British psychologist Bartlett understood the notion of a \u201cschema\u201d as being that which creates a cognitive structure for us to make sense of what is around us \u2013 Taylor also discusses this and conceptualizes the idea of \u201cprototypes\u201d \u2013 or as Bartlett or Baudrillard (and perhaps many others) would understand as a \u2018paradigm\u2019 \u2013 that is, the shared expectation of how a something should present itself. So, the prototype of a kitchen would have to include a source of heat for cooking on, or else it would not be a kitchen and would instead fit into another structure.<\/p>\n
Schemas are useful for helping us understand the world around us, but what happens when this imaginary gets a bit \u2018too real\u2019?\u00a0 Discourse, social practise and the imaginary can be seen to compose our understandings of the world, Taylor saw it as people \u00a0\u2018imagining their social surroundings\u2019 in their day to day life, as articulated through expressions of the self, such as the narratives we create and the stories we tell \u00a0– as well the images and symbols that hold meaning for us. (This is separate from theory as theorists are immersed within their own specialist knowledge systems.)<\/p>\n
As Strauss points out, \u201cparadigmatic examples repeated in popular culture may carry more weight.\u201d \u00a0So the repetition of particular media tropes, messages and ideas can very well form a schematic understanding, or if you like, an \u201cimaginary\u201d. This is a concern because even though we may not fully internalize everything, indeed we may well reject much of what we are fed – we still may hold some contradictory and incohesive values as a result. So in this instance we could draw attention to Strauss’ example of a feminist woman, fully aware of the implications of the ‘glass ceiling’ who has still managed to internalize negative discourses around the idea of\u00a0 the “welfare mother” and is able to view these as completely separate from each other.<\/p>\n
I’ve been thinking about to what extent do these shared practises, that become \u2018common sense\u2019 understandings of the world, constrain and limit our own agency in how we are able to think about certain things? What actually lies underneath discursive practise? And how possible is it to reach what Saussure believed as a fixed \u2018objective\u2019 reality buried beneath layers of signification?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
British psychologist Bartlett understood the notion of a \u201cschema\u201d as being that which creates a cognitive structure for us to make sense of what is around us \u2013 Taylor also discusses this and conceptualizes the idea of \u201cprototypes\u201d \u2013 or as Bartlett or Baudrillard (and perhaps many others) would understand as a \u2018paradigm\u2019 \u2013 that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40977,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[136347],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40977"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":259,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions\/259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}