ETHNICITY AS OTHERNESS IN VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS

An Approach to a Critical Discursive Methodology

The illiterates of the future will be the people who know nothing of photography rather than those who are ignorant of the art of writing.
Lszl Moholy-Nagy

Thomas Vilhelm Sltis Masters Thesis in Communication Dept. of Communication Faculty of Social Sciences University of Helsinki April 1998

HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO ) HELSINGFORS UNIVERSITET ) UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI

Tiedekunta/Osasto ) Fakultet/Sektion ) Faculty Laitos ) Institution ) Department

Faculty of Social Sciences

Tekij ) Frfattare ) Author

Dept. of Communication

Sltis, Thomas
Tyn nimi ) Arbetets titel ) Title

Ethnicity as Otherness in Visual Representations: An Approach to a Critical Discursive Methodology

Oppiaine ) Lromne ) Subject

Communication
Tyn laji ) Arbetets art ) Level Aika ) Datum ) Month and year Sivumr ) Sidoantal) Number of pages

Masters thesis
Tiivistelm ) Referat ) Abstract

April 1998

119 pp.

The thesis aims at developing a methodology based on critical discourse analysis for the analysis of photographic images. The study provides an approach to an analytical framework for empirical content studies of ethnic portrayal in visual mass media. The pivotal point of the analysis is the discursive properties of visual representations as ethnic individuals and groups are presented in media imagery, and the critical point of view is aimed at the power inequality and dominance produced and reproduced by means of media discourse. Ethnicity refers in the study to minority groups that are perceived as different in the physical, racial appearance and/or sociocultural properties from the dominant majority group. Visual representations encompasses both still and moving images, and they are conceived and analyzed in terms of their content (as opposed to form). The approach combines the fields of visual communication and theory on representations with critical cultural studies conception of ethnicity as Otherness. In the beginning of the work the characteristics of the visual is spelled out in relation to verbal texts. Ethnicity is conceptualized in terms of Otherness on the basis of Saids Orientalism and further developed by the work by Hall. The analytical framework of critical discourse analysis that provides the backbone of the study is Faircloughs three-dimensional model, which deconstructs the communicative event into analysis of the sociocultural practices, discourse practices, and text analysis, even though the sociocultural practices are not attended in detail. The textual analysis is divided into an analysis of the representational, relational, and identity aspect of the text, and their corresponding discourse practices. Thus the approach at hand is conceived as a sixcell model, with the sociocultural dimension providing the ideological backdrop for the analytical framework. The analysis operates mainly with the concepts of visual text, discourse, and ideology, as well as orders of discourse as conceived by Foucault. The representational aspect focuses on the inclusions and exclusions of ethnic protagonists in the visual text. In the relational aspect the issue of power becomes paramount, by focusing on the relations between ethnic protagonists and media workers on the one hand, and relations between members of the dominant cultural sphere and Otherness on the other hand. The identity aspect emphasizes the construction of identities of the media protagonists by the relations between the dominant and the Other, and the inherent power inequality between the two is pointed out. The proposed method is productive in its attention to the discursive character of visual representations, in the possibility of approaching both visual and verbal texts with similar theoretical premisses, and in the attention of the method to the historicality of the discourses. The main weaknesses lie in a satisfactory merging of the character of the visual text in a framework primarily predisposed for verbal texts, and in an unarticulated terminology. Main references are Fairclough, N.; Hall, S.; Mitchell, W; Said, E.; van Dijk, T.
Avainsanat ) Nyckelord ) Keywords

representation - visual - ethnicity - discourse analysis - critical analysis

Silytyspaikka ) Frvaringsstlle ) Where deposited

Muita tietoja ) vriga uppgifter ) Additional information

HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO ) HELSINGFORS UNIVERSITET ) UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI

Tiedekunta/Osasto ) Fakultet/Sektion ) Faculty Laitos ) Institution ) Department

Statsvetenskapliga fakulteten
Tekij ) Frfattare ) Author

Inst. fr kommunikationslra

Sltis, Thomas
Tyn nimi ) Arbetets titel ) Title

Ethnicitet som den Andra i visuella representationer: en inledning till en kritisk diskursiv metod.
Oppiaine ) Lromne ) Subject

Kommunikationslra
Tyn laji ) Arbetets art ) Level Aika ) Datum ) Month and year Sivumr ) Sidoantal) Number of pages

pro gradu avhandling

Tiivistelm ) Referat ) Abstract

April 1998

119 s.

Mlsttningen med avhandlingen r att utveckla en metod fr att analysera fotografiska bilder baserad p kritisk diskursanalys. Arbetet erbjuder genom en analytisk referensram ett nrmelsestt fr empiriska innehllsstudier av etniska representationer i visuella medier. Utgngspunkten fr analysen r de diskursiva egenskaperna av visuella representationer d etniska individer och grupper r avbildade i massmediala bilder, och arbetets kritiska infallsvinkel r riktad mot ojmlikhet och dominans som upprtthlls genom mediediskurser. Ethnicitet syftar i denna avhandling till minoritetsgrupper som uppfattas olika av ras eller till sina fysiska egenskaper och/eller socio-kulturella tillhrighet frn den dominanta majoritetsgruppen. Visuella representationer innefattar bde still och rrliga bilder, och de behandlas och analyseras till sitt innehll (inte form). Den freliggande metoden kombinerar visuell kommunikation och teorier om representationer med kritiska kulturstudiers begrepp om den Andra. Arbetet inleds med en beskrivning av det visuella i frhllande till verbala texter. Etnicitet begreppsligas p basen av Saids Orientalism och begreppet vidareutvecklas med referens till Hall. Den analytiska referensramen r hrledd ur Faircloughs tredimensionella modell, som analyserar en kommunikativ hndelse p basen av sociokulturell praxis, diskursiv praxis och textanalys. Den sociokulturella dimensionen ges hr mindre vikt. Textanalysen r uppdelad i en representionella, relationella och identitets aspekt av texten, med deras respektive diskursiva praxis. Slunda erbjuder arbetet ett nrmelsestt, en sexcellsmodell, med den sociokulturella dimensionen som en ideologisk bakgrund. Analysen utnyttjar huvudsakligen begreppen visuell text, diskurs och ideologi, svl som den diskursiva ordningen myntad av Foucault. Den representionella aspekten lgger vikt p inkluderingar och exkluderingar av etniska aktrer i texten. I den relationella aspekten betonas maktbegreppet genom att fsta uppmrksamhet dels p relationerna mellan etniska aktrer och media representanter, och dels p relationerna mellan medlemmar av den dominanta gruppen och den etniska Andra. Identitetsaspekten understryker konstruktionen av mass mediala identiteter genom frhllandet mellan den dominanta och den Andra, och den innebyggda maktojmlikheten mellan dessa tv betonas. Metoden r anvndbar i det att den fster uppmrksamhet p de diskursiva egenskaperna av visuella representationer, i det att analys av visuella och verbala texter kan kombineras genom samma teoretiska utgngspunkter och i det att metoden ger utrymme fr en diakron analys av diskurser. Den huvudsakliga svagheten ligger i svrigheten att sammanjmka visuell text med en referensram mnad fr verbal text, och i en komplicerad begreppsapparat. Huvudsaklig litterat utgrs av: Fairclough, N.; Hall, S.; Mitchell, W.; Said, E.; van Dijk, T.
Avainsanat ) Nyckelord ) Keywords

representationer - visuell - etnicitet - diskursanalys - kritisk analys

Silytyspaikka ) Frvaringsstlle ) Where deposited

Muita tietoja ) vriga uppgifter ) Additional information

Avhandlingens sprk r engelska.

iv

CONTENTS
1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Relation to and internal relevance for mass communication research 1.2 Visual representations within the field of critical cultural theory 1.3 External relevance and current interest 1.4 Points of departure, limitations, and perspective 1.5 Approaching the key questions 2 PREVIOUS STUDIES OF VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS AND ETHNICITY 2.1 Representations as a metaconcept 2.1.1 Knowledge: true representations Visual realism 2.1.2 Ethics: responsible representations 2.1.3 Power: effective representations 2.2 Disciplines related to the study of representations 2.2.1 Discourse analysis Critical discourse analysis (CDA) In respect to the visual 2.2.2 Semiotics Social semiotics 2.2.3 Ethnic Studies Stereotyping in ethnic studies The Other in ethnic studies 2.3 Definitions 2.3.1 Representation 2.3.2 Ethnicity 2.3.3 Racism 2.3.4 Text 2.3.5 Discourse 2.3.6 Ideology Racist ideology and images 2.3.7 Hegemony 2.3.8 Power 2.4 Presuppositions in this study 2.4.1 Continuous dialogue between visual representations and society 2.4.2 Ethnicity as a pejorative element in mainstream media discourse 3 THE SIX-CELL MODEL 3.1 A visual methodology wanting 3.2 The method 3.2.1 Ethnicity as Otherness 3.2.2 Theoretical construct of approach Sociocultural practice 3.2.3 Discourse practice analysis 3.2.4 Textual analysis: Representational, relational and identity aspect 3.3 The key concepts 3.3.1 Text and visual text 3.3.2 Discourse 3.3.3 Ideology 3.4 On the location of meaning 1 4 6 7 10 13 15 15 17 20 22 23 23 27 31 32 33 33 34 34 35 36 39 41 42 42 42 43 43 44 45 46 48 52 54 55 55 57 58

v 3.5 Research questions 4 OTHERNESS AS A CONCEPTUAL CONSTRUCT: When We meet The Other 4.1 Edward Saids conceptualization of the Other 4.2 The disempowered Other 4.3 When ethnicity is transformed into Otherness 4.4 The visual Other 4.5 Conclusions 5 REPRESENTATIONAL ASPECT: The Struggle for Presence 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Visual text analysis 5.2.1 Inclusion: the explicit content of the visual text 5.2.2 Exclusion: Absence has meaning 5.3 Discourse practice analysis 5.4 Discourses of the ethnic Other 5.5 Conclusions What is the representational aspect? How can it be analyzed? 6 RELATIONAL ASPECT: The Image of Power 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Visual text analysis 6.3 Discourse practice analysis 6.4 Conclusions What is the relational aspect? How can it be analyzed? 7 IDENTITY ASPECT: Identity as Difference or Difference as Identity? 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Discourse practice analysis 7.3 Visual text analysis 7.4 Stereotypical identities in discourse 7.5 Conclusions What is the identity aspect? How can it be analyzed? 8 CONCLUSION 8.1 The Method Revisited 8.1.1 The representational, relational, and identity aspect combined 8.1.2 Discourse and discourse practice dimension 8.1.3 Note on the sociocultural context and ideology 8.1.4 The Other revisited 8.1.5 Epistemological problems 8.2 Denying visual representations of ethnicity 8.2.1 Representing ethnicity 8.2.2 Representations ontologically REFERENCES Literature Other references 60 62 62 63 65 66 67 69 69 70 71 72 73 74 76

78 78 81 82 83

86 86 88 89 91 93

96 96 96 100 101 102 104 106 106 109 113 113 119

1 INTRODUCTION
The aim of this study is to develop a methodology based on critical discourse analysis for the analysis of photographic images. This analysis would provide an analytical framework for empirical content studies of ethnic representation in visual media. My main interest, and the pivotal point of this analysis, is the discursive properties of visual representations as ethnic individuals and groups are presented in the imagery of the mass media. Visual images, like their verbal counterparts in text, may allow for certain discourses regarding ethnicity, and my assumption is that these visual texts are not independent but participate in constructing these discourses. This discursive property of visual texts should be addressed, and for this reason I have chosen to approach the subject from the point of view of discourse analysis. The practical objective of this study is to produce an approach that would allow analysis of these discourses of ethnicity, and would bring to the surface the larger ideological properties of visual texts regarding ethnic groups in empirical analyses of the visual material. For example, by means of the approach developed here I want to examine whether the visual representations of ethnic groups forward racist discourses, just as some verbal media texts may purport racist ideas and attitudes. While there is a substantial amount of descriptive literature regarding ethnicity and racist representations in photographs, Hollywood film, and news, the methodology itself is weakly represented, and therefore the subject of my study. But what are these discourses regarding ethnicity? Ethnicity refers in this work to a specific form of difference, to minority groups that are perceived as different in the physical, racial appearance or sociocultural properties from the dominant majority group. In order to contrast ethnicity with a larger societal context, and to create a tension between ethnic groups and a vague majority group, ethnicity is conceptualized in terms of Otherness. The ethnic groups are thus analytically conceived as different from members of the dominant society, and as defined by and opposed to the same dominant society. In other words, visual representations of ethnicity are in this work approached from a critical point of view, where the analysis concerns the dominant media institutions as in some cases having the power of imposing their visual representations of ethnic groups. No empirical analysis will be attempted in this study. Rather, the present work raises questions concerning the analysis of empirical material in terms of its discourses: what kind of ethnic images do the mass media construct and how can these images be analyzed? Which discourses are purported in visual texts of a specific ethnic group? How is ethnicity constructed as oppositional, as an Otherness, to dominant society? These are the kind of questions that this approach will seek to answer concerning the empirical make-up of ethnic groups in visual media.

2 The aim of this study can, apart from the practical objective stated above, be divided into a theoretical and methodological objective. My theoretical objective is to analyze visual representations, in terms of characteristics specific to the visual, and thus to pave the way for a transition from the verbal to the visual text in the methodology section. Further, the objective is to point out the difference between visual representations as a comprehensive metaconcept, and visual texts as the subject of analysis. The relation between visual text, discourse, and ideology on the one hand, and visual representations on the other, will thus be clarified. Another for this methodology relevant objective is to theorize the analytical transformation of ethnicity into the concept of Otherness. The theoretical conceptions of visual representation and ethnic Other are interrelated in that the visual representationsapart from the general discussion in the beginningare dealt with to concern specifically ethnicity. Thus the aim is to relate to representation by issues regarding the visual, and regarding Otherness. These two concepts are important for the adaptation of the discourse analysis framework to encompass specifically the visual domains of the ethnic Other. The goal of the practical objective, and the support of the theoretical objective, sum up in the methodological objective. I attempt to combine visual representations and, more specifically the properties of a visual text, with the concept of the ethnic Other, and then to integrate these two concepts into a selected analytical framework of critical discourse analysis. The goal is thus to construct an analytical framework attuned to visual texts regarding ethnicity, and to see how the conceptualized visual and Other operates within that framework. Even though the selected framework is derived from the analysis of verbal discourse, it will be applied in this study only to visual texts. The framework already provides the methodological means to analyze verbal texts, and the key idea is instead to provide a method for the analysis of visual texts within the same theoretical framework. However, since the form and mode of expression of verbal and visual texts are different, the analysis of these two characters of text are often conducted in different fields (e.g. linguistics and semiotics, respectively). Therefore this study is to be seen more as an attempt to initialize an approach, and to outline an integration of visual text with an analytical apparatus from critical discourse analysis. As we shall see, the combination will offer advantages in the analysis of visual representations. The methodology elaborated in this study is inclusive regarding the form of the visual text: consideration will be made of representation in both still and moving images. Visual representation encompass here both of these forms, and the concepts inclusiveness is both its weakness and strength for any analysis of ethnic portrayal.1 Its weakness lies in the conceptual difficulty in separating various forms of representation: it refers to visual images in mass media at large. For analytical purposes, however, I will descend from this general level. The strength of the concept, in turn, is related to portrayal by means of
The term portrayal is in this work applied synonymously with representation, but it is as a concept not in a frequent use in the relevant literature, and does therefore not belong to the terminological apparatus.
1

3 images, and can thus incorporate various visual sources for the construction of representation. While the concept is inclusive in terms of form, it is in terms of content here limited to visual representations regarding ethnic representations specifically. The discourses conveyed in ethnic representations arewhen discussing the dominant media, as in this workassumed to be a part of the same media culture. It is therefore interesting to analyze the discourses in terms of expressions of this dominant media culture, and focus on the ethnic portrayal in the text. The method put forward here does not depart from a formal analysis of visual representation, but rather from questions in the position of the ethnic element in those representations. This gives the option of crossing formal boundaries and connecting the analysis with discourses from various visual media. This approaches the core of the present work: how the ethnic Other is constructed in visual representations. The approach further gives the possibility to seek similarities between the discourses, and analyze the strategies that visual texts apply to construct Otherness. This approach represents a more socially and culturally oriented critical approach to images rather than a formalistic one. What the actual discourses are, whether they support other discourses on ethnicity, and why they are constructed as they are, would be analyzed with the specific empirical material at hand. The relevant literature supporting this argumentation, and methodological consequences of this inclusion will be revisited in section 1.4, when setting the boundaries of this work. The disposition of this study is laid down in three parts. First, after situating this study within context of mass communication research and current interest in this chapter, I will discuss in chapter two key characteristics of representation and the visual. The chapter will also cover a review of previous studies on discourse analysis, semiotics and ethnicity that are relevant for the development of my method. Further, in the light of these studies I will discuss the options for a terminological apparatus to my research subject, and I will state two presuppositions on which the study is based. Following this, in chapter three, I will argue for the integration of the visual aspects of ethnicity into a specific framework of critical discourse analysis, supported by previous studies. I will argue for the conceptualization of ethnicity as Otherness, lay out my methodological model, and define the key concepts in accordance with the selected methodology. With the problem field, a selected method, and a working terminology at hand, I will in the end of the chapter finally state my research questions. Thirdly, in chapters four through seven, I will elaborate on the established analytical framework by addressing each research question in turn. Each of my questions corresponds to an aspect of ethnic representation in visual media. The study will end with my conclusions, and a return to the issues I set out to explore. Because of the wide review and elaboration on concepts that are required for developing a

4 method, the first two parts of the study are emphasized, while the third part is a treatment of the possible paths to follow provided by the selected method. This study is thus more of an overture providing more a possible line of approach to the issue than a ready-to-use method.

1.1 Relation to and internal relevance for mass communication research

Taking into account the pervasive character of visual technologies in the production and distribution of information, the interest in the visual from scholars in the humanities is surprisingly low. While attention to the field of cinema studies has grownlargely as a form of literary or cultural theoryscholars in other fields are usually preoccupied with various forms of verbal communication. It is still the case that most scholars are far more practiced at critically reading a written text than they are at understanding the discursive impact of a documentary film or a television show. (Devereaux 1995: 2.) Still, media culture is predominantly a culture of the image (Kellner 1995: 1). The field of visual communication has been relatively neglected within mass communication research (Griffin 1992: 80-3), perhaps due to the lack of established and widely accepted methods. Methodology has been accused, and indeed found guilty, of excessive subjectivity, and of presenting results that are largely questions of interpretation. Regarding content studies such remarks were gaining ground with the increased importance of audience research and the reception approach (see e.g. Morley 1980; Hall 1984), claiming that audiences are active in interpreting, and come to understand messages in subjective ways. The studies that have been conducted on visual media content are based methodologically to a great extent on semiotics and film theory. Even if the methodology is meticulous on a micro level, both of these disciplines present little or no connections to a macro level, that is, to prevailing social or cultural structures (see further in ch. 2). The results remain decontextualized and without further social implications. This, in turn, is exactly what provides an important area within critical media studies. Critical discourse analysis, on the other hand, has as its very premise the study of the structures, strategies and reproduction of inequality and dominance through discourse. Through these studies, critical discourse studies come to grips with the consequences of discourse and communication. Verbal textand to some extent also visual text, i.e. photographs and moving imagesare not seen as decontextualized, but as promoting discourses, and as attaining meaning when attached to real world social structures.

5 Thus, it is not only the contextualization of analysis within social issues which is essential for critical analysis, but the very relation of the construction of meaning in communication is different. In the interpretation of possible meanings of ethnic representations in the context of this study, visual texts are not considered as objective or as having inherently absolute content, but rather as an interpretative space in which meanings occur and come into expression. This so-called institutional approach specifically is favored, for example, by researchers such as Noponen (1996) regarding photographic images. It falls between the objectivistic approach, where the image is characterized as real and containing an independent content as in semiotics, and the subjective approach whichas mentioned aboveemphasizes individual interpretation. The institutional approach links the formation of meaning in images to institutions and social reality, and hence directs and delineates the evoked meanings. (p. 207.) However, discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis are primarily concerned with verbal texts and discourses. The use of critical discourse analysis for visual texts and discourses places new demands on the conceptualization of text and the techniques of analysis that have traditionally been used. A number of works have accommodated visual aspects of communicative events, and the discipline has been concerned with finding new methods and approaches to discourse in visual texts. These different approaches will be addressed in chapter 2 in the discussion on previous studies. One advantage of analyzing visual texts within the same discipline as verbal texts is that content of both texts can be placed in the same theoretical framework. The two forms of communication are linked to each other, either by supporting or by contrasting one with the other. As Vanhanen (1991) writes in his study of the representation of death in images, the outcome of the visual and verbal language is one entity, which constituents are either aligned or antagonistic in their content and form (p. 8). Kress and van Leeuwen (1992) call for a method of analysis where both the visual and the verbal aspects of representation could be taken into account (pp. 91-3, 102). Similarly, in the book Media discourse, Fairclough (1995b) gives a verbal description of visual imagery in order to include all aspects of the presentation and its discourses in an analysis of television content (pp. 5-8). Since the verbal and visual work upon each other, as exemplified in the last case, there is a call for an approach where discourses could be related methodologically to the same theoretical structure. The verbal and visual texts could thereby either be studied in parallel to each other, or in combination. The combined analysis could also take place on different analytical levels. In this study, the dimensions of discourses are treated on the structural macro level (as opposed to micro analysis, concentrating on a detailed analysis of a specific text), attempting to develop a general approach to analyze visual texts of a wide variety of visual forms. In another context, this macro level could be employed as a framework for research on the micro level within strictly delineated empirical material. The detailed method of verbal analysis could thus become more versatile by its ability to be applied to both levels of analysis.

1.2 Visual representations within the field of critical cultural theory

In this work visual representations stand as a metaconcept, since they are outside, above, the active set of concepts used for the development of the methodology. These representations comprise the field in which ethnic portrayal is activated (as Otherness), and also exist as the interface between the critical analysis of the visual and discourses of ethnicity in the dominant culture. Visual representations hold a position in the field of cultural studies, where one central idea is that reality is not experienced directly, but always through the lens of culture, through the way in which human beings represent themselves and others. More specifically, in the context of media studies, the research here will follow the same course as Campbells study of race, myth and news, where he applies the thinking of critical and cultural studies scholars to the issue of media racism (1995: 13). A critical cultural studies conceptualizes society as a terrain of domination and resistance and engages in a critique of domination and oppression, writes Kellner (1995), and continues that, ultimately, cultural studies is concerned with the process of democratizing society. Media culture can either work as an impediment to attaining this goal, or as a resistant force by presenting positive representations. (p. 4.) An important objective for critical analysis is the elision of power/domination in theory and practice (Fairclough 1995a: 17). The approach of this study is critical, aiming to criticize the prevailing practices of visual representation of ethnicity within the dominant media. That the approach is critical refers in this case to the fact that some of those practices, and here particularly media practices, might be defined by causes and effects that we may not be aware of normally (Bourdieu 1977: 78-87), i.e. outside the discipline of critical cultural studies. Such criticism of the practices of representation in the mass media is here limited to the visual content. One function of media criticism of images, according to Noponen (1996), is to search and reveal meanings in news images. This criticism does not imply a comparison of the pictures to realitywhich could somewhat simplistically be assumedinstead it questions what ideas or conceptions of our society those images reflect upon us. (p. 205.) This point constitutes one premise of my work, and should be borne in mind when reading the following pages. Another premise equally important in this study is the application of a normative approach from which to criticize the forms of dominant media culture. A critical analysis of media content is explicitly normative, because any critique by definition presupposes an applied ethics, i.e. a conception of which

7 media practices should be contested (van Dijk 1993b: 253). The critical standpoint requires an articulation of the social constitution of the concept of race and ethnicity, and a questioning of how these concepts are utilized in representation and, for example, the production of identities. A critical standpoint further includes an analysis of power relations and domination within society, and how these are translated into media culture. The normative standpoint enables one to critically engage cultural texts by spelling out specific values embedded in the texts and applying them in real contexts. (Kellner 1995: 94.) The findings of a critical approach to media content indirectly suggest normative perspectives relating how to produce representations in the media. Finally, within critical cultural studies the content of media should be analyzed contextually, and renouncing the existence of one monolithic ideology (see discussion on ideology in chapter 2). As Kellner (1995) writes: [A] contextualist cultural studies reads cultural texts in terms of actual struggles within contemporary culture and society, situating ideological analysis within existing socio-political debates and conflicts rather than just in relation to some supposedly monolithic dominant ideology, or some model of mass culture that is simply equated with ideological manipulation or domination per se. (p. 103, italics in original.) Kellner argues further that [a] critical cultural studies adopts norms and values with which it criticizes texts, artefacts, and conditions that promote oppression and domination ... . A critical perspective sees culture as inherently political and as, in many cases, promoting specific political positions and as aiding forces of domination or resistance. (1995: 94.) If culture is seen in this light, my choice of the discipline of critical discourse analysis, with its defined presuppositions and specific political disposition, becomes much clearer.

1.3 External relevance and current interest

Representations of ethnicity are crucial in the formation of attitude and prejudice against ethnic groups in society. All representations, as we shall see, stand for something in a simplified, often stereotypical way, be it in a positive or negative context. They are simplifications, per se, but the problem arises when there is no diversity or range in the representations being produced. One-sided and biased representations are not only unfair to the group represented and misleading to the viewer: they might also support prevailing ideas about what is natural in society, and what the power relations are and should be

8 between social groups. Dominant media reproduce a status quo and do not question current social structures. Within verbal discourse studies, media and textbooks have been the primary subject for systematic analyses of ethnic attitudes and beliefs (van Dijk 1987: 30-1). For example, van Dijk has carried out several studies of racism in the press, concluding that mass media is fundamental for the reproduction of racism in Western societies (1987; 1991). Given the importance of the media in creating and reproducing ethnic prejudice and racism, the role of the discourses in this social reproduction can hardly be questioned. Different discourse types are found, amongst others, in television and film, and they may also express ethnic opinions. (van Dijk 1987: 30.) These forms of discourses may also play an important role in creating ethnic stereotypes, especially through the influence of the imagestelevision, movies, adscirculating in the media (ibid.: 47). In writing more specifically about films Shohat and Stam have pinpointed the following: That films are only representations does not prevent them from having real effects in the world (1994: 178). Visual images, with their characteristics of truth and naturalness, raise serious questions about the way in which we all view photographic images, especially our tendency to accept them as evidence about the external world (Worth 1981: 7). In order to illustrate this, let me give two brief and blatant examples. First, the Finnish dairy product company Valio Ltd launched a television commercial campaign for a tropical drink. The entire commercial consisted of an autochthonous man, viewed from the front and caged within the frames of the television screen. Jumping up and down, he was explaining in an incorrect Finnish the superiority of the advertised drink compared to others. His body position was somewhat curved throughout the commercial, with his legs spread wide. The connotations to a savage and animalism can be argued as salient, providing the fictional and ideal home for both the origin of the man, and the drink. The second example consists of still images from contemporary Afghanistan produced by an established and prizewinning news photographer, James Nachtwey (1996: D5), and published in the Sunday issue in the main daily in Helsinki, Helsingin Sanomat. There were four photos in the page long story of which three are of immediate interest (the fourth depicts ruins and a devastated street). The largest (a page photo) depicts how a number of bodies are being taken down from a gallows tree of simple construction, with a large number of bystanders that are attending the scene. The second photo presents a veiled woman grieving by a tombstone in an arid landscape. The third one is a small picture of a man whipping himself, his bloody back visible to the reader. From a western point of view the depicted situations alludes to various forms of underdevelopment: a juridical system that allows for spontaneous and instant

9 executions instead legally institutionalized punishments, a culture where women are required to be veiled, and where men are whipping themselves in public. Both sets of imageries were anchored to verbal texts, and these could be the subject of a discourse analysis in their own right. Naturally, each example belongs to its own genre with its own potential interpretation. Advertisements often mock people and current issues. The news media are in turn governed by numerous criteria (which cannot be included in this discussion), such as availability, selection, and presentation. My point is, however, that even if these examples in themselves are considered banal and unimportant, similar imageries create by one-sidedness, bias, and repetition a representation of various ethnic groups (and ethnicity) which is not always favorable to those portrayed, and which reproduce discourses that may evoke prejudice and racism against those groups. Elliott (1996) puts this well in terms of ethical problems inherent in representations by the media: [T]he power and influence of mass market media create special responsibilities for image providers to be aware of the harm that they do or could cause. Power creates special moral obligations. (p. 5.) Therefore, the images that the media present of ethnicity should be carefully analyzed for the discourses that they purport, and current visual media practices called in question. The importance of the character of representation increases even further if an ethnic group in the dominant media is nearly absent. If the viewers of the dominant media image have little primary contact with a specific ethnic group, and have to form their opinions on the biased and under-represented ethnic media reality, the importance (and value) of that present representation as an information source, grows even bigger. (van Dijk 1987: 123-6, 153; Miller 1980: 12.) To argue for the relevance of the close analysis of our visual culture, let us briefly widen our scope, beyond the boundaries of this study to emphasize the implications of these visual representations. It is important to notice that the consequences of biased visual representations do not only concern the dominant groups perception of minority groups. Radio, television, film, and the other products of the culture industries provide the models of what it means to be male or female, successful or failure, powerful or powerless. Media culture provides the materials out of which many people construct their sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality, of us and them. (Kellner 1995: 1.) Studies show that media coverage, including visual media and its portrayal of minority groups, has effects on members of both the dominant and the ethnic groups (Wilson and Gutirrez 1989: 47-53).

10 The role of the media in issues concerning racism has been a current topic also in Finland. To what extent and in what manner are foreigners presented in images in the mass media? How does the representation reflect the larger social context? What are the means of analyzing and evaluating the media in this respect? Parallel to the studies of verbal discourses, I think there is also a compelling demand to include discourses for the visual to accommodate the importance of images. The assertions in the foregoing seem to indicate that what people see visually depicted (and what they do not see) in the media cannot simply be dismissed.

1.4 Points of departure, limitations, and perspective

As stated above, the method espoused here is not confined to a particular media, but instead, it focuses on the social construction of the ethnic Other in representations found in the visual media. At this stage, in developing the approach for the analysis of these visual representations, it is not customized for a specific material. Consequently, the method presented here is not predisposed to analyze any particular media content or remain within certain generic boundaries. Instead, it draws upon discourses that are similar within and between various genres and media. I argue that when discussing a methodology for examining visual representations of ethnicity, it is not of primary importance to define the media (television, cinema, photographs etc.) or genre (i.e. type of media content, see McQuail 1994: 263) because the term representation surpasses the limits of various visual media, and the ethnic Other rises from the confluence of them all. The key argument is intertextuality, referring to the conception that any one text is necessarily read in relation to others (Fiske 1988: 108), and in this case primarily in terms of horizontal intertextuality that mixes genres, but also vertically where facts and fiction, still and moving images come to blend with each other (ibid.: 108-9, 119-23). Images take a particular position in this crossroads of reality and representation as they are clearer, more impressive than the reality they claim to represent, and move into a continuum of an infinite chain of intertextuality (ibid.: 116).2 The bottom line is that when the ethnic Other is met in various visual media contexts, and despite the viewers awareness of its factual or fictional character and representational constructedness, its representations will influence the intertextual interpretations of visual texts on ethnicity. Thus all the visual media participate in the construction of an ethnic Other, even though the provenance of the representations varies. (Fair 1993: 5; cf. Shohat and Stam 1994 above.)

For an interesting account on intertextuality exclusively in photographic still images, and a number of vertical cross overs between photography and mass media images, see Hutcheon 1991: 229-31.

11 I follow Mitchells (1986) approach by not discussing specific images, but rather the image as grounded in social and cultural practices, and as a part of institutionalized discourses (p. 9), produced by state-owned media, major media corporations, and the entertainment industry (film). The visual material of potential interest for an empirical study would thus be images that portray ethnic features, and that are produced within media institutions of the dominant, mainstream society. These would be news footage, Hollywood cinema, television series and current affairs programs, mainstream commercials, as well as still images that portray ethnic groups. The common denominator is, again, that the majority, if not all, belong and participate in the construction of dominant discourses on ethnicity. However, in an empirical study, the analysis would be limited, for instance, to a specific media, genre, time frame, ethnic group, while the focus would still be held on the discursive character of the visual representations. Now the attempt is to produce an approach that would make such an analysis possible, and to analyze how ethnicity is constructed as Otherness, and that is why I remain on the general level. The same argument regarding the construction of ethnicity through representations applies to my choice of ignoring the distinction between the still and the moving image. Both belong to the same domain of discourses, participating in production of the image we as media consumers (viewers) are being served. Thus, in accordance with Vanhanen (1991) I argue, that the photograph is possible to analyze as a conceptual system, that has its proper codes and levels of meaning, even if they differ from, for example, the codes of verbal language ... . They [still and moving images] do both have their particular forms for production and use, and their specific expressive languages. However, their foundation, their relation to reality, is to be derived from the same image, the technically photographed and produced still image. Both [forms of] images ... are to be used either as single images, series of images, ... or moving images, film.. (p. 33.) To look at the origins of images in a reality is a obvious ground zero for approaching images of ethnicity. The discourses they forward are supposedly based onif not trueplausible assumptions of the character of an ethnic group, and the discourses seek a home in the mind of their viewers of a reality outside representations. Since both still and moving images are concerned, and they both have their particular expressive forms I have excluded photographic and esthetic elements, such as the camera angle, depth of field, composition and the alike. These do act as indicators of how to interpret the image and they do express generic conventions (see e.g. Kress and van Leeuwen 1992). However, this study moves on a macro level

12 exploring visual discourses, and the recognition of these specific means of expression at this point would turn the analysis abundant. Further, I have chosen to exclude all verbal texts from the development of the approach. The analytical framework with which I am operating is derived from critical discourse analysis, and it provides as such an accurate and intricate methodology for verbal accounts. My interest lies in this study specifically in probing the possibilities to adapt the same framework for analysis of visual text. If I had included, or at best had to share the approach with, verbal text, I would have lost my focus on the analysis of visual representations. Although excluding the verbal context runs the risk for the argumentation to become artificial and constructed, it does give freedom to limit and focus on the subject in question. In other words, the importance of the context has not been omitted, but in order to develop an approach or methodology, a number of issues had to be limited. Instead I wanted to give the image a prominentand perhaps selfrighteous placeand let the discourse of images be the thread of Adriane leading the way out of the maze. I will, however, return to some aspects of the contextual problem in the conclusion. Since this study is interested in the dominant media, it excludes visual media content that is produced by ethnic minorities for minorities, such as resistance cinema (critical film produced by minorities) and minority television programming. This kind of media content still remains marginal in comparison to the mainstream imagery. However, there are also other arguments for this exclusion, related to the limitations of interpretation. Two things are important to spell out at this point: First, dominant culture, which in this study is defined as opposed to ethnic minorities, produces its dominant media representations. Visual representations that are produced for an ethnic minority (about ethnic minorities) are thus according to the limitations above outside the scope of this work. Second, it would be unfeasible as author of this study to assume an ethnic perspective when elaborating an analysis of ethnic representations. The analysts own ethnicity sets limitations to what, and how, visual text are, and can be, understood. Also, the use of this projected definition of ethnicity (ethnicity as Otherness) does not entail that the dominant culture would not be ethnic as well, or that is would constitute an undifferentiated cultural whole. The definition is merely a working assumption to analyze the dominant visual representations of ethnic groups, which are perceived as different from the members of the dominant culture. Therefore, while this study is critical, it is explicitly critical from a dominant point of view. The study concerns visual texts produced by the dominant culture, and the meanings read into the visual representations are by a member of that same culture. Being a member of the dominant culture means also to be immersed in the dominant ideology, if we accept an Althusserian (1971) conception that there is no outside of ideology (pp. 170-6). Ideology is in other words ubiquitous, and for a member of the dominant culture visual texts are interpreted within that dominant ideology.

13 In relation to ethnicity, this conception does not necessarily entail that visual texts would automatically be racist because they are produced within that dominant culture, nor that all visual representations of ethnicity would convey a racist ideology when interpreted. Naturally, there are visual representations that do not fulfill such an ideological work, and thus fall outside the focus of the analytical lens of this study. Some texts are more racist ideologically tainted than others, and some instances and types of media discourses more ideologically pronounced. What is important, then, is to recognize whether, and how, a visual text is working ideologically through its discourses. Thus, in concordance with Fairclough (1995b), media discourse is regarded as the site of complex and contradictory processes, including the ideological ones. But racist ideology is not to be seen, however, as a constant and predictable presence in the all media texts per se. (p. 14, 47.) Consequently, I assume in accordance with Kellner (1995) that media cultural texts are neither merely vehicles of a dominant ideology, nor pure and innocent entertainment. Rather they are complex cultural artifacts that embody social and political discourses ... [S]ociety and culture are contested terrains and ... cultural artifacts are produced and have their effects within determinate contexts. (p. 4-5.) Media culture reflects the fundamental cultural conflicts that prevail in a society at a given point in time (ibid.: 101-2). Society is a scene for struggles between antagonistic actors, which reflected from the screens, through the images, and in the texts of our media culture, and thus belongs to the field of critical media cultural studies (ibid.: 56).

1.5 Approaching the key questions

This study is not intended to be an overambitious attempt to fill a methodological gap. Rather, it is a tentative attempt to synthesize three things: first, theories from visual communication on representations and the construction of the visual, and secondly, issues from cultural studies specifically regarding ethnicity as Otherness in these visual representations. Third, these two fields are brought together by a methodology that assumes a political research attitude, that is, critical discourse analysis concerned with unequal, dominant media discourses, in this case pejorative portrayals and racism in visual media.

14

VISUAL COMMUNICATION

CULTURAL STUDIES Ethnicity as Otherness CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Figure 1-1.The fields that are generated for the analysis of visual representations of ethnicity. The second element of ethnicity as Otherness is important in its function as my key subject (and not, for example, gender as Otherness), and consequently in its delineating function. The approach developed here is applicable only to issues regarding the ethnic Other in the media, despite its general character in terms of the visual. The aim is to develop and open up new approaches for a methodology to study photographic images, a methodology that would be relevant and sensitive in analyzing what discourses of the ethnic Other might be conveyed in mass mediated visual representations. *** My warmest thanks go to Professor Martin Jay at the University of California, Berkeley, who shared his time to advise me and give further suggestions. I also owe my gratitude to the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki, to the Finnish Cultural Foundation, as well as to Nylands Nation Student Union in Helsinki for their economic support. Finally, I would like to thank the International and Area Studies Program of the University of California at Berkeley for accepting me on a short notice, but with great hospitality.

15

PREVIOUS STUDIES OF VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS AND ETHNICITY

In this chapter I will first discuss three aspects that are relevant to the understanding of visual

representations, and thereby include a number of observations on the character of images. These aspects are important in their specificity for the visual, and I will thus delineate what I understand with visual representation in this study. Second, I will review the literature from a number of disciplines related to my topic, and weigh their possible contributions to the subject in question. Third, terminology will be presented in an overview of the definitions applied in these various disciplines. Finally, in the light of the literature reviewed for this study, I will state two presuppositions that function as premises for the critical analysis. The approach that I will use will be presented and argued for in the following chapter, along with the defined terminology.

2.1 Representations as a metaconcept

In this section I introduce representation as the key concept of this study, and my focus remains on various aspects and characteristics it posits as a theoretical term. It is considered a metaconcept since it is outside the active set of concepts relevant for developing the theoretical argument of this study. In the final chapter, the conclusions, I will return to it when evaluating the analytical method I have proposed. Representation is a slippery concept with roots in a number of disciplines, and hence it has been given different emphases. In its most basic sense, representation can be regarded as an abstract term that is in a dictionary described as the following: ... / 1. b. Appearance; impression on the sight./ 2. a. An image, likeness, or reproduction in some manner of a thing./ b. A material image or figure; a reproduction in some material or tangible form; in later use esp. a drawing or painting (of a person or thing)./ c. The action or fact of exhibiting in some visible image or form./ d. The fact of expressing or denoting by means of a figure or symbol; symbolic action or exhibition./ ... / 6. a. The action of presenting to the mind or imagination; an image thus presented; a clearly-conceived idea or concept./ ... / 7. a. The fact of standing for, or in place of, some other thing or person, esp. with a right or authority to act on their account; substitution of one thing or person for another./ ... . (Oxford English Dictionary 1989, part XIII: 658-9, italics in original.)

16 There are several interesting items in this selective array of definitions. First, is the preponderance of the visual, the image, and the representation brings up before a person. Second, a reproduction in a visible form that is presented to the mind or imagination implies, in turn, a recipient, the representation stands for something to somebody. Third, within this denotation of the concept falls also the idea of standing for, the right or authority to substitute, something else, which in turn brings in questions relevant in recognizing the right of subjects to their own representation. These three aspects are considered in the course of this work. The concept of image is related to visual representation, but not synonymous with it. As a shorthand term for image I borrow Backman and Eklunds (1988) definition that the image represents something real or fictive, and regardless of what technique is being used, the informative function is generally to portray something for the recipient. The image stands for more than it portrays, both positive and negative aspects, and creates associations in its recipient. (pp. 11, 14.) Images are the means for representing visually. As defined by Backman and Eklund, they also presuppose a recipient. But the term image is used in a wide variety of contexts, ranging from the general impression of a person, entity, or phenomena to the concrete material object, such as a newspaper photograph, and therefore it is not feasible to introduce into the terminological apparatus. Visual representation is conceptually more rigid than image, since it can be broken down in a way that is adapted to the analytical purposes of this study (see further down). For example, the concept of still and moving images are plausible, while moving representations would be incongruent in this study, especially given that attention is assigned to both of these forms of representing. Moreover, representations (as such) allows for a reference to verbal representations, which is terminologically useful when operating with a method derived from the verbal domain, and with concepts that have to be harmonized with each other. However, the term image will be referred to when not addressing questions related to the analytical framework, but the circulation of images in media culture. Further, representation as a term emphasizes the constructedness and fabricated character of the image in media, and thus undermines the somewhat naive belief in verisimilitude of images in general (Stam and Spence 1983: 3). Recently, representation has gained much attention for approaching various issues from a cultural studies perspective in media and film studies, art and other visual analyses, because it is emphasizes the embedment of the concept in the culture that constructs the representation (Jay, discussion, 5.5.1997). Mitchell (1994) states, in his discussion on the relation between the verbal and the visual, that representation can act as a master-term because

17 it has a long tradition in the critique of culture, and it activates a set of linkages between political, semiotic/aesthetic, and even economic notions of standing or acting for. Like all key words, it has its limitations, but it also has the virtue of simultaneously linking the visual and verbal disciplines within the field of their differences and connecting them with issues of knowledge (true representations), ethics (responsible representations), and power (effective representations). (p. 6.) It is through these three issues, knowledge, ethics, and power, respectively, that I will in the following sketch out an overview of the concept and aspects and characteristics relevant for this study.

2.1.1 Knowledge: true representations

Since this study will import its theoretical backbone from the domain of critical discourse analysis, I will begin this analysis by spelling out the difference between verbal and visual representation. There is a abundant amount of literature that aims at describing the similaritiesand indeed the differencesbetween these two modes of communication (see e.g. Mitchell 1986; 1994). Despite the problems inherent in describing these two modes with the same analytical vocabulary, there has recently been within the semiotic tradition renewed attempts of social semiotics to analyze the visual in terms of language, mostly in terms of a visual grammar (Kress and van Leeuwen 1990; 1992; 1996). The counter arguments are many, though. Aspects of verbal grammar are hard to apply to pictorial events because of the fundamental difference in the way the two representational systems mean; pictures [have] no lexicon nor syntax in the formal grammarians sense (Worth 1981: 162, 180). Vanhanen (1991) above referred to the difference in codes between the two modes of representation, even if they both are conceptual systems (p. 33). I find the following argument by Goodman (1985) for a modal division at the same time encompassing and concise, and thus in this context useful: Nonlinguistic systems differ from languages, depiction from description, the representational from the verbal, ... primarily through lack of differentiationindeed through density (and consequent total absence of articulation)of the symbol system (p. 226). In this study I do thus not consider visual images as language, and the analysis does not attempt to deconstruct the images from a linguistic point of view. Instead, I focus on the discoursesas you may somewhat provocatively claim that discourse analysis suggestsand regard the images, the visual text, as merely an expression of these discourses. In deconstructing visual representations I will not adhere to, for example, semiotic definitions within the structuralism tradition (see further below), a tradition that

18 apprehends verbal and filmic expressions as literally assimilable, and that places emphasis on narrative structure (Buxton1990: 5, 16). As suggested before, I will instead lean on a socially and culturally motivated analysis, centered around the ethnic protagonists in the visual text. Another feature specific for the visual image is according to Worth (1981) the fact that isolated images can only be propositional, not negations. Images cannot deal with what is not (p. 32). The unquestionability enforces the truthfulness of the statement. The fact that images can show plenty of things that are not true, does not mean that they are negations, but false affirmations (Worth 1981: 33). As Hodges and Kress (1988) pertinent remark: [T]he camera cannot lie, but sadly photographers and users of photos can and do (p. 121). False affirmations also include possible manipulations of photographic images, an important aspect in todays digitalized image production and replication (Robins 1995: 29-34). However, an isolated image is not only deprived of negating, but it also lacks the ability to produce a meta statement: It cannot comment itself, and it cannot question what it means itself (Worth 1981: 179).3 Seen in this light, the expressive impact and the subtly persuasive eloquence of the photographic image retrogresses into an impoverished stepsister of multi-functional verbal text.

Visual realism
In this study the focus is naturally on photographic images, and those including (ethnic) individuals. Shapiro (1988) writes more specifically about photographs: There is an implicit epistemological code hovering around a photograph. Of all modes of representation, it is the most easily assimilated into the discourses of knowledge and truth, for it is thought to be an unmediated simulacrum, a copy of what we consider the real. (p. 124.) The impression of the photograph as truth is so pervasive, that even when we speak about it, we tend to use the grammar of real world situations, for example, This is John when showing a picture of a person (ibid.). This is the strength of a photographic image, but at the same time what makes it dangerous: the impression or lair of absolute and infallible reproduction. The photograph is not an analogy of reality, though, and that is why it assumes a magical (sic) character writes Vanhanen. The photograph gives a means of penetrating deeper into the unconscious (i.e. of what we are not consciously aware), but at the same time its hovering realism turns it irrevocably and surrealistically real. (1991: 29.) This dialectic character of the photographic image renders it interesting

Verbal texts can be self-reflective, while visual ones remain expressions or statements.

19 to study: while being so persuasive, it also allows us to explore the implicit and neglected aspects in its pictorial representation. In terms of poststructuralist theory, reality is mediated through language and representation, and there is thus no immediate access to reality at all (Shohat and Stam 1994: 179). If reality is equated to truth (i.e. the truthful depiction of reality), then the only access to it is through representations, but all representations assume certain values or points of view. However, this should not lead us to a relativistic view that considers all representations as equally true, but instead representations should be analyzed in terms of their partiality and completeness. Naturally, also this evaluation is made from a certain point of view, and with certain goals, but also the analysis can be compared for its partiality and self-interest. Therefore, the analysis should not be based on the correspondence between representations and reality, which can methodologically be questionableand futilebut on the relative (un)truthfulness of representations. (Fairclough 1995b: 46-7.) The bottom line is that all representations, both fact and fiction, bring about real-life assumptions not only about temporal and spatial location, but also about cultural and social relationships, and even if they do not claim to be true, it implicitly make factual claims (Shohat and Stam 1994: 179). Given this assumption, the importance of discourses produced and reproduced in ethnic representations becomes evident. Such assumptions of representations are in harmony with Slaters (1995) notion that he calls trivial realism, a realism created through a perceptual fidelity of representation by technologies that can copy the world with realistic exactitude (p. 232). Trivial realism supports and is indispensable for representational realism, which in turn is a representation that is internally consistent, coherent and the means that are used for its construction are hidden from view. In other words, it is realistic due to the exclusion of elements not supporting its realism. Consequently, representational realism turns convincing when all perceptual elements are plausible, and the realism starts supporting itself. Imaginative worlds can be rendered realistic by means of this trivial realism: it is detached from factual reconstructions of the world and incorporated into fantastical worlds which then are experienced as real. (ibid..) This may have consequences in transcultural communication, for example, of what is perceived as convincing and therefore seems realistic. The aforementioned assumptions lead us to the fact that it is not meaningful to treat the self-standing single image or series of images on a dimension of truth and falsity. This point of view is also held by Shohat and Stam (1994) in their discussion on the question of truth and realism in fiction film. Much of what is written about ethnic, racial and colonialist representation is corrective, trying to prove that representations are inaccurate. This approach is according to them unfruitful, since the debate leads to an ontological discussion of what is the truth, and accordingly whos truth? This comes into question

20 especially when a film makes historical-documentary claims. (pp. 178-9.) Instead we can analyze what it states, and thus what kind of discourse or discourses it might support or question. Worth (1981), approaching the question of realism as a visual anthropologist, claims that images rather than being representations or correspondences with or of a reality create a reality of their own (p. 33). Photographic data is a structured communicative event, it is not a mirror of what is out there. The photographer is free to take pictures of whatever s/he wants but at the same time constrained and aware that s/he has to point the camera at something, and simultaneously omit something else. The film is thus obviously not a copy, but someones statement, of the world. Correspondence comes rather in terms of conventions and rules for the structuring of the world, how pictures are made. He admits, and somewhat contradictorily, that even if a theory of correspondence is insufficient, images must correspond to something. The image has to refer to something in order to make sense. (ibid.: 181, 194-6.) As Shohat and Stam (1994) stated above, the truth of a visual representation in an absolute sense always remains a problematic (pp. 178-9). It is largely a philosophic concept, but despite its complexity its importance cannot and should not be mitigated. Faircloughs (1995b) remark draws it nicely together: Truth is a slippery business, but abandoning it altogether is surely perverse (p. 47).

2.1.2 Ethics: responsible representations

Any discussion on representations of minority groups must consider the concept of stereotype, because stereotypes provide a means of communicating certain (however very selected) aspects of a group to an audience. Stereotypes allow the audience to recognize a simplified (ethnic) character and then assess his/her characteristics, partly based on stereotypes from factual media content and from entertainment. Some ethnic groups, such as Native Americans and Afro-Americans, have a long history of pejorative stereotyping in the popular culture. Stereotypes can be regarded as shorthand for ethnic representations in mass communication and entertainment industry. (Wilson and Gutirrez 1989: 67.) From a social psychological point of view, stereotyping can be defined as the process of ascribing characteristics to people on the basis of their group membership (Oakes et al. 1994: 1). To deal with people as members of groups to which they belong is cognitively indispensable, but while doing this our perception of the group is changed. This is the reception side of stereotypes; what is represented is imperatively categorized whenever information of specific ethnic groups is communicated. While this is important to realize for the implications of visual representations, it will not be attended to in the context of this study.

21 In his article on stereotypes in the media Linn (1996) argues that [t]he use of an ethnic stereotype tends to reinforce the common belief that it relies upon, thus hardening attitudes about multicultural groups (p. 16). By the same token, but more specifically, Hollywood film made stereotypes self-perpetuating by borrowing stereotypes from other existing stereotypes in popular culture. Film provides impressions of peoples and places that audiences have little or no firsthand experience of themselves (cf. discussion above on intertextuality and induction of fiction to facts). Such stereotypes serve as models for social behavior in regards to these groups for the dominant viewers, while affecting and transforming the identity for the group portrayed. (Miller 1980: 12.) In writing about the portrayal of Native Americans in film in particular, and stereotypes in general, Lutz (1990) states that where the relationship between majority and minority is marked by an unequal distribution of power along the lines of ethnic visibility, ... stereotypes may serve as ideological constructs to justify inequality and to uphold the status quo of institutional racism (p. 32). When applied to groups visibly different from those belonging to the dominant, these stereotypes may harden into ethnic prejudice. Stereotypes grow into a standard, and once you have seen one individual, you have in a way seen them all. (ibid..) Not all stereotypes are negative in their content, though. To counter-argue Lutz (1990) in the foregoing quotation, a common stereotype to be found in the stereotypical portrayal of Native Americans is the Wise Elder4, embodying natural wisdom and rooted presence (Francis 1993: 107). Stereotyping does thus not need to be negative per seit can be useful for communicating certain characteristics or ideas to a large audience. But the problems arise regarding stereotypes when negative characteristics are repeatedly attributed to the same ethnic group (Wilson and Gutirrez 1989: 67). Moreover, the division between a negative and positive stereotype is not unproblematic, because it is associated with issues related to the point of view of the interpreter. I will return to this problematic in the end of chapter 7. It is especially fruitful to view ethnicity in terms of visual representations, since ethnic characteristics are dominantly physically manifested, and thus a visible trait. It is therefore not only the visual representation that is constructed, but also ethnicity, given its socially defined importance. Such ethnic traits are utilized in the production of representational codes to describe ethnicity in photographic images. Visual depictions have a hovering simulacrum with the groups portrayedas if they would be just as it iswhile verbal representations are descriptions, and thus require a translation from the visual to the verbal. There is a risk in the pervasiveness of the visual media in portraying ethnicity, and in a larger sense of ethnocentrism and racism, to only see the physical and visually manifest banal fact of skin color. What

The Wise Elder can in this case be equated with the Enlightenment concept of the Noble Savage (Francis 1993: 7).

22 we should see, is the very intricate, culturally profound and deeply complex system that makes the ethnic and racial distinction meaningful in our society.

2.1.3 Power: effective representations

Fyfe and Law (1988) describe the social construction of visual representations with its inherent inequality: A depiction is never just an illustration. It is the material representation, the apparently stabilised product of a process of work. And it is the site for the construction and depiction of social difference. To understand a visualisation is thus to inquire into its provenance and into the social work it does. It is to note its principles of exclusion and inclusion, to detect the roles that it makes available, to understand the way in which they are distributed, and to decode the hierarchies and differences that it naturalises. And it is also to analyze the ways in which authorship is constructed or concealed ... . (p. 1.) Visual representations are thus not selected at random, but are constructed on the basis of a number of criteria. It is exactly the representation as a site for the construction and depiction of social difference which is of interest in this study: what are the aspects of the image that produce a certain representation? Mitchell continues: Politics, especially in a society that aspires to democratic values, is ... deeply connected with issues of representation and mediation ... [by] the production of political power through the use of media (1994: 3). This comprehends both verbal and visual communication. Vanhanen (1991) argues that if texts (in a linguistic sense) and images are used as means of communication and informationwhich is quite an encompassing premisethey can also be seen as means of power. If the verbal ideology is concretized in texts, then visual ideology is represented in images. (pp. 97-8.) Nichols (1981) has written extensively on still images, as well as on cinema and documentary film. He seeks to establish how society uses images, and to analyze the relationships between cinema and other images, and exploitation. Why do we as audience consent to these practices of image production, selection, and distribution? How is the exploitative function of images concealed to us, or is it concealed at all and instead conceived as the normal practices? He ultimately sees the cinema and still images as institutions of social representations, and tries to establish the relation between images and ideology.

23 Visual representations are, according to Chaplin (1994), not a mere reflection of their sources but refashioned according to pictorial codes. They are thereby separate and other than those original sources. She argues further, importantly, that representations can be understood as articulating and contributing to social processes. These social processes determine the representation but are also consequently influenced and altered by it. Thus representations articulate not only visual or verbal codes and conventions but also the social practices and forces which underlie them, with which we interpret the world. (p. 1.) In this statement the interrelation between representations and social reality is noteworthy, i.e. how representations are both the outcome of and support for social structures. Consequently, ethnic images are not static but the portrayal of indigenous groups follow and reflect their real status and power in society (Miller 1980: xii, 12). And it is this social aspect of visual representations that intrigues me, and that will surface in this study.

2.2 Disciplines related to the study of representations

In this section I present disciplines that contribute to my view of how the study of visual representations of ethnicity can be approached, and during the review indications will be made on what could serve as the theoretical backbone for this study. It is not an exhaustive account of literature on the subject under study; I shall focus upon work which I have found particularly fruitful in arguing for and developing my own analytical framework. Let me open the discussion with Mitchells (1994) words: Although we have thousands of words about pictures, we do not yet have a satisfactory theory of them. What we do have is a motley array of disciplinessemiotics, philosophical inquiries into art and representation, studies in cinema and mass media ... all converging on the problem of pictorial representation and visual culture. (p. 9.) With this in mind I set out to find out what has been done this far.

2.2.1 Discourse analysis

Discourse analysis is a discipline with roots in linguistics, initially only limited to analysis of isolated sentences. Later, in the 1970s, unified models for the description of text and discourse were formulated and eventually lead the attention of the discipline to wider text segments, and mass mediated

24 texts. (van Dijk 1985a: 1.) Since discourse analysis has been theorized in a number of different fields and draws upon different research traditions, it can be said to delineate an approach or a way of thinking about media analysis (Connell and Mills 1985: 32). Based on the character of their social orientation to discourse, the discourse analysis approaches can by one measure be divided into non-critical and critical. The critical differ from the non-critical by spelling out relation of power and domination in the discourse, its ideological functions, and the constructive effects these discourses may entail. (Fairclough 1992: 12.) The non-critical approaches are not productive for this study, not only because of the point of view chosen here, but also for their emphasis on other areas, such as conversation analysis, ethnomethodological approaches, and the social psychology of discourse (ibid.: 13). The critical approach serves my interests and methodology better, because the social aspects of discourse are in a key position when approaching various visual texts, and it is also in this area that issues regarding racist discourse is addressed. The overview of the critical approach is selective due to the various research emphases: I review the work of the relevant authors, and additionally peek at a relevant study that has attempted to apply discourse analytical theory to visual analysis. Some of the research conducted in (critical) discourse analysis regarding the reproduction of racism in the media, such as van Dijks work, were already presented in the introduction.

Critical discourse analysis (CDA)

Apart from the non-critical approaches, we thus have the branch of critical discourse analysis, concerned with problems of power abuse, inequality, and dominance in and through discourse. It is not a separate methodology, but more of a political research attitude, meaning that the analysis assumes an explicit perspective, principles, and aims. (van Dijk 1993b: 249-52.) Detailed critical discourse analysis can provide a wider context for challenging authority and power, and it can pinpoint everyday manifestations of social problems in communication. Its targets for the criticism are the power elites that enact, legitimate, reproduce, or ignore social inequality and unfairness. Further, it can criticize the media and presenting alternatives to prevailing media practices. Large social problems such as inequality, class differences, sexism, racism and dominance are examples that not only exist as such, but are articulated in discourses of both verbal and visual communication. (van Dijk 1985b: 6-7; van Dijk 1993b: 251-2.) Naturally, most of the methodological work conducted in this area relates exclusively to the verbal texts. In this category we can include critical linguistics (Kress and Hodge 1979), an approach that

25 attempted to combine social theory with linguistic text analysis, based on the functionalist linguistic theory (Halliday 1979; 1994). Another approach within the same category is represented by Pcheux (1983), that aimed at the combination of social theory with a method for written political text analysis. However, critical discourse analyses more relevant in the context of this study are represented by van Dijk in his studies on media and racist discourse (1987; 1991; 1993a). His work is based on a social-cognitive model, where the practices of, for example, news production and comprehension have social-psychological emphasis on processes of social cognition. He studies how social processes and relationships are grounded in micro level routine practices, and that also constitutes his motivation for linking media text to context. (ibid.: 1985a: 6-8.) Despite the verbally oriented analysis and socialpsychological orientation, the fruits of his research are beneficial also for this study in describing the functioning of racist discourse. In discourses we witness the realization of the macrosociological patterns that characterize our societies (van Dijk 1985b: 7). Elements of discourses are merely fragmentary enactments of larger societal problems. Yet discourse plays a key role in their ideological formulation, in their communicative reproduction, and in the representation of issues concerning these problems, argues van Dijk. (ibid..) Fairclough investigates, amongst other, the media that he conceives an actor for social and cultural change by means of its alternating discursive practices. Discourse within society and culture is in his view historically variable, and plays in contemporary society a key role in societal reproduction and change. (1995a; 1995b.) He further argues that (media) texts should be analyzed in their context of production and consumption (Fairclough 1995a: 9), and that the institutional and discursive practices in which texts are embedded should be taken into account (Fairclough 1995b: 16-7). The analyses by van Dijk and Fairclough are of importance for the development of my approach, because of their contribution to the study of discourse in relation to racism and to its institutional practices, respectively. I will return to their work in greater detail in the next chapter when discussing the theoretical construct of my approach.

In respect to the visual

In the introduction to this study the importance of recognizing the visual text as a part of the verbal discourse analysis was expressed in, for example, the analysis of television news. Analysis of the verbal discourses is simply not enough to accommodate aspects of both the visual and verbal texts, and they therefore have to be read in conjunction with each other. The visual text as a part of the discourse is crucial

26 to the readers interpretation. If the same discursive system is operating for both the visual and verbal text it produces an ideologically coherent and congruent text (Kress 1985: 33-5). Despite the clear demand for such work, it is hard to find analyses that concretely attempt to address the problem of the visual text within any analyses of discourse. However, one relevant analysis of the conjunction between verbal and visual texts has been done by Hartley and Montgomery (1985). They start from the assumption that although a substantial part of the production of meaning in the media is not strictly verbal or linguistic, some functions of the text may nevertheless apply to visual media as well. In the process of signification a distinction between two elements is made: the text renders the world of persons, objects and events a representation, and simultaneously the representation places itself into relation with a recipient in some respect. (pp. 233-4.) This dichotomy gives us the opportunity to mediate between two different phases of analysis. First, the representational refers to the textual; a selection from an array of signifying elements. Second, the relational connects to the cultural, where relations of power are established and reproduced around fundamental social divisions such as gender, class and ethnicity. These dimensions of dominance and subordination are achieved by means of the production and circulation of specific ideologies. (ibid.: 234-5.) Hartley and Montgomery have thus extended the analysis of how meanings are produced in text to include extra-textual cultural relations of ideology and power (see figure 2-1), which is of interest for the purpose of this study. The analysis is thus developed in two different directions: specific textual features on the one hand, and wider cultural processes on the other.

CULTURE Ideology Power

SIGNIFICATION Representational Relational

TEXTUAL REALIZATION Selection of signifying elements Selection of internal relations to the signified

Figure 2-1: The representational and relational forms of signification in a verbal and visual text (Adapted from Hartley and Montgomery 1985: 234). Based on this scheme, Hartley and Montgomery turn at a later stage of their analysis entirely over to the second phase, and visual text and its relational properties. The relational element is not only a question of positioning the recipient in regard to the text, but an interrelation of elements included in the text. The wider cultural processes present at the relational mode are not merely invoked by textual features, but play an active political role in the cultural relations of power. (ibid.: 245-7, 260.)

27 The described analysisthe selection of signifying systems, and their relation to the recipient and internallyis one method by which principles of discourse analysis are extended to visual language. The relational element is fruitful because of its attention to the internal relations of the signified, and I will therefore take advantage of this approach when developing the relational aspect in chapter 6.

2.2.2 Semiotics
In this section I will probe the field of semiotics by reviewing writings at the same time both descriptive and critical of semiotics. Focus is naturally kept on issues related to visual representations, and respectively why semiotics might not be up to the challenge presented in this work. Semiotics, or semiology, is rooted in the structuralist tradition represented by Lvi-Strauss and Barthes. Lvi-Strauss (1977) argued for an approach that would treat social systems as if they were languages, while Barthes (1957) continued the work by providing a general theory of culture. These approaches constitutes the major theoretical basis for the structuralist view on mass communication and the early semiotic analysis of message systems. Simultaneously the linguistic heritage of these paradigms have also limited the development of semiotics, and have resulted in its partial rejection in the last decades. (Connell and Mills 1985: 33.) Consequently semiotics has not established itself as a discipline, but finds it theoretical premises in the domains of linguistics, literature, and philosophy (Hodge and Kress 1988: 1). However, the work of Barthes and his development of semiotics provided the launching pad for the structuralist view on the mass media. A theory of a mythic discourse indebted to Lvi-Strauss provided further a methodological formalism for analyzing the production of social meaning. (Connell and Mills 1985: 34.) Concerned with extending the general theory of signs to encompass all different signifying systems, semiotics attempted to combine the production of meaning with the concept of ideology (Barthes 1957; 1967). The ambiguity in the relation between signification and ideology exposes the central weakness in the structuralist methods. Even if the argument that signification is the outcome of a production of meanings in a specific system, his definition of ideology implied a single, unilateral system of meanings, which turned out to be unproductive in subsequent studies (Connell and Mills 1985: 35). Further, structuralism was limited to deriving the meaning of each sign from its relationship to another sign within the same system, and was accused of closing off alternative interpretations of the text (Seiter 1992: 51, 56). The attempt of the structuralist paradigm to treat signifying systems abstractly and independently of social relations propelled studies within communication to assign concepts such as discourse a more prominent position. Theoretical studies in other fields changed the focus to the relations between messages and social

28 structures, and this also demanded alterations in existing paradigms of semiotics. (Connell and Mills 1985: 34-5.) The same problems are present also in the context of this study. Semiotic scholars grant that meaning cannot take place outside of human communication, but at the same time semiotics does not require the existence of empirically verifiable receivers of its signs ... Thus authorial intention is not included in the study of signs and neither is the interpretation or reception of the message by empirical audiences. (Seiter 1992: 37, italics added.) This decontextualization, the disregarding of social and even political intentions in the production of meaning, and the breach between the sign (the visual representation) and a well-grounded foundation in the larger societal structures, is a serious drawback in respect to the problem field present in here. The denial of the relation of signs to society, of discourses to power and domination, therefore constitute the first of the problems for adopting semiotics to an analysis of ethnicity in representations. The background of semiotics in the structuralist paradigm asserts that the elements of signification are dependent on, and determined by, the relation of the elements to each other (Connell and Mills 1985: 33). Semiotics studies the way such signs communicate and the rules that govern their use (Seiter 1992: 31). The second problem that arises, then, is the way semiotics as a discipline poses its questions. Semiotics first asks how meaning is created, rather than what the meaning is (Seiter 1992: 31, italics in original). Mitry (1987) follows the same lines of thought, and grants that semiotics might be capable of saying how meaning is arrived at, but incapable of saying why it means (p. 30, cited in Buxton 1990: 6). And in this study it is exactly the what and why questions that are important: what are the potential meanings of the representations of ethnicity that we see, and why does the meaning make sense to us? To contrast the semiotic paradigm and the kind of questions it poses with a discursive approach clarifies what renders a discursive analysis more appealing. In Chaplins (1994) sociological approach she defines discourse analysis in regards to a semiotic one. Discourse analysis is a tool of institutional, ideological investigation, in a way that a Peircean typology [as applied in semiotics], which is based on rules of logic, cannot be. While semiotic theory expresses the meanings of a pre-existent social order, discourse constructs those meanings and that order.5 (p. 91, italics in original.) This transition towards the discourse coincides, and is concordant, with the emergence of cultural studies that oriented media analysis more broadly towards a further elaborated understanding of language and representation. The simple idea of representing was rejected, and meaning is instead seen as the product of specific, culturally and socially determined practices of signification. (Hall 1978: 27-9.)
Peirces typology constitutes the foundation of the North American semiotics tradition, and especially his designation of the icon, index, and symbol sign has been widely referred to in semiotic analysis of visual images. See Peirce 1932: 2.156-2.173.
5

29 Finally, one very concrete aspect of visual communication that renders semiotics into an unfeasible option for this study is one similar to that of linguistics before the emergence of discourse analysis. It relates to the character of the visual text. Each image produces a preposterous amount of information (Seiter 1992: 54), which would then make the issue impossible to process with the current question in mind. Thus, I see the discourse analytic approach offering advantages over a semiotic approach in an analogous way with discourse analysis in relation to linguistics: the possibility of analyzing larger, structural features of discourses in text respective images, and the advantage of addressing those crucial questions of what and why regarding the meaning of representations. Mitchell (1986) questions the ability of semiotics to describe the nature of images altogether. In discussing Peirces typology of the iconic, indexical, and symbolical sign, he argues that the icon sign, i.e. the visual resemblance and similarity in appearance, are not sufficient conditions for any sort of representation. (pp. 53-7; cf. Goodman 1985: 3-6.) He also attacks Barthes (1977) classical Rhetoric of the Image essay, and especially his analyses of photography as only a redescription in a new theoretical jargon. He bluntly states that semiotics is nominalistic: it tries to resist the proliferation of entities, and instead attempts to find names for occurrences in the world. It describes a burgeoning meta-language that proliferates endless networks of distinctions and semiotic entities. (Mitchell 1986: 61-3.) Elsewhere he criticizes along the same lines Gran Sonessons (1989) Pictorial Concepts as a leading work in the synthesization of semiotic analyses of visual representations and verbal discourses. But in practice the only thing that seems to change is the generality of the claims. (Mitchell 1994: 86.) Buxton (1990) criticizes a study by Fiske (1988) where he applies the structuralist methods of LviStrauss on general binary opposites to analyses of a television series. In this method, cultural contradictions are seen as mythic and abstract opposites, which are then in the context of television series destined to metaphorically ... transform these oppositions into concrete representations (Fiske 1988: 132). Buxton criticizes this generated set of opposites for being either simply descriptive or too general: they apply from genre to genre at any point in timethus they are seen as both fixed and atemporal. The simple binary descriptions would be analytically more productive with a viewer-centered approach, but this leads to ... a formalistic dead end: whereas in the structuralist problematic, the reader/viewer is positioned by the text, the viewer-centred approach implies a subject who is independent of the text. (1990: 6-7.) The key problems with applying a semiotic approach to the question relevant in this study lies thus in the kind of questions it poses as a field, and the foundational difference in assumption how (visual) signs communicate. The process of signification as derived from how a sign relates to another instead of its connection to wider social relations and ideology is an additional problem. The importance of the

30 representation through its social implications is on the other hand exactly what would be of importance in this study. In order to rectify this relative and societal decontextualization, social semiotics has sprung up.

Social semiotics
From semiotics and partly from critical linguistics, a new area of investigation into visual images has emerged, social semiotics. In contrast to semiotics, social semiotics is especially concerned with visual semiosis and language, and it attempts to correct the flaws of its predecessor, semiotics. The new field elaborates on the concept of genre and intertextual analyses of texts, as well as practices of text production and interpretation. (Fairclough 1995b: 28; see e.g. Hodge and Kress 1988; Kress and van Leeuwen 1990; 1996.) Hodge and Kress, prominent advocates of social semiotics research, admit that even if mainstream semiotics (sic) has achievements, it has been justly criticized for its assumptions and practices. The core of the critique is that the social dimensions of semiotic systems are so intrinsic to their nature and function that the systems cannot be studied in isolation. (1988: 1.) Semiotics focus on codes and structures of semiotic systems, while overlooking the concrete social contexts, and the functions and social uses of semiotic systems. It attributes power to meaning, instead of meaning to power ... [and] tacitly accepts an impenetrable wall cutting off semiosis from society, and semiotics from social and political thought. (ibid.: 2.) Social semiotics is then a reconstitution of semiotics; applying the strength of semiotic analysis and developing the analytic practice to describe and explain the problems of social meaning (ibid.). However, the development in the area of social semiotics has been weak. It could be argued that in the decade of the resurrection of semiotics the premisses used and the propositions made by social semiotics have not gained credibility. This is because the premise of a visual grammar as transferrable and partly analogous with linguistic means of signifying can be contested on the grounds we saw in the beginning of this chapter: The density of the visual image renders a segmentation of the visual plane difficult, and ambiguous. I do not in this study consider images as analyzable as a language, which is also my main argument for opting out social semiotics. Second, arguing that the construction of a visual ethnic representation is less sensitive to generic boundaries (than perhaps other representations), which in turn renders the elaboration of this concept of genre less productive. Finally, I have within the limits of this study assumed a centering around the social aspect of the ethnic Other as a discourse in visual representation, whereas social semiotic applied to the visual, as presented by its main advocates Kress and van Leeuwen, concerns graphic representation (1992: 92), and more generally visual design (1996).

31

2.2.3 Ethnic Studies

There is an abundance of literature regarding the representation of specific ethnic groups in the visual media: film, television, photography, to name the most important ones (e.g. Bogle 1988; Dates and Barlow (eds) 1990). Further, there is a large amount of literature on the representation of various ethnic minorities, but specifically in film and/or television (e.g. Woll and Miller 1987; Friedman (ed.) 1991). Moreover, there are studies that are aligned along all visual media and which do not only concern ethnic groups as minorities (Devereaux and Hillman (eds) 1995). Finally, as we widen the scope, a large amount of literature on media criticism can be found where also the visual media and its treatment of ethnicity is salient (Campbell 1995). The point with this brief listing is to describe the diverse character of the studies within the field researching on the visual media and ethnicity. A large number of the studies are of an empirical and descriptive character, and their respective method is theorized only within the limit of the subject under question. Methodologically these studies thus represent a very diverse, and at times indeed diffuse, background. The analyses conducted are theoretically rooted in, for example, film or cultural studies (Naficy and Gabriel (eds) 1993) or critical studies more generally (hooks 1996). Methodological studies that would concern photographic images (still or moving)or more conceptually, visual representationsof ethnicity in an analogous way with, for example van Dijks (1987; 1991;1993a) critical discourse studies on racism in text, are not to be found. Because of this diverse field and methodology it is unfruitful to attempt to construct a method on a synthesis of these studies, and even more futile to extrapolate characteristics that would be typical in the representation of ethnicity (cf. the structuralist method in Buxton 1990: 6-7 reviewed in section 2.2.2).

Stereotyping in ethnic studies

Stereotyping in terms of the portrayal of ethnicity in the visual media are frequently discussed within ethnic studies. Stereotypes often maintain a position as the main target for pejorative portrayals of various ethnic groups by being simplifications, and at times biased (see e.g. Lester (ed.) 1996). As we saw before, stereotyping can be conceptually seen as a part of visual representation, in that all representations are such simplifications. The functions and implications of stereotyping are addressed in chapter 7, as a part the identity that is constructed in the visual representation.

32

The Other in ethnic studies

Ethnicity can be considered as a generic term for various ethnic groups, but they all obviously remain with their specific characteristics. However, it could be argued that they still have something in common: they are projected as different from the dominant culture. This is what the literature in the fields of anthropology (see e.g. Fox (ed.) 1991), cultural theory (see e.g. Said 1978; Hall 1992), among others, coin as Otherness. The notion is thus moving beyond ethnicity, overlooking a specific ethnicity, and discussing it as difference and opposition, as Otherness. It is winning ground in critical cultural studies (see e.g. Naficy and Gabriel (eds) 1993; Golding 1997), given that in multicultural societies, the boundaries between clearly delineated ethnic groups are becoming increasingly blurred, the black versus white dichotomy in such societies only exist in theory (Drummond, discussion, 28.8.1997). Thus, for example, it is not only of interest to analyze the identity of a specific group as it is presented in the media, but rather how the identity of that group is constructed as opposed to a dominant one, together with an implied inequality in power. That seems as a plausible line to follow in a critical study of ethnicity, and that is exactly what I intend to do.

2.3 Definitions
In this section, I will review relevant concepts as they are defined in the disciplines discussed above. This review is essential, because it describes the different emphases that are given the concepts in these disciplines, and it clarifies the adaptability and functionality of the terminology for my purposes. In the next chapter, when selecting the course of action in this study, I decide upon definitions that are used throughout this work. These settled concepts will draw upon definitions discussed here, but their choice will be argued for only in connection with the theoretical construct in the following chapter. In discussions above, a number of notions have been used that are connected with various disciplines. These will not be specifically defined, since they do not refer immediately to the theoretical construct that will be applied.

33

2.3.1 Representation
Representations and visual representations were discussed before from three different points of view. I will, for the moment, give a working definition of how the concept relates to concepts that are in active use in the developing of my approach. Visual representations in this work are theoretically considered as the visual text promoting discourses, and, hence, embedded in ideology (see definitions following). Visual representation describes as a metaconcept the meaning of the image, the outcome of interpretation. It is where the visual textexpressing a discourseand the reader/viewerequipped with certain ideological toolsmeet, and the visual text is interpreted (cf. Hall 1997). One needs discourse to make meaning sensible, that is, a framework for understanding and interpretation. Representation implies thus, as we saw in the definition and as Chaplin argues, a recipient: the representation is addressed to somebody and thereby realized (1994: 1). I will maintain contact with this metaconcept by referring to it in the end of next chapter regarding the location of meaning, and then finally return to it in the end in the light of this study.

2.3.2 Ethnicity
Ethnicity is a nebulous concept, and its definition is depending on the point of view (of the analyst; cf. discussion in section 1.4) and the use of the definition (e.g. in critical analysis). Since this work refers to ethnic representations in the media, I will use the definition as it has been used by van Dijk (1987) in his extensive studies on racism and communication. Ethnic is relative to social groups that are identified in ethnic or racial terms. This means that their members are perceived to be different in physical appearance and/or sociocultural properties (origin, language, norms etc.) with respect to dominant majority groups (p. 27, italics added.). Minority is used synonymously for, and as a abbreviation of, ethnic minority group, and implies that such a group is economically, socially, and culturally dominated by a majority group (ibid.: 28), principally white members of the dominant group and culture. There naturally are ethnic groups that fit this definition but, contradictorily, are not dominated by a dominant group. Thus, according to the latter part of the definition, ethnic groups that contemporarily are considered not to be dominated, or ethnically or racially discriminated, are excluded from the analysis in this definition. It is important to keep in mind what this study set out to clarify, and what is of interest for the critical approach: ethnic groups that are discriminated in one way or another by the dominant, majority society, and in this case by the racist discourses conveyed in the visual media. Moreover, this definition of ethnicity will prove useful when defining the ethnic Other in the subsequent chapters, thanks to its attention to the relation between the ethnic and the dominant both in terms of difference and power. Finally, this definition is also well accommodated in the context of visual

34 representations because of its attention to the difference in physical appearance and/or sociocultural properties from a dominant group. Indeed, if this difference is not visually perceptible, the ethnic group is not considered in the analysis, as it was stated in the beginning when setting the limitations of this study.

2.3.3 Racism
The use of racism is intended to cover not only discrimination on the basis of racial features, but also in terms of ethnic features as defined by van Dijk (1987: 28) above. Discrimination, in turn, is the act of making a distinction that is less favorable to one party or another (Sykes 1985: 83). In a racist discourse physical differences bear meaning, they are signs utilized to construct discourses that produce difference (Hall 1992: 296). Racism in the media can be conceptualized in two terms: open and referential racism. Open racism refers to explicit standpoints and arguments in favor of racism. Referential racism is more subtle in presenting unquestionable, natural real or fictive events and advances racist statements that go unnoticed. The latter form is more difficult to notice and more common than open racism. (Hall 1992: 275-6.) Both are interesting in questions regarding the depiction of racism in visual media, and racism that is implicit in the construction of the ethnic representation.

2.3.4 Text
Text has, not surprisingly, a large number of definitions within discourse analysis. Most of these, however, are of a linguistic nature, referring to the lexical, syntactical, and semantic structures of verbal texts (see e.g. Brown and Yule 1996: 190-204). What is of relevance for this study are definitions that describe text more by its function than by its expression, bypassing linguistic elements of the text and emphasizing the social, political and cultural dimensions in order to be applicable to visual texts as well. The following review of the notions pay regard to this. Discourse theory and analysis of text have drawn insights also from film and narrative theory in examining the characteristics of its discursive organization. Text has in this light been theorised as a site in which different and contradictory ideological discourses are articulated so that the text, as a coherent, expressive unity, is a fiction whose coherence is produced by and in a condition of its ideological activity. (Connell and Mills 1985: 38-9.)

35 Social semiotics has redefined the various concepts that are at use in mainstream semiotics, with an emphasis on social action, context, and use. This definition of text is based on the conception of the smallest semiotic form that has concrete existence ... message, and which is about something, which supposedly exists outside itself. (Hodge and Kress 1988: 5.) Text then, in the context of verbal communication, refers to messages of a socially described unity. It is separate from discourse, and it describes the concrete material object produced in discourse. (ibid.: 6.) Fairclough (1995b) refers with text not only to a linguistic definition, but sees for example in the case of television also the visual images and sound effects as constituting a part of the text (p. 58). The use of text in this inclusive way might seem confusing, especially given that its linguistic properties were denied. There are, however, no indications that e.g. Fairclough would refer to this broader conceptincluding imagesstrictly as possessing properties similar to language. Images (later more specifically visual text) are simply a part of a text, but not necessarily containing linguistic characteristics.

2.3.5 Discourse
Within discourse analysis, discourse is seen as a manifest cultural and social product in and through which meanings and ideologies are expressed (van Dijk 1985a: 5). The use of text and discourse often overlap each other, even if a clear distinction should be drawn between the two concepts. Discourse is more frequently used in discussions with a sociological basis, regarding the role of social structure in the study of discourse (Corsaro 1981: 22-6). Also, the emphasis of discourse is more on content, function and social significance, and is thus a category that derives from the social domain. Cross references still occur between the two concepts. (Kress 1985: 27.) The relation between discourse and text is one of realization: Discourse finds its expression in text. However, this is never a straight-forward relation; any one text may be the expression or realization of a number of sometimes competing and contradictory discourses. (Kress 1985: 27.) One of the discourses might be dominant over the other, and have a clearer expression of the ideology. This is especially the case when verbal texts anchor visual texts. The discourses might be different, but they anchor each other to a common ideology, which expresses their relation according to the structuralist paradigm (Barthes 1977; cf. Barthes 1957; 1967 above.) However, texts can also convey different ideologies by different discourses. This can be found, for example, in advertisements. (Kress 1985: 39-40.)

36 Social semiotics view the relation between text and discourse in a similar way, but as a legacy of the linguistic tradition discourse has a emphasis on the social process in which texts are embedded (Hodge and Kress 1988: 6, italics added). This definition of discourse falls close to the first of two put forward by Fairclough (1995b), which pays attention to verbal interaction and real social situations. While this is useless for all studies that do not include actual interaction, the second is of more interest. In accordance with poststructuralist social theory, as represented, for instance, by Foucault (1990), discourse is in Faircloughs conception a social construction of reality, a form of knowledge (1995b: 18). This second sense is also more closely associated with discourse as a specific representation, or from a particular perspective, and as a count noun, one or several discourses, as opposed to an abstract noun (ibid.: 18-9, 41.). Social semiotics also embrace the social domain in discourse, but disregards the issue of power. Discourse is in this case the site where social forms of organization engage ... in the production of texts, thus reproducing or changing the sets of meanings and values which make up a culture(Hodge and Kress 1988: 6). This view does not, however, neglect that the text is socialgiven the social orientation of this form of semiotics. The text signifies the specific social relationship at the moment of ... production or reproduction (ibid.: 6.). In a study concerning questions of domination I consider power a relevant issue, and therefore the poststructuralist approach more fruitful. Finally, in a discussion on the interrelation between verbal and visual texts, Chaplin (1994) applies discourse as an array of related statements, produced under definite social and historical conditions, which define a field of knowledge (p. 87). Also this definition pay homage to Foucault in admitting the explicit link between institutions and relations of power and the formation and function of knowledge.

2.3.6 Ideology
As an introduction on a debated polysemic concept let me quote Hall (1992): Always when discussing the production of meaning, and when it is related to questions regarding power we run into problems in terms of ideology. The production of meaning is not per se ideological. Power, in turn, can be effective also without the production of meaning. Nevertheless the connection between meaning and power or knowledge and power makes the foundation of the ideological instance. That is, racist ideologies are always founded in situations, where the production of meaning is connected to power strategies to deny certain groups access to cultural

37 and symbolical resources. I would like to refer to this as the practice of discrimination. (pp. 296-7.) In philosophical and sociological discussions the meaning of ideology range from system of ideas and world view, to the more polemic ones of false consciousness and ideas of the dominant, ruling class. The concept is important in considerations of social functions and effects of language and discourses. (Kress 1985: 29). Again, I will review only a fragment of the literature, and then obviously the one related to the issues of this study. Hall is a prominent figure in developing social theories of ideology in relation to representation. He refersin briefwith ideology to concepts, structures and associations in which framework we conceive and interpret our social reality in a way that it makes sense. Ideology is thus a reference for thought, a system of representation. (1992: 268.) Nichols (1981) emphasizes the role of social relations, stating that [i]deology is how the existing ensemble of social relations represents itself to individuals; it is the image a society gives of itself in order to perpetuate itself (p. 1). Definitions within discourse analysis concern, firstly the relation of verbal language to ideology. However, more general definitions can be reviewed in the context of this study, where ideology is explicitly tied to social conditions and hierarchies. Kress (1985) states that ideology includes concerns with forms of knowledge and their relation to class structure, conflict, and interest, and to modes of production. Ideology also embraces issues of forms of knowledge in specific social practices. Furthermore, ideology is not only concerned with dominant ideologies, but also with oppositional forms of knowledge in society. (p. 29; cf. Mannheim 1991.) Sykes (1985) states, along the lines of Kresss definition, that all modern societies are characterized by some form of value conflict. The different value systems comprise matrices of different ideologies. These are rooted and prevail in various social groups based on class, religion, national origin etc. Each ideology provide its respective group with a set of ideas or conceptions about the nature of the world and its (social) ontology. Ideology explains the world by defining the participants and processes in the social world and the relationships between them, as well as the criteria by which the latter may be evaluated and the means by which they may be changed. (p. 87.) Consequently, in most societies with competing value systems, there is also dominant ideologies. These are reflected in the structure and principles of major institutions, and are also subscribed to by the majority of the members of society. Those ideologies give us the necessary tools to interpret and understand the world, and to act in it, and to change the current societal organization. The competing ideologies are parallel to the dominant ones, as clearly defined counter-ideologies that are held by proponents of a certain

38 issue for which they want change in society. (Sykes 1985: 87.) This can be exemplified by marginalized ethnic groups that advance interests which are in opposition to the dominant ideologies. Ideology is practice, it is ubiquitous, and it is produced and reproduced by social institutionssuch as the mediathat create societal meanings for their subjects. However, this does not mean that the subjects would be unanimous with a prevailing ideology. Subjects of an ideology are not united, homogeneous or one-dimensional. Similarly, ideology should be referred to in plural since there is no single ideological conspiracy that the media would promote, and thus advance only one racist world view. Neither is there a single-minded racist dominant class in a homogenous form that would run the media. (Hall 1992: 271-4.) Reality is simply much more complex than that, and in order for a critical theory to gain credibility all these nuances must be taken into account.

Racist ideology and images

In debating the production of racism in the media, Hall (1992) distinguishes three different aspects of ideology. First, ideology does not consist of a separate and isolated concept, but rather the combined chain or group of concepts and associations. Ideology is linked to other adjoining concepts, and that can thus come to alter the content of the ideology. This is also how ideologies come to change over time. (p. 269.) Second, ideologies are not individually, but collectively constituted or redefined. This is to a large extent unconscious, not in Freudian terms, but in terms of how discourse reproduces ideology. Ideologies are therefore not the product of forms of social consciousness, but they produce these forms through discourse. (Hall 1992: 269.) Kress (1985) elaborates on the relation between ideology and discourse, and states that [t]he defined and delimited set of statements that constitute a discourse are themselves expressive of and organized by a specific ideology. That is, ideology and discourse are aspects of the same phenomenon, regarded from two different standpoints. (p. 30.) Third, ideologies work by building for its individual or collective subjects a position in which they recognize and accept themselves, and where they can articulate ideological statements as if they were truths. That is how they work: ideologies alter the discourses by deconstructing old ones and relating them to new ones, and by positioning subjects. Thence subjects, such as ethnic groups, can possess different positions in ideologies during different points in time. (Hall 1992: 270.)

39 Halls second aspect is touched upon by Kellner (1995) in questioning current media culture which produces representations that attempt to induce consent to certain political positions, getting members of the society to see specific ideologies as the way things are (p. 59). Political discourses, together with this media culture, have a hegemonic function by which political groups can maintain the prevailing ideology. Ideology is therefore also expressed in various visual media, and these constitute a part of the ideological representations of, amongst others, race. (ibid.) For example, ideological functions of news photographs are disguised in institutionalized and routinized practices, and the conventional and monotone character of the news images covers the ideological effects for the reader (Noponen 1996: 208), while articulating pre-given meanings of social events (Hall 1973: 176-188). We can claim that ideologies are most effective when they form the basis of what we present of the world, that things are as we are used to. And concerning race (as defined socially), it has become one of the most naturalized of ideologies since it seems to be given by nature and eternally defined, while its historical and cultural roots are disregarded.

2.3.7 Hegemony
As a descriptive example of the relation between ideology and power on the one hand, and visual representation on the other, Barton and Barton (1993) use the practice of mapping the world. Ultimately, the map in particular and, by implication, visual representations in general are seen as complicit with social-control mechanisms inextricably linked to power and authority. (p. 53.) In order to analyze the function of ideology in the visual representation they deconstruct the functions of hegemony: what is in fact represented, what is included, and what is excluded? Hegemony is, as ideology, an enormous and contested terrain, with advocates in several disciplines of social science. Here I will therefore limit my focus to a few specific issues regarding its functions in respect to critical studies and visual media. In critical theory and in the selected method the definition of hegemony is developed from Gramsci (1971), referring to a ruling ideology, emphasizing the winning of consent in the exercise of power (Fairclough 1995a: 17). It allows for such consent by rendering the established power seem natural and common-sensical (McQuail 1994: 99). Hegemony is a continuous striving for leadership and domination in economic, political, cultural, and ideological terms: it is the unification of economic and other social forces to form a controllable bloc out of society. Consent is achieved not so much by dominating but by integrating the society as a whole in this power configuration through concessions and by the use of ideological means. (Fairclough 1995a: 76.) It thus functions as a vehicle for a specific ideology to win ground and naturalize the interest of an economic-political elite. Hegemony is a useful concept in the

40 theoretization of media culture, and in questions on how media maintain social power relations in providing access to the media for those in a position of authority. (McQuail 1994: 99.) Hegemony can be argued to be a process by which certain definitions of reality attain dominance in society. Conceptually it can be divided into rules of inclusion and rules of exclusion. Rules of inclusion determine what is included in and what are the aspects and strategies for representation. The claim to dominate by the use of these rules may be overt or covert. Aspects of representation may also be included just to disempower the Otherthe dominated groupby depriving it the access and right to, and taking control over its own representation. The rules of exclusion is the rule of repression, the marginalization of the underdogs and the centering of the dominant interest. (Barton and Barton 1993: 53-59.) The relation between exclusion and inclusion is applied by Zavarzadeh (1991) in his discussion on film in particular, and power relations in general. He uses the concepts of center and margin to describe the adversary forces at play, where center denominates the established and obvious (sic) discourses of culture, and supports the generally accepted conception of the world. The margin challenges and sets pressure on the settled norms of the center, and questions its position as common sense and second nature. This pressure reveals the naturalness of cultural norms to be ideological constructs imposed by the dominant group as universal. (pp. 169-70.) The relation of center and margin is finally one of exclusion and inclusion and thus ultimately a political one because the exclusions and inclusions are, in the last instance, about power in culture and the relations of exploitation that having and not having set up among people. To investigate the connections between a cultures center and margin then is to inquire into the politics of values. (Zavarzadeh 1991: 170.) The relation between hegemony and representation is, in turn, examined by Ryan and Kellner (1988). They claim that the prevailing patterns of thought, perception and behavior that sustain our current social order are determined by representations. Therefore the formwhich here refers to means of representationand the content need to be transformed to fit the dominant forms or modes through which people experience their surrounding world. If the cultural representations that construct a shared social reality are questioned and altered, then also the current social arrangement will be challenged. (p. 267.) Thus, hegemony is the social and cultural struggle for whose ideas are to prevail, and whose to form the commonsense view for the majority of societys members. It describes the general predominance of a dominant class, and the political and ideological interest in a society. However, as with in the case of ideology, it is not a conspiracy of a ruling group or class, and a passive subordination of the group that

41 is dominated. Instead, since there are competing and varying interests, hegemony is exercised by the ruling class in so far as its interests are recognized and accepted as the prevailing ones. (White 1992: 167.)

2.3.8 Power
Apart from its real world implications, the concept of power gains importance in the context of critical discourse analysis. Fairclough (1995a) argues that power can in relation to discourse be conceptualized in terms of unequal capacity to control how texts are produced, distributed and consumed (and hence the shape of the texts) in particular sociocultural contexts (pp. 1-2). This relates to questions on the right to visual representations, from which point of view they are produced, and consequences on the depiction of power in images. These issues will function as a backdrop for this study, and the specific question of power will be step into the limelight in the chapter on the relational aspect. Further, he sees discourse and power from the point of hegemony, where the creative options in various discursive practices are in fact constrained by hegemonic contestation (Fairclough 1995a: 134). Power naturalizes the meaning of societal definitions and their reflections in images. Its aim is to close lines of interpretation, and to direct the meaning within the boundaries of ideology. (Hall 1997: video recording.)

2.4 Presuppositions in this study

As I am developing and analyzing an approach from a critical analysis point of view I will state two presuppositions that are taken for granted regarding the visual representations of ethnicity that my analysis concerns. The presuppositions are based on the reading of previous studies, and provide the foundation for the critical analysis within the dynamics of media culture.

2.4.1 Continuous dialogue between visual representations and society

Visual representations of ethnicity are reflections of real life social, economic or political circumstances in which ethnic groups are subjugated, and at the same time these representations support the acceptance and normality of such a situation.

42 The relationship between texts and society/culture is to be seen dialectically. Texts are socioculturally shaped but they also constitute society and culture, in ways which may be transformative as well as reproductive. (Fairclough 1995b: 34.) Media content is thus influenced by the wider society, but they also play a prominent role in diffusing and shaping social and cultural changes. This is of primary importance for, amongst others, the changing construction of race relations (Fairclough 1995b: 51), and therefore one main premise for the methodological study of ethnicity in the visual media.

2.4.2 Ethnicity as a pejorative element in mainstream media discourse

In the light of the literature reviewed, such as the studies by van Dijk on racism in the press (1987; 1991) or, for instance, Shohat and Stam (1994) on ethnicity in film, it should be a fairly plausible working assumption that representations in Western visual media are in a large number of cases pejorative toward ethnic groups and ethnicity. Pejorative refers in this case to domination, but also to stereotypical representationssince these are insensitive to cultural or social differenceswhich are hardly plausible for any group portrayed. And if the media is pejorative in its visual representations of ethnicity, it motivates for a critical cultural studies approach. How could the visual representations of the ethnic Other then be methodologically studied? That is what I will explore and propose in the next chapter.

43

3 THE SIX-CELL MODEL

I have in the previous chapter reviewed a number of disciplines, approaches and studies that have some points of relevance to the study of ethnic representations in visual media. What is obvious from this material is the scarcity of studies that at the same time are concerned with discourses and visual representation. Ethnic issues in the media are, in turn, especially attended to within critical discourse analysis. The critical slant of the discipline has moreover a veritable concern for the inequalities and biases that are constantly present in various forms of verbal discourses and communication.

3.1 A visual methodology wanting

Studies in visual communication draw in many cases upon semiotics, where texts are seen as having an independent, inherent, and more or less objective meaning. The semiotic tradition is especially prevalent in film studies, where the key questions emerge rather from the aesthetic than from the social field. Such studieseven if they are anchored to a general theory of culturedisregard the discursive nature of visual communication. They are not taking into account the perpetual character of discourses, that they are reproductive (with exceptions), and thus having real life effects on the audience and the formation of society. This aspect of the visual is at least not prominent in this field of study. Within ethnic studies there are a number of studies that were shortly reviewed above. The background and methodology of these studies are diverse, and even if the results are relevant, they have little to offer in terms of outlines for methodological aspirations. And finally, in visual anthropology and cultural studies we sporadically run into the Other in a number of contexts, but apart from the conceptualizations then more often on the methodological battlefield of the anthropological discipline. There are a few approaches, however, in which this gap is attempted to be bridged. One is social semiotics, where the inadvertence of the societal aspects in semiotics are meant to be corrected. Within discourse studies we find method developments such as Hartley and Montgomery (1985), pulling the verbal and visual texts of news together. What is certain, however, is the need and call for methods that would be helpful for drawing verbal and visual discourses together on a discursive level (see e.g. Hodge and Kress 1988; Fairclough 1995a: 4; Fairclough 1995b: 33, 58.). I have therefore decided to approach visual representations from a critical discursive side, and specifically and exclusively as applied to ethnicity as Otherness. If social semiotics attempts to relate the

44 visual analysis of semiotics in a societal way, this study is an attempt to approach the same field from a different shore, that is, with an emphasis on the discursive nature of photographic images, and using the terminology and theoretical construct of critical discourse analysis, to embrace visual texts and discourses. Given the various backgrounds this study has been inspired by a number of different disciplines and research practices. Similarly to a study by Vanhanen (1991) this dissertation draws upon a number of research traditions, and is thus truly interdisciplinary, which is often the case within communication studies. This seems to hold even more true for visual communication studies.

3.2 The method

As described in the introduction, I review literature on ethnicity as Otherness and introduce it as a visual part in the selected analytical framework of critical discourse analysis. I activate elements of the framework that I find possible and productive for comprehending visual images, and thereby try to bring the fields closer to each other. This necessarily means that the original analytical framework is adapted selectively, and certain elements of the analysis can and should be developed elsewhere. The approach hereby produced would presumably function as a rudimentary analytical framework for an empirical study of ethnic representation. It is important to realize, however, that this analytical framework proposed only outlines an approach for a closer study of ethnicity. Apart from the arguments I have indicated before, the use of the concept of Otherness is motivated just because of its generic adaptability to ethnicity. Thus, in an empirical study there would still be a need to define what ethnic group, what media, what time period, and what elements to focus on, and so forth, to include in the analysis. The use of this framework part in two fundamental lines. Either the approach can be media centered, analyzing the coverage of ethnic group(s) in a specific visual media and/or genres during a time period or between two different time periods. The other option is ethnicity centered, paying attention to the representations of a specific ethnic group in several visual media and/or genres. However, even when a specified ethnic group is selected, the group should for analytical reasons be approached in terms of its oppositional position to the dominant representation, that is, in terms of Otherness. The framework presented here suggests one approach of what issues to pay attention to when analyzing visual representations as a discourse, and one way of approaching photographic images of the ethnic Other. In a sense it also stays truthful to the legacy of the two critical discourse analysts Fairclough and van Dijk, since they both in their literature deal with critical analysis without defining the specific group

45 concerned nor the empirical material for the analysis. Instead, they are concerned with how to approach the problem of inequality and dominance in discourse.

3.2.1 Ethnicity as Otherness

Hall (1992) refers to Edward Saids (1978) conception of colonial discourse in his own argument on the character of racist discourse (see next chapter for a more thorough discussion on Said). One aspect of this discourse is the concept of Otherness, where power is expressed in terms of naturalizing, or in fact, having the power to naturalize and construct a norm system. The Other, which is not naturalized, is then always the reverse, what we are not. This colonizing discourse takes advantage of several discursive strategies in constructing the field of representation. The dichotomy can be extended to continuous symbolic bifurcation, where the field of representation is divided into two opposite chains. This discourse is further condensed, and thereby fading out nuances and grey areas between the opposites, and eventually one chain of opposition comes to mean Western, while the other is Non-western, or symptomatic of Otherness. (Hall 1992: 277-8.) Although the dichotomy is artificial and a conceptual construct, it does give the subject under study an advantageous structural dynamic. The media landscape is naturally more diverse in its range of ethnic representations, but what we lose in approaching ethnicity as Otherness, we gain in clarity by creating a more readily identifiable tension between the ethnic and dominant protagonists involved in the visual text. The concept of Otherness provides other advantages as well. First, the concept is inherent to what I would call a certain ideological stiffness, an insensitivity to historical and contemporary realities and more of an expression of a well-accepted mold for representing a group (cf. Bhabha 1983: 18). The Other is thus as a concept perpetually the Other, regardless of the actual content of the representationin this case the ethnic groupand will remain so until a more differentiated and multifaceted image is as available. The change to this image comes with the change of society, as we have seen in the presupposition in section 2.4.1. Second, and perhaps more important, the Other is a projection of the expectations and the image of an ethnic group as it is held by members of the dominant culture. It is an exogenic construct, compiled not by the group represented, but by the individuals that have the power to represent (cf. Hall 1992: 277 above).

46 Thirdly, and finally, it commonly delineates the characteristics of an entire group and not single individuals, thus wiping out the individual face to a de-personified one (in a stereotypical sense), which is more easily assimilated into the Other (cf. Lutz 1990: 32). With these key arguments at hand, I resume a thorough exploration of Otherness in the following chapter in relation to the analytical model, and now move over to the discourse analysis.

3.2.2 Theoretical construct of approach

The character and differences between discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis were described in the last chapter, and I will here only briefly review critical discourse analysis. This approach is thus according to Fairclough (1995a) interested in the often unclear relations of causality of discourse, ideology, and power in their relation to discursive practices, events and texts, and wider social and cultural structures and processes. The discipline attempts to unravel how such discursive practices, events and texts transform in and emerge from their contested field of power and hegemony. It is particularly for the parties involved in the production and reception that these relations between discourse, power, and ideology might be unclear, and this obscurity or opacity has a function in assuring power and hegemony in society by means of discourse. (pp. 132-3.) With the review from last chapter at hand, it turns out that the analytical framework by Fairclough is more fruitful for my purposes than the one by van Dijk. Van Dijk assumes a socio-cognitive approach to discourse, and social processes and relationships constitute his main motivation for linking media text to context (1985a: 6-8). For this study again, focus should be on the socio-political dimensions of discourse, on how socially available discourses are utilized, and finally the approach should open possible paths to be adapted to visual images. It is in this respect that the approach by Fairclough turns useful in comparison to other approaches within critical discourse analysis. Faircloughs field of interest is to investigate how altering discursive practices in the media constitute social and cultural change (1995b: 29). Discourse within society and culture is historically variable, and in contemporary society discourse plays a key role in societal reproduction and change (Fairclough 1995a: 2). This is the character of dialogue that was stated as a presupposition in the end of last chapter, and which implies the relation between the media and society at large. The media have real-life consequences by affecting the image that the audience holds of minority members (and the minority of themselves, for that matter), while the media borrows its ethnic models for stereotypes from reality.

47 He further states that a key principle for CDA is that analysis of texts should not be artificially isolated from analysis of institutional and discursive practices within which texts are embedded (Fairclough 1995a: 9). The text remains contextualized by paying attention to the processes of production and consumption facets of the discourse practices (Fairclough 1995b: 16-7). Since the focus is on the visual representations as the final product of a visual text in the media, I consider aspects of the practices of production, such as institutionalized routines covering ideological functions mentioned before by Noponen (1996). I will surpass the consumption (reception), but the viewer is obviously implied in discussions on the location of meaning (the process of interpretation) of the visual representation, and on the importance of interpretation as a part of defining the meaning of a visual text (cp. structuralist view). Fairclough (1995a) proposes a three-dimensional framework that combines three separate forms of analysis. The premise is that in every occasion where something is communicated, there are three facets to the event, and the analysis corresponds to these three dimensions. The analysis of discourse practice constitutes one of the dimensions, and is the discursive facet between the societal level and the text. The two others are thus analysis of discursive events as instances of sociocultural practice, and text analysis. These are additional ways of reading, aspects of the same communicative event but from different points of view. (pp. 1-2, 133.) Correspondingly, when the analysis is related to a specific discourse, e.g. a racist discourse, Fairclough (1995a) conceives discourse as a complex of three elements: sociocultural practice, discourse practice, and text, and thus the analysis of a specific discourse can call for analysis in each of these three dimensions and their interrelations. The hypothesis is that significant connections exist between features of texts, ways in which texts are put together (and interpreted), and the nature of the social practice and wider cultural context. (p. 74.) The discourse is remains the center of foci. I begin the elaboration from the wider context, and then move towards the center and the textual analysis.

Sociocultural practice
In sociocultural analysis the dimension is political (Fairclough 1995a: 133). The sociocultural practice dimension may interfere with the communicative event on various levels of abstraction, and can constitute and reconstitute, for example, the institutional practices in the other dimensions (Fairclough 1995b: 62). The sociocultural practices also include more tangible aspects; apart from the political dimension, also the economics of the mediawhich is, as the political dimension, related to questions of power and ideologyand the cultural context are considered on this level. Fairclough describes this generally as the social and cultural going-ons which the communicative event is a part of. (ibid.: 57.)

48 On a textual level this sociocultural dimension may be expressed through the distinction of what is implicit, and what is explicit. Implicit content betrays what is taken as given in the text. This gives an opportunity to analyze texts ideologically, since ideology is generally (sic) expressed as implicit assumptions or presuppositions. (Fairclough 1995a: 5-6.) Such a general assumption is held also by Kellner, suggesting that the analysis should pay attention to what is left out of ideological texts, for it is often the exclusions ... that reveal the ideological project of the text (1995: 113). The explicit content in a text, in turn, refers to a relative fore- and backgrounding of elements on a presence-absence scale (Fairclough 1995a: 5-6), in a comparable function with the inclusion/exclusion aspects discussed by Barton and Barton (1993) above. This aspect of inclusion and exclusion is further elaborated as one of the textual properties in chapter 5. The sociocultural practice dimension is extensive, and would need an analysis of its own in order to include further forces and counter-forces governing representations. Therefore I relate in this study to the sociocultural practice in terms of the ideological context in which the visual text and the discourse practices are embedded, but it does not constitute a part of the proposed six-cell model (see figure 3-1 below).

3.2.3 Discourse practice analysis

In this study, the analytical emphasis is on the concept of discourse practice of the framework, in order to focus on the discursive character of the representations of ethnicity. The textual level, in turn, is important as the dimension where discourses of the visual text are expressed, and it will be addressed in the next section. As we saw above, the discourse practice analysis can be concerned either with the aspects of production and interpretation (consumption), in this study however limited to the production part. The analysis concerns the relationship between the communicative event itself and the orders of discourse, and on which discourse practices it draws upon, and in what combinations (Fairclough 1995a: 134). Orders of discourse is adapted by Fairclough from Foucault (1990). In Faircloughs use it refers to the arrayed set of discourse practices related with a specific social institution, and the boundaries and relations between them. (Fairclough 1995a: 12.) Communicative events thus draws upon the order of discourse, and in doing that they also come to change the content and reinforce the boundaries of the orders of discourse itself (Fairclough 1995b: 60).

49 [T]he order of discourse is the social order in its discursive facetor, the historical impress of sociocultural practice on discourse (Fairclough 1995a:10). Therefore also the discourse positions itself in this historical context, and again both reproducing and transforming parts of it. Discourse practices can be either strongly or weakly delineated, they may be fixed or flexible, and they may be in various relationships with one another. These demarcations between and within orders of discourse are in a constant change, and constitute a part of the sociocultural change. (Fairclough 1995a: 10-3.) The change of the discursive practices take place through transformations. The production of media texts is a collective process, of which follows that media discourses have an embedded and layered character. This refers to the way in which media texts are produced, with several stages between the source (what is recorded) and the final text interpreted by the audience. At each stage one version of the text is embedded in another previous one, including the original source. (Fairclough 1995b: 48-9.) Thus, not only the discourse is located in a historical context: the discourse practice is also an expression of the temporal dimension of discourses: their dependence on previously formulated discourses and the active involvement in the remaking of the orders of the discourses (Fairclough 1995a: 10-1). This transformational process is transferable to the production of visual representations in the media, where the different stages (such as institutional processes related to, for example, news image production) are handled by different media workers, and several phases before reaching its viewers. The historical aspect comes to expression in the production of visual representations; how the visual depiction of ethnic groups in various orders of discourse have come to change over time depending on the preceding practices. Discourse practice and orders of discourse mediate the relationship between texts on the one hand, and society and culture (i.e. nontextual aspects) on the other: ... [T]he specificity of the particular sociocultural practice which a discursive event is a part of is realized first in how the discursive event draws upon and works upon the order of discourse, which is in turn realized in features of texts, so that the textsociocultural practice link is mediated by discourse practice (Fairclough 1995a: 10-1, italics in original). This is the key element why discourse practices are in a central position in this work: the effect of the order of discourse on discursive practices, that in turn is in a mediating position between the larger societal context and the (visual) text. This mediating function harmonizes with the dialogue character regarding the relation between text on the one hand, and the culture and society on the other, that was mentioned in the presuppositions.

50 The expression in text can according to Fairclough (1995b) be stated in general terms as follows: a conventional discourse practice produces a homogenous text, while creative discourse practices produce more heterogenous texts. Creative in this context does not refer to, for example, individual creative qualities, but to an effect of social conditions. Thus, when the social practice dimension, or transferred, the general social and political context, is in a state of transition, the text is rendered more heterogenous. Homogenous texts, in turn, indicate less of a challenge to prevailing practices. The heterogenous text, with its breaches of the conventional forms, is a materialization of social and cultural contradictions, which then renders the text an interesting indicator of social and cultural change. (pp. 60-1.) This is of importance applied to visual representations, since the construction of the Other (by definition) must be seen as a contradiction, and the way it is set up reveals the sociocultural climate prevailing at that point. The relations between the dimensions, first, the discourse practice to the wider societal context, and second, the discourse practice to the text, as the vehicle for the expression of these two types of texts, can be spelled out as follows: ... [O]n the one hand, processes of text production and interpretation are shaped by (and help shape) the nature of social practice, and on the other hand the production process shapes (and leaves traces in) the text, and the interpretative process operates upon cues in the text (Fairclough 1995a: 133). These relations open interesting paths into the visual representations of ethnicity. First, it is of importance to pay attention to the effects of institutionalized practices of image production as exemplified by Noponen (1996), and how they are in their ideological function articulating photographic images as visual-transcriptions of the real world (Hall 1973: 188), and seem to represent reality as the way things are (Kellner 1995: 59). Such institutional practices have an important role in reproducing certain representations of the ethnic Other, while not challenging preceding practices of representing. Second, the order of discourse gives the opportunity to relate the discourse practice to a specific social institution, and thereby follow traces left in the text of the discourses specific to that institution. The analysis can focus on synchronic questions of what discourses are conveyed by certain institutions, and how they borrow and alter the order of discourse from different institutions. Due to the historical aspect of the discourse practice, also diachronic questions can be raised about discourses from different points in time and their relation to the social order. Finally, the creative discourse order gives away the societal flux by its expression through a heterogenous text, even if it is wise to take this indication only as a general rule.

51 The three-dimensional framework by Fairclough would further allow for an intertextual analysis, focusing on revealing genres and their relation to discourses. I have in the beginning excluded the generic division on the basis of the intertextuality when discussing representations of ethnicity. The analysis is thus not possible in this context, but operating with an empirical material with a focus on a specific genre (by comparing visual text to other genres) would open possibilities in this direction. At this initial stage of attempting to apply this critical discourse analysis approach to visual texts, the methodological adjustments that would have been required were not to be placed within the limits of this work. The three-dimensional framework allows for various different emphases. It is important to maintain an inclusive approach to the communicative events, even though only a few selected aspects are in focus. (Fairclough 1995b: 62.) In this work the emphasis is on discourse practices, and the aspect of production as it is seen expressed in visual representations (as final media content). Analysis of the visual text is prevalent in that it is sensitive on the level of concrete representation, where social and cultural contradictions are expressed. Thus, I leave the sociocultural analysis in the background, but since it is predominantly political I will refer to it as ideology through discourse practices, and as concretized in visual texts. Such political analysis focuses on issues important for questions of domination more specifically, and for critical analysis in general. Ideology have a function in defining power relations and governing production in discourse practices, and these discourse practices (and orders of discourse) thereby come to constitute a means for hegemony (Fairclough 1995a: 2). Discourses, in turn, are in this work conceptualized as being ideologically invested, and accordingly embedded in their political context by the sociocultural practices. Consequently, issues regarding ideology and power may emerge in all three dimensions of the analysis (ibid.: 134). Throughout the rest of this study, there will due to this political embeddedness occur cross-references between the different analytical levels of the framework.

3.2.4 Textual analysis: Representational, relational and identity aspect

Textual analysis is concerned with meanings through form, and forms through meaning. It analyzes the organization of the texture of text, but it is primarily conducted on a linguistic level. (Fairclough 1995b: 57.) I have here decided to include the visual aspects of a text, i.e. photographic images, supporting my decision on the fact that Fairclough allows for a more inclusive definition of text (1995b: 17). The textual level is indicative, because various sorts of social and cultural phenomena come to expression in the properties of texts, and renders them sensitive indicators of sociocultural processes, relations, and change (Fairclough 1995a: 4).

52 According to Fairclough (1995b) three categories of questions can be raised in relation to media output: How are things represented, what relations are there between those involved, and what identities are set up? Based on these questions a working assumption can be stated: Any part of any text will simultaneously represent, set up relations, and set up identities. (pp. 4-5.) These three categories function as the key aspects to be taken into account when analyzing the text of visual representations of ethnicity. As we are going to see in the following chapters, by deconstructing a visual representation into these three parts we can reveal issues that are of key importance when relating the ethnic Other to questions of selection, power hierarchies, and identity. The reader should take note that this use of representation is apart from the metaconcept, which obviously embraces all three aspects. Faircloughs (1995b) definition of representation is restricted to the selection of what to include and what to exclude, and what to foreground and what to background (p. 4). However, representation according to this definition is not meticulous enough when analyzing visual representations. As we have seen in the general discussion on the metaconcept in the beginning, the term can be ascribed more facets to it. Thus Fairclough admits that even if representation (in his terms) has gained much attention in debates on inequality, manipulation, and ideology, it is not sufficient. Instead we need to include the relational and the identity aspects in the analysis. The relational aspect of the discourse gives away not only the relation between the protagonists in the text but also between the broadcaster6 and the viewer. Identity aspects are analyzed in terms of what social identities the discourses project, and what these projection tell about cultural values, and in a larger degree also about prevailing ideologies. (ibid.: 17-8.) In the chapters to come, I will limit and make modifications to this categorization of protagonists, broadcaster, and viewer, in order to narrow down the problem area and be able to answer the questions I have set out to solve. To avoid confusion and to emphasize the difference between the metaconcept and the definition by Fairclough, I will use representational aspect when referring to the latter concept. And consequently, representation as I have used it comes to expression through the interaction of these three conceptually assigned representational, relational, and identity aspects. The choice of how to represent, how to relate and how to set up and project identities constitute a choice of meaning, the selection of options from within the meaning potential... (Fairclough 1995b: 18). The selection is thus not limited to the elements chosen to be included and fore-grounded, but extended to the selection of how relations and identities are constructed. This so-called systemic view of text modified

Fairclough refers in this section of his text only to broadcasters in general, but it can be assumed that this term refers to all media workers present in the text since they, in that case, are participating in setting up these relations. This seems plausible given that his use of text refers to both printed (verbal) and broadcasted (verbal and visual) media texts (cf. Fairclough 1995b: 17-8).

53 by Fairclough is founded on the language theory of Halliday (1979), and its crucial difference to its predecessor is that the identity function is distinguished from the relational aspect. The modification further provides an advantage in that it sensitizes the analysis to elements that are absent from a text. (Fairclough 1992: 168.) The features of this modification will be more thoroughly elaborated in the chapter on the representational aspect (ch. 5). Any text can conceptually be assigned these three processes or aspects. Even if their internal emphasis can vary, a reasonable working assumption is that all three are always going on to some degree. (Fairclough 1995b: 55.). The division is presented in the analytical framework in figure 3-1.

SOCIOCULTURAL PRACTICE DISCOURSE PRACTICE VISUAL TEXT

Representational aspect

Relational aspect

Identity aspect

Figure 3-1: Analytical framework for the critical analysis of visual representations. Power and ideology are part of this trichotomy: the representational, relational, and identity aspects are through the sociocultural practices embedded in ideology, and the power struggle it constitutes. The implicit, ideological work of propositions in a text can be addressed with a set of questions regarding the choice of one representational aspect over another, or one construction of relations or identities rather than another. First, we can look into what the social origins of the options are, and who produced the representation. Second, what could have been the motivations for the choice, and third, how does the choices affect the representation and the interest of those involved, and does that, in turn, have bearings on the other choices? (Fairclough 1995b: 14-5.) Just as the media language can be ideologically analyzed by means of these three aspects of representation (Fairclough 1995b: 12), the propositions of a visual text can be subject to the representational, relational, and identity aspect analysis in a similar way. The ideological work of the dimensions can in other words be assessed by asking why a certain selection of elements are chosen instead of another, why certain representational, relational, and identity aspects are constructed as they are. To recall the discussion of truth before, these questions are possible to answer without getting into a discussion about truthfulness of the representation. The question of whether a taken-for-granted propositions helps produce or reproduce relations of domination is independent of judgements about its truth or falsity (Fairclough 1995b: 14-5). But it does not mean that the question

54 would be unimportant for a critical analysis (Norris 1992: 52-69). Instead, issues such as unjust or even totally false presuppositions as a consequence of a given selection for the visual representation, may reveal underlying ideological assumptions, and is therefore interesting to analyze. This specific analytical framework of CDA in figure 3-1 I attempt to elaborate in the following chapters to accommodate for an analysis of discourses of the ethnic Other in visual texts. It has entailed a number of modifications in the function of the framework, given the different construction of a visual text. However, apart from a reading review of what various CDA approaches might offer, and finally selecting this one as the most adaptable, my choice is supported by the fact that the same foundation of the trichotomy has been used in other studies, however with a stronger emphasis on the grammatical resources of images (Kress and van Leeuwen 1992). The analytical and conceptual breakdown remain arbitrary, as always, and adapted here to serve my approach. Such dissections are necessary, however, as to borrow van Dijks (1987) words in stating that all serious analysis proceeds through a number of divisions and abstractions (p. 33).

3.3 The key concepts

Concepts are partly borrowed from CDA regarding verbal discourses, and here modified and defined to adapt to the analysis of visual text, and its discourses. I will develop terminology familiar from critical discourse studies, and partly from visual analysis, to meet the requirements of my analytical framework. However, since this specific framework has been adopted from Fairclough my intention is naturally to stay as close as possible to his definitions of key notions. Ethnicity, racism (including discrimination), hegemony, and power have already been discussed in the previous chapter, and remain as defined. Text, discourse, and ideology are key concepts for the elaboration of the analytical framework, and will therefore in the following be treated in greater detail.

3.3.1 Text and visual text

Text can be conceived in a narrow sense, only referring to verbal texts, including naturally spoken text transcribed into written form. Text can also include visual images, and the verbal analysis will then constitute a part of a more (social) semiotically oriented analysis, as it was stated before. (Fairclough 1995b: 17, 58.) This broader approach is also encouraged by the same author elsewhere, where he states that any cultural artefact can be seen as a text (Fairclough 1995a: 4). The argument for a broader definition

55 lies in the fact that texts contemporarily are recognized as multisemiotic. The advantage for a more inclusive definition is that for a thorough analysis of texts with different, interconnected elements, such as television, the inclusion of the visual text proves appropriate. The disadvantage is, however, that distinctions are blurred and the concept becomes nebulous. (ibid..) I will shift the emphasis of my own definition entirely to the visual elements of the text while supporting my argument on the fact that within critical cultural analysis texts can be defined in such broader terms. Drawing upon the definitions reviewed in the chapter on previous studies, I define text as the site in which different and contradictory ideological discourses are articulated. At instances where I want to emphasize its entirely visual character (opposed to the verbal) I will hereafter refer to it as visual text. Text, in turn, is hereafter used in its more inclusive sense, implying a visual character parallel to the verbal one, which is naturally imperative for its relevance to this study. This choice is also motivated by necessity to stay truthful to the definition as used by the authors referred to in the course of this work. Both text and visual text are separate from discourse, and it is about (it depicts) something that supposedly exists outside itself. As we saw before, texts describe the concrete material object produced for the expression of discourse, such as still and moving visual images. (Hodge and Kress 1988: 5-6.)

3.3.2 Discourse
The definition by Kress (1985) serves this purpose well: text realizes discourse. Discourse finds its expression in text. However, this is never a straight-forward relation; any one text may be the expression or realization of a number of sometimes competing and contradictory discourses. (p. 27, italics added.) Discourse specifies a relatively discrete, socially constructed domain of significations, both producing and produced by a structured and structuring configuration of social relations which creates a reality inseparable from the system of meanings, knowledge and power. This definition in a Foucauldian sense is also put forward by Connell and Mills, and is appropriate forwhat I seeits explicit connection to ideology. Discourse is here extended to encompass visual images (i.e. visual text), as suggested by Fairclough (1992: 4; 1995a: 131). This definition does not exclude the application of this approach to still images since discourses can come to expression also in single images (Kress 1985: 40-1). We are not dealing with a narrative concept which would require a sequence, but an abstract concept that conveys an ideology. On

56 the other hand, several still images can belong to the same discourse even if they are lacking a narrative function, i.e. an internal logically sequential order. Discourses are the location for promoting certain ideologies, and racism can be seen as one ideological discourse (Hall 1992: 296-7). The relation between discourses (in plural, as in the use of Fairclough), and ideologies, is a complex one. Mills (1993) discussing colonialist discourse, for example, argues that there are several discourses at work, depending on setting and history (p. 87), even if they might promote a single, for instance, imperialist ideology. Thus ideology provides the larger setting for the forwarding of a number of ideological discourses (figure 3-2a). On the other hand, in the same text there may be discourses promoting different ideologies (figure 3-2b). The racist discourse maintains a key position in the promotion of inequality and power domination through discourse, because it is rooted in the context of Otherness, and has through its historicity come to affect discourse practices related to the representation of ethnicity. a)
IDEOLOGY DISCOURSE TEXT DISCOURSE

b)
IDEOLOGY DISCOURSE TEXT DISCOURSE IDEOLOGY

Figure 3-2. The interrelation between text, discourse, and ideology: a) Visual text conveying discourses embedded in same ideology, b) Visual text conveying discourses embedded in different ideologies.

3.3.3 Ideology

57 To recapitulate the discussion on ideology before, and to set out the definition that will be applied for the current purpose, the following can be stated about this nefarious notion. Fairclough (1995a) defines ideology as a means through which social relations of power are reproduced (p. 17). In connecting ideology to social relations of power, asymmetrical relations of power are alluded in the concept. The concept is used in a pejorative sense within critical theory, referring to issues of representations as instruments in reproducing domination, and thence it should be applied critically. (ibid.: 17-8.) This definition of ideology is adequate for the purposes, and the point of view, of this study. In discourse analysis, Fairclough (1995b) sees ideology coming to expression through implicit assumptions and presuppositions in texts, that contribute to the reproduction of inequality of power and relations of domination (p. 14). In this context the concept of hegemony turns relevant in referring to dominant ideologies, and to the striving for the winning of consent to exercise power and the reproduction of a given hierarchy of power (Fairclough 1995a: 17). In discourses, the hegemonic function surfaces both in how power relations control and demarcate production in discourse practice, and in how discourse practices, together with the orders of discourse, constitute one form of hegemony (ibid.: 2). Discourses are formed by structures, but also dialectically shape, reshape, and transform these structures that are of a discursive/ideological nature. These structures may include forms of political and economic structures and gender relations. The relationship of ideology to discourse is thus that ideologies are not merely representative but constitutive: ideology has material effects, discourse contributes to the creation and constant recreation of the relations, subjects ... and objects which populate the social world. (Fairclough 1995a: 73.) Therefore not only discourses are invested by ideology, also text express ideology. To this definition we might add the one aspect presented by Hall (1992) above: ideologies can be connected to other ideologies and concepts, and thereby come to alter the meaning of each other (p.269). Therefore ideologies should not be considered rigid or absolute, but to change with, for example, the emergence of new discourses. Such a conjunction with discourse is a point in case: ideology and discourse are aspects of the same phenomenon, regarded from two different standpoints (Kress 1985: 30). Finally, the role of ideology for reproduction should not be over-emphasized. It is a domain of struggle, and there is nothing mechanistic or deterministic about it. It is a question of social relations of domination within a social system which is capitalist, and dominated bybut not reducible torelations of class. (Fairclough 1995a: 18.) Contemporarily the concept is of importance also in relations of domination between ethnic and racial groups (ibid.), which renders ideology relevant for the development of this analytical framework.

58

3.4 On the location of meaning

Critical discourse analysis brings into question the same issue as any content study: To what extent can the meaning of a text be found within the text itself? Text and visual text analysis in isolation from audience reception, especially in the case of television, has been criticized within media studies (Morley 1989; Allen 1992). Also regarding other visual representations, such as photography, the role of the audience has been acknowledged, but research conducted to a lesser extent (Messaris and Gross 1977; Gross 1985). Fairclough (1995a), however, sees an apparent danger in abandoning the text in favor of audience research. Instead, he argues, interpretation has to be seen as a dialectical process resulting from the interface of the variable interpretative resources people bring to bear on the text, and properties of the text itself. (p. 9, italics in original.) This standpoint is one of interpretative space: meaning is evoked in a possible discursive space, and the representation is the product of the encounter of the reader with the text, and the subsequent interpretation. A similar point of view is held by Hall (1997) regarding image reception. He argues that all meaning is in the end a question of interpretation. Making meaning is always a process of interpreting what is represented. Interpretation is dependent on historical and cultural context. (video recording.) This statement simultaneously undermines to some extent the research endeavor by semiotics: the study of a fixed, inherent meaning in images is impossible. However, even though images have no fixed meanings, and have a potentially wide range of meanings, it is not implied that interpretation happens in a semiotic vacuum. Ideology and power fixes interpretation, and therefore also the possibly assigned meaning. (ibid..) First, power and ideology, in a function of fixing the interpretation, consequently also direct the meaning the image comes to bear. Related to the question of meanings, power can thus never be blocked out from the analysis of representations. Who has the power in what channel to circulate what meanings to whom, as Hall points it out. (1997: video recording.) Secondly, if the location of an ideological function is situated in the discourse of a communicative event, it does emphasize the shifting character of ideologies, and the transformations that they are subject to during the course of time. In other words, the interpretation is embedded and changes according to the historical and cultural context where the visual text is presented.

59 On the other hand, if we analytically locate ideological functions in the text of a discursive event, there is an apparent risk of attaching too much attention to the text. Even if there are clear imprints of ideological structures in various texts, they are notas Hall states abovepossible to discern in the text. Meaning is produced through interpretations of texts and, the texts are open to various interpretations. Ideological processes, in turn, relate to texts by rendering them comprehensive events. (Fairclough 1995a: 71.) The interpretative space is thus a somewhat broader conception than the institutional approach presented above by Noponen (1996), but it includes nonetheless the same idea of a space explicitly tied to social institutions and social reality. Even though there are obvious differences in reception between various audiences and audience members7 (Fairclough 1995b:16), the interpretative strategy remains a product of the prevailing ideology, which comes to direct the meaning of the visual representation.

IDEOLOGY DISCOURSE VISUAL TEXT VISUAL REPRESENTATION INTERPRETATION

Figure 3-2. Internal relationship between key concepts, interpretation and visual representation.

3.5 Research questions

This is a methodological study that aims at developing an approach for an analytical framework for the study of visual ethnic representations in the media, based on the theoretical principles and assumptions stated within critical discourse analysis. As we saw in the introduction, there are three specific problem areas: one is to link theories on visual text in media discourse to critical discourse analysis, and secondly, when doing that, relating exclusively ethnicity as Otherness to those discourses. Third, the conceptualization of the visual and Otherness will be incorporated in the selected analytical framework of critical discourse analysis simultaneously, since the Other will be conceptualized exclusively in terms of the visual. The merging of the fields will be based on the definitions and theoretical and conceptual

However, interpretation is naturally limited by the nature of the text, that is, open vs. closed text (Eco 1979). Fairclough does not state clearly what he means with the nature of the text, but it is noteworthyand surprisingto see that he in this case refers to studies regarding television audiences (Brunsdon 1990).

60 constructs in this and next chapter. The emphasis of this study is to develop an approach, since the research problem is discussed in general terms. However, the character of the study remains one of methodology. I have in the introduction limited the area of interest, and placed it within the field of mass communication research and more widely in the field of critical cultural theory. Further, the point of view of this study has been stated as well as certain presuppositions. Previous studies relevant in this context have been examined, and subsequently the theoretical backdrop and analytical framework for this research have been selected. The terminology congruent with the framework has been defined. Finally, the relation between content, interpretation, and meaning has been spelled out. The key question for this study is: How, if at all, can visual representations of ethnicity as Otherness in media discourse be integrated into and studied by means of the framework I have selected within critical discourse analysis? The research question can be broken down into four subquestions, namely: How can ethnicity be conceptualized as Otherness in visual texts and discourses? What is the representational aspect of this Otherness, and how can it analyzed? What is the relational aspect of this Otherness, and how can it analyzed? What is the identity aspect of this Otherness, and how can it analyzed?

These questions should be attended to, and maybe answered, in the subsequent chapters.

61

4 OTHERNESS AS A CONCEPTUAL CONSTRUCT: When We meet The Other

Within a large number of disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences the means of colonial and post-colonial discourses to represent racial (and sexual) others as monolithically and inalterably different from a subject defined as Western, white, and male have been explored and criticized (Holmlund 1993: 1). The Other has grown up from a European cultural imperialism, and matured into various domains where the unfamiliar is represented. These [p]ast fears and antagonisms are encoded in images and symbols, in sayings and rationalizations, which set self and other apart, in ways which may no longer be part of our mentality but which do form part of our ambience and cultural baggage. (Nederveen Pieterse 1992: 9.) I will also utilize the discussion on the concept of Otherness, but after introducing it, focus will be held on issues applicable to visual representations and ethnicity.

4.1 Edward Saids conceptualization of the Other

The scholarly text that has had the most wide-ranging impact on the discussion of the construction and function of ethnic/racial portrayal in the colonial and imperialist discourse is undoubtedly Edward Saids (1978) Orientalism. Said offers us a cogent explanation of what happens when a dominant culture represents what it does not understand. His works speaks to the problems inherent in representations of minion cultures. (List 1996: 15.) He is concerned with questions regarding representation and reality, as well as knowledge and power, and it has been referred to in a wide array of disciplines (Holmlund 1993: 3). In this seminal work Said introduces the notion of Other and Otherness to the field of cultural and social studies. The Orient is in his work seen through the lens of history as socially opposed to Europe as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience (1978: 1-2). The Orient is both adjacent to Europe, and the cultural contestant for Europe, and the most recurring (sic) images of the Other. In this description a common trait for Orientalism (and in a larger sense other exotic cultures) is its interdependence with the West (and the Western world). (ibid.: 1.) Thus, the concept is defining not only the Orient from a Western point of view, but also the West itself, in difference to the Orient.8 And despite the fact that Said discusses Orientalism from a historical point of view, i.e. drawing upon the historical roots of the concept, he also puts the notion to work in a contemporary context by revealing how the concept stretches into our time.

Stam and Spence (1983) agree, stating that this division for the construction of the European identity on the back of the Other, of the savage, goes as far back as the Enlightenment humanism. Colonial representation is in other words rooted in a colonial intertext, in a widely disseminated set of discursive practices. (pp. 4-5.)

62 Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the Orient and (most of the time) the Occident (Said 1978: 2). It is a meta-discourse in a colonialist tradition, a tradition that aimed at legitimizing the bifurcation between two cultural spheres: ... Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, us) and the strange (the Orient, the East, them) ... . [S]uch divisions are generalities whose use historically and actually has been to press the importance of the distinction between some men and some other men ... . [T]he result is usually to polarize the distinctionthe Oriental becomes more Oriental, the Westerner more Westernand limit the human encounter between different cultures, traditions, and societies. (Said 1978: 45-6.) The polarization is not an egalitarian one. The sense of power of the West over the Orient has almost a status of a scientific truth, because of the tendency to make the West into a the standard by which to judge other cultures, and to simplify and emphasize the distinctions between the Orient and the West (Said 1978: 46). This far-going distinction between the two is concretized in Otherness: the conception of the world is rendered easier by dividing events and real life phenomena in two along a cleaving line.9

4.2 The disempowered Other

The Other expresses a prevailing ideology in drawing up the boundaries of what we are: who belongs to us, what is the norm, and oppositely what is not normal and, thus, the Other. When ideology assumes this function within media culture, it is most often white male, Western, and middle or upper class, and from this position, the Other is seen as inferior and secondary. This implies an internal hierarchy. Ideology serves a system of domination by setting up boundaries between different groups in society, and dividing their members along lines of binary opposition. (Kellner 1995: 61.) This is a form of hegemony that emphasizes, on a discourse level, power relations as a means of delineating and, ultimately, controlling the discourse practice. Such orders of discourse, e.g. related to the Western white, come to expression as a racist discourse. In these discourses the Other is thus as much about subjugating a group as about positioning our own culture.

Otherness as concept has also extensively been used within studies addressing gender representation, where the female sex is polarized and juxtaposed in regard to the (dominant) male (Kuehnast 1990: 23-6). Further, it has been applied in studies of the representational divisions of religion and culture, such as the Jewish, in opposition to the dominant (Gilman 1991).

63 The binary opposition between the dominant and the Other is, according to Kellner (1995), created and maintained through abstractions and boundaries. First, abstractions are based on the ideology supporting the justification of the distribution of power in society, and the subsequent separation of its relation to actual consequences for various social groups. Ideology mystifies and masks its legitimation of power, and executes the function of abstraction. (pp. 61-2.) This aspect of ideology is expressed in discourses, as a means to reproduce current power hierarchies that are constitutive for the concrete position of groups. It refers to the same form of opacity that Fairclough (1995a) discussed above as inherent in the production and reception of media discourse (pp. 132-3). Second, abstraction is closely related to the role of ideology in establishing the power constellations in society, and maintaining their boundaries. Kellner (1995) claims that the creation of such boundaries is critical for an ideology to support the hierarchy that is a consequence of an opposition of various groups and interests, and that leads to the domination of the Other. (pp. 61-2.) These boundaries can be conceptualized as the discursive practices expressing an ideology, because the order of discourse reflects through the discourse practices the social order and its hierarchies (cf. Fairclough 1995a: 10). Boundaries are further importantin terms of defining identityas drawing the line between two identities that may entail a power difference between the two. Consequently, given the importance of media in contemporary society, both abstractions and boundaries can be argued to be present in the construction of binary opposition in dominant media culture (Kellner 1995: 61-2). Media discourse is embedded in ideologies reflected in that same media culture, and thereby configures the discourse according to that prevailing ideology. Bhabha (1983) provides a further elaboration on Saids conceptualization of the Other by drawing attention to the fact that it does not explicitly pay attention to the inequalities of power inherent with Otherness. He utilizes the concept of discourse in a Foucauldian sense of Pouvoir/Savoir (power/knowledge) as knowledgesimilar to the definition hereand which is inherent to asymmetrical power constellations. The interrelation between power and knowledge places subjects in a relation of power and recognition that is not part of a symmetrical or dialectical relation self/other... which can then be subverted by being inverted. Subjects are always disproportionately placed in opposition or domination through the symbolic decentering of multiple power-relations which play the role of support as well as target or adversary. (p. 24.) The relative difference in power is important when analyzing the discourse of the ethnic Other in visual texts; one of the things that are at stake is the power of the ethnic protagonist in its visual depiction. This will be attended to especially regarding the relational aspect.

64 It is therefore important to include this discursive aspect of power difference in the concept of Otherness, because it brings together the Other with the question of ideology. Ideology is, as it is defined here, together with discourse two sides of the same coin, the coin called power struggle (cf. Kress 1985: 30).

4.3 When ethnicity is transformed into Otherness

Hall (1992) presents three strategies in the discursive field of racism according to which the location of power is centered around opposites. First, the associations and themes in the portrayal cohere around the two polarities of subjugation and subordination. (p. 278.) This is of interest when we turn to the relational aspect, and focus on the power relationships between protagonists in the visual text. Second, those associations and themes are concretized in stereotypical condensations, that have a structure of metonymy. Instead of advancing a coherent representation, they bring forward only parts of it, simultaneously moldingor fetishingthem into a whole. (Hall 1992: 278.) Here it is important to note that Hall does not refer to the strategy in the same way as Said by simply polarizing the representations around the Western and the Other. Instead, the ethnic is turned into an Other by means of a dialectical process. Elements of an ethnic representation are extracted, and subsequently recreated into a new representation, a representation of the Other. Third, and finally, in the condensations of stereotypes, history (i.e. the historical colonizing discourses) are replaced by nature, and physical differences turn into undisputable indicators of inferiority. Oppressed groups are then not considered victims of historical facts and social circumstances, but as anOther human category. The domination of this Other has been transformed and naturalized into a hierarchy inscribed by nature. (Hall 1992: 279.) This very pervasive and seductive character of the race as naturally defined in ideological discourses we discussed above in relation to the definitions of discourse, and in terms of racism referred to as referential racism.

4.4 The visual Other

Some of the issues here applies to a visual text as such. For example, ethnicity as defined above (in terms of difference in physical appearance and/or sociocultural properties, and in respect to dominant majority group) are readable against Kellners (1995) characteristics of the dominant culture in the beginning of section 4.2. However, there are also more explicit expressions of the visual Other.

65 The primary ethnic division in Western society lies in the classification in white and black, which has been borrowed from and naturalized by other discourses10, argues Dyer (1993b: 142). Whiteness is hard to define, because it secures its power as a representational norm by a certain opaquenessseeming not to be anything particularand when it is somehow pinned down it dissolves into emptiness, absence, denial or even a kind of death (ibid.: 141). Black, on the other hand, has always been seen as a color (cf. to be colored), and thus also something particular, while white is nothing, and not a particularizing quality but everything in its normality. This property of whiteness, to be everything and nothing, is the source of its representational power... [W]hite domination is reproduced by the way that white people colonize the definition of normal. (ibid.: 142.) White or whiteness is thus as constructed as the categorization of black, but invisible to most of the members of that category (ibid.: 143). The ethnic Other is conceptually easily assimilated into an image of a primitive savage, as evidenced in many elaborations on the subject. But there are other Others beyond this primary ethnic division that we need to focus on. The white and black juxtaposition is merely a starting-point. The ethnic Other is also construed when less salient visual differences of physical appearance are present. The primitive is changing in its appearance, and, in order to manage to pinpoint manifestations of this other Other, one needs to be sensitized to its new face in the current of visual text. As Trouillot (1991) states polemicallybut eloquentlyin an article on the Other as the savage object of anthropology: Lingering conditions of modernity make the notion a hard one to evoke in imagination, now that hordes of savages have joined the slums of the Third World or touched the shores of the West. ... The primitive has become terrorist, refugee, freedom fighter, opium or coca grower, or parasite. The primitive can be both in front or behind the camera, and he has found a new place on the viewers map for the homeland of the Other. Thanks to modernity, the savage has changed, the West has changed, and the West knows that both have changed empirically.11 (p. 35) Thus, we can say that the identity of the ethnic Other comes closeras close as it canwithout crossing the border, Kellners boundaries, and merge with us. And as it is coming closer, we need to pay attention to how it is constructed, and that is at issue in the following chapters.

4.5 Conclusions

10 For example, discourses with connotations regarding the colors white and black rooted in Judea-Christian history of good and evil, respectively (Dyer 1993b: 142).

I assume the writer also recognizes that it is not only the West that knows that both have changednot to advocate the very same Eurocentrism he clearly denounces.

11

66 In this chapter we have looked for answers to the question how ethnicity could be conceptualized as Otherness in visual texts and discourses, in order to be integrated into the analytical framework. The following points can be made as a summary: We have traced the Other to its roots in Orientalism, and then followed the trajectory into modern day descriptions of the ethnic Other. What is clear is that the original definition of the Other must be elaborated regarding power, as carried out by Bhabha (1983), in order to be productive in questions of a critical study. The we versus they division is useful, because it can be pervasive but yet subtle, and this is also the strength of Saids argument. Such opposition is especially productive in terms of the upcoming identity aspect, where both two identity spheres are defined, and they are defined exactly by relating (opposing) to each other. The disempowering function of this bipolarization is of importance for comprehending the functions of ideology. Here Kellners attention to abstractionsas to distract the viewer to assume the power constellation as givenis fruitful, as is the construction of boundaries to maintain power relations. Both are of use when deconstructing and analyzing of the ideological work of the text, and in terms of what we as viewers take for granted. Thus when ethnicity as Otherness is in question (and indeed other forms of Otherness as well), its a question of unequal power distribution. The ethnic protagonist is therefore inherent as the bearer of the burden of the weaker Other, and this is one of the main reasons of conceptualizing ethnicity as Otherness. It renders the subject under study sensitive to the questions of a critical analysis. The dialectical process where ethnicity is first deconstructed, and then reconstructed, supports the idea of the Other as a representation. As we saw in the beginning of chapter 2, visual texts as representations emphasize the constructedness of an image, and Halls concept of condensation falls neatly into this conceptualization (1992: 278). Ideology as expressed in discourses covers, orto use Halls wordsnaturalizes the power issue. The physical difference in terms of ethnicity embodies the inferiority of the Other by rendering it altogether different from the dominant. The Other in terms of the visual is problematic due to undifferentiated literature. Dyers (1993b) elaborations are intriguing by effacing the constructedness of us, or the white, and he operates with it as

67 a term referring exclusively to photographic images. Color, or physical difference by skin color, can be argued occupying a more meaningful position than whiteness, and thus playing a key role of ethnicity as Otherness in a visual text. The problems regarding the literature and the relations between the constructions of the Other and white are further addressed in chapter 8, conclusions. Now, equipped with the theoretical construct and terminology of the previous chapter, and the conceptualization in this chapter, I intend to let the visual and ethnic Other interact in the selected analytical framework.

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5 REPRESENTATIONAL ASPECT: The Struggle for Presence

In this chapter I begin to elaborate on the three aspects of the visual representations: representational, relational, and identity aspect. The chapters are covering the analysis of both the visual text and the discourse practices. The larger sociocultural contexts is referred to in both levels of analysis, mostly as the ideological embed where the representations take place.

5.1 Introduction
As we have seen before, representation as conceived by Fairclough (1995b) refers to one general notion of how individuals, groups, situations, and events are represented in text, including visual texts (pp.103-4). However, this definition is not methodologically rigorous enough to encompass the processes or aspects that a visual text holds because of its disregard of relational and identity aspects. Fairclough states that representations form ... a long-standing concern in debates about bias, manipulation, and ideology in the media, but identities and relations have received less attention. The wider social impact of media is not just to do with how they selectively represent the world, though that is a vitally important issue; it is also to do with what sorts of social identities, what versions of self, they project and cultural values (be it consumerism, individualism or a cult of personality) these entail. (1995b: 17.) It is therefore analytically productive to separate the representational aspect from the two others that are seen to constitute a visual representation. The representational aspect in this framework is thus about the selection and type of images (not only in its literal sense) that are chosen to represent ethnicity, and that will be the main topic of the chapter at hand. As we have seen before, visual representations are notand quite obviouslyreflections of reality, but a version that is constructed by somebody, and dependent on the interests and objectives of those who produce them. This means that the analysis of this representational aspect needs to focus on the choice of elements in the visual text, as we discussed them before. In terms of what is included we need to analyze what is relatively fore- and backgrounded, and in terms of what is excluded we need to pay attention to what is left to be implicit in the text. In an analysis conducted regarding selections, we need to relate them to ideologies and relations of domination. (Fairclough 1995b: 103-104.) Approaching the border to the discourse practice dimension we can focus on the presuppositions of the visual text as expressions of

69 discourse. Finally, the chapter closes by looking into two discourses that can be regarded as symptomatic of racist discourse and the ethnic Other. I will shift my standpoint to the representational aspect of the protagonists in the visual text. Since the analytical framework excludes the distribution and consumption parts of the discursive process, I will surpass the audience, and focus on issues exclusively important for the representational aspect of the visual Other. The text remains contextualized in terms of the meaning as the outcome of the interpretation by the audience, but will not be elaborated here.

5.2 Visual text analysis

The emphasis on the three-dimensional framework here lies with discourse practices, but other points of view will also be taken into account (cf. section 3.2 on method). When analyzing the representational aspect there necessarily are connections with ideology (sociocultural practice dimension), because in this aspect of the analysis we are dealing with practices of inclusion and exclusion on the textual level, and issues of explicit and implicit meaning, respectively. What is implicit and presupposed as natural is necessarily a political question, with roots in the prevailing ideology, and expressed both on a visual textual level, and in discourses as an implicit meaning that expresses that specific ideology. The textual level is thus constructed and indeed analyzed in close relation to the discourse practices and the wider social context. The choice of elements, i.e. individuals or groups, present in the text, what is being presented as of interest, is the key for understanding the representational work done by the text. Even if the choices might seem unimportant, and at times unconscious, they can be considered as expressing a discourse, and having much broader implications that the assembly of media workers that produce them might be aware of. The effects of this practice are reflected in terms of the ethnic, and the implicit power hierarchies such choices produce. As Barton and Barton (1993) points out: Such choices ... are not confined to inclusions that legitimate or empower the dominant interests; they may also entail inclusions that disempower the Other (p. 54). As stated above, the ideological work of the representational aspect is expressed on a textual level through distinctions of what is explicit and what is implicit. In terms of inclusion the explicit refers to the ethnic protagonists as present in the visual text, and their relative fore- or backgrounding. In terms of exclusion the implicit content turns relevant: it betrays what is taken as given in the text which is a powerful indicator of the ideological content underlying the discourses. (Fairclough 1995a: 5-6.)

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5.2.1 Inclusion: the explicit content of the visual text

The first choice is in terms of the actual elements, i.e. the ethnic individuals or groups, present in the visual text. Are there ethnic individuals present, and what are the discourse practices that have affected the inclusion in this representational aspect? What are the institutional practices in terms of production that have determined this specific presence? For example, are there ethnic individuals in the images of a communicative event that relate to ethnic issues? The order of discourse is the social order in its discursive facet, it was argued above. It is thus in terms of inclusion necessary to analyze the ethnic presence in relation to social context. Which discourse practices does the order of discourse draw upon for the production of the communicative event? For example, in a news report it is important to interpret the inclusions of the representational aspect against the practices of the news media, and the place ethnicity has in the order of discourse of that specific news discourse. And how does the order of discourse reinforce or challenge the boundaries of that order of discourse? The orders of discourse also give an opportunity to interpret the inclusions of the ethnic Other against a historical background. Here the historicity of the ethnic Other is of interest: to what extent has the presence of the ethnic Other changed in the course of time, i.e. how is the current inclusion of the Other embedded in previous representations? Elements included as an explicit part of the text can be either backgrounded or fore-grounded, with different degrees of informational importance (Fairclough 1995b: 106). These could be, for example, issues related to news broadcasts, and questions of who is centered in the image and who is in the periphery, or whether there are any ethnic protagonists present in a physical environment where they should be? Relative fore-grounding is an expression of power, and contrarily, the backgrounding in turn a form of subjugation, which in Bhabhas words can be subverted by being inverted (1983: 24). The fore- and backgrounding is, however, closely related to the relational aspect because of its internal power relations, and will be dealt with in next chapter. The difference between inclusion and exclusion isas intuition already might tellnot a clean-cut one. There are areas of the representational aspect where the ethnic Other is present, even though it is visually absent. For example, the Other can be considered present through the context, i.e. the location, of the communicative event, and in other words presupposed. Thus, instead of dealing with a simple dichotomy of exclusion versus inclusion, we can construct a scale or degree of absence: fore-grounded backgrounded

71 presupposed absent. When something is presupposed, it means that it is absent from the text, but as a part of its implicit meaning. (Fairclough 1995b: 106.) Absent would in turn naturally mean a total absence from the visual text, and the implicit meaning of the visual representation. This scale entails a nebulous, but important, implication regarding the division of the implicit and explicit, which is not spelled out by Fairclough in this context. There may be cases where the ethnic Other is included in the visual text, but the content of the inclusion is not explicit, and the interpretation is infested by heteroglossia, i.e. forms of multiple meanings. Here the fore- and backgrounding of the ethnic Other is an important indicator of how to analyze what meanings might be conveyed. And conversely, there are cases where absence has an explicit meaning, when the absence itself has a explicit meaning by not accessing the ethnic Other to the visual text (see below). Absence and presupposition will be the topic of the next section.

5.2.2 Exclusion: Absence has meaning

Absences are also significant; why are certain groups predominant in the media while others are not?, asks Fairclough (1995b: 126). The ethnic Other is present in various forms, included as a part of the representational aspect, but nonetheless excluded from some visual texts concerning ethnicity. This form of absence can be analyzed as having a specific meaning. Stam and Spence (1983) characterizes ethnic misrepresentation in this way: At times the flaw in the mimesis derives not from the presence of distorting stereotypes but from the absence of representations of an oppressed group. (p. 7, italics in original.) The inclusion and exclusion dynamic may be seen in terms of the opposites, as a power struggle between the dominant and the ethnic Other. If we conceive inclusions as expressions for the centering of dominant interest, it consequently implies that exclusions are a marginalization of non-dominant interests (Barton and Barton 1993: 59). At this point it is important to make an expressly difference of two forms of inclusion: the inclusion can be in the dominant interest to the extent it is congruent with the dominant ideology. This would come into expression in a homogenous text, in the use Faircloughs terminology. An oppositional presence, in terms of non-dominant interests, would accordingly result in a heterogenous text. The dynamic described in the present analysis refers to the former, homogenous text, produced within dominant culture, while the latter can easily be traced to, for example, minority oppositional programming and film.

72 Implicit exclusionary strategies thus have as their primary target members of non-hegemonic, (i.e. outside the dominant ideology) groups: ... what is commonly referred to in the critical literature as the Other (Barton and Barton 1993: 60). Centering and marginalization can be interpreted in terms of Kellners concept of boundaries (1995: 61-1) discussed above, as a consequence of the interests of oppositional groups. The dominant interest is expressed through a specific order of discourse in which the members of the dominant ideology have control over the discourse practices applied. Thus, it is interesting to analyze the implicit meaning of the exclusion in juxtaposition with the included elements of the ethnic Other: how are the included represented in contrast to the elements that are implicitly present? Further, exclusions, or in Worths (1981) terminology deletions, of non-hegemonic groups from visual texts, are a way of communicating what something is not. As we could see in the section regarding the characteristics of the visual, the image cannot on a textual level negate or state a negative proposition, and thus it works rather on a discursive level by leaving conclusions or presuppositions for the recipient to draw. (pp. 173-6.) The deletion from a visual text may exemplify a case where the absence has been assigned an explicit meaning. The relation between exclusion and inclusion was discussed above in terms laid out by Zavarzadeh (1991), and it will serve as a ending note on the implications of the two notions. He used the concepts of center and margin to describe the opposition between inclusion and exclusion, where center denominates the established and obvious (sic) discourses of culture through hegemony that purports the general conception of the world (pp. 169-70). The choices of inclusion and exclusion relate to such wider ideological context, as we saw when initiating this overview. Heterogenous visual text, challenging the established conception of the world, are the transformative force for altering the power relations between those who are included, and those who are not, and therefore remain excluded from the visual text.

5.3 Discourse practice analysis

When moving the textual analysis of the implicit to questions regarding presuppositions, the emphasis between the visual text and the discourses slide over to discursive practices. Thus, even though the exclusions have to be analyzed from the textual level, the implicit content has to be analyzed against the discourse and the discourse practices. Presuppositions can be defined as propositions which are taken by the producer of the text as already established or given... (Fairclough 1992: 120). Conceptually, visual texts, just like verbal texts, make propositions ofto use the definition in this worksomething that supposedly exists outside itself.

73 Otherwise the visual text would not refer to anything, it would be unintelligible, and so would the presupposition. Presuppositions of a text are based on their intertextuality with other texts, and in accordance with Fairclough (1995b) I have thus located the analysis of presuppositions on the border between text and the discourse practice (p. 61). Presuppositions in a visual text are founded on assumptions that there are other texts (which may or may not actually exist), that are common ground both for the producer and the audience, in which the proposition that is now presupposed is explicitly present, as a form of the accumulated textual experience (Fairclough 1992: 121). In the introduction of this study, the ethnic Other was discussed as a product of the intertextual confluence of various visual texts, and in this regard the presuppositions are of key interest. On what previous visual texts of the ethnic Other is the presupposition based, and what is the explicit or implicit meaning of those text? From what discourse practice does the order of discourse draw upon for the specific communicative event, and how is the discourse located in relation to earlier forms of discourse practice? The accumulated experience of the ethnic Other derives from various visual text genres, and thus transforming the implicit ethnic protagonist to a nebulous Other. Presuppositions anchor the new in the old, the unknown in the known, the contentious in the commonsensical (Fairclough 1995b: 107). Here again is the transformation of the discourse practices of interest, in that the implicit meaning created through exclusions is dependable upon the previously formulated discourses and the orders of discourses activated for the communicative event. These discourse practices are also relevant for the intelligibility of the proposition of the presupposition in the visual text, and should thus be analyzed collectively with other discourse practices.

5.4 Discourses of the ethnic Other

There are two discourses that I find descriptive for the ethnic Other, and significant for the representational aspect. The first forms a certain basic discourse that underlies a large number of the functions disempowering the Other. The second is a counter argument to the idea of domination and marginalization through the issues covered in the representational aspect. Even though the visual text indicates the opposite, this discourse can, and will, be recognized in a role supporting the dominant status quo. These two discourses are by no means meant to be taken as generalizations, since there are other discourses that are specific for ethnic groups, which isas I indicated abovealso the important reason for operating with the concept of Otherness. But these two do illustrate some of the ideology enforcing mechanisms of discourses related to the Other.

74 Dyer (1993a) argues that a certain basic discourse prevails in the way people of color have been depicted, which he refers to as deactivation. The strategy has many resemblances to the patriarchal treatment of women, and its underlying ideological function would be to keep those represented in place, in a subjugated position. He further suggests that it is common (sic) that various oppressed minority groups are portrayed in dominant discourses as non-active. This way of handling subjugated social groups have a number of ideological back forces; the fact that they are passive justifies their subordination, it is a representational confirmation of the prevailing hierarchies, and their activity would imply a different status for those portrayed, and some form of action from the dominant majority. (p. 115-6.) The second issue is related to Fanons (1975) conception of peau noire, masques blancs, black skin, white masks, and the diaspora of the people of color in a white world. Even if the protagonist has a visibly different ethnicity than the majority culture, it does not automatically render her/him Other. The protagonist rather moves on the borderland of difference, a so similar, yet so different position that it transforms into an illusion and ideal of though so different, yet so similar. This can be exemplified by a news anchor of a minority ethnicity who is placed, as a representative of a media institution, within the dominant discourses. This discursive strategy can be referred to as harmonious assimilation. Mass mediain an attempt to de-ideologize its contentassimilate new political and social practices into existing formulas, and thus attempts to transform characters from ideologically loaded symbols into new versions of representations. These assimilations can be ascribed as a way to avoid facing basic sociopolitical issues, and give the viewers an impression that similar changes have taken place in society itself. Such practices help reinforce existing ideologies, even if in a somewhat attenuated fashion. (Cawelti 1993: 46.) From the world of television an easy example would be The Bill Cosby Show, as an appropriation of representational conventions in terms of ideological values. The black family of the show is, ideologically at least, obvious evidence of racial equality and social mobilitysmall, nonthreatening indicators of difference that confirm the possibility of a benign pluralism, or postmodernism, rooted in the ideology of middle class equality. (Miller 1989: 69-75.) In cultural and social terms the show is just black enough not to offend and middle class enough to comfort (Gray 1993: 122). This is a typical example of an assimilationist discourse, which in contrast to pluralist discourse purporting the idea of increased representational variety of ethnicism, presents people of color as invisible and for all practical purposes just like whites (ibid: 121).

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5.5 Conclusions What is the representational aspect?

In this chapter I have reviewed, on the basis of Faircloughs trichotomy, the representational aspect, and the various analytical approaches to visual representations this aspect offers. Textual analysis is concerned with the inclusions and exclusions in the visual text, and as we could see there are a number of references to the sociocultural dimension and the ideology in which the text is embedded.

How can it be analyzed?

Analysis requires constant cross references to the discourse practice level and to the larger societal context. The discourse practice is relevant in terms of the production; how do the institutional practices of, for example, a documentary in television rearrange the order of discourse according to institutional conventions when decisions are made what to include, and what to exclude? Does the discourse practice reproduce earlier representational aspects of the Other, or does it break ground and challenge former practices? This analysis connects to larger ideological context through the distinction of the explicit and implicit, and the possible interpretations of presuppositions. In general terms it was stated that the explicit refers to inclusions, and implicit to exclusions, followed by the counter argument that the explicit and implicit might also be in a reverse relation to inclusions and exclusions. However, I think the primary relation outlined in this chapter is a good working assumption. Here we need to recall the issues specific to the visual text put forward in chapter 2 by Shapiro (1988), stating that the photographic image is characterized by an epistemological code of truth (p. 124). Both with the verbal and the visual there is a translation between their mode of representation and the real. However, while this translation is more salient in the case of the verbal text, the visual is more pervasive as a simulacrum of the real. Therefore it is easier for the viewer to assume the explicit of the inclusion, of what is there, while the exclusion leaves the viewer with vagueness in the implicit presupposition or interprets the meaning of the absence. Presuppositions is an area in this aspect that I find worthy of further exploration, because they hold a key position in questions regarding Otherness. They are relevant in terms of the entire representation that is created in the visual media of an ethnic Other. Through their embeddedness in earlier discourse practices, and their intertextuality with other representational inclusions, presuppositions are indicative to analyze in terms of the production of discourses. Presuppositions constitute a part of the whole interest in the analysis of the absent; absences as a part of the meaning of, for example, what ethnicity is not. Again, for

76 a full understanding of the visual text, we need to turn to the ideological context to reveal how discourses have naturalized the absence from an order of discourse. Finally, Zavarzadehs account of the dynamics between the margin and the center as expressed in the practices of inclusion and exclusion is relevant in terms of change to current representational practices. As we saw in the beginning of the chapter, this decision and division is a political one, referred to by Zavarzadeh as a question about who has power in culture, and ultimately revealing the politics of values. In mainstream media culture this surfaces as the struggle of the ethnic Other over the presence in the media imagery.

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6 RELATIONAL ASPECT: The Image of Power

The relational aspect is concerned with how the text constitutes relationships (Fairclough 1995a: 133). It may be difficult to separate from the identity aspect, but for analytical reasons it is imperative. Identity is conceptually slippery, and it makes more sense to discuss it in isolation from what various relations might bear on its formation. In practice, however, they are inseparable, because identities often shape relations, and relations form identities (Fairclough 1995b: 126). I will address the identity aspect in the next chapter.

6.1 Introduction
When discussing relations (and identities for that matter) Fairclough (1995b) refers to three different categories: audiences, reporters, and the the various categories of other participants(pp. 1256). Since I have opted for exclusively analyzing the production part of the discourse practices in the analytical framework, and surpassing the consumption and audience, I will focus on the relational aspects of the protagonists in the visual text. The two categories concerned are, in this context, reporters and other representatives of the media institutions included in the visual text, and various other participants. In the other participants category can be included both representatives of the dominant culture, and members of the ethnic Other. The argument for singling out the audience is a choice of emphasis. The relational aspect has many facets to it: whereas Fairclough is concerned with how the text is related to the three categories, I am interested in the power structure as it is represented in visual text. The relations, in terms of power, between members of the dominant and the ethnic Other take place in the visual text, and the image surface can be conceived as the battlefield subjugation and superiority between the ethnic Other and the dominant. Therefore this intra-textual relationship is rendered indicative: if we accept the order of discourse as the social order in its discursive facet, then this form of visual text analysis might prove fruitful and inferential of larger societal structures. As Fairclough (1995b) points out, the ideological work of media texts also includes relations that are based on relations between protagonists in the text, and relations between people in everyday life (in a shared lifeworld)(p. 12).

78 The internal relationship of the protagonists in the visual text provides a coherent entity on which to focus the analysis, and which renders the visual text a clearer discursive field to handle. It is clear that there are important relations set up between the visual text and the viewer. One example of such a extratextual relation is eye contact as a mode of addressing the viewer, while not relating to the Other nor allowing her/him create a similar relation. As I stated in the section on limitations of this study, I have selected not to include elements of camera work, partly to avoid a contested area of analysis which is hard to pinpoint unambiguously, and which easily lead to a minefield of subjective impressions. My contention is that, in a study of ethnicity as Otherness, the two categories of participants (reporters and other participants) can conceptually be aligned according to their position inside or outside the dominant cultural sphere. Thus each representative of these categories canas a working assumptionbe described either in terms of a member of the dominant culture, or as the Other, and thereby give the interpretation of relations its necessary dynamic. First, the category of reporters are representatives of a dominant media institution, and can as such, in this context, be assigned membership of dominant culture. If we look at ethnic protagonists in this category, the argument is backed up by the concept and discursive function of harmonious assimilation. For example, a reporter with visible ethnic characteristics can transgress the ethnic/racial cleavage line, and become a representative of the dominant culture, when s/he is in a position of representing a dominant institution. This assigning of dominant membership is naturally one-dimensional, simply based on the definition of ethnicity as it is outlined here, but the despite the reductionism it makes the division between the two spheres possible. Second, with the category of other participants Fairclough (1995b) not only refers to an economic, political, and scientific elite, but to the general public (p. 125). I will here take advantage of this inclusive definition of other protagonists in the visual text. However, to structure this heterogenous category, it will be split in two for the purposes of this study: there are other participants that belong to the dominant culture, and participants that are members of a minority, and in this case constitute the ethnic Other. The relations between these two superimposed binary opposites are presented in figure 6-1.

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REPORTERS (Media personnel present in the visual text)

OTHER PARTICIPANTS Members of dominant sphere Members of minority sphere

DOMINANT SPHERE

THE OTHER

Figure 6-1. The relation between the cultural sphere and the participants in the visual text. The division between the reporter and the other participants as a group including dominant members is relevant: why does the media personnel require a specific category in this broad categorization? Here I would like to call upon an issue related to Slaters (1995) notion of trivial realism of the representation discussed in section 2.1.1. When media personnel are present in the image, the trivial realism succumbs to the fact that the event is presented to the audience by a mediator. Naturally, the depiction may be as real as (or even more real than) when the depiction is related without their presence, but the point is that there are elements present that would not be if the event was mediated as it is. Thus, in visual texts where there are only the elements present from the actual event itself, the trivial realism is supported. This affects the interpretation of the visual text, and the depiction of the relations between the dominant and the Other. Two issues are in focus in this chapter. We need to look at how the category of media personnel relate to the Other, and what the consequences are on the relational aspect of the visual. How is their relation depicted in terms of the activity of the reporter and the Other, and what are the power relations between them? How is the Other addressed? But we also need to raise questions on the relations within the other participants category; between the Other and representatives of the dominant culture. This type of media presence is the case in a large number of fictional moving image texts, and photographs. What is the power relation between these two opposite groups? The analysis of the relational aspect plays a key role in addressing a number of social and cultural questions in the construction of relations in the media. In this context, sensitivity in respect with the ideological functions of the text is prerequisite, as well as how relations of domination in society at large underlie the construction of relations in the media. It is in this respect that the critical perspective is

80 important. (Fairclough 1995b: 126-7.) And to recall an issue from above, it is important to analyze the relational aspect in terms of a selection of options from within the meaning potential (ibid.: 18), how could these relations be set up alternatively? In terms of the analytical framework the main domain of the relational aspect is the discursive practices, because in this dimension the issues of power and domination become paramount. The visual text remains important as the level on which the relations are expressed.

6.2 Visual text analysis

In order to come to grips with the questions that we are facing in this chapter I will use as a point of departure Hartley and Montgomerys (1985) analysis above. Of the two analytical phases presented before in figure 2-1, I will only concentrate on the second, the relational one, where the focus is entirely on the visual text. We saw that the relational is textually realized through the selection of internal relations to what is signified, and this is connected to the cultural sphere where relations of power are established and reproduced. Further, these dimensions of dominance and subordination are achieved by means of the production and circulation of specific ideologies, and they come to concern also fundamental social divisions around ethnicity. (ibid.: 234-47.) This fits neatly with Faircloughs conception that the relational aspect concerns mainly the discursive level of the analysis, since these discourses are formed by their ideological context. I will thus proceed to bring in another figure by Hartley and Montgomery, that I will adapt to describe the various dynamics at work. In figure 6-2, I have extracted the viewer position from the original figure, since this locus is excluded from the present analysis. Also, the relation between the viewer and the participants in the text would in the original figure have been somewhat problematic as being assigned as an externally motivated point of view, referred to by Hartley and Montgomery as neutrality (1985: 245). Instead, the internally motivated point of view (i.e. within the image) relation between the third person (they) and the us (we) position is of interest in this approach. The fact that Hartley and Montgomery have chosen to set up the visual text participant roles in their analysis as a we and they relation gives an opportunity to mediate between the dominant and the Other. The dominant member is not included only in terms of her/his function as a media worker, as in the original figure, but also as a representative of the majority group (and thus in a we position) of the other participants in the visual text. I have thereby applied the figure to encompass two analytical functions, which both corresponds to the division spelled out at the outset of the relational aspect (figure 6-1).

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REPORTERS (Media personnel present in the visual text)

OTHER PARTICIPANTS Members of dominant sphere Members of minority sphere

DOMINANT SPHERE

THE OTHER

Figure 6-2. The relations between the participants in a visual text in the analysis of the relational aspect (Modified from Hartley and Montgomery 1985: 245). The questions that arise concerns the internally motivated relation between the dominant and the Other. The dominant can either be present as a member of the media worker category or as a representative of the dominant general public, and in terms of opposites the dominant is referred to as we. In figure 6-2, the dominant cultural sphere has thus merged the dominant media worker with dominant other participants. The Other, in turn, is by Hartley and Montgomery referred to in broad terms as a scene with figures in it, and here clinging to the denomination they (1985: 245). From a critical point of view, the relation between these two groups constitute a power struggle. Even though the analysis is focused on the level of discursive practices, it is in the visual text that the indicators of this struggle can be traced.

6.3 Discourse practice analysis

As stated by Fairclough in the introduction to this chapter, the emphasis is in the relational aspect on the power struggle and domination that are located analytically on the level of discursive practices. Visual texts are embedded in ideology, and the relational aspect is the main territory of the ideological struggle. Kellners (1995) argument above about the function of ideology in media culture as expressing the norm, and drawing the cleaving line between them and us proves useful in this relational aspect. The function here, is the one of boundaries, supporting the hierarchy by drawing that crucial line between those them and us. (p. 61.) As Kellner suggested, echoing Said, this division is inherent with an internal hierarchy, positioning the Other as subjugated to the dominant. This division, in turn, is reflected by the discourse practices in media discourse, and thereby renders the analysis of the relations of the protagonists descriptive.

82 In this context it is especially interesting to analyze the relational aspect of a set of images of a particular media institution, given that the various visual texts and genres have different conventions in terms of how they portray the Other. For example, modern news imagery should not be racist, even if it may be referentially racist, by the choice of what is included as news images altogether. On the other hand, Hollywood films from a few decades ago may very well be overtly racist on the textual level, and this has come to change with the change of the surrounding society, i.e. the sociocultural context of the discourses. This brings us to the temporal disjunctions that are traceable between various orders of discourse. As we saw earlier, there is a temporal aspect to the discourse practice dimension (Fairclough 1995a: 10-1). The discourses of the relational aspect clearly are founded in earlier formulated discourses, and are expressed in contemporary visual texts. These earlier relations in representations come to bear on current discourse practices of the relational aspect. Analogically, current discourse practices, and discourses, are projected into the future. If we relate the discourse practices to orders of discourse, it seems presumptive that their boundaries are contested by the temporal change of the discursive practices, which in turn comes to expression in the discourses. The relational aspect is crucial in the transformation of ethnicity to Otherness, because of the inequality in power inherent to ethnic Other. As Hall (1992) stated above, the first strategy in locating the power in the discursive field relates to the concentration around two polarities, where the dominant is assigned power at the expense of the Other (p. 278). Absence and presence of certain types of relations are also of importance, i.e. the selection of options from the meaning potential referred to by Fairclough (1995b), and is not limited to the representational aspect, but covers the relational aspect as well (p. 18). Thus we can inquire into the visual text, asking, for example, how else might this have been put?, and search for options in the depiction of the power hierarchy. For example, the relation between a dominant and ethnic member in fiction film is an obvious example of how the systematic subjugation of the Other is perpetrated in a large number of cases even today.

6.4 Conclusions What is the relational aspect?

The relational aspect is in this work characterized by the focus on the protagonists in the text, due to the decision to put the emphasis on the production part and exclude the audience from the analytical

83 framework. The analysis thus comes to concern two categories: reporters and other media personnel, and the other participants present in the visual text. The assumption is that they are interrelated in terms of power. This gives the analysis a proper focus on the relations in the visual text, and they can as be interpreted asin Faircloughs wordsrelations between people in a shared everyday world. This way of interpreting the visual text is also congruent with the relation stated by Vanhanen (1991) above: the image (in this context) has its foundation in reality (p. 33).

How can it be analyzed?

For analytical purposes I stated a working assumption that the two categories discussed can be assigned membership as either belonging to the dominant cultural sphere, as media personnel and as representatives of the dominant culture, or belonging to the sphere of Otherness. That there is no Other in the media personnel category should be clear by now, given the conceptual position assigned to ethnic member, and the function of harmonious assimilation in discourse. The definition of these two categories according to this division was motivated by the use of the notion trivial realism on the visual text level. The presence of the media personnel in the visual text comes to alter the relation between the representative of the media institution and the Other, as opposed to a situation where both the representative of the dominant culture and the Other are members of the other participants category. This difference in relations possible ascribed was taken into account in the modification of the figure presented by Hartley and Montgomery. While the basic constellation between the we and they group was maintained, the figure was extended to include a double function in analyzing the dominant sphere both regarding media personnel, and the dominant members of the other participants category in relation to the Other. However, the division is problematic, and so is the analysis. The motivation for making this distinction is important, but reductional, which renders the analysis and application oversimplified and problematic. Also, as I indicated before, there are clear areas where, for instance, the addressing of the audience in news broadcast clearly signals power relations to the audience. At the same time, it would be crucial to maintain focus on the visual text as the actual field of power and domination: how do the protagonists relate to each other in this representational context? I will return to and further dwell on this issue in the conclusions. On the discursive practice level we noted that the power struggle and domination are the main dynamics of ideology in this relational aspect. Kellners (1995) conception of a division between them and

84 us (p. 61) is again useful in this aspect, in drawing attention to the relation between the two, and the inherent inequality in terms of power. Further, the temporal disjunction was noted as important for the analysis of the orders of discourse. Previously formulated discourses come to bear on present and future ones, and these formulations are embedded in the historicity of Otherness and racism. Such construction of Otherness and the racist discourse was noted by Hall (1992) in the concentration around two polarities, dividing the power to the dominant while suppressing the Other (p. 278).

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7 IDENTITY ASPECT: Identity as Difference or Difference as Identity?

The identity aspect is the last of the three aspects or processes that always and simultaneously take place in texts. It focuses on how text constitute social identities (Fairclough 1995a: 133), and the ways in which social identities are set up in discourse (Fairclough 1992: 64). Apart from the analysis of the construction of relations, the production of identities in media texts isdue to the important position media have in contemporary Western societya significant aspect in addressing a number of sociocultural questions (Fairclough 1995b: 126). Identities are constructed in images not only for the ethnic group concerned, but also for the dominant group when ethnicity is represented. Fairclough (1995b) deals with the identity aspect (as with relational) based on three groups: reporters (including all media personnel that are present in the text), audiences, and the various categories of other participants (pp. 125-6). In this last group Fairclough includes not only representatives from the social elite but also protagonists from the populace. The social and personal identities the media set up regard not only the reporters and audiences, but also the category of various other participants. (Ibid..) My endeavor in the analysis of the identity aspect differs somewhat from the selection of protagonists employed by Fairclough, and I will thus again surpass the audience. As in the relational aspect, I want to emphasize the ethnic Other as it constructed in the visual media, and how its identity is contrasted with that of members of the dominant culture. I want to point my questions on how social identities are projected in the visual text, what they are regarding the Other, how these relate to the dominant and us, and what these might tell about our dominant cultural values (cf. Fairclough 1995b: 17-8). Thus, the focus is on how identities are constructed and projected in visual representations, and how dominant discourse operates in producing these media identities of various groups.

7.1 Introduction
To define identity is a contentious project; it is dependent on and relative to how other definitions of identity have been lain down, and it necessarily turns back the inquiry to the way in which the term is intended to be applied. But it is also a versatile concept in that it is closely connected to relations and the sustenance of relations, and thus to a large extent only conceptually educed from its counterpart. Through its relational character, the identity aspect in the framework is not only about the Other, but about

86 constructing our own identity in visual representations by the use of the Other. Here I review a number of aspects that are of interest for this analysis, and then assume them as a working definition. Identity is a matter of becoming as well as being, and not a question of looking for one true identity. It is ever-changing, not fixed in time or the present, and subject to antagonistic forces (List 1996: 15.). Thus, it is not in this context fruitful to attempt to captivate an identity temporally or ontologically that would somehow be descriptive but instead worth to trace out these forces that come to define identities. Since the construction of identities are subject to such forces, identities necessarily are in relation to other identities. This intermarriage between identity and relation was already clearly touched upon by Fairclough (1995b: 126), and the division may be seen as only analytically motivated. As Shapiro points out, identity is a relationship, not an existential property defined by an individual or a group (lecture, 21.11.1997). What then is this identity that is being created through relations, and what kind of relations are of interest in this context? Grossberg (1996) holds that identity is created through differences as an effect or outcome of unstable and temporary relations which define and mark the identities. The emphasis is thus not on a single identity, but on the relations and connections between the differences, and consequently the variety of identities. (p. 89.) The differences, in turn, entail the existence of boundaries. Thus, put another way, boundaries are the prerogative for maintenance of differences, which in turn are crucial for relations and identities. This conceptualization proves useful for a critical study, because it gives the opportunity to mediate between these relations and the drawing of boundaries between we and they, between the self and the ethnic Other, for the maintenance of a hierarchy, as we saw in section 4.2. The emphasis on the relations for the construction of identity, instead of one true identity as a static notion provides a further advantage, even though dictated by necessity. To view ethnicity as Otherness obviously renders a specific identity impossible to capture. The ethnic Other does not have an identity, it is deprived of it, and what we therefore need to do is look into the mechanisms setting up its Otherness. Further, as we saw in section 3.2.1, the construed identity of the Other is de-personified, and concerns the ethnic group as a whole, or the individual as a representative of a supposedly larger, coherent (stereotyped) ethnic group. Therefore projected, individual identities become secondary, what is of interest is the construction of the identity of an ethnic protagonist in relation to a dominant culture. In terms of the analytical framework we move in the identity aspect yet again on the discursive practice level, due to the proximity of questions of relational aspect. I will however make sporadic excursions to the field of textual practices, to peek at the social and cultural contradictions that it expresses.

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7.2 Discourse practice analysis

The construction of identities viewed in terms of relations more than independent processes entails a concept familiar from last chapter and relevant for critical studies: power. According to Hall (1996) power is the element that is relevant for the understanding of how boundaries between various identities are maintained and how they create identities. Identities emerge within the play of special modalities of power, and thus are more the product of the marking of difference and exclusion, than they are the sign of an identical, naturally constituted unityan identity in its traditional meaning ... . (p. 4.) The construction of identities therefore does not take place outside a difference, but through it. It is only through the relation to the Otherof what the dominant identity is notthat the construction of the dominant identity can take place. This marking of difference is reflected also in discourses regarding ethnic representation. The discourse on identity is dialectical by marking the difference between us and them, simultaneously providing the dominant group an identity while positioning the Other, and in doing that invoking a power inequality. This process is described by Hall (1992) claiming that representing the world with bipolarities has a function of building and securing an identity. It constitutes a part in the process in which a group is placed in opposition with another subordinate group in order to define and create coherence within the first one. The positioning of the dominated group can be referred to as the construction of Otherness (p. 304.) Similarly, it is important to remember that when discussing identity that Otherness, and in this case ethnicity, it only constitutes one aspect of a complex identity representation. And at the same timeand regrettablyethnicity only constitute one form of Otherness, where there can be more (e.g. gender, religion). There cannot be an array of identities that are selected and defined without having alternative identities that are excluded, argues Butler (1993). She states in her writing about gender that all identities operate through a discursive exclusion: the construction of a constitutive outside, and the production of rejected and marginalized subjects that are outside the representable. To claim that there is an outside to the socially intelligible, and that this outside will always be that which negatively defines what social is, I think, a point on which we can concur. (pp. 206-7.) This argument of discursive exclusion is

88 analogous with the one regarding the ethnic Other, as we can see from the following statement by Hall (1992): A racist discourse has a peculiar structure: it assembles characteristics that are typical for respective group into binary opposites. Excluded groups embodies the opposite of the virtuous that form the identity community. Each characteristic is the mirror image of the Other turned upside down. This bipolar division of the world is a basic characteristic of racist discourse, wherever it is confronted. This is what I mean by saying that the racist discourse builds differences. (p. 304.) In this statement we can clearly trace the outline of Saids construction of Otherness in chapter 4. The difference is crucial for the definition of a racist discourse, and this difference is emphasized in visual texts through physical appearance and/or sociocultural properties that differ from those of the majority. As argued by Hall (1992: 279), the physical difference in terms of ethnicity embodies the inferiority of the Other, and expresses a naturalized ideological discourse of power. Before moving over to issues regarding the visual text, I would like to continue the argument by Butler (1993) and Hall (1992) above in relation to the textual level. Butler argues that the identity construction operates through a discursive exclusion. It harmonizes with the statement by Fairclough (1995b) that the choice of how to set up and how to project identities consists of choices of meaning; it is the selection of options from within the meaning potential (p. 18). Thus, as we saw in the section on method, the choices of how the visual text sets up the representational, relational, and identity aspect also concerns the identity aspect, but then on a discursive level as reflected in the visual text.

7.3 Visual text analysis

At this point it is of interest to see how these racist discourses surface on a textual level in the visual text. Bhabha (1983) argues that the construction of difference cannot be maintained without an almost anxious repetition of the discourseas if the Otherness couldnt be provedin images. It has to be fed by constantly inviting the representation of the Other in order to produce the difference as an evidence of the visible. Such salient and spontaneous characteristics are attributed to the ethnic Other. The difference of the object of discrimination is at once visible and natural colour as the cultural/political sign of inferiority or degeneracy, skin as its natural identity. (p. 32, italics in original.) This aspect of physical differences as meaning-bearing signs in themselves as constructing discourses of difference was already referred to by Hall (1992: 296) regarding racism in section 2.3.3. This

89 is the nexus of the visual difference and the ideological discourse of subordination, the physically different body becomes the locus of oppression in the visual text. It is the condensation where history (of subjugation) is replaced by nature (naturalized), and physical differences turned into undisputable indicators of inferiority. The historical facts and social circumstances are overlooked in racist discourse, and the domination of this Other has been transformed and naturalized into a hierarchy inscribed by nature. (ibid.: 279.) Seen from the point of view of the analytical framework, the discourse mediates the wider, ideological and historical context to be expressed through the visual text. The text, in turn, reproduces a hegemony of naturalized power hierarchies regarding the ethnic Other. The historicity of discourses brings us close to questions on how discourse practices are related to, and expressions of, the temporal dimension of discourse, since they are dependent on previously formulated discourses regarding ethnicity. As we saw in the beginning of chapter 4, the discourses of ethnicity have deep roots in the history of defining the identity of the dominant, the West, as well as the Other. The discourse practices have thus been transformed by the use of discourse practices in other historical and sociocultural contexts, which can be traced in current practices. It is important to realize that the historicity does not in this context refer to a historical interpretation of images per se, but that the racist discourses that have prevailed continue to have wide-ranging bearings in the visual representations of ethnicity. As Nederveen Pieterse (1992) points out: The legacy of several hundred years of western expansion and hegemony, manifested in racism and exoticism, continues to be recycled in western cultures in the form of stereotypical images of non-western cultures (p. 9). Given these roots of the discourse practices, it is more readily understood how discourses of the Other have been naturalized, and accepted, in contemporary constructions of visual texts. The exclusion of identity options on the discourse level referred to above does not remain with the portrayal of the individual ethnic Other. Stam and Spence (1983) argue that on a visual textual level we can speak of a structuring absence that does not have to do with the people themselves, but rather with a completely missing social identity in the absence of historical or institutional portrayal (p. 7). We are thus yet again confronted with the historicity of the discourse practices, that are dependable on previously formulated discourses. They echo the legacy of the constructed Other that is naturalized into a hierarchy, not limited to the individual but reaches to issues on history and institutions. In analyzing the identity aspect of representations, it is therefore fruitful to look into the social institutions that are related to specific constructions of identities. The order of discourse, as we saw before, is the social order in its discursive facet, and this order can come to expression of the visual text. For example, in a potential analysis of news photographs of Sami people in Finland the study can reveal how domestic indigenous people are perceived by the dominant media, and how their identity is set up against

90 the dominant, the Finnish, identity. Is it different and exotic, or perceived as something inherent to Finnish culture? And how does these interpretations align with the government policy and public opinion (analyzed e.g. against the verbal text accompanying the news photographs)? To tie up this discussion, we can return to Bhabhas statement on skin color in the beginning of this section. If it is seensomewhat polemicallyas the natural identity for the Other, it entails another implication, more applicable: it is the difference itself, the skin in particular and, ethnic properties in general, that become the identity. Identity is based on difference, and the difference is the identity of the Other.

7.4 Stereotypical identities in discourse

I defined and briefly reviewed characteristics regarding stereotypes relevant for visual representations in chapter 2. I would here like to open a few doors as to what the concept of stereotypes and stereotyping research might add in more specific terms to the identity aspect in the selected analytical framework. This section thereby indicates how the conceptualized ethnic Other combined with issues of stereotyping could be put into work regarding a specific ethnic group in an empirical study. First, in discussing the colonialist discourse, Bhabha (1983) argues that the primary discursive vehicle and strategy for Otherness is the stereotype (p. 18). The identity of an ethnic group can thus be seen as stereotyped in the discourse of the Other, constructing an identity around the difference between the dominant and the Other. This conceptualization of stereotyping has been argued by Gilman (1991), in that he conceives the dichotomy as an illusion (sic) between the self and the object (Other). The stereotype is the perpetuation of a needed sense of difference, a difference between the self and the object, which in the creation of stereotypical mental representations becomes the Other. (pp. 12-3.) In other words, stereotypes can be conceived as participating in the constructing Otherness, and not only as simplified, separate visual representations. This gives a welcome point of view to a critical interpretation of stereotypes, since such discourses can be approached in terms of Otherness. The stereotypical discourses connects to the idea put forward by Lutz (1990) in chapter 2 that stereotypes may serve as ideological constructs when the relationship between the minority and minority is based on inequality in power (p. 32). The stereotype as a strategy for the racist discourse was touched upon by Hall above. In his words the stereotypes are concretized in condensations of selected elements of a representation, that dialecticallyby reflecting back only certain elementscome to bear on the formation of the racist ethnic

91 representation (1992: 278). This selection of the elements brings us to the second aspect I would like to follow up, also this one evoked by Bhabha (1983): Racist stereotypical discourse, in its colonial moment, inscribes a form of governmentality that is informed by a productive splitting in its constitution of knowledge and exercise of power. Some of the practices recognise the difference of race, culture, history ... and on that basis institutionalise a range of political and cultural ideologies that are prejudicial, discriminatory, vestigial, archaic, mythical, and crucially, are recognised as being so. (p. 35.) Thus, stereotypical discourses include a number of elements that are clearly and recognizably racist andif I may use a loaded term to describe the ideologies in the previous quoteinaccurate, but are by the use of ideology bridled for the exercise of power. What is of interest especially from an identity point of view is the mythical aspect of the political and cultural ideologies. Stereotypical discourses of an ethnic Other often purport a mythic idea or conception about the ethnic group, for instance the Wise Elder we touched upon in terms of the positive stereotypes of Native Americans. It can, in Halls words, be seen as condensations, emphasizing elements of representations that are merely projections of the dominant expectations in a specific ideology. My contention is that in terms of the identity aspect it is relevant to remain sensitive to this mythic aspect of the discourse, and contrasting it with an analysis of stereotypes that take cultural specificity into account (Stam and Spence 1983: 10). Such a comparison gives depth to the historical origins of a specific stereotype, which is important when facing a empirical material. Thirdly, and finally, as I already indicated idea of positive (good) and negative (bad) stereotypes is problematic and not a feasible line of approach.12 If a visual representation arguably includes negative stereotypes, there will always remain a problem with reversing it by positive representations: you cannot replace or fix negative stereotypes with good ones, because the regime of representations are thus still upheld (Hall 1997: video recording). This form of reductionism is not all wrong, but is infested by methodological bugs and ethnocentric relativism. What is considered a positive stereotype, and what a negative one? Is the conception possibly made and the stereotype seen from a dominant culture point of view? The stereotype still remains a one-sided statement of a complex subjectivity and portrayal that should somehowbut cannotbe applicable to a larger ethnic group. (Stam and Spence 1983: 9.) According to Hall (1997) the struggle against negative stereotypes thus comes down to contesting them by increasing the diversity of images in the media (video recording). The diversity both of stereotypes, and more broadly of visual representations of ethnicity, is what can arguably brittle and wipe out simplified portrayals of various ethnic groups, and come to generate multifaceted identities.
In order to make my point regarding the problematic around these two forms of stereotyping, I restrict the presentation around this simplistic dualistic division. Obviously, there are stereotypes that are hard to analytically assign to either one group.
12

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7.5 Conclusions What is the identity aspect?

The identity aspect is definitely the most nebulous of the three aspects to come to grips with, but it is at the same time the most important for addressing social and cultural questions. In this aspect both the dominant and the Other is concerned; to the dominant it relates by constructing the identity as opposed to the Other, and to the Other by positioning it through a hegemonic discourse. Identity is in this study seen as dynamic, ever-changing, and therefore dependent on and closely connected to questions of relations. Here it is conceptualized as constructed through differences; a requirement for differences are boundaries, and differences in turn entail relations and thereby identities. The differences also produce relations of power, which are of great importance for a critical approach. There is no identity of the Other; it is deprived of it, and instead defined by the dominant to a certain position and embodies the reverse side of the virtuous that form the identity community. Therefore the identity of Otherness has always to be analyzed opposed to the dominant, and not as a self-containing or self-determined characteristic.

How can it be analyzed?

The identity is in visual representations seen as constructed by means of discourses, and here the discourse practice level in the analytical framework turns useful. As it were, identities are defined by discursive exclusion, and this is where the Other is met. The constructed identity is a choice from a range of a meaning potential, as were the representational and relational aspect, and we can thus sensitize the analysis to elements that are absent, and not constituting the dominant. The visual text is naturally the target for the interpretation of the discourses, even if the analysis is primarily conducted on a discourse practice level. The analysis thus oscillates between the visual text and its discourses. Here the ethnic body, the embodiment of Otherness, can be seen as a main carrier of the differences that constitute the identity. In the skin color the inferiority is naturalized, and the roots of the Otherness dehistorized.

93 When the analysis changes focus to the discourse practices, the identity aspect can be analyzed in terms of how previous discourses practices have transformed currently circulating ones. The discourse practices are part of the historical legacy and are consequently embedded in earlier practices, transformed by institutional practices of presenting the ethnic in images. Institutional practices brings us to questions regarding the order of discourse, and how the visual text has been, and continuously is, anchored to certain discourse practices of specific social institutions. The portrayal of identity may vary according to the connection to these institutions and should be analyzed. Here the structuring absence is of particular interest: the missing social identity of the Other can be construed in terms of missing, adequate historical and institutional portrayal with which to associate the identity with. Regarding the stereotyped identities in discourses, stereotypes can be regarded as the primary discursive vehicle and strategy for Otherness. From the critical analysis and identity aspect point of view the key questions concern how the stereotypes are constructed, how power is distributed in the stereotype, and how the stereotypes can be discerned. This set of questions can be addressed by turning to the Otherness, and the power relations between the dominant and the Other. Also in stereotypes there are identity aspects that refer to majority and minority relations, and these have repercussions on the construction of the identity. Due to the inherent inequality of these identity representations the visual text and the discourse it purports can be analyzed in critical terms. The mythic discourse of stereotyped identities were addressed as an expression of political and cultural ideologies, and that they are condensations in the construction of identity in visual representations, overemphasizing certain aspects of the ethnic identity. When analyzing a specific ethnic group it was argued that the mythic aspect should be contrasted with issues that take cultural specificity into account. Finally, we saw that the division between positive and negative stereotypes is a problematic one, and not very productive. The definition of what falls on which side of this dividing line may be defined by the dominant culture, and does not necessarily represent anything positive at all for the ethnic group stereotyped. Instead, and to join up with Hall (1997), the struggle against negative stereotypes of identity is about contesting them by increasing the diversity of other, positive images in the media (video recording). The final section about the stereotyped identities brings us to the core issue of this chapter over the identity aspect, and at the same time opens up the discussion in the conclusion. The issue is touched upon by Grossberg (1996) in that he argues that the struggle over identity is not over questions of adequacy

94 or distortion, but of the politics of representation itself. That is, politics involves questioning how identities are produced and taken up through practices of representation.13 (p. 90.) This is what this chapter has been aimed at; to analyze ways in which the identity is set up, and how it relates to the Other, however without getting into questions what identity really is like. It is clear from the assumption that all visual representations are only partial reflections of something supposedly real, that consequently also the identity aspect assumes a very limited role in purporting images of the ethnic identity. The choices and ways of portraying this identity can, as we have done here, be analyzed through the lens of cultural criticism, that necessarily involves a political dimension. The politics regarding the visual representation in its entirety will be merged into the discussion of next chapter, conclusions.

13

Representation in its general sense, abridging all three aspects.

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8 CONCLUSION
With this concluding chapter it is time to draw together the representational, relational, and identity aspect, and to see how they come to work together with the dimensions of the framework and the concept of ethnicity as Otherness. The subquestions have been discussed in the chapters on the ethnic Other, the representational, relational, and identity aspect, respectively. Now it is time to return to the key question, and close this study by pulling together issues from these chapters, and surface the problems that indeed were present. Before moving on I would therefore like to remind the reader of the question I set out to answer: How, if at all, can visual representations of ethnicity as Otherness in media discourse be integrated into and studied by means of the selected framework in critical discourse analysis? I will close the study in a reversed order as opening it. First, I will see how this proposed method comes together with the results at hand from the four last chapters. Further, given the problems faced, I will review the representational, relational, and identity aspect of the visual text, as well as the two other dimensions of the framework. The concept of Otherness will be problematized, and indeed the entire construction of the approach. I will then ascend to the level of visual representations, questioning the concept both in the light of ethnicity, and regarding the visual and the ontology of representations. In this chapter I also address the question in which areas to look for further studies.

8.1 The Method Revisited

It might seem a questionable academic project to embark to attempt to combine two fields, the visual and the verbal, that differ much in form and in the methodological background. For reasons that were explained before, I have attempted to do so, and the results areas oftenat the same time both of a productive and a problematic character. The productive results have been presented in the respective chapter describing the three aspects, together with some indications of the problems inherent with the taken approach. I will here conclude on how these aspects with their respective dimensions could be orchestrated to work together. Also, I will question the construction the analysis of the Other, and discuss more profound problems that have surfaced in developing the method.

8.1.1 The representational, relational, and identity aspect combined

96 In the previous three chapters, I have reviewed each aspect at a time, and therefore I will in this section evaluate them collectively. What I want to call into question is the coverage of these three aspects when applied to visual texts, and more generally their capability of dissecting visual representations in terms of racism, and thus open up the discussion for a broader questioning of the adaptability of the method at hand. The representational aspect provides a way to analyze the images in terms of what is included and what is excluded. The advantage with this approach is that it sensitizes for elements, i.e. ethnic protagonists, that are absent from the visual text, and provides thus an ideological reading of the representation. What is presupposed in an image is a fruitful area since it gives the opportunity to analyze the grey area of the visual representation; what the reader/viewer should know without stating it explicitly in the visual text. But there are stones scattered on the path. One issue that I touched upon already in the chapter is related to the working assumption of the inclusion referring to an explicit meaning, and the exclusion to an implicit meaning. There are cases when the representation in the visual text does not correspond with this assumption. Not only is it a sliding scale of foregrounding backgrounding presupposition absence, it is also in some cases fully reversed. If an ethnic protagonist is present in the visual text, does it mean that there are no implicit meanings? And conversely, if the there are no elements of this ethnicity in the text, does it mean that the meaning is rendered implicit? If we expand the analysis in this direction we run into questions of interpretation that are contextually bound to the societal context of the visual text. Another problem is related to the visual textual analysis, and the two forms of inclusion: it was stated that there are homogenous and heterogenous text. The homogenous text is possible to relate to discourses practices that are embedded in the dominant ideology, while the heterogenous texts are indicators of struggles in the ideological field. What is considered a homogenous and heterogenous text, however, is dependent on the interpretation of other visual texts. There are thus no fixed indicators for the interpretation, only references to other visual texts. The representational aspect suffer in general from this lack of actually gripping the visual text, instead the analysis remains vague, and relative to other visual texts. What would be important is to apply the analysis on a defined empirical material, and see what strategies of inclusions and exclusions can be traced in the text. The relational aspect is perhaps the most important for this study due to its questioning of power distribution in the image, but it is as the same time the most problematic to bring under analysis, perhaps due to the nebulousness of the concept of power itself. There are several problem areas in this aspect, of which the following are the most important.

97 It is difficult to even conceptually split the two fields between the dominant and the Other in a satisfying way. The figure modified from Hartley and Montgomery gives a means to approach the relation between the two opposed cultural spheres, but does not allow to bring the argument further. The fundamental problem lies with classification itself; what is assigned as member of the dominant sphere, and what as belonging to the sphere of Otherness? Still this internally motivated relation is relevant, because in visual texts we see power relations concretized in the bodies of protagonists. This division relates to the second problem, as a part of the previous one, which is the division between representatives of the media personnel and dominant members of the other participants category. It is important to realize the difference between the media personnel and the dominant members, because the two have widely different functions that are reflected on the interpretation of the visual text. Still it is hard to approach in the analysis on visual textual level, again as a consequence of the problematic of assigning group membership based on these two broad spheres. This leaves us with a problem field, where it is acknowledged that the power has a key role in the representation of ethnicity in images, but the method is underdeveloped, and would require further studies. Finally, in developing the analysis it becomes clear that the audience is paramount in the relational aspect. Relations between the audience and the visual text affect the meaning of the representation, and build relations with the audience that are specific to the communicative event. This is especially the case with visual representations, where the mode of addressing the audience through visual means is salient. It could be argued that a visual text has a more explicit point of view than a verbal text; it has literally a point of view, and it is as such undeniable. For example, the power relation between a dominant audience and visual representations of ethnic groups grows important through the fact who is addressing whom, and who is bypassed in this communicative event, and thus merely remain in the background. From which point of view is thus the communicative event mediated? The analysis would take advantage with including the viewers, but that again would change the emphasis of the rest of the analysis. The identity aspect is interesting in that Otherness is short of its own identity, and the generic identity is instead constructedand in an extended sense, the construction of identity itself is genericaround the differences with the dominant culture. I think that this way of relating to identity is fruitful, since it would be troublesome to describe the identity as a self-standing, independent concept, and even more so to try to catch the main descriptive lines of that identity as it is presented in visual text. It is also productive in terms of the critical approach put forward in this study, because of its attention to the relation between the dominant and the Other.

98 However, this generic construction of identity has implications on the analysis if an empirical study is conducted regarding a specific ethnic group: how will the identity aspect of that ethnicity be described? I think it is productive to maintain a focus on the aspects that are described as different, or opposed, to the dominant, and look for what ethnic features are rendered salient. Also, it is of interest to see along what lines this difference is built, and where possible similarities are to be found. This sensitizes the analysis to features that are seen as relevant from the dominant point of view, and therefore not only tells about the portrayal of the ethnic group, but also of the projections that we, as dominant members, hold of that group. Since identities in this conceptualization is built in terms of relations it is important to pay attention to the power aspect, as a critical study should do. The difference is inscribed in the body of Otherness, and therefore already accounted for in the very conceptualization. But what is of interest is to see how that inferior power status in translated into the representations of the ethnic Other. This brings us to the questions of Otherness, and how stereotypes are the most important means for constructing that Otherness. The mythic image of an ethnic group is often founded in history, and the stereotype has to be analyzed as an expression of the historical dimension of discourse practices. To analyze the stereotype with reference to the cultural historicity, as Stam and Spence (1983) suggested above, however, poses problems regarding the relativeness of the subject of comparison. What would the standard, right one be, and can a dominant member judge that? Again, it could be more fruitful the approach the representations in terms of discourse practices: how are the current practices of the media event founded in earlier discourse practices, and how does the practice relate to the larger societal context? This issue raises yet again questions on how to approach the identity aspect when we are analyzing visual representations of a specific group. How can we describe the identity aspect of a representation without constructing the stereotype that we are trying to dissect, that is, without seeing the ethnicity in a simplistic way that seems plausible to us? As members of a dominant culture, we are confined to the interpretations possible from within that sociocultural context, and also import preconceptions into the analysis. Identity construction is a complex process, and equally demanding to deconstruct. It is complex in that identities are entwined, and in that they are constantly transformative. Thus, instead of attempting to assign an identity that is conceived appropriate for an ethnic group, interest should be on the construction in the visual text vis--vis the dominant. After reviewing and problematizing the representational, relational, and identity aspect, the crucial retrospective question must be posed: what do these analytical aspects actually bring up methodologically in describing the visual representations of ethnicity? If we look at the three aspects apart from the rest of the method, do they cover and bring into question issues that are relevant for the study of ethnicity in visual

99 texts? If we peek back at the origins of this trichotomy, it was stated by Fairclough that every text will simultaneously represent, set up relations, and set up identities (1995b: 4-5). This is a broad working assumption, and as such covering functions of various visual texts, and therefore the question is rather how these aspects are brought together to work analytically, and in what emphasis. I have in my approach analytically excluded the consumption of the text, and thereby also the audience as a component in the construction of relations and identities. Instead, the focus has been on the aspects as elements within the visual text, providing a more clear and coherent methodological field. However, this is my interpretation and adaptation of the theory, and the emphasis could certainly be different if the theory was applied with another analytical purpose in mind.

8.1.2 Discourse and discourse practice dimension

The representational, relational, and identity aspect provides the analysis with one approach of analyzing the visual text. If the three aspects are interpreted on the visual text level, what is the synthesis of the aspects, and indeed the problems, on the discourse level? The visual textual level connects to the discourse practice level through the visual text as the site where discourses are articulated. The discourses are thus reflected through the visual text, and the discourse practice level is the main analytical dimension for these discourses. The discourse practice is also the dimension that mediates between ideology and the visual text. In the discourse practice dimension the analysis of the order of discourse is relevant in that it sensitizes the analysis to the social origin of the discourse practice, and how this origin is reflected in the discourses. The connection to a specific social institution in a communicative event can be indicative of racism in the discourses of ethnicity. However, on the discourse practice level we run into problems of context. I have in this study attempted to include issues regarding the practices of production and the effect of social institutions, but what has been surpassed is the more specific practices regarding consumption and interpretation. For example, how does the medium as a context for the visual text affect its interpretation? The verbal context, for example, as chosen for the communicative event is a very important indicator of how to read the images, because it obviously adds information, either as congruent or counter discourses, to the viewing event. The order of discourse is important for the analysis of the discourse practices related to a specific social institution, but also as an indicator of the sociocultural practices in a historical context. On the discourse

100 practice level the historicity of discourses proves useful for the analysis of the ethnic Other, since it places the current discourses in a relation with previously formulated discourses. For the elaboration of these dimensions in an analytically more accurate way, profound and comprehensive problems begin to surface. The problem that prevails with all three dimensions is to bring the method further, to enrich the dimensions into a more thorough and specific analysis. The fact that this approach concerns the visual, not the verbal, sets high analytical barriers, and they do not give way by mending the method to apply to the visual in order to surmount the problem. The background of the modified framework applied by Fairclough does not allow for a further elaboration, either, because it falls in a completely different field (linguistics). The method is therefore difficult to develop as such, and the first remedy would be an empirical analysis that might open up new lines to follow. Therefore it would next be important to apply the method on an empirical material, a specific medium, and ethnicity, in order to be able to pin point down what are the further problematic of discourse practices and ideologies backgrounding those images. This would in turn bring up new challenges of what to pay attention to and develop in terms of methodology.

8.1.3 Note on the sociocultural context and ideology

The sociocultural practice level was not emphasized in this study, but rather as providing the social and political context for the discourse practice and visual text dimension. The repercussions of this level are to be seen, however, as a part of the representational selections on the visual textual level, and is thus important. Ideology is the most important notion in this dimension, directing the inclusions and exclusions on the textual level, and stating presuppositions for a meaningful interpretation of text. However, as mentioned in the introduction, not all texts are ideologically oriented to support the status quo. Movies and other forms of visual popular culture within a dominant media culture include ideological conflicts and even oppositional stances. The hegemonic power that dominant media products exert is never complete, and therefore diverse, actively interpreting audiences may not accept the ideological word as it is handed down. (Combs 1993: 11-2.) As we have seen above, in contemporary society there are competing sectors and groups, and these contradictions both within and betweenbut still invarious ideologies lead to the diversification of the representational field. Thus, the competing societal actors advance different ideologies, each to serve their interests. (Kellner 1993: 70.) As Kellner argues elsewhere, ideological functions of media texts do not

101 necessarily fulfill their function (1995: 5), and hence, as Fairclough (1995b) argues, the discourses in the media are not ideological per definition (p. 14, 47). Further, ideologies dont perform only in an up-and-down fashion (sic) only, they also operate on a horizontal level, back-and-forth across an ideological spectrum in the dialectic of historical forensics as mood and circumstance change (Combs 1993:12). This horizontal aspect is relevant in terms of discourse practice, which is analytically sensitized to the historicity of the ideological discourses, and can be applied diachronically. Ideology has in this work been divested the status of a product of an elitist conspiracy, and conceived more as an multifaceted backdrop for the production, and indeed interpretation, of media content and more specifically visual texts. Having said that, it is essential to realize that the state and the dominant media still do have an interest in power regarding the media output. Especially television, with its massive audiences, but also its rather pervasive, visual form, has a tremendous potential of power and influence. Rather, where complicity between the media and a dominant social elite can be assumed, it should be evaluated as an individual case, and not as an expression of prevailing ideological practices. But as such the media as a powerful ideological apparatus does not necessarily suggest that it would be subject to major manipulation by a political or economic elite. (Fairclough 1995b: 45-6.) Just as reality, media is much more complex than that in its relationship to the society in general.

8.1.4 The Other revisited

The concept of Otherness is most important through its polarizing character, and in drawing attention to the oppositional character between the west and the ethnic, between us and them. Further, the implied power inequality is concordant with the fact that the concept is here applied in a critical study, and thus emphasizes issues that are important for questions of social inequality. Ideology plays an important role in the function of the constructing the Other in an oppositional position, because as a concept it sets up the boundaries of what is part of the dominant culture, and what falls outside this sphere. As to conclude the discussion on Otherness, Fair (1993) raises the key issues that have been prevalent in this study: It may be that the most important element of representations of the Other is the way in which these images and discourses serve to maintain and perpetrate social inequalities. Classification is a cultural expression of we-they relations that structures inequalities. Through systems of

102 classification, identity is attributed to a given social group from the outside. That imputed identity is quite likely different from identity(ies) subjectively experienced or experienced as a part of a we group. Classification, of course, is not based on natural characteristics. Rather, it is based on socially constructed ones; it is a product of historically based power relations. (p. 18, italics added.)

Thus, when the Other is confronted in visual representations, we must thus not take difference and inequality it suggests as a given, but rather as a point of departure for further explorations into the provenance of this division. The construction of a we-they is relevant both in terms of the relational and identity aspect, and we need to look for its historical roots by means of discourse practices, and its current function in a spatially and temporally connected world. However, the problem with the application of Otherness is that the analysis comes to focus extensively on issues on difference, thereby distracting the attention from other relevant functions of the ethnic protagonists, and may mislead the analysis of social and cultural meanings in the visual text. First, the difference isimportantlynot to be found only in constellations of racial difference, divisions black vs. white, but in many other forms as well. As I have indicated above, the ethnic Other is met in other forms than a wild savage (cf. Trouillot 1991 in section 4.4), and the Other is thus figuratively speaking changing face. The construction of Otherness is bound by its social and cultural context, the sociocultural reality of a given society in a given point in time. Put in another way, the construction of the Other is anchored both spatially and temporally. Second, similarities can always be traced between the dominant and the Other, and these should not be neglected. In the array of discourses that are present in a visual representation, for instance, there might prevail both discourses that oppose the dominant, and that are aligned together with the dominant (e.g. discourses of immigrants taking work opportunities from us, the dominant, and unemployment as socially excluding for its victims, respectively). Also, the discourse of harmonious assimilation problematizes the analysis of the discourses of the Other, erasing differences while still carrying a heavy ideological load by showing a reality of ethnic relations that does not exist. The Other has proved useful in the context of representations of ethnicity, but leaves questions unanswered regarding its visual character. The construction of Otherness is realized conceptually more on a discursive level than on a visual textual level, even though physical indicators such as those presented by Dyer (1993b) above can be found. Again, it is important to notice that it is not only the skin color that works as an indicator of Otherness, but it is rather the discourse that constructs Otherness that is relevant. These discourses, in turn, are to be traced back to their historical roots, which within this research is echoing the problematic of post-colonial and racist ethnic representation in the Western media landscape.

103 In the Other we see the realization of not only the division between the we and they, but we might also witness the positioning of a group according to the majority interest of our society. To broaden the scope, what is important to recognize in the visual representations of the Other is not only the images per se, but their social implications and possible consequences. For example, van Dijk (1987; 1991; 1993a) has given well founded proof of the importance of discourses in the creation of racism, discourses that also images produce and reproduce. As we have seen during the course of this study, social reality and social representation are intimately entwined; the mediated representation emerges both from reality and from other representations. Finally, to give the appropriate attention to, and further problematize, the conceptual character of the Other, I turn to Trouillot (1991). The us and all of them binary, implicit in the symbolic order that creates the West, is an ideological construct, and the many forms of Third-World-ism that reverse its terms are its mirror images. There is no Other, but multitudes of others who are all others for different reasons ... . (p. 39.) The multiple Otherness is constructed in the many discourses of ethnicity, conferring the visual text functions that are in a large number of cases racist ideologically invested. By means of discourse, the ethnic Other is excludedbehind the screen, within or outside the photographic framesand positioned by the thick lens called ideology.

8.1.5 Epistemological problems

The development of the approach was faced with a large problem area which complicated the construction of the analytical framework. It relates to the discerning of information regarding the verbal and the visual text: what can be seen as referring exclusively to verbal text, what is applicable to both? Naturally, there are cases when an extension to the visual is obviously not feasible, but there still remains a fairly vast grey area. For example, the close reading of Faircloughs Media Discourse (1995b) is not unambiguous, but includes several assumptions that are applicable in both ways. To extract from such a text a methodological and terminological apparatus is problematic, and renders the proper foundation for the present framework unclear. And as Fairclough states himself, the line between the verbal and visual is growing increasingly vague, which leads to the inclusion of, for example, television output in the definition of text (p. 17). Given this textual inclusiveness, what interpretations does it allow for in terms of adapting the approach to the visual? Even if the methodology is set up for the use with verbal texts, it does allow to some extent for adaptation to a visual material. This is the area of the study at hand, but also the area most infested with problems.

104 At the end of the day writing methodology is a question of interpreting previous methodologies for interpreting text. However, such a metalevel is difficult to attain. The question of interpretation may be even more salient when developing a methodological approach than when dealing with empirical questions, because the interpretation concerns the method of interpretation itself, and not an empirical material. The readings become a practice in word and proposition semantics. Thus, what lies at hand here is my interpretation and adaptation. Then again, it could be argued that new approaches are not possible to make without alteration of previous structures, even if these naturally need to be made on well founded arguments supporting the suggested approach. As a consequence of this wasteland of problems one question is raised: how far can I deviate from the initial ideas and conceptions in order to make the method work for the purposes of this study?14 Again, alterations in the methodology should naturally be well motivated and argued for, but every so often the reading is not an unambiguous one. What is exactly indicated in the text, and how far can it be interpreted in the desired direction? The author makes a general statement (i.e. generalization); can I apply the same generality to my argument or must I discard it as invalid (see e.g. Fairclough 1995b: 38-9 regarding television)? Nothing is as clear as it seems at the point of departure, but maybe this realization is a part of the self-discovery when writing academic prose. There are no simple questions, and no simple answers. Nevertheless, the approach put forward by this study still nurtures a number of my initial ideas. The generality of the media, i.e. not focusing on a specific medium or genre, but rather on ethnicity, gives an opportunity to link several issues regarding ethnicity and discourse together, issues that normally are treated in separate contexts. The decision to depart from such a general level was thus twofold. First, I wanted to fall back on a similar approach as the CDA methodologists referred to in this work, in the sense that the methodology would be applicable to a large number of various texts. As in their work, once the method is at hand, the boundaries for the material would be set, and issues specific to visual texts would be taken into account. Second, as argued before, I consciously wanted to include the social dimension, and emphasize the critical point of view. Thus, even if the method requires a close analysis of the visual text, it would be in immediate contact with the larger societal context, and questions regarding the position of ethnic groups and their status in society. The mediation between this level that is generally applicable, building a methodology in a critical discourse analysis tradition, and likewise specific and systematic, remaining contact with the social context, is challenging. However, I do not want to present a limit to a specific medium, becauseas stated at the outsetI conceive as an important feature of the construction of Otherness the confluence of the
14

The larger question becomes a philosophical one: what is my responsibility regarding the method advanced by the initial

author?

105 discourses in the visual media. Such an approach might in its generality overshoot the mark, not hitting anything by aiming so far, but that I will leave to the reader to judge. As with a lot of methodological studies, as with Fairclough (1995a; 1995b), van Dijk (1993b), there is a fair amount of information that is relevant for the elaboration of the subject under study, but which is not integrated into the analytical framework. Such is the case in this study. There are notions that are not immediately related to in the representational, relational, and identity aspect, but which are, however, of importance. For example, the description of the characteristics of visual explains the difference between verbal and visual forms of representation, and what it entails for the suggested analytical framework. Some of these notions remain in the background as to provide the coordinates from, and in, which context to approach the problems of racism in visual texts. I consider these issues important because they develop the framework by adding aspects to the empirical analysis, and within the boundaries of this methodological development they are therefore necessary to include. Once the empirical material is at hand, also the full analytical terminology can be activated.

8.2 Denying visual representations of ethnicity

In this work I have approached visual representations specifically regarding ethnicity, and then referring to representations as the outcome of interpretation. The visual representation has been assigned a metalevel, while the visual text was conceived as the site for (ethnic) discourses. The visual text was analytically dissected into a representational, relational, and identity aspect, and as such these are necessarily and naturally only one way of conceiving representations of ethnicity. The entire notion of representation, however, is debatable as I will argue further down. I will thus problematize the notion first in terms of its relation to ethnicity, and secondly to the visual, and indeed the whole plausibility of representation to represent reality.

8.2.1 Representing ethnicity

Representation is a problem for the Other in that who has the authority to represent, and in what way does the representation matter for those it represents (Nichols 1992: 61). Visual representation is a complex notion, that not only carries a sociopolitical function as we have seen in section 2.1, but is firmly rooted in the cultural forms of society. It has an unequal relation to production and reception, as groups being represented differently depending on their status in that specific

106 media culture, and as interpretation differs depending on the cultural context. Visual representations are neither monolithic nor unambiguous due to their troubled relation to reality. Representations are comprehensive, spanning diverse groups and thus defined according to the reality outside of them. This definition applies more specifically to ethnicity as well: Ethnicity is in the eye of the culture (Dyer 1993b: 4), and not something inherent or encoded in the representation itself. The ethnic Other is as a representation not only a product of a culture, but actively created by the viewer in that culture. As a cultural form representation plays a vital role in how groups are treated in real life, and may by their reproductive character assist in culturally institutionalizing the segregation of minority groups. How a group see themselves depicted is also reflected on the self-perception of that group, and comes to affect the claims that such groups make on the society they live in. Negative representations may have negative consequences on the group portrayed. And equally important, it also affects those in power, those who have the possibility to change the social status of these groups. 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. (Dyer 1993b:1-3.) Thus, culture, and more specifically media culture, have bearings on the groups concerned, and renders representation an extension of politics, or in Dyers words: ... culture is politics, and politics is culture (ibid.: 6). The politics of the culture producing representations brings us back to the argument put forward by Grossberg (1996) in the end of chapter 7. He argues that politics involves questioning how identities are produced through practices of representation, and consequently the identity construction itself becomes the politics of representation. (p. 90.) These practices correspond with practices discussed in relation to discourses of societal institutions, that support specific discourses regarding ethnic groups. If we for a second return to the stereotypical discourses of ethnicity in the identity aspect, we see in accordance with Linn (1996) that it is more specifically stereotypes that may have the negative consequences (p. 16). While at the same time having the virtue of communicating characteristics to an audience, stereotypes entail a simplification of the portrayal of that group, which renders the plausibility of representing ethnicity visually problematic in its entirety. As we discussed before, negative stereotypes can be contested by the use of alternative representations, thus diversifying the image of the group (with good characteristics). This still leaves the visual representation with the construction of the Other, since the regime of representation is continuously upheld. Weiner (1992) approaches the representational problem from another point of view. The challenge is not simply to diversify the output of ethnic representations in the media, but how to produce images that convey multiple ways of seeing, making it difficult to perceive an encounter as merely an opposition

107 between us and them. (p. 55.) This could include more heteroglossia in the visual texts, and alternative discourses by applying a minority point of view to the representations in images. In practice this could be achieved, for instance, by increasing the possibilities for minority groups to produce their own visual representations in the media. As a reply to Weiners pursuit of a merging of the representational dichotomy Devereaux (1995) states that by reducing the distancing in terms of perspective and experience between two different cultures (e.g. by applying a multiple point of view), the interpretation of a representation comes closer to the view of the life of the represented. However, this statement brings us to the central dilemma of the politics of representation ... . [C]an a medium ... rooted in one culture ... ever produce a representation of another culture ... that is not, to some extent, a stereotype? (pp. 15-6.) This is a fully legitimate question, which is important to bear in mind as the ultimate problem of stereotypical representation. Analytically speaking, again, the bifurcation between issues related to the dominant and to the Other can be contested for their plausibility as a research object. The primary motor for a study of ethnicity as Otherness stems from a ethical concern over the oppression of groups by means of media, and the role biased and pejorative visual representations might play. The endeavor becomes a political one, here by the means of critical analysis, campaigning against issues regarding their unfavorable representation, and questioning the politics of representation. However, this kind of attention can be accused of putting these groups on center stage, and thus forcing the groups to assume the stigma of being differentand in the worst casesomehow de-natural, or abnormal. As Dyer (1993b) puts it: Looking, with such passion and single-mindedness, at non-dominant groups has had the effect of reproducing the sense of oddness, differentness, exceptionality of these groups, the feeling that they are departures from the norm. Meanwhile the norm has carried on as if it is the natural, inevitable, ordinary way of being human. (p. 141.) Thus, the analysis itself of these minority groups produces representations, i.e. secondary representations, of the visual representations that indeed help purport the conception of ethnicity as different. This is an extremist view in that it problematizes the construction of difference to the extent that it as such denies an analysis altogether. But it does make an important point, because this view brings attention to how the conception of the ethnic group is made, which is important especially when the analysis is applied to an empirical material. It also calls for the researchers attention to her/his dominant position from where the analysis is purported regarding a non-dominant group.

108 This recognizance of the own position is paramount when analyzing ethnicity, because the point of view is and remains undeniably dominant for a dominant researcher. As some ethnic minority scholars have pointed out, ethnic groups perceived as a monolithic voice and in a unified position is endemic to the Western view of ethnicity. These ethnic groups are, for example, seen as a specific homogenous culture, which is simply opposed to a dominant culture. (Spivak 1990: 39.) The approach put forward in this study is also subject to this same problematic and criticism, and that is why I find it more appropriate to explicitly speak about an Otherness perceived from a Western point of view, moving away from the ethnic concept. Further, it is relevant for the analysis to openly assume the dominant position, and agree that both the societal relevance of ethnicity, and the Other, are constructed. As we have seen during the course of this study, whiteness is a category just as constructed as other ethnic categories. From another point of view, and in another media culture, white could be the Other.

8.2.2 Representations ontologically

Images gives easily the viewer the impression that they represent the world just as is. By approaching visual representations with a set of questions such as the ones posed in this work, the practice of representation can be exposed for analysis. Why are they constructed as they are, and what image of the world do they convey? Such interrogations into the provenance of photographic images brittles and cracks open the regime of visual representation. We have seen how the representational, relational, and identity aspect of visual representations operate in terms of the analytical framework, and I now want to ascend to the three comprehensive issues of representations presented by Mitchell (1994) when beginning the research: knowledge, ethics, and power, and reflect upon how these issues might bear on the three aspects. While doing this, it is important to realize that these three issues, because of their inclusiveness, refer exclusively and restrictively to visual representation and its visual textual properties. First, the practices of inclusion and exclusion in the visual text are related to questions of knowledge, and reflects the issue raised by Fairclough in the characterization of visual realism in the beginning of chapter two. The representations should be viewed in terms of their partiality and completeness, and focus held on the relative (i.e. to other representations) (un)truthfulness of representations. (1995b: 46-7.) The choices of inclusion have a great impact as expressed visually, because of the simulacrum with the real and the impression of infallible reproduction. Therefore the combination with what is chosen to be included, and indeed what is visibly not present in the visual text, together with the visuality of the representation, becomes a very pervasive means of communicating ideas about ethnicity.

109 In discussing the problematic of knowledge and ethics of representations Mitchell (1994) states that [t]he good or true representation is responsible to what it represents and to whom it represents it. Responsible representation is a definition for truth, both as an epistemological question (the accuracy and faithfulness of a description or picture what it represents) and as an ethical contract (the notion that the representor is responsible for the truth of a representation and responsible to the audience or recipient of the representation). (p. 421, italics in original.)

What is important to note in this statement is that the representation does not indicate a direct correspondence with the truth, but the responsibility of the representation as a definition of truth. As we have seen during the course of this study, a correspondence with truth would be futile to attempt to grasp, and therefore the epistemological question of the representation take center stage. The question of responsibility to the truth surpasses the truth itself; the representation must be responsible to what it represents. This entails that there are irresponsible representations, because otherwiseif all representations were responsiblethe responsible representations would be tautological. There are always failures of correspondence, and thus there will also exist a gap between the representation and its responsibility. (Mitchell 1994: 421.) This thus echoes Faircloughs outline for conceiving the representation in terms of its (un)truthfulness of representations to other representations by contrasting them with one another. Second, the ethics of representations share common ground with the problematic of identity and stereotyping: what are the identities that are set up, and how do they affect not only the representation of the minority group in the eyes of the dominant, but the self-image of that group themselves? To stereotype is to assume power by the right of representing somebody, and to use power entails ethnical responsibilities, especially when it comes to affect a larger audience. When discussing questions of ethics it is important to maintain contact with the practices of the production of visual representations. In the end of the day, the ethics of representing is in the hands of the media content workers as they are (re)producing the discourses of ethnicity. The burden of, e.g. racist representation, is not, however, to be ascribed to media workers only. As Hall (1992) points out, the media naturally have certain organization and structure, and their work and production is governed by practices and discourses such as those discussed on the pages of this work, and media representations cannot be reduced to individuals. Thus, the functioning of the media is piloted by prevailing discourses within which boundaries representationsand in a larger, Foucauldian sense, knowledgeare produced. (p. 288.) On

110 the other hand, to counter argue Hall with a more rigorous ethic, it could held that discourses still are and always will be maintained by individuals, and pointing at organizations as such is to shift the attention from the concrete locus of power. However, if ethics are seen in the light of production, it leads the attention to the implications of institutional practices and discourse practices: e.g. the dominant media institution as the domain where the visual representations are produced and as constructing these representations in accordance with the production criteria that prevail within that specific institution. The discourse practices are partly defined by these practices, and by their relation to other discourse practices that, for instance, are counter vesting the institutional practices. Third, power is in the terms of this study a key concept: not only is it the central element of the relational aspect but it is also inherent for the entire critical approach. Thus, it constitutes an axis that permeates all the analytical layers of the study, starting with the power relations as they are depicted in the visual text, through e.g. ideological discourses of deactivation, and to the nailing down the point of view of the researcher. Consequently, all analytical aspects of visual representations can to some extent be addressed by the use of this concept: apart from the relational aspect, we can in terms of power inquire into the implications of excluding the ethnic protagonist from the relational aspect, or question what stereotyping entails as a denial of access to a groups own representations. However, given the versatility and importance of power in questions on representations it was already indicated that the concepts is nebulous and contextually bound. We need not only to look at power, but which forms of power that are exerted, and what representational or social structures it is referring to. This in turn problematizes the conceptual apparatus; in what sense is the concept of power used in a specific occasion. For this reason, I have in this study refrained from a more extensive discussion on the concept, and merely referred to it as it is done within critical discourse analysis. To conclude the discussion on visual representations and ethnicity and as suggestions for further studies, I will turn to one of the prominent scholars in the context of this study, Edward Said. Given the troubled conceptualization of representations and their position he writes that: The real issue is whether indeed there can be true representation of anything ... . [T]hen we must be prepared to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides the truth, which is itself a representation. What this must lead us to methodologically is to view representations ... as inhabiting a common field of

111 play defined for them, not by some inherent common subject matter alone, but by some common history, tradition, universe of discourse. (Said 1978: 272-3.) The problem field is vast, but intriguing. Further studies in the area of visual representations, and in ethnicity, is required not to remain amongto borrow Moholy-Nagys wordsthe illiterates of the future.

112

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