vilma

EN LT

2004-05-16

Karolis : output

Attention Deficit Disorder (with or without Hyperactivity), AD/HD, is ‘one of the most prevalent psychiatric disorders in the U.S.’ and a burgeoning disorder in the UK.

The key characteristic and root cause that now distinguishes AD/HD from other disorders and, of course, from normal brain functioning, is poor self-regulation. An inability to determine the expressions of continuous intentions in AD/HDer’s actions is directly related to the self-circuit deficiency in the AD/HD brain, or the lack of a ‘thing’ which emanates coherent intentions/expressions via action.

Many neuroscientists posit the existence of an executive function in the brain. Time controls one’s ability to 'make use' of the environment, to utilise and 'maximise' gaps, and this is what is deemed missing in AD/HD living.

This research coincides with the building of a sprawling social and popular architecture. The more AD/HD is defined and isolated in its symptoms, the more it is pervasive in the wider social strata through public health screening days, self-help groups, publications, official educational training and on-line groups.

There is a diverse amount of techniques for preparing classrooms, homes and even AD/HD clinics, such as keeping visual images as activity triggers posted for children, only re-arranging furniture after informing the child so that they are not too ‘disoriented,’ reminding children of important intervals in time, or teaching them what time ‘looks like’. Most of these techniques involve manipulating spatio-temporal structure in order to continuously trigger responses in the AD/HD child’s brain, where such spatio-temporal mergers cannot be sustained. I will refer to these activities as creating an ‘external brain’ (this technique is also used in Foetal Alcohol Syndrome, where there is a similar underdevelopment in the brain).

A self-regulation network is 'established' because it cannot be implemented in the brain.

AD/HD on-line support groups, information sites and newsletters have been one response to the burgeoning population of people diagnosed with the disorder. Sites and groups have been extremely active - you could even say, hyperactive.

Neuro-imaging technologies have located the difference between AD/HD and normal brain functioning in the right pre-frontal cortex of the brain. It seems that the deeper the instruments probe to locate the cause of AD/HD, the more it exists 'outside' the brain in the social environment. It is precisely because something inside has been ‘found’ to be ‘not there’ (an AD/HD ability to have a neurological wiring of self) that there is not a retreat of the laser probe (or techno-scientifically enhanced grip on the ‘Inside’) but a continual Interior-monitoring with a concomitant movement Outside to establish ‘it (control)’ ‘there’ in the ‘external brain’ which is responsible for the ever receding but continually worked at possibility of individuating the AD/HDer.

Technologies of the visible have sited a non-site, the site of self-control that is missing. They have sited what cannot occur inside and therefore what must occur outside, yet its possibility of being is that control operates in ‘both’.

There is no 'there' but rather a gap in the right pre-frontal cortex. Since the grip in the depth fails, knowledge of the disorder and its generation in the tertiary setting must be hyperactively produced.

Barkley invokes internet terminology in the possibility of having an ‘on-line’ memory that would supply information about the past and future that can be held ‘on-line’ to help carry out responses or tasks. ‘The provisional or working memory system’ would aid in interpreting and carrying out intentions in an environment which is temporarily lacking ‘events’. It would provide an on-line, overall time executive in order to live productively, futurally.

In terms of political theory, this can be read as a crisis of governmentality.

The case is therefore about what a person is, and how you can tell the difference between a natural person and an artificial person.

A council of prisonors in California has tried to bring suit against the correctional officers of the prison for the restoration of the practice of providing free cigarettes for indigent prisoners, which was discontinued.

The Supreme Court gets to decide whether the provisions for proceeding in forma pauperis should apply only to natural persons, or also to legal persons such as associations and councils. The case is therefore about what a person is, and how you can tell the difference between a natural person and an artificial person.

The word natural, which is precisely at issue here, since we are trying to find out whether the statute applies only to natural persons, is here applied precisely to an artificial person, Congress, which is personified as having natural intentionality: "If Congress had meant. . ." The Court's decision repeatedly relies on this type of personification. There is a personification of an artificial entity, Congress, embedded in the very project of interpreting how far the law will allow for artificial entities to be considered persons.

In treating Congress as an entity with natural intentions, indeed, Souter has already shown how "natural" the artificial can be.

It was in 1871 that the so-called Dictionary Act was first passed by Congress, in which the word Person "may extend and be applied to bodies politic and corporate." More recently, the question of fetal personhood has been debated, not only in the Roe v. Wade decision, where it was decided that a fetus was not a legal person, but also in Weaks v. Mounter, 88 Nev. 118, where it was decided that a fetus was a person who could sue for intrauterine injuries, but only after birth. Recently, the question of granting patents for forms of life such as oil-slick-eating bacteria or genetically altered mice has raised the question of whether a hybrid between humans and close animal relatives can be patented. And also, of course, the question of the ethics and legality of cloning humans has been raised. The law has reached another crisis about the definition of "person."

Current law allows patents for genetically-engineered animals but not for human beings. Humans are not patentable subject matter because patents are property rights, and the Thirteenth Amendment forbids any grant of property rights in a human being. Nevertheless, this exclusion for humans will prove impossible to maintain: within ten to thirty years, or perhaps sooner, advances in genetic engineering technology should allow scientists to intermingle the genetic material of humans and animals to produce human-animal hybrids. ... It may soon be possible to patent—and to enslave— human-animaI hybrids who think and feel like humans, but who lack constitutional protection under the Thirteenth Amendment.

The Thirteenth Amendment is the amendment that abolishes slavery.

Nature turns out to be a self-deconstructive term. It engenders
endless other natures in an eternally repeated pattern of regression. Nature deconstructs nature, hence the ambiguous valorization of the term.

Establishing the identity of Black-capped as opposed to Carolina Chickadees may turn out to be surprisingly complicated, and I am making these species exemplary precisely because they are so common. Suppose that an inexperienced birder glimpses an apparently nondescript chickadee while out for a winter walk on a gloomy day in the Poconos of northeastern Pennsylvania. Because it is cold, the chickadee in question is ruffled in appearance, its winter-worn feathers elevated for the sake of the insulation they provide. And it is flitting about, feeding actively in the last remaining hour of daylight. Flipping through the Field Guide, the birder first realizes that either version of the chickadee's song—chick-a-dee-dee-dee, or the same thing, but higher pitched––is plausibly what she has just heard. Next she looks once more at Peterson's illustrations, and realizes that she did not see the characteristic white wing-stripe of the Black-capped. Then she reads Peterson's discouraging note about poor conditions ("season, wear, angle of light, etc.") and has to confess that her not having seen it does not mean that the white wing-stripe was not there. Despairing, she consults Maps 246 and 247, and realizes that she has chosen that day to go for a walk in one of those liminal areas the maps chart ….

… This birder is now confronted with a variety of interpretive options. It will help her, of course, to become a better "reader"—a better user—of Peterson's guide. She may have to consult other field guides. She might have to go back out and beat the bushes more aggressively the next day, intervening, if need be, in the chickadee's life by "pishing" (mimicking the bird's alarm call) in order to encourage it to show itself to her. She may need to buy a new pair of binoculars. All of this is what habituated users of Peterson's Field Guide might do in such cases, which are by no means unusual or atypical. The "stylized image" has not put the user of the guide in touch with the environment, as Buell argues. In this instance, quite the reverse has happened: the environment has put the user of the guide in touch with the "stylized image."