“Representation, meaning and language” – part 1

This appears to be the introduction to Chapter One of a book called “The Work of Representation” by Stuart Hall.

p15 – “Representation means using langauge to say something meaningful about, or to represent, the world meaningfully , to other people”

p15 – “Does language simply reflect a meaning which already exists out there in the world of objects, people and events (reflective)? Does langauge express only what the speaker or writer or painter wants to say, his or her personally intended meaning (intentional)? Or is meaning constructed in and through language (constructionist)?”

p16 – “To put it briefly, representation is the production of meaning through language.”

p18 – “…we are able to communicate because we share broadly the same conceptual maps and thus make sense of or interpret the world in roughly similar ways.  That is indeed what it means when we say we ‘belong to the same culture’.”

p18 – “Language is therefore the second system of representation involved in the overall process of constructing meaning.”

p19 – Any sound, word, image or object which functions as a sign, and is organizes with other signs into a system which is capable of carrying and expressing meaning is, from this point of view, ‘a language’.”

p19 – “At the heart of the meaning process in culture, then, are two related ’systems of representation’.  The first enables us to give meaning to the world by constructing a set of correspondences or a chain of equivalences between things – people, objects, events, abstract ideas, etc. – and our system of concepts, our conceptual maps.  The second depends on constructing a set of correspondences between our conceptual map and a set of signs, arranged or organized into various languages which sand for or represent those concepts.  The relation between ‘things’, concepts and signs lies at the heart of the production of meaning in language.  The process which links these three elements together is what we call ‘representation’.”

p19 – “Just as people who belong to the same culture must share a broadly similar conceptual map, so they must also share the same way of interpreting the signs of a language, for only in this way can meanings be effectively exchanges between people.”

Section 1.2, called Language and representation, start off talking about art, and how the image of a sheep is not really a sheep, or more accurately, not the same thing as a sheep.  I found myself wander in though here as I began to think about avatars.  Avatars, in Second Life, are not the actual person, but a representation of that person.  But, unlike the art work of a sheep, which is truly not “real”, how not “real” is the avatar of a person.  Is AJ Brooks not me?  This is discussed regularly at meetings and on listserves.  People so closely identify with their avatar and many of them make little or no distinction between themselves and their avatars.  Some might say “my avatar is not a representation of me, it IS me.”  Is it?

Thats all for now.  I’m stopping at section 1.3 on page 21 and I’ll pick up here next study time.