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hall

https://www.msu.edu/course/atl/125/fernandez/hall.html[4/11/2010 1:22:21 AM]

Stuart Hall was the Director of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham and iscurrently Professor of Sociology at The Open University.

Stuart Hall Websites

http://www.tiac.net/users/thaslett/s_hall/hall_index.html

http://socsci.open.ac.uk/SocSci/johnh/d318.html (a guide to the course Stuart Hall teaches in England)

Below are the transcripts of two films about Stuart Hall’s theories:

Race -- the Floating Signifier

Representation and the Media

Stuart Hall Race -- the Floating Signifier

directed by Sut Jally, Media Education Foundation, 1997

Classification and power work together. Classification maintains the order in any system.

We cannot think without classification.

The survival of biological thinking

Race is one of the major concepts which organize the great classification systems (including gender and class) whichoperate in human societies. Classification seems basic to human thinking. What is the right strategy for an anti-racistpolitics? Just being "black" does not guarantee that your politics will be correct. In order to find a politics that willend racism, "You can't just say, well black people are doing such and such and they must be right." I want to discussan approach to the political. There are no guarantees. Failure is always possible. You must do "right" because there isno guarantee ethically and theoretically that your position is "right."

Race is a discursive construct.Despite the fact that scientists have agreed that biological race does not exist, race thinking of all sorts persists. Why isthis? This is the subject of this lecture. Some people believe that all that can usefully be said about race has alreadybeen said.

If the biological concept of race cannot hold water, we must resort to a socio-cultural concept of race. W.E. B. DuBois told us that racial differences are impossible to corellate with intelligence, personality, etc. Nevertheless, racepersists and Du Bois argues that color is important as a badge of the social heritage and insult of slavery.

1. there is scientific consensus on this 2. there is no relationship between intelligence and race but a small minority of researchers continue to try to "prove"that this is so

examples:

Charles Murray The Bell Curve, Christopher Brandliberal thinking is also based partly on biological assumptions about racegenetic definitions of race are common across the political spectrum and in everyday thinking

http://www.tiac.net/users/thaslett/s_hall/hall_index.html

http://socsci.open.ac.uk/SocSci/johnh/d318.html

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3. Much of liberal theory can be explained by resorting to race.

4. diametrically opposed philosophical positions can be derived from the same position

What matters is not scientific fact, but the systems we use to make human societies intelligible.

There are four things we can say about our social contract:

1. the common and conventional wisdom amongst leading scientists is that biological race does not exist.

2. this view is enshrined in the founding documents of UNESCO by Claude Levi-Strauss, but this fact has neverprevented intense scholarly activity by a minority of academics who continue to try to prove that race and intelligencecan be connected

3. these scientific pursuits are vociferously condemned by larged and various groups but still the search for the "reggaeor baseball gene" persists

4. Diametrically opposed political positions can often be derived from the same philosophical position

"The biological definition, having been shown out the front door, tends to sidle around the verandha andcrawl in the window."

Race needs to be understood as a discursive fact. All attempts to ground this category (race) have failed; therefore, theonly grounding is in discourse.

Race is a discursive construct = race works like a language

Race is a signifier which can be linked to other signifiers in a representation Its meaning is relational and it is constantly subject to redefinition in different cultures, differentmoments There is always a certain sliding of meaning, always something left unsaid about race Hence: Race is a floating signifier Example: Gender is a language -- think of the semiotic square for gender.

But what about the reality of racial discrimination and violence? Millions upon millions have suffered anddied. Where does all this come from?

There are two classic positions:

1. The realist: real genetic differences are the basis for racial classification

2. The linguistic position: The purely textual version of race. there are no real differences between races. Thedifferences are created between humans in language and culture.

3. Hall's position: The Discursive -- Differences exist in the world, but what matters are the systems of thoughtand language we use to make sense of the difference.

The differences acquire meaning when they are organized into categories.

power/knowledge creates race and representation

Classification systems have a history and racial categorization has a history.

However, race has a reality. We can see it. Since the Renaissance, race is a signifier of great importance.

1. religious justification -- Encounters during the age of exploration raised the first religious question regarding race -- Who were those beings? Sepulveda vs. Las Casas -- However, first they looked to religion, which was the arbiter of

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truth and knowledge at the time, to justify the classificatory system. -- it failed. They asked, "What is the nature ofthese 'people' in the New World?'" Are these real people? 2. anthropological justification -- It failed -- James Clifford helps it fail. 3. scientific justification -- People looked for the sanction for race in science. It finally fails without a doubt aftergenetics proves race does not exist. You can't see genetics. It is a wonderfully secret code which only a small numberof people have at their disposal.

Fixing Difference: the cultural function of science

(there is a great deal of scholarship about this -- see Donna Haraway on science, primates, race and feminism)

The Enlightenment says everyone is one species. So you need to find a way to divide the species. Edmund Burke,1777 -- "Now the great map of mankind is unrolled all at once and there is no state of barbarism . . .which we do nothave in our view."

The very different . ... (get quote from film... The cultural function of science and the languages and discourses of . . .

For centuries, the effort was to make a clear distinction between two groups. Then after the Enlightenment, the ideawas to make distinctions within the human race.

The panoptic glance of the Enlightenment. Quotes Edmund Burke.

Science/anthorpology/religion fix and secure the . . . reality of race.

Culture is made to lean on nature. They operate metonymically. So that it is possible to read off the one against theother. Once you know where they fit on the scale, you can determine their basic characteristics. We understandculture in terms of our fantasies of nature. Naturalizing race. Taking it out of culture.

Race makes nature and culture correspond to one another. Once you know where a person fits in nature, youcan know where they fit in culture.

This is how the idea of the noble savage fits into race, culture and nature. The noble savage exists in nature but has theattributes of the best of culture. However, this is a fantasy, a fetish which we use to comfort ourselves. This fantasy

stabilizes racial thinking while it appears to destabilize it.

Seeing is Believing.

Race thinking goes like this: the gross physical characteristics of color, hair and bone signify race in the everydayworld. This is a visible difference. What fixes the difference is the genetic code. These things you can see aresignifiers of things you can't see, e.g. intelligence, morality, sexuality. You can read the body as a text. We inspectthis text, the body. We are readers of race. We are readers of social difference. We invoke the body as if it were atranscendental signifier.

The grosser phyisical differences of color, hair and bone. W.E.B. DuBois

They are the visible difference. They are beyond dispute. They appear in the field of vision where seeing isbelieving.

see Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

the dark and unarguable evidence of my own blackness. .. finish quote.

Genetics: Making sense of difference

There is a search for the guarantee which addicts us to the preservation of the biological trace.

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Reading the Body -- you can read the body as a text. You assume that it is the genetic code which produces thesedifference of color, hair and bone.

If you cut me, I bleed. Yes. But insofar as the system of classification systems, we read the text. We are readers ofrace. Readers of social difference. The very obviousness of the visibility of race convinces me that it functions asa signifying system, as a text we can read.

This notion that the genetic code is imprinted through the body. You cannot stop on the surface. The body is invokedas a way to prove the "reality." The body becomes the ultimate transcendental signifier. It proves race. We cannotturn to the body of race. It is standing in the way of our understanding of race as a cultural system.

Analysing the Systems of the Body

Fanon is driven wild by the fact that he is caught and trapped in his body and that the other can see through him byreading the text of the black body. Fanon understood that beneath the body is another schema which is really whatconstructs the relationship between the body and . . .a schema composed of the stories and the metaphors and theimages which is what really composes the body. In this way, racial difference is more like sexual difference than it islike other systems of difference. What we have learned about gender, is what we know begin to learn about thelanguages of race which we speak. Though race cannot perform the function of fixing the truth. Gender differenceand race difference are alike in that the obviously visible differences seem to wind up the subject. Gender studies haverevealed that subtlety of this process. Race studies must investigate the subtleties. Anatomy/physiology seems to windup the question.

It is difficult to do without a foundational guarantee. It is a political argument. Something will guarantee the truth andauthenticity of what we believe. It is hard to give up because in the end, we do not know what it is like to conduct apolitics without a guanrantee of race (especially an anti-racist politics). We want something which tells us that thecontingent choices we make can be read off against the biology.

Why does it matter? Battling racism

Race is difficult to get rid of it because we need a foundational guarantee. This is a political and atheoretical argument. We are continually in search of a biological guarantee. We don't know how toconduct a politics of anti-racism without a guarantee. The scientific template will back our decisionsup.

We could all be wrong. We are often/usually wrong. We are not guaranteed in the truth of whatwe do.

What might it be like to conduct an ethically responsible politics about race. The discourse of ethnicity appears to begrounded in culture, but as you deeply examine ethnicity, you get to race, blood and heritage.

How to reduce the heirarchy of difference?

Only some kinds of difference are selected as the axis upon which power is distributed.

Final question: How do we construct an ethically responsible politics around race without the guarantee of biology.

Stuart Hall: Representation and the Media

dir. Sut Jhally. Media Education Foundation, 1997. color. 55 min.

Everything that Hall states is true of spoken and written language as well as images.

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The Politics of the Media

Sut Jhally introduces Hall. Hall insists on the role intellectual work can play in helping to regain control of an imagedominated world that has drifted beyond the control of ordinary people. Hall believes that ideas matter; that theyinfluence the world "out there."

An image can have many different meanings.

There is no guarantee that images will work in the way we think we do when we create them.

Sometimes his ideas are interpreted to have downplayed the effect of the media. Nothing could be further from thetruth. Hall understands that communication is always linked to power.

Hall wants to hold two ideas together

That messages work in complex waysThey are always connected with the way power operates in a society

He examines our everyday world where knowledge and power intersect.Part 1

Interrogation of the Image

We must probe inside and behind the image. When we are immersed in something, we may come to accept them. Hallwants us to step out of the water and look at the content of the water.

The talk that follows was delivered at the University of Westminster in London.

Visual Representation and the Contemporary World

Representation is more difficult than it appears. Hall concentrates on visual representation, but what Hall points out isapplicable to all representation. Visual media are the privileged sign of late modern culture. Visual media are thesaturating medium of world culture.

Old View of Representation

Hall will try to subvert this old notion: Representation as a Reflection/Distortion of Reality

1. "Representation" means to present, to image, to depict Re-presentation. Re-present a meaning which is already there.

The classic question is: is a depiction accurate?

Hall will try to subvert the above meaning.

2. In political science: re-present = standing in for

Representation is the way in which a meaning is somehow given to the thing depicted.

Some work on representation concentrates on measuring the gap of representation "true meaning" vs. a mediarepresentation

If you think the meaning that a representation is giving a kind of distortion of what it really means,then your work on representation would be in measuring the gap between what one might think of asthe true meaning of an event or whatever and how it is presented in the media. A lot of good work doesexactly this. This notion is too literal. This tries to measure the distortion of the representation.

New Idea of Representation Representation as Constitutive

The old idea of representation is regarded as too literal.

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Do events in the world have one, essential, fixed or true meaning against which distortion can be measured?What was out there in the world which was fixed? What is true meaning? What meanings will people make of"it" ?

Ex: N. Ireland's events have no true fixed meanings. The meaning of an event in N. Ireland does not existuntil it is represented. There will never be one interpretation of what is going on in N. Ireland.

There was nothing fixed to represent. There is never one, true, fixed meaning. There was something, but whatis dubious is the notion that there is a "true" meaning of it and the meanings we make of it depend on how itis represented. The meaning of an event does not exist outside of representation or before representation.

Representation enters into the event itselfRepresentation is constitutive of the event.

Representation makes the meaningRepresentation is part of the event.

Reality does not exist outside the process of representation.

Part 2

Culture as Primary

Cultural studies does not try to find out the "true" meaning. Instead it tries to find out how the meaning "enters" theevent.

Culture is the way we make sense of, give meaning to the world.

Culture consists of maps of meaning frameworks of intelligibility the things which allow us to make sense of theworld which exists but is ambiguous as to its meaning.

Meaning arises because of shared cultural maps which members of a society share together.How do the meanings enter into the event? Culture is the way we give meanings to one thing or another. Sharedmeaning allows us to make sense of the world.If culture gives meaning, it has a central role. It is not just the values and things we happen to have been borninto. It literally is the ways without which we would find the world unintelligible.

Conceptual Maps -- Classify the World

What are shared conceptual maps and how do we classify and organize the world?

The capacity to classify is a basic genetic feature of human beingsThe particular system of classification used in a society is learnt

Culture is a system of representation.

Bear in mind an object you cannot see. Concepts allow us to "store" and think about objects (and "things") which areno longer conceivable or which are not in the world at all. For example, your fantasy life is a system of concepts of"things" which do not exist.

How do I know that you are making sense of the world in the same way I am?

Language is: what we speak and write -- whether it be:

electronic

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digital music

facial gesture and expression body movements

clothing anything which expresses meaning (which is a terribly complex issue)

Language externalizes the meaning that we are making of the world. Language makes available the meanings we aremaking of the world.

Reality and Discourse

Student objection: are you telling me there is nothing but language, but discourse, the only thing that exists is meaning.Students suddenly say all this is nonsense.

Statement 1: True

"Nothing meaningful exists outside of discourse."

Statement 2: False

"Nothing exists outside of discourse." There is no material existence.

Yes: Without language, meaning could not be exchanged in the world.

ex: What is a ball, a football (a soccer ball)? It only has meaning within the rules of the game. These rules arethemselves a language game. The ball, which is a physical object, only become meaningful within the rules of a game. How do things become meaningful?

Part 3

The Practices of Signification

The practices that produce meaning

Media studies concentrates on: Signifying practices = practices involved in the production of meaning

The media are by no means the only way meaning is exchanged. Personal communication is still the primary mode ofexchanging meaning, but our complicated technology circulates meaning in a particular way and has its own kind of

power.

The circulation of meaning can never be separated from power.

The issue of power can never be bracketed out of the quest for an understanding of representation.Meaning vs. Absence

example: Image of Linford Christie, captain of British team, wrapped in British flag at the end of 199? Olympics isnot what you expect to find in the image because he is not the obvious British image.

The difference between what you expect to find and what is in the image involves what is not said. It involvesreading by "knowing" what is not there.

Absence signifies as much as presence

The meaning of Linford as black and British touches on our unconscious assumptions. What is not said is what as

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important as what is said. Everything we understand/read is being read in part against what isn't there. The meaning isin part evoked by what is not said. Every image that we see is being read, in part, against what is not there.

Comment: imagine a book, imagine a closed book, imagine an open book. It was only possible to imagine a closedbook against an open book. and vice versa

Identity, Identification and the Viewer

A kind of identity claim in images cues identification. The implicit question how can you project yourself into theimage? Ads work by stimulating this image.

Advertising tries to construct a position of identification for the view in relation to what is depicted in theimage.

Images construct us through our fantasy relations to the images in a way that implicates us. That is what bothers us.We are caught; we have an investment.

Even in news images, we must project ourselves into the image in some way or it has no meaning/impact.

The viewer himself/herself is implicated in the production of meaning.

The meaning that you, as spectator, take away depends on identification.

We have a fantasy relation to the image

Meaning is interpretation.

What is the answer to the statement: I don't see what you see in the image. Answer: Images have no fixed meaning. Images potentially have a wide range of meanings.

Ideology and Power Fixes Meaning

Making meaning is always a process of interpreting what is represented. Meaning depends on a certain kind offixing. I can tell you what x means. It aims to fix the one true meaning.

Interpretation is dependent on historical and cultural context.

We cannot say: my meaning is true and yours is not. Even if we agree, we have only to wait a day or a weekand the meanings will change.

Are we trapped in a quasi orgasm of meaning as in the French concept jouissance?

Power and ideology attempts to fix the meaning of images and language, but the meaning is always going to besubverted.

Because the fixing of meaning cannot be guaranteed, it can be unfixed -- it can "loosen and fray"

Meaning can only be changed because it cannot finally be fixed.

Meaning can only be changed because it cannot be finally fixed. Ideology wants the image to become naturalized,i.e. fixed, so that you do not question it. Ideology tries to close meaning, to fix it, to stop it. (Comment: In this sense,ideology is anti-language.) Power tries to close meaning, to try to stop the sliding of meaning, but meaning can neverbe fixed.

Because the fixing of meaning cannot be guaranteed, it can be unfixed. It can loosen and fray. The relative openness of

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meaning makes change possible. Makes language possible.

Part 4

Contesting Stereotypes: Positive Images

Stereotyping fixes meaning that are given to groups

ex.: the limited images of black men effect how the society perceives black men in the "real world."

This process circulates a limited way of being in the world. This actually produces knowledge, as in: this is what it ispossible to be, know, do, see.

Images produce knowledge about the world.Contesting stereotypes means increasing the diversity of the images in the media.Diversity opens up new possibilities of identity. This is "the politics of the image."

Positive Representations or Reverse Stereotypes cannot fix meaning any more than ideologically "bad"representations can be fixed. The meaning will always slip away. The idea is that you could maintain a positive image,but just as it is impossible to fix stereotypical representations, it is just as impossible to fix reverse stereotypes.

Contesting Stereotypes: Taking apart Images

Taking apart images requires going inside the image itself. Turn the stereotype against itself. Occupy the fixed terrainof the stereotypical representation. Reversing stereotypes is a problem in itself. If you replace a negative image with apositive image, the assumption is that the negative image could be crowded out. The meaning would be fixed inanother way. It turns out representation does not work this way. Represention has to go inside the stereotype, turn itagainst itself.

Comment: This also is a basic function of language. To turn, to twist new meanings out of old "forms," i.e., to trope.

Closure in representation naturalizes the meaning of images. It hides the process of representation, so that youcannot see that anyone ever produced it.

Opening up the process of Representation poses questions

Where do images come from? Who produces images?

How is meaning closed down in representation? Who is silenced in the production of images?

These questions require one to go into the power of the stereotype itself.

There is no way to keep the reverse stereotype from reverting to the stereotype.Interrogating stereotypes makes them uninhabitable. It destroys their naturalness and normality. Satirizing them makes them ridiculous.

Gender can be used as an example. If you wanted to counteract the fetish of sexuality, wouldyou enter it in order to expose it? Yes. Because of its secret power. If you want to change therelationship of the viewer to the image, you have to intervene in exactly that powerful exchangebetween the image and its pyschic meaning, the depths of the collective and social fantasies to

expose and deconstruct the work of the fantasy. (Stanley Kubrick's movie: Eyes Wide Shut triesto do this.)

Conclusion: What is at stake in Representation?

New Knowledges

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New Identities New Meanings

Keeping representation open keeps meaning open. Keeping representation open allows more knowledge (morelanguage) to enter the world.

Hall emphasizes that he has examined:

marking presence and absence expected/different

the image implicates us in the production of meaning the naturalization of meaning -- how we have no other access to knowledge except through representation controlled

by power.

Questions of power and closure - how symbolic power operates in representation and attempts to naturalize themeanings so that we don't have any other way of thinking, any other access to knowledge about what is being told usabout the world but the way it is being interpreted.

Keeping representation open is a way of keeping new kinds of knowledges, new kinds of subjectivities, newdimensions of meaning which have not been forclosed by the systems of power which are in operation.

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