Study On The Cultural Representation Theory Of Stuart Hall And The Practice Of The Theory

As one of the keywords in the contemporary cultural studies,'representation'is widely employed and practiced, around which many correlative theories has been formed. Stuart Hall's discussion about it can be the representative. He not only discussed the model of the circuit of culture in view of the Marxist production circulation, but also seemed'representation'as the primary site of the cultural circuit. He pointed out that'representation'produced meaning by the signifying practices of the signs,constructed the systems of the meaning of the world to person and made the meaning communicated between the persons in same culture or different cultures. In this sense,'representation'constructs our world of meaning. There are three approaches to'representation': reflective, intentional and constructionist. Hall emphasized the semiotic and the discursive approaches in the constructionist approach to"representation". The previous one which has been called its'poetics'provides one general model of how culture and representation work , rooting in the tradition that begin with the linguistics of Saussure and be developed by the mythology of Barthes; the latter one is more concerned with the effects and consequences of representation—its'politics'and discuss the relations between the discourses/ knowledge which construct meaning and the effective subject-position , and the dispersive power which is the drive and the deep-seated causation of meaning through the discourses theory of Foucault. Hall also points that'representation'ties up with ideology which is neglected by Foucault. By jointing the ideology with'representation', Hall consciously resist on the vulgar Marxist and economic determinism. So the theory of representation presents the sense of cultural politics.With a view to the whole theories of hall, we will find the theory of representation tightly links with the thinking of the'articulation'. The two theories both root in the Marxist tradition and constantly grown up by drawing on and using the various theories of Gramscian, linguistics, constructionist and cultural anthropology; the central problems of'representation'also are of Marxist; the theory of'representation'can be seen as the practice of the'articulation'; it shows the consciously historic choices from the paradigm of culturalism to the paradigm of constructionist and to Gramscian turn. The theory of in Hall just is the innovative envelopment of the theory of articulation which is based on Gramsci and brought forward Laclau. The process that the theory of articulation is represented is also an'articulated'process. The theory of articulation not only offers a contextualization approach to analytical objects, but provides a...