Spaces of Representation

In its most literal sense, geography is the science or art of Earth writing or describing. Thus, how spaces on the earth's surface are described or made visible through language is an important concern. This issue involves an account of (a) the nature of signs, which are expressions of objects or ideas; (b) the process of abstraction, which is the process by which one thing stands for another; and (c) the symbolic mediation of experience, that is, the ways in which we bring reality into consciousness. The roots of this line of thought may be traced to medieval questions of hermeneutics (from Hermes, messenger of the gods) and attempts to find the meaning of the Bible.

Traditional positivist views of representations held to a strict separation between observer and observed, between sign and referent, between facts and values, and between epistemology and ontology. In this reading, claims to truth are mirrors of the objective world, representation is only a technical problem, and interpretation is unproblematic. Because there is only one objective reality, there is only one true meaning of a sign.

The positivist notion of signs and representations was steadily undermined during the 20th century as language and questions of meaning became a central issue of debate. The growth of structuralist linguistics, such as the work of Ferdinand Saussure, argued that signs have no meanings in and of themselves and acquire significance only through their position relative to other signs. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein took this line of thought further, arguing that all linguistic structures were essentially arbitrary and that language was not a neutral avenue for the construction and sharing of meanings but rather an opaque medium in its own right that limited its users' views of reality. Thus, language is not only a mirror of the world but also the means by which we live in the world. By the 1980s, textual and literary analysis had moved to the highly relativistic conception of deconstruction in which texts (and by extension all social objects) have no essential meanings of their own (the original goal of hermeneutics) but instead have multiple, shifting, or even contradictory meanings. Thus, every representation of the world is a simplification—too simple to capture its diversity and complexity—and analysts of language must focus on its silences, limitations, and contradictions.

[Page 445]Social philosophers focused on representations as social constructions. To have meaning, representations must be shared intersubjectively; that is, they are understood only within the context of other representations or intertextually. Discourses are socially produced sets of representations that simultaneously enable and constrain our understanding of the world. Representations can be Frankenstein-like, escaping the intentions of their creators, given that the ways in which representations are interpreted or consumed is not necessarily how they are intended or produced. Michel Foucault argued that representations always are linked to power; that is, they inevitably serve someone's interest. Hegemonic discourses (i.e., representations that serve the dominant powers in a society) tend to legitimize social practices and naturalize the status quo, in the process constituting subjects in everyday life. Thus, the political understanding of representations maintains that they always have social consequences, albeit not always intended ones (i.e., as dominant and subversive discourses), and that knowledge is less a mirror of the world than a contested battleground of views linked to different social interests. Thus, representations are part of the reality they help to construct; word making is also world making (i.e., discourses do not simply mirror the world, they constitute it). In this way, epistemology and ontology always are intertwined. By politicizing the production and consumption of meaning, poststructuralists moved from the postmodern politics of difference to a concern for discursive regimes of truth.

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