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| 2004-05-15 | Karolis : input |
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source_1
Shannon E. Lowe, “Miskinetic Neuropoliticology: the Politics of Constructing and Disciplining the Organism of the Brain”, Culture Machine, 4 (2002). (Digested excerpts) source_2 Barbara Johnson, “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law”, Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski, eds., Material Events, 205-225. (Digested excerpts) source_3 Dana Phillips, “Ecocriticism, Literary Theory, and the Truth of Ecology”, New Literary History, Volume 30, Number 3, Summer 1999, pp. 577-602. (A digested excerpt) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- source_1 Shannon E. Lowe, “Miskinetic Neuropoliticology: the Politics of Constructing and Disciplining the Organism of the Brain”, Culture Machine, 4 (2002). (Digested excerpts) This paper emerges out of research on the contemporary neurological disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder with or without Hyperactivity (AD/HD). AD/HD is ‘one of the most prevalent psychiatric disorders in the U.S.’ and a burgeoning disorder in the UK. From the initial collection of an array of symptoms, AD/HD came to be defined by the three core symptoms of inattention, impulsiveness and hyperactivity. Looking beyond the three core symptoms, more recent literature suggests that 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. The ADD mind is afflicted with a sort of time illiteracy or "time blindness". The present impulse dominates. It has been aptly said that people with ADD forget to remember the future. As one of the leading AD/HD researchers in North America, Barkley has taken recent research in most interesting directions. Barkley begins discussing the ‘executive function’ in the brain, or that which would be the main controlling mechanism for brain processes. Many neuroscientists posit the existence of an executive function in the brain. 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. Ever since the demarcation of AD/HD as a neurological disorder, it has been staunchly defended against being talked about in terms of ‘cure’. Instead, discussions have been re-focused on the so-called ‘management’ of the disorder. 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 such as ‘Scattered,’ ‘ADDed Attractions,’ ‘ADDvantage Magazine,’ ‘ADHD Research Update,’ and ‘http://www.hyperactiveteacher.com/,’ have been extremely active - you could even say, hyperactive. These are only a few examples of the on-line activity of AD/HD groups whose manifesto involves ‘taking control through knowledge’ and whose activity is the production of knowledge. In the past two years, episodes of the American television shows, The Sopranos, The Simpsons and South Park, that dealt with AD/HD have been produced. Neuro-imaging technologies have located the difference between AD/HD and normal brain functioning in the right pre-frontal cortex of the brain. More pointedly, they suggest that the lack of tissue indicates a deficiency in immaterial 'higher control processes', the nature of which is time, in Barkley's formulation. 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. The more the language of the neurological existence of AD/HD is pinpointed, the more AD/HD is spread everywhere. 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. Institutional modes of AD/HD are maintained by capital's movement through them. AD/HD may be read as a financial empire that is held in place by the sale of books, drugs and therapy, and the transactions of wrongful dismissal suits, and school negligence suits. The over (but always 'not quite well enough') developed citizen/'individual' ends up running the post-industrial capitalist machinery, fighting its own onanism, its wasteful, unproductive excess, in the way that leads to claims being made against the state’s inability to adequately provide for individual development. Individuating and disciplining a 'life' is not possible precisely on the soft fibres of the AD/HD brain. The brain is a space of a gapping lack of possible control. The relationship between this ever failing grip on the immaterial, mismanaging, hypothetical steerer and the administrative strategies for creating an ‘external brain’, as the therapeutic remedy for a lack of ‘executive’ function, builds an architecture with an inherent and central deviance. Monsell and Driver, as the spokespeople for an international community of attention and performance neuroscientists, disregard questions of 'nature, unity, substrata of consciousness'. They favour searching for a neuro-substrata of control or that which has the effect of sculpting intentions rather than attempting to find a sculptor. To research this they suggest ‘it is perhaps better first to model control functions from the "outside", and only then to worry about how they relate to what control or lack of control feels like from the "inside"’. Inside and outside are used in inverted commas as they are interested in the functionality of control rather than locationality. What is of interest to them is not what is controlled but how control is exercised. They call for work not only on non-centralized control, as in a 'central executive', but on non-domain specific control - meaning not multilocated or dislocated, but unlocated, which includes the possibility of locating control anywhere. They suggest that new research aided by neuro-imaging technologies makes it possible to postulate an executive system rather than function; a system ‘with interdependent and interacting parts’. One research direction into such a system for AD/HD is Barkley’s ‘working memory’. 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. Hence mis-kinetic neuro-politicology. The ‘individual’s’, ‘society’s’ and the ‘medical-educational institutions’’ primary concern is the maintenance of an ‘external brain’. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- source_2 Barbara Johnson, “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law”, Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski, eds., Material Events, 205-225. (Digested excerpts) The case of Rowland v. California Men’s Colony, Unit II Men’s Advisory Council is based on a provision in the United States legal code permitting a "person" to appear in court in forma pauperis. In other words, a "person" may go to court without prepayment of fees if the "person" can demonstrate indigence. The question to be decided by the court is whether this provision applies to artificial persons such as corporations or councils, or whether it is meant to apply only to individuals. In the case that led to Rowland v. California Men’s Colony, Unit II Men’s Advisory Council, 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. They try to sue in forma pauperis on the grounds that the warden forbids the council to hold funds of its own. The court finds that they have not sufficiently proven indigence. They are allowed to appeal in forma pauperis in order to enable the court to decide whether the council, as an artificial legal person, is entitled to sue in forma pauperis. The appeals court decides that they are entitled, but this conflicts with another court ruling in another case. The Supreme Court therefore 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: it is as though Souter has to treat Congress as an entity with intentions, even natural intentions, in order to say that Congress could not have meant to include artificial entities in its ruling. 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. The majority was only five to four, however. In a dissenting opinion, written by Clarence Thomas, it is argued that there is no reason to restrict the broad definition of “person” to natural persons in this case. Thomas quotes the Court's view of “poverty" as an exclusively "human condition,” and comments: I am not so sure. "Poverty" may well be a human condition in its "primary sense," but I doubt that using the word in connection with an artificial entity departs in any significant way from settled principles of English usage… Congress itself has the word “poor” to describe entities other than natural persons, referring in at least two provisions of the United States Code to the world's "Poorest countries'—a term that is used as a synonym for the least developed of the so-called "developing" countries. Souter has glossed the word poor as though speakers of English could only use it literally. Thomas responds by including the figurative use of poor as included within normal usage. The boundaries between natural persons and artificial persons cannot be determined by usage, because those boundaries have always already been blurred. In treating Congress as an entity with natural intentions, indeed, Souter has already shown how "natural" the artificial can be. The question of what counts as a juridical person has, in fact, been modified over time in the legal code. 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." In an article on constitutional personhood, Michael Rivard writes: 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. The constitutional protection against slavery operates as a constraint on the patent office, but it does so in a paradoxical way. The fear of re-instituting something like slavery, or property in humans, is a reaction to, but also a sign of, what must be an ongoing research goal to come as close as possible to creating the ownable, enslavable human. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- source_3 Dana Phillips, “Ecocriticism, Literary Theory, and the Truth of Ecology”, New Literary History, Volume 30, Number 3, Summer 1999, pp. 577-602. (A digested excerpt) 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. According to a note on Map 246, the Black-capped is known to winter south of its normal range in some years, and the note to Map 247 points out that the Carolina's range "slightly overlaps" that of the Black-capped. To make matters worse, Map 247 reiterates the text's warning that the two species "mingle at times and hybrids are known." Finally, our conjectural naturalist, her attention wandering, notices that Map 248 shows the range of something called the Boreal Chickadee, which is "casual south to n. Ill., Ohio, Pa., N.J., Md.," but only in "chickadee flight years," a phenomenon that is not described. Could she possibly have seen this rare visitor to the Poconos? Could the chickadee she glimpsed have been a sport of nature, a hybrid, or something even more teratological? Could she have picked a worse time and place to go for a walk, and put Peterson to the test? This birder is now confronted with a variety of interpretive options. Fortunately, there are protocols to be followed in cases like hers. But in order to decide which of the two, possibly three, kinds of chickadee it is that she has just seen, she is going to have to rely on something more than just the resources provided by text—in this case, Peterson's - and world, where it is now that dark night in which all chickadees are black. It will help her, of course, to become a better "reader"—a better user—of Peterson's guide, to figure out what he means when he says that a bird is "casual" in a given area and to learn what "chickadee flight years" are. She may have to consult other field guides, a regional bird list, back issues of Birder's Digest and Birder's World, audio and video recordings, the National Audubon Society's Interactive CD-ROM Guide to North American Birds, and perhaps even the rare bird alerts posted at Every transaction entails further action. She is going to have to engage in a lot of this back-and-forth––between text and world, and world and text; between "stylized image" and bird, and bird and "stylized image"—if she really wants to know what kind of chickadee she saw. I think that it is this going back and forth between text and world, and between nature and culture, and the development of tools and techniques, like binoculars and computers and "pishing," to enable it, which gives a notion like getting "in touch with the environment" whatever worth it may have. All this means that Peterson's Field Guide is more like the perpetually open texts celebrated by recent theory than Buell recognizes: no "reading" of the Field Guide ever achieves "closure." This, indeed, is one of the book's virtues, a sign not of its shortcomings but of its usefulness, and explains why copies of it are often dog-eared. At the same time, Peterson's text is probably less like the sort of text Buell really wishes to celebrate, in that it is more constrained, more scientific, and more resourceful, working in more than one medium and form to help put us in touch with the natural world. In short, Peterson's text also invites quibbles. But these quibbles have much less to do with that text's vagaries than with the myriad ways in which differences between species have ramified in the course of avian evolution. In the admirably deliberate "How To Use This Text," Peterson urges those who wish to employ the field-mark system to recall a salient fact: "The ornithologist of the old school seldom accepted a sight record unless it was made along the barrel of a shotgun." As a surrogate of sorts for shotguns, the field-mark system also should be handled with care: "A quick field observer who does not temper his snap judgment with a bit of caution is like a fast car without brakes." "How To Use This Book" is, then, a cautionary text. Suppose that a reader of Thoreau should conceive a desire to hear the screech owl call just as Thoreau heard it one lonesome night. In the chapter of Walden entitled "Sounds," Thoreau paraphrases the screech owl's call as "Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n!" This paraphrase is not unlike the versions of birdcalls Peterson offers in many of the entries in his guide. But Peterson declines the opportunity to paraphrase the screech owl's call. He describes it in fairly abstract terms as a "mournful whinny, or wail; tremulous, descending in pitch. Sometimes a series on a single pitch." Peterson is more circumspect in this case, I think, for the simple reason that the screech owl's call is unparaphrasable. That is, it is not amenable to the sort of verbal treatment Thoreau attempts to give it. As a representation of the screech owl's call, "Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n!" is faulty on two counts, then: (1) It is a trite expression; (2) It sounds nothing like a screech owl. It will not put Thoreau's reader in touch with the world. ––––––––––––––––– Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading. But since a deconstruction always has for its target to reveal the existence of hidden articulations and fragmentations within assumedly monadic totalities, 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. | |