A brief meditation on the notion of
mediation: Techniques of the Self and Material Relationism in ‘speaking’
of Anorexia
Florentino
Blanco and Tomás Sánchez-Criado
Departamento de Psicología Básica
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
PDF
Document
Abstract
The
aim of this paper is to discuss on the ‘public’ and ‘plural’
dimension of the self. The starting point of our argument is a very
simple study of anorexic life stories. Originally the stories were
recalled from an Internet community of ‘people suffering from
anorexia’. In brief, the narrative structure of the stories
was analysed in order to find communalities and variations. Our results
showed that stories were virtually interchangeable, its structure
and content being almost identical. They were, so to speak, public
artefacts for identification and, perhaps more important, for leading
with and making sense of ‘pain’ and ‘suffering’.
On this ground, our work puts forward for consideration some ideas
on (1) ‘the self’ as a relational enterprise, (2) the
socio-technical regulation of ‘private experience’, (3)
the supposed boundaries between subjective and objective spheres and
(4) the genealogy of the experience of ‘pain’ and ‘suffering’
as it is ‘experienced’ in our Western cultures. Above
all, we will try to consider the huge range of mediators (human and
non-human) that are deployed to stabilise a particular notion of the
self. In this vein, and departing from the premise that language cannot
be considered the one and only relational regulator, we will try to
take into account the consequences on the concept of mediation that
might arise from our previous study.
< 1 2
3 4
5 6 7
8 9
10 11
12 13
14 15
16 17
> next
