Representation

  • representation is the meaning through language
  • 2 systems of representation
    • 'system': objects, people and events are correlated with a set of concepts or mental representations which are carried around in our heads
    • how we might form concepts for things we can perceive - people or material objects
  • 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
  • we 'belong to the same culture': we interpret the world in roughly similar ways, we are able to build up a shared culture of meanings and thus construct a social world which we inhabit together. --> 'culture' sometimes defined in terms of 'shared meanings or shared conceptual maps'
  • The meaning is constructed by the system of representation. It is constructed and fixed by the code, which sets up the correlation between our conceptual system and our language system
  • Codes fix the relationships between concepts and signs. They stabilise meaning within different languages and cultures. They tell us which language to use to convey which idea.
  • Codes tell us which concepts are being referred to when we hear or read which signs
  • 3 approaches:
    • reflective approach: meaning is thought to lie in the object, person, idea or even in the real world, and language functions like a mirror, to reflect the true meaning as it already exists in the world
    • intentional approach: it is the speaker, the author, who impose his or her unique meaning on the world through language. Words mean what the author intends they should mean.
    • constructionist approach: recognises this public, social character of language. It acknowledges that 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.
  • Meaning is produced within language, in and through various representational systems which, for convenience, we call 'languages.' Meaning is produced by the practice, the 'work', of representation. It is constructed through signifying - i.e. meaning - producing - practices
  • language is a system of signs
  • sign: the form (the actual word, image, photo, etc.)
  • signifier: idea or concept in our head with which the form was associated
  • signified: the corresponding concept it triggered off in our head
  • Structuralism model: Saussure + semiotics - the semiotic approach provides a method for analysing how visual representations convey meaning
  • Meaning has to be actively 'read' or 'interpreted' 
  • Barthes: denotation (literal meaning) vs connotation (associated meaning)
  • Barthes: myth - signifiers to get meaning --> signs with a simple, literal meaning
  • Foucault - from language to discourse 'a group of statement which provide a language for talking about - a way of representing the knowledge about - a particular historical moment. 
(source: The Work of Representation, Stuart Hall)

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