formulation of Saussure, however, there does not exist a differential chain
of signifiers, and a differential and separate chain of signifieds. The
signified is entirely dependent upon the differential chain of signifiers.
Derrida introduces, therefore, uncertainty and indetermination in the
process of signification. The criticism that he makes of the ‘metaphysics of
presence’ that characterises the dominant conception of the process of
signification has important implications for the notion of representation
utilised in cultural analysis. In the first place, representation is understood
here always as a material mark, as an inscription, as a trace. The
representation referred to here is not ever a mental representation.[3] In
the second place, if the signified – that which is supposedly represented –
is never plainly present in the signifier, the representation – as process or
as product – is never fixed, stable, determined. The indetermination is
13
what characterises the signification, as well as the representation. Finally,

representation becomes meaningful only through its insertion in a
differential chain of signifiers. It is the representation of some ‘thing’,
however, not because of its identity or correspondence with that ‘thing’,
but because it represents that particular ‘thing’ (through a signifier) as
different from other ‘things.’ Thus, for example, the representations that
are made of ‘Black’ (as a ‘racial’ group) are entirely dependent, to make
‘sense’, of their position in a chain of difference among signifiers that
include, among others, the signifier ‘White’ (that is, as representation of
‘White’). It is precisely this dependence of a chain of difference that gives
to representation its undetermined character.
The concept of representation as it is used in cultural analyses is
closely linked to the investigations of Michel Foucault, particularly to his
formulation of the concept of discourse. Foucault focused specifically on
the notion of representation in The Order of Things. There, however,
‘representation’ has a rather restricted meaning, referring to the episteme
of the historical period that Foucault called the ‘classical epoch’: roughly,
the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries. In this book Foucault defines
‘episteme’ as a general form, the substratum, through which what counts
as valid knowledge in a given epoch is defined. An episteme restrains that
which can be thought or known in a given historical moment. For Foucault,
the episteme of Renaissance was based in the notions of similarity and
similitude. There not being an ontological distinction between things
(referents) and words (signifieds), knowledge consisted basically in
looking for and establishing similarities and similitudes between things,
including here words, as expressions, all, of the same transcendental,
divine order. In the classical epoch, words are separated from things: they
represent things, they have their own ontology. Knowledge during this
period is based on the logic of identity and difference, the operations of
classification and taxonomy being central here. It is this that, according to
Foucault, is the era of representation. In the modern episteme, it is the
relationship between the elements, more than their identity and difference
that becomes important. With the modern episteme, it becomes possible
to construct new objects of knowledge, objects that were impossible to
conceive of in the limited space of the episteme of representation.
In the more encompassing concept of ‘representation’ adopted by
cultural analysis, however, it is the concept of discourse, such as that
developed by Foucault that becomes important. It became commonplace
to attribute to post-structuralist positions the assertion that ‘reality is
constructed discursively’. What is of interest to cultural analysis, however,
is not to make such an absolute epistemological assertion, but, more
modestly, to take as its object of analysis those instances and social forms
that are constructed discursively and linguistically. As John Fiske states
(1993, p. 15), ‘it is more productive to say that what is accepted as reality
in any social formation is the product of discourse.’ The objective of
cultural analysis is not to deny the existence of a ‘reality’, but in a way, to
amplify the very notion of ‘reality.’ A discourse about AIDS, for example,
14
that constructs the illness as a divine punishment for sexual perversion is

as ‘real’ as the very HIV virus, although it refers, ontologically to different
‘realities’. It is exactly this type of ‘reality’ that becomes the object of a
cultural analysis centred in the notion of representation. In summary, as in
the case of Foucault, cultural analysis is not preoccupied with saying that
the only objects that exist are those produced by discourse. It is involved,
instead, in a rather more modest project: that of centring its analyses
precisely on those objects that are produced through social practices –
discursive or not. In the specific case of the notion of representation, it is
the discursive practices (in a wider sense, including images and other
forms of visual representation) that become the focus of analysis: ‘across
the social formation there are diverse assemblages of representation,
called discourses, some of which are specifically but never exclusively
visual’ (Pollock, 1994, p. 14).
It is probably in Archaeology of Knowledge that we will find some of
the most explicit formulations of Foucault about the notion of discourse.
The constant idea that we find throughout this book is that discourse
should not be seen simply as a register or reflex of objects that are
anterior to it, but ‘as practices that systematically form the objects of
which they speak’ (Foucault, 1986, p. 56). It is within this meaning that
Foucault says that, from this perspective, the task does not consist
anymore in ‘treating discourses as groups of signs (significant elements
that refer back to content or to representations)’[4] (p. 56). Discourse
does not limit itself to the naming of things that are already ‘there’: it not
only names things, it creates them: another type of thing, to be sure.
Foucault does not here deny to the signs their function of designation.
What he does is simply to say, in a typically post-Saussurian operation,
that is, post-structuralist, that signs do more than designate. It was
precisely with this description of this ‘something more’ that he was
preoccupied in his analyses of madness, of illness, of incarceration and of
sexuality.
In cultural analysis, this productive character of discourse,
emphasised by Foucault, extends to the notion of representation. Cultural
representations are not simply constituted by signs that express those
things that they supposedly ‘represent.’ The signs that constitute the
representations focused by cultural analysis do not limit themselves to
serve as markers for objects that exist independently of them: they create
new meanings. These meanings can be seen as newly created ‘objects’
that, although by nature different, are not less real, in their effects, than,
say, the stone that hits one’s head. It is precisely because they seem ‘real’,
because they are ‘real’, that these meanings have an effect of ‘truth’.
Foucault was interested, as is cultural analysis, precisely in this kind of
object: ‘a critical history of thought is neither a history of acquisitions nor
a history of occultation of truth; it is a history of “truths” understood as
the forms through which one articulates, within a given domain, things of
discourse susceptible to being proclaimed as true or false ...’ (Foucault,
1994, IV, p. 632).
15
In his last studies, Foucault centred his analyses in the close

connections between discourse and power. It is perhaps here that his
notion of discourse acquires the greatest relevance for the use of the
notion of representation made by cultural analysis. Discourses and
representations are located in a strategic field of power: ‘the formation of
discourse and genealogy of knowledge must be analysed not from the
point of view of types of consciousness, from modalities of perceptions or
from ideological forms, but from the tactics and strategies of power’
(Foucault, 1994, III, p. 39). Discourses are located between, on the one
hand, the relationships of power that define what they say and how they
say it and, on the other hand, the effects of power that they put in motion:
‘discourse is that group of significations, both restraining and restrained,
that pass through social relations’ (Foucault, 1994, III, p. 123). In the words
of Stuart Hall (1992, p. 293), ‘it is power, rather than the facts about reality,
which makes things “true”’.
It could be said that Foucault’s research is entirely centred in
questions of representation. He investigated the representation of
madness, of illness, of punishment, of sexuality. In focusing on
representation, Foucault distanced himself both from a phenomenological
analysis (‘what is, after all, madness, punishment, sexuality?’) and from a
structural analysis (‘what causes, structurally madness, punishment,
sexuality?’) as well, to concentrate upon the forms by which the ‘objects’
are constructed through systems of signification.
◆◆◆
Vignette II
Nothing is, apparently more ‘natural’, ‘real’, than the nature which is
exhibited in the museums of Natural History. This ‘naturalness’, however,
is the result of conventions, codes and styles of representation. Timothy
Lenoir analysed this process of naturalisation, giving the examples of the
British Museum of Natural History and the American Museum of Natural
History:
In the nineteenth-century tradition, the museum is a window onto
nature, but what is being represented in an exhibit? What gives the
representation its authenticity? In the case of natural history museums,
such signifying practices amount to the very production of nature:
museums produce nature with their storage rooms, laboratories and staffs
of taxidermists, artists and curators. They produce it in the light of
specific interests. To analyse and deconstruct the semiotics of this kind of
museum is to account for the naturalisation of the history of nature
production. The authority of science is summoned to authenticate these
constructions and in the naturalising process science itself is reciprocally
endorsed. Since their appearance in the nineteenth century, natural
history museums have provided icons for meditating on nature, as well as
laboratories and factories for producing nature. In examining these
16
moments in the history of museum making, we have intended to question

the notion of a natural history museum as a site for the ‘authentic’
representation of nature. We have advanced a different argument:
museums provide semiotic markers of nature whose authenticity is
guaranteed by having the historical processes that produce them
naturalised. (Lenoir, n.d., mimeo).
◆◆◆
Representation, Identity, Power

Cultural or social identity is the group of those characteristics through
which social groups are defined as groups: that which they are. What they
are, however, is inseparable from that which they are not, from those
characteristics that make them different from other groups. Identity and
difference are, therefore, inseparable processes. Cultural identity is not an
absolute entity, an essence that may make sense in and of itself, in
isolation. In daily life, in the ‘normal’ experience of existence, this strict
dependence between identity and difference disappears, erases itself and
becomes invisible. Our identity, as well as the identity of the other (the
difference), appears as absolute, as essence, as an original, primordial
experience. Identity makes sense only within a discursive chain of
differences: that which ‘is’ is entirely dependent on that which ‘it is not’. In
other words, identity and difference are constructed in and through
representation: they do not exist outside of it.
Identity does not exist ‘naturally’: it is something that is constructed,
always in relation to the identity of groups other than our own. Nothing
exists that is ‘naturally’ common to link the different individuals in a
determined group. Certainly there are certain ‘social’ conditions that exist
to make the groups see themselves as having common characteristics:
geography, gender, ‘race’, sexuality, and nation. But even these social
conditions have to be ‘represented;’ they have to be produced through
some form of representation. What a group has in common is the result of
a process of creation of symbols, images, memories, narratives, myths
that ‘cement’ the unity of a group, that define its identity. To paraphrase
the known expression that Benedict Anderson (1993) used to describe the
process of national formation, one can say that identity in general is an
‘imagined community.’ This ‘imagined community’ is constructed through
the various forms of representation.
It is in the intersection between representation and identity that we
can locate the active character of both. Representation is not a passive
field of mere register or expression of existing signifieds. Neither is
representation simply the effect of structures that are external to it:
capitalism, sexism, racism. The different social groups use representation
to forge their identity and the identities of other social groups.
Representation is not, however, a leveled field of play. Through
representation, decisive battles of creation and imposition of particular
17
signifiers are fought: this is a field crossed by relationships of power.

Identity is, therefore, actively produced in and through representation: it
is precisely power that gives identity its active, productive character.
Power situates itself in the two sides of the process of
representation: power defines the form of the process of representation;
representation, in turn, has specific effects, linked above all to the
production of cultural and social identities, reinforcing, thus the
relationships of power. Representation, however, is not simply a carrier of
power, a simple point of mediation between power as a determining force
and power as an effect. Power is inscribed in representation: it is ‘written’,
as a visible, legible mark in representation. In a way, it is precisely power
that is re-presented in representation. Take, for example, that photograph,
typical of nineteenth-century ethnography, in which the colonised subject
is photographed as an ‘object’ of knowledge, looking frightened toward the
camera. It is possible to ‘read’ in it all of the traces left by the relationships
of power that made possible precisely the existence of this photograph:
imperial domination, the inquisitorial look from the
photographer/ethnographer, the avoiding/submissive look of the person
being photographed (or, alternatively, his/her resisting, defiant look). The
relationships of power that function as conditions of possibility in this
representation left their mark and their indelible trace. Even if the function
of representation is to erase these marks and these traces, representation
is, nonetheless, always a social relationship, whether we see it as a
process or whether we see it as a product.
It is in this connection between representation, identity and power
that the ‘identity politics’ become important. Understanding that identity
and representation are political processes, the different social and cultural
groups, defined through a variety of dimensions (class, ‘race’, sexuality,
gender, etc.), claim their right to representation and identity. Power
relationships are dependent on the definition of certain identities as
‘normal,’ as hegemonic. Through ‘identity politics,’ subordinate groups
question precisely the normality and the hegemony of these identities. In
this contested terrain, ‘repressed’ identities claim not only their access to
representation, but also, above all, their right to control the process of
their representation.
Ironically, however, in the dominant regime of representation, the
dominant identity is the invisible norm that regulates all identities. Male,
white or heterosexual (or all of these elements together): identities that,
by functioning as the norm, do not appear as such. It is the other who is
ethnic. It is the other, as homosexual, who appears as a totalised identity:
defined exclusively by his or her sexuality. The feminine identity is marked
by lack in relation to that of man. The subordinate identity is always a
problem: a deviation from normality. It is, always, a marked identity. As a
consequence, the person who belongs to a subordinate group carries,
always, all the weight of representation. As a marked identity, it
represents, always and totally, that identity. In a society in which the
dominant regime of representation privileges the White person, the
18
dishonesty of a White person is simply that: the dishonesty of a person, a

‘normal’ person. On the contrary, the dishonesty of a Black person can
only represent the natural inclination of all Black persons to dishonesty.
Hence, a fundamental irony: in the dominant regime of representation, it is
the subordinate identity within the system of representation which carries
the burden, the weight of representation.
◆◆◆
Vignette III
Douglas Crimp (1992) carried out an analysis of representation about
people with AIDS. He analysed the photographs that were part of artistic
expositions in museums, as well as photographs published in the media.
Crimp sees in these photographs a repetition of the usual representation
about people with AIDS: ‘that they are ravaged, disfigured, and debilitated
by the syndrome; they are generally alone, desperate, but resigned to their
“inevitable” deaths’ (p. 118). At the heart of the ‘fetishistic cultivation and
promotion of the artist’s humanity is a certain disdain for the “ordinary”
humanity of those who have been photographed. They become the
“other”, exotic creatures, objects of contemplation’, registers Crimp (p.
125), quoting Alan Sekula. Crimp warns, however, that one must not face
these representation simply as false, to which one should oppose, then, a
true image of people with AIDS. For Crimp, this type of representation has,
of course, damaging effects: provoking pity instead of solidarity, they do
not help in any way those with AIDS. However, says Crimp, ‘we must
recognize that every image of a person with AIDS is a representation and
formulate our activist demands not in relation to the “truth” of the image,
but in relation to the conditions of its construction and to its social effects’
(p. 126). What these representations do is precisely to erase this context.
◆◆◆
Representation, Stereotype, Image

The notions of image and stereotype are linked one way or the other to
the notion of representation. Their history is probably previous to that of
representation as presented in analyses of the way in which culture
describes/produces its objects. In contemporary cultural analysis, these
notions are taken, at times, as the equivalent to those of representation; in
other cases, they are considered as incompatible with the notion of
representation.
The notion of stereotype, as currently used in Sociology and in Social
Psychology, designates the simplified forms, through which certain
cultural and social groups are described. The stereotype, as it happens
with representation in general, is a form of knowledge. In the process
through which we seek to know each other mutually, stereotypes function
19
as a kind of device of semiotic economy. In the stereotype, the complexity

of the other is reduced to a very small cluster of signs: solely the minimum
necessary to deal with the presence of the other without having to involve
oneself with the costly and painful process of dealing with the nuances,
subtleties and depth of alterity. Stereotypes are, thus, the result of a
complicated compromise. On the one hand, the existence of the other
forces me to place into action some form of knowing them. On the other
hand, this knowledge is restricted by a semiotic economy, in which the
law is the minimisation of affective and epistemological investment. In this
economy, the other, as object of knowledge, is fixed, frozen, immobilised.
Stereotype, in quite the same way as ideology, is an effort to contain the
fluidity, the indetermination, the uncertainty of language and of everything
social: ‘stereotype is a repeated word, outside all the magic, all the
enthusiasm ... it is ... the canonical, coercive form of the signified’
(Barthes, 1977a, p. 57). The stereotype is an attempt to repress the excess
of the signification: it is a salvage operation.
In this perspective, the stereotype cannot, therefore, be seen as
simply false. It is, instead, fundamentally ambiguous, expressing at the
same time a desire to know the other and the impulse to contain him. In a
more psycho-analytic perspective, as the one developed by Homi Bhaba
(1994), for example, the ambiguity of stereotypes develops also from the
psychic division that is established between fascination and curiosity
emanating from the presence of the other and, at the same time, anxiety
and the fear that such existence brings about. Stereotype is the resolution
of these contradictory impulses.
From one point of view, stereotype can be considered a form of
representation. In stereotypes, the other is represented through a certain
form of condensation in which processes of simplification, generalisation,
and homogenisation are involved. As a form of representation, stereotype
mobilises a considerable arsenal of semiotic strategies and resources. The
stereotype cannot be described merely as a disjunction between a reality
and an image, as a defect of reflection of vision or of projection. It is not
simply the case that ‘out there’, somewhere, there is a reality that
stereotype then projects or reflects in an imprecise or distorted form. It is
not simply a question of fidelity, of a true reproduction between an
original and its image. If it were this simple, the stereotype would be easily
dismissed. It is precisely because in the stereotype we find the investment
of a sophisticated semiotics of transformations, dislodgements and
condensations that it is effective. Its force lies in the fact that it deals with
a core that we can recognise as ‘real’ and that it is, then, submitted to a
series of transformations that amplify its effect of reality.
The notion of stereotype collides with the notion of representation,
however, in more than one point. From this point of view, stereotypes
would not be seen as a particular form of representation, but as an
inadequate notion. In the first place, the notion of stereotype, as
demonstrated even in the tentative of recovering made by Homi Bhaba
(1994), dislodges the focus of the analysis from the discursive, textual
20
level to the individual psychological level. The notion of stereotype,

contrary to the notion of representation emphasised by cultural analysis,
is focused on mental representation. In this individualising movement, one
stops focusing precisely on that which is central in cultural analysis: the
complicity between representation and power. This dimension of the
notion of stereotype dislodges, in a corresponding way, the needed
political action: from politics to a corrective psychology. In this
perspective, stereotypes are fought by an adjustment in attitude, by a
social therapy. Without denying that a change in attitude may have a role
in a global political strategy, the interest in cultural analysis is centred.
Instead, in the discursive, textual and institutional dimensions of
representation, and not on its individual, psychological dimensions. In a
way, the notions of stereotype and representation synthesise,
respectively, each one of these different concerns.
The second difficulty lies precisely in the idea of a
non-correspondence between reality and its representation that is
associated with the notion of stereotype. It presupposes, in a way, the
existence of a real that is, thus, distorted, refracted, deformed, by
stereotype. The cognitive and intellectual strategy that corresponds to
this understanding of the stereotype consists in contraposing to
stereotype precisely a ‘true’ description of that which stereotype distorts,
re-establishing, thus, a fidelity between the original and its reproduction in
representation. The corresponding political strategy is exemplified by the
effort of the groups that are victims of stereotypes in contraposing
negative, false images that are proper of the stereotype, with positive,
truer images. The notion of representation, such as it is used in
contemporary cultural analysis, contrary to the notion of stereotype, does
not have as a premise this reference to some domain of the real that has
an existence outside of representation. In the analyses based on the notion
of representation, the question is not that of reestablishing truth, but of
turning visible the relationships of power involved in the process of
representation.
A similar difficulty involves the notion of ‘image.’ Just as the notion of
stereotype presupposes a confrontation with a reality of which the
stereotype would be a distorted reproduction, the notion of image
presupposes the existence of a reality that the image simply reproduces.
In a way, stereotype is a particular case of image.
Contrarily to the notion of stereotype, however, the notion of image
shares with the notion of representation a similar focus in inscription, in
visibility, and in register. We can ‘see’ the representation; we can point to
it. The same occurs with image. The two notions began to separate,
however, as the notion of image is inscribed in a realist epistemology. The
concept of image is linked to those of imitation, reproduction, mimeses,
reflection, analogy, icon, all of them expressing the supposed double
existence of, on the one hand, an image and, on the other, a ‘real’ that that
image supposedly reflects, reproduces, imitates. The real is always
present as the criterion against which images are assessed, a real that is
21
never questioned as itself a product of representation (Pollock, 1990, p.

203). In contrast, the notion of representation, such as it is used in cultural
analysis, is centred in the aspects of construction and production of the
practices of signification. Image reflects reality; representation ‘is’ reality,
that is, the reality that matters.
As a reflection, image maintains a relationship of passivity with
reality. It is limited to reproducing it. The notion of image expresses, in a
way, a static vision of the process of signification. Image is only a register.
In this sense, the photograph, such as it is commonly understood, is the
image par excellence. Representation, on the other hand, is, in more than
one sense, active and productive. As a discursive strategy, it produces the
objects of which it speaks. Moreover, it cannot be produced without the
active mobilisation of a repertoire of semiotic, rhetorical, stylistic
resources. Finally, representation, as we have already seen, produces not
only objects, but subjects as well.
◆◆◆
Vignette IV [5]
Edward Said, in his book Orientalism (1978), was one of the first to
demonstrate some of the potential that the notion of representation came
to have in cultural analyses. In this book, he develops the idea that the
Orient is not an empirical given, but the creation of a particular Western
form of knowing: Orientalism. Orientalism is a form of representation:
What he says and writes, due to the fact of being said and written,
indicates that what is orientalist is outside of the Orient, existentially as
well as morally. The principal product of this exteriority is, of course,
representation. My analysis of the orientalist text, therefore, emphasises
the evidence of such representations as representations, and not as
‘natural’ descriptions of the Orient. What must be sought are the styles,
figures of speech, scenarios, narrative mechanisms, historical and social
circumstances, and not the correction of representation, nor its fidelity to
some great original. The exteriority of representation is always governed
by some version of the truism according to which, if the Orient could
represent itself, it would do so; since it cannot, the representation
undertakes the task for the West and, faute de mieux, for the poor Orient.
The fact that Orientalism has any sense depends more on the West than
on the Orient, and this meaning is directly tributary to the various
Western techniques of representation that turn the Orient visible, of
course, and ‘there’ in the discourse about it. These representation are
used, for their effects from institutions, traditions, conventions and
consented codes, and not from a distant and amorphous Orient.
◆◆◆
22
Realism and Representation

Representation is at its most efficacious when it presents itself in its realist
disguise. Its efficacy depends, in great part, on the realist premises that
accompany it. Realism, as we know, is characterised by the
presupposition that representation – in arts, in photography, in literature
reflects, mimetically the world, the ‘reality’: ‘... the term [realism] is useful
in the distinction between forms that tend to erase their own textuality,
their existence as discourse and those that explicitly call attention to it’
(Belsey, 1982, p. 58). From the realist perspective, the means of
representation – fundamentally, language – function to present to us, in a
transparent way, ‘reality.’ When stripped of its realist premise, what
become transparent in representation are the mechanisms and artifices
through which representation fabricates its ‘reality.’
Cultural analysis has problematised realism in several fields of
cultural production: in the arts in general, in cinema, in photography, in
literature, even in the sciences. In literature, for example, realism, as it is
analysed by Barthes (1992) was central to the novel of the nineteenth
century. Here, the codes and literary artifices function to give the reader
the illusion of a direct contact with reality: ‘the narration does not appear
to be the voice of an author; its source appears to be a true reality which
speaks’ (Coward & Ellis, 1977, p. 49). Cinematographic narrative is
fundamentally realist. It is difficult to imagine cinema without the illusion
of reality brought about by narrative construction. It is significant that a
film such as The Rear Window (Hitchcock), in which a couple looks at the
‘world’ through the window of their apartment, can be considered as an
adequate metaphor of cinema itself. Photography is the form of realist
representation par excellence. Everything in the photograph functions to
give us the impression that the representation ‘is’ reality: ‘... Photography
... effaces the marks of its making (and maker) at the click of a shutter. A
photograph appears to be self-generated – as though it had created itself’
(Solomon-Godeau, 1991, p. 180). Visual arts in general, in spite of the
subversion introduced by the various modernist movements, are still, in
good part, dependent on realist premises.
In realism, representation functions to erase the vestiges of the work
that produced it. Realism supposes, fundamentally, an equivalence
between representation and ‘reality’, between signifier and signified. This
equivalence, however, can only be obtained at the cost of hiding the
process of its production. Realist representation is, nevertheless,
representation: the result of a complex process of signification. Realist
representation is not, after all, identical to reality: its ‘coincidence’ is only
an effect of a construction, of a magic, of an artifice. The signifiers of
realist representation are, in spite of everything, just this: signifiers.
Ironically, the ‘reality’ that realism supposes to present is simply an
illusion: in turn, the reality that it produces is quite ‘real.’
23
Realism forces us to see representation only as a product: a fixed

product, finished, static. The conventions, the codes, the artifices of
construction used by realism function to bring the play of signification to a
close, giving us, in turn, the comfort and the certainty of the familiar, of
the recognisable. In realism, we try to suppress the productivity of
representation to give place to the immobility of what is already known, to
the sensation of ‘reality.’ By hiding the conditions of its production,
realism freezes the signification, paralyses the representation in its state
of identity with the real. The premise of identity between representation
and the represented, between signifier and signified, on which realism is
founded, naturalises the ‘world.’ Realist representation is fundamentally
conformist: even (or mainly) when it is involved in social critique.
Besides naturalising the world, however, realism also essentialises it.
The work of production being suppressed, the play of signification
remains reduced to a search for essence: ‘the realist narrative functions to
uncover a world of truth, a world without contradictions, a homogeneous
world of appearance supported by essences’ (Coward & Ellis, 1977, p. 49).
In the domain of realistic representation, the productivity of signification
gives place to the immobility of the transcendental signified. Essentialism
freezes the signified. It is original: it has an origin outside of this world. It
is eternal: it existed and will exist forever. In realism, the ‘family’, for
example, is an essence that exists outside of history and of representation:
it becomes identical to nature.
The effects of reality (Barthes), the effects of truth (Foucault) and the
metaphysics of presence (Derrida): various expressions through which
post-structuralism exposed the illusions created by realism. They are
three moments in which representation is revealed in all its condition of
‘something fabricated’ – of a fetish (Latour, 1996). Barthes exposes the
processes of construction through which representation appears to us as
identical to reality, subverting, thus its effect on reality. With Foucault, the
value of truth in representation ceases to be seen as a function of a
supposed coincidence (or not) with the real to be conceived, purely and
simply, as an effect of discourse and power. With Derrida, representation
is characterised, definitively, as a result of a differential chain of signifiers,
and not as a place where the presence of the signified is lodged. Together,
they rescue representation from the world of ‘reality’ that it supposedly
pictures, making it return to the world to which it truly belongs: the world
of discourse, of language, and of ‘things fabricated’. After them it will be
impossible to claim, again, the supposed right of realism to
representation.
◆◆◆
24
Vignette V
Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins analysed the photographic style of the
magazine National Geographic, describing the photograph as the place of
crossing of seven types of gazes: that of the photographer; of the
magazine, of the reader; of the non-Western subject; of the Western
subject; the gaze refracted from the other (the other seeing himself as
others see him); the academic gaze:
All photographs tell stories about looking. These looks are
ambiguous, charged with feeling and power. We can see that is it not
simply a captured view of the other, but rather a dynamic site at which
many gazes or viewpoints intersect. The photograph and the non-Western
person share two fundamental attributes: they are objects at which we
look. The lines of gaze perceptible in the photograph suggest the multiple
forces at work in creating photographic meaning. The position of
spectator has the potential to enhance or articulate the power of the
observer over the observed. Colonial social relationships are enacted
largely through a ‘regime of visibility’ in which the look is crucial both for
identifying the other and for raising questions of how racist discourse can
enclose the mirrored self, as well as the other within itself. The
photograph and all its intersections of gaze then, are a site at which
identification and the conflict of maintaining a stereotyped view of
difference occurs. The crucial role of photography in the exercise of
power lies in its ability to allow for close study of the Other. The
multiplicity of looks is at the root of a photo’s ambiguity, each gaze
potentially suggesting a different way of viewing the scene (Lutz & Collins,
1994).
◆◆◆
Representation and Vision:

between the visible and the ‘sayable’
Representation is closely associated with gaze, to vision. In one way or
another, the question of gaze, as well as that of representation, has been
at the centre of cultural analysis. The role of the masculine gaze in the
objectifying of woman, for example, has been central to feminist analysis
of film (Mulvey, 1988; Kaplan, 1997). Imperial Eyes is the title of an
important book in the area of cultural analysis known as ‘post-colonialism’
(Pratt, 1992). Vision and representation, observation and register, are also
inseparable in the strategies of inscription used by science (Crary, 1992),
and in the construction of modern social theory (Jay, 1994).
Representation is directly dependent on a scopic regime, on a regime of
vision. From the perspective of cultural analysis, vision and
representation, in connection with power, are combined to produce
alterity and identity.
25
Vision – naked or artificially, prosthetically, augmented – is situated,

in a way, between the representation and the representable. Curious, the
gaze scrutinises the field of visible things: what it returns is
representation. To say, however, that vision is an element of mediation
does not mean, however, to go back to some kind of realism, renouncing
the assertion of the constructed and indeterminate character of
representation. To say that representation is the result of the operation
through which gaze scrutinises the field of visible things is not the same as
to say that representation is constituted exactly through the presence of
visible things. That which, through the gaze, is returned by
representation, is not the visible: something that gaze surprised in an
instant that for a moment, a brief moment, could have escaped the artifice
of representation. Observation is never done by a naked eye: between it
and the things seen, there is already – interposed – language. When it
returns, through representation, it is again language that is in the way. To
postulate the existence of the visible, in opposition to the sayable, as
Foucault did, does not mean, therefore, to renounce representation, but
only to recognise the active role of vision in the formation of
representation.
There is, as we have seen, a necessary connection between
representation and power. There is, in the same way, a corresponding
connection between vision and power. Because of its active character,
vision is, of all the senses, perhaps the one that best expresses the
presence and the efficacy of power. Many of the very operations of power
are realized and are effected in gaze, through gaze. It is through gaze that
man transforms woman into object: immobilised, and available for his
pleasure and enjoyment. The imperial gaze that, sovereign, encompasses
everything, that unveils everything in the colonial setting, expresses more
than anything the domination of the coloniser over places and persons
(Pratt, 1992). The gaze of the official police photographer is the most
concrete expression of state and institutional power to judge and punish:
its counterpart is the frightened, impotent – rarely defiant – gaze of the
person thus captured. The relaxed, comfortable, benevolent, superior gaze
– a gaze with raised eyebrows – of any person in position of authority
contrasts with the humbled, frightened, reverent – a gaze with lowered
eyebrows – of the person in an inferior position. There is still the scientific
gaze, the medical gaze that freezes and paralyses the humanity of the
person being observed as a mere object of knowledge. The total gaze, all
encompassing, that sees everything, is the supreme expression of a
control, and of a power that in its visual efficacy can allow itself to
renounce resorting to force and violence (Foucault, 1977). In sum, vision
and power are mutually, insolubly, implicated.
It is in representation, however, that the power of gaze, the gaze of
power, find its materialisation; it is in representation that the visible
becomes sayable. It is in representation and visibility that we enter the
domain of signification. Visibility without representation realises merely
half of the trajectory that links vision with language: here visible things are
26
seen already as dependent on the signified, on previous representations.

They only acquire, however, an additional signification, a surplus of
signification, when they materialize in a signified that exceeds visibility:
when they become representation.
It is also in representation that the different gazes that in the domain
of visibility precede representation meet each other, cross each other: the
gaze of who represents, of who has the power of representing; the gaze of
who is represented, whose lack of power prevents that he or she
represent himself or herself; the gaze of who looks at a representation; the
gazes of the persons situated in the representation in different positions of
power. The representation is not, therefore, merely the result of one gaze,
that then leaves, having accomplished its mission, for the realm of the
visible things. Gaze, like a social relationship, survives in representation.
Gaze is, in this sense, not only previous to representation: it is also its
contemporary.
Would it be possible to postulate the mutuality, the horizontality, of
gaze? Would it be possible to assert the subversive, rebellious power of
the defiant, irreverent gaze? Will it be inevitable that gaze serve as
mediator merely of the relationships of knowledge and power that they
objectify, that make the other inferior? Would we be forced, if we want to
compensate in any way its verticalising tendency, to have recourse to a
sense knowingly more inclined to symmetry and to horizontality as is
hearing and listening? Similar questions may be made with respect to
representation. Will it be possible to separate, in any way, the
representation from its complicity with power?
◆◆◆
Vignette VI
It is not only people, individually or in groups that are taken as objects of
representation. Although, in one way or another, it is subjectivity that, in
the end, is implicated in representation, we can also talk of representation
of places, as, for example, does Mary Pratt in her analysis of colonial and
imperial travel literature in her book Imperial Eyes. In chapter 9, she
focuses on the writings of British travellers during the Victorian period
and on contemporary travel writing as well. Citing a typical description of
this kind of writing by Richard Burton, just after he ‘discovered’ Lake
Tanganyika in Africa, she says:
As a rule the ‘discovery’ of sites like Lake Tanganyika involved making
one’s way to the region and asking the local inhabitants if they knew of
any big lakes, etc. in the area, then hiring them to take you there,
whereupon with their guidance and support you proceeded to discover
what they already knew. Crudely, then, discovery in this context
consisted of a gesture of converting local knowledges (discourses) into
European national and continental knowledges associated with
27
European forms and relations of power. The ‘discovery’ itself has no

existence of its own. It only gets ‘made’ for real after the traveler
returns home, and brings it into being through texts. Here is language
charged with making the world in the most single-handed way.
Analyzing Victorian discovery rhetoric, I have found it useful to identify
three conventional means that create qualitative and quantitative value
for the explorer’s achievement. First, and most obvious, the landscape
is estheticized. The sight is seen as a painting and the description is
ordered in terms of background, foreground, and symmetries between
foam-flecked water and mist-flecked hills. Second, density of meaning in
the passage is sought. The landscape is represented as extremely rich
in material and semantic substance. This density is achieved especially
through a huge number of adjectival modifiers – scarcely a noun in the
text is unmodified. The third strategy at work here is the relation of
mastery predicted between the seer and the seen. The metaphor of the
painting itself is suggestive. If the scene is a painting, then Burton is
both the viewer there to judge and appreciate it and verbal painter who
produces it for others.
◆◆◆
The Poetics and Politics of the Curriculum

As a site of knowledge, the curriculum is the expression of our
conceptions of what constitutes knowledge. In general, the notion of
knowledge that is expressed there is fundamentally realist. There exists an
objective world of facts, things, and abilities or, at best, of fixed signifieds
that must be transmitted. In this conception, the curriculum is nothing
more than a repertoire of these elements. It is up to didactics,
methodology, pedagogy, to find the best way of transmitting this static
repertoire of elements of a discovered reality that is then simply reflected,
mirrored, by knowledge. In this perspective, the ‘real’ world is not
represented in knowledge nor is it in curriculum: the real world is, right
there, a presence; it presents itself there, directly, without mediation of
representation. This is a concept of knowledge and of curriculum as a
presence: presence of the real and of the signified in knowledge and in
curriculum; presence of the real and of the signified for transmitter and
receiver.
Curriculum is not, however, as the realist concept wants, a site of
transmission of knowledge conceived as a mere revelation or transcription
of the ‘real’. Curriculum, as well as language, is not a transparent vehicle
that limits itself to serve as a carrier to a ‘reality’ that knowledge brings
forth. Curriculum is itself a representation: not only a site in which signs
that are produced in other places circulate, but also a place of production
of signs in its own right. To conceive of the curriculum as a representation
means to see it as the surface of inscription, as the material support of
knowledge in its guise of signifier. In the conception of curriculum as
28
representation, knowledge is not the transcription of ‘reality’:

transcription is what is real.
Within the realist and objectivist concept of curriculum, it is not
possible, evidently, to give consideration to relations of power. In the
supposed correspondence between, on the one hand, the world of facts
and fixed signifieds and, on the other hand, the curriculum and knowledge,
there is no place for mediation, much less for a mediation realised through
relations of power: within the realist perspective, this correspondence is
simply a fact of nature and of life. The realist concept of knowledge and
curriculum suppresses, thus, any notion of politics. The static world of
things and fixed signifieds is a world without dispute, without
contestation. It is simply there: it is a given.
The surface of representation that is the curriculum is a highly
contested area. To represent means, ultimately, to define what counts as
real, what counts as knowledge. It is this power of definition that is in play
in the curriculum conceived as representation. Representation, as a
practice of language, consists precisely of the attempt to tame the savage,
rebellious process of signification. Representation is an attempt – always
frustrated – to fix, to close the process of signification. To fix, to close: this
is precisely what makes it a game of power. As a terrain where the game of
signification and representation is played, the curriculum is thus an object
of vital dispute.
We will be coming close to a concept of curriculum as
representation, as a site – a contested site admittedly – of construction of
objects of knowledge, if we began to see it, first as a text, as discourse, as
sign, as a practice of signification. In this alternative conception,
knowledge cannot be separated from its existence as sign, from its
material existence as a discursive object. The sign does not reflect, here,
simply, transparently, univocally, in a non-problematic way, signifieds
whose existence may be traced to an extra-linguistic world. In the
perspective that sees knowledge and curriculum as representation, sign is
involved in an active way – it is an accomplice – in the production of that
which counts as knowledge and as curriculum. In this process of
production, sign is not only an object of dispute: it is more than that, a site
of struggle and of conflict. Sign is, here, a field of forces whose vectors are
relations of power. Curriculum would be, thus, a struggle around sign,
around representation.
To conceive of curriculum as text, however, does not mean to see it
simply as a readerly text, in the sense of Barthes. That is, the knowledge
embodied in curriculum is not there as a text merely to be the object of an
act of interpretation that limits itself to searching for a correspondence
with a group of signifiers whose existence may be traced to authorship,
intention or pre-existing reality. In this logocentric concept there is only
one question to pose when facing a text: what is its referent, to what
(pre-existing) signified does it refer? To conceive of curriculum as text, in
contrast, means to see it, above all, as a writerly text, again in the sense of
Barthes. Here, the text opens up itself fully to its productivity. The
29
interaction with the text should not be limited, in this perspective, to

simply ascertaining the presence of a signified to which the text univocally
refers. The text appears, here, in its existence as écriture, in the sense that
Derrida gives to this word. In the text seen as writerly text, the signified
does not exist in a separate domain from that of the signifier: the signified
exists only through the signifier, but not as a presence, rather as a trace
that is linked, in a chain of difference, to other signifieds. In this concept
the text is an attempt to fix a signified that, nevertheless, will always
escape us. It is this indetermination, this instability, that gives its
productivity to signifier, to text: text becomes, thus, fully writerly.
To conceive of curriculum as representation means, therefore, to
highlight the work of its production, it means to expose it as the artifact
that it is. To see curriculum as representation implies to expose and
question codes, conventions, stylistics and artifices through which it is
produced: it implies to make visible the marks of its architectural
construction. There is a place here for a poetics of curriculum. From the
perspective of a poetics of curriculum, curriculum is not seen as a pure
expression or register of a reality or of a pre-existing signified: curriculum
is the linguistic, discursive creation of a reality of its own. A poetics of
curriculum as representation calls our attention to the measure in which
knowledge is dependent on codes, on conventions: on rhetorical
resources. These rhetorical resources structure representation that makes
up curriculum. Its affective efficacy, its effect of reality, cannot be
separated from aesthetic elements that precisely make it to be, above all, a
representation. In this perspective, the focus is not on the signified, but on
the signifier. In a poetics of curriculum, the signifier does not simply
appear as a transparent vehicle through which the signified is expressed;
the signifier is the raw material of representation.
However, to understand the curriculum as representation means also
to emphasise that the rhetorical resources that govern its poetics do not
have merely ornamental or aesthetic objectives or effects: the mobilization
that curriculum makes of these resources is closely linked to relations of
power. The affective efficacy that is made available by poetic resources
mobilised in its construction does not get exhausted in the aesthetics of
its production. Representation is always authorised representation: its
force and meaning are highly dependent on the authority that is
necessarily linked to power. The process of signification is also a game of
imposition of signifieds, a game of power. The text that constitutes
curriculum is not simply a text: it is a text of power. It is not enough,
therefore, to have a poetics of curriculum: we need a politics of curriculum
as well. To conceive of curriculum as representation implies to see it
simultaneously, inseparably, as a poetics and as a politics. Its effects of
power are entirely dependent on its aesthetic effects; conversely, its
aesthetic effects make sense only within an affective economy moved by a
will to obtain effects of power.
Although the notion of curriculum as representation may have a wide
and overreaching implication, it is in the analysis of the role of curriculum
30
in the production of identity and of social difference that this conception

is particularly useful. As we know, there is a close connection between the
process of discursive production of identity and difference that
characterizes representation, on the one hand, and cultural and social
production of identity and difference, on the other. The production of
identity and difference takes place in and through representation. As
representation, the curriculum is directly involved in this process. It is
here, in this intersection between representation and identity, that
curriculum acquires its political importance. Representation, in
connection with power, is centrally involved in what we become. There is
neither identity nor alterity outside representation. Curriculum is, right
there, in that exact point of intersection between power and
representation, a site for the production of identity and of alterity. It is
precisely here, at this point, that curriculum becomes a privileged terrain
of struggle around representation.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Carmen Tesser for her translation of this paper from
Portuguese, and Roger Deacon, University of Natal, South Africa for his
careful reading of an earlier version.
Correspondence
Tomaz Tadeu da Silva, Rua Ludolfo Boehl, 756 apto. 305, Porto Alegre – RS,
Brasil (tomaz@contrabando.com; http://www.contrabando.com).
Notes
[1] I did not have access to Hevey’s book. I am basing my statements on a review
of the book done by Anne Finger.
[2] In the Brasilian translation of S/Z, scriptable is translated ‘escrevívil’
(writeable) (Barthes, 1992, p. 38). In the translation of Roland Barthes by
Roland Barthes, we find ‘escriptível’ (writerly) (Barthes, 1977b, p. 127).
[3] Strangely in a recent book (I refer to a pedagogical book from the Open
University) that focuses on the notion of representation within Cultural
Studies, Stuart Hall adopts a position that restored the mentalist,
psychologising, Saussurian definition of sign. Stuart Hall postulates, here, the
existence of two systems of representation! In the first place, he affirms ‘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’ (Hall, 1997, p. 17, his emphasis: I emphasise, on the other
hand, ‘in our heads’). For him, ‘language is the second system of
representation’ (p. 18). Stuart Hall restores, thus, the existence of a
pre-linguistic world of signification. Stuart Hall does not limit himself here to
restore Saussure: on postulating the existence of two systems of
representation, he radicalises it. How could we imagine that it would be up to
31
Stuart Hall, of all people to restore the metaphysics of presence in the cultural
analysis of representation? His characterisation of the notion of
representation, in this specific book, contradicts in a strong way the emphasis
in the process of signification as inseparable from language, from text, from
discourse, from writing that has characterized contemporary cultural
analyses.
[4] Evidently, in this sentence ‘representation’ is used in the place of ‘signified,’ in
the mentalist sense of Saussure.
[5] In this one and in the Vignettes V and VI, the citation is a montage of phrases
selected from several passages from the text in question. They do not have
this sequence in the original text. For reasons of clarity, I opted for not
indicating here the suppressions.
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The Poetics and Politics of Curriculum As Representation

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Pedagogy, Culture and Society

ISSN: 1468-1366 (Print) 1747-5104 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpcs20

The poetics and politics of curriculum as

Tomaz Tadeu Da Silva

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The Poetics and Politics of

TOMAZ TADEU DA SILVA

ABSTRACT The notion of knowledge that is expressed in current notions of

There is much discussion these days about a supposed ‘crisis of

subjugation; Utopia becomes horror and nightmare; reason becomes

(Pollock, 1994, p. 14). ‘Identity politics’ situates itself, therefore, in the

The first photograph is exemplary of the way in which handicapped

Representation and Signification

As we know, Saussure, having language as his focus, emphasised the

This proto-post-structuralist moment of Barthes would have been

what characterises the signification, as well as the representation. Finally,

that constructs the illness as a divine punishment for sexual perversion is

In his last studies, Foucault centred his analyses in the close

moments in the history of museum making, we have intended to question

Representation, Identity, Power

signifiers are fought: this is a field crossed by relationships of power.

dishonesty of a White person is simply that: the dishonesty of a person, a

Representation, Stereotype, Image

as a kind of device of semiotic economy. In the stereotype, the complexity

level to the individual psychological level. The notion of stereotype,

never questioned as itself a product of representation (Pollock, 1990, p.

Realism and Representation

Realism forces us to see representation only as a product: a fixed

Representation and Vision:

Vision – naked or artificially, prosthetically, augmented – is situated,

seen already as dependent on the signified, on previous representations.

European forms and relations of power. The ‘discovery’ itself has no

The Poetics and Politics of the Curriculum

representation, knowledge is not the transcription of ‘reality’:

interaction with the text should not be limited, in this perspective, to

in the production of identity and of social difference that this conception

Hall, S. (Ed.). (1997) Representation. Cultural representations and signifying practices.

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