ABSTRACT
The notion of representation plays a prominent role in aesthetic criticism. The relational sense of the term, that of ‘representing’, ‘standing for’, opens up a characteristic disjunction, expressed as between ‘art’ and ‘the world’, or ‘literature’ and ‘life’. Another characteristic distinction generated by the term is that between the ‘means’ and the ‘object’ of representation. The capacity of representational art to elide these disjunctions, indeed the projection of this on occasions as an ideal of such art, is remarked upon in the story of Pygmalion in Ovid's Metamorphoses: Pygmalion creates an ivory statue with such skill that he comes to think of it as a flesh-and-blood woman, ‘to such an extent does artistry lie hidden by means of its own artistry’ (ars adeo latet arte sua, 10.252). From the perspective of semiotics (the discourse of the sign, which also invokes representation as a foundational concept in its assertion that a sign ‘stands for’ something else). Roland Barthes has treated in detail of the means by which a text can draw attention away from itself as text so as to create the ‘reality effect’, the sense of direct contact with the real. 1 Contrariwise, the distinction between means and object can lead to emphasis on the former (formalism), as the represented object recedes whilst the medium turns itself back on its own codes and conventions and engages in self-reflexive play. As is the case with all terms projected as autonomous opposites, these distinctions are open to deconstruction, but generate meaning to the extent to which, in what ways, and to what ends, they are kept distinct. Texts work within such distinctions, even when they endeavour to collapse them. Criticism and its object, often projected as separate, can also be seen as operating within similar assumptions and implicated in the same discursive strategies, by viewing them as two examples of ‘the same thing’, as, say, ‘kinds of writing’; their very projection as separate instances of discrete phenomena can be one of the means whereby this complicity is disguised.
