Selfie as normalized autism

Abstract

The article considers the “epistemology of everyday life”: since today the population objectifies the processes of its cognition and their results in social networks, the author applies the epistemological categories to the analysis of this material. The article is based on the materials of the report that was made at a conference organized by the University of Heidelberg and the Saint Petersburg State University on the topic: “The human existence between the illness and the health as a philosophical and a cultural problem”. Its participants were engaged in clarifying the philosophical foundations of psychology and psychiatry. The article considers the emergence of such methodological seminars` tradition a hundred years ago at the University of Heidelberg when K. Jaspers and K. Wilmans discussed whether it is possible to use the concepts of “norm” and “deviation” to characterize the mental health of society. The author of the article proceeds from the fact that Anglo-Saxon empiricism based on video culture dominates in the modern world after the Second World War. The theoretical thought is not welcome; any theory is dismissed as “a conspiracy theory”. This is the continuation of the epistemology of Bacon, who struggled with theories as of the «ghosts of the theater.» However, there are two opposing currents within the empiricism. The first one is the intention to impose on the population a video sequence and ways of ordering the perceptions of this sequence into the familiar subjects — with the elimination of everything subjective. The second current is an expression of objection and self-affirmation, which is expressed in portraying oneself as the center of the world (a picture of “selfie”).