Class 10 - Introducing Stuart Hall
Welcome back!
Welcome back. This week, we’re starting exploring Stuart Hall’s essay on “Race: the Floating Signifier.” This was first given as a lecture before being written as an essay, and the live lecture gives us a much richer sense of Hall as a thinker. So today, we’re going to start by sharing a viewing of the first half of the lecture.
During this viewing, I want you to actively engage in the Zoom chat, commenting and asking questions as we go along. In case you have problems with Zoom, the link to the video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PodKki9g2Pw
We’ll watch up to 31 minutes and 34 seconds, then we’ll explore some questions. In the next session, we will read ahead, then watch the second half, and explore the conclusion of Hall’s argument.
Signifier, Signified, Sign
But first, some groundwork! Hall draws on language that comes from the Swiss thinker and linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Saussure was the founder of the field known as semiotics.
We don’t have time to go into this in great detail, but it will help to have some sense of Saussure’s central claim about language.
So what is this claim? The claim is that language is a system of signs, and these signs are essentially connections between words (sounds / written words) and concepts. Saussure calls these words we use “signifiers”, while the things that they point to as the things as “signified.” A sign is this bundle of signifier and signified. In this view a sign is purely mental or psychological. This tends to make language float free a little of the world of things.
This is not how we usually think about words and things. So we think that words link us directly to things. We think that the word “Cat” points to a real-live cat. But, Saussure insists, it doesn’t. Instead, it points to the concept of a cat.
Not only this, but the connection between the signified and the signifier, Saussure says, is arbitrary. What does this mean? Think about cat in different languages:
- Mandarin: māo 貓
- Bulgarian: котка
- Portuguese: gato
- Burmese: ကြောင်
And so on… There is no necessary connection between these words, or these squiggles on the page, and the concept “cat.”
Meaning comes about through marking out difference in this system of signs. But also, as there is no necessary connection between sign and signified, and no ultimate anchoring of language in the world of things, then meanings shift around all over the place.
Hall doesn’t fully agree with Saussure’s system — I will share a long piece on Canvas where he offers some critiques of it — but this is his starting point.
Break!
Let’s have a tea break to rest our brains.
Discussion
After watching the film, I’ll give you a short while to write some thoughts in response to the following questions.
- What were your first impressions of this talk?
- What is Hall arguing about the biological concept of race?
- Hall says: “race is more like a language than it is like the way in which we are biologically constituted.” What does he mean by this?
- What does Hall mean when he says, “The meaning of a signifier can never be finally or transhistorically fixed”?
- Does saying that race is a “signifier” negate the fact of racial violence? If not, why not?
When we’ve done this, we’ll get into groups, and discuss your reading of the first half of the chapter.
I’m going to ask each group to appoint a spokesperson to write up their thoughts, and then I’ll ask each group to feed back to the main group at the end.
Homework
For your homework, read the rest of the chapter.