Evidence for analysis

John at Ktismatics has a very nice post up about the empirical basis of psychoanalysis/therapy. According to what the literature I've read on this, it seems that while there still isn't adequate evidence for the Unconscious in a strict Freudian sense, there is plenty of evidence that our cognitive processes are not entirely "conscious." In fact, most sensory information that we take in is interpreted and integrated into our thoughts at a level of cognition that is below the threshold of conscious reflection.

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I can attest to having some of the breakthrough moments he describes while in therapy myself, as well.

Politics and greedy reductionism

I've been sporadically following the recent discussion of politics/ontology and how they relate with some interest. I'm not sure exactly where I'd fall in a debate, but I did think this list by Nick at Speculative Heresy hit on some interesting "fault line" type points.

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One thing I've noticed consistently about the sort of discourse that's prevalent in academic philosophy is that it tends to privilege the "political" (or, alternately, the "social") as a field over and against all other fields, as if forces like physical laws, bio-chemical processes, etc., are simply "mediating" forces that eventually find themselves shoehorned into the King of all Domains, the political. This King of Domains ends up being the field that unifies all others and makes them cohere. I can sympathize with anyone who suggests that this way of looking at the world is anti-realist and even pretty profoundly "correlationist"—mostly, though, I see it as a form of what Daniel Dennett and others have called greedy reductionism.

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The greedy reductionist tends to write off all other possible explanations of how a world/situation works or what constitutes a given phenomenon— excluding, of course, the one that comes out of their own professional discourse— and in the process also tends to see their own discursive bias as the only one capable of subsuming all others under its umbrella. Anyone in the sciences is very accustomed to this sort of scholastic guild mentality: physics is the king of all sciences, no, but math is the formal bedrock, no, biology is how this world actually works, etc.

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The truth of the matter is that the world (if physics has taught us anything) need not be explained solely with reference to one unified field. It's entirely possible that the world is a product of a bunch of forces that work independently of one another and, therefore, that these may never be tidily folded into a discursive whole. So the physicist, the biologist, the politician, the social scientist, etc., are all equally right in describing the world according to their own specific set of reductionist criteria. Problems arise only when one reductionist gets greedy and wants all the powers of explanation for themself. When this happens, Dennett says reductionists slip into "explaining away" competing theories as mere "mediating forces" within their discursive field, rather than giving a positive, constructive explanation of the world according to the strengths and limitations of their discipline.

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I have no problem with people making all kinds of divergent political and social theories about how the world works; just don't try to tell me that these are more important or more politically and socially relevant than scientific ones. Case in point, from this week's world news: P. Leonardo Mascheroni. If this story about an American physicist who boldly sold hydrogen-flourine laser information to Venezuala doesn't fly in the face of every cliche about how science is The Man while theory isn't, or how scientists are too blinded by a naive belief in their own "objectivity" to get involved in politics, while grad students in the humanities are somehow perfect exemplars of what it means to be politically engaged in the world, I don't know what would.

Random interesting finding hot off the presses

Synucleins (proteins) apparently have an application in treating depression, and will help researchers fine tune existing treatments. I'd only ever heard of them in conjunction with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's before today. Exciting anyway.

Social cognitive neuroscience: an emerging field

In keeping with the spirit of our recent discussion of where social patterning might fit into neurology, here's a short and sweet op-ed piece in the NY Times about the emerging field of social cognitive neuroscience. It's low on technical jargon but includes summaries of research projects for those interested in knowing where this field might be heading.

The brain is the mind/fuck all y'all

Anthony is right in these comments about environmental issues being extremely important, if not the most important thing on our to do list, if we care about having a future on this planet. It's the real trump card. We can't afford to waste time on anything else. The calculations have already been made. By scientists— you know, those guys who know about stuff that wasn't written in the form of bald assertions 150 years ago. (As for 'vitalist commonsense': a strange turn of phrase, since vitalism is largely a movement associated with the same small circle of French intellectuals k-punk seems to base his own cred on).

Ultimately, when it comes to global warming, I'm less interested in the activism than in the science. It's the scientists who will be the ones doing the actual work, crunching the numbers and laboring over the calculations that solve the problem so the rest of us know what to do. Activism is nice, and it will be important, but we've got to get the science right first.

Speaking of science and self-proclaimed militants...I've wanted to say this for a long time, but I’ve tried to be polite and hold it in. And we all know I don’t last very long at that. So here goes: Some people should seriously consider taking a science class or ten before they speak about things they clearly don't understand. The levels of scientific illiteracy on the topic of depression that I've witnessed floating around this little corner the blogosphere render polite ‘discussion’ really really difficult for anyone who has a shadow of a clue about neurology, psychiatry, or medicine.

The brain is a complex organ. All sorts of things can, will, and always have gone wrong with it, just as things can, will, and always have gone wrong with livers, kidneys, eyes, uteruses, pancreases, appendices, etc. In fact, being more complex than other organs in its function, and regulating many complex functions, there is more that can possibly go wrong in the brain, and therefore a very good chance that most people will experience some type of psychiatric or neurological problem in their lifetime.

This being the case, we can easily infer that depression/dysphoria have always existed to one extent or another (given what we know about genetics, it's most likely maintained a fairly steady rate throughout human history). Now, there may be some kind of interesting discussion to be had about the specific forms these diseases are taking in our society with regard to the political, economic, and social dimensions of our lives. Go ahead and have at that, somebody.

Personally, I find that kind of discussion much less interesting than the hard science, so I'm going to be a little bored by it. This is just a personal preference. Ultimately, though, political and social explanations are going to have to take a back seat to empirical research. We've mapped the genome, people! This is sure to be the single biggest factor in improving life on earth for the next—500 years? Even given all the patenting controversy. In fact, at this point we’ve mapped the genomes of several species. Sooner or later, using this information, we'll understand when (and possibly why) certain mental illnesses evolved, exactly what the mechanisms are for each, and most importantly, how to treat all of them on the molecular level.

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Psychiatric disorders are only more "prevalent" now because we know about them, we know what causes them, and in the rich West, we have the resources to adequately diagnose and treat them. (Bear in mind, it wasn't too long ago that we used to think it was demons and mean, bad fairies possessing people...) What I'm getting at here is people can and will be depressed in all sorts of circumstances because depression is 1) genetically based, and 2) can exist independent of any environmental cause, even if environment can affect onset and severity to varying degrees. Furthermore, the fact that we can treat these things now is a luxury, and one that we should be grateful for—extremely grateful for, in light of the fact that almost nobody else in the world has access to these luxuries.

Making use of the latest medical technologies in treating depression/mental illness is not something we should pass on, or look down on, or discourage people from doing. To do so would be absolutely unimaginably vile, and I don’t respect anybody who (with no credentials or medical education) would discourage people from using industry standard treatments for serious medical conditions. Frankly, it disgusts me that so many “leftists” who push so hard for universal health coverage and have no problem gobbling up antibiotics, vaccines, and everything else medical science has to offer, will in the next breath blindly and ignorantly persist in stigmatizing the treatment modalities that exist for mental illness. Fuck all y’all. Seriously. There are people who need their meds, and adjunctive therapies such as CBT, just to survive on the most basic subsistence level. For every one of the OCD or PTSD sufferers who is convinced to stop taking their meds and skip CBT by reading these militant tracts or blogs or articles: well, let's just say I fantasize that there’s a special place in hell all toasty waiting for the fucker who wrote them.

The whole "dysphoria" discussion I'm seeing online seems to ignore the fact that depression is a medical condition (on purpose, apparently—good idea!), eliding this very important dimension from the "frame" and falling into a sort of idealist position where "dysphoria" is the product of some kind of mind or soul that floats outside of the body and has nothing to do with the neurochemistry of the brain.

Which is fine, of course, if you want to be an idealist. But don't pretend to be on some Marxist/materialist crusade, if this is the case.

Materialism, privilege, revolution

The question of where affects meet politics is one that has had philosophical types stumped (slash writing voluminously—same difference, really) for some time now. Many people on the left, including me, would tend to want to ground any discussion of the affective dimension of political engagement in Marxist-inflected materialism.

Being a materialist, to my way of thinking, has always entailed the belief that some people most definitely have it better than others; that having nicer things, a more comfortable standard of living, access to the latest in medical treatments and technologies, and being born with the privilege afforded to certain classes but routinely denied others (along with the rights that tend to come along with this) certainly does make a difference in life. Being born privileged in the mind of a materialist does make your life qualifiably and quantifiably better than the life of someone else who doesn’t have the benefit of those same privileges. Perhaps the standard unit of measure is not necessarily "happiness", but "comfort", in this equation.

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Otherwise, one wonders, what is the point of pushing for revolution (or mutation, or change, whatever you want to call it) at all? If there is nothing necessarily better about having things, having a nicer home, having running water, a comfortable salary, and easy access to medical care, then why buck the system at all? If even the most privileged among us might, after a revolution, end up being just as genuinely as sad and depressive as everybody was before, despite being very comfortable, what exactly is supposed to be the point of ushering in a “revolution”? Why bother? If "life sucks, then you die"—even if you’re white, rich, and can get SSRIs and free visits to the shrink on your awesome state-sponsored universal health coverage—should we seriously consider waging war (revolution, whatever) with only the promise of our own unhappiness to extend to others afterward?

Since I don’t add teleological/utopian nonsense to my materialism, I generally refuse to direct all of my thinking toward a future world where our political work will be accomplished, and there will be no need to push for change anymore. I’m sure there will always be a hegemonic superstructure, there will always be something to struggle against, there will always be an apparatus or power structure that needs dismantling and reconfiguring. Things can and they will get better, I'm convinced, even if they will never be perfect or entirely fixed.

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But I am also certain that there is a real and clear difference between what scientists can demonstrate is a disease state of the brain (and differential diagnosis) called major depressive disorder, and a much more generalized feeling of dis-ease in the world, what Heidegger and the German existentialists called Angst or the uncanny/unheimlich, and what some people are calling “dysphoria” (even though I’d probably reserve that word for severe and specific medically verifiable cases, since I give preference to the medical definitions of disease states and subscribe to a Churchlandian model of what the human “mind” is).

If there isn’t any difference between 1) feeling generically ill at ease in the world, which everyone feels, of course, to some extent (as long as you phrase the question correctly and focus group it just right), 2) being justifiably angry about political injustice, and/or 3) being sick with a genetically linked psychiatric disorder, it would seem that our “materialism” is really in trouble. That it’s practically baseless, even. In fact, it would seem that what you’re actually talking about is a form of idealism, where there is no distinction between the umwelten of individual people and the biosphere itself as an entity, but instead some mystical union between them in which the “badness” or inadequacy of the natural world is such that no truly good person could be happy living in it.

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Flashbacks to German Lit 350. Goethe and all of them Deutsche dudes would love this shit (it's definitely an interesting spin on the old party line): the high drama of the realization that the world we live in is not the world that the humanists told us existed, where life was essentially beautiful and harmonious. What we're really back to, I think, is a post-Marxist political subject who realizes that humanism is a wash, that it's ridiculous, that the world is not a place where everything that's out of joint can simply be put back in, and man put back at the center of the universe where he belongs, with everyone living in perfect harmony, and global warming reversed by everyone doing their little part collecting soda cans. It's the terrible realization that nature itself is part of who we are, that nature is, in fact, the problem, and that, as such, we are part of the problem as well. This is something it has in common with post-humanism.

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If the speculative world(s) of the "post-humanist" are 'cold', however, it's not because post-humanists are unhappy: it's because after humans no longer center the universe ontologically, the political sphere ceases to be framed primarily vis-a-vis the affective engagement (or disengagement) of humans. The cold spaces form a sort of void that can be filled. Possibilities we've never dreamed of yet open up. Inhuman/non-human actors are given their due as agents in world-making. Until we sort out which actors are doing what, our political actions will be at best stabs in the dark, at worst, serious errors, misfires and wastes of resources. I suppose that, for these reasons, ANT and OOO are where I'd prefer to focus my political and philosophical energies for the time being.

A few more words on biology, sex identity, and post-humanism

I'm seeing some apparently 'materialist' arguments floating around based on the notion that sex difference is real, in the sense that biological sex clearly exists. No arguments there. But a recent Infinite Thought post explicates the work of technofeminist Shulamith Firestone thusly:

Firestone accepts that culture and history have played important roles in shaping the way we conceive of men, women (and children) but that underlying all these interpretations are some basic anatomical continuities – unchangeable until now. It is not therefore economic class that underlies oppression but biological and physical characteristics. As she puts it: ‘Nature produced the fundamental inequality’.

A few minor problems with this. First, biological sex has never (and I do mean never) been unchangeable— in fact, as with any biological trait, our sexual characteristics (primary and secondary) have always been changing (read: evolving) and still are. This is what evolution does: it changes populations genetically every generation. This means that what a woman or a man was biologically (this means physiologically, hormonally, chromosomally, phenotypically, etc.) in pre-historical times is in many respects quite different from what a woman or a man is today, even though on the most basic genetic level we can say that mitochondrial Eve (who lived about 150,000 years ago) shared an xx chromosomal arrangement with modern woman, and Y-chromosomal Adam shared his xy arrangment with modern man. It also means that what we are now is subject to change, and in fact, many scientists project that, at the rate that the Y-chromosome is losing genetic variability, human males will make a "switch" to another chromosome, possibly within the next 100,000 years [if we're still here, that is. Some males from other species have already done this, not a big deal. As the X-chromsome has been steadily gaining variability, chances are it's here to stay for the foreseeable future. Funnily enough, polygyny, which has historically been the most common mode of socio-sexual organization in the world, has been implicated in this.]

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As much as I sympathize with Firestone's brand of materialism and favor biological explanations, I think there's some important information being lost here in the rhetoric. Nature didn't produce 'the fundamental inequality', it simply produced the fundamental sex difference. It was 'culture' that decided the differences between men and women amounted to men being superior to women: 'Nature' didn't, and couldn't possibly have done that. This is a subtle but important distinction to make. There are plenty of societies that have existed historically (and even a few still existing today) where women and men shared resources and lived relatively egalitarian lifestyles—but they're by and large pre-agrarian and typically have no state apparatus.

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Beyond this, I'd have to mention that there is nothing simple about biology, nothing simple about what constitutes a "woman" in the first instance—there are intersex people, for example, who can appear either phenotypically male or female, but have chromosomal, genital, or morphological abnormalities. It is aso quite possible, due to the extremely complex nature of DNA and RNA transcription, for a person to be genetically female but phenotypically male, or vice versa. Biological sex, it turns out, is not a simple binary operation with two clear categories.

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Even if we were to shrug off what some people would call "marginal" cases (but which, in fact, could end up being critical evolutionary adapations—who knows?) such as intersex and transsexual individuals, there are still problems with Firestone's argument from an anthropological perspective. In most cultures in the world, what Firestone experiences as the "curse" of female embodiment is experienced almost nothing like it is in the industrialized West. For example, PMS/PMDD is an almost exclusively Euro-American phenomenon that is all but unheard of in pre-agrarian, pre-colonial, pre-stratified, relatively egalitarian matriarchal tribal and band societies. (There are several theories regarding why this might be the case from a scientific rather than a cultural perspective, including the increased exposure of women to industrial waste in the environment in the west, which is also linked to the higher incidence of autoimmune disorders in western women.) In many cultures, women give birth at home and don't require epidurals, etc. Menopause is not experienced as a living hell in many societies (including Greece, China, and Japan), but a welcome relief from the pressures of fertility. In most countries outside of the post-industrial west, "hot flashes" do not exist, and many post-menopausal women there report a higher rather than lower sex drive.

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Regardless, though, the day that Firestone forecasted, one where women would be released from reproductive slavery, is approaching more quickily than one might realize. The technology already exists to successfully gestate babies full-term in an artificial uterus. The only problem is, every researcher who has tried to do so has been halted by tremendous "ethical" opposition from both the right and the left. As we discussed in my bioethics course, were we to switch entirely to artificial gestation technologies, we'd save thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives per year. The opposition to artificial gestation isn't ethical, then, it's emotional or psychological; like abortion, it's not about those poor helpless fetuses, ultimately it's about denying women the right to exist in any other capacity except the traditional one, i.e., as baby-making machines for men/the state/etc.

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Firestone is right, at least, to look to science for answers, even if she doesn't fully understand what biological sex means. You won't see scientists trying to keep women from circumventing nature—biologists and scientists of all kinds have been trying to prove for decades that what's biology today is certainly not our eternal destiny— you'll see whichever bozo we have in the White House doing that instead. Until Big Pharma decides they can make more money off artificial gestation than the lobbyists can make off fighting it, that is.

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And then there will be the humanist "activists" who go blow up the CEO's vacation home in protest, because it's not nice to make humans outside of bodies, or something.

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And there's always something...

Being gay will cost you $

This just in... gay couples are forced to spend more money and still get fewer benefits than heterosexual married couples with similar salaries, jobs, and lifestyles.