The uncertainty within the human sciences about adequate means of describing social reality.
Considers encounters with imaginative literature as a way of suggesting alternative modes of orienting readers in a literally unrepresentable, perhaps unreadable outside world. Argues that the study of stories does not depend upon representation but upon creation, invention, and conversation. I've noticed that quite a few people come to this blog searching for information about the crisis of representation. This morning I want to write the first of two posts on that subject, picking up on what I said in some posts from early 2008 (this one and this one). It is as if they know, first and foremost, that representation is laughable or, more specifically, that the desire to represent and the presumption that we can do so is laughable. The crisis of representation is not so much a thought as a feeling. One feels ridiculous. For David Harvey, the crisis of representation has to do with the dematerialization and the shifting of a central value system (1990, p. 298). He speaks about the changing experience of space and time, of sign systems, and of the ways in which money and commodities have become the bearers of cultural codes. The crisis of representation that now seems so apparent after the writing of Baudrillard was also the result of a convergence of historical conditions both inside and outside of art. As a result, art’s capacity to depict the world was effected. CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION. This phrase was coined by George Marcus and Michael Fischer to refer specifically to the uncertainty within the human sciences about adequate means of describing social reality. The Crisis of Representation. Then came the five brief, impassioned, jubilant, enigmatic years.. This sentence appears in Michel Focault's preface to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, first published in 1972. The paintings of Gerhard Richter are emblematic of the crisis of representation in terms of both the practice of creating the images as well their situation in the context of art history. Symptoms of a crisis in representation are directly present in the paintings Richter created from photographs. Baudrillard asserted that there is little evidence to suggest that reality, the domain of the original object of depiction, ever existed. This brought about a crisis of representation because traditional modes of understanding the relationship of object and depiction could no longer be considered valid.
http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ501153 http://secondlanguage.blogspot.com/2010/11/crisis-of-representation.html http://secondlanguage.blogspot.com/2010/11/crisis-of-representation.html http://www.jstor.org/stable/40172842 http://www.andrewschroeder.net/2009/03/24/crisis-of-representation/ http://srmo.sagepub.com/view/the-sage-dictionary-of-qualitative-inquiry/n55.xml http://secondlanguage.blogspot.com/2008/03/crisis-of-representation.html http://www.andrewschroeder.net/2009/03/24/crisis-of-representation/ http://www.andrewschroeder.net/2009/03/24/crisis-of-representation/
what is the crisis of representation