Representation
Each and every representation is above all else presentation, an act of showing and an act of bringing out an item by means of a sign.
One couldn’t conceive a mental, intellectual, or social stage prior to the one of representation since mankind is animal parolans. The representation is inevitable, and more or less mimetic according to its linguistic or artistic representation. If the phenomenons are fully given without delay, only the communication of the experience may be achieved thanks to the representation.
Yet, as and when the technè of our societies becomes complex, as well as its languages (artistic, data processing...), a gap is created between the world and its representation: the present evolution reveals an increase in the distance between the item and the token never equaled. Moreover the artist mediator has constantly been disparage as yielding a sacrilegious imitation of reality, without giving access to this wished presence; finally, the mimetic pleasure it conveys is traditionally condemned by the philosopher, if not by the religious man. Today, with the democratization of culture, the classical values crumble giving priority to reason, to loss of transcendence and to technological development enabling the creation of synthetic images, representation suffers a violent crisis, a “semiotic cut” (Daniel Bougnoux).
Nonetheless, despite the reject of the mimesis, literature and art still keep on representing. To represent, is in the first place to go from the tokens to the items; however it is also imitating; at last, to represent comes back to creating.
I. From the tokens to the trueness of items
Paradoxically, if the philosopher and the religious man may condemn the image to mislead mankind in his search for truth, the proselyte image enables to render sensitive what goes beyond the understanding, assuring Man of a divine presence. As a result, its necessity relies on mankind’s anxiety facing the temporary; religion and art have for a long time found some common ground, by establishing values alleged as perpetual, against the rapidity of existence. Likewise, the image enables a work of bereavement and relief. Did not the Egyptians do the same thing with the pictures of Fayoum?
Freud did not neglect stigmatizing the complex of emptiness, out from the apologue of fort-da. A child is able to sublimate the mother’s absence by playing with a reel that he throws in the distance and that he pulls back toward him. Similarly, the image works as a tranquilizer and a painful spur by the creation of an autonomous world in which the principal of pleasure is entitled to quote. It is, according to Derrida, pharmakon, both remedy and poison.
To Plato, philosophy should leave the realm of shadows and throw light on the intoxicating appearances; he draws the original separation between reality and his representation. This desire for enlightenment and truth, inner wisdom among the Ancients, eschatology among the Christians, is found again by the photographer attempting to capture light, in an animist sacrifice: the world’s luminous vibration pervades human beings and things, toward human beings and things, fascinates him, whom works in the order of imminence.
II. To imitate
In the antiquity, the will to represent has been attributed to a propitiatory ritual (“the premices”). Traditionally, the need to re-present comes from this will; to outbreak the double of the one. The re-presentation is thus an iterative structure that moves the “one” into a different spatiotemporal fact, future or past, making it in this way acceptable, because divided in two.
If in drama the mimesis is in itself the representation, Plato, in his Republic, defines the impersonator as the image creator as opposed to the creator of reality. However Aristotle re-establishes the dignity of sensitive items and the sensitive could not be identified with error or evil. The increasing ambition to represent reality reaches its peak with Zola and the Naturalists. In the 19th century, the possibility to imitate reality gains a proportion never equaled due to the analogical particularity of the photographic image: this medium only knew how to respond to what André Bazin considers a fundamental need to humanity, the desire of analogy.
To Nelson Goodman, one knows not imitate reality for the simple reason that one knows not what reality is. However Man uses all sorts of referential techniques, of which analogy. In what way then can an image be considered as reality? The reality image being the one who should relieve the most relevant information, realism appears as a norm between representation and the current esthetic and social system. Gombrich shades the meaning of Goodman’s extreme thesis as reality can be represented thanks to a mirror. Analogy always has a double aspect, the mirror-aspect and the map-aspect: an image redoubles reality and is a sign of reality, which means that it is the “code” to make the comprehension possible.
III. To Create
Photography, as opposed to painting, in it’s almost simultaneity, that short-circuits a priori the artist, has been from the start strongly criticized. “A forgery falsifies art history; an imitator of photography falsifies reality”, writes Susan Sontag. Yet firmly rooted in reality of which it proceeds, photography deceives doubly: the camera is used to enhance the value of appearances, explains Sontag. A tool or a social means to liberate the people, in contradiction it turns against itself, burying itself in a “realism” of comfort, of making truth. More than any other means, photography is capable of expressing the desires and the needs of the dominant social stratum, because photography has only an artificial objectivity. Paradoxically, photographic representation, according to Sontag, is “made anesthetic from a moral viewpoint all as much as it is stimulating from a sensory viewpoint”. By the confusion it entails, photography gathers all human stakes and ideologies on the same level of value.
Photographic representation is thus deceiving: it only shows one fragment of the world, only one moment of temporality, given nevertheless as absolute. Its interpretation is that of detail, of exception or on the contrary, of redundancy. Moreover, in all arts, including photography, the principles of which the mimesis relies on evolves therefore continuously. As a result from it, an underlying revolution takes place in our philosophical perception or interpretation of the world, facing an image, argentic or digital, which appears little by little to be auto-referenced because each steady reference is progressively removed.
Further reading
Barthes Roland, La Chambre claire. Notes sur la photographie, Paris, Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1980.
Bazin André, «Ontologie de l’image photographique» [1945], in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, Paris, Editions du Cerf, 1981.
Benjamin Walter, « L’œuvre d’art à l’ère de sa reproductibilité technique » in Essais 2, 1935-1940, Denoèl Gonthier, coll. «Médiations », 1983.
Benjamin Walter, Petite histoire de la photographie », in Œuvres II, Folio Paris Gallimard, 2000, p. 301.
Bougnoux Daniel, « Milieux, médias, médiologie », La communication par la bande, introduction aux sciences de l’information et de la communication, Paris, La Découverte, 1991.
Debray Régis, Vie et mort de l’image, Paris, Gallimard Folio Essais, 1992.
Derrida Jacques, “ La pharmacie de Platon “, in La dissémination, Ed. Seuil. Paris. 1972, p. 87.
Derrida Jacques, « La différance » (1968), Marges De la philosophie, Paris Minuit, 1972.
Dubois Philippe, L‘acte photographique, Paris, Nathan Université, 1990.
Freud Sigmund, « Au-delà du principe de plaisir », Essais de psychanalyse appliquée, Paris [1914], Paris, Éditions Payot, 1968.
Freund Gisèle, Photographie et société, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1974, p. 5-6.
Goodman Nelson, Languages of art 1968, 1976, (Les langages de l’art), trad. fr. Jacqueline Chambon, 1990.
Kant Emmanuel, Critique de la faculté de juger.
Peirce Sanders Charles, Écrits sur le signe. Paris, Seuil, 1978.
Sontag Susan, On photography, [Sur la photographie] (1973) texte traduit par Ph. Blanchard, en colI. avec l’auteur, Paris, Christian Bourgois, 1983 - 2000.
Zola Emile, « Lettre à Valabrègue », août 1864.