Representing

...the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. The cause of this again is, that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general; whose capacity, however, of learning is more limited. Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, 'Ah, that is he.'

-- Aristotle, Poetics (I.iv)

Look, Papa, oxen...

-- Daughter of Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, upon
discovering the cave paintings at Altamira

The latter epigraph seems to offer an illustration of the first. "Look, Papa, oxen," is a moment of "Ah, that is he." It is the natural corollary, the reverse process of representation -- to recognize the thing represented, and to express this recognition in an act of reiteration. Thus, the girl re-represents the representation in the language at her disposal. In so doing she illustrates the process by which the mind establishes and transmits information through representation -- as she pronounces "oxen," I can see not only the real thing, but the representation upon the wall. I understand through her experience both the real and the represented, the literal and the figurative, the thing itself and the image. In reprinting the words here, I provide the next step in the representational chain -- "oxen," in the context of "Look, Papa," conjures not only oxen and pictures of oxen, but a moving picture of the process by which such conjuration takes place. I see oxen, cave paintings, and a young girl having that pleasurable moment Aristotle describes -- the pleasure of a recognition.

What all of this amounts to is a poem constructed of other poems, a representation representing the series of representations preceding it. In Plato's view, each representation gets further away from the essence of the true thing, which in this case is "the ox." (Of course, even the real ox, for Plato, is an inexact replica of the ideal form of the ox -- but Plato's arguments will have to be dealt with at another time; for our purposes, we'll just call the "oxen" real oxen.) Aristotle takes a different view, and allows for imitation or representation as a natural activity, an activity central, if not fundamental, to learning anything about the world. For Plato, we have a strict opposition between physis and mimesis -- thing and image, real and represented. This is a distinction that will remain more or less intact up to our present day. Derrida famously attempted to deconstruct the opposition, writing of "Physis in differance": "...in this we may see the site of a reinterpretation of mimesis in its alleged opposition to physis." In a way, Aristotle's idea of poiesis allows for this. He sees a didactic and ethical function in representation; and insofar as this is the case, it seems logical that we admit that the imitation (Aristotle is specifically dealing with tragedy here) is not simply an imitation, not merely an inexact replica of something, but is a thing in itself. The Greek word poiesis suggests as much, since it has the connotation of "making." The representation is an object in itself, and lends itself to further representation. The two are not entirely distinct, but also not entirely separate -- they are bound together in unending relation. Thus, Derrida says we do not reject, but reinterpret the opposition. Reinterpretation is his general project, not destruction (as many mistakenly believe). He sums up the project like this:

Thus one could reconsider all the pairs of opposites on which philosophy is constructed and on which our discourse lives, not in order to see opposition erase itself but to see what indicates that each of the terms must appear as the différance of the other, as the other different and deferred in the economy of the same (the intelligible as differing-deferring the sensible, as the sensible different and deferred; the concept as different and deferred, differing-deferring intuition; culture as nature different and deferred, differing deferring; all the others of physis - tekhne, nomos, thesis, society, freedom, history, mind, etc. - as physis different and deferred, or as physis differing and deferring.

What I'm interested here is "culture as nature different and deferred, differing deferring." It's important that he qualifies in this way as well: changing the past tense to the present participle, emphasizing the present action of the difference, the ongoing nature of the process.

Emerson likewise emphasizes the process and poetics of representation. For Emerson, all our language activity is a kind of poetry, all speech and writing a fundamentally creative, and, thus, poetic kind of action. In a reinterpretation of the ancient chicken and egg question of the thing and its image, he sees nature itself as containing the germ of its own representation:

For all poetry was written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.

So nature itself is a kind of text to be read, a representation of some abstract qualities which we try to decipher -- or, more precisely, with which we attempt to enter into relation. And such efforts necessarily constitute an inexact science. Naming is always subjective, and language and poetry are nothing but the invention and arrangement of names. For Emerson, this subjective process, which we share with one another in the form of all communication -- pictorial, linguistic, musical -- is the essence of poetry, and the essence of life. The foundation of our knowledge, then, is not a fixed point, a definite object, but rather a function. It might be seen as a kind of atomistic process of arrangement of parts -- with the caveat that every part partakes necessarily of an inaccessible whole that inspires the process itself:

Beyond this universality of the symbolic language, we are apprised of the divineness of this superior use of things, whereby the world is a temple, whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures, and commandments of the Deity, in this, that there is no fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense of nature; and the distinctions we make in events, and in affairs, of low and high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol.

And this symbolic language is seemingly infinite in possibilities:

We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.

By this formulation, each time we redeploy our descriptive tools we create a new significance. Thus, even Pierre Menard's "reiteration" of Don Quixote can be seen as neither strictly physis nor mimesis: it is a poetic creation, a new thing partaking of the old, an example of nature differed and deferred.

This is perhaps all perfectly acceptable, but does not necessarily get us anywhere nearer an answer to the question: why, exactly, are we "the most imitative of living creatures"? I won't pretend to have any more of an answer to this than anyone else does. But these remarks were occasioned by two recent attempts to represent to us various theories on this subject. Two recent books, reviewed in the New York Review of Books, suggest opposing theories, which the reviewer, William H. McNeill, would like to reconcile. The first, from R. Dale Guthrie, suggests a rather Aristotelian viewpoint: humans of the paleolithic era painted the caves for fun. With little else to concern them, in a time prior to what we think of as "religion," he suggests that such representation is entirely natural, and the cave paintings are evidence of a time when humans had a kind of unmediated relation to enjoyment and desire. The pleasures of the hunt and the proximity to the animal world naturally led to its depiction on the walls, just as desiring males would represent images of the sexualized female form.

This is a pleasing sort of thesis, but is redolent of a certain kind of nostalgia that we may want, or need to resist. McNeill certainly does -- which is why he wishes for a reconciliation with the second view, as offered by Gregory Curtis. Curtis argues (from an art historical point of view; Guthrie's is more anthropological and scientific) that there is a religious motivation -- that the hunters sought to appease the spirits of the animals killed in the hunt, by providing them, even if only in the form of the painted representation, with a comfortable home in the caves. This is a compelling argument, and one McNeill seems to favor -- and certainly one that resonates with our own understandings of our founding mythologies: we represent in order to explain, to comfort, to assuage our fears of the unknown. The notion of representation as a sign of respect to the represented -- in this case the animals -- is also one that has stayed with us. Consider Bernard Malamud:

Literature, since it values man by describing him, tends toward morality in the same way that Rober Frost's poem is "a momentary stay against confusion." Art celebrates life and gives us our measure.

The idea of art giving "us our measure," is very much a reiteration, and thus a representation for our time, of the Aristotelian poetical ethics. And the notion of the inherently ethical quality of representation -- I care about something, therefore I write about it -- seems to go all the way back to the cave.

Today, as I've written elsewhere, representation is a complicated thing. Every day we deal with an administration driven to obscure the facts behind a megalithic wall of simulation. That the institutions of power would tell lies to obscure their motives, or to cover up their mistakes, is surely neither new nor surprising. But what we may need to take heed of is the slipperiness of the slope. There is always the danger with those in power to begin to privilege the power itself over the ends to which it was meant to be applied. This is a kind of nihilism, through which officials will abandon every principle so as to maintain power, thus eliminating the importance of ends in favor of the means themselves. Such can be the case with simulation, as opposed to representation -- and the slope to simulation can be seen today as correlative to the slope to corruption of power. The two means work together to justify one another. With the current President, his "representations" have slipped more or less into the realm of pure simulation, no longer bearing any relation to the "truth." Bush and Cheney substitute consideration, reevaulation, and action with repetition, in an attempt to somehow bring about a situation by simply making it up -- or at least of getting away with whatever it is by making their version of the world real enough for the audience. The world they discuss is one in which the mission is always accomplished and yet the war is never over. This paradoxical situation doesn't seem to refer to anything but itself. As the movement implodes, it only gets more and more difficult to identify even a coherent ideology beneath it. At least with ideology, no matter how thickly veiled with propaganda and bullshit, one knows what to look for. To revisit Baudrillard:

...it is no longer a question of the ideology of power, but of the scenario of power. Ideology only corresponds to a betrayal of reality by signs; simulation corresponds to a short-circuit of reality and to its reduplication by signs. It is always the aim of ideological analysis to restore the objective process; it is always a false problem to want to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum.

Of course, some people have another way of describing the Bushian manipulation of the truth: they just call it lying.