The Matter of Images

Essays on Representations

Richard Dyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135135096
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

Now published in a revised second edition, The Matter of Images searches through the resonances of the term 'representation', analysing images in terms of why they matter, what they are made of, and the material realities they refer to. Richard Dyer's analyses consider representations of 'out' groups and traditionally dominant groups alike, and encompass the eclectic texts of contemporary culture, from queers to straights, political correctness, representations of Empire and films including Gilda, Papillon and The Night of the Living Dead. Essays new to the second edition discuss Lillian Gish as the ultimate white movie star, the representation of whiteness in the South in Birth of a Nation, and society's fascination with serial killers.

The Matter of Images is distinctive in its commitment to writing politically about contemporary culture, while insisting on the importance of understanding the formal qualities and complexity of the images it investigates.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The essays collected here all deal, through particular instances, with the cultural representation of social groupings. This is ‘images of’ analysis of the kind that has burgeoned in the past twenty years, starting with work on women and black people, spreading to other marginalized or oppressed groups, such as ethnic minorities, lesbians and gay men, the disabled and the aged, and now beginning, with studies on men, to encompass dominant or majority groups. These essays were part of that trajectory.

The impulse behind the writing of them was political. It sprang from the feeling that how social groups are treated in cultural representation is part and parcel of how they are treated in life, that poverty, harassment, self-hate and discrimination (in housing, jobs, educational opportunity and so on) are shored up and instituted by representation. The resonances of the term ‘representation’ suggest as much. How a group is represented, presented over again in cultural forms, how an image of a member of a group is taken as representative of that group, how that group is represented in the sense of spoken for and on behalf of (whether they represent, speak for themselves or not), these all have to do with how members of groups see themselves and others like themselves, how they see their place in society, their right to the rights a society claims to ensure its citizens. Equally re-presentation, representativeness, representing have to do also with how others see members of a group and their place and rights, others who have the power to affect that place and those rights. How we are seen determines in part how we are treated; how we treat others is based on how we see them; such seeing comes from representation.

The representation of women and other oppressed groups was, and by and large still is, a relentless parade of insults. Anger, despair or contempt at these fuels ‘images of’ writing but can also block real investigation. Much image analysis seems only to demonstrate that everything is the same and it’s all awful. There is something deadly about such reductive work: it tells one little and thus does rather little politically. It is important not to lose the fire of ‘images of’ work but it needs to be tempered by considerations that get more nearly at the complexity and elusiveness, the real political difficulty, of representations.

This means, first of all, stressing that representations are presentations, always and necessarily entailing the use of the codes and conventions of the available cultural forms of presentation. Such forms restrict and shape what can be said by and/or about any aspect of reality in a given place in a given society at a given time, but if that seems like a limitation on saying, it is also what makes saying possible at all. Cultural forms set the wider terms of limitation and possibility for the (re)presentation of particularities and we have to understand how the latter are caught in the former in order to understand why such-and-such gets (re)presented in the way it does. Without understanding the way images function in terms of, say, narrative, genre or spectacle, we don’t really understand why they turn out the way they do.

Secondly, cultural forms do not have single determinate meanings – people make sense of them in different ways, according to the cultural (including sub-cultural) codes available to them. For instance, people do not necessarily read negative images of themselves as negative. One of the first publications to point this out was Ann Kaplan’s collection on women in film noir (1978), which suggested that it was possible to be inspired rather than offended by images that had been assumed to be, and probably were culturally encoded as, negative, that there was something exhilarating about the way femmes fatales in film noir give men the run-around and exude such incandescent power. Much work since then has stressed the multiple ways in which audiences make sense of images. In stressing complexity and contradictoriness at the point of reception, however, I am not suggesting that people can make representations mean anything they want them to mean. We are all restricted by both the viewing and the reading codes to which we have access (by virtue of where we are situated in the world and the social order) and by what representations there are for us to view and read. The prestige of high culture, the centralization of mass cultural production, the literal poverty of marginal cultural production: these are aspects of the power relations of representation that put the weight of control over representation on the side of the rich, the white, the male, the heterosexual. Acknowledging the complexity of viewing/reading practices in relation to representation does not entail the claim that there is equality and freedom in the regime of representation.

Thirdly, what is re-presented in representation is not directly reality itself but other representations. The analysis of images always needs to see how any given instance is embedded in a network of other instances. Again, as with the point about reception above, I need to draw back from some of the conclusions that might appear to follow from saying this, even while insisting that it is so. By emphasizing the textuality of representation I am not arguing that texts are all there is in the world, that there is nothing of which representations are representations. This is difficult territory. I accept that one apprehends reality only through representations of reality, through texts, discourse, images; there is no such thing as unmediated access to reality. But because one can see reality only through representation, it does not follow that one does not see reality at all. Partial – selective, incomplete, from a point of view – vision of something is not no vision of it whatsoever. The complex, shifting business of re-presenting, reworking, recombining representations is in tension with the reality to which representations refer and which they affect. This is evident in three ways. Firstly, reality sets limits to what, barring idiosyncratic examples, humans can make it mean. (To mistake a cow for a hat is not just an error in logic.) Secondly, reality is always more extensive and complicated than any system of representation can possibly comprehend and we always sense that this is so – representation never ‘gets’ reality, which is why human history has produced so many different and changing ways of trying to get it. Thirdly, representations here and now have real consequences for real people, not just in the way they are treated as indicated above but in terms of the way representations delimit and enable what people can be in any given society.

This last point is most sharply suggested by the case of lesbians and gay men. Many would agree that the categories of ‘lesbians’ and ‘gay men’ are not given by reality. Most societies recognize sexual relations between members of the same sex, whether or not they proscribe, institutionalize or elevate them, but only a minority have an idea of persons who habitually, exclusively and ‘by nature’ have such relations. This is an important point, because it indicates the malleability of human sex activity, the possibility of change. But we live in this society at this time, where some people do feel that they ‘are’ lesbian or gay, and often enough to wish to make common cause with others who feel the same. It is true that such identities are never really as comprehensive as they claim – that many lesbians and gay men, for instance, do not recognize themselves in the identities claimed either within lesbian/gay cultures or by the lesbian/gay movements – but it is also the case that one cannot live outside the society, the network of representations, in which one finds oneself. Negative designations of a group have negative consequences for the lives of members of that grouping, and identifying with that grouping, however much it doesn’t ‘get’ all of what one is personally or all of what everyone in that grouping is, none the less enables one to try to change the circumstances of that socially constructed grouping.

The case of lesbians and gay men presents in sharp form what is none the less another general characteristic of representation, namely that it constitutes the very social grouping that it also re-presents. (This is why I prefer ‘grouping’ to ‘group’, since the latter seems more fixed and given, the former stresses the business of construction.) Ethnic representation for instance is based not on inevitable categories pre-existing human consciousness but on the organization of perception. To take two examples: to refer to someone as ‘nero’ (black) in northern Italy is liable to be taken as meaning that the person is from southern Italy; a light-skinned, black- identified friend of mine found that he was treated as white when he visited Africa. Ethnicity is in the eye of the culture. Even the categorical sex distinction male: female (and not just the gender distinction masculine: feminine) may not be the bottom line of how we must represent humans, as Judith Butler (1990) among others argues. In saying this, however, I give no ground to those who say that there is no reality except representation itself. There are variations in skin colour, there are genital differences, there are different sexual practices – representation is the organization of the perception of these into comprehensibility, a comprehensibility that is always frail, coded, in other words, human.

The complexity of representation lies then in its embeddedness in cultural forms, its unequal but not monolithic relations of production and reception, its tense and unfinished, unfinishable relation to the reality to which it refers and which it affects. It also lies, finally, in its comprehensiveness. Women, ethnic minorities, gay people and so on are not the only ones to be social groupings; everyone belongs to social groupings; indeed we all belong in many groupings, often antagonistic to one another or at the least implying very different accesses to power. The groupings that have tended not to get addressed in ‘images of’ work, however, are those with most access to power: men, whites, heterosexuals, the able-bodied. The problem with not addressing them as such is that they then function as simply the human norm, without specificity and thus without a specifiable relation to power. Latterly the study of the representation of men and masculinity has become a growth industry, but there is still next to no work on whites, heterosexuals or the able-bodied. Such work, adumbrated in a couple of pieces here, seeks to make normality strange, that is, visible and specific. This must not imply, however, an equivalence between such images and those of women and other oppressed groupings. The project of making normality strange and thus ultimately decentring it must not seem to say that this has already taken place, that now masculinity, whiteness, heterosexuality and able-bodiedness are just images of identity alongside all others. That may be the point we wish to reach but we are not there yet. As in all others issues of representation, we must not leave the matter of power out of account any more than the matter of representation itself.

The essays that follow have not been altered from their original publication except for minor errors. This second edition alters from the first only in that the chapter on the sad young man has been removed (and can now be found in my The Culture of Queers (Routledge 2001)) and that three new chapters have been added (Serial Killing, Lillian Gish, The Birth of a Nation); suggestions for further reading have been updated. With a collection like this it is impossible to acknowledge all those who contributed to the writing of them, but I should like to thank those who commissioned, edited and encouraged them: Sarah Benton, Jim Cook, Philip Dodd, Chris Granlund, Larry Gross, Tony Harrold, Jim Hillier, Martin Humphries, Richard King and Helen Taylor, Chuck Kleinhans and Jump Cut, Kobena Mercer, Andy Metcalfe, Sally Townsend, and Armond White.

REFERENCES

Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble, London/New York: Routledge.

Kaplan, E. Ann (ed.) (1978) Women in Film Noir, London: British Film Institute.

Chapter 2

In a word

Many people put a great deal of energy into cleansing language. A colleague of mine is tireless in her use of ‘chairperson’ in the face of almost everyone else’s implacable use of ‘chairman’. Jesse Jackson has headed a campaign to make everyone use ‘African-American’, a campaign that seems to be working, at least as far as the liberal press in the States is concerned. It is one of the more astonishing achievements of 1970s politics that queers now find themselves called by a term they themselves nominated, gay.

Struggling over words is one of the most immediate, practical, day-to- day forms of what may be broadly characterized as left cultural politics. They are at one end of a continuum that includes attention to presentation across the board, the now widely granted centrality of identity as a basis for activity, ideologically inflected reviewing of the arts and the increased stress on the role of consciousness and culture in our general understanding of why and how things are as they are and how to change them. The term ‘cultural politics’ to cover all that is itself inadequate. In some ways, the venerable socialist reference to ‘the struggle for hearts and minds’ is better, because more concrete and inclusive, but it had its own drawback. It tended to imply that there is ‘real politics’ and a correct way, to which socialists had to persuade people (their hearts and their minds) to assent, whereas ‘cultural politics’ sees all aspects of the life of the heart and mind as themselves political and all politics as emotional and ideological. ‘Culture’ is not just the vehicle whereby you win people over to something else that is not culture – culture is politics, politics is culture.

There is no doubt in my mind about the importance of this development. It is not excessively sweeping to observe that the overwhelming reason for the failure of socialism so far, from what we now observe in Eastern Europe, is not a failure of presentation but the desperate inadequacy of a politics that was not about where people were at in their hearts and minds, what they wanted, what fulfilled them. Yet for all that, there is a problem about cultural politics and it is well illustrated by the problems of struggles over words.

Insisting on chairperson, African-American, gay, is a drip-drip-drip that we have to keep up, yet there’s something unsatisfactory about it too. It’s not so much its slowness and the seeming inertia of language but the way there nearly always turns out to be something off about the words and terms we want to get established. We may succeed in some measure in bringing about the change in vocabulary, but how about the meanings and feelings, the minds and hearts?

The feminist project is in some ways different from that of ethnic minority or lesbian/gay interventions. Changing ‘man’ to ‘person’ and so on is about rendering language gender-neutral so that we come to see most human functions as just that, human, not male. For ethnic minorities, lesbians and gay men and other groups (the elderly/senior citizens/people of the third age, for instance, or the disabled/physically challenged/ differently abled), on the other hand, it is more a question of getting new terms established to describe who we are. It is this word project that I want to focus on here.

I had better come straight out with one of the things that set me thinking about this: I have never liked the word ‘gay’. It’s still the word I would use and wish to have used to describe myself and those like myself, but all the same it embarrasses me. I’m not giving ground to those who always said that the gay movement had ‘spoilt’ the word ‘gay’, had ‘deprived the language of a very useful word’ by associating it with sexual peculiarity - those people are very welcome to have back ‘queer’, ‘bent’, ‘pervert’ and all the other very useful words that were in danger of going out of all but homophobic commission. Nor am I going along with the likes of Richard Ingrams, who opined in a recent Sunday newspaper that most of the gays he knew were not gay but miserable (as well any gay man knowing him might be). It’s just that to me ‘gay’ is a rather trivial word, too much suggesting only fun-fun-fun, not adequate to the complexities and variedness of being … gay. No word could ever do all that, but ‘gay’ feels like a delimitation, an insistence on one aspect.

The alternatives are no better, of course. The ‘homo’ words, quite apart from the learned feel where one wants a colloquial term to trip off the mouth, each have their problems. ‘Homosexual’ is too emphatically sexual, with no affective or social ring; ‘homo-erotic’ is too broad, too widely (and usefully) applied to any libidinally charged contact between people of the same sex (such as fathers and sons, contact sports, men in line peeing); ‘homophile’ is too namby-pamby, not sexual enough, and anyway never caught on. The strategy of reclaiming homophobic words, turning them disconcertingly back on society, as in the defiant use of ‘faggot’ and ‘queer’ by many activists, does not rid such words of associations of oddness and marginality, and only sounds proud to gay men who don’t feel ashamed of being queer.

‘Gay’ has another problem too. Some people use it to apply to both women and men (and I have a sense that in North America this is increasingly so among lesbians/gay women themselves), but feminist lesbians have generally resisted this. However, ‘lesbian’ instead is not a straightforward issue. I remember a meeting at the Birmingham Gay Centre about changing its name (as was agreed) to the Lesbian and Gay Centre. Most of the men present, well trained or genuinely committed to lesbians deciding for themselves what they should be called, were happy enough to go along with the change. The strongest voices raised against it came from women, generally older, generally more identified with the bar scene, for whom ‘lesbian’ was the term ‘they’, the doctors and psychologists, had always used against women such as themselves. One said that she’d rather be called ‘bent’ than ‘lesbian’. A word with such a positive ring for one group of women sounded very negative to another.

This example suggests that there is only a limited extent to which we can make words feel to everyone how we want them to feel. Words come trailing clouds of connotation that are very hard to shake off. Take the history of progressive terms to describe US Americans of African descent. Each new term introduced seemed to break through the hatred and prejudice enshrined in the prevalent vocabulary, yet each term itself was revealed to be oppressive, requiring a new term to supersede it. ‘Negro’, for instance, drew from an aspirantly objective description of differences between peoples and was adopted, notably by the Harlem Renaissance, in a spirit of ‘taking pride in one’s race’. It was the way in which one (who-ever one was) was positive about African-Americans at that time, yet it was founded on biological notions of race that seem the epitome of reaction now, especially in the light of where racial pride can lead in Aryan hands. ‘Coloured’ at first sight seemed to avoid this, no longer conjuring up notions of blood ancestry – yet not only did it still focus on a biological difference (skin), it also had the effect of suggesting that there were normal people and ‘coloured’ ones, as if all people do not share the quality of being some colour or other. ‘Black’, by ineluctably suggesting the counter term ‘white’, avoided this by insisting that black people are this colour; it stood against the associations of blackness with evil, insisting that black people take pride in their colour. Yet it seems that ‘black’ too may have run its course, perhaps because ‘black’ is still so widely used in connection with the bad, perhaps because it too still focuses on skin. The same is true of the socially generous ‘people of color’ (including all non-WASP groups), whi...