HomeThe Argument
Welcome to a web site that has a rather unusual purpose, namely: to change the personally taken-for-granted into the publicly granted. In that my purpose is unusual then it might be as well to start with what is today a familiar example of this sort of change, namely: reproductive practice. Clearly, human beings have always engaged in sexual activity as the fore runner to reproductive practice. But, until comparative recently that relation between sexual activity and reproductive practice was generally taken-for-granted. That these activities and practices people were expected to engage within in a taken-for-granted manner. Consequently to talk about them directly or to refer to them explicitly was typically viewed as commonsensically "dirty" or, more formally, as pornographic. That state of affairs did not start significantly to change until well into the Victorian period through the work of people such as Annie Besant, Charles Bradlaugh, and so on. And, broadly stated, it started to change because women were increasing disadvantages because reproductive practice was locked into this taken-for-granted framework. Women wanted to know more about their own fertility and to be able to control their own reproductive potential. And, moreover, they wanted, and grew to demand, publicly granted access to that information and not have to visit backstreet abortionists at the sign of the whirling syringe. It was that demand for publicly granted access for such knowledge that was responded to by pioneers such as Marie Stopes in Britain and Margaret Sanger in America. Stopes opened her first birth control clinic in
It is these changes from the taken-for-granted to the publicly granted for sexual activity and reproductive practice that I propose to use to open up the argument for a wholly new kind of change from the taken-for-granted to the publicly granted. namely: for representational practice. And by representational practice I mean making, using, storing, and handing-on things serving a representational purpose or function.