REPRESENTATIONAL VIOLENCE — A Manifesto How normative fields erase non-representational ontologies
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This manifesto (Artistic Research) develops the concept of representational violence — the structural elimination of non-representational ontologies through the demands of legibility. It argues that violence begins not where bodies are harmed or excluded, but at the earlier point where reality is reduced into symbolic form and permitted to exist only insofar as it can be represented. Representation is not a neutral mirror of the world; it is a world-producing filter that selects, compresses, and erases.I write from an autistic ontology, not as clinical object but as epistemic stance. Perception here retains resolution, resonance, multiplicity, simultaneity — it does not collapse into category. Autism in this manifesto is not topic, disorder, or biography: it is the instrument through which representational limits become visible.Representational violence operates structurally: in bureaucratic classification, diagnostic procedure, legal determination, scientific modelling, and epistemic norm enforcement. What cannot be translated into symbol does not simply disappear — it is removed by design. Systems erase not through malice, but through function. They do not need hostility to eliminate ontologies; they only need to operate successfully.Drawing on long-form institutional documentation recorded in the book Speed’s Work (ISBN-10 : 3819277358), the manifesto demonstrates how social infrastructure generates representational doubles of people — files that stand in for bodies, diagnoses that replace perception, formats that override lived reality. In this exchange, the human does not fail to appear — the substitute succeeds.From this foundation, I claim that diversity cannot exist under representational sovereignty. Recognition is not acceptance, but reduction; inclusion is not plurality, but controlled assimilation. If existence requires legibility, then difference survives only by shrinking.The political demand is therefore simple and non-negotiable:Not more voices inside the same frame — more frames.Not understanding — space for realities that cannot be reduced without loss.Resistance here is not action — resistance is ontology. This paper functions as an interface text within a larger operator-based research corpus. Core concepts are applied here, not re-derived. The underlying research operates in a non-linear, rhythmically recursive epistemic mode grounded in an autistic form of structural perception; the present text provides an interface translation for academic contexts.
Author: Speed, Timothy
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7109425564