I’m going to post something to expand on the themes in this article shortly, but to whet your appetites:

Capitalism would seem to require an optimal balance of happiness and unhappiness amongst its participants, if it is to be sustainable. The need for dissatisfaction is implicitly recognized by Keynesian economics, which sees the capitalist system as threatened by the possibility of individual or collective satisfaction, manifest as a demand shortfall. Capitalism’s gravest problem is then how to maintain governments or consumers in a state of dissatisfied hunger, and how to find ever more credit through which to feed that hunger. The defining difference between the Keynesian era and the neo-liberal era was simply that the former depended on an insatiable, debt-fuelled, ‘unhappy’ state, whereas the latter depended on an insatiable, debt-fuelled, ‘unhappy’ consumer. The question of who or what is to inject such an appetite in future has no apparent answer as yet.

Max Weber, and more recently Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism, addressed a parallel problem, but via moral and cultural sociology. To what extent and on what basis must capitalism serve our human needs and desires, if we are to remain committed to it? Immaterial needs and desires play a key role, as these are less easily exhaustible than material ones. As Boltanski and Chiapello argue:

Whereas capitalism, by its very nature, is an insatiable process, people are satiable, so that they require justifications for getting involved in an insatiable process. It follows that capitalism cannot make do with offering nothing more specific than its inherent insatiability.

The culture of capitalism must keep individuals sufficiently dissatisfied that they continue to seek satisfaction from it, but not so dissatisfied that they reject or resist it outright. Boltanski and Chiapello’s central argument is that capitalism has drawn on varieties of anti-capitalist critique in generating the ‘spirit’ which induces a sufficient mass of the population to remain at this finely tuned level of engagement. At key moments of crisis, capitalist accumulation has alternately drawn on those criticizing its unfairness (the ‘social critique’) and those criticizing its dullness (the ‘artistic critique’) in order to find ‘routes to its own survival’. [12] In promising to answer these critics, it pledges to treat the moral and human injuries that it itself has enacted, thereby renewing its legitimacy.

New Left Review – William Davies: The Political Economy of Unhappiness.

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What do I mean by ‘better at romance’? Well, there are costs and benefits to romance. Having to buy sexy clothes, going on unpleasant dates, paying for pleasant dates, obsessing over another person’s every utterance for months, crying over break ups, blushing over refusals, and compromising over the layout of the living room are all costs. You can probably think of some benefits. I will say we are better at romance when we are more efficient at it, that is we get more benefits for the costs we incur. A romantically efficient person gets more affection and orgasms for the same input of searching and pining, just as an efficient farmer gets more grain and pigs for the same amount of land and dirt. The big question: are we getting more romantically efficient?

It’s fairly hard to judge the rate of improvement here. Romantic satisfaction is complicated to measure and measuring it too quantitatively is supposedly destructive to it. People tend to be private and deceitful about it. But suppose we were getting efficient at romance as fast as we are getting efficient at, say, animating movies. We would notice, even without detailed records, because the relationship we have now would have been completely unbelievable ten years ago (OK, for some near the start of our adult lives this is still true). Even if romance was improving as fast as say farming, everyone would be able to see a huge improvement since their grandparents’ time, when one had to get up at 5AM to start the foreplay.

Still, perhaps romance is improving more slowly than we can tell with such primitive observation methods. There are some reasons to think it is, and some to think it might be getting worse or at least moving very slowly. Let’s break romance down into a few different parts. First you have to find someone to do it with. Then you have to convince them that they have also found someone. Then you have to actually do whatever it is you wanted to do with them, and both enjoy it, or get whatever else it was you wanted out of it.

Where Are You, Sexularity?.

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Social media puts an end to shyness by generalizing its pathology

In The New Inquiry (which is excellent) Rob Horning (he of the equally excellent Marginal Utility and Hipster Runoff Exegesis) writes:

As a shy person, I’ve believed for most of my life that being among new people required an elaborate social disguise, one that would allow me to feel both present and absent, noticed and unnoticed. I’d yearn for some sort of social recognition without the bother of having to be recognized, without that oppressive pressure to live up to anything that might get me attention in the first place. So I’d find myself executing oblique tactics — being stingy and stealthy with eye contact; wearing a mask of deep concentration; staring at an underappreciated object in the room, like a light fixture or molding — in hopes of discouraging people from engaging me in actual conversation while still conveying the impression that I might be interesting to talk to.

The problem with polite conversation, I thought, was that it required the orderly recitation of platitudes before one can say anything interesting, let alone something as original and insightful as I wanted to believe myself to be. I couldn’t bear it. I had an irrational expectation that people should already know what I was about and come to me with suitable topics to draw me out. Rather than attempt agreeable chitchat and compromise my “authentic” identity with false congeniality, I would isolate myself, hoping that withdrawal would make me come across at a glance as mysterious and different rather than rude and feckless. If I had to volunteer talk about my tastes, interests and opinions out of context, they might be exposed as somehow wrong or worse, as not especially distinctive. And even if I hit it off with someone, my ineffable singularity could have easily vanished in the consensus of compatibility. I’d rather my self-importance remain undisturbed by anyone’s curiosity about me than risk seeming ordinary to myself.

This gave me my basic framework about how to behave in social situations. The possibility of discovering genuine connection with other people receded to fantasy; I could only try to make it through without embarrassing myself. Shyness had made me so deficient in empathic experience that I could only view social life in terms of risk rather than opportunity. The best way to manage that risk, I thought, was to be unapproachable but legibly fascinating at a distance, to present myself as an object to be read but with a message that’s inscrutable and fleeting, one that could convey the complexity of the real me without reducing it to something superficial. I could not get past the wish to broadcast my identity without having to interact with anyone.

Facebook, of course, caters to that desire. Because its business model relies on user-generated content and the data-mining it makes possible, Facebook is engineered to facilitate “sharing.” It frees users to build an identity in isolation, unhampered by contingencies of face-to-face interaction or real-time reciprocity. Or in other words, it allows socially anxious people like me to assemble a shyness disguise that others appear willing to accept as genuine.

More at The New Inquiry

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Was Jared Lee Loughner politically motivated, insane or just plain stupid?

Pop quiz: there’s a guy who’s been getting a lot of attention lately who had a long history of mental illness which ended in tragedy, an obsessive focus on grammar, a distrust of the American government, who toyed with the idea that the world we experience is not real- who am I talking about?
Jared Lee Loughner, who shot and killed six people in Tucson Arizona whilst trying to assassinate Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, right? Or David Foster Wallace, about whom all of the above statements are true. Two very different people, both left legacies that the United States, and the world, is struggling to come to grips with. Despite the similarities listed above, nobody would argue that Wallace and Loughner belong in the same rough category- hell, I might lobby to have them recognised as belonging to different species- Homo Sapiens Superior and Homo Sapiens Vulgaris respectively.
The gulf that separates the two is immense, but a vast proportion of it is taken up by one single factor: intellect.
Continue reading

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Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives

Deleuze and Guattari had an instant intellectual rapport. Both men were frustrated with the ‘Mummy-Daddy’ focus of psychoanalysis. By understanding desire in terms of the family romance, psychoanalysis had become (in Guattari’s words) a ‘capitalist drug’, individualising collective problems and neutralising the disruptive effects of desire. Freud’s big mistake, they agreed, was to see desire as something rooted in lack, as an attempt to fantasise a missing object (the mother’s breast, for example). As a result, Freud had imagined the unconscious as a theatre of representations, in which the same grimly repetitive Oedipal drama was performed night after night. In Deleuze and Guattari’s view, the unconscious was better understood in political terms as a productive and potentially transformative force – a force that could change the world. The unconscious, as they saw it, was a deliriously innovative ‘factory’, ceaselessly producing new and transgressive combinations of desires. In the book that eventually came out of this meeting, Anti-Oedipus, they would portray desire as a relentless and impersonal flow, an electric current moving through the social body and interrupted only by ‘desiring machines’ that sought to direct and channel it. A desiring machine could be anything from a breast (‘a machine that produces milk’) to a revolutionary political movement, and its aim was always the same: to connect with other machines (the infant’s mouth, the masses), and produce a shift in reality. Desire had virtually no limits: like power in Foucault, it was everywhere, and it passed through everyone without belonging to anyone.

A second meeting was promptly arranged at Guattari’s château in Dhuizon. As they discussed their project, friends and family dropped in, ‘buzzing around the daily primal scene, in which Félix and Deleuze create intensely’, one witness wrote. ‘In a word, it’s working.’ Deleuze was beguiled by Guattari’s energy: ‘He always seems to be in motion, sparkling with light.’ Yet he also recognised something about Guattari that few others did: ‘When you examine Félix more closely, you realise how alone he really is. Between two activities, or in the midst of people, he can plunge into the deepest solitude.’

The challenge was getting Guattari to endure the solitude of working at his desk: otherwise the book would never be written. That was Deleuze’s first rule. His second rule was that the collaboration would be monogamous: no other parties could be involved, nor would he take part in any of Guattari’s many other militant activities. Anti-Oedipus emerged from their correspondence over the next two years: ‘long, disorderly letters’ that Deleuze would fashion into Deleuzo-Guattarian prose. In recent years, Dosse notes, there has been a tendency to ‘de-Guattarise’ the collaboration and to canonise Deleuze at Guattari’s expense, but Deleuze always insisted on the centrality of his friend’s contribution. In his words, ‘Félix was the diamond miner and I was the polisher.’ As they worked on Anti-Oedipus, he recalled, ‘we no longer knew who had written what … We were more like two streams coming together to make a third.’ The diamond miner took a less sentimental view of the collaboration. ‘We’re really not of the same dimension,’ he complained in his diaries. ‘I’m sort of an inveterate autodidact, a do-it-yourself guy, a sort of Jules Verne.’ Guattari resented ‘being strapped onto Gilles’, and felt ‘overcoded’ by the ‘perfection that he brought to the most unlikely book’. What he really wanted to do was ‘say stupid shit. Barf out the fucking-around-o-maniacal schizo flow.’

More at the London Review of Books.

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‘Post-industrial capitalism has completely destroyed the conditions required for healthy childhood development.’

Over at Alternet, a lengthy but incredibly interesting talk with Dr. Gabor Maté, author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction and a doctor working with drug addicts in Vancouver, Canada, on the causes of addictive behavior in early childhood, and what can really be done for people addicted to anything from smack to shopping.

DR. GABOR MATÉ: The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. And the commonality is childhood abuse. In other words, these people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development, they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again.

And that’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.

AMY GOODMAN: What does the title of your book mean, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, it’s a Buddhist phrase. In the Buddhists’ psychology, there are a number of realms that human beings cycle through, all of us. One is the human realm, which is our ordinary selves. The hell realm is that of unbearable rage, fear, you know, these emotions that are difficult to handle. The animal realm is our instincts and our id and our passions.

Now, the hungry ghost realm, the creatures in it are depicted as people with large empty bellies, small mouths and scrawny thin necks. They can never get enough satisfaction. They can never fill their bellies. They’re always hungry, always empty, always seeking it from the outside. That speaks to a part of us that I have and everybody in our society has, where we want satisfaction from the outside, where we’re empty, where we want to be soothed by something in the short term, but we can never feel that or fulfill that insatiety from the outside. The addicts are in that realm all the time. Most of us are in that realm some of the time. And my point really is, is that there’s no clear distinction between the identified addict and the rest of us. There’s just a continuum in which we all may be found. They’re on it, because they’ve suffered a lot more than most of us.

More at Alternet

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Narcissism is no longer a mental disorder

Why am I only just hearing about this? Did nobody think to give me heads up? DON’T YOU PEOPLE REALISE HOW IMPORTANT I AM?

The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (due out in 2013, and known as DSM-5) has eliminated five of the 10 personality disorders that are listed in the current edition.

Narcissistic personality disorder is the most well-known of the five, and its absence has caused the most stir in professional circles.

Most nonprofessionals have a pretty good sense of what narcissism means, but the formal definition is more precise than the dictionary meaning of the term.

Our everyday picture of a narcissist is that of someone who is very self-involved — the conversation is always about them. While this characterization does apply to people with narcissistic personality disorder, it is too broad. There are many people who are completely self-absorbed who would not qualify for a diagnosis of N.P.D.

The central requirement for N.P.D. is a special kind of self-absorption: a grandiose sense of self, a serious miscalculation of one’s abilities and potential that is often accompanied by fantasies of greatness. It is the difference between two high school baseball players of moderate ability: one is absolutely convinced he’ll be a major-league player, the other is hoping for a college scholarship.

Of course, it would be premature to call the major-league hopeful a narcissist at such an early age, but imagine that same kind of unstoppable, unrealistic attitude 10 or 20 years later.

The second requirement for N.P.D.: since the narcissist is so convinced of his high station (most are men), he automatically expects that others will recognize his superior qualities and will tell him so. This is often referred to as “mirroring.” It’s not enough that he knows he’s great. Others must confirm it as well, and they must do so in the spirit of “vote early, and vote often.”

Finally, the narcissist, who longs for the approval and admiration of others, is often clueless about how things look from someone else’s perspective. Narcissists are very sensitive to being overlooked or slighted in the smallest fashion, but they often fail to recognize when they are doing it to others.

More at the New York Times.

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I’d normally take a belt-sander to my genitals before recommending something from Vice, particularly after their lacklustre black-metal documentary, but this mini documentary on the real-life zombies of Haiti seems to avoid their editorially mandated Nathan-Barleyism. It also has a guy in it who was shot fourteen times in the face.

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Pills, placebos and everyday madness:
A debate on Cartesian dualism has led to radically differing approaches to the treatment of depression

Sixty years ago, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle published his famous attack on Cartesian dualism, The Concept of Mind, which claimed to find a logical flaw in the popular notion that mental life has a parallel but separate existence from the physical body. Among other effects it provided sophisticated support for the psychological behaviourists, then in the ascendant, who asserted that since we could not objectively observe mental activity it was not really a fit subject for scientific investigation.

Nowhere was the notion of banning mental states taken up more enthusiastically than by the emerging discipline of neuropsychiatry. If consciousness and all its manifestations were “merely” the firing of neurons and the release of chemicals in the brain, what need was there to focus on mental states? Once the physical brain was right, the rest would follow.

It was an approach that has spawned a vast pharmaceutical industry to treat any pathological psychological state – anxiety, shyness, depression, psychosis – with a variety of pills. The underlying promise is that scientifically adjusting the levels of various brain chemicals will bring relief and a return to normality. The biggest-selling class of these drugs are the anti-depressant SSRIs – brands include Prozac, Seroxat and Lustral. A recent report revealed that they were the most widely prescribed drugs in America, with an estimated global market value of over $20 billion.

However, as is set out calmly and clearly in Irving Kirsch’s The Emperor’s New Drugs, it would seem that the whole golden edifice is based on a lie. In measured prose, Kirsch leads the reader through the labyrinth of more than twenty years of trials, studies and meta-analyses, and shows that these pills are no better than placebos. The secret of their power lies in such slippery psychological notions as hope, belief and meaning rather than hard chemistry. The ghost in this particular machine has proved to be all too substantial.

More here, at the Times Online.

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