Is Representation Doomed from the Start?

Perhaps all representation is doomed to fail. It is a troubling idea, but seems possible, and even inevitable. Perhaps the hegemonic underpinnings of representations in their most basic form, language, prevent us from ever truly achieving objectivity in representation. That seems to be the aim of representation, after all. Accurate representation is objective truth. But perhaps this is unachievable. If this is all true, how are we to function in such a world?

 Heibrun’s main concern was a lack of a female canon in literature. There was not past, no history of true female readers to set an example for future woman writers. Gilbert and Gubar call this anxiety of authorship. While male writers experience and anxiety of invention, a desire to be more inventive and more successful than those who came before them, women have no foundation to build upon. There were no women writers who came before them. Their primary anxiety involved authorship in its most basic form. It was an anxiety of creating something and publishing something that was an extension—a representation—of themselves and women.

Butler then raises a related, but very troubling, concern. Is it possible that women are unrepresentable? And that a canon that truly and accurately represents female writers is impossible? If, as Butler assets, our entire notion of feminism is powered by our understanding of women as a unified, generalized, misrepresented group, the foundation of the ideology is flawed. Feminism seeks to recognize and support women as a whole. But in doing so, feminists ignore all other intricacies of the female individual. These individuals are united into the category of women solely because they are women. Race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and so on are all ignored. We thus acknowledge them as nothing but their gender. This presents a problem. Isn’t this the very generalizing and lumping together of females that feminists seek to transcend.

Butler asserts that the “presumed universality and unity of the subject of feminism is effectively undermined by the constraints of the representational discourse in which it functions” (Butler 6). We strive to represent women accurately but the representational discourse surrounding women fails from the start. The problem lies in language. When the very language that we use in our everyday lives is laden with misrepresentation, how can we ever hope to achieve accurate representation?

Professor Graban suggested that this is perhaps and issue of privilege, of hegemony. This makes perfect sense. There is no doubt that it is the privileged individuals of the world who create and propagated knowledge, culture, understanding, and rules. They determine how things are to be represented from the very beginning. They create and mold language. Take, for instance, our culture. Our language, our understanding of ideas and of words is heavily influenced by the abled, white, male hand. The problem does not lie in the misuse of representations, but rather the fault in representations from their very inceptions. Language is representation and words are symbols. When a word carries hegemonic history, as all words do, the biases of the hegemonic powers are implicit to the definition and understanding of the world. We may not notice or realize this, but it is undoubtedly true.

This all suggests something quite troubling for representation. When hegemonic misrepresentations are implicit to our representations, unbeknownst to us, is it ever possible to accurately represent anything? It is clear that this is a problem in the case of the female, as Butler argues. But, let us take a step back and look at the whole picture. If our language fails at objectivity, to it’s very core, and language is our primary means of representation, our representations must fail us as well. Does this mean that we cannot ever truly represent anything ever? Are all people, all cultures, all of the world unrepresentable?

While we didn’t read Butler’s book in it’s entirety, Professor Graban hints that a solution might exist in reexamining how we understand—how we represent—representation. Perhaps we are relying on representation too heavily. Perhaps representation shouldn't and can't be expected to reveal objective truth. We expect it to be bale to paint a clear and vivid picture of the truth. Perhaps this is wrong. With all of it’s faults, we can never rely on representation to function objectively in this way. We must, instead, take with it it’s biases. Recognize the hegemonic, privileged underpinnings and work around them. It is merely a matter of acknowledging inevitable terministic screens.