31 July 2009

insuring life in a single sentence

4th Question:. . . . . .? (For the second time.)
Answer: Books? Yes, I read a lot, I've always read a lot. No, I'm not sure we do understand each other. I like to read best on the floor, or in bed, almost everything lying down, no, it has less to do with the books, above all it has to do with the reading, with black on white, with the letters, the syllables, lines, the signs, the setting down, this inhuman fixing, this insanity which flows from people and is frozen into expression. Believe me, expression is insanity, it arises out of our insanity. It also has to do with turning pages, with hunting from one page to the other, overflow of verse, with insuring life in a single sentence, and, in turn, with the sentences seeking insurance in life. Reading is a vice which can replace all other vices or temporarily take their place in more intensely helping people live, it is an aberration, a consuming passion. No, I don't take any drugs, I take books, of course I have certain preferences, many books don't suit me at all, some I take only in the morning, others at night, there are books I don't ever let go, I drag them around with me in the apartment, carrying them from the living room into the kitchen, I read them in the hall standing up, I don't use a bookmark, I don't move my lips while reading, early on I learned to read very well, I don't remember the method, but you ought to look into it, they must have used an excellent method in our provincial elementary schools, at least back then when I learned to read. Yes I also realized, but not until later, that there are countries where people don't know how to read, at least not quickly, but speed is important, not only concentration, can you please tell me who can keep chewing on a simple or even a complex sentence without feeling disgust, either with the eyes or the mouth, just keep on grinding away, over and over; a sentence which only consists of subject and preposition must be consumed rapidly, a sentence with many appositions must for that very reason be taken at tremendous speed, with the eyeballs performing an imperceptible slalom, since a sentence doesn't convey anything to itself, it has to "convey" something to the reader. I couldn't "work my way through" a book, that would almost be an occupation. There are people, I tell you, you come across the strangest surprises in this field of reading. . . I do profess a certain weakness for illiterates, I even know someone here who doesn't read and doesn't want to; a person who has succumbed to the vice of reading more easily understands that a state of innocence can be attained only by those truly capable of reading or by complete illiterates.
(Herr Mühlbauer has erased the tape by mistake. Herr Mühlbauer apologizes. I'd only have to repeat a few sentences.)
Yes, I read a lot, but the shocks, the things that really stay with you are merely the vision of a page, a remembrance of five words on the lower left of page 27: Nous allons à l'Espirit. Words on a poster, names on doors, titles of books left in a store window, unsold, a magazine ad discovered in the dentist's waiting room, a gravestone epitaph which struck my eye: HERE LIES. A name while flipping through the phone book: EUSEBIUS. I'll get right to the point. . . For example last year I read: "He wore a Menschikow," I don't know why, but I was immediately convinced that whoever this man might have been, this sentence meant he wore a Menschikow, indeed, that he had to wear one, and that this was important for me to know, it belongs irrevocably to my life. Something will come of it. But, to get back to the point I was trying to make, even if we were to have more sessions, day and night, I couldn't list the books which have impressed me the most or explain why they made such an impression, in which places and for how long. What is then left you will ask, but that's not the point! there are only a few sentences, a few expressions which awake inside my brain again and again, begging to be heard over the years: Der Ruhm hat keine weissen Flügel [The wings of fame aren't white]. Avec ma main brûlée, j'écris sur la nature du feu [With my burned hand I write about the nature of fire]. In fuoco l'amor mi mise, in fuoco d'amor mi mise [Love set me afire, I was set in a fire of love]. To The Onlie Begetter. . .
(I signal and blush, Herr Mühlbauer has to erase that at once, no one cares about that, I wasn't thinking, I let myself get carried away, the Viennese newspaper readers wouldn't understand Italian anyway and most of them wouldn't understand French anymore, not the younger ones, besides, it's not to the point. Herr Mühlbauer wants to think it over, he couldn't keep up entirely, he, too, doesn't know Italian or French, but he's been to America twice and never once encountered the word "begetter" in his journeys.)

Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina (1990:57-59)

completely natural

Despite all our differences, when it comes to our names Malina and I share the same timidity; only Ivan is completely enthused with his own name, and since it is completely natural to him, since he identifies himself with his name, it is also a pleasure for me to pronounce, to think, to whisper to myself. Ivan's name has become a source of pleasure, an indispensable luxury in my poverty-stricken life, and I see to it that Ivan's name is heard, whispered and quietly thought throughout the city. Also when I'm by myself, when I'm walking through Vienna all alone, there are many places I can say, I've walked here with Ivan, I waited for Ivan there, I had dinner with Ivan in the LINDE, I drank espresso with Ivan at the Kohlmarkt, Ivan works on the Kärntnerring, this is where Ivan buys his shirts, over there is Ivan's travel agency. He just can't have to go back to Paris or Munich again so soon! Also the places where I haven't been with Ivan: I say to myself, some time I'll have to come here with Ivan in the evening and look down on the city from the Cobenzl or from the high-rise in the Herrengasse. Ivan reacts immediately and jumps up when his name is called, but Malina hesitates, and in my turn I hesitate the same way. That's why Ivan does well not calling me by name all the time; he uses whatever pejorative comes to mind or simply says "my fräulein." My fräulein, we're letting it show again, what a shame, we're going to have to cure ourselves of that very soon now. Glissons. Glissons.

Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina (1990: 52-53)

27 July 2009

the rub

If each of us carries around a set of criteria by which we judge certain acts as loving and tender or hating and brutal, what may be a loving act to one person may be a hating act to another. For example, one woman may be delighted if her suitor uses a "caveman approach" with her; another woman may think of him as repugnant for just the same behavior. The woman who sees the caveman approach as loving may in turn interpret a more subtle approach as "weak," whereas the woman who is repelled by a caveman approach may see the more subtle approach as "sensitive." Thus behavior even of itself does not directly lead to experience. It must be perceived and interpreted according to some set of criteria...
  In order for the other's behavior to become part of self's experience, self must perceive it. The very act of perception entails interpretation. The human being learns how to structure his perceptions, particularly within his family, as a subsystem interplaying with its own contextual subculture, related institutions and overall larger culture...
  Our experience of another entails a particular interpretation of his behavior. To feel loved is to perceive and interpret, that is, to experience, the actions of the other as loving. The alternation of my experience of my behavior to your experience of my behavior—there's the rub.

I act in a way that is cautious to me, but cowardly to you.
You act in a way that is courageous to you, but foolhardy to me.
She sees herself as vivacious, but he sees her as superficial.
He sees himself as friendly, she sees him as seductive.
She sees herself as reserved, he sees her as haughty and aloof.
He sees himself as gallant, she sees him as phony.
She sees herself as feminine, he sees her as helpless and dependent.
He sees himself as masculine, she sees him as overbearing and dominating.

  Experience in all cases entails the perception of the act and the interpretation of it. Within the issue of perception is the issue of selection and reception. From the many things that we see and hear of the other we select a few to remember. Acts highly significant to us may be trivial to others. We happen not to have been paying attention at that moment; we missed what to the other was his most significant gesture or statement. But, even if the acts selected for interpetation are the same, even if each individual perceives these acts as the same, even if each individual perceives these acts as the same act, the interpretation of the identical act may be very different. She winks at him in friendly complicity, and he sees it as seductive. The act is the same, the interpretation and hence the experience of it is disjunctive. She refuses to kiss him goodnight out of "self-respect," but he sees it as a rejection of him, and so on.
  A child who is told by his mother to wear a sweater may resent her as coddling him, but to her it may seem to be simply a mark of natural concern.
  In one society to burp after a good meal is good manners; in another it is uncouth. Thus, even though the piece of behavior under consideration may be agreed upon, the interpretation of this behavior may be diametrically disagreed upon.
  What leads to diametrically opposed interpretations? In general, we can say interpretations are based on our past learning, particularly within our family (i.e., with our parents, siblings and relatives) but also in the larger society in which we travel.
  Secondly, the act itself is interpreted according to the context in which it is found. Thus, for example, the refusal of a goodnight kiss after one date may seem to be perfectly normal for both parties, but after six months' dating a refusal would seem more significant to each of them. Also a refusal after a previous acceptance will seem more significant.
  What happens when two people do not agree on the meaning to be assigned to a particular act? A very complicated process ensues. If communication is optimum, they understand that they differ on the interpretation of the act, and also realize that they both understand that they differ in its interpretation. Once this is established they may get into a struggle over whether or not to change the act under consideration in the future. This struggle may take various forms:

Threat—Do this or else.
Coaxing—Please do this.
Bribery—If you do this I will do that in return.
Persuasion—I believe it is a good idea for you to do this because, etc.

However, often in human affairs where there is a disagreement there is also a misunderstanding and failure of realization of misunderstanding. This may be deliberate, i.e., a simple attempt to ignore the other person's point of view, or it may be an unwitting overlooking of the opposing viewpoint. In either case a disruption of communication occurs.

Laing, Phillipson & Lee, Interpersonal Perception (1966: 10-13)

a sort of pidgin English

The concept of diagnosis is contingent on the concept of disease. Diagnosis is the name of a disease, just as, say, violet is the name of a flower. For example, the term "diabetes" names a type of abnormal glucose metabolism. ... Diseases (lesions) are facts of nature, whereas diagnoses (words) are artifacts constructed by human beings.
  ... Names, semanticists love to remind us, are not things. Manipulating things is difficult, sometimes impossible. Manipulating names is easy. We do it all the time. Violet may be the name of a flower, a color, a woman, or a street. Similarly a disease-sounding term may be the name of a pathological lesion or bodily malfunction, or the name of the malfunction of a car, computer, or economic system, or the behavior of an individual or a group. ... We cannot distinguish between the literal and metaphorical uses of the term "disease" unless we identify its root meaning, agree that it is the literal meaning of the word, and treat all other uses of it as figures of speech. In conformity with traditional practice, I take the root meaning of disease to be a bodily lesion, understood to include not only structural malfunctions but also deviations from normal physiology, such as elevated blood pressure or lowered white cell count. If we accept this definition, then the term "diagnosis," used literally, refers to and is the name of a disease, and used metaphorically, refers to and is the name of a nondisease.
  ... Historically, scientific medicine is based on the postmortem examination of the body. Recalling his early work as a neurologist, Freud proudly reminisced: "The fame of my diagnoses and their post-mortem confirmation brought me an influx of American physicians, to whom I lectured upon the patients in my department in a sort of pidgin-English." In scientific medicine, the pathological diagnosis always trumps the clinical diagnosis.
  The use of diagnostic terms becomes problematic when the conditions they name are not disease but merely subjective, unverifiable complaints, referable to an individual's body, behaviors, or thoughts (communications). Psychopathology is diagnosed by finding unwanted behaviors in persons or by attributing such behaviors to them. For example, the term "kleptomania" is both a phenomenon and a name; diagnosis and disease are one and the same. Once "named," the diagnosis of a mental illness validates its own disease status. Psychopathology, unlike organic pathology, can change with the nosology—changing the name can convert disease into nondisease and vice versa (for example, homosexuality into civil right, smoking into nicotine dependence). Mental diseases are, a fortiori, diagnoses, not diseases.

Thomas Szasz, Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America (2001:28-30)

26 July 2009

Teaching Aid

Principles of the Weighty Tome, or How to Write Fat Books.

I. The whole composition must be permeated with a protracted and wordy exposition of the initial plan.
II. Terms are to be included for conceptions that, except in this definition, appear nowhere in the whole book.
III. Conceptual distinctions laboriously arrived at in the text are to be obliterated again in the relevant notes.
IV. For concepts treated only in their general significance, examples should be given; if, for example, machines are mentioned, all the different kinds of machines should be enumerated.
V. Everything that is known a priori about an object is to be consolidated by an abundance of examples.
VI. Relationships that could be represented graphically must be expounded in words. Instead of represented in a genealogical tree, for example, all family relationships are to be enumerated and described.
VII. A number of opponents all sharing the same argument should each be refuted individually.
  The typical work of modern scholarship is intended to be read like a catalogue. But when shall we actually write books like catalogues? If the deficient content were thus to determine the outward form, an excellent piece of writing would result, in which the value of opinions would be marked without their being thereby put on sale.
  The typewriter will alienate the hand of the man of letters from the pen only when the precision of typographic forms has directly entered the conception of his books. One might suppose that new systems with more variable typefaces would then be needed. They will replace the pliancy of the hand with the innervation of commanding fingers.
  A period that, constructed metrically, afterward has its rhythm upset at a single point yields the finest prose sentence imaginable. In this way a ray of light falls through a chink in the wall of the alchemist's cell, to light up gleaming crystals, spheres, and triangles.

Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street (1979: 63-64)

25 July 2009

Cui bono?

People often assert that they are ill or that another person is sick. It is an error to believe that people say these things only because they have a disease or only because the person they call sick has a disease. People are often sick but do not say so or say so only to a few confidants, and they often assert, for a variety of reasons, that others—about whom they know next to nothing—are sick: thus, people simulate illness or malinger (to avoid military service), simulate health or deny illness (to avoid medical attention), and claim that others are sick by diagnosing them (to justify treating them as patients). These elementary truths have not been lost on artists, who provide us with perceptive accounts of the often complex and devious motives of patients and doctors.
  Having a demonstrable disease is not enough to explain why the subject asserts that he is ill (assumes the sick role) or why others assert that he is ill (place him in the sick role). To understand the myriad nonmedical meanings and consequences of illness—that is, the tactical rather than descriptive uses of terms such as "ill" and "patient"—we must, at least temporarily, ignore the pathological dimensions of the concept and instead focus on the classic problem, Cui bono? Cicero explained the importance of posing this question, primarily to oneself, as follows: "When trying a case L. Cassius never failed to inquire, 'Who gained by it?' Man's character is such that no man undertakes crimes without hope of gain."
  No man asserts that he or someone else has an illness without hope of gain. The potential gains, for oneself or others, from asserting such a claim—for example, securing medical help, monetary compensation, excusing crime, and so forth—are virtually endless. They depend on the claimant's character and motives, the social context in which the claim is advanced, and the ever-changing legal and social milieu in which medicine is practiced.

Thomas Szasz, Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America (2001:6-7)

plague throughout

As a science, medicine rests on and makes use of the same methods and principles as the physical sciences. One of these principles is that the observer is a person, and the object he observes is not. Chemists and physicists observe, for example, the characteristics of various elements and classify them as helium, lithium, uranium, and so forth. The classification serves the interests of the classifiers. The objects classified have no interests.
  To understand the many conceptual, economic, and political problems that beset contemporary medical practice, that is, medicine as health care, we must distinguish between scientific medicine, whose objects of study are diseases that affect human beings, and clinical medicine, whose objects of study are persons, usually called "patients." Making this distinction does not imply that one is intellectually, morally, or practically better or more important than the other. Each enterprise has its own agenda and vocabulary.

· The aim of scientific medicine, an enterprise barely 150 years old, is to increase our understanding of the causes and cures of conditions scientifically defined as diseases. The aim of clinical medicine, which may be said to be as old as civilization, is to help persons regarded as sick recover their health.

· The practitioner of medical science seeks to understand disease. The practitioner of clinical medicine seeks to relieve dis-ease.

· Scientific medical knowledge is indifferent to individual or collective human well-being; it may be equally useful for biological warfare and the relief of human suffering. In contrast, the raison d'être of clinical medicine is the welfare of the patient.

... In the ancient world, disease was a gnostic concept, concerned with "spiritual truth," not with empirical evidence. In Biblical, Greek, and Roman accounts, disease is a holistic-theistic concept that precludes distinguishing between literal and metaphorical illnesses, between diseases of the body and diseases of the mind. There is no Latin word for our scientific concept of disease. When the Romans spoke of disease, they used the word "morbus"—the root of the English words "morbid" and "morbidity"—which also means disaster, fault, and vice; or the word "malum"—the root of such English words as "malefactor" and "malevolent"—which also means evil, harm, hardship, and punishment. The King James Version of the Scriptures uses the terms "murrain," "plague," and "pestilence," instead of the term "disease." The Revised Standard Version uses "plague" throughout. Accordingly, the act of healing entailed intermingling natural and supernatural means of influence, medical and religious methods of treating the body and the mind.
  ... Deluged by incessant advertising and propaganda about medical treatments, people forget that Christianity is not only a faith of redemption but also a faith of healing, of both body and soul. Unlike Abraham, Jesus is not only a prophet, he is also a healer, the Divine Physician, the Savior (der Heiland in German). For centuries, Christians regarded sickness as punishment for sin, curable by means of prayer, repentance, sacrifice, and the aspersion of holy water by a priest, the representative of an all-forgiving deity.
  To be plague-stricken was to be smitten by God. This put people in a bind: They believed in the theological explanation of the "plague," at least in part, because they could not get at the natural, physical cause of it, and then they refrained from trying to get at the root of the evil because they thought the evil was brought on by the hand of God. Furthermore, everyday life was replete with proof of the efficacy of miraculous cures for illnesses of all kinds. Shrines with powers of healing dotted the Christian landscape. More than 5 million pilgrims a year still visit Lourdes, and, to this day, the Vatican's official procedure for sanctification depends on medical proof of the would-be saint's having performed at least two miraculous cures.
  ... In short, prior to the nineteenth century, neither physicians nor patients had a precise idea about what was and what was not a disease. Disease was simply a discomfort and a danger, often leading to death, to be avoided and relieved as best one could. ... As the taboo against treating the body slowly lifted, there arose a diverse corps of professional healers: barber surgeons performing operations; herbalists prescribing medicines derived from plants; and doctors of medicine relying mainly on purging the body of presumed toxic substances believed to be the causes of disease.

  ... The waning influence of religion and the waxing prestige of science were slow and gradual processes. In the sixteenth century, the Church began to authorize the dissection of executed felons. Although physicians participated in this enterprise, the true fathers of anatomy were the great Renaissance artists, especially Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.
  ... Once the secrets of nature are revealed, they cannot be ignored. Physicians and lay persons alike began to view the body as a machine whose workings must be understood, rather than merely manipulated in the tradition of herbal empiricists. The stage was now set for the development of the scientific diagnosis of patients, both dead and alive. The diagnosis of live patients is a surprisingly recent development. The first diagnostic method, thoracic percussion, was discovered in 1756 by Leopold Auenbrugger (1722-1809), the son of an innkeeper in Graz, Austria. As a youngster, Auenbrugger learned to tap caskets of wine to determine the quantity of liquid in the container and applied the technique to the human chest. This simple but ingenious method led the famed French physician, René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec (1781-1826) to hit on the idea of thoracic auscultation and, in 1816, to the invention of the stethoscope. Although standard thermometric values were developed in the seventeenth century, the systematic measurement of body temperature was introduced into medicine only in 1851. The development of an ever-growing array of diagnostic instruments and techniques followed quickly. Today, the practicing physician can diagnose many diseases in the living patient as objectively and almost as effectively as the pathologist can diagnose them at autopsy. The long-standing gap between antemortem (clinical) diagnosis and postmortem (autopsy) diagnosis has narrowed but has not disappeared. Despite modern diagnostic techniques, the postmortem examination of the cadaver remains an indispensable tool for scientific medicine and forensic pathology.
  ... Although the development of the modern, scientific concept of disease was a gradual process, the publication, in 1858, of Cellular Pathology as Based upon Physiological and Pathological History, by Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902), is generally accepted as signaling the birth of modern medicine as a profession based on empirical science. The study of pathology as the phenomenology of disease, combined with the study of bacteriology as the etiology of infectious disease, placed medicine as the study of bodily disease on the rock-solid foundation of modern science.

Thomas Szasz, Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America (2001: xxiii-6)

24 July 2009

a stately triumph

Look, I confess! I am new prey of thine, O Cupid; I stretch forth my hands to be bound, submissive to thy laws. There is no need of war—pardon and peace is my prayer; nor will it be praise for thine arms to vanquish me unarmed. Bind thy locks with myrtle, yoke thy mother's doves; thy stepsire himself shall give thee fitting car, and in the car he gives shalt thou stand, while the people cry thy triumph, and shalt guide with skill the yoked birds. In thy train shall be captive youths and captive maids; such a pomp will be for thee a stately triumph. Myself, a recent spoil, shall be there with wound all freshly dealt, and bear my new bonds with unresisting heart. Conscience shall be led along, with hands tied fast behind her back; and Modesty, and all who are foes to the camp of Love. Before thee all shall tremble; the crowd, stretching forth their hands to thee, shall chant with loud voice: "Ho Triumph!" Caresses shall be at thy side, and Error, and Madness—a rout that ever follows in thy train. With soldiers like these dost thou vanquish men and gods; strip from thee aids like these, thou wilt be weaponless.

En ego confiteor! tua sum nova praeda, Cupido;
porrigimus victas ad tua iura manus.
nil opus est bello—veniam pacemque rogamus;
nec tibi laus armis victus inermis ero.
necte comam myrto, maternas iunge columbas;
qui deceat, currum vitricus ipse dabit,
inque dato curru, populo clamante triumphum,
stabis et adiunctas arte movebis aves.
ducentur capti iuvenes captaeque puellae;
haec tibi magnificus pompa triumphus erit.
ipse ego, praeda recens, factum modo vulnus habebo
et nova captiva vincula mente feram.
Mens Bona ducetur manibus post terga retortis,
et Pudor, et castris quidquid Amoris obest.
omnia te metuent; ad te sua bracchia tendens
vulgus "io" magna voce "triumphe!" canet.
blanditiae comites tibi erunt Errorque Furorque,
adsidue partes turba secuta tuas.
his tu militibus superas hominesque deosque;
haec tibi si demas commoda, nudus eris.

Ovid, Amores I.ii (1963, 323-25)

23 July 2009

to suit his purpose

Lying and bluffing are both modes of misrepresentation or deception. Now the concept most central to the distinctive nature of a lie is that of falsity: the liar is essentially someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood. Bluffing, too, is typically devoted to something false. Unlike plain lying, however, it is more especially a matter not of falsity but of fakery. This is what accounts for its nearness to bullshit. For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. In order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing. What is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. It may be, after all, an exact copy. What is wrong with counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.
  ... Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship, in which the teller of the lie submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be the truth. The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth.
  On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared, so far as required, to fake the context as well. This freedom from the constraints to which the liar must submit does not necessarily mean, of course, that his task is easier than the task of the liar. But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying. It is more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the "bullshit artist." ...
  What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.
  This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statement are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.
  It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the thing he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (2005: 51-56)

17 July 2009

reward and punishment

To say that in Protestant countries the Reformation led to a progressive secularisation of Charity is something of a commonplace. But through this process of taking responsibility for the poor and the unable, cities and states prepared the way to a new form of sensibility to poverty. A new form of pathos came into being, which no longer spoke of a glorification of pain, nor of salvation proper both to Charity and to Poverty, but concerned rather the idea of civic duty, and showed the poor and destitute to be both a consequence of disorder and an obstacle to order. The aim therefore was no longer to glorify poverty in the act of relieving it, but quite simply to dispose of it altogether. Bound to poverty as such, Charity too suddenly seemed to be a kind of disorder. But if private enterprise, as a 1575 act demanded in England, helped the state to repress poverty, it became part of the social order and acquired meaning. Shorty before the 1662 Settlement Act, the most important text of the seventeenth century regarding the English poor, Sir Matthew Hale had written a Discourse touching Provision for the Poor, which was a clear indication of the new manner in which the meaning of poverty was perceived. To Hale, helping to make poverty disappear was "necessary, and becomes us both as men and as Christians." He recommended that the mission should be entrusted to officers of the peace, who should subdivide counties, group parishes together and set up compulsory workhouses. No one should then beg: "No man will be so vain, an indeed hurtful to the Publique as to give to such as beg, and thereby encourage them."
  Poverty is no longer part of a dialectic of humiliation and glorification but rather of the relationship of disorder to order and is now locked in guilt. After Calvin and Luther, poverty bore the marks of an immemorial punishment, and became, in the world of state-assisted charity, self-complacency and crime against the good order of the state. From being the object of a religious experience and sanctified, poverty became the object of a moral conception that condemned it. The great houses of confinement were a clear result of that evolution. They were indeed the secularisation of charity, but in obscure fashion they were also the moral punishment of poverty.
  ... But Catholic thought was reluctant to change, as were the traditions of the Church. These collective forms of assistance met with initial resistance, as they appeared to downgrade the merit of an act of individual assistance, and removed the eminent dignity that was inherent to poverty. The Christian duty of charity was being turned into little more than a civic obligation, and poverty had simply become a crime against public order. These difficulties slowly disappeared, and appeals were made to the universities to address the problem. The University of Paris approved the public forms of organization that were submitted for its assessment. ... Before long, the Catholic world had adopted the mode of perception of poverty that had come to prevail in the world of Protestant thought ... within the space of a few years, the Catholic Church in France had given its backing to the Great Confinement ordered by Louis XIV. This meant that the poor were no longer recognised as a pretext sent by God to elicit charity, an opportunity for Catholics to work towards their salvation. Catholics, following the example of the Archbishop of Tours, began to see the poor as "the very dregs of the Republic, not on account of their physical poverty, which properly arouses compassion, but for their spiritual indigence, which is a cause of revulsion."
  The Church had chosen its camp, and in so doing had split the Christian world of poverty, which had previously been sanctified in its totality by the medieval world. On the one side was the realm of Good, where poverty submitted and conformed to the order that was imposed on it, and on the other the realm of Evil, where poverty rebelled and tried to escape that order. The former accepted internment, and found its repose there; the latter resisted it, and thereby merited its condition.
  This reasoning was expounded quite bluntly in a text inspired by the Papal court in 1693, which was translated into French at the close of the century under the title La Mendicité abolie (Begging Vanquished). The author made a distinction therein between the good and the bad poor, those of Christ and those of the Devil. Both bear witness to the usefulness of houses of confinement, the former because they gratefully accepted all that the authorities bestowed upon them, "patient, humble, modest, content with their station and the assistance that the Bureau brings them, and thanking God for his providence." The Devil's poor by contrast complained about the General Hospital, and the constraints that it imposed upon them. "Enemies of good order, lazy, deceitful, lascivious and given over to drink, they speak no language other than that of the devil their father, and curse the Bureau's teachers and directors." Therein lay the justification for depriving them of their freedom, a freedom for which they had no use other than the glorification of Satan. Confinement was thus doubly justified, in a movement of undecidable equivocation, both as reward and punishment, according to the moral standing of the person on whom it was inflicted. Up until the close of the classical age, this ambiguity of the practice of confinement remained, its strange reversibility implying that its meaning could alter in response to the merits or faults of its victims. The good poor, the deserving, saw it as a gesture of assistance, and a good work from which they drew comfort, while the bad poor—precisely inasmuch as they were bad—turned the gesture into an act of repression. This opposition between good and bad poor is essential for an understanding of the structure and meaning of confinement. The Hôpital Général classified them as such, and madness too was divided up in similar fashion, so that it too, according to the moral standing it manifested, could fall under the categories of assistance or repression. All internees fell within the scope of this ethical valorisation, and before being objects of knowledge or pity, they were treated as moral subjects.

Michel Foucault, History of Madness (2006:57-60)

16 July 2009

Eyes that last I saw in tears

Eyes that last I saw in tears
Through division
Here in death's dream kingdom
The golden vision reappears
I see the eyes but not the tears
This is my affliction

This is my affliction
Eyes I shall not see again
Eyes of decision
Eyes I shall not see unless
At the door of death's other kingdom
Where, as in this,
The eyes outlast a little while
A little while outlast the tears
And hold us in derision.

T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (1969:133)

14 July 2009

the delicious skins

"It is a French recipe of my grandmother's," said Mrs Ramsay, speaking with a ring of great pleasure in her voice. Of course it was French. What passes for cookery in England is an abomination (they agreed). It is putting cabbages in water. It is roasting meat till it is like leather. It is cutting off the delicious skins of vegetables. "In which," said Mr Bankes, "all the virtue of the vegetable is contained." And the waste, said Mrs Ramsay. A whole French family could live on what an English cook throws away. Spurred on by her sense that William's affection had come back to her, and that everything was all right again, and that her suspense was over, and that now she was free both to triumph and to mock, she laughed, she gesticulated, till Lily thought, How childlike, how absurd she was, sitting up there with all her beauty opened again in her, talking about the skins of vegetables. There was something frightening about her. She was irresistible. Always she got her own way in the end, Lily thought. Now she had brought this off—Paul and Minta one might suppose, were engaged. Mr Bankes was dining here. She put a spell on them all, by wishing, so simply, so directly, and Lily contrasted that abundance with her own poverty of spirit, and supposed that it was partly that belief (for her face was all lit up—without looking young, she looked radiant) in this strange, this terrifying thing, which made Paul Rayley, the centre of it, all a tremor, yet abstract, absorbed, silent. Mrs Ramsay, Lily felt, as she talked about the skins of vegetables, exalted that, worshiped that; held her hands over it to warm them, to protect it, and yet, having brought it all about, somehow laughed, led her victims, Lily felt, to the altar. It came over her too now—the emotion, the vibration of love. How inconspicuous she felt herself by Paul's side! He, glowing, burning; she, aloof, satirical; he, bound for adventure; she, moored to the shore; he, launched, incautious; she solitary, left out—and ready to implore a share, if it were disaster, in his disaster, she said shyly:
  "When did Minta lose her brooch?"
  He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams. He shook his head. "On the beach," he said.
  "I'm going to find it," he said, "I'm getting up early." This being kept secret from Minta, he lowered his voice, and turned his eyes to where she sat, laughing, beside Mr Ramsay.
  Lily wanted to protest violently and outrageously her desire to help him, envisaging how in the dawn on the beach he would be the one to pounce on the brooch half-hidden by some stone, and thus herself be included among the sailors and adventurers. But what did he reply to her offer? She actually said with an emotion that she seldom let appear, "Let me come with you"; and he laughed. He meant yes or no—either perhaps. But it was not his meaning—it was the odd chuckle he gave, as if he had said, Throw yourself over the cliff if you like, I don't care. He turned on her cheek the heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its unscrupulosity. It scorched her, and Lily looking at Minta being charming to Mr Ramsay at the other end of the table, flinched for her exposed to those fangs, and was thankful. For at any rate, she said to herself, catching sight of the salt cellar on the pattern, she need not marry, thank Heaven: she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution. She would move the tree rather more to the middle.
  Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that's what you feel, was one; that's what I feel was the other, and then they fought together in her mind, as now. It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, and turns a nice young man with a profile like a gem (Paul's was exquisite) into a bully with a crowbar (he was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road. Yet she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung of love; wreathes heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than love; yet it is also beautiful and necessary. Well then, well then? she asked, somehow expecting the others to go on with the argument, as if in an argument like this one threw one's own little bolt which fell short obviously and left the others to carry it on. So she listened again to what they were saying in case they should throw any light upon the questions of love.
  "Then," said Mr Bankes, "there is that liquid the English call coffee."

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1976: 116-19)

11 July 2009

such keen pleasure

They had reached the gap between the two clumps of red-hot pokers, and there was the Lighthouse again, but she would not let herself look at it. Had she known that he was looking at her, she thought, she would not have let herself sit there, thinking. She disliked anything that reminded her that she had been sitting thinking. So she looked over her shoulder, at the town. The lights were rippling and running as if they were drops of silver water held firm in a wind. And all the poverty, all the suffering had turned to that, Mrs Ramsay thought. The lights of the town and of the harbour and of the boats seemed like a phantom net floating there to mark something which had sunk. Well, if he could not share her thoughts, Mr Ramsay said to himself, he would be off, then, on his own. He wanted to go on thinking, telling himself the story of how Hume was stuck in a bog; he wanted to laugh. But first it was nonsense to be anxious about Andrew. When he was Andrew's age he used to walk about the country all day long, with nothing but a biscuit in his pocket and nobody bothered about him, or thought that he had fallen over a cliff. He said aloud he thought he would be off for a day's walk if the weather held. He had had enough of Bankes and of Carmichael. He would like a little solitude. Yes, she said. It annoyed him that she did not protest. She knew that he would never do it. He was too old now to walk all day long with a biscuit in his pocket. She worried about the boys, but not about him. Years ago, before he had married, he thought, looking across the bay, as they stood between the clumps of red-hot pokers, he had walked all day. He had made a meal off bread and cheese in a public house. He had worked ten hours at a stretch; an old woman just popped her head in now and again and saw to the fire. That was the country he liked best, over there; those sandhills dwindling away into darkness. One could walk all day without meeting a soul. There was not a house scarcely, not a village for miles on end. One could worry things out alone. There were little sandy beaches where no one had been since the beginning of time. The seals sat up and looked at you. It sometimes seemed to him that in a little house out there, alone—he broke off, sighing. He had no right. The father of eight children—he reminded himself. And he would have been a beast and a cur to wish a single thing altered. Andrew would be a better man than he had been. Prue would be a beauty, her mother said. They would stem the flood a bit. That was a good bit of work on the whole—his eight children. They showed he did not damn the poor little universe entirely, for on an evening like this, he thought, looking at the land dwindling away, the little island seemed pathetically small, half swallowed up in the sea.
  'Poor little place,' he murmured with a sigh.
  She heard him. He said the most melancholy things, but she noticed that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than usual. All this phrase-making was a game, she thought, for if she had said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now.
  It annoyed her, this phrase-making, and she said to him, in a matter-of-fact way, that it was a perfectly lovely evening. And what was he groaning about, she asked, half laughing, half complaining, for she guessed what he was thinking—he would have written better books if he had not married.
  He was not complaining, he said. She knew that he did not complain. She knew that he had nothing whatever to complain of. And he seized her hand and raised it to his lips and kissed it with an intensity that brought the tears to her eyes, and quickly he dropped it.
  They turned away from the view and began to walk up the path where the silver-green spear-like plants grew, arm in arm. His arm was almost like a young man's arm, Mrs Ramsay thought, thin and hard, and she thought with delight how strong he still was, though he was over sixty, and how untamed and optimistic, and how strange it was that being convinced, as he was, of all sorts of horrors, seemed not to depress him, but to cheer him. Was it not odd, she reflected? Indeed he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle's. His understanding often astonished her. But did he notice the flowers? No. Did he notice the view? No. Did he even notice his own daughter's beauty, or whether there was pudding on his plate or roast beef? He would sit at table with them like a person in a dream. And his habit of talking aloud, or saying poetry aloud, was growing on him, she was afraid for sometimes it was awkward—

Best and brightest, come away!


poor Miss Giddings, when he shouted that at her, almost jumped out of her skin. But then, Mrs Ramsay, though instantly taking his side against all the silly Giddingses in the world, then, she thought, intimating by a little pressure on his arm that he walked uphill too fast for her, and she must stop for a moment to see whether those were fresh mole-hills on the bank, then, she thought, stooping, down to look, a great mind like his must be different in every way from ours. All the great men she had ever known, she thought, deciding that a rabbit must have got in, were like that, and it was good for young men (though the atmosphere of lecture-rooms was stuffy and depressing to her beyond endurance almost) simply to hear him, simply to look at him. But without shooting rabbits, how was one to keep them down? she wondered. It might be a rabbit; it might be a mole. Some creature anyhow was ruining her Evening Primroses. And looking up, she saw above the thin trees the first pulse of the full-throbbing star, and wanted to make her husband look at it; for the sight gave her such keen pleasure. But she stopped herself. He never looked at things. If he did, all he would say would be, Poor little world, with one of his sighs.
  At that moment, he said, "Very fine," to please her, and pretended to admire the flowers. But she knew quite well that he did not admire them, or even realize that they were there. It was only to please her ...

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1973: 79-83)

10 July 2009

leaning her head

But into what sanctuary had one penetrated? Lily Briscoe had looked up at last, and there was Mrs Ramsay, unwitting entirely what had caused her laughter, still presiding, but now with every trace of wilfulness abolished, and in its stead, something clear as the space which the clouds at last uncover—the little space of sky which sleeps beside the moon.
  Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all one's perceptions, half-way to truth, were tangled up in a golden mesh? or did she lock up within her some secret which certainly Lily Briscoe believed people must have for the world to go on at all? Every one could not be as helter-skelter, hand to mouth as she was. But if they knew, could they tell one what they knew? Sitting on the floor with her arms round Mrs Ramsay's knees, close as she could get, smiling to think that Mrs Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure, she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was, physically, touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public. What are was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body achieve it, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? or the heart? Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs Ramsay's knee.
  Nothing happened. Nothing! Nothing! as she leant her head against Mrs Ramsay's knee. And yet, she knew knowledge and wisdom were stored in Mrs Ramsay's heart. How then, she asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives which were people. Mrs Ramsay rose. Lily rose. Mrs Ramsay went. For days there hung about her, as after a dream some subtle change is felt in the person one has dreamt of, more vividly than anything she said, the sound of murmuring and, as she sat in the wicker arm-chair in the drawing-room window she wore, to Lily's eyes, an august shape; the shape of a dome.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1973: 59-60)

02 July 2009

I can hear it in every word you say

"Yes, these ads are good for the culture and good for the country."
  Chip took a deep breath, because this hurt. "Great, OK," he said. "Thank you for your opinion."
  "As if you care about my opinion," Melissa said.
  "I beg your pardon?"
  "As if you care about any of our opinions unless they're the same as yours."
  "This is not about opinions," Chip said, "This is about learning to apply critical methods to textual artifacts. Which is what I'm here to teach you."
  "I don't think it is, though," Melissa said. "I think you're here to teach us to hate the same things you hate. I mean, you hate these ads, right? I can hear it in every word you say. You totally hate them."
  The other students were listening raptly now. Melissa's connection with Chad might have depressed Chad's stock more than it had raised her own, but she was attacking Chip like an angry equal, not a student, and the class ate it up.
  "I do hate these ads," Chip admitted. "But that's not—"
  "Yes it is," Melissa said.
  "Why do you hate them?" Chad called out.
  "Tell us why you hate them," the little Hilton yipped.
  Chip looked at the wall clock. There were six minutes left of the semester. He pushed a hand through his hair and cast his eyes around the room as if he might find an ally somewhere, but the students had him on the run now, and they knew it.
"The W------ Corporation," he said, "is currently defending three separate lawsuits for antitrust violations. Its revenues last year exceeded the gross domestic product of Italy. And now, to wring dollars out of the one demographic that it doesn't yet dominate, it's running a campaign that exploits a woman's fear of breast cancer and her sympathy with its victims. Yes, Melissa?"
  "It's not cynical."
  "What is it, if it's not cynical?"
  "It's celebrating women in the workplace," Melissa said. "It's raising money for cancer research. It's encouraging us to do our self-examinations and get the help we need. It's helping women feel like we own this technology, like it's not just a guy thing."
  "OK, good," Chip said. "But the question is not whether we care about breast cancer, it's what breast cancer has to do with selling office equipment."
  Chad took up the cudgels for Melissa. "That's the whole point of the ad, though. That if you have access to information, it can save your life."
  "So if Pizza Hut puts a little sign about testicular self-exams by the hot-pepper flakes, it can advertise itself as part of the glorious and courageous fight against cancer?"
  "Why not?" Chad said.
  "Does anybody see anything wrong with that?"
  Not one student did. Melissa was slouching with her arms crossed and unhappy amusement on her face. Unfairly or not, Chip felt as if she'd destroyed in five minutes a semester's worth of careful teaching.
  "Well, consider," he said, "that 'You Go, Girl' would not have been produced if W------ had not had a product to sell. And consider that the goal of the people who work at W------ is to exercise their stock options and retire at thirty-two, and that the goal of the people who own W------ stock" (Chip's brother and sister-in-law, Gary and Caroline, owned a great deal of W------ stock) "is to build bigger houses and buy bigger SUVs and consume even more of the world's finite resources."
  "What's wrong with making a living?" Melissa said. "Why is it inherently evil to make money?"
  "Baudrillard might argue," Chip said, "that the evil of a campaign like 'You Go, Girl' consists in the detachment of the signifier from the signified. That a woman weeping no longer just signifies sadness. It now also signifies 'Desire office equipment.' It signifies: 'Our bosses care about us deeply.'"
  The wall clock showed two-thirty. Chip paused and waited for the bell to ring and the semester to end.
  "Excuse me," Melissa said, "but that is just such bullshit."
  "What is bullshit?" Chip said.
  "This whole class," she said. "It's just bullshit every week. It's one critic after another wringing their hands about the state of criticism. Nobody can ever quite say what's wrong exactly. But they all know it's evil. They know 'corporate' is a dirty word. And if somebody's having fun or getting rich—disgusting! Evil! And it's always the death of this and the death of that. And people who think they're free aren't 'really' free. And people who think they're happy aren't 'really' happy. And it's impossible to radically critique society anymore, although what's so radically wrong with society that we need such a radical critique, nobody can say exactly. It is so typical and perfect that you hate those ads!" she said to Chip as, throughout Wroth Hall, bells finally rang. "Here things are getting better and better for women and people of color, and gay men and lesbians, more and more integrated and open and all you can think about is some stupid, lame problem with signifiers and signifieds. Like, the only way you can make something bad out of an ad's that great for women—which you have to do, because there has to be something wrong with everything—is to say it's evil to be rich and evil to work for a corporation, and yes, I know the bell rang." She closed her notebook.
  "OK," Chip said. "On that note. You've now satisfied your Cultural Studies core requirement. Have a great summer."
  He was powerless to keep the bitterness out of his voice. He bent over the video player and gave his attention to rewinding and re-cuing "You Go, Girl" and touching buttons for the sake of touching buttons. He sensed a few students lingering behind him, as if they wanted to thank him for teaching his heart out or to tell him they'd enjoyed the class, but he didn't look up from the video player until the room was empty. Then he went home to Tilton Ledge and started drinking.
  Melissa's accusations had cut him to the quick. He'd never quite realized how seriously he'd taken his father's injunctions to do work that was "useful" to society. Criticizing a sick culture, even if the criticism accomplished nothing, had always felt like useful work. But if the supposed sickness wasn't a sickness at all—if the great Materialist Order of technology and consumer appetite and medical science really was improving the lives of the formerly oppressed; if it was only straight white males like Chip who had a problem with this order—then there was no longer even the most abstract utility to his criticism. It was all, in Melissa's word, bullshit.
  Lacking the spirit to work on his new book, as he'd planned to do all summer, Chip bought an overpriced ticket to London and hitchhiked to Edinburgh and overstayed his welcome with a Scottish performance artist who had lectured and performed at D----- the previous winter. Eventually the woman's boyfriend said, "Time to be off now, laddie," and Chip hit the road with a backpack full of Heidegger and Wittgenstein that he was too lonely to read. He hated to think of himself as a man who couldn't live without a woman, but he hadn't been laid since Ruthie dumped him. He was the only male professor in D----- history to have taught Theory of Feminism, and he understood how important it was for women not to equate "success" with "having a man" and "failure" with "lacking a man," but he was a lonely straight male, and a lonely straight male had no equivalently forgiving Theory of Masculinism to help him out of this bind, this key to all misogynies:

¶ To feel as if he couldn't survive without a woman made a man feel week;

¶ And yet, without a woman in his life, a man lost the sense of agency and difference that, for better or worse, was the foundation of his manhood.

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (2001: 42-45)

01 July 2009

the throne of the mind

What determines the question a scientist pursues? One side in the so-called science wars holds that the investigation of nature is a purely objective pursuit, walled off from the influence of the surrounding society and culture by built-in safeguards, such as the demand that scientific results be replicable and the requirement that scientific theories accord with nature. The gravitational force of a Marxist, in other words, is identical to the gravitational force of a fascist. Or, more starkly, if you're looking for proof that science is not a social construct, as so-called science critics contend, just step out the window and see whether the theory of gravity is a mere figment of a scientist's imagination.
  That the findings of science are firmly grounded in empiricism is clear. But the questions of science are another matter. For the questions one might ask of nature are, for all intents and purposes, without end. Although the methods of science today may be largely objective, the choice of what question to ask is not. This is not a shortcoming, much less a fault, of science. It is, rather, a reflection of the necessary fact that science is, at bottom, a human endeavor. Running through both psychiatry and neuroscience is a theme that seemed deeply disturbing to me almost from the moment I began reading in the field ... when my conviction that the inner working of the mind was the only mystery worth pursuing made me vow to become a psychiatrist. What disturbed me was the idea that free will died with Freud—or even earlier, with the materialism of the triumphant scientific revolution. Freud elevated unconscious processes to the throne of the mind, imbuing them with the power to guide our every thought and deed, and to a significant extent writing free will out of the picture. Decades later, neuroscience has linked genetic mechanisms to neuronal circuits coursing with a multiplicity of neurotransmitters to argue that the brain is a machine whose behavior is predestined, or at least determined, in such a way as seemingly to leave no room for the will. It is not merely that the will is not free, in the modern scientific view; not merely that it is constrained, a captive of material forces. It is, more radically, that the will, a manifestation of mind, does not even exist, because a mind independent of the brain does not exist.

Jeffrey Schwartz, The Mind & The Brain (2003: 7-8)

the elasticity of psychiatric diagnosis

Whatever the merits of the SSRIs, they have been among the most heavily promoted drugs of the past decade. The manufacturers of anti-depressants have taken full advantage of the relaxation of U.S. FDA restrictions on prescription drug advertising in 1997. In 2000 Paxil was the fourth most heavily promoted prescription drug in America, with $91.8 million in direct-to-consumer spending. Eli Lilly spent $37.7 million that same year advertising fluoxetine—$23.3 million as Prozac and $14.4 million as Sarafem. To put these figures in context: GlaxoSmithKline spent more money advertising Paxil than Nike spent advertising its top shoes. Direct-to-consumer advertising clearly works. From 1999 to 2000, antidepressants saw a 20.9 percent increase in sales to a figure of $10.4 billion, maintaining their position as the best-selling category of drugs in the United States. In 2000 Prozac was America's fourth most prescribed drug: Zoloft was number seven, and Paxil was number eight.
  Of course, the SSRIs could not have achieved such spectacular success if they did not work for some patients. Yet an equally important reason behind the success of psychoactive drugs in general, and the SSRIs in particular, is the elasticity of psychiatric diagnosis. Categories of "mental disorders" are in constant flux, and they often expand dramatically once a new treatment is marketed. For example, social anxiety disorder—the fear of being embarrassed or humiliated in public—was considered a rare disorder until physicians began treating it with Nardil (phenelzine) in the mid-1980s and then, later, with SSRIs such as Paxil. Today social phobia is often described as the third most common mental disorder in the United States. Similar stories can be told for obsessive-compulsive disorder and panic disorder... As David Healy has pointed out, the key to selling psychoactive drugs is to sell mental disorders.
  But to sell a mental disorder, you must first capture it and make it your own. A drug manufacturer is not allowed to promote a product for a specific disorder until that product has FDA approval. As a result, SSRI manufacturers jockey aggressively among themselves to claim new pieces of the mental disorder market. While the FDA has approved all six SSRIs on the market for depression, Paxil was until recently the only drug approved for social anxiety disorder. (In 2003 it was joined by Zoloft and Effexor.) All of the SSRIs except Celexa and Effexor have been approved for obsessive-compulsive disorder, but only Effexor and Paxil have been approved for generalized anxiety disorder. Zoloft and Paxil have claimed panic disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder, but only Prozac has been approved for bulimia. Eli Lilly's patent on Prozac expired in 2001, but Lilly has begun marketing the same drug under a different name, Sarafem, as a treatment for "premenstrual dysphoric disorder".
  Conventional wisdom attributes the spectacular success of the SSRIs to their relative absence of side effects. For instance, monoamine oxidase inhibitors, an alternative type of antidepressant, can be dangerous without strict dietary restrictions, and people taking the longer established tricyclic antidepressants often complain of drowsiness, dizziness, dry mouth, or constipation. Prozac and the other SSRIs initially appeared much less burdensome. Another significant reason for the success of the SSRIs lies in their ease of use. "One pill a day forever," says Jonathan Cole. "Fluoxetine at one pill a day is the ideal primary care physician's drug." Today, in fact, it is no longer even one pill a day. Prozac Weekly is a once-a-week version of Prozac that Lilly has marketed using coupons in newspapers and magazines. The one-pill strategy has clearly worked, whether the one pill is taken daily or weekly. It has been estimated that as much as 70 percent of the SSRIs is prescribed not by psychiatrists but by primary care physicians.
  ... In bioethics the conventional response to the phenomenon that Kramer called cosmetic psychopharmacology" has been to classify it as enhancement technology. The distinction between enhancement and treatment had gained currency during the ethical debate over gene therapy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many people were eager to press a research agenda into the therapeutic uses of genetic technology for conditions such as adenosine deficiency or cystic fibrosis but worried about the use of such technologies for eugenic purposes. Since then, bioethicists have used the term "enhancement technology" as a shorthand for all sorts of technologies whose uses go beyond the strictly medical, from synthetic growth hormone for short boys to Botox injections for aging women. The unstated assumption behind the term has been that there is a morally important distinction between enhancement and treatment. Treating illness, it has been argued, is an essential part of medical practice. Doctors have an obligation to treat sick people. Enhancements, in contrast, are seen as extras—ethically acceptable, perhaps, but not something that a doctor has any particular obligation to provide or that a liberal society has an obligation to fund.
  Yet the distinction between treatment and enhancement turns out to be much more elusive than it first appears, especially in psychiatry. Where is the line between psychopathology and social deviance, perversion, or eccentricity? When does shyness turn into social phobia, or melancholy into depression? The problem is complicated still further by the fact that so little is known about the causes or pathophysiology of mental disorders, or even about how chemical treatments for these mental disorders work. Philosophers have traditionally argued that illness is a departure from species-typical human functioning, but that definition offers us little guidance when the subject turns to the human mind and human behavior. What kind of behavior is typical of Homo sapiens?
  It might be better to ask, What should we make of the social place that the SSRIs have come to occupy? Every culture has its own socially prescribed psychoactive substances, from peyote, kava, and betel nuts to alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine. But with the SSRIs, the gate to the drug is guarded by doctors, and the passport for access is the diagnosis of mental disorder. Unlike alcohol, which is dispensed in bars and liquor stores, or caffeine, which is dispensed at Starbucks and Unitarian churches, SSRIs are dispensed at doctor's offices and pharmacies. It is the social place occupied by SSRIs that has produced the ambivalence that many of us feel about their popularity. Unlike bartenders and espresso baristas, doctors have not generally thought of their job as making well people feel better than well. But that might change.

Carl Elliott, Prozac as a Way of Life (2004: 4-7)