<nettime> Take the Red Pill

[Erik Davis <figment@sirius.com>]

The latest of my "Posthuman Condition" columns for Feed

http:www/feedmag.com


TAKE THE RED PILL
BY Erik Davis




YOU PROBABLY HAVE SEEN the ads on TV (if you haven't, you can check one
out at BuSpar.com): a cartoon thirty-something female, animated with
bland, funny-pages strokes, mopes against a white background, her glasses
pushed distractedly back on her head. "I can't concentrate," she
complains. "I feel anxious." "I'm so irritable." The words materialize
around her, heavy text that she throws onto a mounting pile of other
phrases, like "out of control" and "slipping." Meanwhile, the kind and
understanding female voice-over informs us that if we have experienced
"excessive worry" or similar symptoms for six months or more, we may be
suffering from the same plaint that apparently troubles Ms. Cartoon:
generalized anxiety disorder.. 

For viewers who find these symptoms all too familiar, this diagnosis might
come as a relief. After all, once you've been diagnosed with a "disorder" 
there's a good chance that the pharmaceutical cavalry is on its way. And
indeed, according to the ad, Bristol-Myers Squibb's non-habit-forming
BuSpar may be just the ticket. Of course, we must face a raft of side
effects, which the voice-over rattles off like the credits that race by
the end of sitcoms: excitement, headache, nausea, dizziness,
lightheadedness, and nervousness. Though you might think twice about
taking a drug that replaces anxiety with nervousness, our bugged-out
cartoon Cathy is clearly willing to risk the fallout. Fortified with
BuSpar, she smiles confidently as she sweeps up the oppressive verbiage
into a little wastebasket. "Worry"  falls from the sky, and it lands
neatly in her pocket. "Relax," goes the tag line. "BuSpar can help you
handle it." 

The first time I saw this ad, with its folksy appeal to push-button neural
reprogramming, I felt as if I had momentarily slipped into a prequel to
Brave New World as remixed by Phil Dick. A banal future-present shudder
passed through me, something I have come to associate with phenomena I
describe as "21C." Most of the stuff we encounter these days remains
pretty twentieth century, but "21C" phenomena are like animae cyborgs
waltzing through your supermarket. Ten-year-olds with Gameboys in one hand
and cell phones in the other are 21C. Breaking last year's extreme weather
records (and drooling over the resulting weather porn) is 21C. Tiger Woods
-- with his multiethnic, corporate persona, his rich-man's game, and his
preternatural mastery of fame -- is 21C. Faster-than-light photons, cloned
pets, Napster, and millionaire tourists on Mir are all very 21C. And so
are mainstream cartoon TV ads for cosmetic psychopharmacology. 

THE STAGE FOR ALL THIS WAS SET LONG AGO. In the sixties, benzodiazepines
like Valium were used to treat the anxiety and depression that bathed
"normal" nuclear family life. Mother's little helpers were not considered
personality-modifiers -- even though prolonged use often turned mother
into a paranoid freak. But the mainstream acceptance of Valium and its
brethren helped lay the groundwork for Prozac, the first full-bore
anti-depressant to come out of hiding and change our minds about our
minds. Taking the world by storm, Prozac spread the idea that seemingly
normal people -- with functioning but chronically unhappy temperaments --
were actually suffering from systematic chemical imbalances that medicine
could fix. Indeed, the posthuman self is a self on drugs -- SSRIs,
hormones, brain boosters, neurotransmitters. 

On the biological level, all this is pretty good medicine. Scores and
scores of people report that Prozac works for them, and in very manageable
ways. But what does the drug itself have to say? Most psychoactive drugs
have a truth or two to relate -- indeed, we generally experience drugs in
the context of the stories they tell. When the psychiatrist Peter Kramer
listened to Prozac, what he heard was a story in which curing illness was
only the beginning. More fundamentally, Prozac initiated a process that --
amplified by postmodern social mores and the popularity of biological
determinism -- has come to reshape our experience of ourselves as selves. 
As the BuSpar ad shows, we have entered an era that sanctions the
psychoactive use of commercial chemicals, not just to cure disease or even
to relieve suffering, but to reformat who we feel we are. 

Of course, humans have always used drugs and foods to modify their
thoughts and moods. Today millions of people continue to consume nicotine,
alcohol, and caffeine as blunt equivelents of Prozac or Xanax. (It goes
without saying that the action of these drugs, whether BuSpar or coffee,
varies radically depending on the shifting chemical composition of your
brain, as well as other factors.) Nor is BuSpar itself particularly new.
The compound busipirone has been easing worried minds since the
mid-eighties, and it remains only one of a wide variety of time-honored
drugs -- including various azaspirones, benzodiazepines, beta blockers,
and MAOIs -- that are used to treat panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive
behavior, and the nebulously defined generalized anxiety disorder. Like
Prozac, busipirone has an affinity for serotonin receptors, although the
exact mechanism of the drug remains unknown. Unlike the bennies Valium or
Xanax, it's nonaddictive, and apparently not particularly fun. 

But BuSpar is not just the drug busipirone. BuSpar is a carefully marketed
product, one being sold at a time when pharmaceutical corporations are
bypassing the doctor and directly targeting the consumer with
anticholesterol drugs and heartburn medications. Having already cornered
the market on depression in the nineties, pharmacorps have clearly picked
anxiety as the next psychological complaint to go after with their heavy
(and heavily-marketed) guns. Besides ads for BuSpar, SmithKline Beecham
Pharma Canada can also be found hawking Paxil on the tube. A relatively
old-school SSRI first indicated for depression in 1992, Paxil recently
received FDA approval as the one and only treatment for Social Anxiety
Disorder (i.e., painful shyness). In May of last year, Pfizer also
received approval to market Effexor -- an SSRI-like compound that also
inhibits reuptake of norepinephrine -- for the even more vague complaint
of "generalized anxiety." 

Unlike traditional psychoactives, recreational drugs or daily salves like
cigarettes or chocolate, these new drugs are provided without any gestures
to ritual, pleasure, or meaning. Indeed, the stories that package them are
as aesthetically bare as the chilly labs that produced them. In contrast
to alternative medicines, which package their molecules in the language
and imagery of nature, these drugs are instruments -- autonomous scalpels
for the mind. 

Whatever they claim, Bristol-Myers and friends are not really addressing
individuals suffering bug-eyed panic attacks or catatonic bouts of social
fear. Those folks have probably already "seen their doctor" -- or wander
the streets outside the reach of HMOs. What interests the pharmacorps is
the huge market of more generally anxious and unhappy people out there,
biting their nails over death and taxes and social gaffes. In the wake of
Prozac and the genome hoopla, it's likely that people will become ever
more comfortable with the notion that such unpleasant (and unproductive) 
psychological states are simply bad code in the Darwinian bio-computer.
And once you're comfortably ensconced inside that materialist cosmology,
where meaning is secondary to mechanics, there is no particularly
compelling reason (other than medical fallout) not to debug the mind with
consumer molecules. 

Behind the veneer of objective medicine, psychopharmacology is simply
offering its own resolutely philosophical answer to the eternal problem of
human suffering: Use technology to control its symptoms. I don't mean
these drugs are technologies in the sense that they are mechanisms. All
molecules are mechanisms, including the neurotransmitters these drugs
tweak. (Indeed, from a certain perspective, we are always on drugs.) What
I mean is that we take some drugs the way we use so many modern
conveniences: to be productive, to increase our speed and power, to beat
out the other guy, to maximize our gain. Moreover, unlike most
recreational mind-tweakers, whose effects last for a finite trip, BuSpar
and its cohorts are designed to thoroughly pervade the psyche. They don't
give glimpses of cosmic joy or liberation or enhanced sensuality --
special experiences that the self can integrate, enjoy, or, too often,
compulsively attempt to repeat. Instead, they offer the appearance of a
subtle but unremitting transformation. Other than the daily solitary
operation of swallowing the pill, the drug and its effects melt invisibly
into the texture of your everyday. Most drugs initiate us into
relationships; these things seek the transparency that so much technology
craves. They disappear into the self they change. 

LOOK AT THE BUSPAR AD AGAIN. Instead of showing potentially anxious social
situations like giving a sales talk, Bristol-Myers Squibb more cleverly
focuses on the woman's thoughts, which are rendered as text that threatens
her from outside her body. In the old days, when monks and cenobites felt
voices and feelings penetrating their minds from beyond the circle of the
self, they called them "demons." Today the underlying framework hasn't
changed -- we just get more boring names, like "generalized anxiety
disorder." 

As the history of homosexual "perversion" shows, these labels often say as
much about society as they do about science. We all know that "normal" is
a ruse of power, but so in their own ways are "confident," "productive,"
and "socially successful." Social anxiety is not just a bummer; it's
maladaptive. 

I know this because I happen to be someone who, though perfectly happy
interviewing strangers or lecturing before crowds, fares rather poorly at
schmoozing and self-promotion. In fact, when I visited the Paxil Web site
and took the Social Phobia Inventory Self Test, I was only partly
surprised to discover that, according to their no-doubt liberal diagnostic
criteria, I "may be experiencing the symptoms of social anxiety disorder."
They suggested I make an appointment with a qualified health-care
professional and even bring a copy of the test along. This I will not do.
However, the night after I visited the site my wife and I went to a dinner
party. I was severely jet-lagged but felt comfortable -- at least until a
woman I had never met popped by. She was brash and boastful, and I was
just not up for it. I caved in, clammed up and wanted to flee. I knew the
reaction was irrational, but the feelings boiled up nonetheless, along
with a new thought: "Screw this. Give me some drugs!" 

The doctors will of course argue that only excessive forms of these
feelings constitute a disorder. But who, in the end, defines excessive? 
Leaving aside daily stories of Pakistani nukes, global warming, and
atrocities in middle Europe, intense anxiety often accompanies the quest
for meaning and often precedes moments of transformation and insight (as
in, "I really am going to die someday" or "this job really is eating my
soul.") But Bristol-Myers Squibb does not want you to confront the
Kierkegaardian depths, or to find your worry symptomatic of a worrisome
world. They want you to redefine those anxious thoughts and nervous
feelings into random neural static that's obstructing the pure signal of
Reality, American Style. 

Similar critiques have been leveled at psychoanalysis, of course,
especially by feminists sensitive to the way that therapy can adapt people
to unnecessarily lousy circumstances while squelching potentially socially
transformative feelings of anger or sadness. But there is a crucial
difference between shrinks and pills. For all its claims of science,
psychoanalysis remains an essentially literary framework: It affirms that
a mind and a life are a story, a structure of meaning, an opportunity for
fascination and depth. Freud launched some goofy ideas, but psychiatrists
who dismiss the man as a fraudulent pseudoscientist are literalists locked
in flatland. 

And flatland is where the pharmaceutical corporations live. Freed from the
ambiguities of meaning, they can view the labyrinth of the self as a
circuit board. "Accept our authority to redefine your experience as an
organic malady," they are effectively saying. "And in exchange for
mechanizing a portion of your subjectivity, we will give you a mechanistic
solution." 

THE PARADOX IS THAT THESE MECHANISTIC molecules can produce deeper, more
authentic selves. People on SSRIs often describe themselves as finally
feeling like normal people, like the person they were meant to be. This
paradox -- which lies at the heart of the posthuman condition -- is
brilliantly reflected in a pivotal scene in the movie The Matrix. Early in
the film, Morpheus gives Neo the choice of seeing the construct he has
mistaken for reality for what it is -- an oppressive simulation. "You've
felt it your whole life, felt that something is wrong with the world,"
says Morpheus. "You don't know what, but it's there like a splinter in
your mind, driving you mad." Having established the itch -- the primal
anxiety -- Morpheus then offers to scratch. He gives Neo the choice of a
red or blue pill: The red pill will show him the world outside the Matrix,
while the blue pill will allow Neo to wake up in his familiar virtual bed
and to believe "whatever you want to believe." 

Why does Morpheus offer Neo a pill? It's a strange portal: Neo's entrance
into the real world beyond the Matrix is pried open through the
manufactured mediation of a drug. With this paradox, the film draws us
into the feedback loop of consciousness and control that underlies the
posthuman self. 

The loop "begins" with accepting the deeply compelling assertion that the
most familiar patterns of my experience -- including, let's say, a
tendency to fret speaking before strangers -- are directly correlated to
states of my brain. In popular culture, this biological correlation has
become increasingly and understandably confused with causality. Once I
think of the brain as the thing in charge, I realize, perhaps with some
relief, that I am not in control after all. That is, I suffer "excessive
worry" through no moral fault or existential impasse but because of a
Darwinian dice roll or a lousy neural map laid down in infancy. The moment
that I accept this biological account, I can easily choose to swallow a
targeted neural modifier, an instrumental action that, freed from any
context of ritual or pleasure, paradoxically puts me "back in control." 

But who is this me who is in control, and what does it do with its new
experiences? If I choose to automatically curb a basic dimension of my
interior life with a targeted chemical, haven't I implicitly adopted a
highly constricted model of what constitutes "the self"? Rather than
embrace these new feelings of relief as the "real me," someone who
modifies their everyday personality with pharmaceutical products must
identify with the "I" that chooses to instrumentally control its states of
mind. 

Of course, we consciously modify ourselves all the time. Excercise,
therapy, yoga, or prayer can spur remarkable transformations of affect and
attitude. But these changes tend to be gradual, more integral, and our
experiments with them require a degree of focus and commitment. In
contrast, the official drug culture simply targets the Controller -- that
narrow, highly focused self that wants to manhandle the automatic joystick
of experience. Most advertising is aimed at the Controller, that portion
of self that wants to expand its ability to manipulate the world in order
to achieve its goals. Psychiatric drugs, though, add a crucial twist. When
Bristol-Myers says that BuSpar can "help you handle it," the "it" in
question is, in the end, nothing other than a now alienated portion of
you. 

Now, that's OK if the goal of your life is simply to feel as good as
possible for as long as possible. But happiness and freedom may ultimately
depend less on maintaining particular states of mind than on cultivating
the appropriate attitude toward whatever states of mind arise out of the
elegant chaos of life. And it seems to me that control is not the attitude
to hold in the long run. 

Here's the posthuman rub: We are expanding our control into a vast number
of realms that we previously had no choice but to submit to, stoically or
otherwise. None of us who suffer from anxiety or depression can avoid
facing the demand to design the self, even if we choose to make our way
"on the natch." Once I have the option to chemically alter the feelings
that disturb me, then my decision not to medicate, to keep slogging on
through, becomes an equally "artificial" choice: I am simply opting for
another pill. So the question is no longer whether or not to pop a pill.
The question is whether the pills we take are red or blue. And who can
answer that? "No one can be told what the matrix is," says Morpheus,
echoing the truth all drug takers know. "You have to see it for yourself." 

Erik Davis is the author of TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the
Age of Information.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Erik Davis     figment@sirius.com       +1-415-541-5016 vox
Book:  http://www.levity.com/techgnosis
Articles, essays, and whatnot:  http://www.levity.com/figment









#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net