Throughout the century of modernity and postmodernity, “representation” has been frowned upon, even forbidden, to such a degree that it has been necessary to invent ways to dispense with this old and embarrassing concept in art, politics, and ontology: expression, exemplification, reference, or even pure and simple presen-tation, pure and simple.
There is an understandable aesthetic reason for the rejection of the concept: its unsatisfying definition, capable neither of anticipating nor of following the mutations of art in the twentieth century, from Kazimir Malevich to Allan Kaprow, from Marcel Broodthaers to body art. But if “representation” no longer succeeds in accounting for the natural inclination of the plastic arts toward presence (of objects, bodies, events), it is also because philosophy has failed, has not been capable of proposing and presenting to artists a well-grounded concept of “representation” inscribed in matter and in the reality of objects.
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Any theory that claims to be materialist or realist should be judged according to its ability (or lack thereof ) to provide an account for the status of representations.
An image, for example, is certainly a material object or a real object, but it is also another object that has the particular nature of not being what it is: a watercolor and gouache by Dürer that represents a hare is not itself a hare; moreover if it were the animal, it would no longer represent the animal. But if it is not in any way the thing itself, how can it represent that thing? Must I admit the existence of an ideal hare, in addition to its image? In that case, entities proliferate: there’s the real hare, the image of the hare, the hare of which this is the image. Or perhaps the hare of which this is the image exists neither outside of the image nor in the image, but rather in the mind of the one who sees it? This way I remove represen-tations from objects, locate them in consciousness, and then, eventually, seek a materialist or naturalist theory of mind. Thus I am rid of representations, these sort of half or double objects that proliferate in matter, in reality, and undermine materialism and naturalism.
Yet it would be particularly strange to think that a materialist or realist would not situate representations in things themselves rather than in consciousness, because materialists, realists, and idealists agree on this one thing: representations do not exist in truth except by and for those things that they represent. On the
1 Translator’s note: The French title, “Défense de Représentation,” carries a double meaning that is difficult to render in English: défense can mean both defense and prohibition.
contrary, I assert that an authentic realist or materialist way of thinking should be able to account for the objective, real and material, existence of representations produced by human art.
The history of Western philosophy proposes at least three major ways to conceive the status of representational objects: the representational object is understood to be either a copy, a sign, or a duplex.
I
The first model for thinking about representation is mimesis, which is the idea that in the West dominates antiquity and the classical age. The major contribution of mimetic theories is the affirmation that representation is a relationship between two terms in which one of the terms transposes the other by extracting certain of its qualities; thus a two-dimensional representation of a chair transposes the chair onto a surface, making an abstraction of its third dimension. Every copy made by representation is a diminished version of the representable object. Plato considers that there exists a ladder of ontological degradation from the idea to the object and from the object to the representation. Not only natural objects are susceptible to being imitated in this way—for Aristotle, that which is said or that which should be is also representable.
Mimesis can be understood as the linking of two objects or of two series of objects: the first is present, or real, and the second is represented, meaning transposed into a form that draws certain qualities from the first. The identity between the two is assured by a certain resemblance: recovery, analogy, or structural homology. However, three difficulties hobble such a definition of representation.
First, as Nelson Goodman has noted, resemblance, unlike representation, bespeaks a symmetrical relationship.2 The portrait of Thomas More by Hans Holbein surely resembles Thomas More, and Thomas More resembles his portrait—but the portrait represents the face of the humanist while the face does not represent the portrait.
So representation is not resemblance. Next, mimesis supposes not only the prece-dence but the pre-existence of that which is represented relative to its represen-tation: one can not represent that which does not already exist. Finally, mimesis implies an ontological degradation between what is represented and the represen-tation: that which is represented is in some way “de-presented,” since something has been snatched from its full and entire presence to make it exist under another form, diminished, as a copy.
Let’s try another model.
2 See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), 3ff.
II
The second model for representation is signification. This is the model that has dominated modernity since the nineteenth century, under the influence of the work of Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure. A representation is no longer thought of as a copy but rather as a sign. For Peirce, representation is a relationship between three terms, the representamen, the object, and the interpretant.3 A bison drawn with pigment that I perceive on the wall of a Paleolithic cave is the representamen; the bison that these traces seem to me to designate is the object; the set of signs that I mobilize in order to attach the first to the second comprise the interpretant. All the images of bison, drawn or photographed, that I have perceived in the past contribute to the composition of this specific representation of a bison.
To interpret a sign is to triangulate ceaselessly between the sign, its object, and other signs. The same word, with the same spelling and the same sound, can designate many different objects, depending on the interpretants brought into play. When associating the word “rock” with the terms “Chuck Berry” and “Telecaster,” you get a very different object than if you reference “granite” or “clay.” Thus, to signify is to link a sign to an object through the mediation of other signs; it is no longer a question of resemblance or imitation.
Within the context of our semiotic model, representation would never be anything but a type of signification: the portrait of Emile Zola by Manet relates to what it represents, the French writer, by the mediation of a series of other signs. If, after an apocalypse, survivors who lost all trace or memory of the existence of Zola were to discover the painting in an archaeological excavation, they would find a representation of a bearded man, but not of Émile Zola. And if we were to discover a representation of something that we couldn’t identify, made by an extinct people of whom we know nothing, we would perhaps not even be able to recognize it as a representation. Thus, according to the semiotic model, there is no representation without signification, that is to say without interpretation.
However, there is one major objection to the subordination of representation to signification. An essential characteristic of a representation as a sign is its vari-ability: the official sign for “no smoking” shows a cigarette in a barred circle. But each airport, hospital, or cinema, in each region of the world, uses different images to embody this sign—a cigarette or perhaps a pipe, a cigarette with filter or without, a cigarette inscribed in a circle or a square, barred by a cross or by a simple trans-verse line, on a black background or white—yet the meaning remains the same.
Several images can thus serve to signify exactly the same thing, such that one can alter a sign without altering what it means. But does the same go for the image?
A steam locomotive can easily signify any kind of train, because it has become the
3 See Charles Sanders Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 98–119.
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IN DEFENSE OF REPRESENTATION TRISTAN GARCIA
Representation Representation 249
archetype of this mode of transport in the collective imagination. But even so, it does not represent all trains. And an image of a cigarette does not represent exactly the same thing as an image of a pipe.
If the image can become sign, or the sign image, they nevertheless remain absolutely distinct; what separates them is the delicate attachment of the image to what it represents.
Thus, no representation can be affected without affecting that which it rep-resents. Marcel Duchamp’s Mona Lisa with a moustache is no longer the Mona Lisa of Leonardo da Vinci; a photograph retouched by software that permits the accentuation of contrast or the erasure of blemishes no longer represents exactly what it represented before. By contrast, the sign—determined by the triangular relation between the sign itself, the object to which it refers, and the interpretant that attaches one to the other—
can vary without changing the object, so long as the interpretant adjusts the triangu-lation. In signification, the presence of the sign erases itself behind its relation with its object mediated by an infinity of other signs, while in representation there is nothing other than a relation between that which is present and that which is represented.
III
To explain this phenomenon, a third contemporary model exists, one that per-tains neither to classical or ancient mimesis nor to modern semiotics. The redefinition of the image, as distinct from the sign, has been an important trend in analytic phi-losophy since the 1960s. This trend has submitted the notion of mimesis to scrutiny, all the while resisting the semiotic and structuralist groundswell that, in the fifties and sixties, increasingly classified the image as a sign among other signs.
In pondering the status of iconicity, Goodman, Richard Wollheim, Kendall Walton, John Hyman, and Flint Schier have attempted to propose a redefinition of representation. At the heart of their reflections, diverse as they are, lies the same concern for understanding how an image can really combine two things in one: that which represents and that which is represented. For this reason it is tempting to describe this third model as the duplex concept of representation, since it is based on the intuition that a representation presents itself as other than it is and that a theory of representation should seek to model and explain this “duplicity.”
It is possible to organize all the proposed answers by imagining that they have all evolved in a space defined by three axes: an ontological axis, a logical axis, and a psychological axis. Along the ontological axis, the theories oscillate between objec-tivism and subjecobjec-tivism, according to whether the object represented is objectively or subjectively understood in the representing object. On the logical axis, it is a matter of the relation between the two that is debated: the positions vary between recourse to resemblance (which leads to mimesis) and recourse to referentiality (which leads to semiosis). Finally, the psychological axis is bounded on the one hand
by naturalism (the recognition of images is a natural cognitive facility developed by our species) and on the other by conventionalism (recognition of images is regulated by conventions that vary from one culture to another).
All the contemporary stances on the duplex character of representations situate themselves in this complex three-dimensional space: Goodman is objec-tivist, while supporting a logical theory of reference and tending toward a moder-ated conventionalism; Hyman, by contrast, defends the determining character of resemblance (in his “occlusion shape principle”); Wollheim’s theory of “seeing-in”
is ontologically subjectivist, logically midway between resemblance and reference;
Walton’s “make-believe” shifts this position toward a radical conventionalism, while the defense of “recognition” by Schier pushes it the other way, toward naturalism.4
What stays constant throughout all these variations is the concept of the image as a duplex reality: one thing is two, two things are one. All these theories, what-ever their respective merits, tend to consider representation as the relation between two things presented in one alone. For this reason, they are condemned to develop ontologically, logically, and psychologically between two poles, always still missing an aspect of representation. The more they account for the image as an object, the less they can account for the object of this image, and vice versa. Their error is to attribute a single presence shared between two objects (the representing and the rep-resented), instead of conceiving a single object shared between presence and absence.
That is why I have been working for several years on a completely different model of representation.
IV
To represent is first of all to absent.
All representation, be it visual, sonic, or even tactile, presupposes the work of absenting present matter: an image is a three-dimensional object reduced to the state of a quasi-surface, whose depth has been reduced to almost nothing, and one side of which has been transformed into the verso. Thus, to apprehend a photograph as a representation supposes that one is capable of not equally considering the edge, the recto, and the verso of the photographic image: the recto becomes the prominent surface, the edge is overlooked, the verso is the blind back of the image.
4 See Goodman, Languages of Art; John Hyman, The Objective Eye: Color, Form, and Reality in the Theory of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Richard Wollheim, “Seeing-as, Seeing-in, and Pictorial Representation,” in Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 205–26; Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); and Flint Schier, Deeper into Pictures:
An Essay on Pictorial Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Thus, a visual representation consists first of all in the absenting of a spatial dimension. For a sonic representation, it’s not exactly the same: when we hear, for example, the recording of a bird’s song, what is absented is the spatial origin of the sonic phenomenon, since we don’t consider the speaker, the stereo, or the record to be the one that sings. Also, in a certain sense all music is representative as soon as you separate the sound from its cause and no longer hear the effect of a guitar or a violin, but rather a sonic development where each sound seems to cause the following sound, whether in a rhythmic or melodic phrase.
Visual representation, like sonic representation, is the absence of presence, of a dimension of space or of the spatial source of a sound. And in absenting a presence, one necessarily presents a presence. The key to our argument is that all representation should be understood as a system of exchange that takes place within objects themselves: in constraining a dimension or a portion of space to reduce itself to almost nothing (in absenting it, that is), one, not by magic but rationally, makes something that isn’t there appear. And the representation is not initially the presentation of something absent that would exist elsewhere, but the emergence of something absent, owing to the absence of something present. One understands thus that even Malevich’s white square on a white background, the blue monochromes of Yves Klein, or Pierre Soulages’s black monochromes represent something in the sense that they absent a dimension of space and therefore also present something absent. What? At least a surface. Maybe a colored surface. Maybe a surface broken up by forms.
In this way, the great aesthetic illusion of the twentieth century—the belief that we were done with representation because we had discovered the power of abstraction—dissipates: all representation is an abstraction, the abstraction of the presence of things. And this abstraction has the necessary consequence of presenting something absent: a countryside, a face, a feeling, shapes, colors, an event, and so forth. What we see in an image, what we understand in a piece of music, is never there—the image and the music present something absent because they absent something present.
This absenting is neither a conventional decision nor a power of our cognition:
it is a constraint that the representing object exerts on our perception. Representation is a constraint produced by art and incorporated in an object by work, which forces our perception to absent a part of the presence of things. Insofar as it is a constraint, our perception can always oppose it, and I can try to consider a photograph as a three-dimensional object, observing with equal interest its front, back, and side;
I can listen to music forcing myself not to perceive the sound as the effect of an instrument. But in so doing I will need to spend considerable energy forcing myself to believe that I do not see or hear the representation, because the representational object contrives to constrain my perception from recognizing it for what it is.
The representational object is not a copy: it does not imitate another present object, but rather, it presents an absent object. What a photograph of Henry Fonda
in My Darling Clementine seems to present to me is not really Henry Fonda himself, but his absence.
But how to present an absence? All representation possesses a certain degree of determination: in presenting me with an absence, even an emptiness, the rep-resentation determines, surrounds, or defines this emptiness. If I merely trace a circle on paper, I produce a large and enveloping absence: it could be almost any-thing—me, you, a balloon, the earth—just as easily as it could be Henry Fonda’s head. In working the circle, scrutinizing it, I can constrain my perception to elimi-nate more and more possibilities: viewing a face traced in charcoal, with eyes and a mouth. I can always pretend to see the earth or a balloon, but my perception must strongly resist the drawing. By fortifying the strictures—for instance, by including a caption inscribed at the bottom of the drawing—I can force the drawing to des-ignate Henry Fonda. But the representation will never be constraining enough to be saturated, that is to say, to achieve the presence of that which is presented: this will never be the cut-off head of Henry Fonda in person appearing on the sheet of paper in the same way that Henry Fonda will never be present in his representation.
What is present in a representation is an absence, which can be strongly determined but never to the point of saturation with presence. In this way, there is no ultimate degree of realism of a representation.
A representation is thus neither an imitation nor a type of signification; it neither resembles nor refers to what it represents. It presents something absent and determines it without otherwise transforming it completely into presence.
In redefining representation this way—starting from an ontology of objects, a
In redefining representation this way—starting from an ontology of objects, a