Viewed from one side, there is no representation of a thing short of the thing itself. Viewed from another side, the representation is identical to the thing itself.
1 thought on “Identity”
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Viewed from one side, there is no representation of a thing short of the thing itself. Viewed from another side, the representation is identical to the thing itself.
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Another way to phrase this – if we want to analyze the relationship between a thing and its representation, we find we can’t actually get to that relationship from either side. The thing can’t reach into the representation, nor can the representation reach out of itself to the thing. For instance, when I write “the relationship between a thing and its representation”, “thing” is of course a representation of a thing, but within the representational system we are forced to treat it as though it a the thing rather than a representation. We have to assume identity between the thing and its representation in order to conjure the concept of represenation.
This is also the light in which Magritte’s famous pipe is more than a slightly clever but rather shallow joke. “Pipe” is a representation of a pipe just as much as a painting of a pipe is, so when we say that the painting is not a pipe, what exactly are we saying? That it is the real thing, or that it isn’t?