Questioning Representation

The very idea that we could have a theory about mental or linguistic representations which would not be a "game" theory --which would find representations which stood in "natural" rather than conventional relations to the objects represented--is so odd that only something like Heidegger's view of the West as obsessed with the "metaphysics of presence" can account for it.

(Rorty 1982, 133)

[The] linguistic turn may be seen as a device for continuing to treat thoughts as objective and utterly disparate from mental events, without having recourse to the platonistic mythology. There is therefore a danger in reversing the priority of language over thought ...: the danger of falling back into psychologism.

(Dummett 1993, 129)

The Danger of Falling Back into Psychologism

There are two ways in which postmodernity has been defined, or defines itself, as an event of representation. On the one hand, there is the approach usually associated with cultural studies, post-colonial theory, postmodern theory and literary theory. On this account of post-modernism--an account more often described by its detractors than put forward by any actual proponents--there is nothing outside representation. Truth, the real, legitimation, philosophy and the world are effects of textuality. This strong constructivism or representationalism is rarely, if ever, met with, and tends to provide a point of lament rather than any actual target. Nevertheless, there is a dominant movement across a number of disciplines that affirms the primacy and limits of representation. When Richard Rorty (1982) defines philosophy as a "kind of writing" he expresses a typical uptake of post-structuralism that sets itself the task of overcoming foundationalism, legitimation and the questioning of the world in any grand sense. This branch of postmodern theory is remarkably homely. It stresses the inevitability and desirability of remaining within the world, and at one with the domain of representation. The idea of a critical or transcendental position is not only deemed impossible but is criticized for its alienation from everyday life. Against the legitimating meta-narratives of modernity, post-modernism returns all those grand truth claims to the domain of representation.

The second way in which postmodernity is characterized by the problem of representation is in both the post-structuralist and conservative critiques of the first position. ¹ Representation is targeted in many post-structuralist theories as the very problem of overcoming a history of Western thought that has subordinated itself. ² The idea that there is a logic--an ultimate ground or foundation of the given--ties thought to some outside or some "proper image" of itself. Ideas of being, truth, presence logic, or the real have defined thought as re-presentation: the faithful image, copy or doubling of the present. ³ Western thought, it is argued, has always posited some unquestioned "transcendence" or being that is there to be represented. To liberate thought from representation would be to render thought ungrounded. No longer an act of mimesis or recognition, thought would have to be responsible for its own event. The postmodern idea that all we have are representations of the world with no possibility of an ultimate presence is still too foundationalist--for representation then comes to stand in for some grounding logic or condition. Thus, both Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault attack the very notion of the "signifier," the idea that there is a representation, sign or token that is other than some presence or sense (Derrida 1978, 281; Foucault 1972: 229). From this critique of representation as signification there are two possibilities. The post-structuralist endeavor, undertaken by Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Irigaray, is to question the very project of a grounding logic, a project that they see as exemplified in the modern motif of representation. This strand of poststructuralism is deeply critical of the structuralist appeal to sign systems, semiotics and representational conditions, conditions that attenuate the final moment in a Western tradition of perpetual self-grounding (Deleuze 1994 xix; Derrida 1978, 155; Foucault 1970, 208; Irigaray 1985, 133). How can the representational domain be posited as the limit point of our...