Introduction The Problems of Representation across Cultures—Mind, Language, Art, and Politics

Are you genuine? Or merely an actor? A representative? Or that which is represented? In the end, perhaps you are merely a copy of an actor. Second question of conscience.

Frederick Nietzsche, Maxim 38, Twilight of the Idols

I

In the beginning was the word. And the word represented the world that was to come. The ancient Indian Grammarian Panini thickened the plot with his aphorism that the word (token?) represents its own form (type?). Representation became so intimate and reflexive a relationship that the word and the world could hardly be distinguished. Not only did uttering “I promise” amount to promising; in some cultures saying “I love you” or “I leave you” was deemed constitutive of actually loving or leaving. People could not remember persons and situations, objects and facts, entities and events without remembering the names and sentences that “stood for” them. The twosome relation between word and object immediately split up into a threesome relationship, first between words and mental ideas and then between ideas and external objects, and this entire complex threesome relationship claimed the name “representation.” When humans started to reflect on how this standing-for becomes possible, how an acoustic blast that takes less than a second to happen can stand for an event that takes place over a hundred years (take the pronounced words “Crusade” or “Twentieth Century”) or refer (with a twelve-letter word “Mount Everest”) to an object that is twenty-nine thousand feet high, three further wrinkles appeared.

The first wrinkle was registered when it was noticed that sentences and words (vākya and pada) could stand for states of affairs and objects only insofar as they carried meanings or conveyed thoughts or made sense. This was taken by some to show that sentences and terms primarily and directly represented thoughts, ideas, or even images in the minds of people, and these thoughts, ideas, and inner images in turn represented states of affairs and things. But according to others, thoughts and meanings were routes or modes whereby external world circumstances and items could be directly presented or represented by sentences and words. Gottlob Frege for example, claimed that he had discovered a third realm between the mental and the physical: the realm of senses (nothing at all to do with the sense organs), the modes of presentation by which linguistic entities—even false sentences—could stand for external non-mental objects.

The second wrinkle was that, with no apparent connection to language, detectable changes in facial and bodily gestures and postures seemed to represent—this time in the sense of expressing—specific inner emotional states. A frown represented annoyance; laughter betrayed hilarity, derision, and jubilation; the pallor of a sweaty face with eyeballs jutting out meant fear.

The third wrinkle came out of some fairly universal patterns of resemblance, once again not obviously linguistic but pre-verbally visual. These relations of resemblance seemed to enable certain drawable lines and figures to represent external objects and phenomena. An undulating line represented the waves of the ocean, an upward flame-like doodle represented fire, an erect triangle stood for a hill, a circle a coincidence of the starting and ending of a process. These signs were not discovered. They were made. Red lights lit up to indicate stopping, where representing amounted to bringing about. Blowing a whistle or ringing a bell—in the sense that they were intended to cause—stood for the starting or stopping of a game or activity.

Thus, representation turned out to be a maddeningly complex relation undergirding speech, art, theater, mathematical modeling, religious rituals, and eventually that management of people, plurality, power, and progress that we call politics. Political representation seemed to have little to do with statement, depiction, or resemblance, but had more to do with someone speaking or pleading or advocating for a group of people. When a lawyer represents an accused party in a legal suit, he or she builds a legal case in defense of the client. When a protest song such as “We Shall Overcome” or a protest march’s banner saying “I can’t breathe” represents a call for radical social change or a demand for justice, it does not describe anything. It hopes to transform society.

II

Distinct but not unconnected concepts of representation have thus been central to political theories of democracy, mimesis theories of the visual and performance arts, jurisprudence, computational theories of mind, and indirect realist theories of perception in both the West and the East. A carpenter, according to Plato’s Republic, imitates the ideal form of a bed in making a particular wooden bed, whereas a poet or a painter imitates that imitation in making a verbal or visual artwork representing a bed. Sautrāntika Buddhist epistemologists of the fifth to eighth centuries took our perceptions of the world to be mediated by constructed mental images of external objects, which were in themselves constituted by imperceptible atoms. Even in the twenty-first century, philosophers such as Jerry Fodor upheld a “Representational Theory of Mind” that takes thinking as rearrangements of mental representations. Beginning with J. S. Mill’s Representative Government, Western theories of Democracy have debated the idea of elected legislators “representing” or speaking for the people who vote them into office.

While in each of these areas the concept or concepts of representation have been explored and debated, what has been relatively rare is an engagement with problems of representation that straddle different branches of philosophy as well as different Western and Eastern traditions of thought. We need to problematize representation as mimetic image, as semantic and musical meaning-making, as the mirroring of nature, as the possession and construction of general concepts that stand for any one among an indefinite number of particular objects of a kind, and finally as speaking for and deciding on behalf of a collectivity. One ambitious way of connecting these different notions of representation would be, first, to try to formulate, as simply and straightforwardly as possible, one single overarching fundamental problem of representation. Out of our predictable failure to do so should emerge distinct, but interconnected, notions of representation.

Of course, all meaningful representation need not be “clear and distinct.” The relation we express by the verb “represent” when we say “Magritte’s painting Personal Values represents the unequal values a certain individual assigns to the humdrum accessories and furniture of private daily life” is far from clear or logically precise although the figures on Magritte’s canvas have no haziness about them. Magritte’s standard background is the quintessentially clear blue sky studded with white clouds. And “clouds” associatively signify unknowing, constant shape-change, and evanescence. In Japanese philosophical aesthetics we encounter the elusive concept of yugen, deriving from yu, meaning “clouḍ” And a yugen-attuned literary or art work is supposed to resist any kind of analyzable representational reading. Yugen, we are told, is a compound word, made out of yu and gen, meaning “cloudy impenetrability,” and the combined meaning “obscurity,” “unknowability,” “mystery,” and “beyond intellectual calculability,” but not “utter darkness.” A yugen-style work of art or theater does not at all represent (say) anything determinate, but what it makes us feel (what it shows) is not altogether beyond the reach of human experience. Thus, it would be wrong to take this “cloudiness” for something experientially valueless or irrelevant to our everyday life.

III

So, what exactly is the philosophical problem of representation? I think there is more than one problem of representation. Let us distinguish at least four of them here, each in the form of an interrogative.

1. 1. Should representing be seen, like mirroring, as a one-way relation, or can it be a two-way relation? Even a mirror image, actively perceived by the mirrored person, influences the latter. When a woman attempts a hair-do in front of a mirror, the mirror “representation,” consciously or unconsciously, brings about subtle but crucial decisions about her social self-presentation. So much so, that in the aesthetic of some medieval Indian love poetry, the mirror is given the status of a woman’s girlfriend-consultant-companion. Of course, a piece of furniture or stone when mirrored in a glass does not get changed by its own reflection, although some interior decorators would insist that a mirror wall makes the room “look” larger. Consciousness thus may be the capacity to reorient one’s being in the world by representing the world and oneself in it. To be conscious is to be able to change by representing. Even if representation (political, artistic, democratic, novelistic, or theatrical) is deemed one-way, there is another sub-issue: is representation active or passive; can it just happen to occur (as when the moon is represented in a puddle) or must it be done or performed?

2. 2. Must representation presuppose a reality outside, which is reflected, depicted, spoken about, or spoken for, or could the representations bring about, de novo, the representee (what it represents) while creating the illusion of mirroring or picturing an independent world of objects, facts, or events? Or, as a possible middle position, could one take the representee as a partly pre-existent given but partly constructed, organized, or given shape by the acts of representation?

3. 3. How should we interpret or manage radical disagreements among representations of the allegedly same representee? Suppose one representation bolsters the claim that the Bolshevik October revolution made Russian society more just, whereas another historical representation spawns the judgment that the revolution made it more unjust than Czar-ruled Russia. Should one go for an egalitarian perspectivism of alternative standpoints or try a synthetic integrationism? Or are some perspectives closer to facts that are “truer” or “more useful” than others?

4. 4. How is the ethics of representation related to the ontology of representation? Should we try to be pragmatists or happiness-maximizing utilitarians in choosing or rating representations of a certain situation, or should we simply aim at truth, consistency, and completeness of description or depiction, both in poetics and in politics?

IV

The collection of essays on these and other problems of representation that we present in this special issue of Philosophy East and West begin with the philosophy of mind and language. A very wide range of “mental” vehicles of representation have been proposed by late twentieth-century philosophies of cognition: “thoughts, concepts, percepts, ideas, impressions, notions, rules, schemas, images, phantasms” (see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on “Mental Representation”). Our opening essay, by Christian Wenzel, gives an overview of the history of Western ideas about the nature and function of mental representations from Aristotle to Jerry Fodor, via Immanuel Kant, who divided representations (Vorstellungen) into sensible intuitions and concepts of understanding. But then Wenzel compares these Western ideas of mental representations with the Yogācāra Buddhist technical notion of inner (half imagistic and half conceptual) “vikalpas.” Wenzel shows carefully that the Buddhist epistemologists’ issues regarding the intentional structure (ākāra) of a momentary cognitive event that represents its object are uncannily similar to the issues discussed today in analytic philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.

Taking reference as a basic element as well as a variety of representation, Monima Chadha’s essay also deals with a common anxiety shared by contemporary Western and classical Indian/Buddhist traditions: what, if anything, does the term “I” stand for? Chadha critically but sympathetically examines reasons offered for the negative answer that it stands for nothing at all. Some recent Western philosophers argue that the descriptive content associated with the term “I” is too thin to support reference to a diachronically re-identifiable particular. Classical Buddhists in the Indian tradition offer a novel reason why the first-person singular pronoun does not refer to anything. The meaning (in the Buddhist case the exclusion) associated with the term “I” systematically misrepresents or mis-describes the psychophysical bundle it is supposed to pick out. All representation, of course, under such an extreme empiricist momentarism would at best be practically useful fiction-mongering.

From the Buddhist theory of “empty reference” we move next to the early Chinese philosophy of language. Chris Fraser shows how ancient Chinese theorists of language avoided naive mental representationalism and instead grounded the meaning and use of words in social practices. Although the Confucian tradition did worry about “correctness of names” (zheng-ming), in general classical Chinese thinkers emphasized the action-guiding functions of language, focusing at least as much on the use of language in teachings, instructions, and conduct-governing laws as in reporting facts. Even for the Mohists and Xunzi, the use of words to represent objects and situations is accounted for in terms of social practices for distinguishing different kinds of things and associating names with things of the same kind. For these theorists, pragmatics explains semantics. In the beginning it was not the structured depiction of reality but the deed.

Tracking the political/practical problem of representation in European history, Sudipta Kaviraj raises distinct conceptual questions: “Why is representation important in the functioning of the modern state? . . . [W]hen is representation ‘good’ in the sense of being real and effective, and under what circumstances does it achieve what it was meant to—when does it not become a deception or distortion. . . ?” For example, one major unsolved issue in the political theory of representation has to do with the exact nature of the “generality” of the general will that a democratic representative is supposed to speak and work for. Kaviraj takes the most unexpected turn at this point in his article. He proposes a solution to this problem in terms of the Kashmiri Aesthetic idea of “de-personalization,” which he succinctly characterizes as “a process of universalization that also produces an extreme individuation.” In unabridgeable detail, his nuanced essay dares us to consider if the Indian literary aesthetic reflections on how affective heart-sharing is possible in the audience or readers of a play or poem can bring clarity to some troubled questions in the political theory of modern democracy.

The next essay, by Ralph Weber, focuses on the paradox of distance that lies at the core of political representation. The recognition—that is, the understanding and acknowledgment—that the representative has to be close enough to those represented and at the same time be unlike them is crucial for effective and good popular representation in practice and theory. Weber rejects the ongoing attempts to reduce popular representation to an expression of the will of the people. This results in a plastic representation that in fact fails to mirror anything at all. Representation turns out to be an active relationship that involves bonding with the represented and knowing their circumstances, but then also, from a distance, reflecting, imagining, and keeping a check on government. Using some concepts from Chinese social philosophy, the essay ends by claiming that only such critical—not too close, not too distant—political representation could meet the demands of a democratically hedged shi-conception of popular representation from above.

For a representation to be just and politically salutary, if we have to be close to the represented rather than remote and objective, what should a reporter do when reporting rape and its social repercussion? Should they come equally and empathically “near” the violated victim and the rapist perpetrator and the outraged populace and the indifferent policemen or the conniving or moralizing politician?

From the emerging discipline of philosophy of journalism, Swati Bhattacharjee raises difficult questions about the media representation of rape. The media do not just “re-present” all of the current events, they choose what and how to report. Choice entails the responsibility to be fair and equitable to all sides. Reporters need to help audiences understand what a piece of information means. The bad choices journalists often make are usually attributed to sensationalism, in some cases leading even to charges of a “second rape” by the media. An act of sexual violence has multiple and complex meanings. Bhattacharjee’s essay hopes to help journalists make ethical choices when reporting rape.

From media ethics we then move to the dynamics of representation, especially of displacement, in motion pictures. Realistic movies, for all their “magical” absurdity or “revolutionary” messages, are supposed to represent life as it was, is, or will be. Moinak Biswas’ essay on the limits of representation takes a close look at the Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak (1925–1976) and his 1962 film Subarnarekha (“The Golden Line”). The film responds to the socially cataclysmic partition of Bengal in 1947, raising the experience of homelessness to the level of a universal predicament. This required an approach where representation is “not in place,” since the film’s form contemplates the processes of dislocation, death, and madness by working out spaces of connection. Thriving on these connections, Subarnarekha often ends up mirroring that space of unconstrained connection and recombination that we call human consciousness. “How does one portray something like homelessness as a general symptom of civilization in the twentieth century?” Biswas asks. You may try portraying by straying, where the gaps and omissions—the goings away—constitute at once the failure and therefore the success of representation.

Do we also go beyond the limits of representation in music, especially instrumental music, which eschews linguistic lyrics? There is an age-old disagreement over whether music is representational art at all. Some argue that the melodies and harmonies of notes in undulating pitches must be enjoyed and understood in formal terms because they cannot and need not represent anything external to them, while others resist this austerity of formalism by “hearing” meanings in musical sound. Meilin Chinn negotiates this disagreement by borrowing a naming convention from Chinese philosophy whereby what music represents could be called “the great.” Developing this idea of art’s aspiration to represent the great, Chinn suggests that instead of asking how music is like other meaningful phenomena we should be asking how other meaning-bearers are like music.

There is a certain inchoate analogy between music and mystical communication, because both seem to try (and perhaps succeed by failing) to mean the ineffable. The last essay in the present collection deals with a mystical religious deployment of conceptually unanalyzable representation in Hindu Tantra theory and practice. A Tantric diagram (called yantra—originally meaning a machine or a mechanism) is supposed to “mean” something.

But Tantra’s metaphysics is thoroughly non-dualistic. There is only one reality—a single vibrant consciousness—in the universe. How can tantric meditation on the worshipper’s body, which is identified with the cosmos, consist of the dualistic device of a schematic representation standing for some other transcendent reality? After problematizing “representation” in the monistic Tantrism, Sthaneshwar Timalsina’s essay explores the transformative affective intentionality of tantric visualization. In order to capture the embodied nature of meaning in the monistic tantric paradigm of representation, he deploys the concept of saṅketa as a tantric category to address the function of suggestive indication whereby a consciousness-transforming representation is established. Gleaning primarily from the text Yoginīhṛdaya, Timalsina discusses three sorts of spi/ritualistic representation by speech, gesture, and maṇḍalas. The final argument of the essay is that these “sacred representations” do not merely “present again” a reality presented in experience. They transmute the practitioner and her corporeal selfexperience itself.

V

A couple of years back, when we first conceived of this special issue of Philosophy East and West, we were focused as much on crossing the Western-Asian border as on straddling sub-disciplines of the humanities— such as philosophy of mind, language, aesthetics, politics, and religious studies. But now, after deep reading of the invited but carefully and critically refereed essays, we realize the philosophical complexity and fecundity of the very concept of representation. The need to reexamine this concept from the perspectives of epistemology, theory of meaning, semiotics, metaphysics, political theory, democratic-policy studies, foundations of mathematical modeling, voting theory, poetics, philosophy of art, cognitive neuro-psychology, music theory, media studies, film theory, and phenomenology of spiritual practice goes well beyond the demands of comparative philosophy or the inter-cultural history of ideas. Representation is intrinsically intriguing.

In 1992, this journal published a series of articles by stalwarts like Daya Krishna, Richard Rorty, and Robert Solomon on the topic of rationality. When philosophers spoke or wrote about different kinds of rationality then, I felt an unease about how one could decide if the same concept was being used or understood differently across ethical, economic, and logical spheres, or whether utterly different concepts were being verbalized by the same-sounding predicate: “rational.” It is reasonable to have a similar unease about different kinds or senses of representation. The verb “to represent,” when it signifies what an elected representative of a certain community or constituency does as she speaks (votes or deliberates or debates) on behalf of them in the House of Commons, and the verb spelled the same way when it means how my mental image of a rhododendron blossom relates to the actual flower, may be two entirely different words or the same word with two different senses. How can one tell? Artistic, semantic, and political “representations” could mean one concept with many facets or totally different concepts expressed by the same word—like “mean” or “bank.” But I think a more connected and deeper set of insights can be accessed if we treat them as distinguishable senses of the same concept. Drawing fine distinctions and then seeking a complex pattern of unity among them is a time-tested method of getting a more bountiful philosophical crop.

Finally, the seduction of the concept or concepts of representation, I surmise, is partly attributable to its—yet to be excavated—connection with the concept of imagination. A thought, Wittgenstein remarked, is a logical picture of a possible situation. It is perfectly legitimate to replace the word “picture” here with the word “representation.” Just as such representation of possible situations is involved in human and social relations, in conceiving and executing art works, in social and economic planning, in historical or forensic reconstructions of the past, and most importantly in music, dance, and the acquisition of techniques and skills, in each of these contexts acts of imagination as presenting the absent—with different purposes or without any purpose—perhaps constitute a common core of all acts of representation. Leading a revolution guided by the ideal of radical social change, and political activism for fairer representation of a social group may thus turn out to be as much a work of imagination as acting in or directing a play or movie or writing a novel or composing a symphony.