Bipolar Expeditions (46 page)

95. Harvey,
The Condition of Postmodernity.

96. For example, during my fieldwork, the University of California at Irvine's College of Medicine held an evening symposium for the general public called “Human Brain Research for the Layman.” An audience of several hundred crammed in, filling all seats as well as the stairways and standing room at the rear of the auditorium to listen to highly technical illustrated talks from twelve brain scientists and psychiatrists at UCI. The speakers focused on brain-imaging techniques and later mingled with the crowd over punch and cookies.

97. The term “post-suburban” has been defined as “vast urbanized areas for which the concept of urban dominance is becoming obsolete. These areas constitute a settlement-space form that is poly-nucleated, functionally dispersed, culturally fragmented, yet hierarchically organized, and that extends for tens and even hundreds of miles … They are neither suburbs nor satellite cities; rather, they are fully urbanized and independent spaces that are not dominated by any central city.” Gottdiener and Kephart, “The Multinucleated Metropolitan Region,” 34.

98. See Attention! in the sample issue of
Culture Matters,
a general interest magazine for cultural anthropology,
http://www.nyu.edu/fas/ihpk/CultureMatters/index2.htm
(accessed October 4, 2006).

99. McGarry and Joye, U.S. Census, New Jersey; Southern New Jersey Regional Developments, “Southern New Jersey Regional Developments.” More significant than the number of pharmaceuticals in New Jersey is that the headquarters of three of the top four drug companies in worldwide sales are located in the state. Morrow, “Smithkline and American Home Are Talking of Huge Drug Merger.”

C
HAPTER
1

1. For anthropologists, the classic source on the concept of personhood is Mauss, “A Category of the Human Mind.”

2. Macpherson,
The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism,
3. Atwood Gaines specifies that the prevailing conception of personhood in the United States has its roots in northern European, German Protestant culture. This concept stresses the person's autonomy from other persons and control over the self (“From DSM-I to III-R,” 11).

3. Marilyn Strathern, building on a comparison with Melanesian concepts of personhood, describes the contemporary person in Euro-American culture as an agent in whom intention, located within, is the cause of his action. The person is “a carrier, so to speak, not of persons but of the self, and intention and cause are thereby ‘expressed' in the fulfillment of his or her wishes” (“Disembodied Choice,” 73). Alain Ehrenberg puts the contemporary French version of this tradition in a nutshell: “L'action aujourd'-hui s'est individualisée. Elle n'a alors d'autre source que l'agent qui l'accomplit et dont il est le seul responsible. L'initiative des individus passé au premier plan des critères qui mesurent la valeur de la personne” (Nowadays, action has acquired a wholly individual significance. The origin of an action is its agent; he alone is responsible. Of all the criteria one might use to judge a person's merit, initiative is foremost.) Translation by Amy Smiley. Ehrenberg,
La fatigue d'être soi,
198.

4. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 163–64. Elias Canetti described mania as a “paroxysm of desire” by analogy to the hunter's quest for prey
(Crowds and Power,
347).

5. James, “Census of Hallucinations.”

6. Napier,
Foreign Bodies,
163.

7. Whyte,
The Organization Man.

8. Walkerdine, “Beyond Developmentalism?” 455.

9. Turkle,
Life on the Screen,
179. The ideal person of the time embodied in many ways what both Marx and Weber described as “rationality.” For Weber, economic rationality involved application of the best technical means and quantitative calculation to efficiently reach one's ends; for Marx, it was necessary to detail the ideal principles of rational markets capitalism espoused—free and equal exchange among autonomous agents—to see the ways in which in practice they were anything but rational. See Baran and Sweezy,
Monopoly Capital,
338.

10. Whyte,
The Organization Man,
408.

11. Lunbeck,
The Psychiatric Persuasion,
68–69.

12. Stearns,
American Cool,
53. Susan Buck-Morss shows the importance of the cognitive deadening of the factory system, written about so vividly by Walter Benjamin, for the new “human sensorium” of modernity, which is both overstimulated and, as a result, numbed (“The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe,” 8).

13. K. Newman,
Falling from Grace.
See also Harrison and Bluestone,
The Great U-Turn.

14. See
table 6
in the appendix.

15. See Nohria and Berkley, “The Virtual Organization,” for one description of how perceptions of time and space are changed by electronic communication.

16. Turkle,
Life on the Screen.

17. The classic analysis of this process is Foucault,
Discipline and Punish.
For an insightful social history of the asylum, see Rothman,
The Discovery of the Asylum.

18. McClellan, “No Degree, and No Way Back to the Middle.”

19. For a compelling review of Marx's description of how, under capitalism, people's personalities must take on a fluid and open form as they learn to strive for constant change, see Berman,
All That Is Solid Melts into Air.
Since Marx's time, the extent and scale of the development ideal have increased. In the realm of health, for example, people are contending with a series of new ideas about healthy bodies: bodies, which, like the new corporations, are exhorted to become lean, agile, and quick, so that they can adjust to new and frightening pathogens. Health now seems to result not from such measures as state-mandated vaccinations offered on a mass scale by central governments, but from the preventive maintenance each individual carries out in accord with a specific, tailor-made program of health, diet, exercise, and stress-reduction techniques.

20. This way of thinking has also gained a religious tone. Bill McKibben points out that although the majority of Americans believe that the adage “God helps those who help themselves” appears in the Bible, “this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture … was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin” (“The Christian Paradox,” 31).

21. For the history and development of neoliberal ideas and policies, see Harvey,
A Brief History of Neoliberalism;
Strathern, “Enterprising Kinship”; Rouse, “Thinking through Transnationalism.”

22. Norris, “Greenspan Era Taught People to Gamble.”

23. Nineteen percent of Americans, according to a 1996 poll, are self employed, freelance, or sequential temporary workers (Saltzman, “How to Prosper in the You, Inc. Age,” 71). Numbers of these categories of workers are difficult to come by because they are not counted separately in standard Department of Labor statistics. For recent estimates of the numbers of freelance workers, see Teicher, “Freelancing in Your Future?”

24. Saltzman, “How to Prosper in the You, Inc. Age,” 71.

25. Pulley,
Losing Your Job—Reclaiming Your Soul,
136.

26. For recent anthropological analyses of global processes in relation to culture, see Gupta and Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture.'” See also Maurer, “Complex Subjects.”

27. Postrel,
The Future and Its Enemies, xv.

28. Ibid., 57.

29. Hembrooke and Gay, “The Laptop and the Lecture.”

30. In France, what the social theorist Jacques Donzelot calls “changing people's attitudes to change” has made its appearance through the
legal
right of every worker to “continued retraining
[formation permanente]”:
people are thought to
require
an active attitude toward change. Continued retraining “must therefore literally be a continuous process of retraining, from the cradle to the grave, designed to provide the individual with a feeling of autonomy in relation to work, and at work” (Donzelot, “Pleasure in Work,” 273).

31. Historically, emotional flexibility has been associated with an increase in the importance of advanced capitalist institutions. In an important study, William Reddy has shown how, in the French case, increasing contractual relations after the Revolution brought about more, not less, emotional flexibility (The
Navigation of Feeling,
312–14).

32. American Psychiatric Association Task Force on DSM-IV,
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV-TR,
825.

33. Ibid., 362.

34. This list is slightly simplified and shortened. For the full list of criteria, see American Psychiatric Association Task Force on DSM-IV,
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV-TR,
356.

35. When I use the pronoun “we” in a general sense, I refer to people who participate in the Western, Euro-American historical tradition and share at least some of its basic assumptions; when I use the term “American,” I refer only to residents of the United States.

36. Lutz and Abu-Lughod,
Language and the Politics of Emotion.

37. Crapanzano,
Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire,
232. C. Lutz shows that among the If aluk in the Western Caroline Islands, emotion words are not seen as referents of internal feeling states, but as statements about the relationship between a person and an event involving other people (“The Domain of Emotion Words on If aluk”).

38. R. Porter,
Madness,
42.

39. Goodwin and Jamison,
Manic-Depressive Illness,
58.

40. Quoted in ibid., 59.

41. Kraepelin,
Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia.

42. Ibid., 24. Mania and depression were “combined into the new concept of alternating, periodic, circular or double-form insanity. This process culminated with Kraepelin's concept of'manic-depressive insanity' which included most forms of affective disorder under the same umbrella” (Berrios,
History of Mental Symptoms,
298–99).

43. Kraepelin,
Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia,
5–74.

44. Ibid., 2.

45. Ibid., 24.

46. Ibid., 2. Emphasis in original.

47. Contemporary discussions of categories in successive versions of the DSM focus on the differences and similarities between unipolar affective illness (involving only depression) and bipolar affective disorders. They also focus on how to classify the widely varying degrees of mania and depression in individuals (involving alternation between varying degrees of depression and mania). Goodwin and Jamison,
Manic-Depressive Illness,
70.

48. For the complexities of defining emotion in psychology, see Ekman and Davidson,
The Nature of Emotion.
A useful review of the issues from a neurologist is LeDoux, “Emotion: Clues from the Brain.” For ethnographic accounts that founded the contemporary inquiry into the social meaning of emotions, see Lutz and Abu-Lughod,
Language and the Politics of Emotion;
Lutz and White, “The Anthropology of Emotions”; M. Rosaldo,
Knowledge and Passion;
R. Rosaldo, “Grief and a Headhunter's Rage”; R. Solomon, “Getting Angry.” There is support for the endeavor in other fields as well. The philosopher Errol Bedford argued in a classic paper that emotion concepts are not only psychological but have to be understood in the context of a wide range of social relationships, institutions, and concepts (“Emotions”). See also Harré,
Physical Being;
and S. Williams,
Emotion and Social Theory.

49. Crapanzano,
Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire,
232.

50. Ibid., 235.

51. Drawing on his expertise in developmental psychology, William Reddy argues that emotional expressions (he calls them emotives), like performatives, change the world because they change the speaker and his or her feelings
(The Navigation of Feeling,
96–111).

52. Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” 97.

53. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle gives us some markers to follow in the maze of terms used in ordinary English to designate mental states like moods: “Moods … monopolize. To say that [a person] is in one mood is …tosaythat he is not in any other. To be in a conversational mood is not to be in a reading, writing or lawn-mowing mood”
(The Concept of Mind,
99). But to say that moods monopolize is not to say they are all equally intense. As I mentioned, Clifford Geertz stresses the variation in intensity among mood states, some of which can “go nowhere.”

54. Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” 96.

55. Ibid., 97.

56. Elizabeth Lunbeck, personal communication, October 2003. Karl Jaspers, writing in 1913, spoke of depressive states as involving a “loss in productivity which may be transient or lasting”; hypomanic states as involving “exceptional productivity, of the richest creativeness”
(General Psychopathology,
1:217). For historical analysis of the concept of the will in the nineteenth century, see Berrios, “The Psychopathology of Affectivity.”

57. E. Sullivan, “Mood in Relation to Performance.”

58. Sass, “Affectivity in Schizophrenia.”

59. Ibid.

60. Anthropologist Janis Hunter Jenkins's work on schizophrenia speaks directly and perceptively to this issue. She stresses the complexity of emotion in the experience of a person with schizophrenia and the possible role of a disjunction between such a person's facial expression and his or her subjective experience. See Jenkins, “Schizophrenia as a Paradigm Case for Understanding Fundamental Human Processes,” 42–44.

61. Quoted in Sass,
Madness and Modernism,
50.

62. Ibid., 26.

63. Writing in 1926, Sophus Thalbitzer described this watershed, which his own work on manic depression had helped bring about, as follows: “The fact that the disorders of mood have hitherto not been much used to throw light on normal emotional life is due to a great extent to the relatively new classification of the mood-psychoses as an independent, clearly defined group of diseases. This does not mean that the great changes in emotional life which appear in almost all forms of mental disease, had hitherto been overlooked; but the dividing line had not been clearly and consciously drawn between the mental diseases in which the abnormal mood for the main part is secondary in relation to the primary changes in the intellectual sphere (hallucinations and illusions), and the mental disorders in which the distortion of mood in one direction or the other is the essential factor”
(Emotion and Insanity,
41).