:: Representation in imagery ::

I have been promising an overview of Stuart Hall’s ideas of the politics of imagery and ideas on representation and the media.

I’ll give a brief general overview of his theories today and then I’ll get into a more detailed analysis of it as it relates to the I-Space later this coming weekend.

Hall rejects the old view that the truth of something is represented in a distorted way through the imagery chosen by the media. Whereas traditional views believed there was a gap between “true reality” and its copied or “represented” self in the mediums used by mass media, Hall says instead that imagery has no innate view or representation in and of itself until it is viewed or consumed by someone. In this way, the representation doesn’t happen after the fact, but is instead constitutive of the event itself.

Hall says that, as a result, there is no single essential truth to anything. Instead, many meanings are possible based on the overall manner in which an event is represented.

He goes on to say that that meanings arise out of conceptual cultural maps or typologies, in which language and discourse are key. Using language and a cultural lense or filter, humans interpret the meaning of an event based on its representation in an image.

The danger, however, is that power and ideology attempt to fix meaning, lock down meaning in a certain narrow representation, thereby ignoring its fluidity and natural state of flux.

Closure, then, in the Hall sense, is the idea of closing out other representations of an image in order to position a single fixed meaning as the only or ultimate meaning of a representation.

So the three things that are at stake in representation are new knowledge, new identities and new meanings.

The central questions, then, to media analysis using Hall’s views are as follows:

• Who has the power, in what channel, to circulate which meanings to whom?


• Where do images come from?


• Who produces images?


• How is meaning closed in the representation?


• Who is silenced in the production of images?

Using these questions and the ideas of what is at stake in representation, I will apply them against examples culled from the I-Space in general and the blogosphere specifically in order to test the merits of this form of analysis in highlighting the power struggles in the search for meanings and pleasures here, online.

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(Because Hall can be difficult for a new Communications student to understand and dissect unaided, I must gratefully acknowledge the COMZ 360 course handout on Stuart Hall’s lectures of “Representation and the Media” for the ideas presented in this post. Much of this post is a summary or paraphrase of this handout.)