REPRESENTATIVE THEORY

Presented by Bayu Indra Pratama

KEITH KENNEY

State of Art Representative Theories

Behaviorists attempt to observe and measure the real world directly.

Phenomenologists are exclusively interested in a person's introspective experience.

Semioticians and rhetoricians try to understand the linkages between our internal world and the external world, and that linkage is necessary, they believe, because the external world is always mediated by our senses and our mind.

Rhetoricians have investigated how humans create and manipulate symbols in order to persuade other humans,

Semioticians have been more interested in how humans (and other animals) interpret all kinds of signs, including symbols, that were created by other people.

The Concept of Representation (Saussure)

Signifier Signfied

The Concept of Representation (Pierce)

sign

objectinterpretant

The Concept of Representation (Mitchel)

Representation

Maker

ObjectViewer

Signfier

Do you see a real dancer stretching?

Are you reminded of a dancer stretching?

Does the picture look like a dancer stretching?

Or do you have an experience that isjust like the experience of looking at a dancer stretching? Do you read the language of the photograph and realize it concerns a

dancer stretching? Do you have the illusion you are in the presence of a dancer stretching?

Do you make believe you see a dancer stretching? Do you see a dancer stretching in the picture and also see the surface of the picture?

Causal Relation Theories

Transparency theory states that a camera picture represents a phenomenon because it was automatically and mechanically caused by the existence of the phenomenon and because the picture looks like exactly like the phenomenon.

Transparency theory is silent about the communication axis running from maker to viewer because it ignores the viewer and the maker.

In conclusion, transparency theory is important because many viewers, and some picture-makers, continue to implicitly, if not explicitly, believe that camera pictures are aids to vision that allow us to see the world directly. People enjoy looking at photographs of loved ones; they use photographs as evidence in courts of law, and news organizations use photographs to report on people and events.

Causal Relation Theories

A key concept of recognition theory is aspects. Wilkerson (1991) suggested that aspectseeing has five main features. One, seeing aspects involves noticing resemblances.

Recognition theory deemphasizes the symbolic relationship between sign and object because it states that picturing is generative, which means we do not need to learn the meaning of unfamiliar pictures in the way we must learn the meaning of unfamiliar words.

RESEMBLANCE THEORIES

Nonperceptual Resemblance Theory:

A nonperceptual theory states that pictures represent by virtue of similarity with their subjects. This theory has intuitive appeal because when we look at pictures, we seem to see similarities between the picture and what it represents.

Perception-based Resemblance Theory:

A painting resembles its subject if the painting has the same power to affect our organs of sight as its subject. According to resemblance theory, at an early stage of vision, at least, we just receive visual information and what we see is not affected by our beliefs, values, or background knowledge (Rollins, 1999).

Convention Theory

Convention theory holds that a picture represents whatever it does by virtue of belonging to a symbol system with rules or conventions that link marked surfaces of pictures with external things.

"almost any picture may represent almost anything" (Goodman, 1976, p. 38)

In conclusion, Goodman has made rules or conventions central to picture representation, but his theory been justly criticized as having the consequence that any picture can represent anything because resemblance between a picture and its object is rejected as a necessary condition for depicting.

Mental Construction Theories

• ,illusion,

make-believe

seeing-in

Illusionpictures give us the false perceptual belief we are in the presence of the subject. It is the eye, not the mind, that is fooled. The picture triggers a nonveridical visual experience through the arousal of visual sensations. We look at the picture and see something that is not a dancer but that nevertheless causes us to have a visual experience of seeing a dancer.

Gombrich (1977, 1982) believed we fully participate in the game of illusion by intentionally ignoring nonmatching aspects of the representation and by concentrating on following the hints of the painter, who provides sufficient clues to allow our imaginative powers to project what is not there and to complete the representation.

looking at handmade pictures is like playing children's games of make-believe because in both cases we exercise our imaginations in order to understand and appreciate fictional worlds (Walton 1973, 1990)

if we see a subject in a picture and the artist marked the picture so that we should see it, then the picture represents the subject.

make-believe

Seeing-in

According to seeing-in theory (Wollheim, 1980, 1986, 1988, 1993, 1998), we see pictures‘ subjects in the marks, colors, and textures of the pictures' surfaces. Of course, we also can see subjects in things other than pictures.

Conclusion of Mental Contruction Theory• In conclusion, with the three mental construction theories, we

perceive the picture and then we think about a scene, and our perceptions and thoughts become mixed together.

Conclusion of Representation Theories• Representation is a key concept to semiotics, phenomenology, and

rhetoric. In general, each of these fields has its own vocabulary, its own leaders, and its own assumptions, which together seem to lock scholars into a fixed and limited theoretical approach to investigating pictures. The three mental construction theories are closely tied with phenomenology, and the causal relations-resemblance-conventional theories are closely tied with semiotics. Rhetoric has a looser connection to conventional theory and the mental construction theories. Future theoretical work should attempt to facilitate communication and argumentation among these three competing, isolated fields in order to create a theoretical synthesis that would be useful to anyone studying pictures and how they represent.