As I work toward providing biblical presuppositions for the concept of representation, I read through WJT Mitchell’s really dense essay on the word from Critical Terms in Literary Study. What follows are nine observations about the essay (Mitchell’s main points) followed by three things I think are missing from this model.
- The study of literature begins with the “naive intuition” that literature represents life (i.e. mimesis). That’s why Mitchell’s essay is the first in the collection.
- Representation is not just aesthetic or semiotic. It’s political, particularly in this country.
- Representation always costs something, be it presence, immediacy, or truth.
- This same gap in presence, immediacy, and truth makes literature possible.
- We can never totally control representation. As soon as we start using it to communicate, it will also be a tool for miscommunication.
- Representation has always had its skeptics, from the philosophical (e.g. Plato) to the religious (e.g. any religion that prohibits idols) to the aesthetic (e.g. modernism and its rejection of representational art).
- The structure of representation includes the representation OF something BY something TO someone.
- You can classify representation according to the icon, index, and symbol triumvirate. Icons represent by resemblance, indexes represent by causation, and symbols represent arbitrarily. Writing is the third of these.
- Our theory of representation plays a key role in how we interpret the identity of a work of art, that art’s meaning, the integrity of the author, and the validity of any interpretation of that art.
Here’s what I think Mitchell is missing.
- Christ is the representation of the Father. Representation is inscribed into the ontology of the trinity.
- Humans are made in the image of God. We are not just defined by the fact that we use representation. Rather, we are representations.
- Adam and then Christ represented all humanity. That is, representation is a fundamental part of God’s redemptive narrative.
We must take this into account. Over the next two days, I will work out how these biblical concepts help us make sense of literature.