Representation as an issue is deeply problematic because of the ease in which one’s sensitivities can be easily insulted or offended in many ways. Whether through a lack of representation or through misrepresentation, authors attempting to make commentary or even incorporate any amount of culture into their piece walk through a minefield of potential issues. In this piece, I hope to address my thoughts on some of them.
The first issue is whether a text can ever truly be representative of groups of people. Can a writing, no matter how nuanced, really encompass the multi-faceted, nuanced and layered aspects of a culture? Whilst I think most issues of representation fall in a grey area, I think this question in particular has a very clear answer – no. No text, no medium of communication, can ever really replicate experience fully, simply as a fault of language. Language being unable to fully represent ideas is a common theme in philosophy – for example, that of Wittgenstein – and it is an idea that makes sense if one considers that language is not a strict set of rules that one can apply in communication, rather, language more closely resembles a set of conventions built upon through human use and experience. Therefore, in any communication, and cultural communication in particular, the words we use are coloured by our experience of them, and here we reach an impasse. To communicate the experiences of groups of people, one must rely on language, but to fully comprehend the language used, one must understand the experience of that group. If language itself is built out of experience, then it cannot fully communicate certain experiences, and thus, all texts, no matter how close to the mark they may hit, will never be able to represent a group of people in a completely accurate manner.
Next is the issue of who gets to represent what. Can any author, belonging to any culture and having any set of experiences choose to represent a group they do not identify within? Well, after tackling the previous issue, it may seem there is an obvious answer once again – if a text cannot fully represent a culture without the relevant experiences backing it up, then clearly an author without that experience can not produce a text to represent that culture. However, this is a hard line view. Why must all representation be 100% true to life and accurate? Why must we be able to tackle every single aspect in a single text? The argument that an author can only represent their own group is pointlessly limiting on texts, and is a rule in search of an ideal textual representation that does not exist and never can. If we accept that textual representation cannot be fully accurate, then we can accept as well that any author can attempt to represent any group, since there is no way they will be able to represent every facet of the group anyway.
One last issue relevant to the other two is the question of whether representation is problematic. Many argue that representation has caused many problems for texts – forced diversity has ruined casting and contradicted details of source material in films, for example. Representation can also cause problems when not done well – misrepresentation can create and reinforce harmful stereotypes. But I believe the problems arising from such representation aren’t inherently the fault of the act of representation, but simply arising as a consequence of bad writing. Representation is not inherently problematic; it is simply a tool authors can employ in their texts for a multitude of reasons. When used badly, as with any other tool, problems will be faced.
