darren's essay

8/2/2019 Darren's Essay

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Darren Daykin

Portraiture can be a useful way to analyze culture through representation.

Discuss this statement with reference to images from different cultural

contexts and writings from the reading list.

The Representation of any higher order information, such as of a

proposition, such a culture in a photograph, is always going to be problematic by

virtue of the fact that any description of what is being presented that moves

away from what has been denoted is an assumption - a contingent, if you will,

based upon an assumption of experience(s). Roland Barthes recognizes the

problem of the assumptive nature of representation in the beginning of chapter

three in Camera Lucida where he says:

Then I decided that this disorder and this dilemma revealed by my desire

to write on photography, corresponded to my discomfort I had always

suffered from: the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two

languages, one of expression the other critical.

In chapter 15 Barthes readdresses the problem in a different guise: -

Since every photograph is a contingent (and thereby outside of

meaning), Photography cannot signify (aim at generally) except by

assuming a mask


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In chapter 15 Barthes skirts around the issue of a reconciliation between

these two problematic languages, and asks his readers to side step the

importance of the reconciliation by simply stating, Yet the mask is a difficult

region of photography. What is perhaps more accurate a statement is: the

mask is difficult to explain using semiotics alone, as semiotics is wholly

dependent on reason, and when we look at portraiture as a useful way to analyze

culture through representation and try to make meaning from what is being

proposed, at a base of understanding we need to recognize concept behind Rene

Magrittes painting La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images)and defer to

notion that it is still not a pipe. (Fig. 1)

(fig. 1)


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It could be easy to discount the notion of the mask (the mask being a

crude resolution between the two languages) to impart meaning as it is based on

something quite arbitrary, but, that we all can share the same mental framework

of understanding when we receive such information, (even if we are opposed to

it) and that we so readily take onboard this arbitrary information and make

meaning from it suggests that we are perhaps able to derive some sort of

causality from experience through a synthesis, as, We all share these categories

of experience (Kant. 1999).

The idea of synthesis is not at all new in the traditions of philosophical

thinking, from Aristotelian colloquies to Hegelian dialectics; these forms of non-

inductive reasoning are used to make logical arguments about any proposition

through: an idea, its negation and the combination or thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

For example, If we consider the idea of a rainy day, we must instantly also

understand its antithesis a day without rain, and a synthesis that would give us

a reasonable conclusion of the weather, alternately, if we consider the

proposition of existence as the thesis, non-existence as the antithesis resulting

in the synthesis history. This mode of rational reasoning is at the heart of

Structuralism, from the Sausurrian tradition, in which we can only know

something negatively. E.g. we arent able to understand (assume a meaning) a

thing in isolation, it must be measured against other thing within its semiotic

framework, only from this position can we conclude that we now know it, but

not as what is, but what it isnt - as not being those other things within the

framework. In the field of identity it important to assert that; one can only know

oneself negatively as the not-other.


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This mode of thinking fails to address, what Bathes calls, the language of

expression and what would be better described as Empiric (guided by

experience). Kant perfectly illustrates and reconciles the two, problematic

languages (critical vs. expressive Rational vs. Empirical), in his critique of pure

reason: -

That a straight line between two points is the shortest is a synthetic

proposition. For my concept of straight contains no notion of quantity,

but only of quality. The concept of shortness is thus wholly an addition,

and it cannot be derived from any analysis from the concept of a straight

line. Intuition must, therefore, lend its aid here, by means of which alone

is this synthesis possible. (Kant. 1999)

To contextualize the above argument, consider the widely accepted

statement: The continent of Africa is part of the 3rd world. My concept of Africa

contains no notion of an alternate continental genus, but only of a landmass. The

concept of the 3rd world is thus wholly an addition and it cannot be derived from

any analysis from the concept of the African continent (Even though the

definition of Africa that I have used in not necessarily the most accurate, as it can

be further reduced, I feel that the argument is still valid as an illustration of

Kants). Because we all share the same frameworks of experience not only does

synthetic a prioir judgments give us a reasonable framework for representation

but Kant has proven that they must also exists, independently, and outside of

pure reason. (fig. 2)


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(fig. 2)

So from the root these unquantifiable ideas of Judgment and intuition are

present in the creation of meaning. The problem of meaning is that of choice, but

choice is all but removed by hegemonic discourse. Thinking outside of the box

means to have thoughts and ideas that are outside of or conflict or compete with

established narratives and hegemonic discourse. The arbitrary nature of

defining meaning from first order information means that there are gaps in our

relationships to the external world that need to be connected, institutions fill


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that void using prescriptivism and are reinforced with the rhetoric of motivated

bias, this is as true of culture as representation and representation of culture as

it is of any other sign: -

Culture is of course to be found operating within a civil society, where

influence of ideas, institutions and of other persons work not through

domination but through consent. In any society not totalitarian, certain

cultural forms predominate over others, just as certain ideas are more

influential than others. The form of this cultural leadership is what

Gransci calls Hegemony. (Said).

Illustrations of cultural leadership are perhaps most apparent in colonial

criticism and post-colonial theory. Representations as culture, becomes

successful when they are able to exploit the gaps in our relationship to the

external world by fixing meanings within those gaps. An example of the

problems of representing the decentralized the other vs. the centralized -

cultural leaders - is the gaze and more specifically the fixed gaze and

associated narrative, as the gaze become a fixed paradigm and is disseminated

through hegemony.

Imagine a photographer is commissioned to photography people from a

culture different from his own, I think it is fair to say that the photographers

cultural persuasion is likely, perhaps automatically going to influence his/her

photograph, and if their cultural persuasion contains ideas of these others as

being decentralized, it is likely that on some level (overt or covert) these ideas


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would be present in their photography. Here lies the power of the author. If

these photographs or writings (anything that has an author), are constantly

distributed in to culture as a forms of knowledge, as was the case in the colonial

period, the representations of the other contained with the text will forever

contain these notions of the other as decentralized to the point where it

becomes a part of the narrative of the culture.

Its not the case the Orientalist discourse is necessarily true or false. It is

the case though that it insidiously devaluates the subject of its attention

that there is an implicit Eurocentricism which Said does go as far to

consider a form of racism in Orientalism, quite irrespective of any

measure or degree of truth that what are, the meticulous researches of

what a lot of these characters turn up. (Fry. P: 2009)

Through the authority of structuralism and perhaps colonial criticism; we

have seen and adopted ideas of the 3rd World, The Nobel savage, etc, as an

acceptable representation of groups of the decentralized others, without

necessarily understanding that the premise of the statement does in fact

decentralize the other.

My analysis of the Orientailist text therefore places emphasis on the

evidence. Which is no way invisible for such representations as

representations, not as natural descriptions of the Orient (Said)


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Through the writing of Homi Bahbah, whos post-colonialist critique,

(which differed greatly from that of Saids, as Bahbah considered the position of

the subaltern), gave an academic voice to the decentralized other. While the

other is still considered decentralized it now has a voice that attempts to

challenge the narratives associated with the other: -

I move slowly in the world, accustomed now to seek no longer for

upheaval. I progress by crawling. And already I am being dissected under

white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed . Having adjusted their

micrometers, they objectively cut away slices of my reality. I am laid bare.

I feel, I see in those white faces that it is not a new man who has come in,

but a new kind of man, a new genus. Why? Its a Negro! (Fenton.

1952:116)

The African America academic W.E.B. Du Bois, with, I imagine, an

understanding of the power/knowledge structure of hegemonic representation

decides to create his own identity of the population of African Americans, with a

view to replacing, more than stereotypes of the African in America, but to

broaden the existing, narrow, narrative of African Americans. Instead of the

mask of slavery as Barthes suggest we seen in Richard Avedons portrait of

William Casby (fig. 3), he depicts civilized Africans with middle class, western,

sensibilities, as an alternative paradigm. (fig. 4)


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(fig. 3)


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(fig. 4)

While this strategy would have been successful if you simply measure

success as being raising the profile of African American in a positive light, the

success is pyrrhic at best as it removes Africanicity and perpetuates the colonial

idea that African arent good enough because they are not like us. As if the

reduction of Africanicity equates to an increase in civility. Which perversely

makes African culture reach for a bar that has been set by non-Africans, which


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sound suspiciously like a modern form of the same colonialism, governed by

totalitarian ideals that are driven by motivated bias. But perhaps this is to be

expected as Dubois was educated at Harvard therefore the question of Hybridity

must be asked, particularly as it is so evident in his photography.

In contrast to Du Bois, Samuel Fossos self-portraits, shows the absurdity

of the root of the current hegemonic narrative about, perhaps all non-whites but

specific to Africans, as derived from the structuralist traditions of Hegel,

Saussure and Barthes. On one hand, his photographs ask questions about the

dialectic structure, it self, in which he, himself, as an African and the western

world has been defined. If the west is defined by what it is not, the question

asks do you know what it is that you arent? (fig. 5). Namely his representation

of himself and a mind set of an African in his self-portraits. His photographs

upset the balance of the mutually dependent dialectic; if the narrative of the

African identity is redefined then so to must the narrative of the west. Forcing

the western world to look internally and reexamine what has been proposed.

Alternatively, with absurdity of the representational system as a theme, Fossos

self-portraits makes aware the fact that African are seen as decentralized and

asks the question how far from the center are we removed in your opinion, Is

this enough?


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(fig. 5)

In conclusion Id like to reiterate that ideas get decimated through

hegemonic discourse, by the time theses ideas reach the mainstream culture, the

ideas have become warped - going through the empiric and/or divisive filters of

some form of distortion, where is it apparent that, in many cases, theory

becomes distorted-fact, or what Said has called motivated bias. While the zenith

of academic and scientific study is the emergence of irrefutable truth, which is

typically elusive, the academic, in this case Said, understands this to the point


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that he makes mention the facts that there are other questions to be asked,

researched and answered, in his introduction, that may or may not solidify his

position.

I believe its safe to assert that culture is popular opinion. The question of

where opinion is formed does not seem to be the concern of the layman. The

dissemination of culture is distributed through networks of institution and

media where ideas are packaged in such a way that lends its self to these types of

distortion. The term the other is synonymous with anything other than the

western white male and is one such package that covertly continues to

perpetuate the idea of a central self vs. a decentralized other in the eyes of the

layperson. By changing the definite article the to the indefinite article to an,

cultural differences are put on equal footing, the other that we are concerned

with at the time becomes centralized when the concerns of that other are in

question or in comparison to another other, as we see with Bahbah interest in

the colonial effects of the subaltern and Said interest in the west, both

approaches have merit and are valid, the question of there differences in method

essentially become a question of mere perspective.

So how do we represent an other? The only way to make an accurate

representation anything with authenticity is by using natural signs, but it seems

that such a proposition is impossible, because of the absence of natural signs in

any referent. Alternately, I propose making theoretical and cultural assumption

readily available or to make theoretical and cultural assumptions clear in a

photograph. If cultural differences were celebrated rather than seen as


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antagonistic these assumption would inform an audience and contextualize the

photograph in a way such as to make bias an open proposition rather than a

form of covert brow beating.

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