The Oscars and the Illusion of Perfect Representation
I've spent much of my career on this question of the various relations of representations and reality. It was the topic of my dissertation, which was an attack on the claim that reality is a product of or is constructed by means of or just is pictures or words, a position I associated with my supervisor, Rorty, and with his heroes, including Heidegger, Gadamer, and Dewey. The question of realism in representation (and an implicit argument that representations by and large derive from rather than create the antecedent reality) is everywhere in my work, including essays in End Of Story, How to Escape (actually drawn from the work on Entanglements, then in process), and elsewhere. It is central to my work on race in Act Like You Know and I work through the issues explicitly from many angles in Political Aesthetics. I was writing about it in my high school journals. I do not know why these questions so obsess me!
Some other treatments, from splicetoday:
