The Blue Monkey Review

A few weeks ago my daughters and I drove out to Shanksville, to see the Flight 93 memorial. It isn’t very far from where we live—less than an hour’s driving time along route 30. On 9/11, after having the images of the collapsing towers burned into my long-term memory, I drove to a meeting at a coffee shop that looks onto route 30. Emergency vehicles kept rushing past, heading east toward Shanksville. What a time of shock and disbelief! The student whom I met that morning told me, when she finally arrived, that there were reports of car bombs in Pittsburgh. People really were afraid to do anything. After the morning’s events, you could believe almost anything.

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Thanks to the discussion that resulted from last week’s posting, I decided to improve my mind by reading Michel Foucault’s essay/chapter entitled “Panopticism” in Discipline and Punish. It contains a remarkable discussion of an idea of Jeremy Bentham’s, the panopticon. This “all seeing machine” was Bentham’s plan for a prison in which the cells would be arranged in tiers around a central yard, with all of the cells having windows on the outside and inside. At the center of the circular yard would stand a tower with windows all around. This simple device would allow the warder (or anyone else) in the tower to see everything that the prisoners did, while the prisoners could not see the warder, could not even tell if it was the warder or someone else or no one at all watching them. Consequently, the constant visibility of the prisoners, and the invisibility of their guardians, would make control simple, almost automatic.

I don’t know if anyone ever built a prison on this design, and if so if the idea worked. Prison construction in the U.S. has boomed in recent decades, so a simple and automatic means of controlling the prison population would seemingly attract lots of attention. But the actual existence of a panopticon really is irrelevant as far as Foucault is concerned (though, he never tells us that in so many words, instead leaving the impression that panoptic structures are all over the place). Because the panopticon serves as a metaphor for the use of power in western societies since the 17th century. Foucault points to the persistent organization and ordering or humanity in every possible manner (but especially in imagination, in what we might call discourses, perhaps?). And this order serve to regularize and control the humanity that is so ordered. A system that orders must investigate, study, dissect, know what it is ordering—the subject must become transparent, seen in every possible way and at every possible time. Social structures flow into political structures flow into police structures. They are all panoptic, viewing everything from the obscure perch of social statistics or science, and they all serve to establish control over what they examine. At least, this is what I think Michel Foucault is telling us. It’s an interesting and useful perspective. In what follows, I want to try to use it to discuss a peculiarity of contemporary society known as “blogging.” And, of course, I want to take issue with it.

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Posted by at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Several of my blogs this year have dealt with therapy and the therapeutic culture (the TC) in one way or another. A recent e-mail from a regular reader makes it clear that my loose and inexact use of the term therapy has become a cause for concern. One defense I can make is that many people, some historians included, use the term history [i.e., a disciplined study of the past] in wildly meaningless ways. The current administration in Washington has been particularly irresponsible in making claims about something it calls the “lessons of history.” But I suppose that is no excuse for vagueness on my part.

I have no objection to therapy as a practice in the field of mental health. Many people have benefited from therapy or. When I go to therapy, I do it voluntarily and with a clear sense of what I want to gain. The therapist, or counselor, takes a particular role defined by her field of expertise and by the regulations of the therapist’s guild. The therapeutic exchange has the potential to become a search for clear thinking and deeper understanding on one’s self and one’s emotional responses. If you haven’t tried it, I recommend it.

But it isn’t actual therapy that compels me to rant about “therapy.” Rather, it is the saturation of contemporary U.S. culture with terms and metaphors drawn from therapy, and the even deeper alliance of therapeutic notions with consumer capitalism. We should not refer to the rapid proliferation of the therapeutic metaphor as therapy, but as “therapeutisitic.” So, for instance, when a local radio station plays a commercial that explains why I have a problem with my [car / love life / debt management / looks] and in 60 seconds introduces me to simple and certain means of eliminating this blight, I’ve involuntarily experienced a therapeutic moment administered by someone who has no credentials to perform therapy. In fact, it isn’t therapy. It’s therapeutistic. Or when a store manager who has taken a course in customer care soothingly responds to my complaints, and uses communication tools that signal to me that he understands my point of view, he is providing me a therapeutic environment. However, I don’t want a therapeutic environment, and it’s not really a therapeutic environment, because I haven’t sought therapy and the store manager isn’t interested in my mental health. It’s therapeutistic. But, I’m not European and don’t have a degree in post-modernism, so I’ll have to settle for real words. When I write therapy here, or anywhere else, I will leave it to you to decide if I mean therapy per se, therapy qua therapy, actual, genuine therapy, or if I really mean actions, words, or symbols that are simply therapeutistic.

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Posted by at 7:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Any student of U.S. culture today must recognize the pervasiveness of therapeutic systems and language in daily life. At my gym the television that entertains the stationary bikers and elliptical trainees always shows the same channel, so every morning it makes the transition from “Good Morning America” to Regis and Kelly to Dr. Phil McGraw. Dr. Phil, although the latest and currently the most popular TV therapist, joins Dr. Laura and Dr. Ruth and a long line of radio talk therapy shows. We talk about our feelings these days, something my parents never did as far as I can remember. And when we talk about them we use words like “depressed” rather than sad, lonely, blue, sick, nostalgic, or even melancholy. A child might feel happy but describe herself (and, unfortunately be described by her teacher/parents/counselor) as “hyper.” Therapeutic language, and therapy of one kind or another, has taken the place of an older religious way of appropriating experience and understanding the world, a vision that pitted cosmic forces in the struggle between sin and salvation, heaven and hell.

That having been said, however, another feature of the therapeutic culture in the early 21st century is the seemingly seamless convergence of Christianity and therapy. Katja, in a blog entitled “Magazine Digest,” gave a thumbnail review of an article that she had read in a popular Canadian men’s magazine, Toro. The author noted the use of therapeutic terms in business, but he also included the observation of a friend of his that many of the terms had made been taken over from religious education. These include terms like “closure” and “community” (not as in “the Shaker Community in Canterbury, NH”; rather, this refers to individuals who have something in common but as a group lack all other characteristics of community, as in “the business community,” “the gay community,” “the political community,” “the cyber community,” and so forth). This observation does not contradict my previous judgment that therapy seems more important than sin and salvation. Some of the largest and least compatible of the subdivisions of American Christianity, like the Roman Catholic Church and American evangelicals have turned into a Christian therapeutic community. And while their theology remains unchanged, the therapeutic practice has changed the meaning of Christian dogma. God offers therapy, and therapy offers us God.

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Only a very few civilized people are capable of existing without reliance on others or even capable of coming to an independent opinion. You cannot exaggerate the lack of people’s inner lack of resolution and craving for authority. The extraordinary increase in neuroses since the power of religion has waned may give you a measure of it.
Sigmund Freud, “The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy” (1910)

One of the self-evident truths of the contemporary punditry, accepted by journalists at Time and professors of cultural studies and executives on Madison Avenue, is that we live in a “therapeutic” culture. Outside the punditosphere ordinary people conduct their lives without worrying or thinking much about it or even knowing about it. But inside the orbit of ideamongers the therapeutic culture stands as an article of faith, or, more appropriately, an analytical paradigm. I know that I took the t. c. for granted myself for years without exactly knowing what it meant, though I never would have admitted that and thus forfeited my journeyman’s card in the pundit’s guild. I finally had my road to Damascus experience with the therapeutic culture concept when I read an article by T.J Jackson Lears in which he explained that this did not refer to the idea that we are all crazy and in need of therapy (although, I’m not so sure about that one—see last week’s blog). Rather, “the therapeutic world view” that Lears discussed “is a constellation of concerns about self, energizing a continuous, anxious quest for well-being. From the therapeutic view, well-being is no longer a matter of morality but of physical and psychic health.” In other words, our culture provides us with a continuous sense that something is wrong, that we are not quite leading full and complete lives. At the same time the culture provides many resources that seemingly promise well-being, health, completeness. One source of the power of this therapeutic culture, then, is our assumption that such a thing as mental health exists.

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Posted by at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the glass and wonder.
Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister (1949)

Like everybody else, I grew up in a world where there was no mental illness. Or, there was so little of it that it could all fit inside the few mental institutions that no one ever saw anyway so they might as well have not existed. Yes, there were wild children at school, but they (okay, we) were treated not as young psychos but as young criminals. My family proved the point. Whether you checked on us longitudinally (back to the first land speculators chased out of Virginia into the old southwest) or latitudinally (crackers, hillbillies, and lumpenproletarians spread from Arkansas to California), everyone in my family was just fine. I won’t make any claims about IQ tests, but I’m sure we would have all done the family proud on a lie detector test and (if such a thing existed) on a test of mental health. And what held for the Spurlocks held for all humanity, at least the white American variety of humanity I had any familiarity with. Certainly the Communist system must have driven people crazy with their lack of personal freedom and constant shortages of consumer goods. But, of course, that did not affect me, my family, or anyone else I knew. So, case closed. The world was so mentally healthy we never gave it a minute’s thought.

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Posted by at 7:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I had planned to write about love for more than a week. This week, though, as I thought more about the project the Time and the New Yorker that arrived in my mailbox both had texts that seemed valuable. In the end, my ruminations refer most often to the articles in Time. But, my impetus for giving this topic some attention, particularly the connection between love and addiction, goes back a couple of months when a therapist, in fact my therapist, suggested that I look at a book entitled Addicted to Love. I never managed to lay hands on that book, but I have done quite a bit of other reading on afflicted love and even more thinking about it. No, I won't be sharing any of my private life with the world community. I'm sure that's a relief to everyone.

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Posted by at 8:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)