The adventures of the psychosomatic

 The psychosomatic has fallen out of favour, or, more complexly, has become in the popular imagination a way of detracting from the reality of a malady or uncomfortable situation. Partly this is the result of a good thing - a feminist demand that the medical profession treat the ailments of women with respect, rather than dismissing them as "mental" things women do. Since this happened and happens, that critique still has bite. However, I think the bite is in the dismissal of female testimony. And it does not tell us, fundamentally, about the psychosomatic.

There’s an obvious antinomy in the argument that psychosomatic conditions aren’t real. The ground of that objection is based in a sort of common folk psychological positivism, a naïve materialism. The argument goes that an illness or something with sickness like symptoms is real if you can trace the cause back to some alien presence in the body – a virus, a bacteria – or some genetic or natal cause. Otherwise, the symptom or disease like condition is not real, in as much as its cause is some idea. It is, instead, feigned. However, how would feigning be possible if ideas in some sense had no effect on the physiological condition of the body? Once we grant that the effect can occur, we have granted another causal route for bodily conditions. We don’t really have to go too far afield in our folk interpretations of our actions to see the most commonplace instances of this. I have an idea that I want to run, so I run. Running causes my heart to beat faster and my breathing to quicken. Nobody would say that the heart beating faster and the breathing wasn’t real. One might say, however, that I was proximately responsible for this by my decision to run. We can change our example and make the responsibility charge (which, I should point out, is a term that is overdetermined – it is not just a way of talking about a cause, but a way of talking about the morality of an act) a little fuzzier. I’m afraid of heights. When, for instance, I went up with my wife years ago to to have drinks on top of a swank L.A. hotel in a balcony that looks out from forty stories, I experienced some slight physiological Wilfred Changes and a great deal of a sort of proprioceptive mental discomfort that I cannot trace back to a decision I made, as in the running case. Instead, the phobia has a subconscious status. I am aware of it, but I can’t turn it off and on in the way I can the decision to run. Even in dreams, when I go high up I get afraid. Even those peope who are resistant to the idea of a subconscious would probably try to persuade me to treat it like running or other actions I turn off and on, implicitly acknowledging that it has another footing. In habit, say.

The point is, whether a condition comes from chemicals or a virus or something unconscious, it is real in as much as it is felt. A therapist might speak of an unconscious decision to feel in a certain way, using the model of decision-making that would put the idea on the same plane as the decision to run, but this is a simplification and distortion of the unconscious idea. Eventually, Freud, needing “deciders”, came up with a topography of the self that included the ego, the id, and the superego. It is not clear, however, that decision actually describes the effect of an idea on the unconscious level. We need, as Freud knew, to get rid of our authoritarian illusion that there are deciders all the way down. There isn’t. The rock does not decide to be a rock, the tree the tree, the sky the sky.

The unconscious is back in style, scientifically, although neurologists try to make clear that they are not talking about the yucky Freudian unconscious, with all that sex going on. This unconscious is sexless and data driven. It has become obvious that we take in far more sense data than we can consciously process. It has to go somewhere. The popular model for this is the User illusion – taken from computers. Users downloading a file will look at the little graph showing the file being downloaded as if it is connected to the activity, instead of being a mere icon pointing to the activity going on, and thus unconnected to it in a real sense – in the same way that the blinking light warning you to get oil for your car is not the thing you pour the oil over when you get the oil. The user illusion idea is that mostly we deal with icons in our consciousness instead of the real processes going on in our unconscious.

This view of the unconscious dovetails with Freudian theory much more than the neurologists and pop scientists think. That is because most of them have never read Freud at all, but have read magazine articles about what a kook Freud was. Oh well.

The violent resistance to the suggestion that a symptom or condition can have its ultimate cause in the unconscious is another symptom of the flatheadedness of our time. On the other hand, the original Freudian therapeutic impulse, which was about understanding our unconscious idea and thus ‘curing’ the condition or syndrome, seems to have been way too optimistic, way too premised on a conversion motif . What changes the body necessarily operates through the bodies tools, and corporal tendencies can reinforce themselves in different ways once a condition is established. It is likely that if a person were really suffering from some psychosomatic condition, he would really need certain physical treatments. Just as I would need, say, treatment if my panic over heights caused me to have a heart attack or something.

My point is that the rejection of the psychosomatic is something encouraged by the positivist trend in medical science that is ultimately therapeutically unsound.

The unconscious – can’t live with it, can’t live without it.

Backrooms

 Went to see Backrooms yesterday with my son – who is an ardent fan of horror movies – and I began sceptical and came away impressed. Our first anti-AI allegory! It makes sense that AI is best attacked from the horror angle – it rather comes out of horror gothic, out of Frankenstein. The movie, I feared, would be boring, but the director, a twenty year old youtuber, Kane Parsons, is pretty expert at playing the dozens with the scary story/scary film genre. The jump scares are all, or almost all, built from implication, from noises and shadows.

I think I have detected, from the Descent and As Above, So Below to Barbarian a subgenre, aptly named on Reddit as Underground horror, in which the primal memory of going down the birth canal (okay, perhaps there is none back there in the cortex, but still) is twisted into the adventure of being chased through ever narrower corridors, from which one must escape the monster.

But to return to the Anti-AI motif – AI slop really is monstrous, so why not draw the obvious conclusion? We always turn to some gothic motif to make our liberal political points – to dystopia or allegory in Animal Farm and 1984 (and as a piece of art, incidentally, Backrooms is far superior to 1984) – and now it is the turn of the evil empires churning out AI. It is apt that a Youtuber feels the danger here – it is not a fake Luddite sense of all technology being bad, but a real sense that this technology is debasing the internet technology we have, in the same way cryptocurrency debases money by creating fake money.

So, I was wrong to irritate my son by making the Dad joke of calling it Bathrooms consistently when we were discussing going to see it. My bad.

Anger and repetition: a non-Kierkegaardian excursus

 

In Repetition, Kierkegaard’s founding binary is that between recollection and repetition.

As founding binaries go, that is a good one.

Myself, though, I have been thinking about anger and repetition. And here there is a psychology that, I believe, escapes the Kierkegaardian remit.

My own experience of anger, phenomenologically interpreted, is peculiarly driven by repetition. That is, my anger will express itself to me, in my head, as a sort of dialogue with the person I am angry with. This could be someone I know, or it could be someone on social media, or it could be someone with whom I have a bad encounter, etc. The anger will flow into formulas in my head that keep repeating themselves. Anger, I have noticed in angry arguments, does take that blamemaking, repetitive form. I would wager that if you record any angry argument – from societies as different as the Irish-Americans and Balinese – you will find a significant percentage of phrases or words repeated. Repetition is not only the form into which the feeling of anger is pressed, it becomes the motor of anger as it is experienced.

Now I would contrast this with that particular form of happiness called satisfaction. This is not Kierkegaard’s notion of happiness. It has a utilitarian spirit that is alien to his question about repetition – when repetition becomes conceptualized as a part of, or a critique of, dialectic.

But in my own experience, the thing about satisfaction is that it is shaped by refusing further repetition. It is not only absolutely of the moment, it is, in a sense, a refusal of both the past and the future. That is, of recollection and repetition.

My son used to have a very cute trait. When he was happy about, say, a meal, he would say this is the best thing I ever ate. And in that moment he meant it. Neither the past nor the future would alter the satisfaction that here, this food I am devouring, is the best I have ever eaten. This did not express a real quantitative judgment. I don’t think he was actually remembering a series of foods. Rather, the food presented itself, in the moment, as overwhelmingly satisfying.

Consumer society is, in its fundamentals, opposed to this peasant satisfaction. If satisfaction as stasis is encouraged, consumer demand will flatline. Satisfaction, from the corporation’s view, must be edged with dissatisfaction. No perfect moment – no satisfied moment – can be, theoretically, allowed. As this is impossible, the corporate compromise with satisfaction takes many forms. One of which is to take some satisfactory situation and make it more uncomfortable. To, in other words, make the customer just a little unsatisfied, without losing the customer. An unsatisfied customer might be willing to pay a bit more for a higher level of service, meaning discovering, once again, that satisfaction. In this case, satisfaction becomes positional – it becomes competitive, a minor triumph over other customers.

And we know how that goes. That is, if we have ever gone to the airport and flown on a plane. That is the whole business plan of airlines nowadays.

Repetition and anger can well become a political norm. I am not sure how I’d quantify this, but I do think periods of ebb and discontent are partly articulated by an increase in the use of wooden language – which is designed to be repeated. It is so designed that it can be used without actually giving the words any semiotic seriousness. This is a fact noticed by all polemicists – from Jonathan Swift to Karl Kraus.

I should ps this post: Freud, of course, conjoined repetition and anxiety - finding anxiety dreams that were curiously rife with repetition. Freud eventually used this material to develope the notion of the death drive, in which repetition is used as a control mechanism. I could go on... but I won't, except to point out that repetition as function sees repetition as subordinate to the drive, whereas I think that this misses the way repetition can take control of the control - the song, so to speak, is subordinate to the tempo, becoming a different song - a deformed song, a song varied beyond its canonical essence - as the tempo alters.

Karen Chamisso Poem

 ''I'm like a mike -- I have no set sound of my own,'

Said Peter Sellers, nailing

the twentieth century poetic.

I have emerged in the shambles after

and have witnessed the death

of all that imitative fury

which once seemed the modernist escape

from the boring drawl

of one’s perpetually Victorian parents.

Now the jokes in my childhood jokebook are all dead.

He said

- she said.

The view of the top 20 percent income bracket: the great American twenty first century

  An interesting variable in U.S. elections is that the top 20 % does most of the talking - the media, the politicians, the "experts" - but the bottom 80 % does the deciding. The top 20 % is happy with their stocks, but appalled by Trump's boorishness. The bottom 80 % is unhappy with all of it.

For the top 20 percent, this has been a very good century. Their stock portfolios have made them rich. After an oopsy moment that spanned the 2007-2010 period, they were on the road to wealth once again, and have stayed on it for a remarkable 16 years.

Among those people, politics really is a return of the same: a sort of cartoon band of the same figures going around and around, and you could be fans of one or the other. And their political spokesmen - their pundits and pollers, their Nate Silvers and Matt Yglesiases - all agreed that what you do, if you do politics, is you looked at polls - to figure out what the underling class thought - and then you figured out messaging, and then the game went on. A serious game, absolutely removed from historical context or any perspective that would make the great 21st century they experienced as anything more than a grand success.

The 20 percent have had a lot of success slowing politics until it reflected this pivot: keep the means the wealthy use to get wealthier, and bend everything else to that. This is now called the Abundance ideology, before it was the third way, but its posiitional/class character is all about the same configuration.

The crushing of labor in the final stage of the Cold War and the post-Cold War neoliberalism created the social environment in which this 20 percent could talk aloud, one to the other, and call this politics. Now one part of this discourse is fraying - the alt-right is going back to its old openly racist, sexist, lbgt-phobic ways. The liberal gaze that once made overt racism a no-no even while instituting neo-Jim Crow jailing policies and the like has broken down. But the 20 percent is still having the best time.

Most of our analysis will continue to be milled by these people. But the collapse of the liberal gaze is a symptom that underneath, there are anxieties that all the stuff that was put away - for instance, the threat of an international labor movement, or the threat of street activism, etc. - are not so put away.

Oh Saul Alinsky - America turns its lonely eyes to you!

"The despair is there; now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change. We'll give them a way to participate in the democratic process, a way to exercise their rights as citizens and strike back at the establishment that oppresses them, instead of giving in to apathy. We'll start with specific issues -- taxes, jobs, consumer problems, pollution -- and from there move on to the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and the Congress and the board rooms of the megacorporations. Once you organize people, they'll keep advancing from issue to issue toward the ultimate objective: people power. We'll not only give them a cause, we'll make life goddamn exciting for them again -- life instead of existence. We'll turn them on."

sanity and poetry

 

How much madness we’ve flushed down the drain!

The correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell is instructive. Bishop stood for sanity, as much of it as she could stand. She grew up in a house with a mad parent, her mother. Lowell stood for insanity, or sanity shaken to vertigo – and of course suffered from madness himself.

I take this from Colm Tóibín's essay/review: 

“Some of their exchanges remain fascinating, such as the letter in 1957 in which Bishop responded to a draft poem (which became ‘For Elizabeth Bishop 2: Castine, Maine’) that Lowell had written about her in which he mentioned that her mother had tried to kill her. ‘I don’t remember any direct threats,’ Bishop wrote, ‘except the usual maternal ones. Her danger for me was just implied in the things I overheard the grown-ups say before and after her disappearance. Poor thing, I don’t want to have it any worse than it was.’ The following year, it must have struck Bishop with considerable force to learn that Lowell, who had had a breakdown, was incarcerated in the same mental hospital as her mother had been. ‘My mother stayed there once for a long time,’ she wrote to him. ‘I even have some snapshots of her in very chic clothes of around 1917, taking a walk by a pond there.’”

We have, of course, an odd and slightly menacing way of talking of ourselves as "wired" - as though nerves were wires. It is an odd thing, since the wire model of the nerve was pretty much a dead end, and the synapse showed us that it was something else that is happening in the brain and body. Yet we calmly speak of hard wiring, as though we were all appliances. A vision that has its roots in the maddest of delusions, truly of Schreber-like proportions. Wires, of course, don’t go mad, they rust, they misfire, they loosen. There are shorts, there are circuits.

It is a funny thing, but for me, it is only together, only in the circuit of their friendship, that I really appreciate Lowell and Bishop. We do like to take our writers one at a time, but often they come in twos – Blok and Bely, for instance; Verlaine and Rimbaud. Perhaps it was the unhappiness of Baudelaire’s life that he really didn’t find a pairing – he was always the albatross. 

Folie a deux – granted; But sanity is a deux, too. Don’t credit yourself with it if you have it – cause you didn’t make it, baby. You didn’t make it.

Left conservatism

1.Norman Mailer used to call himself a left conservative – a conservatism with no connection to capitalism.

In Mailer’s case, he had an allergy to progress and its symbols – to plastic, to contraceptives, to a certain bio-politics.

Well, I have sympathy for the allergy to plastics, but I don’t take chemistry as a force I oppose. My Old MAN, an a/c OG, bitched in the 90s about the regulations that we imposed on Chlorofluorocarbons. Those regulations were righteous, however. In some ways, the only presidential action since LBJ that was actually worth a shit was George H.W. Bush’s convocation of the big wigs to get an agreement signed to end the chemical aggravation of the ozone hole. The agreement moved the technology – it didn’t destroy HVAC.

Mailer, a Manichean, would have disapproved, perhaps. He definitely didn’t like the products of air conditioning – for instance, Miami Beach.

I think left conservatism is almost impossible in the U.S. – though certain alt-right people have poked at it. But it had a career that is worth looking at.

2. In Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Man, she makes the following shrewd hit at Burke:

“There appears to be such a mixture of real sensibility and fondly cherished romance in your composition that the present crisis carries you out of yourself; and since you could not be one of the grand movers, the next best thing that dazzled your imagination was to be a conspicuous opposer.”

Wollstonecraft was echoing the suspicion that dogged Burke throughout his career – that he was an Irishman who valued cleverness over sound thinking, celebrity over sense. One of Wollstonecraft’s polemical moves is to crucify Burke’s Reflections on his early essay on the Sublime – an essay that moves from paradox to paradox. Her strategy makes for a few strange paradoxes itself, since basically she portrays Burke as a fashionable sentimentalist – a man of a certain kind of womanly cast – while she herself represents manly reason.

The Burkean paradox in the essay on the sublime out of which his system springs is to separate pain and pleasure as distinct qualities unconnected by the continuum of sensation by which they were defined by people like Hartley – and, in general, in the sensationalist tradition:

‘Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition. People are not liable to be mistaken in their feelings, but they are very frequently wrong in the names they give them, and in their reasonings about them. Many are of the opinion, that pain arises necessarily from the removal of some pleasure; as they think pleasure does from the ceasing or diminution of some pain. For my part, I am rather inclined to imagine, that pain and pleasure, in their most simple and natural manner of affecting, are each of a positive nature, and by no means necessarily dependent on each other for their existence. The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference. When I am carried from this state into a state of actual pleasure, it does not appear necessary that I should pass through the medium of any sort of pain. If in such a state of indifference, or ease, or tranquillity, or call it what you please, you were to be suddenly entertained with a concert of music; or suppose some object of a fine shape, and bright, lively colours, to be presented before you; or imagine your smell is gratified with the fragrance of a rose; or if without any previous thirst you were to drink of some pleasant kind of wine, or to taste of some sweetmeat without being hungry; in all the several senses, of hearing, smelling and tasting, you undoubtedly find a pleasure; yet if I inquire into the state of your mind previous to these gratifications, you will hardly tell me that they found you in any kind of pain; or, having satisfied these several senses with their several pleasures, will you say that any pain has succeeded, though the pleasure is absolutely over? Suppose on the other hand, a man in the same state of indifference, to receive a violent blow, or to drink of some bitter potion, or to have his ears wounded with some harsh and grating sound; here is no removal of pleasure; and yet here is felt in every sense which is affected, a pain very distinguishable. It may be said, perhaps, that the pain in these cases had its rise from the removal of the pleasure which the man enjoyed before, though that pleasure was of so low a degree as to be perceived only by the removal. But this seems to me a subtilty that is not discoverable in nature. For if, previous to the pain, I do not feel any actual pleasure, I have no reason to judge that any such thing exists; since pleasure is only pleasure as it is felt. The same may be said of pain, and with equal reason. I can never persuade myself that pleasure and pain are mere relations, which can only exist as they are contrasted; but I think I can discern clearly that there are positive pains and pleasures, which do not at all depend upon each other.’

Such a view of pain and pleasure cannot, obviously, submit to calculus – on the contrary, it not only rejects the utilitarian calculus, but the whole idea of founding societies on ‘indexes of happiness’ in which pain and pleasure, quantified, can be matched against each other. In Burke’s view, it is simply impossible to even speak of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, since this mistakes the essence of happiness. This is what is behind the most famous passage in the Reflections on the Revolution in France:

‘It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in — glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.’

Burke, of course, was writing before Smith’s economics had been joined to Bentham’s utilitarianism. The ‘delightful’ vision of the Queen refers us back to the essay on the sublime once again:

“It is most certain that every species of satisfaction or pleasure, how different soever in its manner of affecting, is of a positive nature in the mind of him who feels it. The affection is undoubtedly positive; but the cause may be, as in this case it certainly is, a sort of Privation. And it is very reasonable that we should distinguish by some term two things so distinct in nature, as a pleasure that is such simply, and without any relation, from that pleasure which cannot exist without a relation, and that too a relation to pain. Very extraordinary it would be, if these affections, so distinguishable in their causes, so different in their effects, should be confounded with each other, because vulgar use has ranged them under the same general title. Whenever I have occasion to speak of this species of relative pleasure, I call it Delight …”

Now, there is a sense in which this passage can be overemphasized. In the Great Transformation, Burke does not figure as an opponent of capitalism. He was, in fact, one of Smith’s partisans. It was quite in keeping with Burke’s principles that his loyalty would be at once to an enlightened system that restrained the government from granting monopolies and a feudal political order that largely depended on an ideological monopoly. What interests me, here, is the tension between, on the one side, the advent of an economic system which would profit the upper class for which Burke stood as an advocate, and, on the other side, the gross attitudinal changes that would subvert the legitimacy of the ancien regime order. Burke’s notions about pleasure and pain aren’t mere whims, even if they so appeared to Mary Wollstonecraft, but are fundamental to a philosophical anthropology which reacted against capitalism and socialism (considered to be of the same order), gradually gathering around itself a certain systematicity, one of gestures and not logic (for it never fully lost its suspicion of systems), with a defence of irreducible human and social qualities, the unbought grace of life, that became anti-humanistic insofar as these qualities did not match up with the universal qualities projected by economics, physics, and psychology.

Left conservativism does not have, cannot have, a great thinker as its totem. It pops up in the romantics, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Hazlitt, Eliot, etc., but it is always a guest at the wedding, never one of the nuptial air. This was the great contradiction that tugged at European societies up until 1945 – and when I say tugged, I might add bombed, battled, battered, slaughtered, imprisoned, colonized, and exhausted itself. Frankenstein’s creature is a casualty of this tension – the new man who comes into the world entirely without the unbought grace of life, though endowed with an irrepressible Lockean potential.

Helas, nous avons tous devenu des Frankensteins, mon vieux, A planet full