feed-back

Representational

Practice

an argument directed to breaking

 an unrecognised social prohibition

Welcome to a site that is decidedly unusual in its scientific purpose.  Within a scientific context what is usual is to announce some surprising discovery that extends people perceptual range.  That is not my purpose.  Instead I seek to change attitudes towards goings-on that are already wholly within people' perceptual range.  That purpose requires, therefore, establishing two markedly different senses for the term 'invisible'.  In one sense things are invisible because they exist beyond people's established perceptual range.  Whereas, in contrast, things are also invisible because their existence is taken- for-granted. 

Changing the balance between the taken-for-granted and the granted

Based on that distinction it can be argued that it is far more socially acceptable to extend people's perceptual range than it is to open up the domain of the taken-for-granted.  And that is so because the working of any human collective, at any particular time, is based upon maintaining an established balance between the personally taken-for-granted and the publicly granted.  It is, however, just that balance I seek to change for the myriad of things serving a representational purpose or function - things such as words, numbers, pictures, maps, models, puppets, and so on, and so forth. 

At the moment the human practices involved in making and using such representation things resides in the main within the domain of the taken-for-granted.  Whereas I argue there is a pressing need for that practice to be moved into the domain of the publicly granted. 

Contrived ignorance

Which, at first sight, might seem reasonable enough.  But look a little deeper and it becomes clear that it carries consequences of a revolutionary kind.  And that is so because the plausibility of a whole pantechnicon of knowledge, from traditional theology to contemporary psychology, is powered by a contrived ignorance for humanly based representational practices.  An ignorance that established social pressures maintain within the domain of the taken-for-granted.

Psychiatric deception

That contrived ignorance's working out in practice is perhaps most readily illustrated This by the so called 'mental disease' of schizophrenia and the deception practiced in that regard by psychiatrists.  That deceptive practice turns upon obscuring the distinction between identification and explanation; or, to be more technical, diagnosis and aetiology.  If attention is paid to what psychiatrist do in their day to day practice then it is clear that their identification of a person to be labelled schizophrenic, that is their diagnosis "of" schizophrenia, is based upon what that person says and does.  Which means that the diagnosis of schizophrenia lacks any of the physiological based aids that now inform a whole range of disease that uncontentiously involve some bodily pathology.  Thus, the person labelled schizophrenic exhibits peculiarities in his, or her, representational practices.  Although precisely what those peculiarities are the psychiatrists, for the most part, fails to make clear.  The peculiarity that tends to be most commonly noted is that of hearing voices.  But that, it can be argued, is not a pathological symptom in itself. 

 Aetiological yarns that misrepresent

The psychiatrist, from his representationally based diagnosis, then proceeds to claim that the aetiology of his patient's condition is some abnormality of body, brain, or gene.  Albeit the precise character of such bodily pathology decades, if not centuries, of research have failed to isolate and to identify.  But that repeated investigatory failure has its social consequence.  For psychiatrist are able to spin an aetiological yarn that serves to divert attention from what the person identified as schizophrenic is actually suffering from, namely: some difficulty of access to his or her collective's representational practices and products.  Thus, psychiatrists are, in short, in the business of misrepresentation.

  representational practices and products serve a wide variety of uses, misuses, and abuses

   Taken-for-grantedness                                              

   The argument                                                

   Representational Revolution             

   Photo gallery

   Notes

   References

   Everyday understanding

  Links

  Search page 

COUNTER: