8 responses to “The Body Microbial ( you contain multitudes)”
what do you make of this trend dmf? getting rid not just of consciousness, but of the brain as center of neurological behavior? does this undermine post-struct./post-nihil attempts to contextualize mental disorders as political symptom? The whole post-nihil project? i.e. “your social anxiety is just your microbes/bad diet talking” etc. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/magazine/can-the-bacteria-in-your-gut-explain-your-mood.html
thanks for asking kb, for me this doesn’t unseat the brain as the center of most of the neurological structures/functions (including those that con-fuse us into thinking we have selves and all) but just as brains are kluged (and even in some ways conflicted) this adds layers to the complexities/feedback-loops at play.
I came to post-structuralism via life-sciences, environmental (not conservation but JJGibson) psychology and the beginnings of philo-of-tech/STS/ANT and so embraced the sense in Derrida, Foucault and co. that things weren’t systematizable, were leaky and buggy, multi-resonanced, and always-already being re-contextualized/re-assembled and such, so these sorts of findings are right in that vein for me (if that makes sense?).
I’m always for taking into account aspects and complexities of context/environs (now how and why is tricky of course) especially when it comes to interactions and in particular human-doings like medical diagnoses (clearly highly political) but I’ve never doubted that our bodies would be structurally vulnerable to all sorts of malformations/invasions/injuries and such. so my beef is more with the confusions that come with treating our ignorant clusterings of symptoms as causes, routine-ized incarceration/surveillance and all (we need to do away with psychiatry and all talk of “mental” illnesses. My own questions and work is more around how do all of the factors at play (in whatever limited, and hopefully experimental and open to feedback/correction, ways we come to frame them) create affordances and hindrances for those involved?
Also on the nihil front (i’m more after as in after-shocks than post) my sense is that we are making it up as we go with what and who is at hand (and in our guts!).
well that’s a lot of highly compressed fragments mashed together on the fly so if any of it is of interest, unfathomably opaque, or just questionable please let me know and i’ll try to be clearer.
-dirk
dirk, that’s certainly very helpful, and along the lines I had limply attempted to sketch for myself—trying to invoke Lacan’s anti-quiescence version of the death drive and a questionable understanding of positive feedback/cybernetics (..yea yea, i’m still an undergrad) over a gut-brain discussion with a stubborn theory-h8r biology major recently had the predictable effect of leading me to momentarily abandon all my theoretical ground in favor of a compensatory rush to google clinical neuroscience papers and recoil at the prospect of a scientific homogenizing/depoliticizing-NewAge-style-reductionism, so on seeing your post i thought i’d take the opportunity to briefly bounce some vague thoughts off a clearer head with far more experience on all this. apologies for the subsequent simplistic/offhand/inane prompt, and thanks very much for the characteristically dense batch of thoughts (“highly compressed fragments mashed together” always good by me!). more generally, thanks for your/et. al.’s work on Synth0 and the surrounding web, as it’s all been a significant personal resource for a few years despite my never having done more than spectate.
-kb
glad i could be of some help kb (typing/writing isn’t my strong suit) and your questions were quite reason-able and welcome as is your reply.
For me “reductionism” isn’t a problem when it is simply showing us our errors about there being say souls, or minds, or such (replacing projected spooks with actual things) but what never sat well with me in science work was when people didn’t ever really take into account environs and relations, the effects and limits of their own interventions (we don’t simply dis-cover things in labs we make/assemble things, proto-types as I like to call them) and or they ignore the specificities of actual cases.
Lacan’s deep (and to me objectionable) hegelianism aside the nascent work into cognitive-biases, extended-minding, and neurophenomenology really undermine the fundamental freudian take on the un-conscious as processes whereby we supposedly register some-thing/event and than repress it,
turns out as with say visual perception we are always already (except in the cases of malformations or damage) sifting/shaping our interactions with the world towards our interests/ends (we are always manipulating our environs, not capable of letting things/people just be, and here I can imagine a move along the lines of Freud’s work in sublimation not as an civilizing of some repressed primitive-animalistic urge but as a kind of
intentional cultivation-crafting-hacking of the materials at hand).
have you had a chance yet to study any Science&Technology-Studies or Actor-Network-Theory (not easy to come by in the US I had to go to the UK back in the day)?
Will resist the urge to throw a list of names/links yer way without more of a sense of what you are studying and what your interests are but if you wish to share more of what you are working on these days I’d be glad to share some resources and reflections.
thanks again for joining in our efforts here, we could always use more hands and interests making the scene, all of this is a work in process and so no one has mastery, the high-ground, or the final word.
dmf, thanks again. i’m very much on board with your point on reductionism, and i suppose my own momentarily nagging response to the gut-brain thing falls into the latter issue: in my case, the entertainment of this possibility of finding an easy fix in regard to what is ultimately the basic problem of affective experience (with the imagined ad campaign arguing something like: “There’s no reason to sit around glumly thinking through the vast problems of postmodernity etc when your/everyone’s debilitating alienation can just be understood as the neurological side-effect of unhealthy Western diet! Just try diet x for a month and your thoughts will become more affectively positive, you will feel more content and satisfied, etc.)… the disruption of that sterile process via essential leaks, interventions etc is what I was looking for conceptually but struggling to find mechanically (perhaps, of course, because the relevant scientific/clinical work available seems interested in elucidating a particular process without really engaging in the messy effects of reciprocal interactions with other systems etc. i.e. if microbes can affect your cognitive neurotransmitters, how can other environmental stimuli/ancillary cognitive processing interrupt/ influence that relationship, affect, etc.)
I’m very interested in what you’ve sketched of your current work, and would really love to hear more….names/links would be greatly appreciated! I’m aware a whole host of pertinent pieces/posts/links/videos have been all over S0, but having had little engagement so far with ecology/STS-type contemporary thought I’m afraid I’ve tended to lose some of the more sophisticated lines running through the relevant resources I have looked at. In terms of my own academic work, my Comp Lit studies in the US (my philo dept is an analytic fortress) have consisted mostly of the usual continental/post-struc thinkers thus far and with a few exceptions has been a pretty orthodox/predictable introduction to theory…unfortunately it’s on me to go out and get the contemporary stuff. A name like Latour gets mentioned by a sharp prof from time to time without ever finding its way into a syllabus, as do ANT and STS, but I haven’t yet had the chance to jump into them beyond dilettantish blog-hopping (which, after all, has been a more vital source of education than the 65k/year university..) So yes, resources to dive into would be wonderful. And if you could throw out a few words regarding your take on Lacan’s Hegelianism too, I’d be very grateful, as my engagement with Hegel thus far only goes as far as Zizek. Certainly love the update of sublimation as ecological-hacking!
dmf, my apologies, have been unable to find time to dive in to the Fish pdf, will report back with relevant questions or for further recommendations when i can if that sounds okay with you?
hey kb, thanks but no need to apologize, and no hurry (or necessity really) to any of these exchanges (or any recommendations), please feel free to make use of this blog when and if it is helpful/entertaining
synthetic zerØ 
what do you make of this trend dmf? getting rid not just of consciousness, but of the brain as center of neurological behavior? does this undermine post-struct./post-nihil attempts to contextualize mental disorders as political symptom? The whole post-nihil project? i.e. “your social anxiety is just your microbes/bad diet talking” etc. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/magazine/can-the-bacteria-in-your-gut-explain-your-mood.html
thanks for asking kb, for me this doesn’t unseat the brain as the center of most of the neurological structures/functions (including those that con-fuse us into thinking we have selves and all) but just as brains are kluged (and even in some ways conflicted) this adds layers to the complexities/feedback-loops at play.
I came to post-structuralism via life-sciences, environmental (not conservation but JJGibson) psychology and the beginnings of philo-of-tech/STS/ANT and so embraced the sense in Derrida, Foucault and co. that things weren’t systematizable, were leaky and buggy, multi-resonanced, and always-already being re-contextualized/re-assembled and such, so these sorts of findings are right in that vein for me (if that makes sense?).
I’m always for taking into account aspects and complexities of context/environs (now how and why is tricky of course) especially when it comes to interactions and in particular human-doings like medical diagnoses (clearly highly political) but I’ve never doubted that our bodies would be structurally vulnerable to all sorts of malformations/invasions/injuries and such. so my beef is more with the confusions that come with treating our ignorant clusterings of symptoms as causes, routine-ized incarceration/surveillance and all (we need to do away with psychiatry and all talk of “mental” illnesses. My own questions and work is more around how do all of the factors at play (in whatever limited, and hopefully experimental and open to feedback/correction, ways we come to frame them) create affordances and hindrances for those involved?
Also on the nihil front (i’m more after as in after-shocks than post) my sense is that we are making it up as we go with what and who is at hand (and in our guts!).
well that’s a lot of highly compressed fragments mashed together on the fly so if any of it is of interest, unfathomably opaque, or just questionable please let me know and i’ll try to be clearer.
-dirk
dirk, that’s certainly very helpful, and along the lines I had limply attempted to sketch for myself—trying to invoke Lacan’s anti-quiescence version of the death drive and a questionable understanding of positive feedback/cybernetics (..yea yea, i’m still an undergrad) over a gut-brain discussion with a stubborn theory-h8r biology major recently had the predictable effect of leading me to momentarily abandon all my theoretical ground in favor of a compensatory rush to google clinical neuroscience papers and recoil at the prospect of a scientific homogenizing/depoliticizing-NewAge-style-reductionism, so on seeing your post i thought i’d take the opportunity to briefly bounce some vague thoughts off a clearer head with far more experience on all this. apologies for the subsequent simplistic/offhand/inane prompt, and thanks very much for the characteristically dense batch of thoughts (“highly compressed fragments mashed together” always good by me!). more generally, thanks for your/et. al.’s work on Synth0 and the surrounding web, as it’s all been a significant personal resource for a few years despite my never having done more than spectate.
-kb
glad i could be of some help kb (typing/writing isn’t my strong suit) and your questions were quite reason-able and welcome as is your reply.
For me “reductionism” isn’t a problem when it is simply showing us our errors about there being say souls, or minds, or such (replacing projected spooks with actual things) but what never sat well with me in science work was when people didn’t ever really take into account environs and relations, the effects and limits of their own interventions (we don’t simply dis-cover things in labs we make/assemble things, proto-types as I like to call them) and or they ignore the specificities of actual cases.
Lacan’s deep (and to me objectionable) hegelianism aside the nascent work into cognitive-biases, extended-minding, and neurophenomenology really undermine the fundamental freudian take on the un-conscious as processes whereby we supposedly register some-thing/event and than repress it,
turns out as with say visual perception we are always already (except in the cases of malformations or damage) sifting/shaping our interactions with the world towards our interests/ends (we are always manipulating our environs, not capable of letting things/people just be, and here I can imagine a move along the lines of Freud’s work in sublimation not as an civilizing of some repressed primitive-animalistic urge but as a kind of
intentional cultivation-crafting-hacking of the materials at hand).
have you had a chance yet to study any Science&Technology-Studies or Actor-Network-Theory (not easy to come by in the US I had to go to the UK back in the day)?
Will resist the urge to throw a list of names/links yer way without more of a sense of what you are studying and what your interests are but if you wish to share more of what you are working on these days I’d be glad to share some resources and reflections.
thanks again for joining in our efforts here, we could always use more hands and interests making the scene, all of this is a work in process and so no one has mastery, the high-ground, or the final word.
dmf, thanks again. i’m very much on board with your point on reductionism, and i suppose my own momentarily nagging response to the gut-brain thing falls into the latter issue: in my case, the entertainment of this possibility of finding an easy fix in regard to what is ultimately the basic problem of affective experience (with the imagined ad campaign arguing something like: “There’s no reason to sit around glumly thinking through the vast problems of postmodernity etc when your/everyone’s debilitating alienation can just be understood as the neurological side-effect of unhealthy Western diet! Just try diet x for a month and your thoughts will become more affectively positive, you will feel more content and satisfied, etc.)… the disruption of that sterile process via essential leaks, interventions etc is what I was looking for conceptually but struggling to find mechanically (perhaps, of course, because the relevant scientific/clinical work available seems interested in elucidating a particular process without really engaging in the messy effects of reciprocal interactions with other systems etc. i.e. if microbes can affect your cognitive neurotransmitters, how can other environmental stimuli/ancillary cognitive processing interrupt/ influence that relationship, affect, etc.)
I’m very interested in what you’ve sketched of your current work, and would really love to hear more….names/links would be greatly appreciated! I’m aware a whole host of pertinent pieces/posts/links/videos have been all over S0, but having had little engagement so far with ecology/STS-type contemporary thought I’m afraid I’ve tended to lose some of the more sophisticated lines running through the relevant resources I have looked at. In terms of my own academic work, my Comp Lit studies in the US (my philo dept is an analytic fortress) have consisted mostly of the usual continental/post-struc thinkers thus far and with a few exceptions has been a pretty orthodox/predictable introduction to theory…unfortunately it’s on me to go out and get the contemporary stuff. A name like Latour gets mentioned by a sharp prof from time to time without ever finding its way into a syllabus, as do ANT and STS, but I haven’t yet had the chance to jump into them beyond dilettantish blog-hopping (which, after all, has been a more vital source of education than the 65k/year university..) So yes, resources to dive into would be wonderful. And if you could throw out a few words regarding your take on Lacan’s Hegelianism too, I’d be very grateful, as my engagement with Hegel thus far only goes as far as Zizek. Certainly love the update of sublimation as ecological-hacking!
yes very good, given where you’re at in terms of yer educational focus I was wondering if you have read any of Stanley Fish’s work? as that might be a good way into all of this: http://engl102-stevens.wikispaces.umb.edu/file/view/fish,_how_to.pdf
dmf, my apologies, have been unable to find time to dive in to the Fish pdf, will report back with relevant questions or for further recommendations when i can if that sounds okay with you?
hey kb, thanks but no need to apologize, and no hurry (or necessity really) to any of these exchanges (or any recommendations), please feel free to make use of this blog when and if it is helpful/entertaining