Answer & Explanation:Paper should be in MLA format single space with no more then five citations. This is not a research paper read the article below and discuss its. The question is as followed. You must start at least one sentence as follow, “What this means to me is”. Talk about “Matter out of place” “Feeling of orientation space” Explain the dynamics of floating signifier. Talk about the signs, symbol, representation, and the invisible ideal of race.
Stuart
Hall says that race is a “Floating Signifier”. What does he mean
by this term? How does ones race act
like a language? Also, discuss the concept of
“Matter out of Place”. How
does your race play a part in this phenomenon? The article that needs to be read is attached below.
race__the_floating_signifier.pdf
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1
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Race, The Floating Signifier
Featuring Stuart Hall
Transcript
INTRODUCTION
CLIP: Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing”
SUT JHALLY: As the previous clip from Spike Lee’s film, “Do the Right Thing”
shows, racial slurs and insults trip easily from people’s lips. More and more, it
seems, the dividing lines within our society are being drawn along how we are
physically different from one another. What W.E.B. Du Bois called the differences
of color, hair, and bone; what everyone understands as visible racial differences.
This program examines the inner workings of the system and tries to unlock the
secret of how and why race matters so much to people. We are going to do this
by talking and listening to a leading expert in the field. Stuart Hall is a professor
of sociology in Britain and is a key figure in the development of what has come
known as cultural studies. His many writings now enjoy an international and
global audience. On the subject of race, culture, and society we could not be in
better or more insightful hands. I should point out, that in what follows hoards of
principal focus is not on the effects of racism. He takes those as his starting
point. Now, as a result, some people have accused him of not paying enough
attention to the practical outcomes and violence associated with racism. Nothing
could be further from the truth. Hall is passionately concerned with the
psychological, cultural, and physical violence that racism inflicts, but he believes
that’s a better fight against it we have to first understand the logic of how it works.
He wants to understand how racism is cultivated in our imaginations, of how it
works in our heads, so that we can better combat it on the streets.
What racism, as a philosophy, contends is that there is a natural connection
between the way people look, the differences of color, hair, and bone, and what
they think and do. With how intelligent they are, with whether they are good
athletes or not, good dancers or not, good workers, civilized or not. Racists
believe that these characteristics are not a result of our environment, but of our
biological genes. Blacks, for instance, are born not as intelligent as whites. Hall’s
basic argument is that all attempts to show this scientifically, that blacks are not
as intelligent as whites, have failed. And yet, there is a persistent and widespread
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belief in the inferior mental capacities of black folk. To understand why this
should be the case Hall argues that we have to pay attention, not the objective
facts of the situation alone, but to the stories the culture spins for us about what
the physically differences we are born with mean. This involves examining the
discourses that surround race. Taking what he calls a “discursive position”. That
is, analyzing the metaphors, the antidotes, the stories, the jokes that are told by
culture about what physical racial differences mean. In fact, when we do this, we
see that historically things like skin color have been given many different
meanings over the years. There is nothing solid or permanent to the meaning of
race. It changes all the time. It shifts and slides. That’s why the title of this
program is Race: The Floating Signifier. What racial difference signifies is never
static or the same. This sounds very theoretical and abstract but Hall’s motivation
for insisting on this strategy are not at all academic. It is only once we understand
how racism works that we can struggle against it and understanding it takes
hard, analytical work.
The lecture that Hall delivered on this subject at Goldsmiths College in London,
which we’ll see shortly, is a starting point for this work. But first we are going to
see an interview I conducted with him where I asked him to talk a little bit about
why classification, putting people into different groups, is so important to human
beings and how race fits into that. I also asked him to address the political
implications of his analysis.
STUART HALL: As you, you know, in human culture, I would say, the propensity
to classify sub-groups of human types; to break up the diversity of human society
into very distinct typings according to essentialized characteristics, whether
physical characteristics or intellectual ones, or characteristics of the body and so
on. This is a very profound kind of cultural impulse. In a way, it’s a very positive
cultural impulse because we now understand the importance of all forms of
classification to meaning. Until you classify things, in different ways, you can’t
generate any meaning at all. So, it’s an absolutely fundamental aspect of human
culture. What is, of course, important for us is when the systems of classification
become the objects of the disposition of power. That’s to say when the marking
of difference and similarity across a human population becomes a reason why
this group is to be treated in that way and get those advantages, and that group
should be treated in another. It’s the coming together of difference, or
categorization of our classification and power. The use of classification as a
system of power, which is really what is very profound and one then sees that
across a range of different characteristics. You see it in gender, the ascription of
clear masculine and feminine identities and the assumption from that that you
can predict whole ranges of behavior and aspirations and opportunities from this
classification. Classification is a very generative thing once you are classified a
whole range of other things fall into place as a result of it. But, another important
point about classification is that it awakens, well let me put it another way, it is a
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way of maintaining the order of any system, and what is most disturbing is that
anything that breaks the classification. So, you know, its not just that you have
blacks and whites, but of course one group of those people have a much more
positive value than the other group. That’s how power operates. But then,
anything that attempts to ascribe to the black population, characteristics that
used to be used for the white ones, generates enormous tension in the society.
Mary Douglas, the anthropologist, describes this in terms of what she calls
“matter out of place”. She says every culture has a kind of order of classification
built into it and this seems to stabilize the culture. You know exactly where you
are, you know who are the inferiors and who the superiors are and how each has
a rank, etc. What disturbs you is what she calls “matter out of place”. What she
means by that is you don’t worry about dirt in the garden because it belongs in
the garden but the moment you see dirt in the bedroom you have to do
something about it because it doesn’t symbolically belong there. And what you do
with dirt in the bedroom is you cleanse it, you sweep it out, you restore the order,
you police the boundaries, you know the hard and fixed boundaries between
what belongs and what doesn’t. Inside/outside. Cultured/uncivilized. Barbarous
and cultivated, and so on.
And races, of course, one of the principle forms of human classification, which
have all of these negative and positive attributes kind of built into it. So, in a way,
they function as a common sense code in our society. So, in a way, you don’t
need to have a whole argument, you know, about “are blacks intelligent?” The
moment you say that blacks, already the equivalences begin to trip off peoples
mind. Blacks then, sound bodies, good at sports, good at dancing, very
expressive, no intelligence, never had a thought in their heads, you know,
tendency to barbarous behavior. All these things are clustered, simply in the
classification system itself. What I’m interested in then is how these definitions of
race come to operate, how they function. I’m interested partly of how they
function, of course, in the systems of classification, which are used in order to
divide populations into different ethnic or racial groups and to ascribe
characteristics to these different groupings and to assume a kind of normal
behavior or conduct about them. Because they are this kind of person, they can
do that sort of thing, and we’ll believe that sort of thing, and we’ll suffer from that
set of problems, etc. Everything is kind of inscribed in their species being, they’re
very being because of their race. So, I think that ones seeing there is a kind of
essentializing of race and a whole range of, diverse range of characteristics
ultimately fixed or held in place because people have been categorized in a
certain way, racially.
These are very big cultural principals we’re talking about and a whole lot in terms
of power and exclusion results from having the system of classification. So, in the
lecture I want to talk about how this, how race as a principal of classification
operates to sort out the world into its superiors and inferiors along some line of
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biological or genetic race and how as a consequence of that all the conduct of
society towards black people is inflicted and shaped by that system of
classification.
I end the lecture with the phrase, “politics without guarantees”, and what I mean
by that is that in a funny way race itself, if you think that race is a fixed biological
characteristic, and that a whole number of other things: cultural qualities,
intellectual qualities, emotional and expressive qualities follow from the fact of
being genetically one race or another, if that is your image of race. You will think,
then, that the very fact of race can actually guarantee a whole range of things
including, just to name two, whether the works of art produced by a person who
biologically belongs to that race is good or not. So, you know, if they’re black it
means that they’re also very expressive, it also means they’ll produce a certain
kind of work of art and it’ll be good because it’s black. And similarly, a certain
kind of politics that defends the race, tries to protect us against discrimination,
etc. In which all black people will be figured as people who are holding the
correct position and when you ask what positions do they hold what you will
respond is not the normal political argument: “well they believe in the following
things which I think are viable and progressive things for black people to vie for
now in order to change their circumstances”. You will say well they’re like that,
they think like that because that’s how black people think, its right that black
people should –. So it’s right that these functions act as a kind of guarantee that
the work of art will be good because it’s black and will be politically progressive
because it’s black. Now, we actually know that the word does not come out like
that. Some of the words are not good. Though black, made with the best of
positive intentions to reverse negative stereotypes, to praise the diversity of black
people, they just don’t work aesthetically. And similarly, we know black people
have a range of different political positions: conservative, reactionary,
progressive, and so on. And that these fall out in a way in which is not defined by
their genetic or biological disposition. So, I’m trying to end the notion that our
politics is to cure. We know it’s correct entering the very, very difficult debate. Are
we correct? What is the right strategy now? What are the tactics we ought to
adopt? Who can we be in alliances with? What is the strategic thing, in this
moment, to go for? You know, the normal game of politics. It sort of in a way
prevents us from having to play that difficult game because we have another
guarantee. We know it is because we wrote it and I think in a way it leads to a
kind of mechanistic anti-racist politics, not a thoughtful one, not a self critical one,
not a reflexive one. So, by ending the guarantee, I don’t mean by that of course
that it’s black people or black politics that’s involved. The reason why it matters is
not because what’s in our genes it’s because of what is in our history. It’s
because black people have been in a certain position in society, in history, over a
long period of time that those are the conditions they’re in and that’s what they’re
fighting against. And of course that matters, but then black, the term black, is
referring to this long history of political and historical oppression. It’s not referring
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to our genes. It’s not referring to our biology. And in order to fight a politics, which
is effective in ending the oppression of black people, you have to ask what is the
right politics to do. You can’t depend on the fact that it’s blacks doing it; that this
will guarantee in heaven that you’re doing the right thing. So I want blacks to
enter into what I think they’ve been reserved in doing, which is, you know the
hard graft of having arguments with their own fellows, men and women who are
black, about it. And that’s a difficult thing because in a way you have to mobilize
effectively, you can’t depend on just the race to take you to your political
objective. And it’s not therefore that I have a counter-politic to the existing politics
of racism to put into the space but its rather a sort of approach to the political
which I always see as not a practice which has any guarantees built into it, its
not, there is no law of history which tells you we will win, we may lose. Just as
there is no law of history, which will human beings won’t blow themselves to bits,
they probably will. So one has to act in the notion that politics is always open. It’s
always the contingent of failure and you need to be right because there is no
guarantee except good practice to make it right to mobilization, to having the right
people on your side committed to the program. So I want people to take politics a
bit more seriously and to take biology less seriously.
LECTURE AT GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE New Cross London
What More is There to Say About ‘Race’?
STUART HALL: I want, at what you might think a rather late stage in the game,
to return to the question of what we might mean by saying, what are the
implications of saying as I’ve done in a rather provocative title to this lecture, that
race is a discursive construct, that it is a sliding signifier. Statements of this kind
of acquired a certain status in advanced critical circles these days, but it’s very
clear that critics and theorists don’t always mean the same thing or draw the
same inference from the statement when they make it. What’s more, the idea that
race might be described as a signifier is not one which in my experience has
penetrated very deeply into or done very effectively the work of unhinging and
dislodging what I would call common sense assumptions and every-day ways of
talking about race and of making sense about race in our society today. And I’m
really talking in part about that great untidy, dirty world in which race matters,
outside of the Academy as well as what light we may throw on it from inside.
More seriously, the dislocating effects on the world, of political mobilization
around issues of race and racism, the dislocating effects on the strategies of antiracist politics and education of thinking of race as a signifier have not been
adequately charted or assessed. Well, you may not be persuaded by the story
yet but that’s my excuse for returning at this late date to a topic about which I
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know many people feel that after all, or that can usefully be said about race has
already been said.
The ‘Formal’ Rejection of Biological Racism
STUART HALL: What do I mean by a floating signifier? Well to put it crudely,
race is one of those major concepts, which organize the great classificatory
systems of difference, which operate in human society. And to say that race is a
discursive category recognizes that all attempts to ground this concept
scientifically, to locate differences between the races, on what one might call
scientific, biological, or genetic grounds, have been largely shown to be
untenable. We must therefore, it is said, substitute a socio-historical or cultural
definition of race, for the biological one. As the philosopher Anthony Appiah put it
succinctly in his now renowned and elegantly argued contribution in a book,
which I think many of you will know, it’s the critical inquiry book called Race,
Writing and Difference edited by Henry Louis Gates. He argues that, “…it is time,
as it were, that the biological concept of race was sunk without trace”. As we
know, human genetic variability between different populations, normally assigned
a racial category, is not significantly greater than it is within those populations.
And what WEB Du Bois, who is a great African-American thinker and writer on
these questions, a figure not necessarily known in the United Kingdom as well as
he should be, who wrote a wonderfully moving text called The Souls of Black
Folk. But what Du Bois argues in his essay called The Conservation of Races,
what he called “…the differences of color, hair, and bone”. Though, as he
observed, and I quote, “…clearly defined to the eye of the historian and the
sociologist” – it’s a good thing, because there’s a lot of things sociologists don’t
see, but he thought that racial difference was something they might just make out
– “…that such things are on the whole, poorly correlated with genetic difference
and on the other hand, impossible to correlate significantly with cultural,
intellectual, or the cognitive characteristics of people. Quite apart from being a
subject to extraordinary variation within any one family, let alone within any one
so-called family of races.”
The Survival of Biological Thinking
STUART HALL: I want to note four things at once about this general position.
First, it represents the by now common and conventional wisdom among leading
scientists in the field. Second, that fact has never prevented intense scholarly
activity being devoted by a minority of committed academics to attempting to
prove a correlation between racially defined genetic characteristics and cultural
performance. In other words, we are not dealing with a field, in which, as it were,
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the scientifically and rationally established fact prevents scientists from
continuing to try to prove the opposite.
Thirdly, I observe that though the radicalized implication of this continuing
scientific work into for example, race and intelligence, are vociferously refused
and condemned by large numbers of people, certainly by most liberal
professionals and especially by Black groups of all kinds. In fact, a great deal of
what is said by such groups, amongst themselves, is predicated precisely on
some such assumption, i.e. that some social, political or cultural phenomenon,
like the rightness of a political line or the merits of a literary and musical
production or the correctness of an attitude or belief, can be traced to and
explained by and especially fixed and guaranteed in its truth by the racial
characte …
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