Culture, Identity, and Representation - Assignment Example

Running Head: Culture, Identity and Representation Culture, Identity and Representation s Culture, Identity and Representation 1. Briefly outline the main concepts of Saussure, Barthes and Foucault in relation to representation. Developments in thoughts towards our knowledge of the world have been made possible partially by social and technological changes, such as the enormous expansion of technologies of travel and communication, which have greatly increased our exposure to other cultures. The paper will be looking at the advertisement — Alfa Romeo Car Range - I Am Giulietta. It will examine how the advertisers piece words, images and music together to construct a particular critique of television. In Mythologies, Roland Barthes says that “pictures. . . . are more imperative than writing, they impose meaning at one stroke without analyzing or diluting it." (Barthes 1973, 110) If that is true for pictures or images, then the imposition of meaning at one stroke must be even truer for music video. The reasons we say this is because the image in music video has definite helpers which help us produce sense - these are music and text. Image, music and text help each other in such a way that we can ignore none when discussing music video. The statement is not true for the advert of I Am Giulietta where Uma Thurman and Lynda Hayes remain unsuccessful in giving a good impression. And certainly they are not totally responsible for the failure because a number of people doing their job behind the camera have their equal share. The type of music that accompanies an image sets the tone in which that image is viewed. The spoken, sung or written text that accompanies an image where a car is seen being driven around twisting mountain roads and city streets also could not affect our interpretation of the image. This is referred to as anchorage. The music director could not make effective use in the music video in an attempt to anchor the meaning of certain images. Eventually, this use of anchorage did not made the general message of the video more accessible to the viewer. The first impression one gets from the music video is that it could be a tirade condemning television as a medium. On closer inspection this is not, in fact, the case. We must remember that music video usually uses television for its mode of transmission. Throughout the video of I Am Giulietta images are used to carry precise meaning and are put in a certain sequences to express particular meaning. The speed with which the images flicker across the screen because of the speed of the car forces us to read the images quickly, much like we read words on a page. Because of this viewers dont have time to think about the images, but nevertheless, can easily construct meaning from them. This is in line with Barthes assertion in Mythologies that images impose meaning at one stroke. In addition reading of these images is automatically and simultaneously anchored by the music and words which are spoken or shown on the screen. Saussures work at the start of the 20th century in advocating a structuralist view of language has been a highly important part of this process (Saussure, 1974). For in arguing that different languages make different distinctions about the world and human experience, Saussure made an influential case for the thought that language structures our understanding of reality rather than serving as a neutral means of communicating about reality. Another vital source of criticism of nomenclaturism came from the later linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein (1961), who argued that language was an arrangement of public conventions and that the meaning of words derived from their usage within linguistic communities rather than from reference to some reality that could be simply observed beyond language. A more recent critique of nomenclaturism has also been offered within the work of Derrida (1976) who has examined that Saussures idea of the arbitrary nature of the sign is only logical for us because of the opposition of signs such as nature/law, nature/art and nature/ culture within Western thinking. Derrida, therefore, deepens our sense of the interruption of representation and reality by showing that our very ability to articulate this as an issue is a product of the particular linguistic and conceptual system that we operate in within our culture. According to Foucault, representation is not just one of many contemporary philosophical dilemmas. Foucault was not different many of former interpreters because he regards philosophical thought from Descartes on cantering on the dilemma of knowledge. Music plays an important role in an advertisement and the use of music video is an excellent medium to carry a message because it bombards the senses with a lot of information in one stroke. Music, text and images unite to create a medium which is accessed easily. The use of slogans to complement the words of the song is probably one of the most powerful aspects of music videos as they serve to anchor the meaning of the video as a whole. The criticisms of nomenclaturism offered by Saussure, Barthes and Foucault throw up a significant challenge to how we think about our therapeutic work. Models of counselling have classically assumed that language is capable to give some kind of direct access to reality and the truths of the human condition. The work of Saussure, Barthes and Foucault, however, suggests that it is more plausible to see language as a self-referential system of social practices that offer only a local and culturally bound view of our survival. If language is not capable to provide us with a direct or objective view of reality, then how can we consider about therapeutic communication in the light of this? Following the work of Taylor (1992), the emphasis here will be on two possible ways in which we might conceptualize therapeutic work in the context of the dislocation of representation and reality. Both of these possibilities are, however, as we shall see, potentially difficult, and a more promising option may be to attempt some synthesis of them. The first idea to issues of representation and reality to be considered here, and one often associated with post-modem writing, is that of seeking to move beyond the idea of a reality that exists beyond our words and symbols. This notion is captured well in the following words of Baudrillard (1996): “Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality; a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory... it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today [of a map so detailed that it covered the world], it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own.” (p. 76) 2. Critically discuss the future of identity and identity politics in relation to sexuality. The future of identity politics in relation to sexuality is clearly linked to the relationship between identity formations. Hal Foster, an important member of this discourse, takes position on the Left, a position that he thinks to be defiant to reactionary, right-wing cultural politics. Constructing Hilton Kramer as an intellectual antipode, Foster takes a distance from the conservative critics prohibitive stance of intolerance and anti-postmodernist sentiments. (Foster 1996, 205) Inquisitively, Foster’s critical efforts have been viewed as connected with conservative fundamentalism within the canon. Foster is concerned in regard to clearly political art and art from the so-called periphery, expressing it is a continuation of an outmoded dialectic: a Hegelian binary fixation that is naive to the post-modern concept that modern power is exercised from multiple positions and localities. This vision intimates that identity art has a basically moral base--an instructive, didactic intentionally from which it must turn away. Political art is what the theorist calls a "trauma discourse" — a form of narcissism that pits an innate alterity against an inherent victimizer. This self-absorption is described a self-othering as self-absorption--or (in relation to the global diasporic artist) "ethnographic self-fashioning”. (Foster 1995, 180) For fully appreciating the impact of this theoretical discourse, it is essential to unpack its function relative to analysis of the art object. For instance, Foster examines the photography of Cindy Sherman using Julia Kristevas construct of abjection, paying particular attention to those works that connect the obscene the excretory and the grotesque. This aspect of Sherman s work is embraced, in that it is a literal manifestation of abjection. Depicted are intuitive demonstrations of the fragmentation of the body, as well as filth, offal, rotting flesh, and base physiological functions. However, the feminist underpinnings within Shermans images are mentioned in terms of the gaze: the subject under the gaze or the subject as picture. The predominance of identity-based counter-discourses, such as the feminist dimensions of Sherman’s critique, is viewed as lacking an aesthetically oriented engagement with the art object: “There are dangers with this siting of truth as well such as the restriction of our political imagination to two camps, the abjector and the abjected and the assumption that in order not to be counted among sexists and racists, one must become the phobic object of such subjects.” (Foster 1996, 123) There is presumption that these trauma discourses are based on an unfashionable binary of abjector and abjected, and that the artwork of the abjected functions as a testimonial against a domineering power. In this special case, feminism is viewed as an articulation of a victimized state resultant of a patriarchal society. As a result, it logically follows that the feminist subtext present in the work of Sherman would be undermined in favour of focusing on formal concerns. More frankly, this line of logic suggests that identity-based artists are deliberately locked in their bodies because they romanticize and ultimately make spectacles of their identities: “This idealization of otherness tends to follow a temporal line in which one group is privileged as the new subject of history, only to be displaced by another, a chronology that may collapse not only different differences (social, ethnic, sexual, and so on) but also different positions within each difference.” (Foster 1996, 179) The quote from Foster’s work conveys a sense of apprehension about the commodification of difference — an approach that results in "a politics that may consume its historical subjects before they become historically effective." (Foster 1996, 179) In reality, much trepidation surrounds the stylish interchangeability of identities for the sake of financial success in the global marketplace. In this theorization, nonessential cultural producers dishonestly proffer a highly visualized lingua trauma to satisfy the demands of the art market. (Foster 1996, 123) Viewed under the rubric of this significant effort, it becomes clear how — in the case of Shermans extraordinary output — the political intentions of such art could be regarded as injurious if the work essentialisms gender inequities at the cost of other oppressions. At the same time, if it fetishists (and makes a spectacle of) the suffering of a particular constituency for financial gain it eventually will belittle the reality of a hegemonic set of power relations in contemporary society. This type of familiarity with the future of identify politics holds the potential for misuse. A group of minority artists indicts societys fixation with corporeality as a means of differentiation by utilizing their own bodies. Making use of ones ideologically sexed body, as a mise-en-scène to question identity-based forms of oppression, is not essentially complicit with the sensitively powerful manifestations of these tactics exhibited throughout history. There are a lot of books about the visual seductiveness of a fascist aesthetic and the concerted effort to make the body a raced spectacle. Such guardedness of identity art appears to stem from an awareness of the well-documented violence arising from such historical phenomenon. This seems politically concerning on the surface; still, in utilizing a model that is distinctive to particular historical circumstances, there is a danger that such ideas could be misused in the service of a type of dogmatism that would leave out certain artists. References Barthes, R., Mythologies (London: Paladin Grafton Books, 1973), p. 110. Baudrillard, J. (1996). The map is the territory. In W. Truett Anderson (Ed.), The Fontana Post-Modernism Reader (pp. 75-77). London : Fontana . Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology. Baltimore , MD : Johns Hopkins University Press. Foster, Hal., (1995) "The Artist as Ethnogorapher," in The Return of the Real, the MIT Press, 180. Foster, Hal., (1996) "Obscene, Abject, Traumatic," October 78 (Fall 1996): 123. Foster, Hal., (1996) "Whatever Happened to Postmodernism?" in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 205. Foster, Hal., (1996) "Whatever Happened to Postmodernism?". Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 179 Saussure, F. DE (1974). Course in General Linguistics. Glasgow : Collins. Taylor, M. (1992). Reframing postmodernisms. In P. Berry & A. Wernick (Eds), Shadows of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion (pp. 11-29). London : Routledge. White, M, & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. New York : Norton. Wittgenstein, L. (1961). Read More