New Post at the avant guardian

In this week's installment of popOp we drop that delicious album from Spiritualized and just before we nod out we consider the crucial role that "drugs" has had in structuring the Western imagination since the Ancient Greeks.

Go ahead, take a little read - it won't kill you and you won't get hooked. Promise.

Desubjectification

My friend, Ryland, asked me a great question tonight:
"Every time you talk about desubjectification in yr popOp, I don't understand what you mean. What do you mean by desubjectification?"

In reponse:

I think a great place to look would be in Foucault as this is where Agamben (from whom I learned the term) gets it. He gives a fairly good account of it in an interview in 1978 with Le Bitoux (Mec, 1988, trans. Savran, 1992). The idea seems fairly similar to D&G's discussion of the BwO - a zone of intensity, no longer a representation of an ontic being. 

Foucault states, in that interview:

[in the bath houses] you meet men who are like you, who are like what you are for them....You cease to be imprisoned in your own face, in your own past, in your own identity."
So desubjectification can be an affirmation of non-identity. A means by which to become a multiplicity, a communal being.

Immediately I don't feel much of a resonance with the idea of an emancipatory strategy in this sort of situation, it seems a bit too much plaisir and less jouissance. But then I read this article "Overcoming Masturbation" by Light Planet, a mormon proselytizing organ. Now I see why desubjectification as a strategy would be of use to someone.

I'm fairly surprised that 1) these people think there is something wrong with masturbation 2) the problem will be "cured" by not "admiring oneself" nor touching one's body, and 3) one strategy for overcoming the problem of enjoying oneself a-sexually is to eat a snack "even if you're not hungry" and finally 4) don't even pray about it.

Seriously? You believe that prayer, the direct means of access to the Lord of all Creation (including masturbation, mind you!) is actually a bad thing when you're trying to overcome what God created us to do?

I'm with you, Foucault:

It is regrettable that such sites of erotic experience do not exist for heterosexuals. Wouldn't it be a marvelous state of affairs for them to be able to, at any hour of the day or night, enter into a place furnished with all the comforts and with all the possibilities they could imagine...?

I am writing this week's popOp about addictions (even masturbation, I guess) and the centrality of this concept to the very notion of how we think of the universe. I'm referencing, of course, Plato's Phaedrus and the discussion of pharmakon-pharmakeia-pharmakeus-(pharmakos); thanks, Derrida!

Addiction as Cultural Pathology?

I use an addiction model to understand the nature of human relationships, I employ a comparative philosophical perspective to investigate this addiction model. Philosophy, at its best, is the tool for reconceptualizing how we understand the world. In my research, funded by NIDA and as a researcher for Kennesaw State University, I noticed that the addiction science literature tends to operate with a particular model of how humans can define themselves and so how they interact. This assumption tends to guide the research and experiments toward a certain range of responses and perhaps outcomes.

Culture is a recursive patterning of human behavior in relating to the world. Like a fractal, if we can get a sense of the overall pattern, we can begin to understand how the system works at a micro and macro level. Addiction, it seems to me, is above all a pathological recursive patterning of one's behavior. But addiction does not happen only in an individual, contrary to our primary methods for treating and “dealing with” addictions (prison, a strict pharmacological intervention). Because human beings are defined by this recursive patterning of behavior that we call culture, if we are to properly understand this phenomenon called addiction, we must examine the interactions between the person addicted (or with the problematic use of a substance) and their environments. The guiding question became for me, what insights might a focus on the relational dynamics of selfhood provide to understanding how methamphetamine practices are negotiated throughout the drug-use career?

There are two predominant strategies for the treatment of addiction – pharmacological interventions and psycho-social interventions and most commonly employed is the incorporation of both dimensions when treating those afflicted. Following Volkow and Li (2004), the term addiction is employed so as to distinguish between chemical dependence (defined by the DSM-IV) and the broader phenomenon encountered while documenting the respondents' meth-using practices which can be characterized as repeated drug use resulting in an intense desire for methamphetamine and an impaired ability to control their urges to use methamphetamine. My aim is not to conflate chemical dependence with addiction, nor do I use the term without an acute awareness of the historical and philosophical problems associated with it (Berringer, 1979; Buhler, 2005; Davies, 1998; Hammersly, 2002; May, 2001). The pharmacological interventions developed to date (methadone for opiates, disulfiram for alcohol, the TA-CD vaccine for cocaine and perhaps methamphetamine), as the developers themselves are quick to point out, are not preventative and cannot act as stand-alone treatments: the effectiveness of these interventions are attenuated if the patient simply begins taking larger doses of the drugs. Thus, the central problematic in addiction science right now is managing relapse, a phenomenon that seems to be intimately related to drug use initiation and reiteration. It is here argued that these are primarily social processes and as such require a properly social intervention.

The success of therapeutic group dynamics as found in Alcoholics Anonymous-style twelve step programs seem to be based on the insight that an individual who changes not only their individual behaviors but also their social context is more likely to abstain from problematic use of drugs. This process of recovering in groups such as AA is possible through the many interpersonal interactions of the members themselves (Kitchin, 2002). Adams (2008) has argued that addiction is the gradual foregrounding of the person's relationship to the substance of abuse and so he calls for an increase in the intimacy among individuals' relationships as a means to both attenuate the individual's susceptibility to addictions as well as a means to overcoming addictions. Where Adams' model assumes externalized relationality, I am suggesting the primacy of internalized relationality in identity formation, as Hughes, Valentine, & Kenten (2009) have stated, our identities are, “inevitably socially and historically, constituted...always embodied, material; and so subject to embodied social and material constraints.” (10)

Culture is a recursive patterning of interactions. How we understand ourselves is subject to a long process of identity creation and negotiation within a social milieu. The identity migration model (Hughes, 2007; Hughes, Valentine, & Kenten, 2009) is a three-step process that assumes that people are fundamentally developed and come to define themselves in their relationships to their environments and their social worlds. Central to understanding both how one creates an idea of oneself (identity creation) as well as understanding how one changes one's identity over time (identity migration) is recognizing the performative nature of social life. We seek to produce an identity within what our social contexts allow and, given this pallet from which to choose, we then evoke this sense of self as frequently as is possible. With frequent evocations of this constructed self we are able to say that we are “being true to ourselves.” Because repetition is central to how we understand “who we are” at the fundamental level, we can to discuss problematic usage of substances of abuse without already having to concede to the language of volition or chemical overdetermination. In this way the identity migration model presents an understanding of addictions that eschews the classical dilemmas that have been well-documented in the literature (Bailey, 2005; Berringer, 1979; Davies, 1998; Graham, 2008; Hammersley, 2002) enabling us to generate novel understandings of the initiation into problematic behaviors as well as routes to cessation by illuminating the fundamentally relational nature of problematic behavior. The identity migration model also bolsters a renewed vision of risk in the addiction literature, as Pilkington (2007) has demonstrated what is at risk in drug-use is not necessarily the assumed legal or health implications, but must be expanded to include the traumatic loss of one's identity-affirming position within a group.

There is neurophysiological evidence (Volkow and Li, 2004) to suggest that the brain itself, without the learned cues from external phenomena will function differently as it unlearns the methamphetamine habit. While Hughes (2007) prefers to eschew, “a positivistic preoccupation with causality,” as well as avoiding a, “clinical search for the 'mechanism' of addiction,” (674) I would suggest that employing this apprenticeship language succeeds in her goal of reorienting addiction as an object of social theory and also jibes well with what the neuroscience of learning seems to be indicating (Schultz, 1998, 2000; Tripp and Wickens, 2008). Addictive behavior seems to be the result of a hijacking of the brain's inherent reward system corrupting how the brain naturally processes salience (Robinson and Berridge, 2000; Everitt and Robbins, 2005). The identity migration model, understood in the manner I've described suggests that the reward of methamphetamine is not only found in the surge of dopamine that accompanies the metabolism of methamphetamine, but this model also fits within the model of learning as a process of the dopaminergic system. These modes of understanding addictions are extremely powerful in identifying pharmacological interventions that will facilitate the social interventions that are necessary to reinforce methamphetamine cessation.

My data demonstrates the identity migration model is a process with three distinct moments: 1) an apprenticeship to methamphetamine use in a meth-practicing community, 2) an archaeological “bottoming-out” that the performative utterance announces so that gains entry into a community of recovery and thus 3) one may perform recovery at given opportunities. Key to understanding this process is the fundamentally social nature of methamphetamine use. With this analytic we are provided a lens for reconciling both pharmacological and psycho-social addiction interventions. With future studies employing the analytic here described and with other substances of abuse it is hoped that the community will be able to shift our understanding of addiction from an individual's pathology to an understanding of the primacy of social relations in how we understand ourselves.

Heidegger's Profound Boredom and Addiction

Today I presented the following paper calling for a reconceptualization of addiction in light of Martin Heidegger's theory of moods. The paper was presented at the Southern Sociological Society's Annual Meeting and I prefaced the remarks with two things:
1) Heidegger is very explicit in his 1929-30 lecture (later published as Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics) that he is not at all interested in kulturphilosophie (or sociology or anthropology) - nonetheless I think that we all can benefit from reconsidering modern living in light of what Heidegger has discussed -
2) specifically, I'm thinking that it's no accident that the concepts of addiction, modernity, and the study of modern society (sociology) all occurred within the same fifty year period.

Here are the slides to what I presented:

Heidegger's Profound Boredom and Addiction

Relationality and Methamphetamine

Today I presented this talk at the Southern Sociological Society's Annual Meeting in a panel discussion concerned with qualitative research methods. This is a similar talk to the one I gave at the Society for Applied Anthropology in Mexico a couple of weeks ago.

Tomorrow I will be presenting another paper in a theory session: Heidegger's theory of profound boredom and insights that we might gain to understanding addiction in light of his theory of moods. Wish me luck!


Relationality and Methamphetamine Use

It Costs More To Be Poor

It's true: living costs poor people more than the not poor. I bring this up because I read this headline and the supporting report today:

"Study finds median wealth for single black women at $5"

(here's the report upon which the article is based)

Here's a report from the Washington Post that discusses this counter-intuitive truth "The High Cost of Poverty"

Also, here's a report from the Brookings Institutes, almost exactly a year before the WaPo article, discussing the financial costs of being poor, "Public Policies to Alter the Use of Alternative Financial Services among Low-Income Households"

The poor pay more to have access to their income:

• for example -- if you cannot pass a Chex Systems report, then you likely cannot get a bank account, which means you will pay someone to cash your check. If you're not familiar with this concept, the poor will pay somebody money to give them access to the money they earned.

The poor have to pay in terms of housing:

• if you are poor, you likely have a poor credit history, based on this you will not qualify for standard financing for your mortgage. You might be offered a subprime loan, and since about 2006 we've seen what that leads to: massive financial hemorrhaging that can only be stopped by giving the ultra wealthy of the world all the money they want.
• Some might say, "don't buy a house if you can't get good financing." But, of course, paying rent (as everyone who tries to sell housing initiatives to the public typically brings up), means not building wealth and again, loosing that money.

The poor have to pay more for transportation:

• Not unlike financing a home, if you are poor you will likely pay a more punitive interest rate for that car loan...
• ...Unless, of course, you don't buy a car and instead use public transportation. As a regular user of the bus and train services in Atlanta, I can assure you that although our system is very efficient (despite what most white people in the metro area suspect) - public transit's real cost must also include the time spent waiting for transfers and connecting service. This is really a drag now since it seems likely that half the bus routes in the city will be cut soon.

The poor have to pay more for health care:

• The poor tend to work in industries that do not provide things like health care, but they may qualify for limited assistance from programs like Medicaid (maybe)
• The leading reason people (62% of those who filed) filed bankruptcy in 2007 because of medical debts. 92% of those who listed this as their primary reason for filing had $5000 of medical debt or more, this representing more than 10% of their gross income (from the American Journal of Medicine)

But the real cost of being poor vis-a-vis health care is more subtle - because the Federal Poverty Rate as it is, being poor is likely also going to cause a life time of health problems such as diabetes and heart disease.

The Federal poverty rate is not determined by your income, the cost of your housing, the cost of transportation; it doesn't consider medical debt, nor student loan debt, and certainly not consumer debt (credit cards or pay day loans). The Federal poverty rate is a measure of how much it costs to get a certain number of calories (not nutrients, just calories). I've talked about this before, here.

To refresh you: the Federal poverty rate seeks to find the cheapest cost for the individual to get calories. This means that the individual is encouraged to consume the foods that would have the richest calorie pay-off - since you're only given a limited amount of money to spend, you'd better buy the most food at the cheapest cost.

This is why you will see in really poor neighborhoods signs at the (freaking) convenience stores and gas stations that state "Food Stamps Accepted Here."

What foods have the best pay-off? Foods that have been heavily-processed and contain high-fructose corn syrup. They are typically foods that also have really large amounts of fat and calories from fat.

Of course, poverty doesn't fall out of the sky and like lightning strike you: you're typically born into poverty or at the threshold of being lower-middle class. This likely means also that your recipe book (as it were) is filled with foods that made sense to eat two generations ago when your forebears were working the fields and mines - more likely to die from work injuries than live long enough to develop diabetes or heart disease.

More on this later....

You Are Not a Gadget vs. What Is an Apparatus?

To be fair, I'm only discussing the second chapter of Jaron Lanier's manifesto so this may not be the best representation of his book. But, it seems the chapter helps introduce us to Giorgio Agamben's essay.

Lanier states that the purpose of the second chapter is to apply "metaphors from certain strains of computer science to people and the rest of reality." He calls this strategy cybernetic totalism and this chapter is the metaphoric treatment and pragmatic response to "an apocalypse of self-abdication" although I might suggest in the second edition that he reconsider self-abdication and go with self-abnegation instead.

I agree very strongly with Lanier when he states that the "Rapture and the Singularity share one thing in common: they can never be verified by the living." But, ultimately, this chapter seems somewhat flat and wanting of something more rigorous than statements like "Antihuman rhetoric is fascinating in the same way that self-destruction is fascinating: it offends us but we cannot look away." I get the gist, so I shouldn't put too much emphasis on these sorts of statements. Especially since overall I agree with the trajectory of what Lanier's putting out there: that people should not be designing software and gadgets to promote the accomplishment of the Singularity and we can finally slough off this mortal coil we call bodies and live only in our minds. That's a Hale Bopp cult way of thinking.

Again, I agree, overall, with the sentiment that Lanier is putting out there: (some) people (might)are promoting the advent of an artificial intelligence so as to sell apocalypse 2.0. I like statements like,

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate risks before making bad loans (news flash: they still do). We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. [...] Whenever a computer is imagined to be intelligent, what is really happening is that humans have abandoned aspects of the subject at hand in order to remove from consideration whatever the computer is blind to.

Preach on! I say. But, again, at least in this chapter, Lanier's flat. His worry that "we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process" just limps along in this chapter (although maybe it picks up later, I dunno). And the reason why Lanier's jabs and right hooks can't connect is because they lack what Agamben's essay's got.

The essay begins by suggesting that Foucault employs a term "apparatus" (dispositif in French) to accomplish three things in his body of work:

1. the apparatus is the network itself between discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, and so on
2. the apparatus is always located in a power relation and has a concrete strategic function (which means that it is not a gesture)
3. given these, the apparatus is found at the intersection of knowledge relations and power relations.

Agamben, after discussing where Foucault might have developed this idea (Hyppolite's discussion of Hegel), tells us that apparatus is developed by Foucault so that he can "take a position with respect to a decisive problem: the relation between individuals as living beings and the historical element," which he defines as the institutions and processes of subjectification present in society. So we can see that we are making inroads to what Lanier is going on about when he's making ad hominem attacks against certain technologists, "The digital hive is growing at the expense of individuality." Being a concerned Confucian I am troubled by Lanier's call to individuality (even when he makes contradictory statements about interdependence of all living things but then rails against the appropriation of music from the 60s as somehow a lesser form of creativity).

Indeed, Lanier's manifesto (or at a minimum the second chapter of it) would benefit from an investigation into the definition of apparatus (French, dispositif) which has these three meanings:

1. the enacting clause of a law, thus the section of a judicial opinion that decides
2. the way in which the parts of a machine are arranged
3. the set of means arranged in conformity with military plans

As Agamben mentioned this summer, he has recently put the wraps on a project investigating the theological origins of secular law in the West. In these researches he's found that the Greek term oikonomia came to play the most crucial role in the development of the Western church and by extension modernity itself. The term oikonomia (from which we get economy, ecology, etc.) refers to the management of the household and related affairs. The term was crucial in helping to explain the apparent disharmony in the Trinity (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost). Trying to avoid any sort of pagan pantheism (of course, native to all the regions that the newly formed Church were trying to overcome), the Fathers of the Church argued something like this:

"God, insofar as his being and substance is concerned, is certainly one; but as to his oikonomia - that is to say the way in which he administers his home, his life, and the world he has created - he is rather triple. Just as a good father can entrust to his son the execution of certain functions and duties without in so doing losing his power and his unity, so God entrusts to Christ the 'economy,' the administration and government of human history."

Thus oikonomia became the apparatus that introduced Trinitarian dogma and the divine providential governance of the world into the Christian faith. The downside of this introduction, as Agamben points out, is that God is seperated in His being from His action. This is also the problem of subjectivity in the modern era - how can I be a human being and not a human doing? "Action (economy, but also politics) has no foundation in being: this is the schizophrenia that the theological doctrine of oikonomia left as its legacy to Western culture."

Apparatus designates the way in which and through which we might actualize an activity of governance, but it is devoid of any ontological foundation and this is why the apparatus is said to produce its own subjects.

Agamben recognizes in his essay that to fully accomplish what he must in the interpretation of Foucault's term "apparatus" he must begin to establish his own thinking about the term. "I wish to propose [...] a [...] partitioning of beings into two large groups or classes: on the one hand, living beings (or substances), and on the other, apparatuses in which living beings are increasingly captured." In doing this we are able to return to the theological discussion above and see that we have the ontology of creatures but also the oikonomia of apparatuses that seek to govern and guide these beings.

He defines apparatuses as anything that "has the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings." So an apparatus is just about any thing and certainly any technology.

He defines subjects as "that which results from the relation and [...] from the relentless fight between living beings and apparatuses." And so here we see the first volley against Lanier.

Where Lanier sees the, "digital hive is growing at the expense of individuality," and so suggesting there is a better way to use apparatuses, Agamben states his set-up might, "produce the impression that in our time, the category of subjectivity is wavering and losing consistency," but what needs to happen is not getting rid of technology nor overcoming it but to amplify the ridiculousness of this masquerading of subjectivity that technologists believe in.

Taking a similar tack as Foucault, Agamben points out that "apparatuses aim to create - through a series of practices, discourses, and bodies of knowledge - docile, yet free, bodies that assume their identity and their 'freedom' as subjects in the very process of desubjectification." To illustrate this seeming paradox, that an apparatus creates subjects by desubjectifying them, Agamben points out the apparatus called penance. In performing penance the I that sinned is absolved and thus is created a new I that is capable of entering the Kingdom of Heaven.

This is the same apparatus in addiction "recovery" this is the recovering over. 

Agamben states that what defines the apparatuses confronting us in this current phase of capitalism (perhaps spectaclism) is this process of desubjectification inherent to them. It is here that Agamben and Lanier are on the same page. Lanier states, "there is nothing special about the place of humans in this scheme [....] Information is alienated experience." Thus, Lanier states, information doesn't deserve to be free contra the Whole Earth Catalog.

But, ultimately, Agamben and Lanier do differ in so far as Agamben finds it impossible to achieve what Lanier seems to be putting forward in chapter 2 of his manifesto:

Here lies the vanity of the well-meaning discourse on technology, which asserts that the problem with apparatuses can be reduced to the question of their correct use. Those who make such claims ignore a simple fact: If a certain process of subjectification (or in this case desubjectification) corresponds to every apparatus, then it is impossible for the subject of an apparatus to use it "in the right way."

Agamben's essay finishes in a supremely satisfying consummation of all the parts this far invoked and (maybe because it's later or because I'm lazy) I want to simply reproduce here:

Rather than the proclaimed end of history, we are, in fact, witnessing the incessant though aimless motion of this machine, which, in a sort of colossal parody of theological oikonomia, has assumed the legacy of providential governance of the world; yet instead of redeeming our world, this machine (true to the original eschatological vocation of Providence) is leading us to catastrophe.

Agamben suggests that we must make profane (the bringing back to the human what was elevated to the realm of the sacred) apparatuses. This rings very nicely with Heidegger's gelassenheit.

Something's Cookin'

I'm writing my new piece for The Avant Guardian, it will be available this Friday.

It's going to be good, I hope you like it.

It's about Lil' Wayne.

Listen up:

Poverty, Healthcare, & Agriculture

To somewhat flesh-out some of what I was saying yesterday about how the poverty level is determined, today I am sharing some great reads.

My friend from the AccionUSA days, Tina Valverde, pointed me to a great article asking, "Why are libertarian rightists defending a dysfunctional, state-engineered food system?"

While I'm not at all interested in Libertarian politics (I'm vehemently opposed often), it's a great article chock-full of excellent links to articles offering a history of food subsidies and pointing out the unintended harms of maintaining this corporate welfare.

An oldy, but goody, from the CATO Institute presents a case against Archer Daniels Midland (ack! two links to libertarian-aligned articles! what strange bedfellows).

Then there is this great article form the New Yorker from last year that discusses the intersections of health care policy and agricultural policy.

And to be fair, here's a public relations piece "a farmer in Missouri who will spend the next 6 weeks on a combine." But the piece reeks of lobbyist-talking points and slicker than subsidized-corn oil.

2009 Annual Meeting of the Georgia Sociological Association

Today I am presenting at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the GSA, being held at Morehouse College here in Atlanta. This is a presentation from a longer article I am writing of the same title.
Boshears GSA Presentation Public

Heavy Bored Cyborg: Attunement and Addiction (2/2)

What follows is the continuation of the paper I presented at the first annual conference of the Pacific Association for the Continental Tradition (PACT). Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

The beginning of the paper can be found here

of Berryman's heavy boredom, and what, if anything, can we glean from this about addiction today?

In reviewing the literature concerning addiction I came to wonder what Berryman would have though of being characterized as having a pathological loss of reason, which is how the earliest attempts at understanding habitual drunkenness characterized this state of affairs. This pathology was also understood as a collapse of moral reason.¹ In many ways this sentiment remains in place and as a cornerstone of recovery treatment in Alcoholics Anonymous, where those seeking recovery must announce that their best thinking got them to this point.² The medical model of addiction subsumes personal agency and suggests that there is a pathology but what the causal mechanism is has yet to be determined. Thus, if we accept that addiction is simply a chemical problem we necessarily must accept, then, that the addicted individual is no longer culpable for their behaviors. The mechanistic model, for all of its empirical merits, however, falls short in explaining addiction because addiction, as Davies points out, is a question of both one's physiology and volition, which are mutually exclusive:

Addiction, impossibly, seeks to make these accounts complementary; something they cannot be. The notion invites us to apply a rational/decision making frame-work to our fellow men/women, up to the point where they start to encounterproblems with their drug use, and then to switch to a view of man/woman as machine.³

Although the the term addiction ultimately has been abandoned – over the past twenty years – in favor of chemical dependence and substance use disorder – what has remained is the insistence that those using substances of abuse ultimately must subsume themselves to the authority of medical-style interventions.⁴ While those in neuroscience (particularly neurodegeneration) no longer use the term addiction, the top journal for substance abuse is still called Addiction. The National Institute on Drug Abuse features prominently on their website a section called Addiction Science where those curious can learn the story of why drugs are bad. At the intersection of the Public and the Private is the ongoing development of drug use literature. Like literature, as Avital Ronell points out, whether it's the criminal justice system, the local AA meeting place, those that come under the eyes of the Authorities-That-Be cannot be allowed to go into the public without covering over the wound of non-being, thus the subject becomes interpellated as a re-covering addict. This recovering over of the subject clearly is suggestive of Freud's “Mourning and Melancholia” as this recovering is a covering over of the ways of being that we develop as we apprentice in our drug using careers. We are, in recovery, learning to forget that life prior to the intervention. Clearly also in the formulation of the drug use career or trajectory (apprenticeship-disorder-recovery) is the question of thinking (erfahrung) which leads this paper to discussing Heidegger.

According to Heidegger, Being in the modern era is concealed by the growing purveyance three attitudes: In the recent calls for the “Responsible Use of Cognitive-Enhancing Drugs by the Healthy”⁵ society at large demonstrates once more its succumbing to the trap Heidegger foresaw has as its goal the concealing of Being itself in boredom.⁶ According to Heidegger, Being in the modern era is concealed by the growing purveyance three attitudes:

1. Calculation – which he calls the basic law of comportment and is the prerogative of the principle of organization.⁷ Perhaps we can think here of the speaking machine. Sprachmaschine, as we are told, completes the metaphysics of technological Ge-stell (enframing). Self-deception, warns Heidegger, is the inexorable direction of the Sprachmaschine, “the superficial impression is still maintained that the human being is still the master of the language machine. But the truth might well be that the Sprachmaschine puts language into its service and in this way masters the essence of the human being.”⁸ Isn't, at the heart of addiction the earnest belief that we can control the dose such that, like the Sprachmaschine we maximize the efficiency of its employment without simultaneously destroying ourselves? Central to Heidegger's thinking on the matter is man's relationship to time.
2. The second element concealing Being is acceleration – the phrase is “not-being-able-to-bear the stillness of hidden growth; it is necessary to forget quickly.⁹ Heidegger states it thus, “the geneuine restlessness of the struggle remains hidden. Its place is taken by the restlessness of the always inventive operation, which is driven by the anxiety of boredom.
3. The third prevailing attitude is the outbreak of massiveness – not just “the masses” but the rapidly stacking up of the calculable towering over us and so rending us blind to the unique as it is not accessible to “the many.”
4. The result of these three is thus the “divesting, publicizing, and vulgarizing of all attunement.”¹⁰

Because of Being and Time many believe that our anxiety in awareness of our finitude is the fundamental attunement that can be attributed to Dasein (the Being-there of humans being). It is from the disclosure of Dasein that we are able to apprehend the richest possibilities of our being. But anxiety is not the only nor solely privileged attunement which can be attributed to Dasein; Heidegger also finds that being in the state of profound boredom also discloses Dasein. Heidegger develops this discussion of boredom in the 1929-30 lecture course published as Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics¹¹ so as to illuminate what separates the human animal from all other animals (as Kuperus has written recently).¹² Dasein is absorbed with all its responsibilities, tasks, appointments, and in completing these, we have become an indifferent one, as in “One would think to do this differently,” or, “One wishes it could be otherwise.” We are lost to ourselves in the things of our living. Our identity has been lost in the beings with which we occupy ourselves. We have become – as Heidegger himself expresses it – an “undetermined I.” The common link between technology and profound boredom is in how one relates to time.

Heidegger outlines three forms of boredom: 1) becoming bored by something – as in killing time while waiting for the train, 2) being bored with something and its associated time – a recognition, in his example after the fact, that the events of the evening were in the end boring, and 3) profound boredom – the phrase he uses is es ist einem lanweilig, “It is boring for one.” We experience this profound boredom as indifference, the “It” of “It is boring for one,” is, “the title for whatever is indeterminate, unfamiliar.” This “It” should be familiar as it is who we are, this profound boredom has left us standing there acutely aware of the universe's complete anesthesia to our being as this coming and going. Similar to the first form of boredom, but unlike the second, we are fundamentally incapable of engaging other beings in this state of profound boredom, in fact being itself refuses to be engaged, this telling refusal is the mark of profound boredom. And, just as Berryman's mother (repeatingly) admonishes us all: to confess that we have such boredom is to admit an emptiness.

It is in this emptiness of profound boredom and the narcosis that is being-on-drugs that I am most intrigued. We revisit Berryman's poem in light of this question, how do we transform being heavy bored into an affirmation of being's possibilities? The profundity of profound boredom is in the revelation of the emptiness of the universe. It is in this manner of thinking that I am tempted to imagine the Heidegger that would reflect on shunyata (ku,空), emptiness. And in my intoxication with this imagining, I recall Fukushima Keido Roshi telling us one evening that LSD-zen is not the same zen that he has cultivated and that he can transmit. Fukushima does not deny that one might experience something profound under the influence of a technology such as LSD, but perhaps he has in (no)mind something similar to Heidegger. The essence of the development and use of technology in the last two centuries has been to achieve given ends in the most efficient manner while expending minimal resources – the principle resource to be spared being time itself. The result of the promotion of technological innovation, as Thiele has stated, “This victory over time bears a price: humanity comes to relate to time as an obstacle and antagonist, as a recalcitrant force that demands harnessing. The effect of technological innovation, in other words, is not so much the saving of time as its conquest.”¹³ This antagonistic relationship to time is problematic for both Fukushima and Heidegger as our being is a dwelling¹⁴ in time. There is no room in this essay to discuss in any appreciable depth, unfortunately, how Fukushima might discuss the problem, but we can further explore Heidegger's thinking.¹⁵

Time weighs most heavily on the bored. Thus Nietzsche asks in proposing the eternal recurrence, that heaviest burden, how will we be disposed to ourselves and our lives in this light?¹⁶ We typically counteract boredom through busy work and preoccupations. In so doing we are passing the time in order to become masters over time. Our attempts to kill time, an attempt to drive boredom away, is actually a driving on of time.¹⁷ But any effort to kill time obscures the essence of our being, which is defined as a being-in-time. In profound boredom we cannot simply go about business as usual, as Heidegger states, profound boredom “brings the self in all its nakedness to itself as the self that is there and has taken over the being there of its Da-sein. For what purpose? To be that Dasein.”¹⁸ This telling refusal of beings as a whole is a calling: to consummation of this emptiness that is the foundation of being and its fundamental responsibility to being as a whole.¹⁹ Rather than the self care that anxiety provokes in Being and Time, with all the attendant problems of how to face the Other (as, say, Levinas points out); profound boredom, like Heidegger's later works on Gelassenheit, is a call to responsivity rather than responsibility.

Being-as-a-whole's telling refusal of our Dasein in the state of profound boredom is not only the medium by which our Dasein returns to itself as responsible to itself, it is also an expression of Nature's being-there. Thus they are mutually implicated in a hyperbolic sense of freedom as my freedom can only be understood in a relationship to nature and its ultimate disinterestedness in my busy work. We cannot discuss Being-as-a-whole's disinterestedness in us as a production of our personal taste; while it may be a calling, it is not a calling to overcome nature's fundamental disinterestedness. Finding ourselves in this state of profound boredom, as Ross has stated recently, “reveals nature within its 'ownness.'”²⁰ What's more, profound boredom calls upon us to poeisis, such that we poetically dwell in the world as the world reveals itself to us in its own terms, no longer mediated by our preoccupations and busy work. In this way, can we understand the problem of the social phenomenon that we call addiction not as a failure of an individual's decision making capabilities but of a mutual inability to understand the conditions and interwoven events that lead one to cover over the profundity of our interrelatedness?²¹

Heidegger's discussion and development of this profound boredom helps us to intimate an orientation towards ourselves in an expanded sense such that who we are is mutually implicated and consummated in our relationships to the world as itself. Chief among Heidegger's concerns was man's relatioships to technology, promoting a return not to a simpler time without technology, as a neo-Luddite, but a return to the world as the primary site of wonder. Thinking in this manner about addiction shifts our prescription from a focus on an individual that is responsible for its choices to an investigation of the conditions among us that facilitate or encourage narcosis. Sharing Heidegger's call to reminding us of the profundity of identification in the face of technology, D.W. Winnicott, in his essay “Struggling Through the Doldrums”, announced that in the long shadow being cast by the development of atomic warfare our society can no longer justify harnessing the energy of its youth toward military use as a given and thus we enter the Teen Age. He speaks of this in terms not unlike a recovering drug user, “we have lost something we have been in the habit of using, and so we are thrown back into this problem,”²² of being. Winnicott's contribution to developmental psychology was to expand our understanding of children and in doing this he pioneered the use of group therapy. Whatever is the psyche of the teen it is certainly also the psychology of the group: they form groups on the basis of the most inconsequential uniformities, theirs is the struggle for an identity, the struggle to feel real. The constant frustration of the adolescent is phrased in terms of drive:

One member of the group takes an overdose of a drug, another lies in bed in a depression, another is free with the flick of a knife. In each case there are grouped a band of adolescent isolates behind the ill individual whose extreme symptom has impinged on society. Yet in the majority of these individuals, whether or not they get involved, there was not enough drive behind the tendency to bring the symptom into inconvenient existence and to produce a social reaction. The ill one had to act for the others.²³

Winnicott states that the problem of the adolescent is not only that is terrifying to be an adolescent and to do battle with the pervasive gnawing of being trapped in unreality, but the problem cannot be contained in one person: it hurts those of us that have yet to have successfully negotiated our own adolescence. Like Heidegger, Winnicott suggests to those that would hear that telling refusal of this uncanny world, that unreality where our tasks and ambitions are of no consequence, the way out of this labyrinth is not through slaying minotaurs, it's in our ability to heed his directions home. This paper is a call to a sense of hyperbolic responsibility in those that would listen: to promote the self-consummation that one is challenged by in the terror of profound boredom.

1Berringer, Virginia. “Morality and Medical Science: Concepts of Narcotic Addiction in Britain, 1820-1926.” Annals of Science 36, no. 1 (1979): 19.

2Hoffmann, Heath C. “Recovery Careers of People in Alcoholics Anonymous: Moral Careers Revisited.” Contemporary Drug Problems, no. 30 (2003): 37.

3Davies, J. B. (1998). “Pharmacology versus social process: Competing or complementary views on the nature of addiction?” Pharmacology and Therapeutics, 80, 268.

4May, Carl. “Pathology, Identity, and the Social Construction of Alcohol Dependence.” Sociology 35 (2001): 17.

5Henry Greely, Barbara Sahakian, John Harris, Ronald C. Kessler, Michael Gazzaniga, Philip Campbell, Martha J. Farah. “Towards Responsible Use of Cognitive-Enhancing Drugs by the Healthy.” Nature 456 (2008): 702-705.

6Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Trans. Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indian University Press. 1999. §76.

7Ibid. §58.

8Heidegger, Martin. Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens. Ed. Hermann Heidegger. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983. Vol. 13 of Gesamtausgabe. 149. Reference from Charles Bambach. “Heidegger, Technology, and the Homeland.” Germanic Review, vol. 78, September, 2003.

9Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Trans. Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indian University Press. 1999. §76.

10Ibid.

11Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts in Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 1995.

12 Kuperus, Gerard. “Attunement, Deprivation and Drive: Heidegger and Animality.” In Phenomenology and the Non-Human Animal, edited by Corrine; Lotz Painter, Christian. New York: Springer, 2007.

13 Thiele, Leslie Paul. “Postmodernity and the Routinization of Novelty: Heidegger on Boredom and Technology.” Polity 29, no. 4 (1997): 505.

14According to personal communications between Joan Stambagh and Eugene Gendlin, Heidegger himself sees the phrase Befindlichkeit in his later work as wohnen (dwelling). http://www.focusing.org/gendlin_befindlichkeit.html#2

15We might start by talking about killing time instead of killing the Buddhas we meet on the road.

16Nietzsche, Friederich The Gay Science with a Prelude in German Rhymes and Appendix of Songs. Ed. Bernard Williams. Trans. Josefine Nauckhof and Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. §341.

17Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts in Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 1995. 95-6 §23.

18Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts in Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 1995. 143 §31.

19Hammer, Espen. “Being Bored: Heidegger on Patience and Melancholy.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 12, no. 2 (2004): 286.

20Ross, Andrew Peter. "Rethinking Environmental Responsibility: Heidegger, Profound Boredom, and the Alterity of Nature." Dissertation, Queen's University, 2007. 46.

21Here I'm thinking of that most boring hunk of rock in Rilke's “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” It's just rock, but bursting forth from it is a star and so we are told that in witnessing this we must change our lives. Rilke consummates not just the ancient sculptor's vision of a complete body, but also the entire process of stellar evolution. He comes to know, in the profound boredom of the procession of history – which could careless about this sculpture – that our Being must always be revisited so as to be attuned to being-as-a-whole.

22Winnicott, D.W. “Struggling through the Duldrums.” Deprivation and Delinquency. New York: Rouledge 2000. 150.

23Ibid. 153.

Here is a sampling of my paper that I will be presenting at Seattle University for the Pacific Association for the Continental Tradition (PACT). I won't bore you to death with the whole thing, and I'm likely to revise it between now and then.

Please feel free to make any comments toward revision as the paper will greatly benefit from your input.

Profound boredom, according to Heidegger, is an attunement – one of several nuances of the term Befindlichkeit other translations could include mood or state of mind – from which we find ourselves in this world. It's perhaps more widely understood, from his Being and Time, that an attunement of anxiety is the fundamental state from which we understand our being-in-the-world (Dasein). This anxiety leads one to a state of self care so as to cultivate our being-in-the-world (Dasein), but this strategy of self-care has lead to some strong arguments against Heidegger as the care of the self is ultimately only caring for oneself. Unlike this anxious attunement, profound boredom reveals our thrownness in the world as an event of mutual determinacy. It is not that I am bored profoundly, but that in this state I come to be aware that the universe itself is profoundly uninterested in me. It's hard for me to read the phrase profound boredom and not think also of John Berryman's collection The Dream Songs, from which I've taken part of the title of this paper. Berryman was an epic drunk; and shortly after winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Dream Songs, he threw himself off the Washington Bridge into the Mississippi River. As Heidegger put it in his 1929-30 lecture course on the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, our attunement to the world is how we find our selves in the world, and ultimately these attunements provoke us into a state of poetic dwelling in the world. Perhaps it is appropriate to then begin our thinking about addiction by invoking Berryman here.

Dream Song 14¹

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

In the pronouncement that, “I am heavy bored,” is the reader forgiven for wondering if perhaps Berryman's alcoholism and jumping to his death were not related to this kind of boredom as perhaps an attunement or a fundamental state of receptivity to the world? Could it be that addiction's recovering, the covering over of “addiction” practices seek to cover over the experience of profound boredom? Berryman's poems speak a language of irrecoverable loss; this language is simultaneously dependent upon loss as the origin of ontology, as Schwieler has pointed out, making both ontology and poetry possible.² This pervasive mood is how one finds oneself in Berryman's poetry, as Heidegger has argued as well. The history of addiction discourse is also the history of the will; as Derrida asks, how can we not write about addiction? Both concepts in the modern era have developed primarily in a negative relation to each other. Heidegger gets hooked on Schelling's talk of the will³ and after a significant binge he decides that beyond talk of volition and cognition there is also running in the background moods or attunements.

From Schelling, perhaps, has come the modern pursuit of will with his announcement that, “Will is original being and to it alone all predicates of being apply,” and with will is its handmaiden, cognition. As Clark so nicely put it, “If modernity suffers from an 'epidemic of will' that is indissociable from an 'epidemic of addiction and addiction attribution' ... then Frederich Schelling is patient zero.”⁴ Heidegger's relationship to Schelling's thinking is of course indispensable to understanding more fully Heidegger's own thought, however it cannot be properly treated here and I refer you to Clark's excellent essay referenced in the notes. Suffice it to say that Heidegger's engagement with Schelling leads him to extend Schelling's philosophy of time and move beyond rationalist and voluntarist thinking into dispositions.
Central to Heidegger's thinking is the German word Befindlichkeit as in the common way of asking “How are you?” is, “Wie befinden Sie sich?” This literally says, “How do you find yourself?”⁵ Befindlichkeit, then, as a disposition or mood is how we find ourselves in the world. Heidegger states, in Being and Time, that our moods are not simply accompanying the “higher faculties” of will and cognition but rather disclose our “there-ness” in the world, our “Being-In As Such” as Chapter V of the first division is entitled. Our Being-In, according to this theory of moods, includes two moments: understanding (Verstehen) and our findedness (Befindlichkeit). Heidegger states that, “What we ontologically designate by the term “findedness” is ontically quite familiar and everyday: the mood, the Being-attunded.”⁶ Our attunements place us factically in an existential situation. So what is the facticity

1Berryman, John. The Dream Songs. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. 1969.

2Schwieler, Elias. Mutual Implications: Otherness in Theory and John Berryman's Poetry of Loss. Umeå: Moderna språk, 2003. 31.

3Clark, David L. “Heidegger's Craving: Being-on-Schelling.” Diacritics, Vol. 27, No. 3, (1997), pp. 8-33.

4Clark, David L. “Heidegger's Craving: Being-on-Schelling.” Diacritics, Vol. 27, No. 3, (1997), 10.

5Gendlin, Eugene T. “Befindlichkeit: Heidegger and the Philosophy of Psychology.” Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry: Heidgger and Psychology. Vol. XVI, Nos. I, 2 & 3, 1978-79. Found at http://www.focusing.org/gendlin_befindlichkeit.html

6Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper Collins. 1962. 172.

Toward a More Sensible Model of Addiction and Policy

(The following is from an email exchange with my friend, Hannah. Thanks, Hannah, for getting me inspired!)

I think that both addiction studies and decriminalization arguments benefit enormously from what the data says, and we're not really getting novel data so much as we're simply listening to what the participants are saying and trying to act as translators for everyone else. What we're saying is that people aren't waking up one day, typically as young teens or tweens, and saying to themselves, "I gotta get some illicit narcotics." It's not the case that people begin using drugs because they are seeking the drugs or the effects of ingesting the drugs.

Rather, the drug use comes to them. The vehicle of transmission always is a social medium: a family member introduces the practice of drug use to the child; a new kid at a new school can't fit in with anyone but the kids that are using drugs and in so hooking up with these kids the new kid now has something that makes him popular; maybe it's a summer job and the teen's boss told her that using meth will enable her to get more work done in a day.

Right now we have this emphasis on addiction as a personal disease (this is when the model for addiction is most coherent, there are, of course, many informal definitions that influence policy makers). It may be true that there are people that are physically dependent upon substances of abuse, where their body chemistry simply requires a supplement of dopamine in the brain; but, the truth of the matter is that these chemically dependent people are, at best, 10% of the people in all of the literature on addiction.

One can guess that a majority of drug users are never even included in the study of drug use (maybe because they only used once or twice); the nature of drug use networks is such that they are a hidden population because drug use is illegal. The result is that most people that are included in the addiction literature are not quite accurate representations of the whole drug using population; they're not accurate representations because the primary organ in society that senses drug users is the criminal justice system (again, because drug use is a moral crime). This situation has serious ramifications on society.

One result is that we continue to have a terrible sample population upon which to base our theories of drug use and addiction. This means that we have really unintelligible models for understanding drug use and addiction (such that even in the best case scenario, where people accept that addiction is a disease, the disease is not really a physical ailment but a pathological inability to make moral decisions - just to be clear, morality has no biological basis, it's strictly a mental capacity). The last element of our trifecta, then, is that we have really terrible policy toward this phenomenon called drug use and addiction. The policy seeks to (this is really when policy is at it's most coherent, which is of course rare)...seeks to balance the impossible: that we can develop a pill (NIDA and NIH are the two agencies that really pursue this most aggressively) that will cure addiction, or maybe develop some biological mechanism that would predict who will develop a chemical dependence - and let's keep in mind that at best that would be 10% of the minority of the population we've ever encountered. And on the other hand our current policy tries to develop the best moralistic (morality formalized and codified is law) solution to the problem - to be clear the problem is a moral one, a failure to choose the right thing.

Why won't these work together? Because there is no biological basis in making choices, if there were we could make a pill that enhanced decision making, right (and this is how some people in the field talk); so if we could make a pill that helped you make better choices we'd then have to concede that free will is not real because what we thought was reasoning and rationality was really a math equation. Of course, if free will doesn't exist, then we really can't put nobody in jail for making bad choices. Maybe we could put society on trial for not giving these people access to the substances that enable them to make the right choices, but this is clearly nonsense and an undesirable view (that there is no free will).

So our paper is trying to point out that this emphasis on morality and biology is missing out on the big picture: that people use drugs and they do so primarily in social settings. 99% of the time substances of abuse are consumed in intimate networks (i.e. family settings like a cook out with beer, a group of drug buddies in the fraternity, coworkers on the highways delivering groceries to grocery stores); only in the worst case scenarios, at the end of the drug using trajectory, does the criminal justice system encounter drug users: when they're stealing to get the drugs that former friends will no longer lend to them, when they're so consumed with drink that they no longer can live with their families, and so on.

If you look at drug use networks you see that they are very conservative: they are completely dependent upon mutual trust. Once someone breaks that trust, by ceasing to reciprocate in one form or another in that relationship (i.e. doesn't pay for the drugs in a timely manner, drank the whole bottle themselves, or quits using the substance that they once shared using and so now suspiciously might be a narc), this is the moment when drug use patterns fracture and we can predict how likely one is to relapse or cease to use substances of abuse.