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Rep / Non-Rep & Foreclosure

Catching up with things, and the first of two posts this week, reflecting on events last week. Staying with this question of foreclosure – how do representational cultures of all kinds, foreclose on futures?

The Brain Health Futures Summit led by the truly inspiring Bonnie Shaw last week revealed a further interesting ‘futures’ contradiction that remains, as arguments are made toward a ‘Brain Health Future’ predicated on both a representational model of brains as atomised units of productivity, and non-representational ones in which cultures of care support social and intellectual nourishment.

The Economic Case by Harris Eyre, Head of Neuro-Policy positioned brain health as a $26 trillion opportunity, reframing cognitive wellbeing as “brain capital” for national competitiveness. Social production (volunteering, care, community support) represents hundreds of billions annually in Australia, I think he suggested 14 percent of GDP, and larger than the mining sector but invisible in economic frameworks.

The Relational Reality told a different story through A/Professor Jo-An Occhipinti (née Atkinson), followed by a panel with Ika Trijsburg Kier Paterson Paterson, Briony Rogers, and Michael Hogan on climate, Indigenous healing, and community infrastructure emphasising what economic framing excludes: brains are fundamentally shaped by place, culture, relationships, and collective conditions, an unpaid system of social contribution and mutual support that sustains communities.

The Contradiction: To make brain health matter to policymakers, Eyre et al translate it into GDP metrics. But this monetises precisely what resists monetisation. Grandparents caring for children gets counted because it enables parents to work. Volunteering matters because it acts as a stabiliser. Even intergenerational reading programs are justified through preserved brain volumes. Everything must serve productivity.

The Foreclosure: Every time we translate community support into economic equivalents, we foreclose other ways of valuing these activities. If brain health is infrastructure for productivity, interventions get designed to optimise economic output rather than strengthen relational conditions that actually support cognition.

This isn’t to dismiss economic arguments, they’re strategically necessary. But we need to recognise the trap: the same frameworks that might secure investment also risk transforming brain health into another site of extraction, where cognitive wellbeing becomes instrumentalised for competitive advantage rather than cultivated through collective care.

Perhaps the question isn’t how to make brain health count economically, but whether economic representation itself, like the data models and AI frameworks we’ve seen foreclose other futures, is structurally incapable of holding what matters most about cognitive wellbeing: the unmeasured, the relational, the collective conditions that resist translation into productive units.