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mentioned sentiments are strong. However, this critique of representation
has been brilliantly parodied in the memorable stories of the fiction
writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). In
The Congress
, Borges (1979:
20-2) famously considered the 'problem' of representation identified by
Rousseau:
Don Alejandro conceived the idea of calling together a Congress of the
World that would represent men of all nations
Twirl, who had a farsee-
ing mind, remarked that the Congress had a problem of a philosophical
nature. Planning an assembly to represent all men was like fixing the exact
number of Platonic types
...
...
Twirl suggested that Don Alejandro might rep-
resent not only cattlemen but also Uruguayans, and also humanity's great
forerunners, and also men with red beards, and also those who are seated in
armchairs.
The story ends with an echo of another Borges tale about cartography, in
which the 'perfect map' is devised: 'the College of Cartographers evolved
a Map of the Empire that was of the same scale as the Empire and that
coincided with it point for point' (Borges, 1981: 131).
Borges reveals the absurdity of avoiding representation and achieving
'pure presence', particularly in a world containing around 7 billion people
leading highly interdependent but geographically separated lives. For the
reasons I listed in the previous section, epistemic dependence is writ large
in the twenty-first-century world - a world Rousseau could scarcely have
envisaged when
The social contract
was published in 1762. The question then
becomes: what is included in any given representation, what is excluded (i.e.
rendered invisible or silent) and why? But representation is unavoidable for
another reason too. We might say that representation is not only a practical
necessity, but also an established social convention.
What do I mean? I mean that the
idea
of representation is part of the
Western worldview, which is why I included it in
Figure 1.5
. This idea is
predicated on a distinction between representations and representatives (on
the one side), and that being represented (on the other). As Tim Ingold and
other anthropologists remind us, this distinction is not a cultural universal,
let alone 'natural'. But it's nonetheless real for us, a distinction we rarely
(if ever) question in our everyday lives. We proceed as if the distinction is
a given, and so, in some sense, it therefore
is
. Dutch philosopher Bas van
Fraasen puts it like this: 'there is no representation except in the [important]
sense that some things are used, made or taken to represent some things as
thus or so' (van Fraasen, 2010: 511). The 'reality effect' to which Judith But-
ler and Tim Mitchell refer (following Roland Barthes) is achieved precisely
by positing a difference between things taken as objects and their repre-
sentations (even when these objects are other representations or, as with
my discussion in this section, representation in general). This difference is
especially important for representations that advertise themselves as being
'realistic' or 'truthful' because the world 'beyond' representation gets used
