«Neurologist Rebecca Saxe presented the most beautiful “photo” of the year. It’s the image of a MRI captured when a mother kisses her two-month-old son. Lips placed on the toddler’s head immediately cause a reaction in his brain. Dopamine is released, which gives the feeling of well-being, but also oxytocin, baptized as the love hormone, because it is responsible for the affection and attachment. Kissing causes a chemical reaction in the toddler’s brain. Reduces fear and increases confidence, provokes feelings of affection and attachment, a sign that the baby understood that he is protected. Vasopresin, the “glue” that connects mothers to babies in their first months of life and serotonin, is also released, which regulates the mood.»
Of course, it was a facelessbook post.
What’s astonishing to me is the admixture of the language of pop-science with the language of the sacred. It shouldn’t astonish me as a boomer, I suppose, because we started this crap, or at least it was applied in earnest on us during the consumer bacchanalia after the Second World War, only later achieving its current casual apotheosis. Historically speaking, this kind of machine-enhanced self-optimization began with the Olde Tyme progressives. I’m constantly returned these days to Dr. Amy Laura Hall’s superlative history of these developments, Conceiving Parenthood, wherein she traces through text and images the role of American Protestantism in the early twentieth century progressive movement and its accompanying “social hygiene” movement — coupling a fetish for institutional/managerial rule with eugenics. The companion-book I’d personally recommend would be Barbara Duden’s Disembodying Women, where Duden called fetal sonograms and pictures like the one above “skinning women.” Here we’ve skint a toddler, too.
Last night around 1:30 a.m., I had a full blown panic attack that kept me awake for the next two and a half hours. I’ve been diagnosed as having “stable angina,” my reward for decades of bad food, booze, and cigarettes, and for a moment I figured I was having a heart attack. Being a former medic, I remember “sense of impending doom” as one of the clinical symptoms of coronary thrombosis, so seeing my sudden waking in a state of aimless fear was a way of getting a handle on it . . . oddly enough, provisionally diagnosing a “heart attack” was a kind of comfort. But alas, within moments I realized that I did not have that signature pain traveling from my neck down through my shoulder and arm, so I had to ride out the wayward fear like a hyper-ventilator breathing into a paper bag. The panic attacks, like the ticker-issues, have a fairly straightforward and uncomplicated etiology as well: brain damage from reading Ayn Rand as a teen, followed by twenty years in Army special operations and a host of other probative masculinity activities wherein my intense fear of not being seen as fearful (sometimes called male socialization) led me to do fearful things again and again to prove I was not afraid. Oh, and a bad conscience . . . there’s that, too. I pretty much deserve the panic attacks, the angina, and a lot more besides, so . . . no hug emojis, okay.
Which is to say, returning now to the creepy image above that engendered a Pavlovian sentimental reflex in some of its viewers (and an annoyed reflex in this one), there are a lot of different ways to fear. Fear, or “anxiety” in the bloodless language game of managerial culture, isn’t a thing, any more than “the state” or “science” or “critical thinking” is an unchanging and universally recognizable thing. Or love, which is what the skinned image above purports to show with its little orange love-lights in those mushy maps of intracranial ruggae.
Love and fear are phenomenological — first person, contextualized, and tidal. In the two titles I mentioned, Hall’s and Duden’s, they were both writing about motherhood, that anachronistic (and likewise phenomenological) experience that’s been serially eclipsed in public discourse by liberal “feminism,” by “scientific management,” and more recently by gender ideology which attempts to erase pregnant women with linguistic idiocies like “pregnant person” and “birth giver.” At least the above image of the mother (gasp!) and son (re-gasp!) didn’t fall into the “declarative identity” quicksand.
This isn’t a boomer pic though. Yes, when we grew up, we were assailed in school by anatomy atlases and anatomical models with invisible skins that rendered the natural opacity of the living inner-body visible. But the “diasonograph,” or proto-ultrasound, wasn’t invented until 1963. It didn’t become a regular feature of prenatal management throughout the metropoles until the 1980s when this boomer was already well into his thirties with a tween daughter he neglected while giving aid and comfort to Central American death squads.
It was in the 1980s, according to Ivan Illich, that “systems-thinking” became hegemonic, the formative epistemology of Gen-X. Of course, boomers latched onto it as well — I certainly did. And that’s what’s represented in the ghoulish picture above — the body, the person, as a manageable system which presupposes its own objectifying reduction into shit like . . . “Vasopresin, the ‘glue’ that connects mothers to babies in their first months of life and serotonin, is also released, which regulates the mood.” (writer bangs head on wall)
Skinning and systematizing for the purpose of optimization — the silicon-vallification of the once embodied person. The curious paradox of simultaneous disembodiment (looking at oneself from outside one’s proprioceptive existence) and morbid preoccupation with everything the body is doing. Duden notes how this epistemic shift was accompanied by a culture-wide obsession with managerial risk-management and a kind of Becker-esque denial of death: one’s embodied existence experienced as a looming threat (instead of a gift), held at bay with the assistance of a phalanx of experts and self-optimization gurus . . . until they pull the plug (think about that!).
The flip side of optimization is body-marketization, corresponding with, among other things (like the relentless commodification of everything), the transactional model of sexual relations. Not just fitness crazes, but in particular body-building exercise . . . think about the term “body building.” In the sexual marketplace where we display ourselves as sexual commodities. There’s a definite class aspect to all this which has led me in my dotage to cast a kind of class-privilege suspicion on everyone who has well-optimized bodies, perfect teeth, and the like. Unfair, maybe, but there it is. Projection, too, because once upon a time I did the performance and display thing myself. I’m not making a moral point in this intervention — if I’m making a point at all — but kicking at the puffball of our unexamined ways of knowing. (I swallow a handful of pills every night just to overcome chronic insomnia, okay, and I let doctors insert a thingamajig into my heart a few years back.)
Duden kicks the puffball as an historian of perception. She gives a macabre account of the development of modern anatomy and its imagery, which includes Da Vinci and his appetite for the bodies of executed criminals. In the old days, those who were drawing what they saw after slicing open (and literally skinning) cadavers had to go through multiple bodies and sketch quickly, because they were in a race with purification. Reminds me of my own anatomy and physiology training as a Special Forces medic, when we spent days in Fort Sam Houston’s cadaver warehouse fingering our way through corpses and dismembered parts of corpses in a headache-inducing miasma of embalming fluids. We needed heavy doses of acetaminophen and alcohol afterward to suppress the headaches and rekindle our appetites.
One of the most interesting things I found in Duden’s accounts was the history of dissecting dead pregnant women and their fetuses. The problem of decomposition was met with a tactical division of labor. A doctor would conduct the dissection accompanied by a skilled artist, the latter assisted by the injection of brightly colored fluids into the vessels of the corpses (mothers and fetuses) to highlight them. Conflict quickly erupted between doctors and the artists. The artists became interested in reproducing exactly what they saw — their focus being in curious forms and textures — but the physicians demanded they rid the images of idiosyncrasies and “flaws” in order to produce generalizable (ideal, therefore correct) images. Maternal-fetal corpses were hard to come by, and so there were few examples available in early years; and doctors were still convinced by their own training of fetal development as homonculus — the fetus was always shaped like a newborn, just smaller. When the artists drew what they saw — what we now know to be dramatically changing morphology during fetal development — the doctors forced the artists to change their representations to fit what the doctors assumed to be correct . . . having assumed the few examples they had were somehow deformed.
The other interesting observation from Duden was the transition from images as illuminatio to facsimile. In studying images relating to pregnancy that accompanied the texts of Hildegard von Bingen in the twelfth century, these illuminatio were designed as what Duden calls ideograms — pictures that illuminated text as a “kind of adornment [which] encouraged the imagination.” An intrauterine glow from the mother’s belly “was meant to elicit a response, not only from the eyes in the forehead but from all five inner senses, which were simply taken for granted . . . Unlike the illustration of a fact, a graphic analysis done from the writer’s perspective, the iconogram of the ‘child’ in the womb in medieval miniatures glows in its own light.” As opposed to facsimile light which intrudes from the outside into the naturally opaque, but now flayed, inner-body.
Having thrown all that out there without arriving at some “point,” let’s remind ourselves that the provocative image above is something I encountered on social media, media being the virtual space of epistemic legitimation for many decades now. I’ll only note in passing how the image-enhancing text (a reversal of Hildegard’s images which enhance the primary text) inserts certain pseudo-sacred hooks like “beauty” and “baptism” to “connect” with the sentiments of the observer.
Again, no particular point to make here, except to throw another few thoughts into ongoing discussions about the current epoch which is wading shoreward into fantasies about imaginary-fifties restoration, fully-automated luxury communism, transhumanism, and other such drivel, while a tsunami approaches from the rear. (I’m hanging my hat on Easter.)
Duden writes . . .
There are several steps by which a biological fact becomes a media image and then takes on bodily consistency as the experience of pregnant women [the objects of Duden’s study]. One can reflect on how the blastocyst comes to nest in the media and then assumes bodily reality in the womb . . .
. . . The media use people in white coats, people with titles certifying to their academic status, and people whose credibility is bolstered by references to the prizes they have won as mouse-catchers. The linguist Uwe Pörksen of Freiburg calls these people the professional “transmission belts” of technical terms into the pool of ordinary language. When technical terms reach ordinary speech by this route, a protean linguistic entity is whipped up, what Pörksen calls “amoeba words,” a modern creation with unprecedented characteristics. While a technical term in a technical context must denote with such narrow precision that the halo is minimal, these same words when pronounced by the certified expert in a media event lose practically all power to denote and acquire an unlimited power to connote. This is what has happened with such terms as information, process, sexuality, production and several dozen others. By appealing to some academic specialty for clarification, they stress the speaker’s seriousness and importance and become unchallenged elements of everyday speech.
Stan, this resonates profoundly as does Michael Anderson's comment. Thank you.
This is resonating with me right now, as I received a voicemail from my "medical provider" (I don't seem to have a "doctor" anymore) yesterday, telling me I need to schedule my annual Medicare "wellness visit" (delayed by COVID), complete with various and sundry tests. I'm wondering what they will try to conjure up to sell me "services" that will strain me financially and put me more in the clutches of the Medical-Professional Complex. This is about profit, too...as Joe Bageant put it---"dancin' at the doomsday ball."