Key Media Concept – Representation

Definition: Representation refers to the construction in any medium

(especially the mass media) of aspects of ‘reality’ such as people, places,

objects, events, cultural identities and other abstract concepts.

Key Points:

Representations become familiar through constant re-use and come to

feel 'natural' and unmediated. A key concern is the way in which

representations are made to seem ‘natural’, despite the fact that they

change over time.

Representation is unavoidably selective, foregrounding some things

and backgrounding others.

Representations require interpretation – meaning is often subject to

individual interpretation

Representation always involves 'the construction of reality' from a

particular point of view

Systems of representation are the means by which the concerns of

ideologies are framed to create ways of looking at texts; such value

systems ‘position’ their subjects.

Contemporary theories of representation stress the construction of particular

realities.

Stuart Hall – Reception Theory

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He wrote a paper entitled ‘Encoding/Decoding’ (1981) in which he discussed

the three ways of reading a text.

Preferred reading – the reader experiences recognition of their own values

and interprets the text as the producer intended

Negotiated reading – the meaning of a text lies somewhere between the

producer and the reader. Even though the producer encodes the text in a

particular way, the reader will decode it in a slightly different manner

Oppositional reading – the reader interprets the text in a way that is totally

oppositional to the intended reading

Laura Mulvey - The Male Gaze

As Jonathan Schroeder notes, 'Film has been called an instrument of the

male gaze, producing representations of women, the good life, and sexual

fantasy from a male point of view' (Schroeder 1998, 208). The concept

derives from a very important article called ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative

Cinema’ by Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist. It was published in 1975

and is one of the most widely cited articles in the whole of contemporary film

theory. It focuses on how 'subject positions' are constructed by media texts

rather than investigating the viewing practices of individuals in specific social

contexts.

It explores the idea of the power of gaze and sets up some of the basic

concepts behind the representation of gender.

Mulvey notes that Freud had referred to (infantile) scopophilia - the pleasure

involved in looking at other people’s bodies as (particularly, erotic) objects. In

the darkness of the cinema auditorium it is notable that one may look without

being seen either by those on screen by other members of the audience.

Mulvey argues that various features of cinema viewing conditions facilitate for

the viewer both the voyeuristic process of objectification of female characters

and also the narcissistic process of identification with an ‘ideal ego’ seen on

the screen. She declares that in patriarchal society ‘pleasure in looking has

been split between active/male and passive/female’ (Mulvey 1992, 27). This is

reflected in the dominant forms of cinema. Conventional narrative films in the

‘classical’ Hollywood tradition not only typically focus on a male protagonist in

the narrative but also assume a male spectator.

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Traditional films present men as active, controlling subjects and treat women

as passive objects of desire for men in both the story and in the audience, and

do not allow women to be desiring sexual subjects in their own right. Such

films objectify women in relation to ‘the controlling male gaze’ (ibid., 33),

presenting ‘woman as image’ (or ‘spectacle’) and man as ‘bearer of the look’

(ibid., 27). Men do the looking; women are there to be looked at.

It was Mulvey who coined the term 'the male gaze'.

Mulvey distinguishes between two modes of looking for the film spectator:

voyeuristic and fetishistic, which she presents in Freudian terms as responses

to male ‘castration anxiety’. Voyeuristic looking involves a controlling gaze

and Mulvey argues that this has has associations with sadism: ‘pleasure lies

in ascertaining guilt - asserting control and subjecting the guilty person

through punishment or forgiveness’ (Mulvey 1992, 29). Fetishistic looking, in

contrast, involves ‘the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented

figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous.

This builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something

satisfying in itself. The erotic instinct is focused on the look alone’. Fetishistic

looking, she suggests, leads to overvaluation of the female image and to the

cult of the female movie star. Mulvey argues that the film spectator oscillates

between these two forms of looking (ibid.; see also Neale 1992, 283ff; Ellis

1982, 45ff; Macdonald 1995, 26ff; Lapsley & Westlake 1988, 77-9).

Semiotics

The audience look for signs to help them interpret the narrative. These

deeply rooted signs are based on the expectations the audience has

due to their prior knowledge of old tales or myths.

The theory of how we interpret these signs are as follows:

o Sign = the total of the signifier and signified eg how we interpret

the combination of the signifier and the signified

o Signifier (the object)

o Signified (the meaning)

Roland Barthes – Denotation and Connotation

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Meaning includes both denotation and connotation. 'Denotation' tends

to be described as the definitional, 'literal', 'obvious' or 'commonsense'

meaning of a sign. The term 'connotation' is used to refer to the socio-

cultural and 'personal' associations (ideological, emotional etc.) of the

sign. These are typically related to the interpreter's class, age, gender,

ethnicity and so on. Signs are more 'polysemic' - more open to

interpretation - in their connotations than their denotations.

In 'The Photographic Message' (1961) and 'The Rhetoric of the Image'

(1964), Barthes argued that in photography connotation can be

(analytically) distinguished from denotation (Barthes 1977, 15-31, 32-

51). As Fiske puts it 'denotation is what is photographed, connotation is

how it is photographed' (Fiske 1982, 91).

Related to connotation is what Roland Barthes refers to as myth. We

usually associate myths with classical fables about the exploits of gods

and heroes. But for Barthes myths were the dominant ideologies of our

time.

Like metaphors, myths help us to make sense of our experiences

within a culture (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 185-6). They express and

serve to organize shared ways of conceptualizing something within a

culture. Their function is to naturalize the cultural - in other words, to

make dominant cultural and historical values, attitudes and beliefs

seem entirely 'natural', 'normal', self-evident, timeless, obvious

'common-sense' - and thus objective and 'true' reflections of 'the way

things are'.

It is possible to argue that all media representations relate to broader

cultural myths and belief systems.

TASK:

Pick one of your productions and answer the following questions on the blog:

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1. What/who is being represented?

2. How is it being represented? (Use microelements)

3. How is the representation made to seem 'true', 'commonsense' or

'natural'?

4. What is foregrounded and what is backgrounded? Are there any

notable absences?

5. Whose representation is it? Whose interests does it reflect? How do

you know?

6. How do people make sense of the representation? According to what

codes? (Consider Mulvey’s theory and Barthes concept of myth –

make reference to both).

7. Apply the theory of semiotics to your production i.e. what are the signs

and their associated meanings?

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