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Representations
by
Charles Lamson
A student once told his teacher that "The Sixties" was a time of rampant drug use, wild sex, permissiveness, anti-Americanism, and widespread social disorder. His point was that nothing good had come out of the 1960s, and that it was best to put that to put that foolish and destructive era behind us. I asked him when he was born. "Nineteen-seventy-five," he said. How could he know so much about the 1960s? "Various sources he said. when i pressed hgim to be more specific he admitted that he had not read any books about the 1960s but had gained his knowledge from TV and stuff."
There is nothing wrong with learning about distant times, places, and people from television. But we should be mindful that television offers us knowledge in the form of representations, that are usually designed more to entertain than inform. This means that someone, or some group of people, has selected for us a part of the picture - a subset of all that could be known about something else - and presented it to us as if it were the whole picture. Thus, what we get is a crafted, partial re-presentation of a reality. To which, we might have no direct access.
The student who told me about the 1960s had not checked out the representations he had been given. If he had, he might have learned that during the 1960s, most college students did not protest or riot, or take drugs, or participate in orgies, and while many repressive aspects of U.S. society - racism, sexism, imperialism, militarism - were challenged through polite and impolite protest. There was mostly a "business as usual" attitude and environment, not widespread social disorder. He might also have learned that many of the gains in civil rights, that he took for granted, were made during the 1960s.
Of course, even if this student read books about the 1960s and talked to people who lived through that time, he would still be relying on representations. Not having been there, and having no way to go back and see for himself, he had no choice but to rely on representations created by others. Unfortunately, the student relied on representations that were stereotypes, and did not question how or why they were created.
Images or representations are very similar. an image is created by a signifying performance that we can witness directly. a representation is an image of a time, a place, a kind of people, a thing, or an event that is not readily available for witnessing .to talk about wht the 1960s were like, or what the chinese are like, or what the dar side of the moon is like, or what a qark is like, or what happened last week at a party, is to create a representation. the representation brings the distant or unobservable reality into the here and now.
The Necessity and Danger of Representations
Like images, representations are indispensable. If we are going to talk about distant realities at all, we must create representations of them. Also, like images, representations are created with help, or hindrance, from others. Sometimes, others affirm our representations ("Yeah, that's how it happened"); sometimes they offer competing versions of their own ("Let me tell you what really happened!"), in which case, we might have to do some revising. The representations we finally agree upon are usually the result of negotiation.
Being sociologically mindful, we see not only that representations are indispensable, but that what we take reality to be, depends on the particular representations we create and agree upon. Failing to be mindful, we may fail to see that representations are indeed representations, and we may mistake them for an unmediated view of reality.
A student once told his teacher about a TV program that purported to see real cops in action. The teacher said that he should not take the program too seriously, because its representations of police work were probably fabricated to make them more entertaining. The student insisted that the program showed events exactly as they happened. His teacher could not convince him otherwise, until he found an article written by a person, who had helped produce the program, explaining how the apparently "real" crime scenes were contrived. The student then realized that he had been fooled. But no doubt, millions of people believed that the program was an unfiltered, accurate portrayal of different realities.
Being sociologically mindful, we should be suspicious of representations - like the cop show - that claim not to be constructed. We should be suspicious, because someone is trying to convince us what a distant reality is like, while hiding the fact that they are choosing how to represent that reality to us. If we are mindful, we will always see representations as constructed. And then, we will ask who is doing the constructing, for whom, and why. Sometimes the answers will be obvious, sometimes not. In any case, if we ask the questions we are less likely to be taken in.
It is important to be wary of representations; precisely, because we are so dependent upon them. Consider all the matters that are represented to us: historical events and eras; events in other countries; the state of our own economy; the character of the leaders and people in other countries; the actions of corporations and of governments; the various worlds of scientific research. In some cases, we may have direct access to what is being represented. When we do not, which is most of the time, we would be wise to examine representations from several sources, and again to consider how they are constructed, with what interests in mind.
*SOURCE: THE SOCIOLOGICALLY EXAMINED LIFE, 2ND EDITION, 2001, MICHAEL SCHWALBE, PGS. 140-142*
END
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