Abstract of “Representation, meaning and language” by Stuart Hall
Representation connects meaning and language to culture
Representation mean using language to say something meaningful about, or to represent, the world meaningfully, to other person
3 different accounts or theories:
Reflective
Language simply reflect a meaning which already exists out there in the world of objects, people and events
In the reflective approach meaning is thought to lie in the object, person, idea, or event in the real world and language functions like a mirror, to reflect the true meaning as it already exists in the world.
Greeks used the notion of mimesis to explain how language, even drawing and painting mirrored or imitated nature.
They thought of Homer’s great poem. The Iliad, as imitating a heroic series of events.
Critiques:
Visual signs do bear some relationship to the shape and texture of the objects which they represent. But as was also pointed out earlier, a two-dimensional visual image of a rose is a sign – it should not be confused with the real plant.
If someone says there is no such word as rose for a plant in her culture, the actual plant in the garden cannot resolve the failure of communication between us. For us to understand each other, one of us must learn the code linking the flower with the word for it in the other’s culture.
Intentional
Language express only what the speaker or writer or painter wants to say, his or her personally intended meaning
Holds that the speaker imposes her unique meaning on the world through language.
Critiques:
We cannot be the sole or unique source of meanings in language since that would mean that we could express ourselves in entirely private languages.
Comunication depends on shared linguistic conventions
Our private intended meanings, however personal to us, have to enter into the rules, codes and conventions of language to be shared and understood.
Our private thoughts have to negotiate with all the other meanings for words or images which have been stored in language which our use of the language system will inevitably trigger into action.
Constructionist
Meaning is constructed in and through language
Neither things in themselves nor the individual users of language can fix meaning in language. Things don’t mean: we construct meaning, using representational systems – concepts and signs.
We must not confuse the material world, where things and people exist, and the symbolic practices and processes through which representation, meaning and language operate.
It is not the material world which conveys meaning.
Signs may also have a material dimension.
Representation is a practice, a kind of ‘work’, which uses material objects. But the meaning depends not on the material quality of the sign, but on its symbolic function.
Signs are arbitrary, they are fixed by codes.
E.G: Traffic lights example:
We use a way of classifying the colour spectrum to create colours which are different from one another.
The creation of the colour-concept.
Other cultures may divide the colour spectrum differently. Use different actual words or letters to identify different colours.
It is the difference between Red and Green which signifies.
In principle any combination of colours – like any collection of letters in written language or of sounds in spoken language – would do so, provided they are sufficiently different not to be confused. Constructionists express this idea by saying that all signs are ‘arbitrary’.
Meaning is ‘relational’.
2 main intern distinctions:
SEMIOTIC APPROACH (Ferdinand Saussure)
DISCURSIVE APPROACH (Michel Foucault)
Some main characteristics of constructivist perspectives:
Possibility to give meaning to things through language
It is the link between concepts and languages which enables us to refer to either the ‘real’ world of objects, people and events.
Systems of representation based on two aspects:
Meaning depends on the system of concepts and images formed in our thoughts which can stand for or ‘represent’ the world, enabling us to refer to things both inside and outside our heads.
He considers this to be a very simple version of a rather complex process
We also form concepts of rather obscure and abstract things which we can’t in any simple way see, feel or touch.
It consists not of individual concepts, but of different ways of organizing, clustering, arranging, and classifying concepts, and of establishing complex relations between them
E.G: We use the principles of similarity and difference to establish relationships between concepts or to distinguish them from one another.
Classifying according to sequence
Meaning depends on the relationship between things in the world – people, objects and events, real or fictional – and the conceptual system, which can operate as mental representations of them.
Culture is sometimes defined in terms of ‘shared meanings or shared conceptual maps’.
The conceptual word we use for words, sounds or images which carry meaning is signs.
However, a shared conceptual map is not enough. We must also be able to represent or exchange meanings and concepts, and we can only do that when we also have access to a shared language.
Language is the second system of representation involved in the overall process of constructing meaning. Our shared conceptual map must be translated into a common language, so that we can correlate our concepts and ideas with certain signs.
Signs are organized into language and it is the existence of common languages which enable us to translate our thoughts (concepts) into words, sounds or images, and them to use these, operating as a language, to express meanings and communicate thoughts to other people.
Any sound, word, image, or object which functions as a sign, and is organized with other signs into a system which is capable of carrying and expressing meaning is, from this point of view, a ‘language’.
The relation between ‘things’, concepts and signs lies at the heart of the production of meaning in language. The process which links these three elements together is what we call ‘representation’.
The relationship in these systems of representation between the sign, the concept and the object to which they might be used to refer is entirely arbitrary.
By ‘arbitrary’ we mean that in principle any collection of letters or any sound in any order would do the trick equally well.
The meaning is not in the object or person or thing, nor is it in the word. It is we who fix the meaning so firmly that, after a while, it comes to see natural and inevitable.
The meaning is fixed by the SYSTEM OF REPRESENTATIONS.
Codes fix the relationships between concepts and signs.
To belong to a culture is to belong to roughly the same conceptual and linguistic universe, to know how concepts and ideas translate into different languages, and how language can be interpreted to refer to or reference the world. To share these things is to see the world from within the same conceptual map and to make sense of it through the same language systems. Early anthropologists of language, like Sapir and Whorf, took this insight to its logical extreme when they argued that we are all, as it were, locked into our cultural perspectives or ‘mind-sets’, and that language is the best clue we have to that conceptual universe. This observation, when applied to all human cultures, lies at the root of what, today, we may think of as cultural or linguistic relativism.
E.G: The English make a rather simple distinction between sleet and snow. The Inuit (Eskimos) who have to survive in a very different, more extreme and hostile climate, apparently have many more words for snow and snowy weather.
SUMMARY
Meaning is produced by practice of representation. It is constructed through signifying – i.e. meaning-producing practices.
It depends on two different but related systems of representation:
Classification and organization into meaningful categories of the concepts which are formed in the mind.
The exercise of language, which consists of signs organized into various relationships.
But signs can only convey meaning if we possess codes which allow us to translate our concepts into language and vice-versa.
Codes do not exist in the nature, but are the result of social conventions we learn and unconsciously internalize.
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