Page 64 - Critical and Cultural Theory

REPRESENTATION
surfaces once more: do rhetorical images evoke mental representa-
tions of real things or are they used to make the false seem true?
The empiricist approach to representation proposes a distinction
between the ways in which we interpret nature (i.e. infer the laws
of nature from the facts that it presents to our senses and to our
minds) and the ways in which we speculate about nature (i.e. form
subjective images of it). Speculations, according to this model, are
misleading: they are fictions, more or less biased and selective, that
misrepresent nature. When speculation comes into play, the mind
does not reflect genuine facts but rather acts as a disfiguring
mirror. The idea of the mind as a distorting medium has been
advocated by several disciplines. Not all of them, however, have
followed the empiricist line and dismissed subjective mental repre-
sentations as practically useless. In fact, what is often emphasized
is not the notion that the mind should be reformed so as not to
misrepresent reality but rather the idea that misrepresentation is
integral to human existence. Important developments in the study
of subjectivity carried out in the areas of psychoanalysis and
theories of ideology, for instance, have stressed that misrepresenta-
tion plays a central role in the construction of personal and collec-
tive identities: what we think we are is often a product of how our
culture misrepresents us and of how we misrepresent ourselves. 9
Most importantly, misrepresentation is an inevitable component
of perception. We always relate to reality, however mediated it
may be, as physical bodies. This entails that our sense impressions
are bound to be affected by our material circumstances. Our indi-
vidual faculties and our surroundings impact on what and how we
experience, and on how we represent what we experience to our
minds and possibly to others. Given that both our faculties and
our environment are subject to contingent variations (to do with
factors as disparate as light and climate, moods and dispositions),
it would be preposterous to assume that we could represent the
world uniformly and objectively. Objectivity is a myth designed to
make us believe that there is one proper way of seeing and repre-
senting reality - and therefore a means of marginalizing all that is

9
**~These concepts play an important part in Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic
theories and in Louis Althusser's writings on ideology. They are examined in
detail in Part II, Chapter 1, 'Ideology' and in Part II, Chapter 2, 'Subjectivity'.

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