Representation occupies a contested and multi-layered position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a neurological mechanism, a semiotic event, a literary-aesthetic category, and a phenomenological problem. Damasio furnishes the most systematic neurobiological account, distinguishing dispositional representations — latent synaptic formulae that trigger momentary reconstructions in early sensory cortices — from the topographically organized images they generate; he insists that the body is the original and primary referent of representational activity, antecedent to any cognitive or linguistic encoding. Craig extends this somatic logic into interoception, arguing that re-representation of cortical interoceptive activity underlies subjective feeling itself. Merleau-Ponty resists cognitivist readings entirely, insisting that bodily space is not 'space thought of or represented' but lived motor intentionality — a position that reframes representation as a secondary, potentially distorting abstraction imposed upon pre-reflective being-in-the-world. Derrida interrogates the metaphysical scaffolding of the concept, exposing how sign-theory construes representation as a progression toward truth it structurally cannot reach. Auerbach, working across the history of Western literature, treats representation as the formal and ethical problem of rendering reality in language, tracing how style, social milieu, and historical consciousness jointly determine what can be represented and how. These tensions — neurological reconstruction versus phenomenological immediacy, literary mimesis versus semiotic deferral — give the term its enduring theoretical charge.
In the library
18 passages
The brain constructs evolving representations of the body as it changes under chemical and neural influences. Some of those representations remain nonconscious, while others reach consciousness.
Damasio argues that representation is primarily a brain-body transaction in which somatic states are continuously mapped, with only a subset achieving conscious status, establishing the body as the foundational object of all representational activity.
Damasio, Antonio R., Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994thesis
What dispositional representations hold in store in their little commune of synapses is not a picture per se, but a means to reconstitute 'a picture.'
Damasio distinguishes dispositional representations — stored firing-pattern formulae — from the transient topographic images they reconstruct, demonstrating that representation is a generative process rather than a static copy.
Damasio, Antonio R., Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994thesis
The players in my proposed arrangement are an explicit representation of the causative entity; an explicit representation of the current body state; and a third-party representation.
Damasio proposes a triadic representational architecture in which convergence zones mediate between the representation of an external entity and a concurrent representation of body-state, producing the neural substrate of emotion.
Damasio, Antonio R., Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994thesis
Movement is not thought about movement, and bodily space is not space thought of or represented… The history of apraxia would show how the description of Praxis is almost always contaminated and finally made impossible by the notion of representation.
Merleau-Ponty contends that the concept of representation systematically distorts the analysis of motor intentionality by intellectualizing what is originally a pre-reflective bodily orientation toward the world.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962thesis
The appearance of an image in recall results from the reconstruction of a transient pattern (metaphorically, a map) in early sensory cortices, and the trigger for the reconstruction is the activation of dispositional representations elsewhere in the brain.
Damasio elaborates the mechanism by which dispositional representations fire back to sensory cortices to reconstruct perceptual images, framing memory and recall as active re-representational events rather than passive retrievals.
Damasio, Antonio R., Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994supporting
An external reality becomes a sign when it is arbitrarily associated with a representation which does not correspond to it, and which is even distinct from it in its content, such that this reality must be its representation or signification.
Derrida, via Hegel's Propedeutics, exposes the foundational arbitrariness of the sign-representation relation, showing that representation is constituted by a non-correspondence that metaphysics struggles to overcome.
Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
I see feelings as having a truly privileged status. They are represented at many neural levels, including the neocortical, where they are the neuroanatomical and neurophysiological equals of whatever is appreciated by other sensory channels.
Damasio argues that feelings are not epiphenomenal but are fully represented across neural levels, granting them equal epistemic standing with sensory data and a constitutive influence over cognition.
Damasio, Antonio R., Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994supporting
the brain would create some kind of description of the perturbation of the state of the organism that resulted from the brain's responses to the presence of an image… the image of the self perturbed would be displayed together or in rapid interpolation with the image that triggered the perturbation.
Damasio locates the genesis of a 'metaself' in the brain's second-order representation of its own perturbation by images, linking representational layering to the emergence of subjective knowing.
Damasio, Antonio R., Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994supporting
these convergent findings are consistent with the concept that the re-representation of the cortical i[nteroceptive activity underlies subjective feeling].
Craig advances a hierarchical re-representation model in which successive cortical integrations of interoceptive signals in the anterior insula produce subjective emotional feelings.
Craig, A. D., How Do You Feel? Interoception: The Sense of the Physiological Condition of the Body, 2002supporting
the history of Western representations of reality neither on a preexisting method nor a schematic time-frame, but on personal interest, learning, and practice alone.
Auerbach's introduction, as glossed by Said, frames the entire project of mimesis as an anti-systematic inquiry into how subjective formation and literary style jointly shape what counts as a representation of reality.
Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
the representation of everyday reality, does not stop there, but goes on beyond it. The constant endeavor to poeticize and sublimate reality is still more clearly noticeable than in Shakespeare.
Auerbach identifies in Calderón and the Spanish siglo de oro a mode of representation that incorporates the everyday only to transcend it through poeticization, revealing how stylistic level determines the reach and limit of mimetic ambition.
Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
seldom been so impressively represented as during this epoch; and stylistically these representations are of a character which is clearly differentiated not only from the realistic art of the ancients… but also from that of the earlier Middle Ages.
Auerbach marks a qualitative historical shift in representational style between medieval epochs, insisting that mimetic form is always period-specific rather than universal.
Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
if feeling is representing a quality to oneself, and if movement is changing one's position in the objective world, then between sensation and movement… no compromise is possible.
Merleau-Ponty critiques the intellectualist assumption that feeling is merely representing a quality to oneself, arguing it severs consciousness from the motor engagement with the world that constitutes lived experience.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting
Why is the metaphysical concept of truth in solidarity with a concept of the sign, and with a concept of the sign determined as a lack of full truth?
Derrida interrogates why the metaphysical tradition binds representation to a structural deficiency — the sign oriented toward but perpetually short of the truth it is meant to convey.
Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
Phantasia outside Part 3 3, 4, 99 n. 9, 202–7; see also Appearance, Image, Representation, Sensory appearance, Sensory imagination, and Sensory impression.
Lorenz's index conflates representation with phantasia and a cluster of related Aristotelian terms, indicating that in ancient psychology representation names the faculty by which sensory impressions are preserved and made available to desire and deliberation.
Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006aside
The subjective experience of these feelings depends on integration of the highest level of the emotional agent, the 'I,' which requires a deeper representation of the activity in the emotional motor system.
Craig argues that the constitution of a subjective 'I' depends on a deeper representational integration of emotional motor activity, linking hierarchical representation directly to self-hood and phenomenal experience.
Craig, A.D. Bud, How Do You Feel? An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self, 2014supporting
The reality of the appearances of Farinata and Cavalcante is perceived in the situation in which they are placed and in their utterances.
Auerbach demonstrates through Dante how the representation of individual character is inseparable from situational placement, so that mimetic depth is achieved through the intersection of person, utterance, and divinely ordained circumstance.
Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside
in both cases we are dealing with attempts to fathom a more genuine, a deeper, and indeed a more real reality; in both cases the incident which releases the excursus appears accidental and is poor in content.
Auerbach identifies in Woolf's technique of excursus a representational strategy aimed at a deeper reality beneath surface incident, anticipating depth-psychological concerns with the latent beneath the manifest.
Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside