Page 57 - Critical and Cultural Theory

LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION
ingly placed on the sense of uncertainty that pervades our percep-
tion of things and, concomitantly, our articulation of what we
perceive through texts (both verbal and non-verbal). The world
cannot be represented accurately and objectively for the reason
that it is not a given but rather an effect of how it is perceived
from various viewpoints. Much recent criticism has claimed that
the real as such is unattainable. We only experience it through the
mediation of texts, images and stories. These never mirror reality
transparently and neutrally but actually represent it according to
the codes and conventions of specific societies.
Such codes and conventions are not always consciously
employed. Indeed, much of the time we resort to them semi-
consciously or even unconsciously. This is because they are so
deeply ingrained in our culture's fabric that we have forgotten
their constructed (and largely arbitrary) status. That is, we adopt
them as though they were natural tools rather than the products
of cultural decisions. The representations created through the
application of those codes and conventions are accordingly natur-
alized - i.e. their status as constructs is effaced. In the case of
Western cultures, the process of naturalization has been assidu-
ously sustained by their dominant mode of representation, namely
realism. 1 Realist techniques conceal the process of production of a
text or image so as to encourage us to believe that representations
reflect the world, that they offer a keyhole view on a solid reality
shared and recognized by each member of the same culture. Such
techniques do not simply pursue an aesthetic programme. In fact,
they serve eminently ideological purposes. Representations are a
vital means of supporting a culture's ideology: the world view
invented by that culture to legitimate itself and to discipline its
subjects. 2 When realism represses the artificiality of representa-
tions, its main objective is to assert itself as an objective and trans-
parent depiction of the world in the name of ideological stability.
The principal message it aims at conveying is that reality is
unchanging, for denying that something was made is to deny that
it could be unmade. This is what Norman Bryson terms the
'natural attitude': a suppression of 'history', of the possibility of

1 •*" Realism is further explored in Part III, Chapter 2, The Aesthetic'.
2 t*~An in-depth discussion of this topic is supplied in Part II, Chapter 1,
'Ideology'.

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