Representation (text only)1st (First) edition by P. Stuart Hall

by Stuart Hall

Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Culture, Media and Identities Series) [Paperback] Professor Stuart Hall (Editor)

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Theory, Cultural, History

Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Stuart Hall was an influential Jamaican-born British sociologist and cultural theorist. He was Professor of Sociology at the Open University, the founding editor of New Left Review, and Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham.

Reviews

[Brittany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great reference book for the study of visual culture. Highly recommended for anyone studying theory or criticism.

[Alborz Baghipour · Rating 4 out of 5]

همه ما کم و بیش از وجود و اهمیت «معنا» و «فرهنگ» در زندگی اجتماعی آگاهیم و درباره آنها بسیار سخن می گوییم ولی معمولا تصور روشنی از ماهیت یا چیستی آنها نداریم، نمی توانیم آنها را به دقت تعریف کنیم و بخوبی نمی دانیم چرا چنین اهمیت فراوانی در زندگی ما دارند. در این کتاب، یکی از برجسته ترین اندیشمندان و نظریه پردازان معاصر فرهنگ می کوشد به پرسش از چیستی و اهمیت معنا و فرهنگ پاسخ های معتبر و روشنی بدهد. او، که فرهنگ را چیزی جز «معناهای مشترک» نمی داند، با قلمی بسیار دقیق، عمیق و در عین حال ساده، می گوید که معنا چیست و چگونه بوجود می آید یا به اصطلاح تولید می شود. او سپس به بیان اهمیت معنا می پردازد و می گوید که معنا، در قالب اسطوره و گفتمان، چه رابطه و نسبتی با قدرت دارد

لازم به توضیح است که ترجمه فارسی، تنها مقدمه و فصل اولِ کتاب حجیم استوارت هال را شامل می شود

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

[FINALISING NOTES FROM PREVIOUS STUDY]

Introduction

- culture is about 'shared meanings' with 'language as central to meaning and culture' where 'language games' are common.
- circuit of culture - representation -> identity -> production -> consumption -> regulation.
- an individual's facial expression: who I am (identity), what I am feeling (emotions), what group I feel I belong to (attachment).
- creating meaning about individuals through representation: the words we use about them, the stories we tell about them, the images of them we produce, the emotions we associate with them, the ways we classify and conceptualise them, the values we place on them.
- semiotic approach (the science of signs - the how of representation), discourse approach (where meaning, representation and culture are constitutive - its effects/consequences - polities).
- does visual language reflect a truth about the world which is already there or does it produce meanings about the world through representing it?
- the book interprets practices of signifying - what does the image mean? what is the ad saying? how does context affect meaning? how does relations of power affect meaning?



Chapter 1 - The Work of Representations (Stuart Hall)

- 3 approaches in exploring the connection between representation, meaning and language to culture: reflective (objects, people, events), intentional (meaning), constructionist (language).
- Constructionist approach (shared culture of meanings) is the most common in Cultural Studies.
- Representation - to describe, depict, portray, symbolise, substitute, stand for.
- System of representation - system (objects, people and events ordered into concepts in our mind) which represent aspects of the world enabling us to refer to things both inside and outside our heads.
- Pierce: icon (visual signs), index (written or spoken signs), symbol.
- Codes fix the relationship between language and signs, stabilising meaning between different languages and cultures.
- Cultural codes are fixed on a linguistic level but fluid on a socio-cultural level.
- Reflective approach - treats language functions like a mirror - "A rose is a rose is a rose" (Gertrude Stein) - mimesis - the imitation of nature.
- Intentional approach - the speaker/author imposes their unique meaning on the world through language - words mean what the author intends.
- Constructionist approach - must not confuse material world with symbolic practices and processes where representation, meaning and language operate. It is not the material world which conveys meaning, it is the language system we are using to represent our concepts. Meanings have been assigned in our culture by the code governing the chosen language (ie. traffic lights). Meaning is relational. Representation is the production of meaning through language.
- Arbitrary - no natural relationship between the sign and its meaning or concept.
- Saussure Structuralist principle: sign (object/thing), signifier (physical existence - sound/word/image), signified (the mental concept).
- Pierce - object/referent --> representation/signifier --> interpretant/signified.
- Barthes - mythologies - orders of signification - first order: reality/denotation; bridging order: sign, signifier, signified; second order: culture (connotation and myth).
- Derrida - argued that difference can never be wholly captured by any binary system (1981) - cultural studies can become self-defeating by becoming tied up in 'circle of meaning' knots.
- Hegel - dialectic approach - the epiphanies of knowledge and meaning found in debates of conflict.
- Gramsci - refers to systems of power as hegemony - knowledge linked to power not only assumes the authority of the truth, but has the power to make itself true.


Foucault:
- discursive approach to representation - concept of discourse, issue of power and knowledge, question of the subject.
- He prioritised relations and historical context of power over relations of meaning and language. Foucault believes that semiotics is ahistorical.
- Believed discursive formations sustained a 'regime of truth'.
- Considered everyone both oppressors and oppressed in circulation of power beyond a feudal construct.
- In 'The Subject and Power' (1982), Foucault discussed the two meanings of the term 'subject': subject to someone's control and dependence, and tied to one's own identity by a conscience and self-knowledge - in relation to power, all construct subject-positions.
- In 'The Order of Things' (1970), Foucault discusses Velasquez's 'Las Meninas' and questions on representation - the painting has no one, fixed or final meaning - Foucault reads painting in terms of representation and the subject - the underlying message is its subtext - representation is not about the true reflection or imitation of reality - its meaning depends on how we 'read' it: the subject-position for the spectator-subject.



Chapter 2 (Francis Bonner) deals with Documentary Film and Television and does not connect with A Level Media Studies like it does with A Level Film Studies, so this review will skip an analysis for now.

Chapter 3 - The Poetics and the Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures

1/ Introduction
2/ Establishing Definitions, Negotiating Meanings, Discerning Objects
3/ Fashioning Cultures: The Politics of Exhibiting
4/ Captivating Cultures: The Politics of Exhibiting
5/ Devising New Models: Museums and their futures

Chapter 4 - The Spectacle of the 'Other' (Stuart Hall)

1/ Introduction
2/ Racializing the 'Other'
3/ Stage Racial 'Difference': 'And the melody lingered on...'
4/ Stereotyping as a Signifying Practice
5/ Contesting a Racialized Regime of Representation

Chapter 5 - Exhibiting Masculinity (Sean Nixon)

1/ Introduction
2/ Conceptualizing Masculinity
3/ Discourse and Representation
4/ Visual codes of Masculinity
5/ Spectatorship and Subjectivization
6/ Consumption and Spectatorship

Chapter 6 - Gender and Gender: The Case of Soap Opera

1/ Introduction
2/ Representation and Media Fictions
3/ Mass Culture and Gendered Culture
4/ Genre, Representation and Soap Opera
5/ Genres for Women: The case of soap opera

[María]

Had het niet verwacht, maar vond dit vak met elk college interessanter worden

[Ife · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a year to read this cover to cover but I finally did it

Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices is a seminal textbook on the topic of representation, not in the way we have commonly come to think about representation i.e. how to navigate depicting marginalised groups of people (although it is preoccupied with that as well), but in the broader philosophical sense of how do we read the meaning of art, language, images etc. that is rendering something (cultures, groups of people, reality etc.) as well as how do we evaluate the cultural impact that representations have. It's all a bit hard to grasp but the introductory chapter by Stuart Hall does a really good job at explaining the basic philosophies and/or their embodiments from Ferdinand Saussure to Foucault Michel to Roland Barthes and finally the semiotic approach which is the method the book favours.

In the next chapters, written by Frances Bonner, Henrietta Lidchi, Sean Nixon and Christine Gledhill respectively, several signifying practices are evaluated which all showed the complexity of these questions of representation when applied to different cultural signifying practices (mode of representation - film, museum, advertising etc.)

I particularly liked Bonner's chapter on the documentary because while I had considered that not everything in a documentary could be taken on face value and it had occurred to me that there is avenue for the documentarian to craft their own narrative, I had never considered the extend to which reflecting/"representing" reality through documentary can be problematic. It was also very well structured and gave lots of great terminology to describe different types of documentaries which I find really helpful.

I found the last two chapters on how the New-Age masculinity came to be and on the soap opera as a genre less interesting and well-argued, but in the latter I think that is because soap operas were not a big part of my childhood and they are going almost extinct so I couldn't resonate as much with its critique of the signifying practice.

This is such a useful and versatile anthology for anyone doing film and media studies, mass communication, cultural studies, sociology etc. and it now holds a special place for me as it made me realise that I want to go on to do academic work around cultural studies, thinking about images and representation.

[فاروق الفرشيشي · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a bit complicated to sum up every concept I've discovered in this book, or every proposition/theory it advances (That I have some reservations about). There are 6 chapters. The first one might be the most important one to the reader who doesn't know about Saussure, Roland Barthes and Foucault (Particularly his ideas about Discourse/power). The second discusses representation of the factual in documentaries and their relationships with Reality Shows. The third is about museums as a media for anthropological representation. The fourth analyses the representation of black people in the western discourse. The fifth doesn't really matter. And the last one is about Soap Operas as a gendered genre.
Sometimes I felt some parts could have been a lot easier to read, some ideas redundant and some arguments weak. For example it suggests it cannot use Foucault's theory because it doesn't recognize the natural resistance of the receivers of the discourse/power. Well I guess that resistance is some other discourse/power. But, anyway it was fun (and tiring) to read and I thank the person who gave it to me.

[mahatmanto · Rating 4 out of 5]

ini memang buku pegangan mahasiswa, textbook.
suatu kompilasi dari berbagai segi dari yg namanya praktik representasi.
ringkas dan mencakupi hampir segala yg disebut praktik representasi sehingga pasti butuhtindakan lebih lanjut utk terapannya dalam penelitian.
pencitraan mengenai pihak lain yang jauh, berbeda, di luar itu merupakan praktik kekuasaan. suatu tajuk yang disukai pada kajian budaya akhir-akhir ini.
tentunya juga menarik bagi sejarawan, utk menganalisis bagaimana praktik representasi itu berlangsung dalam penulisan sejarah: suatu peristiwa yang pernah berlangsung jauh di waktu lampau.

[Elliot T. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great, lucid introduction to the semiotic interpretation of culture. I always liked the idea of studying behavior, language, and objects as reflections of our collective values, but the theorists that I was trying to read (Foucault, Saussure, most of their followers) were too damn hard to understand. This might have had something to do w/ the fact that they had to be translated from other languages. Regardless, Hall mixes history, theory, and specific examples of applied semiotics in a way that makes it easy to understand and easy to see the worth of looking at the world in this way.

[Suhasini Srihari · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work clearly defines 'representation', and gives the reader an understanding of how various elements (language, culture, gender, genre, etc.) act as variables in affecting and altering the meaning and concept of 'representation'. The book also provides a detailed critique on how language participates heavily in the 'meaning production' and 'mass reception'. The knowledge in this work is heavy, yet thought provoking.

[Anya]

sociology is currently totally kicking my ass

[Chantal · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

This is one of the better books I had to read for university. It's written by different authors but still it was very comprehensible and I actually learned things.

[Angel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very detailed and important work, but please, can someone tell academics that they don’t need to repeat the exact same thing with some different words for at least 5 times.

[Avni Alper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okuma parçaları bölüm sonu özetleri ile tam bir ders kitabı şeklinde yazılmış kültürel kuramları çok iyi açıklayan bir ders, başvuru ve meraklısına başucu kitabı.

[Lieke Geels]

vond het best erg interessant, dat wordt een dikke 10 voor cultural representations

[Bárbara Reis · Rating 5 out of 5]

livrinho da minha vida

[Jen]

This book is very insightful. Like some other articles and cultural theories by Stuart Hall, it encourages critical eyes and mind to think about where "meaning"comes from in everyday life.Knowledge or meaning is represented and manipulated by power and interest.

[S. Efraim Lindbo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very easy to comprehend introduction and learning the basic tools of cultural theory and practice, case by case. Stuart Hall is the founder of the Birmingham school of thought in liberal arts and cultural studies, and the field was just emerging at the point of this publication.

[Bianca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting ideas on representation through mass communication, but reading this is 2013 makes me see the need for a major update.

[Arda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hall is pretty cool.
I often find myself thinking about what he says regarding identity being not so much about what "is" but what about what is "becoming."

Notes from strat comm:

Hall delves into the question of how meaning is produced also through way of internalization, and clarifies that messages, in and of themselves, have no effect, unless meaning is established from them.

Hall sees that there had previously been a rather simplistic understanding of message in the way that it had been tied to sender message receiver. He demonstrates that there is more going on in that process. There is a level of command that is intrinsic within that process. The regarding of sender message receiver process is by no means natural: Even though the process may appear to be a literal interpretation, yet there is an analytic element that is integrated in that process which is much more complex and not to be taken for granted.

In that respect, the sent message could be in the form of a visual image or a word that may appear as having no deeper interpretation or ulterior motive, but Hall determines that there is much more going on behind what we see in such an image or a word, and that this process reflects and reproduces images of dominance.

While the sender message receiver is not a natural process as it had been deemed to be, yet it does become naturalized by means of people’s habit of perceiving that reality. In other words, what we think of as natural is not in fact naturally defined, but it may get to be defined as standard; charged with cultural and ideological directives. Our learning and getting-used-to those social conducts is what makes the process seem natural to us, even though it in fact is not so. The audience is then inclined to take those seemingly natural dominant messages that are in fact constructed and reinforced. There is a level of manipulation, then, that goes on in this message-making process: Societies pick certain meanings that they favor over others, and structures of discourse get to be based on preference.

The ways in which dominant meanings are created, often obscurely to the audience that deems them as natural, would involve a decoding of messages to determine their denotation vs. connotation.

[Gabriella Giotti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ottimo libro, offre una visione completa della " rappresentazione" di come le immagini, il linguaggio e il discorso possano essere i siti per appunto rappresentare. Ho letto questo libro per l'Università e devo dire che ne sono rimasta fortemente colpita ci aiuta a riflettere su una questione che spesso diamo per scontato ovvero il concetto di significato. Il primo capitolo offre una visione di studiosi come Saussure , padre della linguistica moderna , di Focault incentrato su studi come discorso, potere e sapere e Barthes con il suo contributo di connotazione e denotazione. Il secondo capitolo mostra i documentari e reality tv . il terzo ci presenta l'argomento dei musei visti come siti di rappresentazione e di contatto con " l'altro". Il 4 ci rimanda ai contatti migratori e colonizzatori dell'africa con i conseguenti "stereoypes" del "diverso". il 5 sulla questione della "mascolinità" nel mondo pubblicitario ed infine sesto capitolo su il caso delle soap opera .Spero di essere stata di aiuto con questa mia recensione.

[Mas AlDardasawi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked Stuart Hall's work on representation and the analytical approach he takes, examining representation as a process rather than a fixed outcome. In his book, he argues that representation is not simply a reflection of reality but a system of meaning-making that operates through language, symbols, and cultural constructs. Hall emphasizes that meaning is not static; instead, it is continuously shaped and contested. His perspective challenges the assumption that representations are neutral or objective. Rather, he highlights how meaning is produced, exchanged, and reinterpreted within a cultural framework.
Reading through his work, I found his approach similar to scientific reasoning-constructing understanding step by step, rather than assuming universal comprehension. Hall also explores how language and systems of knowledge production work together to create meaning. He stresses that culture plays a central role in shaping representations, making them inherently fluid and open to reinterpretation.

[Alâ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I waited until I was done writing my thesis. Representation not only helped me construct a lot of my ideas upon, but also--for sure within time-- I just learned to appreciate the theory itself, and it helped me relate to people better. This will be a bit of an oversharing but I am a person who feels a lot of anger most of the time -lol- and sometimes it is a nice reminder to understand that not all people will understand you and vice versa, simply we are not the byproducts of the same culture, and that is something everyone needs to learn and master, for a peaceful mind. I suggest this to especially literature students, I am pretty sure at one point in your studies, you will need this framework :)

[Casey Browne · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent reference book for the study of visual culture. Highly recommended for anyone studying theory or criticism. This is one of the better books I had to read for university. Different authors write it, but it was very comprehensible, and I actually learned a thing.

[isaac lim · Rating 3 out of 5]

The commentary of this piece has become so uninteresting in the present social science context. But that’s more a reflection of how commonplace the innovation and ideas that Stuart Hall introduces in this work have become than of the quality of the work itself

[Iris van den Brand · Rating 3 out of 5]

Laagdrempelig. Fijn.

[Nec · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh.
Intereshaaaaaaante.

[Annalise Gallagher · Rating 3 out of 5]

it was fine. very redundant.

[Niels]

(read for my university literature class)

[Leon]

read: “Chapter One: The Work of Representation” by Stuart Hall

[Sam]

"The Work of Representation"