Lecture Notes
Culture in the Age of New Media
For M.A. students in Modern Languages in Intercultural Dialogue (Romanian,
Russian, and English) – Chisinau, Republic of Moldova
Course tutor: Dr Habil. Oana-Celia Gheorghiu, Senior Lecturer
The Cross-border Faculty, Dunarea de Jos University of Galati, Romania
On Culture and Representation
1. Culture
cul·ture / ˈkəlCHər/• n. 1. the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded
collectively.∎ a refined understanding or appreciation of this: men of culture. ∎ the customs, arts, social
institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group: people from many
different cultures. ∎ the attitudes and behaviour characteristic of a particular social group: the drug culture.
When social scientists use the term culture they tend to be talking about a less restrictive concept than that
implied in everyday speech. In social science, culture is all that in human society which is socially rather
than biologically transmitted, whereas common sense usage tends to point only to the arts. Culture is thus
a general term for the symbolic and learned aspects of human society, although some
animal behaviourists now assert that certain primates have at least the capacity for culture.
Social anthropological ideas of culture are based to a great extent on the definition given by Edward Tylor in
1871, in which he referred to a learned complex of knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, and custom. This
definition implies that culture and civilization are the same. But this equation, although possible in English
and French usage, runs counter to the German distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation, the former
referring to symbols and values, while the latter deals with the organization of society. Archaeological
usage, though acknowledging the wholeness of human societies, makes a distinction between material
culture (or artefacts) and practices and beliefs, the non-material or adaptive culture transmitted by teaching
and tradition. Only material culture is accessible to archaeology, whereas adaptive culture is the subject of
history, sociology, and anthropology.
For nineteenth-century anthropologists, culture was a conscious creation of human rationality. Civilization
and culture, in this conception, showed a progressive tendency towards what were regarded as higher moral
values, and this enabled the Victorian mind to construct a hierarchy of cultures or civilizations which
provided a rationale for colonial activities by apparently higher-order Western civilizations.
Modern ideas of culture arose through the work of field anthropologists such as Franz Boas, around the
turn of the century, and tend towards relativism. The intention is to describe, compare, and contrast cultures,
rather than ranking them, although Boas and some later North American anthropologists have also been
interested in the processes by which cultural traits may be borrowed or otherwise transmitted between
societies. This has led to the development of the idea of culture areas, and a comparative ethnography
of North America, both of which are largely absent in British social anthropology. For the latter, culture is
generally taken to mean a collection of ideas and symbols that is generally distinguished in the discipline
from social structure, and this distinction is also central to European and North American sociological
usages of the term.
In America, it is sometimes argued that the concept of culture can provide ways of explaining and
understanding human behaviour, belief systems, values, and ideologies, as well as particular culturally
specific personality types. One exponent of the latter theory was Ruth Benedict (see, for example, The
Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 1944).
In cultural anthropology, analysis of culture may proceed at three levels: learned patterns of behaviour;
aspects of culture that act below conscious levels (such as the deep level of grammar and syntax in language,
of which a native language speaker is seldom aware); and patterns of thought and perception, which are
also culturally determined.
Starting from Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures, according to which “there is no such thing as a human
nature independent of culture” (1973: 11), where culture is regarded as “a set of control mechanisms –
plans, recipes, rules, instructions” and less as a “complex of concrete behaviour patterns – customs, usages,
tradition, habit clusters” (1973: 8), Greenblatt redefines Geertz’s ‘control mechanisms’ as a cultural system
of meanings that creates specific individuals. Literature, appertaining both to the wider cultural system and
to the individuals that create it, functions, in Greenblatt’s view, in three ways: “as a manifestation of the
concrete behaviour of its particular author, as itself an expression of the codes by which this behaviour is
shaped, and as a reflection upon these codes” (2005: 4). Failure to concern with these interrelated aspects
in a critical essay may result either in biographical or psychoanalytical criticism or, if the literary work is
regarded “exclusively as the expression of social rules and instructions”, in a piece of Marxist representation
of ideological superstructures. On the contrary, if the three aspects are grasped in the analysis by using
cultural and anthropological criticism, literature becomes “part of the system of signs that constitutes a
given culture” (6). The goal of this approach, which Greenblatt names, at this point, cultural poetics, is “to
investigate both the social presence to the world of the literary text and the social presence of the world in
the literary text” (6).
2. Cultural Theory in brief
Cultural theory. This term has been applied to diverse attempts to conceptualize and understand the
dynamics of culture. Historically these have involved arguments about the relationship between culture and
nature, culture and society (including material social processes), the split between high and low culture,
and the interplay between cultural tradition and cultural difference and diversity. Cultural theory has also
been marked by an engagement with concepts which have often been taken to cover some of the same
ground signified by the notion of culture itself. Prominent here have been the concepts of ideology and
consciousness (particularly its collective forms).
The works of Raymond Williams (The Long Revolution, 1961) and E. P. Thompson (The Making of the
English Working Class, 1963) have been particularly influential in the development of post-war British
cultural theory. Williams's emphasis on culture as a ‘whole way of life’ and Thompson's emphasis on
culture as how groups ‘handle’ the raw material of social and material existence opened up new ways of
thinking about culture—in particular uncoupling the concept from a narrow literary and aesthetic reference.
Both Williams and Thompson studied the lived dimension of culture and the active and collective process
of fashioning meaningful ways of life.
The so-called culturalist reading of the term developed by both Thompson and Williams was subsequently
challenged by other more obviously structuralist interpretations. These emphasized the external symbolic
structures of culture, as embodied in cultural languages and codes, rather than its lived forms. In this
formulation, culture could be read as a signifying system through which the social world was mapped. The
structuralist version of cultural theory was also strongly informed by Louis Althusser's version of Marxism.
Althusser offered a reworking of Marxist theories of ideology which gave greater scope to the efficacy of
the ideological realm. In particular he emphasized the relative autonomy of the ideological or cultural
domain whilst holding on to the principle of the ultimately determining character of economic relations and
processes.
The concern to recognize the efficacy of cultural practices in Althusser's writings was further developed
within cultural theory by the appropriation of the ideas of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci's work opened up new
ways of conceptualizing the role of culture and cultural practices in class formations and class alliances
and, in particular, gave great weight to the role of culture in securing forms of political and moral leadership
and authority (hegemony). The influence of Gramsci's ideas was particularly important in helping cultural
theory move beyond the impasse created by the tensions between competing culturalist and structuralist
perspectives in the 1970s (see, for example, Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 1978).
As Gramsci's importance has waned within cultural theory, so that of Michel Foucault has increased. A
central thrust of Foucault's influence has been to shape a more discursive understanding of cultural
languages and of the interconnection between power and representation (see Sean Nixon, Hard Looks,
1996). Foucault's influence has also been obvious in arguments about the historically specific character of
culture and its development as both an object and instrument of government (see L. Grossberg et
al. (eds.), Cultural Studies, 1992)
The interplay between race, ethnicity, and culture has also emerged as a central concern of contemporary
cultural theory. This has often been via a critique of the forms of ethnicity assumed within the tradition of
British cultural theory associated with Williams and Thompson—or what Paul Gilroy has termed the
morbid fascination with Englishness (see his Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, 1987
). It has also challenged the incipient nationalism of conceptions of culture which link it to particular
bounded national territories. In place of this, writers such as Gilroy have emphasized instead the
transnational movement and mixing of cultures. Cilroy's notion of the ‘Black Atlantic’ represents an attempt
to envisage cultural processes outside the restrictions imposed by nationally delimited conceptions of
culture. In this sense, it has much in common with Edward Said's work on orientalism, which examines not
only the internal dynamics but also the external determinants of cultures. In Said's Orientalism (1978),
Western conceptions of culture and civilization are depicted as having been formed against a process of
naming and symbolically subordinating the Oriental.
Feminist arguments have also exerted an important influence on recent cultural theory. Looming large here
has been the interplay between feminism and psychoanalysis. This has led to much discussion about the
ways in which gender identities are formed within cultural languages and through cultural practices. Recent
work on memory, fantasy, and gender performance has been especially suggestive (see P. Adams and and
E. Cowie , The Women in Question, 1993; and J. Butler , Bodies that Matter, 1993).
3. The Iceberg Model, Localization and Cultural Context
Crossing cultural gaps is a determining factor in any global marketing plan. A comprehensive understanding
of people and places around the world has to guide the development of any international marketing or
localization strategy. But can you develop a full understanding of a concept as complex and nebulous as
culture? What exactly is a culture made of and how can outsiders learn it effectively?
ICEBERG MODEL FOR CULTURE
The premise of the Iceberg Model is a metaphor of an actual iceberg—we can only observe 10% of the
actual iceberg, and the rest is hidden beneath the surface of the water. In the same way, when observing a
culture, 90% of that culture is hidden from casual observation, and we can only see the basic characteristics
of the culture.
The Iceberg Model breaks down all aspects of a culture into three categories, each one diving deeper into
the cultural “iceberg.” A combination of these three types of characteristics make up every culture around
the world.
Why is culture like an iceberg?
When we see an iceberg, the portion which is visible above water is, in reality, only a small piece of a much
larger whole. Similarly, people often think of culture as the numerous observable characteristics of a group
that we can *see* with our eyes, be it their food, dances, music, arts, or greeting rituals. The reality,
however, is that these are merely an external manifestation of the deeper and broader components of culture
-- the complex ideas and deeply-held preferences and priorities known as attitudes and values.
Deep below the "water line" are a culture's Core values. These are primarily learned ideas of what is good,
right, desirable, and acceptable -- as well as what is bad, wrong, undesirable, and unacceptable. In many
cases, different cultural groups share similar core values (such as "honesty", or "respect", or "family"), but
these are often interpreted differently in different situations and incorporated in unique ways into our daily
lives. Ultimately, our Interpretations of our core values become visible to the casual observer in the form
of Observable Behaviors, such as the words we use, the way we act, the laws we enact, and the ways we
communicate with each other.
It is also important to note that the core values of a culture do not change quickly or easily. They are passed
on from generation to generation by numerous factors which surround us and influence us. These Formative
Factors are powerful forces which guide us and teach us. The things our educators and parents teach us, the
opinions and ideas we see and hear in the media, the way our laws and social norms structure our world --
all of these things (and many more) mold us and our cultural values. Cultural change is never quick and
forces, ideas, and beliefs -- both new and old -- continually impact our way of seeing the world and deciding
what matters to us (our Core Values), what that means in our personal and professional lives
(our Interpretations), and how we ultimately act (our Observable Behaviors).
So, like an iceberg, there are things that we can see and describe easily... but there are also many deeply
rooted ideas that we can only understand by analyzing values, studying formative factors, and in many
cases, reflecting on our own core values.
1. SURFACE CULTURE
These characteristics can be divided into three levels, the first being Surface, which includes all the easily
observable characteristics of a culture. Characteristics of the Surface level could include:
Language
Currency
Art Style
Cooking
Music
Holidays
Fashion
Literature
Sports
Religion
2. UNSPOKEN RULES
The second level in the Iceberg Model is hidden underneath these surface characteristics; they’re called
Unspoken Rules. Unspoken rules take more time for an outsider to understand. These characteristics
include:
Business Etiquette
Social Etiquette
Modesty
Symbolism of objects, colours, and individuals
3. UNCONSCIOUS RULES
The final level of characteristics are Unconscious Rules. These are the most difficult characteristics to learn
and navigate around. Because they’re rooted so deeply within a culture, it’s difficult even for those within
a given culture to articulate or even notice these particular aspects. And yet Unconscious Rules can still be
the most critical for outsiders to know and understand. Examples of Unconscious Rules are:
Verbal and non-verbal communication
Sense of time
Physical Distances
Gender
High context vs. low context
Concept of death
Age
Class
Physical Space
Thoughts on what makes good leadership
Concern about the present, or the future
Emotional responses
Concepts of right or wrong, and good or bad
AVOIDING LOCALIZATION MISTAKES
A lack of understanding of Unspoken or Unconscious Rules can create problems on a personal or
professional level. In the 1950s, Pepsi decided to change the colour of their Pepsi Cola vending machines
in Southeast Asia from a dark blue to an icy, light blue.
Unfortunately for Pepsi, light blue was associated with death and sorrow in that area of Asia. As a result,
Pepsi’s market shares in that region fell significantly. Pepsi’s failed to research an unspoken rule in
symbolism, and the region’s response was due to both an unspoken rule about symbolism and an
unconscious rule about death. We can learn a lot from Pepsi’s mistake, along with the many mistakes1
companies have made while localizing products.
1
When you're globalizing a brand, it's always a good idea to check whether your name, logo, or tag line means something different
in the regions where you're expanding. Here are the 20 worst examples that neglected this crucial marketing step:
1. Braniff International translated a slogan touting its finely upholstered seats "Fly in Leather" into Spanish as "Fly Naked."
2. Clairol launched a curling iron called "Mist Stick" in Germany even though "mist" is German slang for manure.
3. Coca-Cola's brand name, when first marketed in China, was sometimes translated as "Bite The Wax Tadpole."
4. Colgate launched toothpaste in France named "Cue" without realizing that it's also the name of a French pornographic
magazine.
5. Coors translated its slogan, "Turn It Loose," into Spanish, where it is a colloquial term for having diarrhea.
6. Electrolux at one time marketed its vacuum cleaners in the U.S. with the tag line: "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux."
7. Ford blundered when marketing the Pinto in Brazil because the term in Brazilian Portuguese means "tiny male genitals."
8. Frank Perdue's tag line, "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken," got translated into Spanish as "It takes a
sexually stimulated man to make a chicken affectionate."
9. Gerber marketed baby food in Africa with a cute baby on the label without knowing that, in Ethiopia, for example, products
usually have pictures on the label of what's inside since many consumers can't read.
10. Ikea products were marketed in Thailand with Swedish names that in the Thai language mean "sex" and "getting to third
base."
11. KFC made Chinese consumers a bit apprehensive when "finger licking good" was translated as "eat your fingers off."
12. Mercedes-Benz entered the Chinese market under the brand name "Bensi," which means "rush to die."
13. Nike had to recall thousands of products when a decoration intended to resemble fire on the back of the shoes resembled
the Arabic word for Allah.
14. Panasonic launched a Web-ready PC with a Woody Woodpecker theme using the slogan "Touch Woody: The Internet
Pecker."
15. Parker Pen, when expanding into Mexico, mistranslated "It won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you" into "It won't
leak in your pocket and make you pregnant."
The Iceberg Model provides a valuable method of understanding the core values and characteristics of a
country’s culture. By taking their time, a company can be sure that their localization efforts will produce
positive results.
16. Paxam, an Iranian consumer goods company, markets laundry soap using the Farsi word for "snow," resulting in
packages labeled "Barf Soap."
17. Pepsi's slogan "Pepsi Brings You Back to Life" was debuted in China as "Pepsi Brings You Back from the Grave."
18. Puffs marketed its tissues under that brand name in Germany even though "puff" is German slang for a brothel.
19. The American Dairy Association replicated its "Got Milk?" campaign in Spanish-speaking countries where it was translated into "Are You
Lactating?"
20. Vicks introduced its cough drops into the German market without realizing that the German pronunciation of "v" is "f" making "Vicks" slang
for sexual intercourse.
4. Cultural Studies
Cultural studies A developing area of academic interest, sometimes taught as a distinctive university or
college qualification, which lies at the interface between the social sciences (notably sociology) and
humanities (most obviously literature). It is principally concerned with the nature of mass culture and the
workings of culture industries. Among other things, therefore, it embraces the study of popular
culture, communication, consumer society, the mass media, leisure, post-modernism, and aspects of
literary and sociological theory which address the construction of identity and ideology. Typical of those
whose writings are considered central to the field (although they themselves might deny the applicability
of this label to their work) would be Jürgen Habermas, Stuart Hall, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard, and
Jean-François Lyotard.
As a field of interest, cultural studies seems to lack a distinctive or coherent disciplinary core, and over the
years it has borrowed both its substantive topics and theoretical orientations increasingly freely from other
areas of scholarship. Recently, some critics have claimed that it now exerts a pernicious influence on
teaching and research in sociology, political science, and social history, by encouraging practitioners of
these subjects both to abandon systematic empirical work in favour of what, at least in extreme cases, is
largely ‘data-free’ social science (that is, unsubstantiated speculation intermittently illustrated by only
casual empirical observation), and to underestimate the importance of social structure in everyday life.
However, proponents argue that cultural studies has revitalized sociology: first, by exposing its obsession
with moribund concepts related to the world of production, and deriving from its nineteenth-century origins;
and, second, by alerting researchers to the real concerns of ordinary people in the advanced societies of the
late twentieth century.
It is clear that British (and to a lesser extent American) sociology took a pronounced ‘cultural turn’ in the
early 1990s. However, it remains to be seen whether this reflects a lasting move towards
greater individualism in advanced societies, or is merely part of a larger (but temporary) end-of-century
mood of introspection in Western civilizations. A good overview of some of the key issues and debates in
this arena will be found in The Polity Reader in Cultural Theory (1993).
(Dictionary of Sociology 1998, Oxford University Press)
5. Cultural Materialism
Cultural Materialism (term coined by Raymond Williams in 1980) designates that analysis which examines
culture “less as a set of isolated artistic monuments” and more “as a material formation, complete with its
own modes of production, power-effects, social relation, identifiable audience and historically conditioned
thought forms” (Eagleton 1983: 198). It is also Raymond Williams who provides a definition of the Marxist
concept of materialism:
(i) a very long, difficult and varying set of arguments which propose matter as the primary
substance of all living and non-living things, including human beings;
(ii) a related or consequent but again highly various set of explanations and judgements of mental,
moral and social activities, and
(iii) a distinguishable set of attitudes and activities, with no necessary philosophical scientific
connection, which can be summarised as an overriding or primary concern with the production
or acquisition of things and money (1985: 197).
One may infer from the definitions above that Williams’s interpretation of Cultural Materialism as literary
theory is even farther from any orientation towards new critical aestheticism or structuralist linguistics than
New Historicism. Instead, the connexion to Marxist criticism becomes more sensible. It is the critical mode
that brings literature closer to sociology than it has ever been, considering the former “a practice in the
society […] which is no fully available for analysis until each of its practices is included” (Williams 2005:
44). The relation between art and society is discussed in terms similar to those proposed by New
Historicism, regarding writing as a form of contribution to the dominant culture. To Williams, literature,
the visual arts, music and “the powerful arts of film and broadcasting” possess the “capacity to embody and
enact and perform meanings and values” and cannot be given “a uniform, static and ahistorical relation to
some abstract social formation” (45). As part of the cultural process, these ‘practices’ contribute to the
dominant culture and transform it (45). Raymond Williams does not deny the ‘object’ status of certain
works of art: “particular sculptures, particular paintings or particular buildings – these are objects. There is
no Hamlet, no Karamazov Brothers, and no Wuthering Heights, in the sense that there is a particular great
painting” (2005: 47-49). Nevertheless, he states that art is an activity and a practice subject to conventions
and formative of social organisation at the same time. For this reason, he advocates that literary criticism
should rather look at the conditions of the practice instead of the components of a product. The specific
interest in the context of production leads the analysis away from the traditional criticism, which relates a
work of art to a genre and searches for predefined traits that the text must contain due to its being assigned
to that specific genre. Williams’s suggestion is to replace this category with that of collective modes, as
individual projects may be “the practice of a group in a period”. Furthermore, by identifying the relation
between this individual project and the collective mode to which it is subsumed, literary critics perform a
double analysis – that of the composition and that of its conditions of production.
In ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, Williams advances the idea of culture as
being made of a system of relations between dominant, residual and emergent forms, whereas the latter two
cannot possibly exist outside the dominant form, in which they are contained and which they oppose at the
same time. Residual forms represent those archaic forms still active and relevant within contemporary
culture. In Michael Payne’s Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, British monarchy is considered a
good example of residual form, which is “gradually perceived as archaic within popular discourse as it loses
its cultural legitimacy” (2010: 200). Along the same lines, emergent cultures – newer and initially
marginalised forms, like feminism or eco politics, which set out to challenge both dominant and residual
forms, end up being incorporated, together with their subcultural and subversive overtones, in the dominant
culture.
Taking up this distinction and adding the influence of Althusser’s, Gramsci’s, and Foucault’s
theories on ideology, hegemony and power, cultural materialists discuss texts by laying emphasis on the
role of institutional authority in shaping textual identities. Michael Payne (2010: 163) notes that “most
cultural materialist criticism has stressed the ways in which texts contain the seeds of opposition to the
dominant structures they embody; they certainly do not see all canonical texts as straightforwardly
complicit with the powers of the state, then or now”.
Up to this point, not much seems to differentiate the cultural critics’ method of inquiry into the
literary text from nineteenth-century historicism and Marxism. Mention should be made, however, that the
articles quoted above, ‘Literature and Sociology’ and ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’,
were first published at the beginning of the 1970s, before Williams’s explicit engagement with semiotics.
In his 1981 Culture (published as The Sociology of Culture in the United States in 1982), culture2 is defined
as “the signifying system through which a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and
explored. This signifying system allows a convergence between the anthropological and sociological sense
of culture as a distinct ‘whole way of life’ and the more specialised, if also more common understanding of
culture as ‘artistic and intellectual activities’”. The signifying practices acquire relevance in the definition
of culture: as long as they bear significance (signify through language), they are cultural products. Thus,
Raymond Williams ‘democratises’ culture, as it comes to represent “not only the traditional arts and forms
2 In Culture and Anarchy (1869), Matthew Arnold proposed the spelling of Culture with a capital C and attempted at
restricting its meaning to “the best that has been thought and said”, which is, though unclear, a reference to art,
literature, philosophy, etc. The list of ‘what is not Culture’ was much more exhaustive: nature, society, progressive
civilization, the economy, technology, industry, mass education, mass communications, daily life, most forms of politics.
Cultural theorists opposed this restrictiveness and assigned the term cultural to various forms of specificity: “social,
psychological, material and symbolic, class and gender specific, specific also as to ethnicity, race, religion, language
group, region, profession, nationality, historical period and so on”. Nevertheless, Raymond Williams was to make, in
his turn, a similar distinction between Culture (arts) and culture (the whole social life) in the essay The Long Revolution
(Gallagher 1995: 309-311).
of intellectual production but also all the signifying practices—from language through the arts and
philosophy to journalism, fashion and advertising” (qtd. in Gallagher, 1995: 313).
It is this democratisation which further enables cultural critics to dwell on texts that do not have
much to do with the literary. In time, this practice has evolved towards complex analyses of pop culture
texts (e.g. film, song lyrics, television broadcasts, advertisements, stand-up comedy, comics and
animations, glossy magazines, etc.), attracting harsh criticism from present-day followers of the Arnoldian
principle, who still make an elitist distinction between high culture and low culture. This interest in the so-
called pop culture is of a more recent date and more often associated with Cultural Studies. However, during
the 1980s, when Cultural Materialism dominates the British academia, focus is still laid on famous literary
texts of the past, chief among which Renaissance and Victorian ones – for a form of validation through
canonicity, if not for other reasons. As it was the case with the New Historicism, two other Shakespearean
scholars are credited with the publication of the Cultural Materialism manifesto: Jonathan Dollimore and
Alan Sinfield establish four major principles of the emerging literary theory in the preface to Political
Shakespeare - New Essays in Cultural Materialism (1985), not before acknowledging the influence of
Raymond Williams. Their proposal is a combination of historical context, theoretical method, political
commitment and textual analysis:
Historical context undermines the transcendent significance traditionally accorded to the literary
text and allows us to recover its histories; theoretical method detaches the text from immanent
criticism which seeks only to reproduce it in its own terms; socialist and feminist commitment
confronts the conservative categories in which most criticism has hitherto been conducted; textual
analysis locates the critique of traditional approaches when it cannot be ignored. We call this
cultural materialism (Dollimore and Sinfield 1994: vii).
If the first two categories bear clear resemblance to the new historicist tenets by stressing the importance
of context, subverting the prevalence of the literary text and challenging traditional criticism3, the third,
political commitment, requires a closer look. It is the very point in which Cultural Materialism diverts from
New Historicism. This is not to say that New Historicism would be apolitical, but that Cultural Materialism
is downright political; moreover, it has “overt political ends in the contemporary world” (Brannigan 1998:
98).
Moving from the purely theoretical to the applicative, one may find a good example in Salman Rushdie’s
treatment of Midnight’s Children, exposed in ‘‘Errata’: or, Unreliable Narration in Midnight’s Children’
(1983). He observes that history is always ambiguous, and that literature is not history, but plays with
history forms. Analysing his goals pursued in writing this novel, Rushdie asserts that he was, at first, in a
Proustian search for lost time. In time, however, he realised that he was searching for a way to reconstruct
the past so as to suit his own ends, using memory as a tool. Saleem Sinai (the central character and narrator),
far from being an objective historian, attempts to “cut up history to suit himself, just as he did when he cut
up newspapers to compose his earlier text” (1991: 24). It is thus obvious that the author’s motivation is to
endow his narrator with a cultural materialist-type of reasoning. In admitting the unreliability of his narrator,
Rushdie lays emphasis on the fact that Midnight’s Children is a novel, and not “some sort of inadequate
reference book or encyclopaedia” (1991: 25), however, as he stresses in another article (‘Outside the
Whale’, 1984) in which he polemicizes with Orwell’s ‘Inside the Whale’ (1940) and ‘Politics of the English
Language’ (1946), the need of politics in literature is very actual: “it becomes necessary, and even
exhilarating, to grapple with the special problems created by the incorporation of political material, because
politics is, by turns, farce and tragedy” (1991: 100).
3 Although never mentioned as such, reference is most probably made to Formalism and New Criticism.
Yet another one of Rushdie’s observations, namely that the writer “need not always be the servant of some
beetle-browed ideology” and that “he can also be its critic, his antagonist, its scourge” (1991: 98) is also
close to the cultural materialist discussion of literature in terms of compliance versus resistance to ideology
and superstructures. In Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-war Britain, Sinfield enlarges upon society
being forced “to reproduce itself both culturally and materially by putting in circulation stories of how the
world goes” (1989: 2). Various institutions, considered dominant structures are responsible with this (the
media, religion, education, the political parties) and so is literature, which may either reinforce or contest
the narratives of these structures. This contestation occurs when literature resists the ideology imposed by
the State apparatus and focuses on “dissident politics of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation” (Sinfield
1992: 10).
Representation
Texts do not exist in isolation, establishing relations both synchronically (with parallel/ contemporary texts)
and diachronically (with texts written before them), which give access to present and past, but only to a
limited extent. This very simple interconnection has been termed in various ways; however, the term which
best serves the purpose of this subsection is that of intertextuality, as texts can only represent aspects and
facts, not transpose them from the realm of the real into that of the written. “Life is the non-representable
origin of representation”, Derrida (2005: 295) notes, in relation to Antonin Artaud’s theatre, but the
statement can also be read as generalisation, in which case, this sentence alone suffices to explain Foucault’s
and his followers’ understanding of discourse as constructed representation of reality. Representation is
thus construed as an imperfect form of life imitation, and this imperfection is related to a series of factors
outside the text: the author’s distance from the represented factual aspect/ event (in time and space), his/
her subjectivity (which may be wilful, with manipulative ends), but also various societal, political,
economic and cultural constraints, which, for the sake of brevity, one may include under the term context.
In cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s words, “representation does sort of carry with it the notion that
something was there already and […] has been represented” (1997: 6, emphasis in the original). This
‘something’ may range from topics, people, events, situations, to politics and ideologies, etc. which are
endowed with meanings through words or images. Hence, Hall’s definition of representation is: “the way
in which meaning is somehow given to the things which are depicted through the images or whatever it is,
on screens or the words on a page which stand for what we’re talking about” (1997: 6, emphasis in the
original).
Narrowing the scope of the definition of representation to the domain literary representation, one
may find extensive information in the field of literary theory. The present section relies on W. Mitchell’s
description provided in the volume edited by Frank Lentricchia, Critical Terms for Literary Studies, having
in view the fact that literary representation is a key term with new historicist and cultural materialist critics,
inasmuch as representation (in a broader acception) is a key concept in cultural studies. In the chapter
mentioned, the notion of representation is tackled diachronically, from Aristotle and Plato, who regarded
all the arts as modes of representation (1990: 11) to the postmodern experiment, which brings about
“concepts such as the identity of the text, the determinacy of meaning, the integrity of the author and the
validity of interpretation”, which “all play a role in the representational character of literary texts” (1990:
17). A foundational concept in aesthetics, semiotics and political theory, representation is… represented
(faute de mieux) as a triangular relationship: “[it] is always of something or someone by something or
someone to someone” (12, emphasis in the original). Representation, Mitchell says, “is an extremely elastic
notion which extends all the way from a stone representing a man to a novel representing a day in the life
of several Dubliners” (13) – and it goes without saying that, when one speaks of literature, only the latter
type of representation applies. As it is, ultimately, an issue of social agreement (“let us agree to represent
this with that in this way” (13)), literary representation functions through codes and conventions (language,
tonality, representational schemes, styles, genres) and “can never be completely divorced from political and
ideological questions” (15).
There is a tendency in contemporary philosophy to expand the concept of representation on
the whole artistic phenomenon, resulting in the assumption that even though not all representation
is art, all art is representation (Davies, 2009, pp. 504-508). Closely related to representation is the
concept of imitation, which assumes that the relationship between a work of art and reality is
similar to the one between copies and original. But a distinction must be made between an
extremely accurate representation of a particular object, which would lead to imitation in the direct
meaning, and representation as a convention - as it happens in the case of some conventional
representations, like angels in Christian paintings. If the first case favours the artwork’s analogy
with a mirror which closely reproduces the surrounding world, the second case favours the analogy
with the language or code of signs (Sheppard, 1987, pp. 9-10). Understanding an artwork involves
both the recognition of similarity and the understanding of the convention (1987, p. 12), therefore
no art theory can embrace exclusively one of the two perspectives. The concept of imitation is
perceived in quite a pejorative sense and is unfair to the artwork. A trompe-l'œil painting, which
is a perfect imitation, is not usually considered a significant work of art. The concept of imitation
narrows and lowers the art theory. That’s why, Stephen Halliwell prefers the term mimesis (gr.
Mīmēsis, mīmeisthai), to imitation, and presents the concept of aesthetics, treated by Baumgarten
in the eighteenth century as an extension to the notion of mimesis (Halliwell, 2002, pp. 10-14).
The history of this concept splits into two major ways to think about the representative art, which
resume the previous distinction: (1) as a model that reflects the world like a mirror and emphasizes
the relationship between the work of art and reality; (2) as a model that simulates or creates the
world and emphasizes the internal relations of the artwork (2002, pp. 23-24). Of course, both
models still relate to reality. The first to introduce an art theory as a mimesis is Plato, but Aristotle
develops the concept.
As art developed, people always strived to modify and improve the existing works. Having
various tools of self-expression, people learned to combine them, creating new works. A great
example of such combination is The Birth of Venus by Botticelli, based on the poem La Giostra
by Angelo Poliziano. Claude Debussy wrote a symphonic suite Primavera inspired by Botticelli’s
painting with the same name. There is also a French film Images pour Debussy, which is an
example of recreating musical imagery in cinematography. It is one of the many examples of
adaptation.
This is a good illustration of “cycle of interactions” of various types of art, which can be
found in the book Images of Literature in Graphics and Cinema by Henri Surenovich (Vartanov,
1961, pp. 3-4). This kind of interaction leads to the creation of new works. In other words, this can
be called “transformation”, “reconstruction” and “transfer” of a story into another language.