Beyond Representation?
We are consumed by an obsession with representation, which permeates every aspect of our lives—from politics to art, to the mundane realities of the workplace. Representation has become more than just a mode of thinking; it has evolved into a culture, a morality, a totalizing framework in which we now reside. This fixation on representation—on being represented, on ensuring our presence is captured, and on having representatives to stand in our place—dominates us.
We equate thinking with representing, fabricating concepts of things and then forcing reality to conform to these newly invented constructs. Take the concept of "creativity," for example. In this framework, "innovation" is often isolated as the key predicate—a defining trait that represents creativity. However, "innovation" manifests differently in various contexts, such as in an artist versus an engineer. If we fixate on a narrow definition of innovation, say only valuing technological advancements, we ignore the unique ways creativity expresses itself in other fields. Our fetish with innovation reduces the concept of creativity, forcing it into a rigid framework that fails to capture its diverse expressions.
Representation is the act of repetition—an unthinking, mechanical replication of what is identical, similar, and familiar. It reduces the vibrant, dynamic experience of the world to something already recognized and agreed upon—existing values, established ways of thinking, feeling, and perceiving. It is a mere placeholder for the richness that once pulsed with spontaneity, potentialities, and singularities. Van Gogh’s sunflowers are not just representations of flowers or "the beauty of nature"; they are an exploration of the often hidden forces that animate life, captured in the form of a humble yet profound flower.
The very term "re-presentation" suggests a process of reduction: it is a second-order presentation, an abstracted version of something that has already faded. Our focus shifts away from engaging with experience itself, with reality in its thickness and indetermination, and towards maintaining the concept that stands in its place. To continue the examples from last week, in politics, it is not about understanding what the people want and their ever changing needs and realities, but about constructing a consistent and logical concept of political representation via policies and institutions. Similarly, in cinema, it is not about capturing the singular experience of being a minority on screen, but about selecting an identity, a person, who can legitimately represent them. These are the perverse pleasures of representation—the singular becomes the individual, the chaos becomes a cosmos.
Representation gradually takes on a life of its own, increasingly detaching itself from the object it is meant to depict. Over time, it evolves into an autonomous entity, governed by its own internal logic and rules, rather than maintaining any intrinsic connection to the original object or experience. To be deemed legitimate, representation must adhere to certain moral standards and tests that often dictate who can rightfully represent, and what constitutes a “good” or “bad” representation.
These standards do more than merely guide the act of representation; they introduce a mediation that acts as a barrier, further distancing us from the true reality of the object in question. This imposed morality transforms the purpose of representation from faithfully conveying the original experience or object to ensuring compliance with external norms. In doing so, representation becomes more about upholding a predetermined structure.
From the outset, both the subject and the object of representation are constructed within pre-established boundaries, reinforcing existing ways of thinking and preserving current values and perspectives. This is why representation fails as a form of thought—it has become a fantasy, a fancy, rather than a form of thinking. Its purpose is not to engage with the enigmatic and often chaotic nature of human experience, but to reinforce the status quo. We are not yet thinking, we are representing: repeating, maintaining a prescribed morality, a fixed politics, a predetermined way of being. Representation severs us from the pulsations, vibrations, swirls, forces, flows, and surges of reality that could touch the mind, unmediated. There is more to the world than what representation can capture, and it is precisely this excess—what lies beyond representation—that must be thought.
Left unchecked, we will continue to extend representation, endlessly creating more elaborate abstract concepts meant to stand in for objects that have no real existence. Going back again to representation in film, one can never genuinely capture the experience of an entire minority on screen (although this is what is supposedly at stake with the question of representation in film); this pursuit seems driven primarily by a desire to satisfy the moral demands of representation. True thinking will not emerge from our desire to represent—it must arise from somewhere else, beyond the confines of representation.
Caught between its dual objectives of constructing conceptual frameworks and addressing the demands of concrete lived experience, philosophy seeks a delicate middle ground. It navigates the tension between the logical, rational reality mediated through concepts and the often tumultuous, nuanced, and rich reality of lived experience.
This dualism in its modern iteration has troubled philosophy since Kant. On one hand, Kant emphasizes activity, spontaneity, and freedom, suggesting that knowledge, morality, and art emerge from the mind's creativity and imagination. This perspective fosters a philosophy of active engagement, where reality is seen as something to be shaped and transformed. However, this same activity is distanced from our direct experience—what we actually perceive are merely the results of this conceptual activity, not the process itself. We don't experience freedom in its true form; we only grasp a concept, a representation of freedom. Our morality is validated only by adherence to a universal general law, and art risks being reduced to mere formalism. Thus, while Kant’s critique seeks to inspire transformation, it also imposes limitations that confine the mind within predefined paths, ultimately reinforcing the very realities it seeks to challenge.
This tradition is further solidified by Hegel, with his notion of infinite representation, where everything in reality is subject to conceptualization, and nothing escapes representation. In this view, nothing in the world holds meaning unless it is represented, articulated, or given a concept. There are no trees—only the concept of a tree. In contrast, phenomenology, existentialism, and postmodernism prioritize direct, unmediated engagement with reality through art, experience, and experimentation.
How can we escape the suffocating grip of representation, with its pervasive logical and moral demands that infiltrate every aspect of our lives? As postmodernism suggests, one possible approach is through experimentation—the notion that thinking requires a creative disruption, a shock, that forces us to break our habitual tendency to represent. We will explore more of this next week.