Page 56 - Critical and Cultural Theory

REPRESENTATION
In 1953, M. H. Abrams summed up the development of Western
attitudes to representation by recourse to the metaphors of the
mirror and the lamp. The 'mirror' encapsulates the notion that the
mind reflects the external world (mimetic approach). The 'lamp'
embodies the idea that the mind radiates its own light on the
objects it perceives (anti-mimetic approach). According to
Abrams, the mirror-model was predominant up to the eighteenth
century when, with the advent of Romanticism, the lamp-model
began to gain momentum (Abrams 1953). The image of the mind
as an essentially passive, or at best reproductive, apparatus has
been gradually replaced by that of the mind as an active and
creative power. Today, many important developments in critical
and cultural theory are associated with a crisis in representation.
Words, sentences, thoughts and pictures are all representations
suggesting a relation between two things (e.g. 'x represents y'). But
the existence of a relation does not automatically entail the exis-
tence of the thing represented (for example, a representation of the
birth of Venus does not guarantee that such an event ever really
took place). It would therefore be misleading to conceive of repre-
sentations as reflections of a pre-existing reality.
Furthermore, neither pictures nor sentences nor thoughts repre-
sent intrinsically: as Wittgenstein has observed, a picture of a man
walking uphill could also be a picture of a man sliding backwards
downhill. There is nothing inherent in the picture which makes the
first reading more valid than the second. A representation only
represents by virtue of being interpreted and ultimately represents
anything it is capable of suggesting - that is, it has an indefinite
number of potential representational contents. The concept of
representation is also intimately connected with that of repetition:
it could be argued that words, for example, are representations
which only acquire meaning to the extent that they may be
repeated - namely, used again in different contexts. When we
speak or write, we never create anything from scratch: rather, we
reiterate what was already there, we literally re-present. Moreover,
no representation is immediately and unequivocally connected
with an underlying reality. The idea that we may be able to paint
faithful pictures of the world is becoming more and more
obsolete. This applies to visual artists and fiction writers, histor-
ians and geographers, linguists and anthropologists, sociologists
and psychologists, film-makers and designers. Emphasis is increas-

39