A photograph of a crowd can illustrate a story about a public celebration or a story about a breakdown of order. The people in the photograph have stayed where they were. A caption, a crop and a headline can change what their gathering is taken to mean. This everyday operation is a good place to begin with Stuart Hall’s The Work of Representation, the opening chapter of Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997).
What is representation for Stuart Hall?
For Hall, representation is the production of meaning through language. He uses language in a broad sense. Words, photographs, facial expressions and traffic lights can all serve as signs. A red light tells drivers to stop because they have learned a code that connects the visible signal to an instruction. The physical properties of red leave the question of what to do open.
Hall distinguishes two systems of representation. First we use a conceptual map to recognize and organize what we encounter. We can recognize different kinds of chairs as chairs and distinguish them from tables. Second, a system of signs allows us to communicate these concepts. A culture supplies enough shared conventions for people to make sense of one another, even when they disagree about a particular image or word.
Three theories of representation
The reflective approach treats language as a mirror of a meaning already present in the world. The intentional approach locates meaning in what a speaker or author wants to say. Hall sees part of the problem in each account. A photograph can record something that took place, and a photographer can have a purpose. Both still depend on conventions shared with the people looking at the image.
In the constructionist approach, meaning is made through systems of concepts and signs. The people and the street in the photograph exist. The category under which a newspaper presents them, and the associations that come with it, are produced through representation. Change the caption from “residents gather” to “crowds block the road” and you invite readers to organize much of the same visual information differently.
From Saussure to Foucault
Hall turns first to Ferdinand de Saussure. A sign joins a perceptible form, the signifier, to a concept, the signified. Signs gain meaning through their relations and differences within a system. On a traffic signal, red acquires its practical meaning through its place alongside other signals in a code.
Michel Foucault shifts attention to discourse. A discourse includes the terms, institutions and practices that make certain things possible to say and certain people authorized to say them. In the newspaper example, a semiotic analysis can show how the headline guides the reading of the image. A study of discourse can ask how officials, journalists and residents acquire unequal authority to name what happened. The two questions lead to different kinds of evidence.
Hall’s chapter gives us a way of reading familiar things more closely. The next time a picture looks self-explanatory, ask which words made it so, whose account supplied those words, and what a different caption would allow you to see.
Further reading· The Politics of Looking · Encoding and Decoding
