Tag: Representation

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Representation: Part 3

I’ve been working this week on a view of representation that takes into account Christian presuppositions. You can find my earlier posts here and here.

In what follows I respond to the nine points made by WJT Mitchell in his essay on the topic for the Critical Terms in Literary Study volume. I put his points in italics and mine in bold. The point is to sketch out ways in which the Christian description and deployment of the term “representation” would overlap and differ from the non-Christian description and deployment of same.

  1. The study of literature begins with the “naive intuition” that literature represents life (i.e. mimesis) and that humans are symbol making creatures. At the heart of God is the Son’s perfect representation of the Father (Heb. 1:3). At the heart of creation is the Logos creating the universe and calling it good (Gen. 1) which implies that creation is a perfect creative representation of what God intended to make. Moreover, both men and women are made in God’s image (Gen. 1:26). So the study of literature begins by acknowledging that humans are not just symbol-making creatures. They are symbol-made creatures who reflect a symbol-making God.
  2. Representation is not just aesthetic or semiotic. It’s political, particularly in this country. Representation is not just aesthetic or political; it is spiritual. Or rather, because it is spiritual, it is necessarily aesthetic and political. Representation is at the heart of the godhead. It manifests itself in our being as creatures made in God’s image. We live in a world sustained by God’s eternal Word. Any field of study that asks us to consider representation gets us closer to understanding metaphysical truth.
  3. Representation always costs something, be it presence, immediacy, or truth. While this claim may be true ethically (i.e. the right or wrong uses of human representation) it is not true metaphysically. For the reasons listed above, I don’t think a Christian cannot agree that representation has a necessary cost. Our image-bearing nature is premised on distance. Creation reflects God’s power and glory. He called it good although it was different than him. Christ was not suddenly sinful because he became a person. We were only able to see the Father truly because of that representation. After the fall humans can and do use God-given tools (e.g. logic, language) for ethically malicious ends, but that is different than saying that there is a cost always built into representation. In fact, it is because of representation that redemption is possible (Rom. 5:12-15).
  4. This same gap in presence, immediacy, and truth makes literature possible. It’s telling that the perfect representation of God, Christ, is the Bible character who uses the most blatantly literary form: the parable.
  5. We can never totally control representation. As soon as we start using it to communicate, it will also be a tool for miscommunication. This is ethically true before redemption, but God’s word will always accomplish what it was intended to accomplish (Isaiah 55:11) which means that even in an ethically fallen world, the metaphysics of representation are not tainted.
  6. 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 God of Christianity is both transcendent and immanent. The law forbids graven idols or images (Exodus 20:4) but establishes symbols and types that will represent the divine. God wants to communicate with humanity. He does so through creation, his revealed word, and ultimately Christ. Christianity is wary about representation primarily because of how crucial it is to the nature of God, creation, and humanity.
  7. The structure of representation includes the representation OF something BY something TO someone. My problem with this model is that it means that the audience (the one who receives the representation) is the only necessary agent in the process. It leaves the agent representing TO someone blank, as though all we can talk about is a person who imputes meaning after the fact. If the Christian story is true, then meaning and representation are ethical and personal because they both begin with God. Creation itself represents God’s glory (Psalm 19:1, Romans 1:20), and the Psalmist and Paul tell us we should be able to discern from creation the existence of the one who created the world. (Note: my thinking here is not as clean and precise as it should be.)
  8. You can classify representation according to the icon, index, and symbol triumvirate. Icons represent by resemblance, indexes represent by causation, and symbols represent via arbitrary signs. Writing is the third of these. This taxonomy gives us a way of thinking about the differences among Christ (God’s icon), people (God’s index), and the Bible (God’s symbolic revelation). One note: just because symbolism can be arbitrary doesn’t mean it has to be, however.
  9. 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. Truth. That’s why it matters if Christian presuppositions clash with those of scholars like Mitchell.
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Representation: Part 1

The core of Christian theological aesthetics is the religious experience of reestablished communion with God, mediated in this case by aesthetic structures which create, facilitate or sometimes even require a triune meeting between the work of literary art, the spiritually awakened human person, and the divine life of God revealed by faith and reason.

From Christianity and Literature: Philosophical Foundations and Critical Practice

In their book on Christianity and literature, David Lyle Jeffrey and Gregory Maillet argue that Christians experience the communion above through literature when they apprehend the true, good, and beautiful in what they read.

At the core of this experience is mimesis, literature’s imitation or representation of human life.

Jeffrey and Maillet spend an entire chapter arguing for a correspondence view of truth over and against coherence and pragmatic views. The correspondence view holds that a verbal statement is true insofar as it corresponds with external reality. The way that literature’s “fiction” can claim truth is through aesthetics, its participation in the expression of the beautiful.

Beauty is an important theological concept, one that is not ultimately subjective but, as they argue, “is intrinsically linked, inseparably interdependent, with the intellectual truth and moral beauty existent within the life and presence of the Christian God.”

All this is crucial to explaining to my students what literature is and how it fits into God’s work in the world.

My next two questions are this: what are the biblical presuppositions undergirding literature’s use of representation (conceptual), and what are some concrete ways I could teach these abstract ideas (pedagogical)?

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Representation: Part 2

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.

  1. 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.
  2. Representation is not just aesthetic or semiotic. It’s political, particularly in this country.
  3. Representation always costs something, be it presence, immediacy, or truth.
  4. This same gap in presence, immediacy, and truth makes literature possible.
  5. We can never totally control representation. As soon as we start using it to communicate, it will also be a tool for miscommunication.
  6. 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).
  7. The structure of representation includes the representation OF something BY something TO someone.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.

  1. Christ is the representation of the Father. Representation is inscribed into the ontology of the trinity.
  2. Humans are made in the image of God. We are not just defined by the fact that we use representation. Rather, we are representations.
  3. 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.