| Steven Meinking on 1 Sep 2000 15:43:58 -0000 |
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| Re: <nettime> Take the Red Pill |
Erik: Excellent text! I agree with you completely: that current (and past?) drug sympathies are spawned from the constraining grip of a drug culture that functions from a determinate platform of normalization, a dangerous platform, in that its very foundations are rarely appraised critically, if noticed at all. I was surprised to see you mention critiques of psychoanalysis in this context. While psychoanalysis and its discourse remains at the core of present day psychology/psychiatry, psychology/psychiatry took a radically different turn with the advent of drug therapy. Up to the time of his death and afterward, Freud was constantly ridiculed and criticized for not forging psychoanalysis into a "true" scientific discipline, and thus for failing to provide a scientific ground for psychology. It wasn't until psychology and its discourse were institutionalized, until psychology as science had settled on a concept of "normal," until psychologists became psychiatrists and engineered a regimen of drug treatments for "abnormal" conditions that could be changed through treatment, that psychology finally earned a seat at the table of "normal science." And it is for this capability to physically manipulate and biologically alter the body according to its own scientific norms, that psychology is lauded and held in great esteem today - _not_, on the contrary, on the merit that psychology is able to actually _cure_ anyone. Our endearment to psychology and its legitimation rests only in its apparent ability to help one _cope_ normally with their environment. So it should come as no surprise that consumers flock to prescription drugs, over-the-shelf drugs, self-medication, herbal remedies, etc. to gain that competitive _edge_ in our culture, an edge which ideally enables one to cope at or above the "normal" level of the general population. And with the release of the new over-the-shelf anxiety drugs, it appears that the border-limit of the "normal" is once again expanding. Yours in discourse, Steven Meinking http://www.mp3.com/overtone # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]