Bogeys - or bodily betrayal
Thursday, 31 July, 2008 - 21:13
Featherstone and Hepworth note how a loss of bodily control can be associated with a loss of social acceptibility - they describe this as 'bodily betrayal'. On ageing, they say:
"Degrees of loss impair the capacity to be counted as a competent adult. Indeed the failure of bodily controls can point to a more general loss of self image; to be ascribed the status of a competent adult person depends upon the capacity to control urine and faeces."I wonder if their analysis extends to what Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) doctors tend to call 'muck'? Last year as my sinusitis entered its, oh, 3rd or 4th month, my doctor asked if my mucus was discoloured. I said I wasn't sure. Is a green bogey normal or discoloured? Here's something worth meditating on: your snot.
[Featherstone & Hepworth, 'The mask of ageing and the postmodern lifecourse' in Featherstone, Hepworth & Turner, 1991. The Body: social processes and cultural theory, London: Sage, cited in Nettleton & Watson (eds.), 1998. 'An Introduction' in The Body in Everyday Life, London: Routledge, p1-20 (and by the way, isn't that gobful a nice exemplar of the constructedness of knowledge?)]
Do you notice when your snot is clear? Before my doctor asked this question, I had never considered that snot was any colour than green. I mean, snot is normally green isn't it? Aren't bogeys green? Actually, snot is only green when you have some kind of infection (it is a sign of bacterial colonies growing in your nose. Nice). But the rest of the time (like if you have hay fever) your snot is clear. And because it is clear, you don't notice. And by 'you don't notice it' I mean 'I don't notice it'. The clear stuff that came out of my nose when I had a bit of hay fever or early stages of a cold, wasn't 'snot', or mucus. It was invisible, irrelevant. How had I managed to think of snot as only green? What did I think the clear stuff was? I don't even remember. I wasn't even in control of my body to start with.
So when my doctor asked if my 'mucus' was 'discoloured', I thought, 'What - other than green? You mean, terracotta? Puce? Fuscia? Magnolia? Purple? Shit-brown? Or just normal, everyday green?"
I think I'm going to lump this with the rest of my parents' failings, alongside neglecting to tell me about smegma and ejaculation. I don't need to tell you how freaked I was in the bath THAT day.
Narrative-based anti-medicine
I had almost forgotten about it. Friends had more or less stopped asking after my sinus pain. My daily medication had reached efficacy to the point of barely noticeable routine. The symptoms were ongoing but receding into forgettable habit. I had few expectations from my appointment with the sinus consultant today, but in the back of my mind I hoped that he would move decisively and more treatment - maybe an operation? - would arrive in the foreseeable future such that I could finally move on with my life. My hopes were not high - my hopes were modest and manageable.
Everything went out of whack as soon as I entered the consultant's office. There, in the room, was not the doctor I had seen before, and was expecting to see now, but someone I had never met before. Almost immediately I involuntarily hit a wall of stupor when she asked me why I had come all the way to Andover - such a long way from where I lived - for my appointment. I stared at the wall, utterly unable to answer: "it's not my choice," I said. She looked over my notes. "Well, Dr N- is one of the country's leading sinus doctor, so your specialist has refered you to him," she said. I know this. She knows this. Why are you asking me? The nurse came in and shortly asked the same question. The doctor repeats the Dr-N-leading-country-sinus mantra. I have come all this way, and it is a waste of my time. I know this too.
She says she will examine me with a rigid scope. The nurse enters the next room, but it transpires the doctor intends to examine me here now, not next door. "I thought you were going to make him walk!" the nurse says. Just then, the doctor inserts a spray tube into my nose and I get a hit of cocaine-like dullness. The liquid drips out of my nose and onto my T-shirt. She notices and asks the nurse to pass me a tissue. The anaesthetic liquid has already dripped onto my T-shirt, and she is wielding the scope. It is a metal rod, cut at an angle at the end, with a light shining from it. She inserts it into one of my nostrils, and I excruciate for a few seconds as she twists it through my sinus. I can barely breathe - I am dying for her to remove this intrusion into my head. My eye muscles crush around it as I sense it nearing my interior being; my eye is closed, but the light illuminates my head and my eye sees a redness from within itself. She swaps to the other nostril.
"Aaargh!!!", I recoil as the scope scrapes the tender insides of my nose and my head jerks back. She is displeased - the over-sensitive insides of my inflamed sinuses are a fault, and I feel bad for feeling the pain. She complains that when I scrunch up my nose and eyes, she can't move the scope. I am a defect patient, whose pain will not allow her to examine me. I don't even know her name. She finishes as I wipe my tears onto a gauze tissue already damp with anaesthetic spray and snot. I really don't even know who this woman is. "You mustn't eat or drink for two hours". Of course she can't have known that I skipped lunch in order to get here on time, because she has not even asked me for my permission to enter my head with a shining metal rod in the very places where I have intense pain.
In the closing exchanges of the appointment, between the doctor and the nurse and me, I gather myself and command my polite composed voice to ask about timescales and locations. She says I must see Dr N - of course, I thought I had come today to see Dr N. I don't care where the appointment is, as long as it is soon... "Dr N has some annual leave coming up, so it may be a few weeks." Why am I even here? "Okay," I say. I leave the room, walk into the sunshine, go back to the car, and am not quite overwhelmed by the urge to cry. Instead I drive for an hour-and-a-half feeling frustrated, and somehow manage to get home without crashing, while the cocaine numbness thaws in my throat.
Worst of all, of course, I constantly tell myself that there are people worse off than myself, and that I shouldn't complain, because doctors and nurses deal with very sick people who are very ill and dying and I'm lucky that all I have is constant but manageable pain in the front of my head where my being is. Anything short of life-threatening peril is, in the over-stretched world of public health care, irrelevant.
So, in short, today's brief experience of care in the NHS left me feeling angry, bitter, and frustrated, but also guilty for my self-indulgence in thinking I might expect anything more.
The Transitive Author
I've had (this isn't meant to sound as confessional as it does) Roland Barthes on my mind recently. Earlier in the year a student quoted some of him at me in an essay, and I'm afraid I don't think they really grappled with the sense of the text (note I'm not saying they 'interpreted it incorrectly'!) - it was more of a quote-shoe-in to tick the theory box. But the quote - a line I've often glanced over and left behind as I engage in the tmesis of excavating a Barthes text - has kept coming back to me in the form of the question I wrote on the student's paper - 'What do you think Barthes is getting at here?'
Barthes opens The Death of the Author with some introductory questions which help to frame his exercise - he wonders, when a writer writes, whose is the voice? A question that arises because, according to B., writing is 'the destruction of every voice [... writing ...] is the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the identity of the very body writing'. Fine. I love this, and the rest of the essay explores this counterintuitive insight so interestingly that it has made its way into every cultural studies curriculum that ever made a student's life misery. But I find myself returning to the start of the second paragraph - which our friend the student earlier quoted:
No doubt it has always been that way. As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.
[The Death of the Author]
Leaving aside the discussion of the historicity of the 'idea of the author', and the Foucault debate, and all that, I'm persistently drawn to, and dwell on, that word: intransitively.
To narrate a fact intransitively is to narrate a fact no longer with a view to acting directly on reality.
To narrate a fact transitively is to narrate a fact with a view to acting directly on reality.
To speak transitively is to intend to act on reality.
Write with purpose, with an object.
A subject acting on an object.
To narrate a fact intransitively is to speak no longer with a view to acting directly on reality.
To speak intransitively is to speak without purpose, without object.
[Joe's head, a lot, recently]
Of course, I can understand that B. at this point heads off into his own particular intentional use of 'intransitively' - that is that 'the claim to decipher a text is ... quite futile'. Indeed, the entire business of dwelling on 'what Barthes is getting at' has a bottomless irony which peered into too long gets quite vertiginous. But I am a human being - indeed, I am an impure thinker - and when addressed by a speaker, even if it is across the sea of the 'starred text', the chasm of decades and the incommensurability of two different native tongues, I first reply: 'what do you mean?'
So the word 'intransitively' follows me around. The author speaks without intention in the way that the dead speak to the living - either through the reconstruction of the memories of the living, or in the cynical charlatanism of the medium/critic. But I read transitivity differently (as, I think Barthes would agree, is my right). To speak transitively is to intend to act on reality. To speak transitively is to not only want to change the world, but to attempt to do so. I saw a quote by Hunter S Thompson on, of all places, a Facebook profile, which captured that intention:
Although I don't feel that it is at all necessary to tell you how I feel about the principle of individuality, I know that I am going to have to spend the rest of my life expressing it one way or another, and I think that I'll accomplish more by expressing it on the keys of a typewriter than by letting it express itself in the sudden outbursts of frustrated violence.
[Apparently this comes from The Proud Highway]
But even when writing is not a valve for pent-up rage, who pretends to speak without the intention of changing the world? A dissertation I marked recently also indirectly stabbed at this idea: do documentaries effect social change? Of course it is an impossible question to answer, but it provokes the thought that the documentary form covers a spectrum of approaches - and the approach that pretends to 'reflect' reality, and offer an 'intransitive' factual window onto reality is only the most dishonest form.
A colleague of mine recently gave a seminar on his work. Trevor Hearing explores the documentary film form as a way of engaging in scholarly work - to use film-making both as a research tool, and as a way of communicating academic knowledge. It forces recognition of a dialectic between film and text - the practice of visual 'story-telling' versus the abstract, supposedly 'factual', textual form, and this reveals the hidden values of each. The very things that Trevor's films are made of are human actions and interactions and their interface with the documents, visual, textual, and filmic, that human beings by their very productive nature leave behind them.
But again, what Trevor's stimulating and fascinating work illuminates is the dishonesty of that peculiarly academic practice of writing papers in which the author 'disappears'. The stock comment to write on student essays is often 'try to write less subjectively - be more objective...' - or - 'try not to write in the first person...' what other perspective do we actually expect people to write from? Where is this mythical third person position whence the academic writes? In fact, the academic paper is a worked and reworked artefact, painstakingly laboured over by a human being, in a chair, with a tilting head, and a breathing, aching body. That disappearing 'I' is a fiction. If Trevor's film had so many edits as that supposedly free-standing, evidence-based, objective - intransitive - academic paper, the cuts would leap out of the screen and reek of manipulation. The emphasis on, not the disappearance of, the author is what makes Trevor's film so much more meaningful.
One of the strange ironies of knowledge is that the practices and the discourses are so often at odds with each other. Science stakes a claim to be a 'descriptive' practice - that is, its methods produce descriptions of the world - reflections if you will. This is at the heart of the scientific claim on truth - that language can be bent into a form that faithfully describes and corresponds to brute reality - that language can be made intransitive but faithful. Actually, the real products of sciences are the world-changing technologies that every minute break the human connection to the past. And these extensions of man are made precisely because that linguistic practice is so very transitive, so very laden with rhetorical, persuasive action, discursive power, intention. With our knowledge, constructed as it is from experience and language, we act irreversibly.
I seem to have used Barthes' Death of the Author to argue in favour of the reappearance of the author. Blimey. But then, he is dead.
MARP Radio & Interactivity 2008 - Part 2
Second session from 20th May 2008 (apologies for the delay!)
Here's some links:
- Quicktime Interactivity
- ACB Radio
- Some coverage of BBC's Annotatable Audio project: at journalism.co.uk; and at Tom Coates at Plasticbag
- Go Elf Yourself
- NPR Story of the Day
- Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything
- SatCom (at The Guardian)
- BOB (BU campus only)
- Twistori
- Twittervision
- Last.FM (me!)
- del.icio.us (me!)
- del.icio.us popular mp3
- Radio Clash
- casetteboy
Tuesday 27th will be the last of our formally scheduled sessions, so I suggest that you come with ideas for projects you might like to throw around - however small or monumental they might be - anything from learning how to use a RSS feed, through to hacking SatNavs. I don't promise to know how to do all of these things :-) If you can't make the session, feel free to post your suggestions here.
Also, let me know what you'd like to do with the rest of the time we have - six hours in all. Either let me know in the session on Tuesday, or again, add a comment below, or email me.
Direct Download for MARP Radio and Interactivity Seminar podcast part 2
MARP Radio & Interactivity 2008 - Part 1
Thursday, 15 May, 2008 - 11:12
Here's a recording of the first session on Radio and Interactivity from the MA Radio Production at Bournemouth Media School, and some links to things we talked about:
Some key points for those who couldn't attend:
- We'll meet on Tuesdays, and save the time from the Thursday sessions for later
- Next Tuesday, we'll discuss examples of interactive radio / audio that you've found that you enjoy. It would be great if you could post links in the comments below before the session!
- Part of the purpose of the next two sessions is to thrash out ideas about what you'd like to do with interactivity - something for your showreel? a collaborative project? individual work? tutorials or workshops? etc.
Direct Download for MARP Radio and Interactivity Seminar podcast part 1
Journal fiction
Wednesday, 07 May, 2008 - 20:26
She says he found the journal by google. "I want to fucking kill myself" plus "I'm feeling lucky". He went to the root, and found the phone number. Called the phone number - this sort of thing doesn't happen every day, she notes drily.
The last thing she says - she may go to Paris. 6 months ago. So I call the number, because I think she's dead. We'll talk about the hole you fill with junk food and TV, and the way you cover the mirrors. We will, sooner or later, stand together under the shelter, in the rain, and watch the stray drops collect over the iron ornamentation and whorl into a bare stream of hopelessness at our feet.
The phone rings onto voicemail, and the crackle of transatlantic distance deters me. Layering complications onto someone's unsuspecting answer-phone. I try again, some hours later. Her voice is there, faint, surprised (even though this has happened before) - I googled, found the journal, went to the root, and called the number. I wanted to triangulate, as though if I knew she was there, and that he - the first one - was also somewhere, then we'd be three points, marking summits, we could take sightings, and locate ourselves. In the absence of a mirror, I needed to see myself reflected by other means, in the words of someone on the end of a google search. I'm pleased she's alive.
She thanks me. We make valedictions. But we have always made valedictions.
Epiphany
Today is my father's birthday. He would have been 57. I miss, amongst a myriad other things, his way of pricking overblown seriousness with scurrilous absurdities. And buried in his poems I find this moment of pathos, which made me chuckle in light of my recent grappling with philosophical horse-bollocks:
I found out!
For one moment I knew.
Then it passed from me
In a drunken stupor
In the Market Place Gents
Andrew Herbert Flintham (1951 - 2001)
Broken university
Thursday, 01 May, 2008 - 17:49
I have a lot of other stuff to write about, and I will get around to it. In the meantime, I just want to note an observation which occurred to me recently. A moment of realisation.
I've been delving into writing code for collective intelligence, and as I worked through some of the intellectual ideas behind the various algorithms and principles, it occurred to me that universities are exactly the sorts of place where collective intelligence does not emerge.
Despite the fact that universities form a hub and focus for people who value intelligence, and sometimes, even creative thinking, actually the entire tertiary education system is set up to discourage collectivity, and incentivise secrecy and competition.
Universities do not exist for the benefit of learners, they exist for the benefit of researchers. Reward systems recognise research and publication, exercises which demand 'originality' and 'novelty' - which discourage people from sharing their ideas - and scarcely notice pedagogy. Researchers talk more about whose ideas are whose rather than what those ideas are.
The minor army of people who are there because they want to help people to learn are invisible, unrecognised, overlooked, ignored, tolerated. How have we managed to have such broken universities?
Placebo prozac
Sunday, 09 March, 2008 - 17:29
SSRIs are no better than placebo at treating depression in the majority of cases. It's been a couple of weeks since this story broke, but it was infinitely fascinating, and for a while I was amazed that no-one seemed to be examining the weird reflexive problem that breaking the story itself seemed to present. Placebo (in my limited understanding) works because patients believe they are being treated - and presumably the improvement in the psychological state of the patient has physiological benefits. But then if the national media tells everyone that even though the pills they take are actual 'medicines' as defined by NICE and the pharma-industry (rather than sugar-pills), actually the benefit they're getting is really only a placebo, doesn't that mean that you remove the efficacy of even the placebo (because now everyone knows their benefits are 'only' psychological)?
As the author of the report, (and by the way, isn't the PLOS open access peer-review journal an awesome thing), Irving Kirsch, stated on the Channel 4 News coverage:
one of the core characteristics of depression is a sense of hopelessness, and anything that combats that, and instils a sense of hope is going to help people feel better.
Doesn't the coverage of this report tell those patients that their hope is illusory? I know that about 10 years ago I enquired about a stop-smoking trial. The researcher taking applications said that the trial would use a placebo, and that half of the participants would be given a glucose sweet, while the other half would be given a 'placebo'. I mentioned that I had heard that glucose sweets helped to combat the physical symptoms of nicotine withdrawal because they mitigated the drop in blood sugar levels, and had tried it before (with obviously limited success). At this point, of course, the researcher said I couldn't take part because, since I had used glucose sweets before, I would be able to tell whether I was being given the sweets or the placebo, rendering my participation in the trial meaningless.
In fact, this is precisely the point of double-blind trials which use placebos: the researchers don't know who is getting the medicine and who the placebo; and equally, the patients don't know either. Ethically-speaking, they have to know there is a chance, because I think the procedural codes of these trials require that participants are told that some of them will receive placebo.
Of course, all of this acknowledges the fact that a patient's psychological state, their expectation, hope and optimism, has an important and measurable effect on the likelihood that their prognosis improves.
So it was interesting to see Ben Goldacre look at the topic in his unfailingly interesting column Bad Science:
Do drugs stop working if you know they are little better than a sugar pill? And do cultural factors, like our collective faith in a treatment, have a measurable effect on the benefits? On this, there has been a only tiny amount of highly tenuous research.
And in the little research that has been done on the subject, while some reports might imply that declining 'belief' in a medicine reduces its efficacy, there is also evidence that even when patients are told explicitly that they are being given a placebo, nevertheless, the treatment has a beneficial effect.
This, I suppose, gets the media off the hook for telling millions of people that their medicine is no better than sugar pills, and perhaps we'll see more in the coming years as to whether the use and efficacy of these SSRIs change. And of course, exposing the the cravenness of the pharma-industry can never be a bad thing. But it does still leave the question, what exactly is it about the change in expectation that using a placebo encourages, that works therapeutically, even when people know it is just a placebo? And, indeed, why can't I just heal my head, by believing it will be healed?
Bollocks might be true, but it is still bollocks
Thursday, 06 March, 2008 - 17:33
I've had something of a realisation over the last few weeks. I managed to relieve some of the pressure in my work that had built up due to absence and illness, which gave me the chance to step back and think about things.
I used to write posts on this blog about how the elitism and jargon that is associated with academic work and cultural and media studies just mystifies the subjects, works as a barrier to newbies, and generally disappears up its own postmodern arse.
Then I registered for a PhD.
So, looking back on the post I wrote 3 weeks ago about Habermas and Gadamer makes me realise that I've been rimming the sphincter of elitism as much as anyone I've ever criticised. I consider this a direct consequence of registering for a PhD: before, intellectual work was all about pleasure and discovery, and doing it for its own sake; after, it's been about validity and legitmacy, what is true and how we know it is true. Of course those things matter, but fuck me, it doesn't matter if something is true if it is also bollocks. I need to remember this: bollocks might be true, but it is still bollocks.
So I'll try and rewrite the truth and method thing some time so that it makes sense to a human. In the meantime, I also need to figure out how to do a PhD without it decaying into a level of tedium that will make all living things wither. Otherwise, it's just bollocks, isn't it?
