This is part two of a response to the Doug Henwood "Butler intro".
I have two anecdotes. One is about chronic depression (or melancholia as Butler writes the term), the other is about the formation of feelings in a work site. To summarize a little about feelings; emotions are present in everyone¹s waking moment. We could have surgery that disconnected certain circuits in the thalmic regions of the limbic ring around the brain stem. Then our judgement would decline, our ability to know something called self interest would disappear, and the ability to feel would be gone for good. Self interest isn¹t individualism either, but the ability to know that a long term plan will benefit one. It might be better thought of as a sense that we know we form connections with others and what that would feel like if we failed to live up to their expectations, than as the technical literature explains "self interest".
Emotions are encapsulated. The temporary emotions such as anger fear, surprise, disgust, sadness, joy, are called "affect programs" (Paul Ekman) meaning that they emerge prior to consciousness, over-ride consciousness, are homologous across human culture, and homologous to animals especially primates. Feelings like love are global, meaning we are always in love, and love does not emerge in temporary and stereotypic expressions, and are like the "self interest" that is destroyed when certain circuits of the limbic ring are cut. They seem culturally constructed. Depression is global, always present and is encapsulated meaning that conscious thought cannot decide to not be depressed, but depression is present as a component of conscious thinking and shapes conscious thinking in noticeable ways or in technical jargon, infuses thought with a qualia.
Since Butler¹s work is about consciousness it is important to consider the work in appropriately defined "scientific" understandings. This means not that a scientific theory is sacrosanct and unquestionable. Any theory must stand up to criticism. Although, it is sometimes very hard to find a criticism appropriate to an intuitive*1 command of the failings of a theory.
Never the less scientific theory usually has considerable history behind the theory, and specific empirical research to back up the claims. Since I am not a scientist I cannot presume such a level of direct research and development. But such stuff as I find in the library and book stores is the only thing I can support what I have to say beyond the opinions I form, and the personal connections I form with others over time. The following two anecdotes are personal connections. They do not have the force of science, but they are well within the parameters of what Butler is writing about in terms of "melancholia", and subjugation.
A Work Site
I recently worked at this site. The supervisors frequently exhorted the workers to work faster, one more mistake and you are fired, fuck you, no talking, you will stay here until the error is found if it takes all night, etc. This was a non-union job. I have been in union jobs, and know full well that a union alters this sort of scenario. When there are no contractual relationship with the bosses, no way to file grievances, it drastically affects how people must cope with such stress. This anecdote describes how people understand how they cope with their feelings in these conditions.
It is production work. Product is processed under a tight schedule. There is a great deal of security, armed guards, locked and triple guarded entryways. It is manual labor. It requires extreme attention to detail. I will make the situation anonymous otherwise. No names.
I began my employment the same week as Mr. C. A former cocaine addict by his own admission. Mr. C Lost his house and car when the DEA confiscated them in a drug bust. Middle aged Mr. C. was starting the same week as me. I write these things simply to give a flavor of the job site. We formed an alliance over time. I was not an immigrant like Mr. C. Mr. C shares the same national identity with other co-workers, and they frequently spoke in the tongue of origin. I could not understand their speech at all. Mr. C often spoke despairingly of his own nationality and those people of his language origin. I don¹t know why he felt he needed to do this to me. I would say something like "Well I don¹t experience it that way, I don¹t agree". So he knew I wasn¹t expecting his self deprecation or disparaging his fellows of nationality. Alliances are important though, and he was trying to do something with such ploys to gain my trust in him. He would often share his meals with me. Really doing a lot of nice things for me.
We were new employees. Older employees had nearly twenty years at the job.
Early on Mr. C began to complain about "crazy" Ms P. This senior employee was "uncooperative". Then Mr. R warned me about Ms P. Then Ms V warned me, and Ms B warned me. It turns out their concern was that Ms P liked to control her own work. This often offended others because Ms P would redo something someone else did. If one offered Ms. P a hand she would rather do it herself. Her behavior was static and unchanging with regards to cooperation. If you did exactly as she told you, then you were acceptable to her, but to show the slightest initiative of your own would cause her to become angry with you, and to treat you with a great deal of retaliatory paybacks.
My point is that cooperation means a lot on the job to these various people. The supervisors can¹t and won¹t change the situation concerning Ms P. Ms P is the antagonist to all the other workers. They call her "crazy".
This is an anti-disabled slur, and in itself the charge of "craziness" is both anti-emotions in a Western sense, and completely lacking any sort of material or scientific grounding. Yet the lack of cooperation and the intense feelings of anger have a sense about them of what we mean by the problems of dealing with emotions in human relationships and in work. It is in fact very much like the example of the gururumba "wild pig" disclaimed behavior. In a work situation where workers are subjugated with no alternative to the rules of the work site they must cope somehow. Those rules being imposed for reasons of profit there is an attempt to identify in how people feel about work, such as for example Ms P wants control over her work very badly, to identify such emotions as the crucial matter of the work site (and ignoring the social constructin that capitalism imposes). In other words, the disability of "crazyiness" becomes the brunt of the scapegoating that benefits employers in setting one group of workers against the next. I would make the point here that feelings are encapsulated. The thing that we can change at will is the content of the thoughts. The feelings are outside change as "affect programs".
No doubt Ms P is probably a rigid person. Her eighteen years at the job with most of those years being the outsider would produce a role in the group everyone would be familiar with, and expect. To change that, well the behavior doesn¹t change because the supervisor comes and screams "fuck you".
Or orders Ms P to cooperate. I saw both instances. Ms P endures. She is the focal point of oppression, yet the creation of a state of anger concerning her uncooperation are not really very important to the employer, because the work gets done. As long as the work goes out the door the next day the same old emotional climate prevails. Year in year out.
Depression
A woman I know works with disabled people. This woman is well versed in depression. She has chronic depression. Drugs seem to help this woman with her chronic depression. This woman peer counsels other disabled persons. She gives the other person/client aid in coping with everyday living. That is her job.
A woman in her sixties came to this peer counselor. The sixty year old has acute chronic depression. The client is a homeless woman, having been kicked out by her daughter onto the streets. Over the course of time the peer counselor was forced to call the police by the depressed persons words and deeds, and the depressed person was arrested and placed in jail against her will for a short period of time. Over time (approaching a year) the counselor tried every trick in her book to help the depressed person. Nothing worked, and the homeless woman disappeared one day in a state of hopelessness. A few months later this homeless person showed up again, drastically changed in mood. She was no longer depressed. She had shock treatments.
I asked a friend about this dramatic turnaround. This friend was locked up for two years against her will in a mental hospital for reasons of her own depression. This friend said that typically in those days in the sixties that people would show up on her ward feeling sunny and happy. Other experienced members of the ward would ask "shock therapy"? The happy person would say "yes". My friend observed in those days shock therapy lasted six months and then the depression returned. So it is reasonable to guess that with only shock therapy the homeless person would soon return to her previous state of mind. Perhaps now with the current line of drugs the depression can be held at bay indefinitely. But in any case emotions are highly resistant to change suggested by another¹s words. Depression or any other globally described mood remains mainly outside material control by human beings. At this time.
There is a point to this story, shock therapy works for unknown reasons. We don¹t know the damage done. It was patently outlawed by the sixties social rights movements, and has since been slowly returning as "acceptable" therapy though the medical establishment makes noises about going over to magnetic "non-invasive" therapy. Textbooks still describe the "Limbic theory of Emotions". This has been falsified in the nineties, yet information only slowly changes in our society about what is substantially known to be true by a few obscure experts. What we know about how emotions work are still very much in a state of profound ignorance. We know the mind is modular according to a definition created by Jerry Fodor at MIT, but we don¹t know how emotions are specifically tied to specific modules of the brain, nor the propeties of those modules in the sense we know color vision is about three color receptors in the retina. The best we know is that if certain circuits are cut in surgery that emotions stop happening in certain peoples minds. We know a great deal about vision and the modules of the brain especially the occipital lobe that specifically control modules of vision. We can say from the relatively simple perceptual areas of the brain that there is not much doubt the rest of the brain will work in principle generally the same as the perceptual areas of the brain.
We therefore find ourselves in the position where experts will advocate shock therapy in large hospitals where outside social opinion carries little weight. Where people such as P above seem to feel much better, but we don¹t know the damage to P¹s brain, and these things are defined by experts not the people involved. I see when I talk to people with a disability called depression that their life experience tells them a great deal more than the theories of experts do. In the case of P her pain from depression was remarkable. She was constantly threatening suicide, and making real attempts to kill herself. If a person chooses to do shock therapy I can¹t say they were wrong, because I don¹t have the evidence to go against that. But I do get better information by talking to a friend who has been hospitalized, and knows how the system works. I want to make this point, no matter what the theory says about how the mind works, these are contingent guesses which needs to be matched to the real world, and the people who live that life. Especially concerning disabilities, it is easy and convenient given the scape-goating that our social system places upon disabilities in human beings to negate and ignore and oppress people for their disabilities, and that those people properly ought to fight the fight.
Therefore with regard to experts theories whether that theory is employing "melancholia" concerning subjugation or whatever the theories must be tested and criticized against the experiences of oppression itself.
I will quote Charles Brown to this effect here:
Angela,
The Marxist answer to your question as to how to know the thing is that we know the truth of a thing through practice, through practical-critical or revolutionary activity. So,in this case the answer to your question is which knowing of the thing helps us to change it, to abolish it, turn it into its opposite. The Marxist epistemological test is practice.
Charles
*1 I use intuitive in this case as a standard reference to a property of neural networks such that for instance we could grasp that someone is lying to us "minus a logical chain of explanations". This is a property of neural network functions. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/19990118/cf401e54/attachment.htm>