Representation Flashcards
How to define representation?
The action of standing for, or in the place of, a person, group, or thing, and related senses (politics!)
Something which stands for or denotes another symbolically; an image, a symbol, a sign.
What are the roots of representation?
The effort to improve representations of the world is part of the story of progress associated with the Enlightenment.
Representations are partial, reflecting ideas of the time and technical capacity of the time.
How is representation intertwined with power?
The production of representation has often been associated with power, authority, privilege, and resistance
e.g. religious texts, maps.
Who is represented? What can be represented? Who controls the work of representation, and its audience?
Explain the crisis of representation.
West-based growing critique of representation.
No universal, essential truth, only relative.
Everything is context-specific and being (re)produced through representational practices
-> if nothing has essential meaning = epistemological crisis
What lies beyond representation?
Representations also move us, affect us, or generate emotions, and this is just as important as what they mean.
Maybe thinking does not always involve the manipulation in our heads of representation, but:
- Embodied practices
- Devices
- Feelings
Critiques of non-representational theory?
Masculinist
Theoretically abstract
Where is the evidence?
Difficult to operationalize methodologically (without using representation!)
Focus on what happens beyond representation means that it risks ignoring conventional social and cultural issues
Lasting role of representation?
Representations still very important to organising the world. More than just content, they are affective (move us) and this makes them especially important to politics.
But we should recognise that they are always partial, fragmentary, and will always fail to ‘capture’ the world.
