Representation

Although popularly associated with postmodernism, the idea that the world is a representation goes back to the origins of western thought. Plato's allegory of the cave suggests that we cannot see the truth but only a reflection of it. Descartes's hypothesis of the evil demon holds that all we know is merely an illusion produced by another, alien intelligence. There are a variety of philosophical idealisms after Descartes, which claimed that the world comes about only as an effect of our will or that the world exists only insofar as it is perceived. In postmodernism, however, these essentially metaphysical speculations are seen to be socially embodied through such mass media as the movies, television, advertising, and the Internet. Thus, a film like the Wachowskis' The Matrix (1999) is understood at once as a revival of the old Platonic fantasy and a powerful metaphor for our contemporary society of the spectacle. Indeed, in the now celebrated catchphrase of the film, uttered by the leader of the resistance, Morpheus, to the newcomer Neo, “Welcome to the desert of the real,” the film‐makers even acknowledge the prominent postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard and his theory of simulation, which is often taken for an argument that the world has become its own representation

Aesthetics · Allegory · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Epistemology · Fantasy · Interpretation (philosophy · Literature · Metaphor · Politics · Postmodernism · Representation (politics · Simulacrum · Spectacle · Variety (cybernetics · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Philosophy, History, and Historiography

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