Bipolar Expeditions (48 page)

40. Michael Silverstein astutely puts his finger on how style is being deployed in U.S. political campaigns: “How does what impresses us as the very height of
illogic
have a processual ‘logic' of its own, such that successful politicians' discourse respects this logic? And where can we see these processes at work, where ‘issues' get lumped and turned into ‘message'—operators available for stylistic fashioning of image? How does a politician fashion ‘message' as a kind of magnet for sometimes randomly assembled ‘issues' that clump to it like iron filings arrayed in its magnetic field?”
(Talking Politics,
21).

41. Mendoza-Denton, “Key Terms in Language and Culture,” 235–36. Roman Jakobson elegantly analyzes the “pithy style” of the “brief and tenacious genre,” the Russian proverb, identifying phonological and grammatical features (“Notes on the Makeup of a Proverb”). See also Jakobson's “Baudelaire's ‘Les Chats'” for an analysis of stylistic elements of Baudelaire's “Les Chats” including rhyme, grammar, gender, phonetics, and semantics. Thanks to Renato Rosaldo for pointing me to these papers.

42. Jakobson categorized most forms of aphasia into two types, “the metonymical, concerned with external relations and the metaphorical, involving internal relations. While each of these two types of aphasia tends toward unipolarity, normal verbal behavior is bipolar. But any individual use of language, any verbal style, any trend in verbal art displays a clear predilection either for the metonymical or for the metaphorical device”
(Studies on Child Language and Aphasia),
48.

43. Jakobson,
On Language,
130. See also Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language.”

44. I am indebted to James Boon for telling me about Jakobson's work on style at an early point in my writing.

45. Jakobson,
The Framework of Language,
106.

46. In his characterization of “schizoid style,” Louis Sass is working toward a similar end. Describing the introverted, isolated person with “a sense of inner dividedness” as “schizoid,” Sass differentiates this aspect of a person from the psychotic condition of “schizophrenia.” The “schizoid” style is a “general style of character or personality that may be found to any degree and can be present in well-functioning and reasonably healthy persons. It is a style dominated by a certain hypersensitivity and vulnerability and by detachment from both self and world”
(Madness and Modernism,
100–101). Efforts to characterize a “style” go in a different direction from efforts to define pathology. Aspects of a style might, by particular criteria, be pathological. But the style can also be apprehended as a manner of being, a certain flavor characteristic of a person's way of going through life: “A particular style of being [involves] certain temperamental or emotional propensities and a distinct set of characteristic conflicts, concerns, and styles of psychological defense” (102).

47. The art historian E. H. Gombrich finds similar kinds of aesthetic patterning in the work of artists: “The personal accent of the artist is not made up of individual tricks of hand which can be isolated and described. It is again a question of relationships, of the interaction of countless personal reactions, a matter of distribution and sequences which we perceive as a whole without being able to name the elements in combination”
(Art and Illusion,
65–66). This does not stop us from trying: we cannot suppress “the active mind,” the “effort after meaning” because it “cannot be defeated without our world's collapsing into total ambiguity” (395). Gombrich is trying to capture something ineffable about style: we perceive it as a whole without being able to name the elements that are combined or to describe exactly how or when they are combined.

48. Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception,
143.

49. Ibid., 146.

50. Merleau-Ponty adds in a footnote that “the mechanics of the skeleton cannot, even at the scientific level, account for the distinctive positions and movements of my body”
(Phenomenology of Perception,
150).

51. Describing the way rules, customs, habits, and learning come together in complex ways in social life, the anthropologist Veena Das cites a vignette from Michael Gilsenan's ethnography about Lebanon. In the story, a young man performed an act of revenge with a style that, as Gilsenan puts it, included an “archetypal” gesture of indifference to his own safety. Das makes an important point that adds to our understanding of style: to become a man, the young hero had to find his own style of performing a heroic act because this individual style, rather than the enactment of a set part, is what called forth the exclamation from his elders, “You have returned a man!” (“Wittgenstein and Anthropology,” 177).

52. As Elias Canetti aptly puts it, “[T]he manic's transformations have a tremendous ease about them”
(Crowds and Power,
347).

53. My argument here is akin to Ann Stoler's account of colonial regimes, whose authority has been thought to rely on the rule of reason. She argues that Dutch rule in Indonesia also relied on the management of affective states, “public moods,” and the racial distribution of sentiments. See Stoler, “Affective States.”

C
HAPTER
3

1. See Collier, Maurer, and Suárez-Navaz, “Sanctioned Identities.” This article deals specifically with the role of Western legal practice in constituting personhood as ownership of the self and its capacities. D. W. Murray cautions against assuming too quickly that all foundational Western concepts posit an autonomous, unitary self. David Hume himself is cited as a philosopher who posited a noncontinuous, fragmentary self. See Murray, “What Is the Western Concept of the Self?”

2. The will played a large role in John Stuart Mill's mid-nineteenthcentury writings about human nature. He thought one could only “overcome the potentially vicious force of habit” by exercising the muscles of the will. This was central to the development of the self and of society: some cultures (such as India and others in the east) remained mired in habit or custom and stasis, but the destructive force of custom could be overcome by the exercise of choice. See Joyce,
The Rule of Freedom,
118–19.

3. Scull,
Social Order/Mental Disorder,
286–87.

4. Ibid., 88.

5. Ibid., 86.

6. Jasin, “Considering Off Meds.”

7. Icarus, “My Pdoc Emasculated Me.”

8. Acoftil, “Neurontin Stories?”

9. Gerth and Mills,
From Max Weber.

C
HAPTER
4

1. The importance of how linguistic categories are used here cannot be overestimated. Susan Gal states the point succinctly: “The notions of dominance and resistance alert us to the idea that the strongest form of power may well be the ability to define social reality, to impose visions of the world. And such visions are inscribed in language and most important enacted in interaction” (“Language, Gender, and Power,” 427).

2. This important concept is Mary Louise Pratt's. See her
Imperial Eyes,
6–7. It has been usefully developed by James Clifford to understand interactions between museum staff and members of native communities about the interpretation and display of objects in the museums' collections. See his
Routes,
188–219.

3. Luhrmann,
Of Two Minds,
especially 284–90. As part of my fieldwork, I sat in on many sessions of a class called Analytic Case Conference, which was designed to train medical residents in psychotherapy. The professor who taught this course and I are jointly writing a paper for publication about the pedagogical similarities between training students to do ethnography and training them to do psychotherapy. For accounts of diagnoses and treatments arrived at through interactions among physicians, nurses, and other staff in a psychiatric ward, see Rhodes,
Emptying Beds.
See also Estroff,
Making It Crazy.

4.
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary.
“A heavy sea in which large waves rise and dash upon the coast without apparent cause” (Oxford English Dictionary online).

5. For brevity, I have omitted some parts of the medical histories presented in rounds. These presentations are only a small part of the process of recording a case. Interviews of patient and family, observations by physicians and staff, discussions and reinterpretation are all involved in producing the written records that make up a case. The anthropologist and psychiatrist Robert Barrett has written a detailed and illuminating analysis of how the case record is produced in an Australian psychiatric hospital. See his
Psychiatric Team and the Social Definition of Schizophrenia,
107–42.

6. Slavoj
i
ek reveals the dynamic in this kind of coercion, calling it, in Lacanian terms, the “impotent gaze.” See his
Looking Awry,
72.

7. Rosenberg, “The Tyranny of Diagnosis,” 255.

8. Butler,
Bodies That Matter,
232.

9. Butler,
The Psychic Life of Power,
2; Foucault,
The History of Sexuality: Vol. 1
.

10. Butler,
The Psychic Life of
Power, 3, 19.

11. Although I am in sympathy with Butler's account, I argue that the strong linguistic emphasis of her account (as indicated by the linguistic terms in the quotes above) creates this trap unnecessarily. For Butler, it is primarily language whose terms provide the conditions for the possibility of social life. Such an emphasis is appropriate, perhaps, given her focus on the logically necessary conditions for social existence. But here I am aiming for an approach to knowledge formation based on “embedded knowledge” that “cannot be deduced from people's talk.” See Mol,
The Body Multiple,
15.

12. Butler,
Bodies That Matter,
237.

13. Billig,
Freudian Repression,
140. See also Cameron and Kulick, “Introduction.”

14. Gordon,
Ghostly Matters,
22, 206.

15. Kulick, “No,” 141.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. In psychiatry, “poor insight” is considered a common characteristic of psychopathology, especially of schizophrenia. An early discussion of the issue is A. Lewis, “The Psychopathology of Insight.” Psychologists have explored the effects of insight on patients' compliance with treatment recommendations and on the outcomes of treatment. See David, “Illness and Insight”; David, “Insight and Psychosis.”

20. African Americans' experience with medical experimentation in the early twentieth century, such as in the Tuskegee study, justifies Keith Burton's suspicions. In the Tuskegee study, four hundred poor, mostly illiterate black men were enrolled in a study of the natural history of syphilis. Even after penicillin became available as an effective treatment, the study continued so the researchers could observe the effects of late-stage syphilis. The study only ended in 1972 after a leak to the press. Mr. Burton does state three times that he was terrified of the unknown injections. On the history of the Tuskegee study, see Jones,
Bad Blood.
See also Reverby,
Tuskegee's Truths.

21. Austin,
How to Do Things with Words,
60. Emphasis in original.

22. Cameron and Kulick would argue that what is being done in all performatives involves the emergence of a subject. See their “Introduction.”

23. Austin,
How to Do Things with Words,
76.

24. Ibid. Emphasis in original.

25. Ahern, “The Problem of Efficacy,” 14.

26. Butler,
Bodies That Matter,
232.

C
HAPTER
5

1. Horwitz,
Creating Mental Illness,
57.

2. Ibid., 60.

3. Ibid., 74.

4. The DSM is required for bureaucratic reasons, but many physicians find it a very imperfect instrument. In my fieldwork, psychiatrists would informally describe the myriad emotional complexities hidden under the DSM's headings and subheadings in tones of considerable frustration.