Responding to one of Anxiousmodernman’s comments in my post on BP, Circling Squares writes:
Estimates vary but its been reported recently that 27 million Americans are on anti-depressant drugs. (1) That is a heck of a lot of people who are medically numbed; it is pretty difficult to be angry, righteous and politicised when you are taking drugs to stop you from feeling. (2) Besides the direct effect on those specific people, this indicates a far wider tendency, as you said, to individualise blame, to accept failure as one’s own fault and thus, because one is trapped into that circle (there’s no way out, nowhere else to go from there), self-harm and self-medication follow.
There’s more to Circling’s response, so please go read it. There are a few points worth making in response to Circling’s remarks. First, anti-depressants don’t prevent feeling, but rather depression prevents feeling. When, in the grips of depression, everything is bland or gray. Nothing interests, nothing motivates, nothing excites, nor is there much in the way of any affect whatsoever. The depressed person is more or less paralyzed or completely numb. It is thus a mistake, I believe, to suggest– if this is what Circling is implying –that if only we weren’t medicated, if only we embraced our depression, we would be capable of acting. The reverse rather seems to be the case. Moreover, when anti-depressants are at their best, far from turning one into a numb zombie, they actually liberate affect and the capacity to engage with the world. It becomes possible to care or be engaged with the world around us.
read on!
Here I think it’s worthwhile to be a bit Spinozist in our attitudes towards anti-depressants. Anything that increases our power of acting or conatus is accompanied by affects of joy and we should never sneer at joy. I am not suggesting that everyone should run off and get medicated– often there are serious and debilitating side effects to psychotropics, though occasionally one gets lucky –but am saying that we shouldn’t demonize or stigmatize psychotropics. There’s an old joke that Lacanians like to make about Guattari’s La borde clinic that sneers at how they began treating their schizophrenics with insulin. This is a stupid joke and reveals the limitations of Lacanian theory. Guattari– who, incidentally remained a member of Lacan’s Ecole his entire life and who himself did his analysis with Lacan –adopted an ecological approach to treatment that included the symbolic, collective relations, institutional structures, social structures, and yes, neurology. There is no a priori reason that psychotropics should be excluded from treatment– though clearly people shouldn’t be put in chemical straight jackets –and any actually practicing Lacanian analyst will tell you that there’s no contradiction between being in analysis and taking psychotropics. It seems to me that some puritanical attitudes we encounter towards psychotropics among those who adopt radical political orientations are premised on an untenable split between mind and body.
I do think, however, that there is some truth to what Circling says about the manner in which drug treatment of psychic maladies individualizes these maladies. As Circling suggests, all too often neurological and medicalized approaches to psychic maladies treat these maladies as a purely personal affair, ignoring the broader social context in which they occur and how that social context tends to produce certain forms of subjectivity. The psychic malady is treated as akin to a cold or the flu, as a virus the individual alone has, and the social conditions that render these forms of subjectivity probable are ignored. However, it’s important to note that the issue here is not an either/or. At birth, every neuron in our brain is more or less connected. Neurological takes place through the potentiation and depotentiation of synaptic connections that lead some neurological connections to atrophy and die off. This depotentiation of synaptic connections takes place, in part, through stimulations from the environment. Consequently, neurological structure is necessarily continuous with environmental relations, and this includes the social. This is why psychic maladies like a predominance of depression in a population (and during the last century, hysteria, can be treated as symptoms of broader social structures and as insights as to what is pathological in the social structure. Roudinesco has some interesting things to say about this.
However, it should also be borne in mind that while we might recognize, following Levi-Strauss’s path as announced in An Introduction to Marcel Mauss –symptoms as essentially social symptoms, we must also recognize that one condition under which the social frame in which symptoms are generated can be acted upon for itself is that subjects become agents of their symptoms rather than patients of their symptoms. Between Anna O. (Anna Pappenheim) who is unable to drink or eat and who has fallen into autism and Anno O. the social activist who fights on behalf of women’s rights and who is a fierce advocate of children, something has to take place in relation to the symptom… The symptom has to be transformed and one has to become an agent of the symptom rather than passively “speaking” the symptom through, for example, the medium of mute conversion symptoms.
I also find it perplexing to suggest that somehow Freudian and Lacanian practice are somehow Marxist or socially conscious in flavor. One of the standard Marxist criticisms of psychoanalysis was precisely that it individualizes psychic suffering in precisely the way that Circling suggests that neurology individualizes psychic suffering. The clinic is squarely situated in the dimension of the subject, and anyone who has either undergone analysis or practiced as an analyst knows, the content of the session is generally populated by the personal: one’s relations to parents, aunts, uncles, friends, work, lovers, etc., etc., etc. If one wants to get a flavor of what the clinical setting looks like, Guattari’s psychoanalytic notebooks (not his theoretical musings), provide excellent fodder. Here Zizek gives us an entirely distorted picture of what actually takes place in the clinical setting (and it is not surprising that Zizek is generally suspicious of the clinic). I point this out not to denounce psychoanalysis– I think this focus on the subject is one of its strengths –but only to suggest that the issue is more complicated than the formula “neurology-neoliberalism/psychoanalysis-Marxism”.
With respect to my post on the BP oil spill, we should raise the question of whether the problem has been properly analyzed. Is it really a question of people not getting worked up about these sorts of things? The sociologist Niklas Luhmann suggests something different. According to Luhmann societies are autopoietic systems. As Maturana and Varela define it,
An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network. (Autopoiesis and Cognition, 78)
Autopoietic systems continuously (re)produce themselves by constituting their own elements. Two key claims of autopoietic theory are that 1) autopoietic systems are operationally closed, and 2) that autopoietic systems form by constituting a distinction between system (self-referential) and environment (other-referential). The claim that autopoietic systems are operationally closed is the claim that operations within an autopoietic system only refer to themselves, not to an outside. The distinction between system and environment (all that is outside the system) is itself constituted by the system and reference to the environment only occurs through the distinctions of the system itself.
As a consequence, we cannot talk about information as something that is “out there” in the world or environment such that the system receives information that would exist regardless of whether or not the system existed, but rather must talk about systems constituting information through their own distinctions or organization. As Luhmann puts it,
…one could say that a system can only see what it can see. It cannot see what it cannot. Moreover, it cannot see that it cannot see this. For the system this is something concealed ‘behind’ the horizon that, for it, has no ‘behind’. What has been called the ‘cognized model’ is the absolute reality for the system. (Ecological Communication, 22 – 23)
Systems do not represent the world, but constitute a world through their own distinctions or organization. In Harman’s terms, systems only ever encounter objects as sensuous objects, never as real objects. Systems can be perturbed or irritated by other objects, but they will always transform these perturbations into information through their own internal “codes”.
If Luhmann is right (and I go back and forth on this issue) and societies are autopoietic systems, this has profound implications for how we think about the nature of political issues, for like any other autopoietic system, societies will be operationally closed and organized around a self-referential distinction between system and environment. What, then, according to Luhmann, are the elements that society constitutes, that compose a society (self-reference), and what is excluded from society? Luhmann’s hypothesis is surprising: Society consists entirely of communications. The autopoietic activity of society through which society reproduces itself is communication. Put in negative terms, society consists of communications alone and persons, psychic systems, are outside society, belonging to the environment of society.
It will be noted how nicely Luhmann’s thesis here meshes with key claims of object-oriented ontology with respect to mereology. Two of Harman’s key claims are that 1) objects are absolutely independent of one another, and 2) that objects are composed of other objects. As Harman puts it,
…we have a universe made up of objects wrapped in objects wrapped in objects wrapped in objects wrapped in objects. The reason we call these “substances” is not because they are ultimate or indestructible, but simply because none of them can be identified with any (or even all) of their relations with other entities. None of them is a pristine kernel of substantial unity unspoiled by interior parts. We never reach some final layer of tiny components that explains everything else, but enter instead into an indefinite regress of parts and wholes. Every object is both a substance and a complex of relations. (Guerrilla Metaphysics, 85)
For me one of the most fascinating riddles of object-oriented ontology is how you can simultaneously have objects exist independently of one another and have objects wrapped in other objects. This riddle is what I’m referring to when I refer to the strange mereology of object-oriented ontology. We find a similar mereology at work in Luhmann’s systems theory. Society cannot exist without psychic-systems or persons, but persons are not parts of society, nor do– to make matters even more paradoxical –do persons even communicate. Communication only takes place in society and communication only refers to communications. As Luhmann puts it, “…the environment of social systems cannot communicate with society” (29). As such, persons are thoroughly in the environment of social systems. They are systems in the environment of another system, not themselves parts of social systems.
If this is the case, then the question of political change is quite different. If and insofar as persons belong to the environment of social systems, and insofar as systems are operationally closed, the issue is not whether or not people are worked up about events such as the BP oil spill. Persons can be worked up about a number of things pertaining to economic injustices, poverty, war, environmental destruction, etc., but persons belong to the environment of social systems, they are not themselves parts of social system. And as a consequence, the perturbations persons generate in social systems will often be registered as mere noise, rather than productive of information that selects new system states in the social system and sends it moving in a new direction. The question, then, is not so much that of how to get people worked up and engaged, but rather how to perturb an operationally closed system in such a way that the perturbation is not registered as mere noise but rather generates information that leads to the selection of different system states. And this requires a second-order observation of how systems are organized. Denouncing the apathy of people really makes little sense here, because what we’re talking about is not people, but about how particular social systems are organized.
The situation here is deeply analogous to that of Lacanian psychoanalysis (and Lacan was no stranger to cybernetics, cf. Seminar I and II). Freud learned early that simply telling patients the meaning of their symptom had little effect in dissolving symptoms. If this is the case, then this is because psychic systems, like social systems, are operationally closed. The environment cannot communicate with the psychic system, but rather the psychic system only communicates with itself. The question for psychoanalysis after the flight of Dora was thus two-fold: First, how is it possible to perturb a psychic system so that the system produces “information” that selects new system states? Second, how is it possible to relate to a psychic system in such a way that it becomes capable of “seeing what it cannot see” or the organizing distinctions that govern self-reference and other reference? Introduced by Freud, and formalized by Lacan, psychoanalysis adopted a much more passive listening approach to the analysand that intervened in the immanence of the analysand’s speech, emphasizing certain repetitive signifiers in the analysand’s speech in “distorting” ways (in Seminar 23 Lacan remarks that the “homophone” and “equivoc” are the tools of psychoanalysis”) that elide the logic of the psychic systems self/other distinctions and lead it to generate new system states.
Moreover, by occupying the enigmatic place of the “dummy hand” or “playing dead” while paradoxically being present, the psychoanalyst engenders conditions of second-order observation in which the analysand gradually becomes aware of the distinctions governing his self/other relations in transforming perturbations into information and how the other is not out there in the world but is a product of his own self-referential distinctions. This is nothing but the traversing of the fantasy insofar as it is the fantasy that governs these relations or that functions as the “ur-schemata” regulating relations to the environment. The analyst is able to promote the traversal of the fantasy precisely by not being where the analysand expects him to be. The situation is similar with respect to the social: In what way can elements in the environment of social systems (us, for example), perturb social systems in such a way that these systems no longer repetitively reproduce their schema but begin to drift in a new direction?
Larval Subjects . 
June 2, 2010 at 4:24 pm
This is brilliant and right on.
June 2, 2010 at 4:46 pm
[…] here’s ANOTHER OF HIS FINE BLOG ESSAYS. The parts on capitalism, depression, and clinical psychiatry are interesting enough. And by the […]
June 2, 2010 at 5:05 pm
Please disregard if this an irrelevant question but what role does trauma have in the Lacanian model of change and in turn how might it correspond to the social?
June 2, 2010 at 6:06 pm
Excellent post. You description of depression as apathy is spot on. And this is its own kind of horrible, muted suffering and pain. My own experience with depression has always been one of a death-like state of perpetual despair, and medication definitely was one important agency of change (of which there are others, some I can help, some I can’t, like the social system itself you speak of). In my experience, medication can be the difference between between the claustrophobic darkness of night and the increasing light of dawn. A well considered and well placed anti-depressant can’t be underestimated in its result.
Levi writes:
Denouncing the apathy of people really makes little sense here, because what we’re talking about is not people, but about how particular social systems are organized.
Precisely, which is why I thought of Harvey’s multi-dimensional relations (which you posted here some time ago, I believe). As I said, I think people are suffering — this numbness is a kind of suffering and pain, I think, perhaps made all the worse because often it simply appears as amorphous or like a fog.
June 2, 2010 at 6:20 pm
I just wanted to put this here. Graham Harman responds to your thoughts about the mereology of the autopoietic:
In similar fashion, an object’s “foreign relations” and even its own pieces are merely a part of the environment of that object.
I mean, come on. This is a fantastic example of how far removed OOO is from an insipid naive realism of “what you see is what you get.” This is one of the weirdest ontologies extant. It’s really epically strange such that I think it is endlessly compelling.
June 2, 2010 at 6:39 pm
Yep, Joseph, my sentiments exactly. Keep an eye out for Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology as he’s going to develop a lot of this in terms of how objects relate to one another. With any luck we’ll be putting our heads together in the near future to co-author a book that deals explicitly with these issues.
June 2, 2010 at 6:46 pm
Lovely post! I wish I’d got there first, as I’ve often thought Luhmann / systems theory would be a crucial addition to any object oriented ontology. But one more critical reason for thinking this is that it puts in question Harman’s litanies of objects and opens up the possibility of making finer distinctions: not ALL objects are autopoietic systems in Luhmann’s / Varela’s terms. Legal systems, cells, selves, hurricanes, the world economy, the global climate, an atom (?) – these all count as autopoietic objects, but a grain of dust, a chocolate chip cookie, a shower of rain, perhaps are not, in that they do not have systemic ways of interacting with other objects. This is very vague, but I wonder what OOO can do with systems theory? Anyway it’s good to see someone has looked beyond the association of the likes of Luhmann with continental idealism, despite Luhmann’s own analogies between his project and Kant’s.
June 2, 2010 at 7:24 pm
Ah! The perils of using too few words too quickly in Levi’s blog comments strikes me again!
I wasn’t trying to demean depression medication at all. I certainly wasn’t implying that ’embracing’ this negativity is a better alternative. Nor that neurology is somehow illegitimate or wrong. I was just trying to suggest that what these sort of statistics indicate is a culture that locates the root cause of phenomena such as depression only within individual brains rather than in society as a whole as well.
Of course depression is manifested in the individual brain and it would be ridiculous to suggest that its causes are purely social. Many people achieve relief though medication, yes; it’s true that some people get to feel well again and live normal lives, I shouldn’t have suggested otherwise (my fingers ran ahead of my brain).
In my defence would add that some meds do numb and depression, while numbing, no doubt, is often painful too. Lithium, for instance, is well known for its numbing effects, of course. So I wasn’t completely talking out of my arse, I just didn’t think through the way I phrased it.
Mark Fisher does a wildly better job of articulating this point in his book. In fact you quoted just the paragraph I was thinking of when I wrote my comment earlier back in February:
Actually, having re-read the post I just pasted the above from you say there pretty much exactly what I was getting at (but better).
In any case, I am glad I was able to provoke such a great post! I hope I’ve cleared up what I meant a bit.
June 2, 2010 at 8:01 pm
Isn’t Marx calling our attention to this same split between society and its environment, and how this relates to social (revolutionary) change, in the Theses on Feuerbach. Specifically I am thinking of how in Thesis 5 he charges Feuerbach with starting “out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis.”
Isn’t that to say that he starts out with the autopoetic system full of contradictions, and only seeks to abstractly smooththem out, harmonizing the disturbances (or how they appear) with the way things already are taken to be?
June 2, 2010 at 8:10 pm
What I should have added too (this is really the key point, actually) is that rates of depression have massively increased in the last couple of hundred years. Part of that can be put down to better medical care which takes people’s mental health more seriously (rather than just expecting people to ‘get on with it’) and, of course, drugs companies are constantly pushing for more and more marginal ‘conditions’ to be recognised and for more and more medication to be prescribed for them. So, more and more people are counted as depressed today who would in the past have been considered ‘a bit upset’ or not counted as anything at all. All of that is true, but it still doesn’t account for the sheer, overwhelming mass of depressive illness in ‘developed’ societies.
In my country (the UK):
Really, it’s frightening.
Whether taken as a palliative or a cure, medication for mental health is an extremely valuable thing but that should not make us lose sight of the fact that, as a whole, it is also a social palliative that, one way or another, helps people ignore the strikingly obvious facts that something stinks in our midst and its just about all we can do to cover our noses most of the time. The answer isn’t to shove our noses straight in the stinking wretched thing, of course we’ve got to keep some distance but if we’ve become so perfumed that we’re forgetting the rotten mess exists then we’re not in a good situation.
(One of the more strained metaphors I’ve ever submitted to text, but there we go.)
Your point about Luhmann is fascinating although I don’t see why the things you oppose there are actually mutually exclusive. If the system operates under the condition that the wear and tear generated by the system’s operation (the ‘negative externalities’ in economist speak) are absorbed in large part by the bodies of the people (they live under conditions that make them depressed but instead of getting medicated and doing something about these conditions they just get medicated) then is not the continued subdued state of people’s bodies not precisely what allows the system to keep on ticking? In this situation is it not getting people agitated and engaged that is precisely the “perturbation [that] is not registered as mere noise but rather generates information that leads to the selection of different system states”?
June 2, 2010 at 8:17 pm
No worries, Circling. If you go back and reread my post I think you’ll see that I agreed with much of what you said. Thanks for provoking some theorization in me!
June 2, 2010 at 8:19 pm
Joe,
One of the key points of autopoietic systems theory, at least as Luhmann theorizes them, is that they don’t strive for equilibrium, but only function through disequilibrium and the production of differences. I don’t see Marx and systems theory as opposed, though their relation is something that has to be worked out.
June 2, 2010 at 8:29 pm
Richard,
Exactly! The work I’m doing right now for chapter 4 of The Democracy of Objects is directed at working out these differences. With Harman’s reading of Zubiri, I agree that all substances or objects are systems, but not all objects are autopoietic systems. Nonetheless, non-autopoietic systems and autopoietic systems do share certain features in common. All substances, I would argue, are closed in the sense that they only relate to other objects in the world in terms of their own structure. However, it doesn’t follow from this that all systems are operationally closed. At least that’s the direction I’m moving in.
OOO has a rather fraught relationship with Kant. OOO’s point is not that Kant is mistaken per se, but that what Kant says about psychic systems as they relate to the world is true of all objects as they relate to the world. That said, while I am proposing an ontological reading of Luhmann, I think there are a variety of ways in which Luhmann already departs from the idealist tendencies of systems theory. Unlike Maturana, for example, Luhmann never suggests (to my knowledge, now I’ll find him saying exactly this, sigh) that systems bring a world into being. Luhmann is careful to distinguish between the environment of a system (self-referentially constituted by the system) and systems in the environment. In other words, he grants autonomy to other systems and refuses to reduce them to mere products or phenomena of a particular system. In this respect, he mirrors Graham’s distinction between real and sensuous objects. These systems just would be what I call substances or objects and would constitute the in itself of being without falling into any traps of representational conceptions of knowledge.
June 2, 2010 at 9:36 pm
[…] on Depression Here. I share with him a certain worry about the knee-jerk “anti-pills” mentality in some […]
June 3, 2010 at 12:06 am
I would be interested in a discussion of depression that set aside the presumption of a cure. It seems that if I claim a pathology to be a *social* symptom, this claim is already immanent to a certain normative trajectory, the “where” of “where are you going with this?”; the same could be said of the individual situation of a pathology. But is this true of all discourse? Can a claim be made that leads one nowhere in particular except further *in*?
It remains for me to clarify what this *in* signifies for any of that to make sense, so I guess another way to put idea is in the terms of Luhmann’s autopoeitic systems: is it possible that a new system arise out of an system without interference? I believe that the answer should be no, as the system only reconstitutes its own composition of elements, and I suppose such a system should already be chaotic (in the technical sense of the term) and so its trajectory predictable, but I’d like to hear your reply at any rate.
June 3, 2010 at 12:09 am
On second thought, perhaps I shouldn’t meddle with autopoietic systems, as it might make the interest I wish to express much more convoluted than it is.
June 3, 2010 at 12:11 am
My interest is also just that: an interest. For now. I make no serious claim to anything.
June 3, 2010 at 4:23 am
V. Interesting.
Maybe structure determined entities do encounter each other ‘in some way’ thru their ‘structural coupling’?
“We speak of s.c. whenever there is a hist. of recurrent interactions leading to the structural congruence btwn 2 or more systems.” (M/V, The tree of knowledge).
But these interactions don’t specify the changes that occur – only ‘trigger’ them – as you note.
The classic example of structural coupling is ‘trophallaxis’ (flow of foods – e.g. in an ant colony)…
But OOO would argue that the ‘real’ ants (like all other real objects) never encounter each other…not even indirectly -maybe.
They encounter each others’ ‘structure’ but do not determine the changes that occur – whilst the system conserves its ‘organization’ or ‘identity’…???
Varela would argue that the nervous system is not a decoupled monad constructing any arbitrary reality.
But as you note ‘it’s complicated’ – like relationships options on facebook.
It comes down to how the ‘real object’ is defined – and to whether we agree with Harman’s critique of sciences’s oh so naive efficient causality!?
It seems clear to us that a shove, however modest, falls under efficient causality. But on the other hand, if we try to apply the idea of the four causes to an act of advising a friend,
we are struck by grave doubts about the possible type of causality of the advice. This points up the fact that Aristotle’s
celebrated theory of causality is strictly formed around “natural” realities. Aristotle’s causality is a theory
of natural causality. As I see it, one must rigorously introduce a theory of personal causality, next to Aristotle’s
natural causality. Zubiri, Sentient Intelligence.
June 3, 2010 at 8:04 am
another valuable resource for all interested in psychoanalyse and 000 is Tobie Nathan. He published ‘Medecins et sorciers’ with Isabelle Stengers in 1995.
http://www.ethnopsychiatrie.net/TNenglish.htm
He works particulary with African immigrants in France whose ‘fetishes’ he does not treat as simple ‘beliefs’. “There are an infinite number of efficacious therapeutic systems.”
Here I see a real difference of orientation. These people (like Nathan or Stengers) bypass ontology for pragmatism. What works – not what is it?
June 3, 2010 at 4:15 pm
I would never want to demonize anti-depressants. Clearly a large part (maybe all) of emotion is chemical and pills can alter these chemicals. My worry is that we don’t know enough about the brain to do anything that is much more effective than a placebo. Drug companies have know that their drugs are only slightly more effective than a placebo but suppressed the research for years:
Today we look back in horror in how we treated mental illness even a few decades ago, not to mention centuries ago. I have the feeling that in a few decades will will look back in horror that we ever prescribed, say Paxil, for depression. Already we know that in many people, especially young people, some anti-depressants cause suicidal feelings and that drug companies have know about this for years but have ruthlessly suppressed this research as well.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-antidepressants-cause
The vicious circle is that greedy messed up drug companies are one social factor in causing so much depression, and then the drugs themselves are hit or miss and that when they miss they can make this much worse.
Again, just to reiterate, I’m not demonizing anti-depressants. I have confidence that when we understand the brain better we will be able to make customized drugs for each persons brain and get a much better success rate.
June 4, 2010 at 5:37 pm
I completely agree with Levi and Joseph C.
I have to say that working with and having just come out of a relationship with someone with a serious mental illness (not that there are any minor ones) the importance of medication can’t be emphasised enough, whilst acknowledging the ‘social palliative’ aspect.
In my relationship the feeling that psychotropics were a kind of straight jacket or that on them my ex-partner was not herself caused a hell of a lot of suffering when she refused to take her medication. It also caused ongoing pain on top of her illness in regards that she felt whatever version of herself these medications ‘constructed’ they were none of them her. Here it was less the fact of medication but the prevalent attitude towards medication that caused suffering; not the mood stabiliser or anti-depressant or whatever but the social relationship that directed how she experienced them.
They were always construed in an imprisoning sense. So where the denial of these preparations comes up, I think Levi’s emphasis on the Spinozan element (that Anodyne Lite talks about as well) should always be brought home.
There is also a kind of split that goes on when we talk about mental health problems that others have alluded to; the split of the mind from the body. This is still, unbelievably, ingrained in the psychiatric hospital that I work in where we have an ‘organic’ unit and a ‘functional’ unit. Where no one would criticise the use of medications on people with dementia (whom I work with as a nurse) it seems legitimate for some to reject the such use on those with depression or schizophrenia.
I wonder how much of this is the result of the anti-psychiatry movement. Despite its good intentions and the reforms it achieved there is a sense in which extreme pronouncements like Szasz ‘the myth of mental illness’ is just the opposite but identical number to ‘its an excuse/they’re trying to avoid responsibility’ that emerges from neoliberal ideology.
In the absence of the kind of organisational structures you mention I think that people, isolate as they feel themselves to be under neoliberal ideology (and at the same time far too close to each other) simply become depressed. Its not a new idea: the world in which we live, with its intersecting systems, that we broadly call capitalist is one that actively produces the conditions for a kind of psychic withdrawal. We might say that it actively engenders the Cold World of a dysphoria. This is why I say the condition is broadly post-traumatic.
In that way people like Zizek’s emphasis on Bartleby is wrong because his ‘refusal to even refuse’ isn’t in any way a radical act. It is simply a symptom of the apathy of a disinvestment in life.
Again, to reiterate with dementia, we wouldn’t see anything radical or liberatory in the profound withdrawal of someone in the advanced stages, no longer able to recognise themselves, others, objects, unable to remember even how to eat or swallow.
In my field there is a lot of talk of a biopsychosocial model as against a medical model which matches up to the debates between OOP and eliminativism. I would love to see OOP become more involved in mental health but, obviously to anyone reading this, I wouldn’t be the person to do it.
June 4, 2010 at 5:44 pm
[…] To read the rest of the texts and the discussion that follows click here […]
June 5, 2010 at 12:28 am
Drone,
I think you hit the mark with your remarks about the anti-psychiatry movement and pharmaceuticals. The point here is that it’s not an either/or. We can simultaneously agree with the anti-psychiatry movement and the excesses of psychiatry in forcing people into chemical straight jackets and recognize the efficacy and liberating nature of some of these drugs. Here I think the Lacanians have it right in their focus on the subject. The problem denounced by the anti-psychiatry movement revolved around the tendency of psychiatry to objectify (in the non-OOO sense) subjects, erasing their status as autonomous actors altogether. They were right.
Full disclosure here. I’ve suffered from some pretty severe depression throughout my life and have run the full gamut with psychotropics, ranging from chemical straight-jackets to liberative drugs. I did a three year period during my teenage years where I was on a small dosage of thorizine and one of the early generations of anti-depressants. During this period I didn’t feel much of anything, though I did become a logical and conceptual machine similar to Hegel’s Science of Logics. Since, I’ve been on anti-depressants that were absolutely miserable, filled with horrible side effects and throwing me deeper into the blandness of depression, but I’ve also been on anti-depressants that have allowed me to act and feel in a way I suspect would not otherwise be possible given my odd, bi-polar sort of brain chemistry. However, as someone else put it– Joseph, I think –these are things that should be done in combination with talk therapy. My experience in the Lacanian clinic, both as an analyst and as an analysand, was life-changing and fundamentally reconfigured my relation to others, thought, and writing.
June 5, 2010 at 2:59 am
Thank you for this. As someone who lost a year in my life to … whatever it was, and a number of other seasons… with at least 4 diagnosed bipolars in my immediate family. Public perception–or the distortions thereof, can be truly frightening. Back and forth from In Your Face… to back in the closet with the next news clipping of some horrible violence done by someone with one of these “mental” illnesses. Like, how many have ‘normal’ men and women killed at the command of their ‘normal’ leaders?
I know who I’m afraid of… the more ‘normal’ a person seems… the more I begin to plot a strategic retreat.
June 5, 2010 at 3:19 am
A follow up on this… the Scientologists through a wide network of front publications, have done incalculable damage to the public perception of mental disorders and treatment. Not least, because I suspect they’ve made it more difficult to direct legitimate criticism at the institutional elite… particularly at psychiatry, which has invested itself so thoroughly in support of the psychotropic drug models that individual psychiatrists really have become essentially “Pdocs,” as their victim/patients are wont to label them… drug dispensers who write scripts at the advice of primary care givers, psychotherapists, whatever… with little input into what goes into the process of diagnosis/evaluation.
The double corruption of capitalist structures where they should have no place, and cults with media power, has made treatment for any mental illness like guessing the right lottery number… whether you accidentally hit on a competent care giver or … more likely… not.
June 13, 2010 at 9:55 pm
[…] taught me is the withdrawal of objects from their relations. This is best thought in terms of my recent post on Luhman. What I’ve discovered through my daughter is that all substances are abyssal black boxes. […]
June 17, 2010 at 12:43 am
[…] third way of making this argument would be through onticology. As I argued in an earlier post drawing on systems theory, every object is a system organized around a distinction between itself […]
June 25, 2010 at 8:19 pm
[…] closed analysand. At any rate, if Reid is interested he can read more about systems here, here, here, and here, or he can do a search for Luhmann on this blog. […]