Week 4: Notes on The Spectacle of the Other

Notes on The Spectacle of the Other (Chapter 4)

The image both shows an event (denotation) and carries a ‘message’ or meaning (connotation) - Barthes would call it a ‘meta-message’ or myth about ‘race’, colour and ‘otherness’. 

We can’t help reading images of this kind as ‘saying something’, not just about the people or the occasion, but about their ‘otherness’, their ‘difference’. ‘Difference’ has been marked. How it is then interpreted is a constant and recurring preoccupation in the representation of people who are racially and ethnically different from the majority population. Difference signifies. It ‘speaks’ (229, 230).

Images do not carry meaning or ‘signify’ on their own. They accumulate meanings, or play off their meanings against one another, across a variety of broader level of how ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ is being represented in a particular culture at an one moment, we can see similar representational practices and figures being repeated, with variations, from one text or site of representatives

→ Since images are usually ambiguous in their meanings, I agree that the meaning that the viewers takes away from the image greatly varies. Hall states that these variations occurs as we contrast a specific subject with its opposite (good/bad, soft/hard, etc).

1.2 Why does ‘difference’ matter?

1. linguistics approach

"‘difference’ matters because it is essential to meaning; without it, meaning could not exist" (234)

difference signifies; it carries a message" (234)

Binary oppositions 

It is the ‘difference’ between white and black which signifies, which carries meaning

we can contrast it with its opposite (black/white, day/night, femininity/masculinity, British/others-alien)

binary oppositions capture the diversity of the world within their either/or extremes, they are also a rather crude and reductionist way of establishing meaning (making a rigid two part structure with one pole of the binary having the dominant one)

relation of power beterrn the poles of a binary oppositions

2. Saussure

we need ‘difference’ because we can only construct meaning through a dialogue with the ‘Other’

The ‘Other’ is essential to meaning

BUT the meaning cannot be fixed and one group can never be one fixed term controlled by one group

→ I agree that meaning is changing, especially in Japan. In Japan, there is a constant change in trends. Some superfoods, such as mate or chia seeds became fashionable when Miranda Kerr introduced them. However, as time passes, they are now considered outdated. This healthy goods can never be one fixed term.

3. du Gay, Hall et al.

states that culture depends on facing things meaning by assigning them to different positions within a classificatory system. The marking of ‘difference’ is thus the basis of that symbolic order which we call culture

Various anthropologists argues the importance of symbolic boundaries to all cultures; that social groups impose meaning on their world by ordering and organising things into classificatory systems

And Levi-Strauss states that one way of giving them meaning is to divide them into two groups (binary oppositions)

What if things turn up in the wrong category or things cannot fit in any categories??

Mary Douglas “pure” vs “matter out of place”/impure/abnormal

“pure”: something that gives cultures their unique meaning and identity

“matter out of place”: the breaking of our unwritten rules and codes that unsettles culture

ex) dirt

4. the ‘Other’ is fundamental to the constitution of the self, to us as subjects, and to sexual identity

Freud’s Oedipus complex:

the consolidation of our definition of ‘self’ and of our sexual identities depends on the way we are formed as subjects, especially in relation to that stage of early development

Interesting Points

Hall states that the "question of ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ has come to play an increasingly significant role" as ‘difference’ is ambivalent: could be positive and negative (238).

It is positive because it is "necessary for the production of meaning, the formation of language and culture, for social identities and a subjective sense of the self as a sexed subject” (238).

On the other hand, it is negative because "it is threatening, a site of danger, of negative feelings, of splitting, hostility and aggression toward the ‘Other’” (238).

Difference between a type and a stereotype (Richard Dyer)

Stereotype

・"Stereotypes get hold of the few ‘simple, vivid, memorable, easily grasped and widely recognised’ characteristics about a person, reducing everything about them to those traits, exaggerating and simplifying them, and fixing them without change or development to eternity

He points out that stereotyping reduces, essentializes, naturalises and fixes ‘difference’ (258).

・Stereotyping deploys a strategy of ‘splitting’

→ He points out that "stereotyping is part of the maintenance of social and symbolic order” (258). 

→ He also points out that "stereotyping tends occurs where there are gross inequalities of power, [of which is usually] directed against the subordinate or excluded group” (258). It creates boundaries and excludes everything that does not belong - the so-called the ‘other’.

Type

・"A type is any simple, vivid, memorable, easily grasped and widely recognised characterisation in which a few traits are foregrounded and change or development is kept to a minimum." - Dyer.

→ We use types to make sense of the world as we place things in terms of categories. 

→ We come to 'know' someone by thinking of the roles they perform, assigning them to a group according to class, gender, age etc and we place them in a personality type. This builds a picture of them by what we gather from 'typing' him/her.