Given the fact that the term ‘representation’ implies a reduction and simplification, it is odd that this notion has always been linked with a miraculous and spontaneous production; always an addition ex nihilo. When we read Plato, and he approaches the question of false propositions (in the Theaetetus, and Sophist in particular), he immediately feels this requires an investigation into non-being, difference, identity, and other deep ontological questions. We moderns are apt to be confused by this: what is more simple than the idea that there are beliefs, and they are just as easily false as they are true? It seems Plato is tackling questions we feel are simple, but falling into yawning abysses (his own characterisation) because he lacks the logic of representation. But do we fare better than Plato here? We have solved his problem by relocating it.
The logic of representation now easily accounts for accurate and inaccurate maps. Illusion is easily explained. But the abyss now is relocated to the question of the miraculous and immaculate conception of the machinery of representation. Descartes does great work cleaning house and setting up shop, but we now have mental representations which we can’t give a sufficient account of. Kant turns Descartes’ shop into a full blown administrative office and warehouse: everything is now a representation, with its formal papers and barcode, on condition that we cannot give an account of where this representational logic and machinery emerge from, of what it is even a representation of. Things are stretched to their limits. The post-Kantians start wondering if re-presentations are in fact… presentations?
Without the logic of representation, the abyss of non-being awaits us. But with the logic of representation we have instead a groundless sliding upon a surface with no depth. This is the same problem seen from two vantages of a terrain. The truth that clings to a lie, and the artifice in even the most straightforward statement of fact. The logic of representation changes the problem, and its topology: no longer the terrifying gravity of depth and non-being, but the dizzy proliferation of surfaces, and their description, which produces more surfaces. We can thus divide two philosophical movements or instincts: the neurotic geological survey of depths that only promises to make the simplest of questions slide us into the abyss at the heart of being,—or the hysteric bricolage of the proliferation of frames upon frames and the endlessly confabulated logic of forms that rewrites itself as it maps.
Maybe the answer to the problems that the notion of ‘representation’ brought to the table—mind-body problems, the mystery of truth and meaning, the whole question of the ontology of the image and representation—is in seeing representation as not a notion among others, like [wolf], or [crowd], or [stone], but as a marker and pointer towards a problem, indicating a method or a procedure. The question is, then, never what is the status of this or that representation, this thought, or artwork, or sentence, or symbol, but rather what does this representation indicate needs to be done, what problematic does it make possible; what logics does it provide to help us avoid once again sliding unceremoniously into the abyss of non-being, like a hair down a drain.