CR5_Hall_The Spectacle of the Other_1997_Chap 4

Chap4: Stereotyping as a signifying practice

Stereotyping reduces people to a few, simple, essential characteristics, which are represented as fixed by Nature. In this chapter, Stuart Hall will examine four further aspects: (a) the construction of 'otherness' and exclusion; (b) stereotyping and power; (c) the role of fantasy; and (d) fetishism. Hall argues that stereotyping as a signifying practice is central to the representation of racial difference. 
we understand 'the particular' in terms of its 'type'. We deploy what Alfred Schutz called typifications.
In this sense, 'typing' is essential to the production of meaning.Therefore, Dyer argues that we are always 'making sense' of things in terms of some wider categories. For example, we come to know a person, it is depend on the information we accumulate form positioning him/her within these different orders of typifications.

The difference between a type and a stereotype : The first point is: stereotyping reduces, essentializes, naturalizes and fixes' difference'. The second point is: stereotyping deploys a strategy of 'splitting' and stereotype is its practice of 'closure' and exclusion. It excludes everything which does not belong. Types are instances which indicate those who live by the rules of society(social types)and those who the rules are designed to exclude(stereotype). The third point is that stereotyping tends to occur where there gross inequalities of power. 

In short, stereotyping is what Foucault called a 'power/knowledge' sort of game. It classifies people according to a norm and constructs the excluded as 'other'.



Chap4.1: Representation, difference and power

Power has involves knowledge, representation, ideas, cultural leadership and authority, as well as economic contrast and physical coercion. Power not only constrains and prevents: it is also productive. It produces new discourses, new kinds of knowledge, new objects of knowledge, it shapes new practices and institutions. Power can be found everywhere. As Foucault insists, power circulates.


Chap4.2:Power and fantasy

The important point is that stereotypes refer as much to what is imagined in fantasy as to what is perceived as 'real'. Hall argues that 'stereotyping' can be seen as a particular type of power.


Chap4.3: Fetishism and disavowal


Fetishism: 

In representation, it can be understood in relation to what cannot be seen, what cannot be shown. Fetishism involves the substitution of an 'object' for some dangerous and powerful but forbidden force. In anthropology, it refers to the way the powerful and dangerous spirit of a god can be displaced on to an object, which than becomes charged with the spiritual power of that for which it is a substitute. In psychoanalysis, 'fetishism' is described as the substitute for the 'absent' phallus-as when the sexual drive becomes displaced to some others part of the body. 

disavowal: 

Fetishism involves disavowal. Disavowal is the strategy by means of which a powerful fascination or desire is both indulged and at the same time denied. 

So finally, fetishism licenses an unregulated voyeurism.