Gone Fishing

The internet is kind of a bummer! All the popular social media sites like Instagram, Twitter, and Letterboxd seem to do is promulgate 'sociality' while actively denying the tools necessary for people to forge actual friendships and meaningful conversation. Neocities seems cool though.

I can relate a lot with the feeling that—somewhere along the line—you stopped being a human being. Perhaps it was a near-death experience, or the breakdown of some precarious social fabric you hadn’t realized was binding your entire world together that awakened you from that half-somnambulate stupor. Often it’s not so dramatic—you scroll Twitter looking at memes and other people’s bodies when you stop to check the time; thirty minutes have passed, “well… it didn’t feel that long”, you reassure yourself. So you keep scrolling. Rinse and repeat until two hours have elapsed. If you’re a city mouse, underground trains slice into view across electrified railways, whooshing the air into a howling quaver like the vocalizations of some prehistoric beast. You consider briefly your vulnerability as body amidst bodies, capable of being stuck and electrocuted and pulverized at any moment. Then the train cars open. … When discussing trauma in any sort of scholarly context, one is practically obliged occupationally to reference modern psychiatry’s imprimatur, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association and currently in its fifth edition. Its mission statement is to quantify various neuroses as pathology, but this is quite self-defeating at the outset. If all neuroses were actually shown to be “diseases like any other”, with clear etiology and empirical demonstrability, there would be no need for a psychopathology as distinct from pathology—they would be, well, diseases like any other. Neurosyphilis, for instance, was believed to be a mental illness before it was discovered to originate from a bacterium, with reliable prognosis and obvious causation, it immediately left psychiatry to become the onus of neurology. Ignoring this foundational faux pas, the DSM still relies heavily upon qualitative assessments to make diagnoses, which are highly subjective. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—the clinical diagnosis of trauma—is explained as originating from “an extreme traumatic stressor involving direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury.” The trouble is that are those who but conduit symptoms all the same: ancestral trauma passed down from holocaust survivors and former slaves, attack-drone operators in no physical threat themselves, and “vicarious traumatization” as experienced by trauma counselors listening to patients’ testimony. … In some of the most harrowing years of American history, when an unjustifiable war raged abroad in Vietnam and student protesters took to the streets of Washington, New York, and Chicago, R.D. Laing was advancing the heretical notion that schizophrenia was not a pathological disorder at all, but the unwitting crucible of a harrowing psychological voyage, undertaken wittingly in the form of meditation and psychedelic drugs. That madness was “a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world” and “cannot be understood without understanding despair.” I want to advance a parallel notion for the case of trauma. Not that it is non-pathological or natural or rational or even necessarily healthy, but that it is foremost the function of a particular time and place, just as schizophrenia is the function of egregious societal norms, as Laing’s book The Divided Self would suggest. There is a tendency to believe that going insane, getting hurt psychologically was the same a hundred, a thousand years ago as it is today. Under this analysis, trauma is not a determinate, timeless constant of the human psyche—a convention as stubbornly held in the North American and European teleological mind as the Judeo-Christian notion of redemptive suffering—but the action and reaction of a distinctly technogenic consciousness, of which PTSD is merely the most radical incarnation of. Any meaningful genealogy of trauma begins not with a sweeping renaissance in the humanities, Freud’s recumbent couch or the trenches of World War I where shellshock was first theorized, but in Sir John Eric Erichson’s 1866 theory of “railway spine” postulated as the cause behind painful symptoms experienced by survivors of railroad accidents with no obvious physical maladies. Poor station-to-station communication railroad accidents were a fairly common occurrence in Victorian England. Early train carriages such as the “Stanhope” were constructed of flimsy wood, required passengers to stand, and besides a roof, lacked almost any protection from the elements. However by late 1860s, “bed-carriages” where passengers could lie asleep for the duration of their commute had been commercially available for over twenty years and wooden carriages soon to be outlawed entirely. The arrival of Erichson’s disease during this time is punctual. Doubtless the psychological shock of a crash would be greatly exacerbated if you were not already anticipating the possibility beforehand. Namely, due to an environment of high-comfort underscored by high-anxiety: cushioned seating cabins with protective windows and pullman porters who catered passengers, shined shoes, and tended sleeping quarters. By Erichson’s time, railways were a nigh ubiquitously accepted mode of transportation with some 30,000 miles of track laid in the US alone. Except in total derailment of its illusionary security. Trauma, that would be re-animated in magnificent fashion when the Lumière Brothers screened their filmed arrival of a “Train at La Ciotat” to the horrified bedazzlement of audiences as they allegedly scampered to the back of the theater, in flight from the projected image of a life-sized train coming towards them. The last anecdote remains doubtful, wide appeal as one of the foundational tales of modern cinema. We are still regularly stunted by the statistical probabilities of dying in a “freak accident”, of how many hours we spend weekly staring at screens, or how time seems to fly by or screech to a halt when we are bored or having fun: evidence of our own inescapable subjectivity. The first is from Simone Weil, who shares an exemplary interpretation of the Platonic allegory of the ring of Gyges—a mythical device that turns its wearer invisible. Lifted from the finger of a giant’s corpse by an unassuming shepard discovering its magical properties utilizes it to seduce the queen and kill the monarch, crowning himself king. Weil postulates that it is not the wearer who turns invisible, but the ring itself. “The ring of Gyges that has itself become invisible—that is precisely in what consists the act of setting apart. It is setting apart oneself and the crime one commits; not establishing the connection between the two.” The relevance of psychoanalysts like Freud and Jung to our times has by and large been their insight that modern man is a profusely amnesiac, unreflective creature, but can redeem his humanity by “lifting from repression into consciousness.” But what happens when the opposite occurs? When we In all its bruntness and rebjectivation and instead taken as a statement of pure facticity. The myth of Narcissus, so we are conventionally told, is a tale about vanity. Punished by Nemesis to fall into an unrequitable love after casually breaking the heart of the nymph Echo, Narcissus is directed towards a still pond and subsequently falls in love with own reflection. Unwilling to leave, eventually dying where he laid peering illuminously into his own reflection. Mcluhan points out an error in this popular interpretation of the Greek myth: Narcissus does not fall in love with his own reflection knowing it to be himself—he believes it is another person. “The point of this myth” explains Mcluhan “is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any ma­terial other than themselves.” Had he known the figure was in-fact himself, he’d simply numerate the experience into the I find his interpretation of the story most prescient. These exemplify a sort of twofold polarity in the contemporary response to technology. Either we peer into the reflection of Narcissus, entering fatal catatonia at the sheer annihilatory power of the ambivalent technology, or we put on the ring of Gyges, enabling us to do utterly impermissible things with absolute ease and comfort. prosthesis They are both modes of depersonalization. The reality lies probably somewhere between these disparities. The sensuous immediacy of occurrence lags behind what we know “really happened” intellectually. I know I’ve been on my phone browsing Twitter for two hours, even as experiential time and clock time de-synchronize. I know this train is a mammothian serpent traveling along electrified railways carrying roughly the same voltage as a low-powered electric chair, even as I board it calmly enough to sit and read a book. The drone operator knows that the amorphous swirl of white pixels on his screen is actually a person they’re killing, even as they sit thousands of miles away on comfortable swivel chairs eating M&Ms in well-ventilated rooms. Under such dissonance, matching one’s experience with the public forum loses its spontaneity and becomes the task of a manic process of mental resubjectivation—these are our most prolific contemporary violations of ourselves—Debord and Baudrillard stand witness. Irreconcilable claims crowd the world-stage as contradictory projects force us to switch between disparate modalities at the will of the minute-hand, the speed of the moving vehicle and the touch of the smartphone. Thus far I have shied away from trauma of the personal variety. The kind of which well over half of the population is alleged to have: sexual and domestic violence. These are testy grounds —what I do take issue with is the tendentious notion that these are errant occurrences in otherwise smoothly functioning models, not models that are themselves only partial and inadequate to represent reality in all its indeterminacy and absurdity. We probably all have some things living in our head rent-free: The Rockwellian nuclear household has become synonymous with plasticity, but this has not inspired any mass , outliving even the usefulness of the family institution itself. Or the near ubiquity of what social psychologist Joseph Heinrich called “impersonal pro-sociality” across continental borders. People may well have been raping each another since the dawn of humanity, but how long have we held it that families (greatly atomized to the two or three people we spend the majority of our lives surrounded by) should be the axiomatic platonic standard? Or that we should potentially encounter millions of unique faces across our lifetime and successfully share a foundation of common strategy? Much shorter than we have been sexually assaulting one another, I suggest. The Japanese tell each other sayonara (“goodbye”, sayo–so, nara–if) literally, “So be it.” All is a mess and yet all is alright: “It is what it is” and “Whatever happens happens.” As historian John Toland explained: “Life was sayonara. Empires could rise or fall, the greatest heroes and philosophers crumble to dust, planets come and go, but Change never changed, including Change itself.” In Heidegger’s time, the question concerning technology Insistence that technology was fundamentally value-neutral means less that technology was neither good nor bad but . Technology is utility; utility is inherently fixated. Sartre suggested that “every choice reveals what we think a human being should be.” meaning, we are each of us responsible for each other when making decisions. If one chooses to work hard, we are saying everyone should work hard. If one chooses to eat healthily, we are saying everyone should eat healthily. Continuing this under the modus of technology, if one utilizes the hammer for hammering, they are actionably negating its function as a dumbbell or a paperweight, calling it absurd. If one rids a garden of “weeds”, they are actionably negating the competing with those botanically valued. If one utilizes the chicken as an egg producer, culls male chicklings, Ignoring this foundational faux pas, the DSM still relies heavily upon qualitative assessments to make diagnoses, which are highly subjective. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—the clinical diagnosis of trauma—is explained as originating from “an extreme traumatic stressor involving direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury.” The trouble is that are those who but conduit symptoms all the same: ancestral trauma passed down from holocaust survivors and former slaves, attack-drone operators in no physical threat themselves, and “vicarious traumatization” as experienced by trauma counselors listening to patients’ testimony. … In some of the most harrowing years of American history, when an unjustifiable war raged abroad in Vietnam and student protesters took to the streets of Washington, New York, and Chicago, R.D. Laing was advancing the heretical notion that schizophrenia was not a pathological disorder at all, but the unwitting crucible of a harrowing psychological voyage, undertaken wittingly in the form of meditation and psychedelic drugs. That madness was “a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world” and “cannot be understood without understanding despair.” I want to advance a parallel notion for the case of trauma. Not that it is non-pathological or natural or rational or even necessarily healthy, but that it is foremost the function of a particular time and place, just as schizophrenia is the function of egregious societal norms, as Laing’s book The Divided Self would suggest. There is a tendency to believe that going insane, getting hurt psychologically was the same a hundred, a thousand years ago as it is today. Under this analysis, trauma is not a determinate, timeless constant of the human psyche—a convention as stubbornly held in the North American and European teleological mind as the Judeo-Christian notion of redemptive suffering—but the action and reaction of a distinctly technogenic consciousness, of which PTSD is merely the most radical incarnation of. Any meaningful genealogy of trauma begins not with a sweeping renaissance in the humanities, Freud’s recumbent couch or the trenches of World War I where shellshock was first theorized, but in Sir John Eric Erichson’s 1866 theory of “railway spine” postulated as the cause behind painful symptoms experienced by survivors of railroad accidents with no obvious physical maladies. Poor station-to-station communication railroad accidents were a fairly common occurrence in Victorian England. Early train carriages such as the “Stanhope” were constructed of flimsy wood, required passengers to stand, and besides a roof, lacked almost any protection from the elements. However by late 1860s, “bed-carriages” where passengers could lie asleep for the duration of their commute had been commercially available for over twenty years and wooden carriages soon to be outlawed entirely. The arrival of Erichson’s disease during this time is punctual. Doubtless the psychological shock of a crash would be greatly exacerbated if you were not already anticipating the possibility beforehand. Namely, due to an environment of high-comfort underscored by high-anxiety: cushioned seating cabins with protective windows and pullman porters who catered passengers, shined shoes, and tended sleeping quarters. By Erichson’s time, railways were a nigh ubiquitously accepted mode of transportation with some 30,000 miles of track laid in the US alone. Except in total derailment of its illusionary security. Trauma, that would be re-animated in magnificent fashion when the Lumière Brothers screened their filmed arrival of a “Train at La Ciotat” to the horrified bedazzlement of audiences as they allegedly scampered to the back of the theater, in flight from the projected image of a life-sized train coming towards them. The last anecdote remains doubtful, wide appeal as one of the foundational tales of modern cinema. We are still regularly stunted by the statistical probabilities of dying in a “freak accident”, of how many hours we spend weekly staring at screens, or how time seems to fly by or screech to a halt when we are bored or having fun: evidence of our own inescapable subjectivity. The first is from Simone Weil, who shares an exemplary interpretation of the Platonic allegory of the ring of Gyges—a mythical device that turns its wearer invisible. Lifted from the finger of a giant’s corpse by an unassuming shepard discovering its magical properties utilizes it to seduce the queen and kill the monarch, crowning himself king. Weil postulates that it is not the wearer who turns invisible, but the ring itself. “The ring of Gyges that has itself become invisible—that is precisely in what consists the act of setting apart. It is setting apart oneself and the crime one commits; not establishing the connection between the two.” The relevance of psychoanalysts like Freud and Jung to our times has by and large been their insight that modern man is a profusely amnesiac, unreflective creature, but can redeem his humanity by “lifting from repression into consciousness.” But what happens when the opposite occurs? When we In all its bruntness and rebjectivation and instead taken as a statement of pure facticity. The myth of Narcissus, so we are conventionally told, is a tale about vanity. Punished by Nemesis to fall into an unrequitable love after casually breaking