The coloniality of representation and black African subjectivity
3.5. Representation, modernity and coloniality
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(2012: 43). The second task is to engage in the “reconstitutive challenge” of building theory through “revitalising the historical and cultural possibilities of the African legacy, interrupted by colonialism and neo-colonialism” (Santos, 2012: 43). The Eurocentrism of the concept of the public sphere lies in that it centres Europe’s 18th century history while expressing the emergence of the European bourgeois political subject in the context of European “practices and institutions”
such as coffee houses and clubs (Santos, 2012: 44). Santos notes that “its theoretical and cultural presuppositions are entirely European” (Santos, 2012: 44). For the Global South the question that arises is “assuming that the public sphere has become a hegemonic concept, is it possible to use it in a counter-hegemonic way?” (Santos, 2012: 45). We now turn to discuss representation, subjectivity and coloniality.
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Culture is a slippery concept defying definition. Hall notes that previously, culture has been defined as “the sum of the great ideas, as represented in the classic works of literature, painting, music and philosophy- the 'high culture· of an age” (1997: 2). In the modern age it has come to loosely refer to widely distributed forms of popular music, publishing, art, design and literature
“what is called the ‘mass culture’ or the ‘popular culture’ of an age” (Hall, 1997: 2). As a result, there has been a huge debate between what is regarded as high culture and popular culture. High culture is the culture of those seen as occupying the high levels of society, like monarchs, the civilised and the polished. However, there has been an emergence of the anthropological definition of culture that sees it as referring to “whatever is distinctive about the ‘way of life’ of a people, community, nation or social group” (Hall, 1997: 2). The cultural turn, especially in cultural studies and the sociology of culture, has tended to emphasize the importance of meaning to the definition of culture (Hall: 1997:2). Here culture is taken as a process and a set of practices. Hall sums up this school this way; “primarily, culture is concerned with the production and the exchange of meanings – the ‘giving and taking of meaning’- between the members of a society or group” (1997:
2). The importance of putting emphasis on meaning is that these “cultural meanings are not only
‘in the head’. They organize and regulate social practices, influence our conduct and consequently have real, practical effects” (Hall, 1997: 3). Emphasising that meaning is produced, Hall notes that
“it is participants in a culture who give meaning to people, objects and events. Things ‘in themselves’ rarely if ever have any one, single, fixed and unchanging meaning” (1997: 3). Culture functions through language or as a language. Languages work through representation. Hall argues that languages are “‘systems of representation’ essentially, we can say that all these practices ‘work like languages’, not because they are all written or spoken (they are not), but because they all use some element to stand for or represent what we want to say” (Hall, 1997: 4). Webb posits that
“much of the work of representation depends on first having established relationships of equivalence” (2009: 9). What that means is that before the work of representation, “we must make it possible for ‘a’ to mean, or substitute for, ‘b’. This involves establishing relationships of equivalence between a word or other sign, and the concept and thing that is observed – the referent”
(Webb, 2009: 9). This is made the more difficult by the fact that “representation is a complex and slippery process because it is cultural and not natural, therefore not necessary or fixed” (Webb, 2009: 10). In representation, the sign is always empty of real content (Webb, 2009: 10).
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Making a case for constructionist approaches to representation, Webb notes that “the processes of representation do not simply make connections, relationships and identities visible: they actually make those connections, relationships and identities” (2009: 10). What it means is that representation is not simply an act of “substitution and reiteration” but it is the act of ‘constitution’
as “it constitutes – makes real – both the world and our ways of being in the world and in communities” (Webb, 2009: 10). In media studies, for example, Bowles notes that representation is taken to refer to “simply the question of how the media portray events, people and ideas, and how that portrayal then influences the real world of events, people and ideas” (2002: 72). Webb notes that “what is missing in this depiction is the systematic nature of representation” where it is taken not just as a noun but as a verb “representation as the action involved, and the processes that must be gone through, in the work of making words or gestures” (2009: 10). Importantly,
“representation is not just about rendering and delegating, but is also about organizing and arranging knowledge and ideas” (Webb, 2009: 10). In the constructionist approach to meaning and representation, language is tied to either the semiotic or the discourse approaches to representation.
Semiotics is the study of signs “and their general role as vehicles of meaning in culture” (Hall, 1997: 6). Discourses are seen as “ways of referring to or constructing knowledge about a particular topic of practice: a cluster (or formation) of ideas, images and practices, which provide ways of talking about, forms of knowledge and conduct associated with, a particular topic, social activity or institutional site in society” (Hall, 1997: 6). This dissertation uses both approaches to representation.
Even after so much theorisation and making sense of representation, it remains a complex and slippery concept. Following Spivak, Webb turns to German language to offer a nuanced discussion of “what it can mean, where it can mean” and the limits of these meanings noting that “the German language allows more carefully delineated senses of the word: Darstellung (making present), Vertretung (speaking for and standing in for), Wortvorstellung (representations of words), and Sach- or Dingvorstellung (representations of things) (2009: 7). However, the English language has one word to talk about representation. Prendergast proffers some definitions of representation, and the first one is “the sense of represent as re-present, to make present again, in two interrelated ways, spatial and temporal” (2000: 4). Webb notes that, in gesturing at something not there as present, this first definition “is representation as Darstellung, the notion of making or rendering
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presence” (2009: 8). Here to “re-present [is] to make present again” (Webb, 2009: 63). In this case or mode “a particular representation can have the capacity to make visible, in the here and now, something that was (or might have been) present in a different here and now – it accommodates both space (it is present) and time (it is in the present)” (2009: 8). For Prendergast (2004), the second sense of representation is where presence is delegated or where something substitutes for something. This appears both in language and politics. In language, Webb notes, “a word makes a concrete thing, or an idea, present in conversation or writing. I say ‘elephant’, and though there is no elephant in the room, the concept of elephant is rendered, or brought into consciousness – allowed to stand in for the animal” (2009: 8). These examples are illustrated in politics where certain people represent, that is, stand in for, other people. Representation, therefore means that
“in both language and politics, this sense of representation allows a term, image or agent to substitute for an absent object, idea or person.” (Webb, 2009: 8).
Prendergast notes that representation is an “essentially modern invention, one of the master concepts of modernity” (2002: 2). Foucault posits that before representation there was rresemblance, which went up to the period of the Enlightenment, before representation became the more dominant mode of understanding the media (1970: 51). Alves describes the Enlightenment as “the beginning of the modern age; it was characterized by a massive outpouring of philosophical thought and political actions, all grounded on a belief in what is ‘rational, secular, democratic, and universal” (2000: 488). This is the time when the beginning of the idea of the modern man as the Subject are located. It is argued that, at this time, man became, “therefore, the subject and mastermind of history” (Alves, 2000: 488). Colebrook (2000) argues that modernity ushered in representation to counter the old approach that saw knowledge as something grounded and validated by a link to ‘the thing itself’. Lloyd questions “the seemingly unyielding racism of the so-called liberal institutions” asking “how could institutions whose missions promised democratic inclusivity and enlightened inquiry remain in practice so resistant to the project of racial desegregation?” (2019: vii). He notes that this question was located in the “context of the intellectual left’s then-pressing concern with ideology and institutions, to inquire into the political formation of subjects that educational institutions were charged with producing” (Llyod, 2019:
vii). This was to engage in the critique of the role of culture in the shaping of political subjects.
Today, these questions seem urgent because “the language of rights and representation that [are]
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still the idiom necessary to any defensive agenda” (Lloyd, 2019: viii). Smith opens his book on decolonising research by referring to how ‘research’ is a dirty word. In other words, she is arguing that representation is a dirty word. Lloyd notes that “the constitutive relation between the concepts of universality, freedom, and humanity and the racial order of the modern world is grounded in the founding texts of the disciplines that articulated them and that we now term the humanities” (2019:
2). He posits a concept of a racial “regime of representation” built on Cedric Robinson’s concept of “racial regimes” and Patrick Wolfe’s idea of “regimes of race”. According to Robinson (2007),
“racial regimes” refer to “constructed social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for the relations of power”. According to Wolfe (2016), the “regimes of race” marks “regimes of difference with which colonisers have sought to manage subject populations”. Lloyd argues that
“though I seek to maintain their mutual focus on how such regimes articulate relations of power and domination, my aim is to elaborate the ways in which the aesthetic structures those relations, even in the name of universality, through a complex conceptual matrix of representation” (Lloyd, 2019: 7). We now turn to the coloniality of ‘human’ as the subject.