ABSTRACT
A common prejudice links many communities of theorising, including the ‘posterities’ of recent practice: representation is taken as a second-order derivative if not wholly negative mediation. Of what? Leave that open for the moment: reality, presence, economy, essence? Whereas-concealed amongst a number of less interesting pretensions-the proposed theorising of Durkheim-‘sociology’—the unique theorising of organic1 community, reflexive upon itself, begins with re-presentations, that class of uniquely social phenomena that are ‘…capable of exercising upon the individual an external constraint…’;2 constrain, that is, individuality as membership. Moreover, in the injunction to take social phenomena as ‘things’, representations are taken as first-order, irreducible-not derivative mediations but the sui-generic phenomena that generate the possibility of sociology as a specific discipline.
