Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research

University of Basra/ College of Arts

Department of English
MA studies

On Representation

Submitted by: Ahmed Hatim Abadi Ahmed

 Abstract

Representation is simply the act of imitation or the act of identification,

people identify themselves by means of their mimetic ability, when they
see themselves in others and perceive a state of mutual equality. This
paper highlights representation as an idea that has been central in
discussions of intentionality for many years . It shows representation as
outlined by key theorists and their theories in the classical and modern
ages starting from Plato who takes ‘representation’ with several
meanings and connotations in the dialogue and alters the term according
to the context in which he uses it to Aristotle who views representation
as a sign and argues that each area of knowledge is imitated in the sense
that as a human being we all learn through imitation . It explores one of
the main figures who deals with Representation in its connection with
logic who is Charles Peirce . It highlights the role of De Saussure who
played a major role in the development of semiotics with his argument
that language is a system of signs that needs to be understood in order to
fully understand the process of linguistic.
Introduction

Representation defined as the process by which language constructs and conveys

meaning ( Roland , Princeton ency) . One of the main aspects or the main component
of this process of representation is reference which means that words (texts) refer,
or create pointers to, the external world, to other words (other texts), to themselves,
or to the process of referring . The idea of representation has been essential in
discussions of intentionality for many years. But , recently it has playing a main role
in the philosophy of mind, particularly in theories of consciousness . In this period ,
multiple representational theories of consciousness, corresponding to different uses
of the term “conscious,” each attempting to explain the corresponding phenomenon
in terms of representation. Moreover , each theory attempts to explain its target
phenomenon in terms of intentionality, and assumes that intentionality is
representation ( Hall, S,1997) .

Representation, also called Representationalism . It is a philosophical theory of

knowledge based on the emphasis that the mind realized only mental images
(representations) of material objects outside the mind, not the objects themselves.
The validity of human knowledge is that called into question because of the need to
show that such images should correspond to the external objects ( Mitchell, W. 1997)

This belief , still current in certain philosophical thoughts , has roots in 17th-century
Cartesianism, in the 18th-century empiricism of John Locke and David Hume, and
in the idealism of Immanuel Kant .

Representation has been connected with aesthetics as an art and semiotics (signs).
Mitchell observes that “representation is an extremely elastic notion, which extends
all the way from a stone representing a man to a novel representing the day in the
life of several Dubliners”.

The term ‘representation’ has many definitions and interpretations. In literary theory,
‘representation’ is usually defined in three ways.

To look like or resemble .

To stand in for something or someone .
To present a second time; to re-present . ( O'Shaughnessy, M & Stadler J , pp.77)

The reflection on representation began with early literary theory in the ideas of Plato
and Aristotle, and has evolved into a significant component of language, Saussurian
and communication Studies .

Representation according to Plato and Aristotle

Since the time of the ancients , representation has played a main role in
understanding literature, aesthetics and semiotics (Mitchell, W. 1997) .
Plato and Aristotle are the main figures in early literary theory who considered
literature as simply one form of representation. Aristotle for example , considered
each mode of representation, verbal, visual or musical, as being natural to human
beings. So , what distinguishes humans from other animals is their ability to create
and manipulate signs. Aristotle considered mimesis as normal to man, therefore
considered representations as necessary for people’s learning and being in the world.
Aristotle moves on to say it was a definitively a human activity. From childhood
man has an instinct for representation, and in this respect man differs from the other
animals that he is far more imitative and learns his first lessons though imitating and
represent things ( Goran , pp, 38)
Aristotle discusses representation in three ways :

The object: The symbol being represented.

Manner: The way the symbol is represented.

Means: The material that is used to represent it.

On the other hand , Plato looked upon representation with more caution. He
considered that literature is a representation of life, yet also believed that
representations interfere between the viewer and the real. This creates worlds of
illusion leading one away from the “real things”. Plato then believed that
representation needs to be controlled because of the possible dangers of fostering
antisocial emotions or the imitation of evil. Plato does not consider that the pleasure
we feel is aimed at the representation, which is an object in its own right, and not at
what it is a representation of. Representation is, for him, transparent. It derives its
features only from what it represents, an object we can see directly through it. The
imitation of expressing sorrow is simply sorrow expressed, just as sorrow is
expressed in life. Their only difference is the underlying, imperceptible feeling that
fiction lacks and reality possesses. But imitation, as we have seen, tends to become
nature. We imitate in life what we admire in the theatre ( Long, H . pp.151)

Platonic-Aristotelian argued that “visual and acoustic spectacles accompany music

and dance, so they are subservient to the purpose of representation” . But , Aristotle
did not discriminate against literature as “intensively” as Plato (Auerbach, E., 1953).
Plato, as mentioned before, advocated “prohibiting all poetries by the hymns of God
and praise of good man”. The former, however, maintained that human beings are
mimetic creatures; the dramatists can provoke strong emotions of audiences and
invoke their empathizes. With these emotions, human beings may get closer to
“real.”

The main mean of literary representation is language . An important part of

representation is the relationship between what the material and what it represents.
The questions here are, “A stone may represent a man but how? And by what and
by what agreement, does this understanding of the representation occur?” One
understand reality only through representations of reality, through texts, discourses,
images: there is no such thing as direct or unmediated access to reality. But because
one can see reality only through representation it does not follow that one does not
see reality at all because Reality is always more global and complicated than any
system of representation can comprehend, and we always sense that this is so-
representation never “gets” reality, which is why human history has produced so
many and changing ways of trying to get it. ( Mitchell, W , 1995)

So , throughout the history of human culture, people have become dissatisfied with
language’s ability to express reality and as a result have developed new modes of
representation. It is necessary to construct new ways of seeing reality, as people only
know reality through representation. From this arises the contrasting and alternate
theories and representational modes of abstraction, realism and modernism . In
modern era , many are aware of political and ideological issues and the influences
of representations. It is impossible to separate representations from culture and the
society that produces them ( Hall, S )

In the contemporary world there exist restrictions on subject matter, limiting the
kinds of representational signs allowed to be employed, as well as boundaries that
limit the audience or viewers of particular representations. In motion picture rating
systems, M and R rated films are an example of such restrictions, highlighting also
society’s attempt to restrict and modify representations to promote a certain set of
ideologies and values. Despite these restrictions, representations still have the ability
to take on a life of their own once in the public sphere, and can not be given a
definitive or concrete meaning; as there will always be a gap between intention and
realization, original and copy ( Hall, S ,1997)

Consequently, from these definitions , there is a process of communication and

message sending and receiving. In such a system of communication and
representations it is inevitable that potential problems may arise; misunderstandings,
errors, and falsehoods. The accuracy of the representations can by no means be
guaranteed, as they operate in a system of signs that can never work in isolation from
other signs or cultural factors. For instance, the interpretation and reading of
representations function in the context of a body of rules for interpreting, and within
a society many of these codes or conventions are informally agreed upon and have
been established over a number of years. Such understandings however, are not set
in stone and may alter between times, places, peoples and contexts. It has generally
been agreed by semioticians that representational relationships can be categorised
into three distinct headings: icon, symbol and index (Mitchell, W) .

For instance objects and people do not have a constant meaning, but their meanings
are fashioned by humans in the context of their culture, as they have the ability to
make things mean or signify something. Viewing representation in such a way
focuses on understanding how language and systems of knowledge production work
to create and circulate meanings. Representation is simply the process in which such
meanings are constructed. This approach to representation considers it as something
larger than any one single representation. A similar perspective is viewing
representation as part of a larger field, as Mitchell, saying, “…representation (in
memory, in verbal descriptions, in images) not only ‘mediates’ our knowledge (of
slavery and of many other things), but obstructs, fragments, and negates that
knowledge” and proposes a move away from the perspective that representations
are merely “objects representing”, towards a focus on the relationships and processes
through which representations are produced, valued, viewed and exchanged.

Peirce and representation

Charles Peirce (1839–1914) was the founder of philosophical pragmatism and

scientist. Peirce’s central ideas were focused on logic and representation. He
distinguished philosophical logic from mathematics of logic. He regarded logic as
part of philosophy, as a standard field following aesthetics and ethics, as more basic
than metaphysics, and as the art of formulate methods of research ( Burch, R 2005)
He argued that “logic is rooted in the social principle , since inference depends on
a standpoint that, in a sense, is unlimited" .

Peirce argues that logic is formal semiotic, the formal study of signs in the broadest
sense, not only signs that are artificial, linguistic, or symbolic, but also signs that are
looks or are indexical such as reactions. He argues that “all this universe is perfused
with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs”, along with their
representational relations, interpretable by mind and the focus here is on sign action
in general, not psychology, linguistics, or social studies ( Fitzgerald, J.1980)

He argued that, since all thought takes time, “all thought is in signs” and sign
processes that the three irreducible elements of semiosis are (1) the sign (or
representamen), (2) the (semiotic) object, the sign’s subject matter, which the sign
represents and which can be anything thinkable—quality, brute fact, or law—and
even fictional , and (3) the interpretant (or interpretant sign), which is the sign’s
meaning or ramification as formed into a kind of idea or effect that is a further sign,
for example, a translation. When a sign represents by a resemblance or factual
connection independent of interpretation, the sign is a sign because it is at least
potentially interpretable. A sign depends on its object in a way that enables
interpretation, forming an interpretant which, in turn, depends on the sign and on the
object as the sign depends on the object and is so a further sign, enabling and
determining still further interpretation, further interpretants. This process is
logically structured to maintain itself and is what defines sign, object, and
interpretant.

Peirce observed that in order to know to what a sign refers, the mind needs some sort
of experience of the sign’s object, experience outside, and direct to, the given sign
or sign system. In that context he spoke of direct experience, direct observation,
direct acquaintance, all in much the same terms. For example, art work can exploit
both the richness and the limits of the audience’s experience; a novelist, in disguising
a roman à clef, counts on the typical reader’s lack of personal experience with the
actual individual people portrayed. Then the reader refers the signs and interpretants
in a general way to an object or objects of the kind that is represented (intentionally
or otherwise) by the novel. In all cases, the object determines the sign to an
interpretant through one’s direct experience with the object, direct experience in
which the object is newly found or from which it is recalled, even if it is experience
with an object of imagination as called into being by the sign, as can happen not only
in fiction but in theories and mathematics, all of which can involve mental
experimentation with the object under specifiable rules and constraints. Through
direct experience even a sign that consists in a chance look of an absent object is
determined by that object ( Fisch, M. H ,1986)
De Saussure and representation

De Saussure (1857–1913) played a main role in the development of semiotics with

his argument that language is a system of signs that needs to be understood in order
to fully understand the process of linguistics ( Culler , 1976) . The study of semiotics
explores the signs and types of representation that humans use to express feelings,
ideas, thoughts and ideologies. Although semiotics is often used in the form of
textual analysis it also involves the study of representation and the processes
involved with representation. The process of representation is characterised by using
signs that we recall mentally or phonetically to comprehend the world. De Saussure
supposed before a human can use the word “tree” she or he has to imagine the mental
concept of a tree. Two things are essential to the study of signs:

The signified: a mental concept, and the signifier: the verbal manifestation, the
sequence of letters or sounds, the linguistic realisation.

The signifier is the word or sound; the signified is the representation.

Saussure notices that signs are arbitrary: There is no link between the signifier and
the signified and are relational which means that we understand we take on meaning
in relation to other words. Such as we understand “up” in relation to “down” or a
dog in relation to other animals, such as a cat ( Barry, P ,2002)

Also , signs Constitute our world – “You cannot get outside of language. We exist
inside a system of signs”.

De Saussure suggests that the meaning of a sign is arbitrary, in effect; there is no

link between the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the word or the sound of
the word and the signified is the representation of the word or sound. For example,
when referring to the term “sister” (signifier) a person from an English speaking
country such as Australia, may associate that term as representing someone in their
family who is female and born to the same parents (signified). An Aboriginal
Australian may associate the term “sister” to represent a close friend that they have
a bond with. This means that the representation of a signifier depends completely
upon a person’s cultural, linguistic and social background. If words or sounds were
simply labels for existing things in the world, translation from one language or
culture to another would be easy, it is the fact that this can be extremely difficult that
suggests that words trigger a representation of an object or thought depending on the
person that is representing the signifier. The signified triggered from the
representation of a signifier in one particular language do not necessarily represent
the same signified in another language. Even within one particular language many
words refer to the same thing but represent different people’s interpretations of it. A
person may refer to a particular place as their “work” whereas someone else
represents the same signifier as their “favorite restaurant”. This can also be subject
to historical changes in both the signifier and the way objects are signified.

According to De Saussure , the essential function of all written languages and

alphabetic systems is to “represent” spoken language. Most languages do not have
writing systems that represent the phonemic sounds they make. For example, in
English the written letter “a” represents different phonetic sounds depending on
which word it is written in. The letter “a” has a different sound in the word in each
of the following words, “apple”, “gate”, “margarine” and “beat”, therefore, how is a
person unaware of the phonemic sounds, able to pronounce the word properly by
simply looking at alphabetic spelling. The way the word is represented on paper is
not always the way the word would be represented phonetically. This leads to
common misrepresentations of the phonemic sounds of speech and suggests that the
writing system does not properly represent the true nature of the pronunciation of
words ( Holdcroft, D. 1991)

Another point of view is the one of cognitive science and information theory, a
representation is a type of modeling our recognition that an artwork is an imitation
of the external world is one species of pattern recognition. But the representation in
every representation is also, more directly, a presentation itself. So every
representation is re-present and re-presents as it represents ( Shea , 2018) The
relation of the verbal representation to the original sensory one is one of analogy or
resemblance , which is very different. An analogy is a perceived congruity in
structural relationships between two sets of phenomena. The difference in modality
is foregrounded, and difference is accepted as an essential part of the process.

The nature of representation may become clearer if we consider the case of

translation. The translated poem is not a copy good or bad; it is a version enacted
in another medium. The nature and quality of the translation are controlled by the
translator’s skill but also by the resources offered by both the source and the target
language . All trans., i.e., is mediation, so that the aim of faithful representation is
not to copy the original but to try to do the thing that the original did in its medium
as well as that can be done in the new medium, insofar as the doing in the original
is understood by the translator. This account, which relates one verbal
representation to another, can be extended to all representation in art and indeed to
language itself as representation ( Ettobi , pp,215 )

All verbal representation is translation by its nature . A verbal representation is in

effect a translation. Target language., except that the source language. Is not
verbal; it is sensory. The point is not that direct comparison between the

Two modes of representation is impossible but simply that it is confounded by the

radical differences between the representational media, which are very different
codes.

Many recent commentators have seemed to think that the verbal representation of
experience in literature does not effect and instantiate any real presence. But it is
odd to complain that literature is an order of experience secondary to sense
experience. We should ask, rather, whether a literary (poetic) artwork represents
the same objects, in the same way as, and with the same resulting degree of
credibility as, sense experience: if so, How and how much, and if not, why and
what instead. Is verbal representation inferior to sensory representation? Plato
answers in the affirmative; the romantics answer in the negative. Sense experience
itself is, of Course, a representation; the verbal artifact, however, during the
process of reception—reading, hearing, or observing—presents itself directly to
cognition, supplanting the external world. It blocks out normal sense data,
replacing them with other data about sensation in a precoded form. “It is hard to
write any piece of literature that corresponds to anything as such, whatever it be,”
says Viktor Shklovsky in O teorii prozy ( Theory of Prose ), because “art is not the
shadow of a thing But the thing itself.” (Hall, S)

The eye sees the words on the page, in prose, only to ignore them: they are
transparent. Poetry, by contrast, is translucent if not opaque: meaning is still
conveyed but now in words whose design arrests our attention. Fundamental to the
nature of all art is that it achieves its effects by increase of order or design.
Regardless of authorial intention, most artworks show themselves to be
supercharged with design. It is traditional in Western poetics to think of the faculty
or capacity of imagination, i.e., image making, as central to literary representation,
This is indeed important . For realistic representation and verisimilitude, but It
cannot supplant the making, the craft, the shaping of the medium that evokes those
images and, as it does so, binds their elements more tightly together by form. In
poetry, the shaping is of the sensory medium (sound) and carried out largely at the
preverbal (phonological) level (meter, rhyme, sound patterning). In its heightened
design, texture, and materiality, poetry does not compete with the external world as
a species of representation: it off ers additional resources and forms of order that
are constitutive, not imitative: they enact a heightened form of representation that
creates that heightened mode of consciousness that, since antiquity, has been called
poetic . Poetry aims to show that relationships exist among the things of the world
that are not otherwise obvious; it accomplishes this by binding words together with
the subtler cords of sound. These bindings, like the relations they enact, are formal.

Even Aristotle supports this view: mimesis as “imitation” is only part of the account
of art given in the Poetics . Aristotle views imitation as a central human activity;
nevertheless, he makes it clear that the Chief criterion for drama is not spectacle,
diction, credible character, or even verisimilitude but the making of a strong plot,
i.e. structure . As for poetry, the account of the means of imitation given in the
Poetics is truncated and somewhat garbled; but several modes are identified, and the
manner of the imitation is by no means assumed to be direct or literal. The role
attributed to imitation in the Poetics has distinct limits: only some arts are imitative.
Indeed, Aristotle holds that the order of art need not be and at least once he holds it
must not be the order of reality . On the whole, Aristotle goes to considerable lengths
to differentiate the art object from the reality it imitates, and this almost entirely on
account of aesthetic design . Both imitative and nonimitative arts share this feature,
which suggests that, for Aristotle, it is design itself that distinguishes art from life.
Even in realistic and referential art, where design is a signifier for the reality outside
the artwork, the signifier is a presentational form. In all art, i.e., the artwork itself
stands as an icon for signification itself (Hall, S )

There was much interest in the 20th in language. As it manifests itself in psychology,
philosophy, prose fiction, and culture. Sigmund Freud showed that words are often
the keys to dream interpretation, because language itself writes the structure of the
unconscious and while the relation of signifier to signified is central in Saussure,
much of Jacques Lacan’s work explores processes based on links between signifier
and signifier. René Girard has argued that desire itself derives from mimesis. In
philosophy, Martin Heidegger conceived poetic language as presentational rather
than representational, presenting Being itself, a framework built upon by H.-G.
Gadamer. Reference and representation have been major subjects in The study of
narrative fiction. It has been argued by cultural theorists that the study of
representation must focus not only on the code but on the physical and cultural
means of production of that code, since these forces undeniably affect both the nature
of the Code and the uses speakers put it to. All these inquiries bear directly and
deeply on the fundamental issue of how language functions, which is to say, on what
is possible in verbal representation. All of them take language as the master trope
for human mind and action.
Conclusion

Representation is a common term. It is used in many different fields in

psychology and philosophy, linguistics and literary studies . The idea of
representation has been crucial in discussions of intentionality for many
years. But , recently it has playing a main role in the philosophy of mind,
particularly in theories of consciousness . In this period , multiple
representational theories of consciousness, corresponding to different
uses of the term “conscious,” each attempting to explain the
corresponding phenomenon in terms of representation. Moreover , each
theory attempts to explain its target phenomenon in terms of
intentionality, and assumes that intentionality is representation . As an
idea , Representation has been outlined by key theorists and their theories
in the classical and modern ages starting from Plato who takes
‘representation’ with several meanings to Aristotle who views
representation as a sign and argues that each area of knowledge is imitated
in the sense that as a human being we all learn through imitation .
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