Representation becomes a central issue in all theories of knowledge, whether realistic or idealistic, that start from the mind to go out to the world, rather than the other way around. In Bergson's phrase, all perceptions become "veridical hallucinations." (Matter and Memory, p. 68) In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault traces a sequence of epistemes, of relations between signifier and signified. According to Foucault, the preclassical relation was a "natural" one. To search for meaning within this episteme is to "bring to light a ressemblance." In the classical episteme , signifier and signified are no longer linked through analogy or similarity, but through representation. "Representation, therefore, does not belong to the natural order, but has its origins in convention: the sign becomes, in short, an instrument of the analytically controlled use of reason, of knowledge." In the 17th and 18th century vision of human thinking as representation, Reason represents that which Nature presents. The idea that the basic function of Reason is the representation of what is presented by Nature resulted in the metaphor of Reason as the mirror reflecting the light of Nature.
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visuality
"Thought is what sees and can be described visually." --René Magritte in a letter to Michel Foucault.
Visuality can be thought of as sight as a social fact, with its historical techniques and discursive determinations. -- as a set of scopic regimes, of which modernity is one example. (see also vision )
Sigmund Freud provides a kind of scientific founding myth for the importance of visuality in human society in his exploration of the upright gait. For Freud, the assumption of the upright gait made man's genitals, which were previously concealed, visible. (Had women's genitals previously been revealed and were now concealed?) This was accompanied by the devaluation of the intermittent olfactory stimulus which the menstrual process produced on the male psyche, in favor of the continuity of sexual excitation, the founding of the family, and the threshold of human civilization. (Civilization and its Discontents, p. 46-7 n.) (see sexuality.)
In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault describes epistèmes as systems of visibilities.
Perspective and Cartesian rationality provided the classical regime of visuality, which was meant to be founded on the geometric certainties of optics.
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