Happy Nations and Unhappy Veterans

This is a small, rough something I put together while I was at BIOS (LSE) during June. It’s really half a paper, kind of – and quite rough along with it – and part of where I want to go next is to ask about the, well, unhappy recipients of US military violence, and why, exactly, they don’t quite show up on the radars of those writing articles about therapeutic forgetting. And about the role propranolol could play in exacerbating the asymmetry of trauma produced in wars with Western countries who have easy access to pharmaceuticals.

The rise of happiness discourse in the last few decades has been remarkable. Although the Declaration of Independence codified the pursuit of happiness as a key element of freedom for US politics, happiness talk has spread far and wide. There are mildly critical public and popular discourses – such as Alain de Botton’s Affluenza – but these mostly critique assumptions about what it is that will make us happy. The goal of happiness remains a pervasive influence, especially on contemporary understandings of freedom. Indeed, as more and more is ‘discovered’ about happiness, it has become less a lucky accident, as Sara Ahmed points out the word’s etymological root in ‘hap’ might suggest, and more something earned through labour, something worked towards, a telos which shapes lives.

As Carl Elliott has shown, however, happiness is increasingly both over-determined and difficult to know: a Wittgensteinian beetle-in-the-box, he claims. Wittgenstein writes “Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a ‘beetle’… No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is by looking only at his beetle” (Wittgenstein, cited in Elliott, 2004, p. 301). Elliott suggests that it is this radical internality to happiness which makes it so susceptible to the production of anxiety and uncertainty which is leveraged by pharmaceutical companies, particularly in the US’s context of aggressive marketing. Elliott writes:

Wittgenstein’s beetle box game makes an important point about the words we use to describe our inner lives – words such as ‘pain,’ ‘depression,’ ‘anxiety,’ ‘fulfilment,’ and so on… Because nobody can look into the box of another player, nobody has any way to compare his or her ‘beetle’ to that of another player…. So they begin to worry. How does my ‘beetle’ measure up. Is my ‘beetle’ healthy? Would I be happier with a different ‘beetle’…. And this is precisely the reason it is possible to market successfully so many ways of improving psychic well-being, from psychoactive drugs and cosmetic surgery to self-help books and advice columns. If I never know for certain whether the quality of my experience matches up to yours, I am always susceptible to the suggestion that it could be improved (Elliott, 2004, pp. 301-302).

Of course, this idea of the radical internality of psychic states is already suspect from a Foucauldian perspective. This sense of a concealed inner self is, for him, a fiction produced by the recurrence of the repressive hypothesis. It grants legitimising truth effects to individuality and individualism, in turn concealing processes of subjectivation, and the implication of those radically internal experiences in much larger political structures. Although Foucault’s distrust of existential and phenomenological concepts of subjectivity led him to avoid discussion of ‘how people feel,’ numerous scholars working with even a partially Foucauldian frame are concerned with precisely this: the politics of how individuals feel.

The subjectivating technology of being ‘obliged to be free,’ (Rose, 1999, p. 87) as Nikolas Rose calls it, which brings with it both biopolitical (population administration) and anatomopolitical (individual discipline) effects, is modulated through ideas, ideals, and experiences of happiness. Elliott cites a French surrealist painter, Phillipe Soupault, who claimed, ‘one is always in danger of entrapment by what appears on the surface to be a happy civilisation. There is a sort of obligation to be happy’ (Soupault, cited in Elliott, 2004, p. 303). Even as happiness is not straightforwardly equivalent with freedom – the persistence of ideas of ‘false consciousness,’ ‘happy slaves,’ and perhaps even ‘happy housewives,’ demonstrates this – freedom is predominantly oriented toward, and justified by, happiness. As Lauren Berlant argues, commenting on contemporary American political culture, the shared fantasy about politics is that ‘[t]he object of the nation and the law… is to eradicate systemic social pain, the absence of which becomes the definition of freedom’ (Berlant, 2000, p. 35). In eradicating social pain, freedom is achieved, and the pursuit of happiness made possible. Foucault’s account of the ‘normalizing society’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 252)  where freedom is a key dimension of power, cannot be unbound from the experiences of happiness and suffering in contemporary neoliberalism. Where Foucault argued that ‘there is one element that will circulate between the disciplinary and the regulatory… [:] the norm’ (Foucault, 2003, pp. 252-253), Sara Ahmed’s account in The Promise of Happiness manages both to share his concern to demonstrate the relation between ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ technologies of power, yet demonstrate the normative significance of feelings:

[H]appiness involves a way of being aligned with others, of facing the right way. The points of alignment become points of happiness. The family, for example, is a happy object, one that binds and is binding. We hear the term ‘happy families’ and we register the connection of these words in the familiarity of their affective resonance. Happy families: a card game, a title of a children’s book, a government discourse; a promise, a hope, a dream, an aspiration. The happy family is both a myth of happiness, of where and how happiness takes place, and a powerful legislative device, a way of distributing time, energy and resources. The family is also an inheritance. To inherit the family can be to acquire an orientation toward some things and not others as the cause of happiness. In other words, it is not just that groups cohere around happy objects; we are asked to reproduce what we inherit by being affected in the right way by the right things (Ahmed, 2010, p. 45).

The pursuit of happiness, then, for all that it is fantasised by liberalism as the site of free, individual creativity, is profoundly political. The teleological orientation towards happiness is not simply about achieving the right emotional state, but also about feeling the right feelings in relation to the correct objects: a form of individual, communal, national and international alignment through which the alignment is maintained.

Therapeutic Forgetting

It is in this context, then, that I want to think through the politics of recent developments in the use of propranolol in terms of happiness and suffering. Propranolol is a remarkably efficient drug. It is used to reduce anxiety, to regularise heartbeats, to reduce the tissue damage in burn victims, amongst a range of other uses and the many new ones in development (including as an aid to quitting smoking, and perhaps even for enhancing cosmetic surgery patient’s satisfaction with the results of their surgery). Recently, however, it has been found that propranolol has an unusual effect on memories of trauma. In reducing the release of stress hormones in response to trauma, propranolol modulates three elements of memory, according to Elise Donovan:

[the] formation, acquisition, and encoding of the memory; emotional response to and consolidation of the memory; and reconsolidation, reinstatement, and retrieval of the memory, which includes recall and the emotional responses triggered by later stimuli. (Elise Donovan, 2010, p. 63)

Much of the discussion of propranolol as a tool for ‘therapeutic forgetting’ has been about its effect on the second element, the consolidation of the memory (). If administered within 6 hours after a traumatic incident, propranolol affects the consolidation of the memory. Rather than being ‘overconsolidated,’ as some commentators describe the ‘pathological’ memories that produce PTSD, the memories are consolidated in a ‘normal’ fashion (Bell, 2007; Henry, Fishman, & Youngner, 2007). There is, however, probably currently more scientific research on the effect of propranolol on the final element of memory, in the recall and reconsolidation, because, if as effective as it is hoped, this will enable the treatment of those already living with PTSD. In both cases, however, the benefit here is meant to be that the ‘emotional’ or ‘affective’ part of the memory is stripped out, whilst the ‘facts’ remain, although there is some uncertainty about whether stress hormones also assist in producing particularly clear or detailed ‘factual’ memory (Kolber, 2006).

The usefulness of the capacity of propranolol in ‘therapeutic forgetting’ was already explicitly tied to questions of happiness in one of the earliest sources of commentary on it, the US President’s Council on Bioethics’ report, Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, released in 2003. This may, in fact, be where the somewhat misleading name ‘therapeutic forgetting’ arose. Although numerous anxieties about the effects of therapeutic forgetting were given in this report (which was widely acknowledged to be quite conservative!), the majority of the concerns expressed had to do with ‘authentic’ personhood, with the (especially moral) value of diverse experiences of happiness and suffering, and, somewhat awkwardly, the social and political importance of memories of suffering. They end with this claim about a propranolol-using future:

Nothing would trouble us, but we would probably be shallow people, never falling to the depths of despair because we have little interest in the heights of human happiness or in the complicated lives of those around us. In the end, to have only happy memories is not to be happy in a truly human way. It is simply to be free of misery—an understandable desire given the many troubles of life, but a low aspiration for those who seek a truly human happiness. (President’s Council on Bioethics, 2003, p. 264)

The resistance expressed in this report is grounded fairly clearly in a commitment to ideas about normal human being, ideas which those from the ‘transhumanist’ side of the tracks suggest indulge in a naturalistic fallacy, assuming that what (already) is is all that ought to be. However, whilst much academic and bioethical commentary in the aftermath of the report resisted this conservatism (especially in the American Journal of Bioethics target article and set of responses published in 2007), I want to suggest that there remains an implicit commitment to particular ‘alignments’ towards suffering and happiness. It is this commitment to the apparent dovetailing of happiness, an absence of pain, and individual freedom which has produced both the numerous positive arguments for propranolol, and a neglect of larger concerns.

Ethics, Politics, and Suffering

Propranolol is hard to argue against. The reduction of suffering is an important ethical imperative, one which crosses, I would suggest, both the rigorously systematised conceptions of ethics that bioethics is committed to, and other more critical frameworks such as those offered by Emmanuel Levinas, or Jacques Derrida. The reduction of suffering is imagined as core not only to political structures, as the Berlant quote I cited above indicates, but also to medicine; even if and where we might critique that image of such institutions, at least some aspect of their legitimacy and significance may be said to arise from it. Liberating individuals from their suffering so that they may pursue happiness is such a simple good.

Yet the consequences of liberating individuals through the use of propranolol also reveals that suffering plays a key motivating role in producing normal, happy, free people: people oriented correctly towards their own optimisation, towards a happiness that is not merely their own end, but also others. There is an example given by Elise Donovan of a case in which she believes propranolol could not and should not be denied:

Take… the case of a 30-year-old veteran who has completed a tour in Kosovo in addition to three tours in Iraq. Upon walking past a cemetery on the way to a 4th of July BBQ, he is overtaken by grief at the sight of veterans’ graves decorated for the holiday. The grief, guilt, and memories triggered by this sight result in his spending over an hour sobbing uncontrollably in the cemetery on the grave of a deceased veteran, while sounds of civilians enjoying their holiday can be heard in the distance (Elise Donovan, 2010, p. 72).

Without minimising one iota the suffering experienced by this young veteran, it is also interesting that Donovan selects an event – Independence Day – which is meant to be taken as a site of happiness. The decorations, the promise of the BBQ and the sounds of civilians, are all proper alignments to happiness: they render Independence Day and the creation of the United States as happy objects, sites around which happiness is supposed to coalesce.

I have suggested that happiness is attributed to certain objects that circulate as social goods. When we feel pleasure from such objects, we are aligned; we are facing the right way. We become alienated – out of line with an affective community – when we do not experience pleasure from proximity to objects that are attributed as being good. The gap between the affective value of an object and how we experience an object can involve a range of affects, which are directed by the modes of explanation we offer to fill this gap (Ahmed, 2010, p. 41).

The weeping veteran’s suffering, then, is explicitly situated as a misalignment: a failure to be made happy by what ought to make one happy, and thus a failure to participate in recreating the object of the nation as a happy one. Ahmed elsewhere discusses the ways that alienated subjects, such as unhappy migrants, can become ‘bad objects’ for social projects, such as multiculturalism, because the alienated subject’s unhappiness is supposed to result from an individual misalignment with the happy social project, rather than from, for example, the implicit racism that can characterise much multiculturalism. Yet the case of the unhappy veteran produces a more complex and troubling dynamic for this politics of happiness than the unhappy migrant. In this case, PTSD becomes the unhappy object, not the individual, partly because the willingness to fight ‘for one’s country’ is so clearly a happy orientation towards a happy object. The suffering is thus understood as an injustice, because it is assumed that the veteran would and will be happily aligned, given that this suffering is the result of his or her commitment to the military protection of the happiness of this happy object of the nation. The happiness of the military veteran – who is the go-to example throughout many of the papers on propranolol – appears as good, and right, and properly aligned: a straightforward good thing.

There is, of course, a continual problem with suffering veterans in this politics of happiness. The evidence of his or her participation in the happy alignment to the happy object of the nation is given by suffering, a paradox in this fantasy about good political institutions. This is where the politics of propranolol becomes particularly problematic. “Treating trauma” like this inevitably produces it as a pathology. Arguably the creation of PTSD already did this but as sociologists such as Peter Conrad has underlined, the capacity to treat is part of what produces a particular state of being as pathological (Conrad, 2005). It renders the problem of PTSD a medical problem, and, more than this, a medical problem experienced by the survivor. This narrows the clinical and societal focus to the survivor, and the aftermath, responsibilising her or him as an individual. As with other examples of neoliberal responsibilisation, this functions to obscure the situation that produced the suffering that is now being ameliorated (Kelly, 2010). Whilst this tendency may be slightly less in the case of veterans because in such robust evidence of their “happy alignments,” holding them entirely responsible for their suffering is clearly problematic, the approach to their ‘PTSD’ means it is, nonetheless, present.

The problem here is that the veteran’s PTSD is one of the few sites of trouble for the happy object of the nation. The suffering of those on “the other side” of whatever conflict the veteran was involved in not only does not trouble the state, but affirms it: these people who suffer suffer because they are/were incorrectly aligned (they were terrorists, is perhaps one of the more familiar examples) and thus their suffering works only to affirm the happiness of the happy object. Thus, the problem in the case of propranolol is that what is being obscured is what Ahmed calls the ‘scene of wounding’ (Ahmed, 2004, p. 33), a scene and a wounding in which the happy object of the nation is implicated. After all, it is the nation that sends soldiers off into combat, knowing they will probably experience trauma. The nation, this happy object, supposed to guarantee freedom, sends soldiers to kill others. In fact, in military training, the capacity to resist the trauma attached to killing is bound to achievement, such that succumbing to it is coded as failure. Similarly, military training encourages the development of incredibly close ties between soldiers, which both enhance safety in combat zones, and increase the likelihood of trauma arising from watching friends die.

In this sense, the suffering of veterans is testimony to the failures of the happy object of the nation. In this context, then, the politics of propranolol is intensely problematic: it covers over the scenes of wounding, enabling realignment. That realignment might be a happy one, for the individual – indeed, according to Ahmed’s argument, it is no accident that that alignment toward the happy object is happy – but it is happy, too, for the legitimating fantasies of those political structures which are meant to guarantee happiness. Given that the vast majority of major political changes have arisen in and through the insistent testifying to suffering – whether that suffering arises from colonisation, racism, war, sexism, homophobia, ableism or any one of a range of responses to ‘bad objects’ – the forgetting of that suffering, even when it does not obscure the ‘facts’ of the memory, has ramifications for progressive social change.

Conclusion

In this context, I think that it is premature to jump to a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ about propranolol, despite the number of academics willing to do so. I would suggest, instead, that this kind of critical appraisal of the politics of propranolol underscores that such biomedical developments have a politics which arises not straightforwardly from the drug itself, nor from the solution it offers to a particular form of suffering. Rather, the politics of propranolol arises from the political significance of memory, suffering, happiness and freedom, such that attending solely to the veteran suffering from PTSD can obscure far larger problems, problems which are implicated in the reproduction of suffering. The extreme antagonism between the ethical imperative to reduce this individual person’s suffering, and the political means to address the occurrence of suffering in the first place, indicates a profound problem with contemporary political structures that requires thorough consideration. As Erik Parens puts it,

[w]ork on our bodies instead of our environments may incline us to ignore the complex social roots of the suffering of individuals. And the easier it is to change our bodies to relieve our suffering, the less inclined we may be to try to change the complex social conditions that produce that suffering (Parens, 1998, S7).

Without such a negotiation, the ethical imperative to relieve suffering becomes part of biopower in a way that continues to conceal the violence that lies in the gap between legitimating fiction and experiential reality, a gap that biopower produces and sustains.

 

fMRIs, Female Sexuality and Foucault

Over at New APPS, Catarina links to and comments on a New Scientist article about fMRIs and female sexuality. When my comment grew to be so unwieldy (sigh), I decided to post it over here instead…

Mmm, interesting post – thanks Catarina! And Mark, you’re entirely right… but I think this point has more to say in this context…

Whilst I understand and also reject the Freudian model of understanding ‘mature’ female sexual pleasure (a thesis shocking in its persistent) as lying in being a ‘lodging place for the penis’ (as Irigaray puts it), I’m also hesitant about suggesting that female sexual pleasure arises primarily from the clitoris and that this is unsurprising because it is the homologue with the penis. Again this seems to centre a very particular masculine imagining of sexual pleasure (one, I might add, not necessarily experienced by all men), with feminine versions then imagined as a mirror image. I understand not wanting to buy into a Freudian model, but as Irigaray points out, challenging Freud lies not just in saying ‘my sex is not nothing’, nor ‘my sex is one’, but in elaborating a feminine experience of multiple sites of pleasure, sites which are both distinct and unable to be fully distinguished. The acknowledgement that nipples might also activate ‘genital regions’ (it wasn’t clear to me whether this meant the apparently clearly distinct vaginal or clitoral areas) seems to me to appeal interestingly to such ideas.

Part of the reason I find Irigaray’s focus on the multiple interesting is because it also helps do justice to the voices of other women, who are often treated as if they – like all those immature women out there failing to have vaginal orgasms! – must be, as Mark put it in comments on Catarina’s post, lying. One example is those women who have experienced some form of genital cutting, as Catarina alludes to in the post linked to above. There are a thousand different elements to the debate about female genital cutting, but voices claiming sexual pleasure, like those of the women in this study,  are often dismissed (see also Njambi’s assessment of the how and why these debates often play out this way). There are lots of ways of considering how sexual pleasure can occur in these situations – and the authors focus on the way that, as Catarina pointed out, clitoral tissue is ‘iceberg-like’, spread far further below the surface than most acknowledge. This is legitimate and even expected from scientific types, but it is also probably worth analysing how the experience of erogenousness might be modified by changes to the body.  ( I’ll note that ‘activation’ in the fMRI linked to above can’t really, as far as I understand, be equated with ‘being turned on’ except through the subjective experience of the individual woman – the ones whose accounts, it would seem, may not be able to be fully trusted unlike the Truthiness of the colourful scans – but this is an ongoing issue with fMRI studies, as far as I can tell).

But I also think that the experiences of those with spinal cord injuries have something to contribute here. There’s some evidence [pdf] that orgasmic stimulation does not necessarily, in all cases, require direct contact with the genitals: other parts of the body, such as the skin above the site of spinal cord injury may become intensely erogenous, even to the point of producing orgasm; and in certain cases, women can experience ‘thought orgasms’ with no physical stimulation whatever. Such orgasms are only sometimes experienced as ‘connected’ to genitalia (in much the same way as the nipple example above, I think?) but the fMRI, despite the initial dubiousness of the neuroscientists – because let’s not just actually believe people when they tell you what they experience, amirite? – demonstrates very few differences between those experiencing orgasm through direct vaginal/clitoral contact (they squoosh these two in together, which is clearly a problem) and those having ‘thought-orgasms’.

The point of this is that many of those theorising accounts of sexuality and eroticism which don’t match ‘common sense’ – such as those of BDSM practitioners, trans people and people with spinal cord injury – via contemporary theories of the body talk about ‘remapping’ erogenous zones.  Often, though not always, they’re building on Foucault’s argument about pleasure in relation to sadomasochism, which que(e)ries the ‘virilisation’ of pleasure, that is, questioning the account of sexuality not just the focussed on the genitals, although this is part of it, but focussed on the penis-king. In this sense, Foucault’s account shares some terrain with Irigaray’s, undermining Freud’s focus on the penis and its speculuum-sheath, but also helping to make eroticism and pleasure flexible and multiple, that is, understanding pleasure as capable of modification. He particularly discusses fisting and the role/power-play aspects of sadomasochism, but his point is really: there are pleasures to be produced that exceed heteronormative common sense.

As far as I can see, the accounts offered by these studies of fMRI (well, and their popular representations, which are probably the real site of the problem) would do well to maintain a level of complexity in negotiating with the Truthiness of their studies. Not only do they need to be circumspect in the claims they make about the relationship between the brain and experience (the key difficulty with this kind of neuroscience, I think) but they also need to be more thoroughly aware of the specific embodiment of sexuality of those they are ‘testing,’ and the role that this is playing in a supposedly generalisable ‘neuroscience of sexuality’ (and – sigh – we’re back to Ogg and Gaddam territory). In taking a particular cohort as potentially universalisable, not only are alternative experiences of sexuality excluded or rendered derivative or ‘unnatural’, but the contingency of those dominant, ‘common-sense’-compatible experiences of sexuality are obscured – for example, perhaps the connection between the activation of nipples and genitals is related to the sexualisation of breasts and genitals in contemporary Western culture; and perhaps the continued activation of ‘genital’ areas of the brain in people with SCIs says more about the lingering effects of genitocentric sexuality than about a necessary nerve connection to the genitals (the Vagus nerve really came into its own in the Komisaruk and Whipple paper!) . And, as Foucault seemed profoundly concerned to elaborate, the denial of this contingency, when it becomes truth, also works to deny everyone the proliferating possiblities of pleasures (and the political challenge that that brings – but that’s another chapter in this story, to be told another day).

 

Going Dutch! Part 3

- All the electricity sockets are permanently on.

- The light switches are like three inches squared!

- Fridges are in cupboards, and freezers are at the bottom.

- Phillips developed a ‘Senseo’, which is a coffee-making machine that takes ‘koffie’ pads and produces an espresso! Not a fabulous one, but not terrible either. Apparently the Dutch are very proud of this creation

- There is a sink in my study in my house…

- People automatically walk to the right. I’m pretty sure in Australia it’s the opposite…

- TV has BBC 1 and BBC2 (if you pay about $20 per month) but I haven’t worked out what schedule they’re sticking to..

- My computer at work automatically replaces all my quotation marks with various accents. It’s making me a) scare quote a lot less and b) get annoyed at quotes that start or end with vowels. (Actually I fixed this one pretty quickly).

- Apparently in order to get a mobile contract you need to provide a bank statement. I haven’t quite clarified why this is.

- French theory is, well, not so big here. Or not in my department, anyway. They get Foucault, and say Derrida and generally people know who that is, but beyond that, it seems to be a blank. Eep!

- Today on the walk home, I saw a black dog with flashing LEDs on the collar to make him visible to bikes and cars.

- I’d never known that when ice melts, it breaks into these rigidly geometric shapes when it suddenly warms up, and into soft-edged things when the warming is slow or given by the rain.

- At 5.15 on a Friday afternoon, they announce that the building is about to close. And then they close it at 5.30. I really kinda love this containment of work time!

- There’s a lot of ‘karnemelk’ around. In fact, there’s a few cartons of it in the little fridge at work. I therefore thought it was appropriate milk for coffee. Nee. I say again, Nee. It’s buttermilk, and it went all bitsy and gross in my coffee. I now have a litre of it and I don’t know what to do with it!

- Dutch bakeries make some nummy stuff, including some cherry Dutchish (I don’t think it could be called a Danish?) with crunchy sugary bits on top. Nom.

- The ducks here come in quite large sizes. Yes, some are possibly geese, but some are still ducks only HUGE.

- Watching ducks congregating on a floating bit of ice, then occasionally kicking off into the water… is pretty cool.

- Vegetables come in sealed plastic bags. Well, some do, in totally unpredictable ways: zucchinis do not, but eggplants, capsicum and all tomatoes do. I do not approve of this use of plastic!

- My Dutch class has kids from: Brazil, Venezuela, Vietnam, Belarus, Ukraine, Israel, Greece, Rwanda, Scotland, Italy… and a couple of others besides. No two people are from the same country (the majority, however, speak – sigh – English. I feel very behind!)

- Houseboats look really really awesome, mostly – there’s a couple of floating permacaravan-style things, with lots of aluminium, but the majority are proper boats, ready to take off down the canals. Makes me think of Lyra and her gypsy friends!

- There are no post offices; the post service is entirely privatised, and that means there are a few counters hidden away inside stores. I discovered this when I asked the dude at the bank for the closest post office and he proceeded to spend 5 minutes typing things into his computer to work it out!

- They call it ‘stormy’ here when there’s gusty wind and rain. I miss the Australian summer storms of thunder and lightning and drenching rain (though it’s gone a bit overkill on the latter in Oz of late!).

- Apparently, my colleagues tell me, Wilders (the famously right-wing/neocon racist bigot) is on trial at the moment for, I think, hate speech (my colleague’s translation was ‘discriminating against people in public’). But his lawyer is kind of a ‘show’ lawyer – he’s known mostly for making popular descriptions of legal proceedings, and popular comment on them – and so of course the judges and this lawyer and Wilder are being scrutinised thoroughly. The claims Wilders makes are outrageous, of course…

- When you answer the telephone, you must say your name, or be thought of as, to quote my Dutch language teacher, ‘someone who does not pay taxes’. I find this description very amusing.

- Some of the very old buildings here are clearly old multilevel warehouses: the top floor is shaped like a triangle, and there’s double doors at the very top, designed so that one could haul goods up six floors and then store them. Eep! The idea of all those very steep stairs scares me!

-If you order, say, a small pile of feminist books from Amazon, and you are not at home when they are delivered, they will be left with your nearest at-home neighbour, and a form slipped under your door to alert you to the fact.

-Glass must be taken to the supermarket for recycling. Paper can be left out once a month for collection. But recycling plastic seems to not happen at all – not really sure why!!

-There is a day a year when everyone brings out whatever things they want to sell to just outside their house, and then proceed to drink, sell things to people and buy things off people. Like a garage sale, only on all streets at once, and drunken.

-A key piece of advice: the first answer will always be ‘no’. And in response to this, one should explain why one needs the other person to do the thing you’re asking…

-Pizza is not sliced up here – you have to do it yourself!

-Good Indian food is hard to find, and expensive. Ditto for Mexican, though there are lots of these restaurants, so I should research further… I guess

 

Thinking through shame

I just finished reading Lisa Guenther’s really lovely article, “Shame and the temporality of social life” Conteingental Philosophy Review 2011. She explores the phenomenology of shame, starting with Sartre’s famous (and I like to think, true!) story about being caught peering into someone else’s room through a keyhole which grounds his account of shame as ontological, considering Levinas’ ethical account which situates shame as the pivotal moment that can enable murder or responsibility, then exploring Beauvoir’s account of gendered and colonialist shame as both oppressive and opening the way to solidarity. Given that my superpower is ambivalence, I love the way her account weaves together an image of the experience of shame as teetering, promising and refusing, offering and closing-down. I don’t want to discuss it in detail here, because it’s still marinating, but at the risk of spoiling you, I’ll just quote a paragraph or two from the end:

My aim in bringing these thinkers together has been to articulate the ontological, ethical and political ambivalence of shame as the feeling that most eloquently expresses our embodied entanglement with others, its its potential for both violence and solidarity, and to connect this ambivalent potential to the temporality of social life. In a world where social power is unevenly distributed along axes of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and so many other ways of cutting up identity, there may be no social position free from the stickiness of shame. For manyo f us, these axes intersect in ways that privilege us in some respect and oppress us in others, entangling us in multiple and conflicting forms of shame. There may be no clean way to resolve teh ambivalent dynamics of shame, but this does not mean that we are doomed to remain stuck in the repetition of the same. Rather, it suggests that the politics of solidarity and collective responsibility is more than just our ethical and political obligation; it is our future. We only have a future, both personally and collectively, if we respond to the ontological, ethical and political provocations of shame in a way that shifts the focal point from preserving our own self-relation – our place in the world, what Levinas might call ‘ my place in the sun’ – towards a responsibility relation with others. This is not to say that everyone must advocate for everything at all times, but thereis not time – no future for the struggle against oppression – without an investment of our freedom and our vulnerability in collective responsibility and political solidarity with others.

The ambivalence of shame attests to the irreducibility of our exposure to others, both as the site of relationality and ethical responsibility, and as the site of its exploitation through oppression. The opening of ethics is not simple, but dangerous; the same exposure that makes responsibility possible also makes murder possible. But this also means that the impulse to murder and oppress – to deny the other an open future – remains bound to the very ethical command that it violates. I can murder the other, but I cannot silence the ethical command of the other; I can be complicit in the political exploitation of myself or others, but I cannot foreclose the possibility of solidarity. And as Beauvoir’s own political action shows, even when I do commit myself in solidarity to responsibility for others, I cannot guarantee that my own motives will be pure of self-interest. This ambivalence does not foreclose the provocations that open and re-open my own actions to critical interrogation; it presupposes them. Shame would not be possible if others did not matter to us; and because others matter, oppression is not the last word on shame but only one of its ambivalent possibilities. (np)

 

Re-marking

And again, strangely, and from afar…

… distance and time make it feel so far, but so bone-deep familiar as well.

 

Normality, Normativity and – gulp – Pedagogy

I’m currently trying to get my head around the very minimal teaching that I will be doing this semester. In the Dutch system, at least where I am located, all students finish their studies with a ‘bachelortheses’. It might look a little like an Australian honours thesis, but I’m gathering it’s quite different. For one thing, everyone writes them. They’re a maximum of 6,000 words long. And you get six months in which to write it. And it’s not in a one-to-one supervisory relationship, but is supervised in groups of 5 students to one supervisor. Of which I am one.

The vast majority of these students will never have written a full academic essay. Most courses here are short, lecture-based and culminate in a multiple-choice exam. So I am suddenly realising that the key element of this project is the writing. In some ways, I’m really looking forward to this because I get to work with them over around 16 weeks. I’m thinking of suggesting that we make our meetings a little longer (they’re flexible, based on my choices, really) and include a specific, weekly session on various writing skills. Given also that many of these students will be German, this will probably be useful for ironing out some hiccups as they occur.

It’s also complicated for me, in that this is the first teaching that I’m doing, and I’m discovering that these students may not be, well, equipped to handle my comparatively random take on things. I can’t assume, for example, a critical approach to, well, knowledge. This makes me gulp a little. It makes me gulp a little more to find out that the English language program here is run mostly by Americans and that this has meant that it’s… sigh… more scientistic than other bits. Won’t that be fun? The dense normativity of such sites is a little frightening, but also exciting as a space in which to make an intervention (right?! )

But my bachelortheses group topic should select somewhat:

The concept of the normal has had a profound influence on contemporary science and thus on contemporary styles of life. This group will explore both the history and the more recent function of ideas of the normal, normalcy (normality) and normalisation, particularly as they have guided medicine, psychology and the human sciences more generally, in their interaction with those categorised as ‘abnormal’. Those who are interested in the philosophical and theoretical interrogation of the concept and category of ‘normal’, and its effects on people’s lives, will enjoy participating in this group. Whereas ‘abnormality’ in a psychiatric sense is hotly debate elsewhere, I would especially encourage those students who are interested in the normalisation of those with bodies deemed to be ‘abnormal’.

So at the moment I’m trying to work out what kinds of readings I’m going to give them to get them thinking about this topic. I mentioned Ian Hacking to another staff member, who thought he would be too complicated. I’m not sure what to think about that, because I tend to think that Hacking is a very approachable writer! But so far, here’s my ‘theory’ background that I’m kicking around as I try to think this through. For the record, I’ve also got a list of different ‘normalisation’ therapies which will constitute the ‘case studies’ for the contemporary function of the normal for them; in the first session we’ll pick whichever ones they’re most interested in. So far this list includes: human growth hormone use, cosmetic surgery, circumcision (for boyfolk and girlfolk), intersex ‘corrective’ surgery, limb-lengthening surgery, pre-natal genetic diagnosis, self-demand amputation and cochlear implants. I may include trans ‘reassignment’ surgeries, but I’m a little uncertain about replicating the sense that surgery is The Trans Thing To Do, so we’ll see. I am, though, interested in the ‘wrong body’ story which seems to shape many of these practices, and also shapes the ways that trans is medicalised. Mm.

But in terms of theoretical background, I’m trying for things that will ease them into the critical approach to ideas of normality. So far I’m thinking about:

Lennard Davis’ second chapter from Enforcing Normalcy, which gives a potted history of the rise of the idea of the average, its influence on modern ideas of democracy, industry, grammar and most of all, on ideas of disability. I like this because it’s accessible, it’s fairly broad, and it raises the question of how disability is contextually situated (which students both often struggle with, and get really excited by).

Ian Hacking’s “Making Up People”, specifically the London Review of Books version. It’s useful because it discusses the ‘looping effect’ of particular normalising technologies: i.e., that we usually underestimate the effects on people of how we think, categorise, and treat them.

Ian Hacking’s Taming of Chance, chapter 1. I actually want his “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers” but apparently this is too big an ask of the university library (?!) and has not been reprinted (sadface) since its publication in 1982 in a journal that is no longer on major subscription lists (Humanities in Society Number 5, she says, in the vain hope some kind person might have an e-copy they’re willing to bounce my way). The latter, I seem to recall, is a really neat historical and political unpacking of the development of stats, in the context of Foucault’s idea of biopower. The former is a bit drier, with all the detail of the history and fewer of the broad brush strokes that make Hacking kinda useful!

Next we hit the Foucaults: I’m thinking the final lecture from Society Must be Defended, which unpacks the way that racism (taken as the division of the social world into the subrace and superrace) fits with the development of medical concepts of health, of normalcy and of course the introduction of the biopolitical (the management of the population).

Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume 1, the bit on the Repressive Hypothesis. I want to give the students a sense of how intimately bound up together ideas of normality and the concept of an inner self needing expression are. After all, the idea of ‘becoming who I really am’ appears so neutral, but is so often enacted in normalising ways.

I’m also thinking of a bit from Discipline and Punish, because there’s some stuff on normality in there. But I have to go back to it, because it’s been a while. Also surveillance might be useful (obviously is heavily implicated in Hacking’s ‘looping effects’).

Canguilhem is probably a bit unavoidable, although I’m going to try to be selective on this one: probably the section from the end of the revised version of The Normal and the Pathological, where he explicitly tries to tie his history of medicine to politics. But I’d quite like some of his earlier points about suffering tending to produce medical consideration of the state of the patient, and thus the deeming of particular styles of being as pathological, which in turn has more to do with the mismatch between the patient and their world than about anything necessarily inherently bad (as he says a lot in that book, nature doesn’t side with humans against, say, colds and flu)

I’m considering putting in a section of Lisa Blackman’s book The Body because there’s a section that does the ‘outside-in’ thing of exploring the idea of bodies as signifying and social, and works back into the production of selves through embodiment. I don’t want to overload them with too many ideas, but this seems to be key for talking about modifying bodies like we are…

And finally I’m thinking of Nikolas Rose’s “Normality and Pathology in the Genetic Age” for a little updating of this stuff. There’s a newer ‘version’ of this paper, called “Normality and Pathology in the Neurobiological Age” but while I think there are useful things about the ‘we’re all a bit pathological!’ argument, I think it tends to efface that the hierarchies of normality and abnormality remain shockingly material in their effects.

The lovely NP of Rough Theory suggested Steven Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, for ease of access into these ideas. I’m still thinking about it: in some ways it’s useful way in, though perhaps less pithy than it might be (I get it, pop sci and all that). But it’s a bit hard to tell whether I’ll need to start from that point, and I do kind of like to avoid both ‘but the Real World!’ talk and ‘bias and objectivity’ kind of talk, because often students cling to these far more familiar ideas and use them to refuse to consider, say, the idea that objectivity is problematic, or that we need to put a question mark over the idea of the Real World, or at least over our access to it. So we’ll see!!

Any thoughts welcome, obviously! It’s hard to plan too thoroughly at this stage, because I have really no clue of the educational background of my group. Some may be ‘honours’ students (who take higher level classes all through); others may have done the science studies stuff here, and be a little familiar with some of these ideas; and of course, they may all be happily drifting along with the scientism of the English speaking program…

 

Useless Suffering and the Grand Narratives

I’ve just been reading a paper called “The Problem of Suffering and the Sociological Task of Theodicy,” written by David Morgan and Iain Wilkinson, at the same time as re-reading Levinas’ “Useless Suffering“, mostly to find juicy quotes (Levinas has to be one of the least quotable philosophers I know of – well, that’ s not quite right. He’s very quotable, but only at length. It’s an issue). I guess I’m back to thinking about suffering. I suspect I’ll never escape it!

But the paper from Morgan and Wilkinson I found a bit troubling. First of all, there’s a bit of a lack of clarity in the way that they differentiate ‘theodicy’ and ‘sociodicy’ and ‘inverted sociodicies’ (?). They claim that the first is, as we might be familiar with already, the justification for the belief in god despite the existence of suffering. The second, they suggest, is kind of like the same, only it’s about the belief in, y’know, progress. As Levinas puts it in “Useless Suffering,” this is mostly about the faith in a ‘kingdom of transcendent ends’, which of course for me evokes the Nietzschean critique of the ‘two worlds’ in Platonic Christianity. And the final, ‘inverted sociodicies’, is “brings from obscurity the ‘hidden hurts, fears and desperate cravings’ without which the ‘real story’ of the twentieth century cannot be told (Graubard)”. (Morgan and Wilkinson, p. 205). This would be the one that Morgan and Wilkinson see their own project as part of. I have a lot of sympathy with their position on this, really I do, although there’s a bit of carrying-on about how no one else (except a select inner circle) has been doing these ‘inverted sociodicies’ before which I think is indicative of a real failure to grasp what precisely is going on here. I am not convinced that no one else in academia has, at the centre of the drive for their work, a desire to name sufferings that have not been named, or a desire to alleviate those sufferings in some way. Maybe I’m just hopeful, but I honestly find it very difficult to believe. I think that one of the things that’s interesting about a lot of academic work is the various manifestations of that ethical impulse, and the ways that institutions so commonly fail to sustain it. Anyway.

What’s interesting to me, though, about their desire to participate in these ‘inverted sociodicies’ (which, to be upfront here, I’m going to argue are less ‘inverted’ as failing to grasp how thorough-going theodicy/sociodicy are in the commitment to the grand narratives) is that it hangs on a very particular conception of knowledge and language.

Despite numerous well-respected claims to the contrary – from Levinas, from Elaine Scarry, from Schopenhauer, amongst others – they argue that suffering can and should be articulated, be made meaningful, be made, specifically, the object of knowledge. Not knowledge of where and how suffering occurs, but knowledge of what suffering is like. The experience of it. In one of the bits that made me particularly indignant, they suggest first that suffering ‘lies in our “capacity for knowledge”, and then declare that “there is a paradox here, for whilst suffering appears to depend on the need to impose meaning on our lives, suffering is often at its most unbearable when meaning is the very thing it negates.’ (Morgan and Wilkinson, p. 203).  They then refer to Levinas, whose description of the phenomenology of suffering contains this (as I’ll show) erroneous quote:  “Taken as an experienced content, the denial and refusal of meaning which is imposed as a sensible quality is the way in which the unbearable is precisely borne by consciosuness, the way this not-being-borne is, paradoxically, itself a sensation or a given.” In this quote, they leave out a key word: “the way in which the unbearable is precisely not borne.” This is not about stocism, and nor is it about an underlying subject who is capable of bearing the unbearable sensation, who will always persist. This is about the sensation of the complete decimation of the subject. This is, as I’ve described it elsewhere, about the breaking apart of a world (which is meaningful, though not in the way that Wilkinson and Morgan argue it is (rationalish) but in the way that Levinas describes – a world opened to the other).

But Levinas also makes a distinction between suffering-in-me-for-the-suffering-other (which has as its meaning compassion, according to him: ethics, in some sense), whilst the suffering other is an outrage, a useless, meaningless evil which cannot be given meaning without doing (more) violence.  But Wilkinson and Morgan go on to suggest that the problem is that we just haven’t yet come up with the proper, adequate language yet. And when we do, we will be able to really progress forward, according to them. This, I think, is a complete failure to grasp what’s going on, but more than this, it subjects suffering to precisely the same modernist endeavour that has shaped the ideals of progress that they are apparently so wary of. KNOW EVERYTHING.

Suffering hasn’t arisen as the dark-but-expungable underside of modernist progressive drives. In fact, most of those modernist progressive drives take as their justification the relief of suffering. Look at Lyotard’s two grand narratives: the March to Freedom (thanks Marx!) and the Progress of the Spirit (shout out to (not) my boy, Hegel!). These are not motivated by a selfish desire to ‘enhance’ the world, not really. They are motivated, at least in part, precisely by the desire to alleviate suffering. Let’s make no mistake: the reason that Nazism, source of such suffering, became comprehensible to everyday Germans wasn’t through simple irrationality, through a straightforward failure to be concerned with suffering. It was precisely because it was made rational. As Foucault put it, what we saw in the 19th and 20th centuries was the development of a very particular kind of racism, supported by the ‘avalanche of numbers’ (Hacking). This racism divided the world into the subracial and the superracial. We can see where this is going. But the point here is that the genocide of the subracial was precisely justified as a strengthening  of the population, as a future-focussed, utopian drive towards a world in which no one suffered, in which everyone was strong, and able-bodied, and strong of mind, and fertile, and strong. A world in which none would have to suffer, and indeed, in which one may be maximally free. Foucault has some really nice ways of describing it in Society Must Be Defended – something about how the ‘vital principle’ was sustained through the excision of the subracial. And these stories, which were never delimited to Nazi Germany anyway, Western Nurembergian protests notwithstanding,  go on and on and on, now! The story we tell now is that you wouldn’t suffer if you’d just be whiter, more masculine, more able-bodied, more neurotypical, more more more ideal, more normal.

The point here is that I really do sympathise with Morgan and Wilkinson’s attempt to try and shed some light on the mucky and often-obscured underside of the shiny story of progress. But to do this in the name of that progress, to claim that progress and suffering are here simply in “an irreconcilable and destabilizing tension between the civilizing ideals of reason and the record of exploitation, violence and suffering which has been inflicted upon nations, ethinic communities and globally vulnerable groups” (p. 210), well, that seems to me to be a complete failure to grasp precisely what is at stake here. This shiny story of progress is earned on the backs of that suffering, because the shiny story of progress has no time, nor space, for difference, as Lyotard was so at pains to point out. It plays a key role in producing, manifesting, concealing and, yes, justifying, that suffering.

I don’t have the answers here. These are not simple matters. Part of why they are not simple is because it is so very easy to get so caught up in the commitment to the ethical alleviation of suffering that one puts faith in whatever brings that alleviation closer quicker, without really engaging fully with the genealogy of the complex structures within which we’re operating.  But the seductive ease of the equation of knowing more with progress in negotiating suffering… we need, desparately, to remain critical about that. Because theodicy structures our cultural logics, promising utopias (if we could all just become one, become equal, become same) and sustaining anguish and suffering in the here and now…

 

Me, myself, my mind and my brain… and I.

I’ve recently been reading an article by one of my colleagues (this one here, “Taking care of one’s brain: how manipulating the brain changes people’s selves” by Jonna Brenninkmeijer). She’s done some, as we call it in the biz, qualitative work with people participating in some of the edgiest of brain treatments (you know, the ones that have little or no scientific proof – sometimes because of little research – and supposedly magical results). Mostly neurofeedback machines. Her concern in the paper is not with ‘whether it works’ so much as with how it works; what effects these new technologies have on how people conceive of themselves; indeed, who they think is doing the conceiving of the self.

This is something that I’ve been intrigued by for a long time. We tend, I think, to use phrases like ‘I have depression’ or ‘I have bipolar’ rather than ‘I am depressed’ or ‘I am bipolar’. This configuration intrigues me: it suggests ownership of the mental illness, but it also makes clear a differentiation between the self and the illness. The self itself is not ill, it has an illness. Disability activists have been aware of this issue for a long time, of course. It tends to manifest along an Anglo/USAian split (though obviously not in any absolute way) where the Brits angle for ‘I’m disabled,’ as a claim of the difference of the self, and a refusal to see disability as irrelevant to the real self, whilst the USAians tend to prefer ‘having’ a disability because it’s ‘person-focused,’ not letting the subject be obscured by the disability. This in turn is the manifestation of some very different commitments, familiar from other sites of activism, to do with the (predominantly liberal) assertion of similarity and the (predominantly radical) assertion of difference. But this configuration of illness and disability, of course, has an older manifestation. Our dear old friend John Locke explicitly situated the body as property. Inalienable property — unable to be given away or sold (though this is of course coming into question with some of the new biotech… and that’s a story for another day, a nice long story!) — but property nonetheless.

This long history, of course, is part of what is challenged by certain kinds of phenomenologists, and the feminist theorists of the body that I talk about all the time. Merleau-Ponty, for example, explicitly tells us that we do not have our body, and nor are we ‘in it’, but we are it. Elizabeth Grosz focuses on the gendering of the mind/body split, saying some interesting things about how bodyliness gets allocated:

The male/female opposition has been closely allied with the mind/body opposition. Typically, femininity is represented (either explicitly or implicitly) in one of two ways in this cross-pairing of oppositions: either mind is rendered equivalent to the masculine and body equivalent to the feminine (thus ruling out women a priori as possible subjects of knowledge, or philosophers) or each sex is attributed its own form of corporeality. However, instead of granting women an autonomous and active form of corporeal specificity, at best women’s bodies are judged in terms of a ‘natural inequality,’ as if tehre were a standard or measure for the value of bodies independent of sex…. By implication, women’s bodies are presumed to be incapable of men’s achievements, being weaker, more prone to (hormonal) irregularities, intrusions, and unpredictabilities. Patriarchal oppression, in other words, justifies itself, at least in part by connecting women much more closely than men to the body and, through this identification, restricting women’s social and economic roles to (pseudo) biological terms. Volatile Bodies, p. 14.

In exploring the inadequacies of this account, the problematic politics involved, and some of the shape of an alternative account,she goes on to say

corporeality must no longer be associated with one sex (or race) which then takes on the burden of the other’s corporeality for it. Women can no longer take on the function of being the body for men while men are left free to soar to the heights of theoretical reflection and cultural production. Blacks, slaves, immigrants, indigenous peoples can no longer function as the working body for white ‘citizens,’ leaving them free to create values, morality, knowledges. Volatile Bodies, p. 22.

It is unsurprising, then, that the mind/body split continues to so inflect these supposedly new ways of talking about ourselves. Jonna’s paper is especially nice because she’s interested in how those who take part in neurofeedback understand the connection between self (mind) and brain (body). As always seems to happen when people attempt to maintain this distinction, there are (what get coded as, given the Cartesian split) confusions, incoherencies, fuzzinesses, and willfulness attributed to both brain and self in certain ways, in certain dimensions.

The self/brain split, of course, is not quite the mind/body split: the self/brain split leaves the rest of the body irrelevant, the dramatic influence of other aspects of corporeality notwithstanding (Elizabeth Wilson’s Psychosomatic does a good job of considering the influence of, for e.g, the gut on aspects of the brain). The brain gets configured, then, as slightly less bodily, slightly more modifiable, slightly closer to the mind than the body proper, fuzzing out the mind/body split into something that looks slightly less splitty but isn’t really. It’s still about the capacity for control.

There are a few consequences of this way of talking about the mind and brain and body that I want to discuss briefly. One is that turning a mental illness into a possession probably makes therapy a lot easier, in a few ways: first, it creates a self separate or separable from the illness, that can then negotiate with the illnes; second, it makes that self ‘innocent’ of the ‘badness’ or ‘wrongness’ or ‘pathology’ of the illness; third, it reorients authenticity, situating the depression-less-self as the really true self, and thus undermining the sense that one is depressed because one is realistic, and that any modification of that idea makes one inauthentic or fake. Peter Kramer, in Listening to Prozac, gives an example of a woman who feels like Prozac lets her ‘be who she really is’: socially easy, great in negotiations at work, a good manager, a cheerful daughter…. isn’t it interesting what counts as a true self, now? (My copy of the Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed has not yet arrived, or doubtless I’d be citing her just here!).

There are a few questions to be asked about this, of course. One is the question of responsibility: the separation of the self from the illness can be used to suggest that one cannot be held responsible for the effects of that illness on others. Again, therapeutically this can be useful in that guilt can hinder therapy, and politically, because the question of whether or not one can ‘help’ one’s illness (strange turn of phrase, that one, isn’t it?) is bound up with our ideas about the immutability of the natural being grounds for the social sphere to actually deal with difference, although with the increases in our ability to change ourselves, this is getting less strong. But it also shapes relationships in ways that can be problematic, especially in contexts of abuse, because it can make drawing lines around what one will and won’t accept difficult (why no, I’m not speaking from experience, however could you tell). After all, oughtn’t one to care for, rather than punish or reject, those who are sick? And if they aren’t their sickness, and you love who they really are, then can you stop loving/caring (etcthanksfemininityyoutellakillertale). Another, more extreme, example of this might be the inclusion of Paraphilic Coercion Disorder in the new DSM, which situates rape as not a crime but a symptom of a sickness. (My superpower (ambivalence) goes into overdrive over that one; if nothing else, it certainly makes especially clear Foucault’s argument that the psy sciences are slurping up judicial power).

Another is the way that it configures the self. The expansion of psychological abnormality–such as through the Paraphilic Coercion Disorder referred to above, or through the increasing talk about how ‘we’re all on the (autism) spectrum,’ or through questionnaires such as those for Sex Addiction (be warned that I suspect the box you tick at the top of the survey modifies your results substantially) which implicitly pathologise a range of very common, if unwanted behaviours (obviously my concern is not what is ‘real’ sex addiction or autism or anything, so much as why we want (psychology) to draw the line)–this expansion of pathology coincides with the push of the “normalizing society” (Foucault, Society Must be Defended, somewhere I can’t find just now because fuck googlebooks/the publisher/my books are still on the seas etc). This push isn’t just towards a statistical norm, it’s towards an ideal. The splitting of the self through situating all ‘abnormality’ as not-really-me functions in really fascinating ways, enabling an ideal self to become the real self, even if that self is never manifested. Which on the one hand might make some space for difference, in that I-am-really-x-but-can’t-quite-manifest-it-oh-well. On the other, though this configures the difficulty in achieving the realisation of the ideal self unfair rather than just-the-way-life-goes (an external impediment rather than, well, me) especially given that the world offers so very many means to achieve that self.

And all of this feeds into the modification of individuals (ha! ‘in-divid-ual’ indeed!) through therapeutic, pharmaceutical and other means. My concern about this (and I hope that this is obvious by now on this blog) is less to do with the number of pills people take, or the amount of therapy, or the idea that people might be changing away from some naturally-given ideal. I really couldn’t give a fuck about all of that. My concern is more with how rigorously intimate the refusal of difference is becoming through this kind of discourse. My concern is that this intimacy–it’s playing out within the self now– means that the extent to which ideas of the normal, sustained by these ‘innocuous’ phrases about having rather than being, become so thoroughly a part of our selves that they seem neutral, seem natural, seem to be about the way that things really are. Not only does this problematically continue to situate those deemed to be ‘more bodily’ than some ideal as still problems, as Elizabeth Grosz sketches above. The intimacy of these issues–this is about how I situate me, myself, I, my brain, my mind, my body, when I’m not even thinking about them/me–preclude examination of the terms by which suffering is produced and sustained by them. Or so I’m thinkin’ just now. Thoughts welcome, as ever, mes amis!

 

Making Materialisms New

I alluded a few posts ago to ‘the new materialism’, and some of the responses that it had gathered. I’ve been casually reading a few of the responses to Sara Ahmed’s paper “Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Thoughts on the Founding Gestures of the ‘New Materialism’”, one by Noela Davis and another by Iris van der Tuin (both accessible via the European Journal of Women’s Studies, subject to [sigh] subscription). I’m intrigued by the whole space of this discussion — by Davis’ characterisation of Ahmed’s concerns as somehow angry, by van der Tuin’s attempt to rework the space as partly to do with feminist temporality (I’m not positive I’ve come to grips with all of her argument, but that’s okay for the moment), by some of the ways that some ‘new materialists’ characterise other feminists’s arguments, by the grumpiness on both sides…

What is fascinating to me is how biology and the biological get configured in the disagreement. I almost put both of those terms in scare quotes, but that’s half the issue here: do we put biology and the biological into question or not? Each ‘side’ seems to mischaracterise the other on precisely this question. On the one hand, some suggest that the ‘social constructivists’ (a problematic collapse of those who see sex/gender as distinct, and those who think, for e.g., that sex is gendered) treat any reference to biology as reductive, as essentialist and as determinist. Others suggest that this mischaracterises the complexity of ‘social constructivisms’. I want to just take a little sample to discuss:

The analyses that follow in this book are my attempt to slow down the speed with which renunciations of the biological can happen in feminist writing on the body. I have taken the nervous system as my test case. This preference for neurological analysis does not imply that cultural, social, linguistic, literary, or historical analyses are somehow secondary considerations. Rather, my point is that the cultural, social, linguistic, literary and historical analyses that now dominate the scene of feminist theory typically seek to seal themselves off from – or constitute themselves against – the domain of the biological. Curiously enough, feminist theories of the body are often exemplary in this regard. Despite the intensive scrutiny of the body in feminist theory and in the humanities in general over the past two decades, certain fundamental aspects of the body, biology, and materiality have been foreclosed. After all, how many feminist accounts of the anorexic body pay serious attention to the biological functions of the stomach, the mouth, or the digestive system? How many feminist analyses of the anxious body are informed and illuminated by neurological data? How many feminist discussions of the sexual body have been articulated through biochemistry? It is my argument that biology – the muscular capacities of the body, the function of the internal organs, the biophysics of cellular metabolism, the microphysiology of circulation, respiration, digestion, and excretion – needs to become a more significant contributor to feminist theories of the body. (Elizabeth Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body, p. 10).

What strikes me as fascinating in this account is that Wilson situates herself as remedying  a problem in feminist theories of the body. Without getting into the question of whether Ahmed is right when she suggests that Wilson mischaracterises feminist theories of the body, I want to point out something interesting about the way that disciplinary lines are cast here. Wilson says that “cultural, social, linguistic, literary, or historical analyses are [not] somehow secondary considerations” in her work, but that she is trying to address the tendency she sees in feminism to ‘seal themselves off from – or constitute themselves against – the domain of the biological’. She is, thus trying to rework the lines between the long list of ‘cultural etc’ analyses and ‘the biological’, a line she suggests is the product of feminist accounts.

My first reaction to this is that ‘the biological’ has gotten off scot-free in this account (and I have to say, Wilson’s happy support of Freud, her generous reading of him as telling enabling stories about the body sits very peculiarly beside the lambasting of feminism for being ‘sealed off’ and the supposed . .  ‘Feminism’ here gets to be an area of study, with analyses, whilst ‘the biological’ is a category that contains more than knowledge: it is a ‘domain,’ and implicitly, then, this goes on to refer not just to the knowledge of biochemistry, but its ‘reality’ (I’m going to hang on to those scare quotes here, because I don’t actually think that the new materialism is realist in this way, but I want to discuss the rhetoric it’s drawing on here). The question of who drew the line between biology and culture, roughly, is answered, and somehow it’s feminism’s fault that that line has been so hermetic. And this, I think, means that the account of power/knowledge in the legitimation of discourses remains uninterrogated. Biology becomes feminism’s ‘bad object’, whilst feminism’s situation in the contemporary field of knowledge is treated as neutral; feminism made the body inert, apparently, whilst biological analyses didn’t? This reminds me of Foucault’s discussion of the concept of geneaology and the idea of the science of Marxism:

In more detailed terms, I would say that even before we can know the extent to which something such as Marxism or psychoanalysis can be compared to a scientific practice in its everyday functioning, its rules of construction, its working concepts, that even before we can pose the question of a formal and structural analogy between Marxist or psychoanalytic discourse, it is surely necessary to question ourselves about our aspirations to the kind of power that is presumed to accompany such a science. It is surely the following kinds of question that would need to be posed: What types of knowledge do you want to disqualify in the very instant of your demand: ‘It is a science’? Which speaking, discoursing subjects – which subjects of experience and knowledge – do you then want to ‘diminish’ when you say ‘I who conduct this discourse am conducting a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist’? Which theoretical-political avant garde do you want ot enthrone in order to isolate it from all the discontinuous forms of knowledge that circulate about it? When I see you straining to establish the scientificity of Marxism I do not really think that you are demonstrating one and for all that Marxism has a rational structure and that therefore its propositions are the outcome of verifiable procedures; for me you are doing something altogether different, you are investing Marxist discourses and those who uphold them with the effects of a power which the West since Medieval times has attributed to science and has reserved for those engaged in scientific discourse. By comparison, then, and in contrast to the various projects which aim to inscribe knowledges in the hierarchical order of power associated with science, a genealogy should be seen as a kind of attempt to emancipate historical knowledge from that subjection, to render them, that is, capable of opposition and of struggle again the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal and scientific discourse. It is based on a reactivation of local knowledges—of minor knowledges, as Deleuze might call them – in opposition to the scientific hierarchisation of knowledge and the effects intrinsic to their power: this, then, is the project of these disordered and fragmentary genealogies.” Pp. 83-85 Foucault Power/Knowledge two lectures

This element of the whole question of the line between ‘science’ and ‘non-science’ gets a bit covered over when we characterise feminism as the problem in drawing lines around biology. This is important, but not because I want to declare feminism innocent, and nor because I want feminism to work for its innocence by talking about biology. It’s important because I think that the question of ‘biology’ for those feminists Wilson is unhappy with is more vexed than she is making out. She ‘contends that feminism can be deeply and happily complicit with biological explanation; it argues that feminist accounts of the body could be more affectionately involved with neurobiological data.’ Psychosomatic, p. 13). This ‘complicity’, let’s be clear, is precisely what is at stake for lots of feminists: biology has been fundamentally bound up with some pretty problematic politics. Where Wilson seems to suggest that feminsts are responsible for relegating the body to inertia, there’s a fairly long history that suggests feminism hasn’t had nearly the level of discursive dissemination to do this. I actually think there are good, profoundly political reasons to resist Wilson’s suggestions that feminists ought to ‘pay serious attention to the biological functions of the stomach, the mouth, or the digestive system… neurological data [and] ….biochemistry?’ There’s something troubling about the presumption that in order to provide an adequate (adequate to what is precisely the question here) account of anorexia, for example, one must talk about biology in terms determined by biology, by a set of hyper-legitimised knowledges. What are we suggesting here, that scientific discourse has particular access to ‘the real’? Really? Because that is, after all, a core component of science’s popular significance at the moment: it has become that which can represent the ahistorical substrate, the solid ground that almost disappeared when God died, or when the grand narratives got blood all over their hands. Science, let’s be clear here, is given an astonishing level of faith in contemporary culture, and I think it’s particularly because it looks like it tells us true stories about the world. I can see why many many feminists might want to challenge those true stories, and the legitimacy of scientific stories about the world, to show that there are others. I’m not quite convinced, I think, that it is feminism that does the sealing off of itself from science, in this sense. I want to suggest that this might be about providing a proliferation of discourses to challenge the dominance of particular ones.

Now I don’t want to underestimate the political savvy of the new materialism here. I was at a conference once when Vicki Kirby laughed and said, ‘It’s all Nature!! Well, we call it Nature, but you could call it anything, really! Culture, if you wanted.’ It struck me then that the new materialism isn’t necessarily so different from that it imagines itself as critiquing. And that in many ways, there are really useful political effects of refusing to allow those problematic conceptions of science (as that which merely describes the world) to be the only uses made of scientific knowledge. Why leave Nature to be defined by a science that is so easily turned into a means for telling us the truth of the world? I can see that there are useful things about refusing to respect biology’s ownership of biology, to refuse precisely this distinction between epistemology and ontology. This isn’t antithetical, though, to the feminist theories of the body Wilson seems to be unhappy with, at least not in any straightforward way, which have challenged precisely that distinction between the epistemological and the ontological, perhaps especially where science has tried to instantiate it.

At the same time, though, claims like the following seem to me problematic:

It is the presumption of this book that sustained interest in biological detail will have a reorganising effect on feminist theories of the body – that exploring the entanglement of biochemistry, affectivity, and the physiology of the internal organs will provide us with new avenues into the body. Attention to neurological detail and a tolerance for reductive formulations will enable feminist research to move past its dependency on social constructionism and generate more vibrant, biologically attuned accounts of the body. (Psychosomatic, p. 14).

More vibrant accounts, more biologically attuned accounts, new avenues into the body? This seems to me to undermine the strength of the new materialism: that bodies are fundamentally tied up with knowledges about them. In fact, this seems to be a point of continuity between the earlier ‘constructivist’ accounts and new materialist accounts. So why do we want accounts of the body? Why don’t we want more vibrant bodies?

My point here is not to participate in the ‘gotcha’ game that seems to be the level at which these conversations seem to be happening at the moment (both sides legitimately claiming that quotes are being taken out of context). Wilson really isn’t referring to the ‘really real’ to which biological knowledge has especial knowledge. My point is more that these are difficult things to talk about. When I defended Butler against Kirby’s suggestion that she was a linguistic idealist or whatever the newest term is for the baddest of all social constructivists, I pointed out that English is a (phallogocentric) bastard, endlessly supposing both too much and too little difference: distinctions where we try to suggest otherwise, and collapsing distinctions we want to maintain difference.

For me, then, the question that I really want to pose about the new materialisms is this: why science? Why is scientific discourse being privileged here as the thing that feminists should really come to grips with? Why is it being accorded such importance? Are there not political questions to be asked here: do feminist scientific accounts of the body challenge the legitimising power of certain knowledges in contemporary culture, or do they simply accede to them? Are we proliferating discourses about embodiment in ways that might open out ways of being, or are we opening up feminist resistances to the potential delegitimising assessments of certain kinds of biology which are invested in an inert, knowable body?

I think back on my thesis, for example, and I think about how rare mention of biological terms of reference were. In some ways, some would say that I left aside ‘the body’ to biological accounts; I really wouldn’t, though — I’d say that I offered an alternative account of bodily being, one which let us explore the politics and vulnerabilities of embodiment. I could have spent my thesis talking about neurobiological accounts of pain receptors in the brain, about the ways that they get activated in pretty much the same way for ‘social’ as opposed, apparently, to ‘physical’ pain. But instead I focussed on the ways that bodily being is produced such that individuals have both deeply specific and carefully politicised vulnerabilities: to their own abnormalcy, for example. I talked about how there’s a political economy of bodies that produces those vulnerabilities, and the ways that the gift in that economy can enable the ethical. Part of the reason I didn’t is because I prefer reading Derrida to examining methodologies, charts and tables of results. But part of it is also because I refuse to let science’s (yes, often populist — I don’t necessarily hold individual scientists responsible for this) claim to simple correspondence truth shape how and why I do the work I do, even for other people. That is, given the proximity of correspondence truth to scientific discourse, if only in the popular imagining of science, producing a non-scientific account of embodiment (well, ‘producing’ might over-estimate my contribution to the conversation) enables me to challenge the idea that science Tells The Truth, as well as challenging the naturalising of bodily vulnerabilities that science is often used to produce, as well as offering an account of intercorporeality, politics, ethics, medicine, concepts of normalcy and abnormalcy, of race, of ability, of gender, of sex, of sexuality… I am not sure why this needs to be characterised as ‘dependency’ (Wilson, p. 14) on a non-vibrant constructionism.

No doubt there are lots of people who think that I don’t deal with the limits of the biological, but isn’t that precisely the point? Do all challenges to the conception of biology as limitation, as constraint, as inertia, have to occur through the same terms as those conceptions were first made in? And do we concede too much to ‘science’ when we do, let alone its tendency to claim to be the one true truth? If we can call ‘Nature’ ‘culture’, and the dominant narrative about ‘Nature’ is that it’s inert, and the dominant narrative about ‘culture’ is that it’s flexy as fuck, is there a problem with knowingly leveraging, of fucking with, of queering this distinction? Of taking moments at which the natural is supposed, according to certain accounts, to assert its singularity in no uncertain terms, and refusing–to believe it, to let it be so, to know it so, to live it so–even if, or perhaps mostly especially if (all we know about) the fantastical fixed substrate shouldn’t let us? Does that really lack vibrancy, my new materialist friends, does it?

Here, of course, I have my usual anxiety that I have been too clear, drawn lines too clearly, refused instead of engaged… so of course, I welcome everyone’s thoughts! Oh, and sincere apologies to Elizabeth Wilson, who had the unfortunate privilege of being my exemplar — a result of readyness-to-hand, I’m afraid!

 

(Apologies to those who tried to wrestle on through my typo-laden quotes. I get impatient with copying from one window to another!)

 

Going Dutch! Part 2

• Bike riding is terrifying. It seemed like a good theory, but everyone looks so confident. It’s going to take me a while to adjust to that once I start riding (I’m giving myself a bit of time – besides, the bike in the house is too high, and I refuse to ride a too-high bike!)
• I have to get a maintenance contract for the furnace. I didn’t even know I had a furnace. It turns out, though, that there’s a hotwater service with a booster that heats the water both for showers and stuff *and* for the all-through-the-house heater things. Nice, if apparently a little inefficient. I have to keep remembering to turn off the heating when I leave in the morning.
• Those heated towel-rail things are the best ever. At first I was just in love with the warm towel when I got out of the shower, but I have also discovered they are a wonderful way to dry clothes… well, woolens at least – not sure about synthetics yet…
• A bed that looks like a double bed may in fact be two single beds pushed together. Sighsigh.
• The community created around New Years’ fireworks is kinda amazing – bunches of people gathered in the street, sending things up into the sky (mostly – I saw one go whizzing off down the street at foot level – eek!). It meant I was surrounded by things going off. I stood on my balcony for a short while, wrapped in my doona (I was sickly and couldn’t go out and play with the Dutch kids) and then started worrying about whether bits of fireworks come down… hot… clearly my Australian childhood didn’t prepare me. Didn’t prepare me for the fire in the street, either – apparently completely normal. So used to freaking out over fire! Also, there’s a limited amount of time that people can set off fireworks in (from 10 am on new year’s eve to 2 am on new year’s day). Anyone letting off fireworks outside that time is made to clean up the mess the fireworks leave on the streets on new year’s day.
• Health insurance is compulsory and about 130 bucks a month – cheapest. Sigh.
• Electricity will likely cost me about the same amount per month. Eep.
• Tiny birds hanging around for winter are extremely cute.
• There seems to be a thing about candles – they’re always lit in windows in the evening. Intriguing! And kinda pretty too!
• It’s really odd walking down the street, passing windows without curtains in them and then thinking ‘oh my god, that’s someone’s loungeroom and they’re watching TV! I am such a voyeur!’. I’m so used to street-front windows only belonging to shops!
• (Old) Dutch stairs are the steepest ever. I hit my knees if I try to go up too fast. Calling them ‘ladders’ would probably be less misleading. Seriously, my foot doesn’t fit on the step. Which is okay going up, but coming down is a bit scary.
• There’s an extraordinary array of curry pastes and powders, and vegetarian not-meats at the supermarket. Like, extraordinary. Scary, even, one might say! I think I’m just overwhelmed with the variety and not being able to tell whether any of them are vegetarian!
• Dutch cheese is squishy and comes with wax on the outside.
• I really have *absolutely* no clue what people are saying to me in Dutch. As a result, I’m tuning out a lot of random conversation around me. I didn’t even realise until I was in the supermarket and suddenly realised the girl who had been pondering the cheese next to me was in fact speaking English…
• There appear to be 10 TV channels which are mostly shopping channels, at least for some proportion of the day, and many of the ads are terribly American.
• Dutch talk shows look a lot like they’re taking place in someone’s house…
• You pay for *all* maps, including tourist maps with lots of ads in them, and bus route maps, which are apparently wrong anyway.
• I haven’t yet discerned whether cafes are in fact coffeeshops, and eetcafes are cafes, or what. I’m poor just now, but I plan to find out soon. Also I have a coffee shop across the road from me – cutely called Ragamuffin, and done in Jamaican/Rasta colouring) which explains why everyone parks on the pavement and puts their hazards on, just outside my house!
• Everyone parks on the pavement, almost everywhere. The streets are *very* narrow, and really not designed for cars at all.
• There are some pretty people in this town… and some of them own some pretty awesome coats
• The inner part of the town feels like it should be stress-free, with no cars around, but the bikes provide traffic instead!
• Dutch lessons are expensive! Thank goodness work’s paying.
• I am not a fan of being called an ‘ex-pat’. I get why I am, but I have associations with Singaporean ex-pat society (it was my first encounter with the term, I think, and with what it might look like) and they are ugly.
• Lots of Dutch people work 4 days a week. This is completely acceptable. This I kind of love. It’s also part of this whole ‘you work your hours’ thing. Although my boss has made some suggestions about ‘coming in on the weekend,’ most people seem to stick fairly closely to their assigned hours. Nice.
• For working 40 hours a week, I get…. 8 weeks of holidays a year. Although again my boss said something about how no body takes them all. I am dubious about this fact, though…
• Everyone says that the Netherlands have ‘really high tax’. It’s about 30%. From what I remember, that’s pretty close to Australian taxation (though I don’t know if they have a tax-free threshhold thing).