1. Stuart Hall's Definition of Culture

Culture is not so much a set of things - novels and paintings or TV programmes and comics - as a process, a set of practices. Primarily, culture is concerned with the production and the exchange of meanings - 'the giving and taking of meaning' - between the members of a society or group. (Hall, 1997, p. 2)

Representation: three definitions

• To 'represent' meaning to stand in for, as in the case of a country's flag, which when flown at a sporting event, for example, signals that country's presence at the event. The flag stands for or symbolizes a nation, distinguishing France from China or Ireland from the USA.

• To 'represent' meaning to speak or act on behalf of, as in the sentence 'A spokesperson on behalf of lesbian mothers voiced the concerns of the group on television.'

• To 'represent' meaning to re-present. In this sense, a biography or historical writing re-presents the events of the past. Equally, a photograph re-presents a moment or event which has already occurred - it presents the occasion again. A photograph or painting can also, of course, represent someone or something in the sense of standing in for. Posters of rock stars, religious paintings and public statues all fulfil this function. Images that function in this way are said to be iconic.

2. Language as an arbitrary system of signs

Only a social group can generate signs. Noises which have no meaning may be purely individual, but meaning intelligibility, cannot by definition be produced in isolation. The sign is in an important sense arbitrary. And it is the arbitrariness of the sign which points to the fact that language is a matter of convention. The linguistic community 'agrees' to attach a specific signified to a specific signifier, though in reality, of course, its agreement is not explicitly sought but merely manifested in the fact that certain linguistic units are used and understood. 'The arbitrary nature of the sign explains in turn why the social fact alone can create a linguistic system. The community is necessary if values that owe their existence solely to usage and general acceptance are to be set up' (Saussure, 1974, p. 113).(Belsey, 1980, pp. 39-45)

3. Communicating meaning: Stuart Hall's idea of 'Representation'

Members of the same culture must share sets of concepts, images and ideas which enable them to think and feel about the world, and thus to interpret the world, in roughly similar ways. They must share, broadly speaking, the same 'cultural codes'. In this sense, thinking and feeling are themselves 'systems of representation', in which our concepts, images and emotions 'stand for' or represent, in our mental life, things which are or may be 'out there' in the world. Similarly, in order to communicate these meanings to other people, the participants to any meaningful exchange must also be able to use the same linguistic codes - they must, in a very broad sense, 'speak the same language' . . . They must also be able to read visual images in roughly similar ways. They must be familiar with broadly the same ways of producing sounds to make what they would both recognize as 'music'. They must all interpret body language and facial expressions in broadly similar ways. And they must know how to translate their feelings and ideas into these various languages. Meaning is a dialogue - always only partially understood, always an unequal exchange.

Why do we refer to all these different ways of producing and communicating meaning as 'languages' or as 'working like languages'? How do languages work? The simple answer is that languages work through representation. They are 'systems of representations'. Essentially, we can say that all these practices 'work like languages', not because they are all written or spoken (they are not), but because they all use some element to stand for or represent what we want to say, to express or communicate a thought, concept, idea or feeling. Spoken language uses sounds, written language uses words, musical language uses notes on a scale, the 'language of the body' uses physical gesture, the fashion industry uses items of clothing, the language of facial expression uses ways of arranging one's features, television uses digitally or electronically produced dots on a screen, traffic lights use red, green and amber to 'say something'. These elements - sounds, words, notes, gestures, expressions, clothes - are part of our natural and material world, but their importance for language is not what they are but what they do, their function . They construct meaning and transmit it.They signify. They don't have any clear meaning in themselves. Rather, they are the vehicles or media which carry meaning because they operate as symbols, which stand for or represent (i.e. symbolize) the meanings we wish to communicate.To use another metaphor, they function as signs. Signs stand for or represent our concepts, ideas and feelings in such a way as to enable others to 'read', decode or interpret their meaning in roughly the same way that we do.(Hall, 1997, pp. 4-5)

In summary, meaning is produced via signifying practices, in which signs are assembled according to sets of codes in order to represent, in material form (speech, the written word, visual images, music, body language, clothing, the environments we live and work in), the mental conceptualizations shared by a particular grouping of people.

4. Representation and Discourse

Discourse is a language or system of representation that has developed socially in order to make and circulate a coherent set of meanings about an important topic area. These meanings serve the interests of that section of society within which the discourse originates and which works ideologically to naturalize those meanings into common sense.Discourses are power relations' (0'Sullivan et al. 1983: 74). Discourse is thus a social act which may promote or oppose the dominant ideology, and is thus often referred to as a 'discursive practice'... Such discourses frequently become institutionalized ,..particularly by the media industries in so far as they are structured by a socially produced set of conventions that are tacitly accepted by both industry and consumers. Discourses function not only in the production and reading of texts, but also in making sense of social experience. A particular discourse of gender, for example, works not only to make sense of a television program . . . but also to make a particular pattern of sense of gender in the family, in the workplace, in school, in social clubs - in fact, in our general social relations. (Fiske, 1987, pp. 14-15)