The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysisby Michael J. Shapiro

The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and PolicyAnalysis by Michael J. ShapiroReview by: Sura Levine and Andrew ParkerPolitical Theory, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Nov., 1989), pp. 696-701Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191410 .

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696 POLITICAL THEORY / NOVEMBER 1989

Still, we should be grateful that Landes's book raises these broader questions of public action and engagement, even if it does not adequately resolve them. We now have a better place to begin new or renewed discus- sions that will direct feminist theory toward further gender analyses of politics and feminist practice toward reconstituting the public sphere.

-Mary G. Dietz University of Minnesota

THE POLITICS OFREPRESENTATION: WRITING PRACTICES INBIOG- RAPHB PHOTOGRAPHY, AND POLICYANALYSIS by Michael J. Shapiro. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. Pp. xiv, 203. $27.50.

That an art historian and literary theorist have been asked to review this book is one measure of the changes that the field of political theory has undergone in recent years -changes that Michael Shapiro has done a great deal to bring about. The latest in his series of pathbreaking works on the relationship between politics and language, The Politics of Representation not only includes chapters on such familiarly political topics as ideology and foreign policy, but also offers extended political readings of biographies and photographs, thereby provoking a general reconsideration of the "familiar- ity" of the categories in question. Criticizing "the prevailing boundary commitments that separate one domain of knowledge/practice and its objects of attention from another" (7), Shapiro calls for the extension of political analysis to works of art and literature as one way to combat the enervating effects of a traditional division of disciplinary labor. Because The Politics of Representation appears at a moment when art history and literary theory are similarly experiencing their own forms of boundary confusion, Shapiro's work seems especially timely and important to us in the possibilities that it offers for renewing an interdisciplinary dialogue.

Whether dealing with the Kissinger Commission Report or a biography of Benjamin Franklin, Shapiro characteristically begins his analyses by recalling one of Michel Foucault's most productive insights: that "representations do not imitate reality but are the practices through which things take on meaning and value" (xi); that discourse should be "viewed not as com- munication, that aspect of language invoked when we merely speak of things, but as part of a productive practice inviting inspection of its various linguistic dimensions" (30). By thus construing representation "in terms of the discursive economies in which it participates rather than on the basis of what are ordinarily taken to be [its] referents" (122), Shapiro can successfully inter-



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rogate what a communicative conception of language obscures: the historical embeddedness of representations, the fact that the objects of any discipline are created discursively rather than simply discovered in nature. For example, although analysts of U.S. foreign policy may speak authoritatively of a nation called "Guatemala," there is (as Shapiro argues) "no natural or unproblematic way to identify or represent" that country (91), for "Guatemala" functions as a term within a geopolitical discourse "dominated by such things as 'regime ideology' and the foreign policy behavior of leaders" (91)-a discourse, in other words, that has been much more concerned with preserving its own powers of definition than with recognizing the interests of a country it seems only to describe:

Guatemala is part of what we think of as the international system, a historically produced set of relations among nations. The predominant grammar of this international system has all of the individual nations performing as subjects and objects in the practice of international speech, a set of statements, regarded as intelligible, which issues from national units. But these units, which are consolidated both in the recognized system of territorial boundaries and in speech practices, embody histories of struggle over how those units are to be represented and understood.(92)

By thus specifying the discursive codes through which the identity of nations is constructed or contested, Shapiro does not simply transgress the norms of "contemporary political science, which predicates its approaches to inquiry on the view that language is transparent" (12); he opens the way to new forms of political analysis by rendering "politically relevant the rhetoric or writing practices through which we have tended to naturalize the objects of representation in the practices of inquiry or the writing genres that give us public policy, accounts of lives, foreign policy, and visual images" (xii). If such an approach seems to place an unusual political weight on the very medium of inquiry, this is precisely what Shapiro intends as he stresses "the pertinence of regarding social theorists and analysts as writers" (xiv). Assuming as an axiom "a radical entanglement between textual and political practices" (xii), Shapiro attempts throughout the book to identify kinds of writing that, in challenging the naturalizing conventions of particular discursive regimes, thereby acquire a subversive political charge: "What a politicized form of writing must do, in general, is somehow disturb us, force us out of our narrative habits by giving us an experience of discord in both our relation to things and to each other, by making unfamiliar, through transcod- ing or refiguring or otherwise recontextualizing, what has been familiar" (54). In each chapter, accordingly, Shapiro distinguishes what he terms "pious" from "impious" modes of representation, "the former having the



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effect of reproducing or reinforcing the prevailing modes of power and authority and the latter tending to challenge them" (xii). By opposing Ansel Adams's images of an empty Western wilderness with Richard Avedon's "repopulation" of the region, or by contrasting a moralizing biography of Lyndon Johnson with Sartre's iconoclastic reading of Flaubert, Shapiro seeks above all to "make possible the recognition that what we have regarded as political realities could be rendered otherwise" (xii) -a rendering that can finally be regarded as political as the "realities" it never simply designates.

As should be apparent from this brief summary of the book's main arguments, we find ourselves greatly excited by what Shapiro has accom- plished here - so much so, in fact, that we have identified several issues that he might address in the future as he continues to refine his interpretive strategies. In the first place, although Shapiro is clearly working within a problematic defined above all by the writings of Foucault, The Politics of Representation is indebted as well to a Marxist tradition of Ideologiekritik. The tensions between these two discourses - the former eschewing a rhetoric of deformation, and the latter always on the lookout for "delusion" and "dissimulation" - sometimes produces startlingly provocative syntheses: for example, the book's "general reading/writing metaphorization of the ideology problem" (21). At other moments, however, Shapiro strains with less success to keep Marxism and poststructuralism operating within the same discursive paradigm. One example would be his construal of Foucault's work "as a form of ideological criticism within Althusser's conception of ideology" (23): As Shapiro is the first to acknowledge, such an understanding runs counter to Foucault's repeated insistence that the very category of ideology, with its distinction between surface and depth, was fundamentally foreign to the spirit of his enterprise. When Shapiro writes, then, that Foucault invites us "to weigh the costs of this modem, delusional form of power which represents itself as something else" (20; our emphasis), we cannot help wondering, given what seems a sheer distrust of the possibility of figuration, whether it is Marx rather than Foucault who is actually the subject of this statement.

We raise this issue here because some of the book's best insights appear constrained by its commitments to detecting and expunging what it calls, at one point, the "merely ideological" (34)- as if, despite its many compelling arguments for the irreducibility of representation, what remains at stake were simply a passage from error to truth. Although this tendency to "demystify" the texts that he reads is certainly not exhaustive - his treatment of Freud's Leonardo, for example, produces not "truth" but a kind of knowledge that "must be reflected back into the text's ambivalences and ambiguities"



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(71)- what comes to dominate Shapiro's argument is a binary optic through which texts are discovered to be deluded or self-aware, "either politicized or depoliticizing," (141) in their deployment of discursive codes. That this lens tends to generate a far too narrow focus seems evident to us not only in the limited kinds of photographs he discusses (they are almost exclusively portraits) but also in his reading of such works as Dali's The Phenomenon of Ecstasy, where Shapiro argues that the effect of this collage is "radically denaturalizing" and hence politically progressive in its ability to disrupt "the process through which the viewer's interpretive codes accord a representational quality to photographs" (146). One question to ask, however, is who this generalized "viewer" might be -whether, indeed, Dali's collage must be considered progressive by all of its possible beholders. For if Dali's work disturbs the unified representational space conventionally expected of a photograph, its fragmented, repetitive images of ecstatic women (with the faces of two men positioned as onlookers along the edges of the frame) can be read as a recontainment, along clearly gendered lines, of whatever disruption the collage had unleashed. As Jacqueline Rose succinctly ex- plains: "sexual difference, if you give it half a chance, will take over any subversion or mutation of visual space" ("Sexuality and Vision: Some Questions," in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster [Seattle: Bay Press, 1988], 120). By further omitting any discussion of women whose photography places sexuality at the center of the revisionist practice, Shapiro unnecessar- ily restricts what counts as political in reproducing a canon well within the parameters of Beaumont Newhall's standard history of the medium.

The issue, as Shapiro recognizes elsewhere in a citation from Barthes (154), is that it is less the photographic image per se than its interaction with possible beholders that carries the force of the political. Inspired by Barthes's Mythologies, Shapiro argues that

Of all modes of representation, [photography] is the one most easily assimilated into the discourses of knowledge and truth, for it is thought to be an unmediated simulacrum, a copy of what we consider the "real." Despite the elements of photographic practice that contribute to the signifying effects or rhetorical force of photographs -angle of vision, framing, distance, lighting, style of developing, etc. - the interpretive culture within which photographs are displayed tends to bracket the practices involved in creating the image and concentrate on the image itself. (124)

As might be expected from this passage, Shapiro will take his distance from "the bulk of photography" insofar as it remains "naturalizing in its effect," directing his attention instead to certain examples that, in resisting "the seductiveness of the real," enable a "detection of practice and ideology"



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(134-135). Yet it is just this perspective that Barthes came to criticize in the work of his final years -a criticism we think worth quoting here at length:

It is the fashion, nowadays, among Photography's commentators (sociologists and semiologists), to seize upon a semantic relativity: no "reality" (great scorn for the "realists" who do not see that the photograph is always coded), nothing but artifice: Thesis, not Physis-, what it represents is fabricated, because the photographic optic is subject to Albertian perspective (entirely historical) and because the inscription on the picture makes a three-dimensional object into a two-dimensional effigy. This argument is futile.... The realists, of whom I am one and of whom I was already one when I asserted that the Photograph was an image without code-even if, obviously, certain codes do inflect our reading of it- the realists do not take the photograph for a "copy" of reality, but for an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art. To ask whether a photograph is analogical or coded is not a good means of analysis. The important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the object but on time. (Camera Lucida, trans. by Richard Howard [New York: Hill & Wang, 1981], 88-89)

Engaged, above all, in a rigorous form of self-criticism, Barthes rejects here the demystifying approach of his earlier Mythologies, arguing instead that any conventionalist account of photography, with its emphasis on the con- trivance of the real, misses what in fact is most distinctive about the medium: that the link between photography and evidence is not, as Shapiro maintains, simply contingent (135); that photographs do record realities, but only in and as their past; that the problematic posed by photography is hence properly temporal rather than ontological in structure. To conceive a politics of photography that directly engages this temporality seems, in our view, one of the most urgent tasks of contemporary criticism, a project that Shapiro seems exceptionally well positioned to pursue.

Our final point concerns the privilege Shapiro consistently accords to literature as "the exemplar of the nondelusional," a mode of writing whose characteristic playfulness and self-consciousness render it "a hyperpoliti- cized genre," an unrivaled paragon of ideological analysis in its capacity to disclose "how language practices impose forms of authority" (8, 73). In so identifying irony and reflexivity as literature's constitutive properties, Shapiro affirms a traditional conception of the literary, an ahistorical model whose own implicit politics many literary theorists have begun to question. Although he previously rejected any radical distinction between "fictional and scientific genres of writing" (7), this very opposition seems to reinstate itself when Shapiro argues that "linguistic self-consciousness tends to be more evident in literary texts than in those produced by social and political analysts" (26). If, as the book powerfully maintains, politics is to profit from



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opening its borders to literature, then literature must undergo transformation as well in acquiring the kind of historical specificity that Shapiro associates with "scientific" practices. To succeed in this double endeavor will not only provoke a renewed assessment of the possibilities of interdisciplinarity, but also will further strengthen an ability that Shapiro most prizes, one reflected in abundance throughout The Politics of Representation: "the ability to render political things that previously had not been -that is, to make new matters negotiable" (76).

-Sura Levine Hampshire College

-Andrew Parker Amherst College



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The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysisby Michael J. Shapiro