Representational Discourses

I. A representation constructs a visual or mental image of the object of a physical or imaginary gaze and, by adding metaphors of self, constitutes a subject of this gaze. A representation is thus a "discourse" that constructs an object and constitutes a subject of a physical or imaginary gaze.

A. Wordsworth’s "Elegiac Stanzas" recounts the process by which the poet matured from one representational discourse (one way of representing the object world and of constituting a self) to another.

1. The poet’s first representational discourse constructs, with past tenses, an exterior object of the poet’s past gaze: a calm, unchanging, eternal sea and castle ruins. Through personification, it constitutes a calm, blissful, happy, past inner subject of this gaze.

2. The poet’s second representational discourse constructs a present exterior object of the poet’s gaze: a stormy, changing, mortal sea and castle ruins. Through personification, it constitutes a moody, dispairing, past inner subject of this gaze, who is seeking fortitude and indifference.

II Not only do representational discourses construct an object and subject of a real or imaginary gaze, they can also constitute a second subject, one who is remembering, imagining, or observing the object and subject of the gaze.

On the second page of Wordsworth’s poem, the poet, in the present, remembers his past happy gaze on the calm sea and ruins. From his present point of view, this past gaze -- the past calm object/sea and the past happy subject/gazer -- is an illusion:

"Ah! Then, if mine had been the painter’s hand,
To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the poet’s dream."

III Some writers, like Pascal, use representational discourse to construct an object world and constitute a subject self, only in order to put into question ("deconstruct") the illusion of an object or a subject that this discourse constructs.

A. Pascal thus uses descriptions of a real gaze to construct an image of humanity’s relation to nature. Human beings look into the sky and see the sun. Earth becomes a metaphor for the subject of the gaze, human beings, which is but a point within the vast orbit of the object of the gaze, the sun.

B. Pascal then uses descriptions of an imaginary gaze to construct another image of humanity’s relation to nature. If human beings imagine looking from the solar system out onto the entire universe, their solar system becomes a metaphor for the subject of their imaginary gaze. It becomes only a point within the vastness of the universe, the object of the imaginary gaze.

C. Pascal’s first description (A) defines the world as the visible solar system, an enormous "circle," and the earth as a metaphor for the gazing self, a point. But in his second description (B), the solar system becomes a mere point in relation to the enormous circle of the universe. The second description puts into question (deconstructs) the first definition of the solar system as a circle by showing that, from another perspective, this circle is only a point. A third description transforms the universe into a point in relation to an even larger space.

D. In this "infinite regress," Pascal puts into question the "rational" means by which the mind constructs a conscious, representational image of the natural world and the gazing self. Since perspectives can always change, Pascal’s descriptive discourse cannot describe the relation between gazing subject (part) and its object (whole), without implying another perspective from which the whole is only a part. The rational ability to distinguish between part and whole (or center and circumference) breaks down. So too does the difference between self and world.

E. Pascal’s discourse thus deconstructs its representations of the world and the human self, leaving man, reason, and consciousness with only ignorance and error.

IV Representational discourses can thus both construct and deconstruct representations (a consciousness) of world and self, object and subject, of a gaze. Do they communicate knowledge about the world? or only ignorance?

V. If representational discourses are as erroneous as Pascal says, then the question may become less whether they communicate knowledge about reality, than how they function. What is the poet Wordsworth doing by juxtaposing two representational discourses from different moments of his life? What is Pascal doing by using representational discourses, not only to construct, but to deconstruct all representations of nature? What is Zola doing by using representational discourse to reconstruct late nineteenth-century society? What is Lazaro doing by using representational discourse to reconstruct sixteenth-century Spanish life of a poor, abandoned boy?