Friday, December 30, 2011

Thinking Through Aspergers: Alienation & Community


"You said you were 'close.' 
What were you close to? The group? People?"
"Please don't make this a special episode about me"

Community, Contemporary American Poultry

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To dispel misnomers, I do not wish to here clinically examine or speculate on aspergers, but rather to "think through" aspergers, and see what it might help us articulate about the experience of alienation and community. 

A great example of this sort of thinking through occurs on the NBC comedy 'Community' in which the character Abed Nadir is often unofficially diagnosed as portraying aspergers by other characters and by the shows creator Dan Harman (himself open about being clinically diagnosed). In commentaries for several of the episodes and in interviews, however, Harman voiced pride in avoiding ever trying to strictly classify Abed as having a specific condition or to 'run down the check-list' although he is also proud that the character has come to be respected and admire by 'members of a certain community' for not only demonstrating the challenges but also the dignity of functioning with aspergers. He may be the most liked and put together persons on the show, comments Harman.


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Thinking through aspergers, while not trying to over-determine a person based on a clinical mindset, Abed routinely performs the 'meta' commentary on the television-ism, media-ism, philosophy-ism, writing-ism, that is being attempted on the show. Harman comments how Abed allows him to call himself out on things which appear overly theatrical or pedagogical, and to explain things without the need for breaking the 4th wall in the way many mock-reality TV shows such as the Office or Modern Family do. One issue with this, which Abed ends up calling himself out on, is when the Meta-Language attempts to escape itself by being Meta about itself. In an episode where Abed attempts to make a movie about him making a movie about him making a movie etc. etc. etc. he ends up becoming a self-titled Christ figure, and explaining his theory about how meta-movie making and theology become inevitably recursive.  This enclosed, if not narrowing circle, wonderfully comments on a issue which thinking through Abed/Aspergers allows us to approach: logic can become alienating.

Logicians are probably familiar with the criticism to "get out of your head" and there is much to learn from that. The modern tradition of philosophy following Descartes "Cogito Ergo Sum" and on through Psychoanalysts such as Freud, Lacan, and Zizek run into the dilemma which is that by doubting everything outside their own thought, their thought becomes the engine of the universe. Even when moving into physical and meta-physical speculation, Zizek describes reality as a great mind, brought  into  being  spontaneously through an un-being, an un-God, which is in other words: an un-conscious. In this line of thought, we find not only that it becomes difficult to care about the world outside one's mind, something which Zizek often criticizes himself for. Furthermore, Zizek, following Lacan, in basing their existence out of a central lack, or nothingness, which perpetuates only by narrowly erring away from the void on each pass, we can see the circle-game at play. Some creeds of Buddhism likewise follow this logic, but asserting existence as a wheel of suffering which the escape out or into nothingness is the ultimate goal.


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How is that Abed came to be one of the most endearing characters in Community? By not being perfectly logical. In the episode in which Abed becomes meta-meta, the story arc ends with Abed praying publicly for the narcissistic film he is making to be destroyed, a plea which is over-heard by another character who comes in and destroys the footage and the film cameras. As GK Chesterton writes in the Suicide of Thought chapter of Orthodoxy, to escape the perfectly circular logic of 'the madman' we must not try to argue with him but to get him to simply stop arguing/thinking and to simply do something else. It is the illogical wanderings of a happy person kicking the grass and humming a nonsensical tune which will get us out from trying to assert fantasies of perfect conspiracy and understanding over all reality. We escape Meta-Language when we walk away from trying to define the meaning of language. Also, when we ask for intervention.

We do not need to follow the theological under-tones of the Meta-Episode, but merely the self-contained Media(tion) and Community logic of the show to discover how Abed escapes his alienation. The first episodes after the Pilot, introduces Abed as a character who openly uses Media references and making movies as a performative language to allow him to communicate and make connections with others. His father, who initially disapproves of his choice in college majors, after seeing his first film project realizes the value of doing something, even if it has no inherent meaning, for the sake of allowing his son a means to connect with others. We can see Judith Butler's performativity exemplified by Abed who admits that what he is doing is theatrical but nonetheless enjoys it and employs the behavior as the best (if only) option available to him to accomplish things. Derrida seems to suggest a similar conclusion in his study of structure, sign and play. There is a sense in which one cannot even say "there is no meta-language" because that itself becomes a meta-language. One can only perform performing and find some sense of irony and game in that.


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From a linguistic and a material level, all things are mediated, and so our connections with others as we enter into understanding our languages and networks/communities we find that the words and objects which constitute us and allow us to connect with others are "not our own." We do not and cannot come into being without an outside system and we cannot continue to live without taking in things (food, air, affection, care, etc) from outside ourselves and then expelling them. 

By saying that Abed depends on Media to connect with others, or his Community to connect with others, is really no more than saying we all that we all depend on games/things which are a common go-betweens/languages in order to communicate. You may say that Abed is crip, because of his need for these prostheses, but then we are all crip; but in different ways at different times/places. Becoming aware of this may in fact help us to better help ourselves and others. 

As Abed concludes the quote above: "Everyone else needs my help. That's what people don't get. They need to connect with me. I just need to be able to connect with people like you can, then I can make everyone happy." A bit optimistic, but thinking through optimism may need to be the focus of another post.


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Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Remembering the Past in Out of the Silent Planet


"A pleasure is full grown 
only when it is remembered... 
You say you have poets in your world. 
Do they not teach you this?"

CS Lewis 

Out of the Silent Planet


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I. Forgetting the Past

Another semester is over, a blur, which in places is hard to remember. Another return home for the holidays, a queer confrontation with the past. With Fall term papers over, as well as numerous applications sent for jobs and academic opportunities for my friends and me, it is often hard to remember where the last couple months went. Part of that is neurological/chemical. In times of intense emotion, when endorphin and adrenaline are surging through constricted blood vessels in the body, we can do a lot in what appears to be a much shorter period of time. The eyes dilate, the brain's processing is heightened, and we could very well deliver a KO against a bus that is blocking the cross-walk. Good for the moment, bad for memory. 

Likewise, lack of sleep  is a common partner to periods of stress and greatly inhibits the complexity, creativity, and speed of thought, in addition to being absolutely terrible for memory production. Sleep, neurologists generally agree, helps the brain process the events of the day and establish the networks which will allow for memories to be recalled at a later date. Little sleep, little memory. Often why the day after conferences I may earnestly ask "how did my paper go?" I am not (necessarily) being vain, I may not remember it very well. We have often had that experience of remembering stepping onto stage and the rest being a big blur. In clinical terms, this is called Trauma.

If the brain usually functions in such a way as to be able to retain certain connections and impressions, while letting others pass over without significant impact, trauma exhibits the interesting characteristics of being so memorable that it over-loads the system so as to short-circuit storage. It can be pleasurable as well as painful. An emotional first-date and a funeral may both be hard to remember at a later date because in the moment our mental networks were disoriented by intense jouissance.

The effect of such trauma is also interesting, as the lack of memory might seem like only a minor problem or even a blessing which helps us move on with our lives without the burden of the intense emotional baggage. This may in many situations be the case, but complications can arise, among other avenues, from the incomplete storage of memory. The body has a memory it is holding on to but can't process out, so it becomes a cyclical occurrence. The traumatic event is relived. The traumatic event is relived. The traumatic event is relived, and it can cause cycles of hurtful behavior. The army vet hears a car back fire and begins uncontrollably shaking and taking cover. The graduate student calls up Mr. Bad-News to hook up, takes up smoking again, or just has panic attacks for weeks after a particularly bad round of papers because they were unable to process the bodily/mental intensity in the moment.

This irony is exemplified in ritual terms by the Roman practice of Damnatio Memoriae in which a person hated by the state is not only killed, all record and memorial of him is destroyed as well. The intent was to erase the person's presence in the past, the now, and the future completely. What often came of this was that these persons took on an infamy and are passed down to historians through hidden but public references. By making it so that the person was hard to remember, the memory created by and around their absence took on a mythic dimension. This not only speaks to the allure of the forbidden, but the way memory encapsulates and continually revisits sites of trauma.

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II. Memorials and Pharmakons

During the Holidays we repeat these rituals and mark time in relation to the past, to perform an act in the present and to affirm that this ritual will be practiced again in the future. For me, in addition to being one of the few things that has made the dark, dreary months of winter a little more cheery, the Holidays also remind me of how terrible my memory is. While I can recall the book and page numbers, even the place on the page, where I read a certain quote or repeat from memory the lines of a favorite play or movie, the details of events often are lost to me. This has lead me personally to blog, facebook, tweet, buy souvenirs, and take a lot of photos. It has been commented that I will have a very well documented life when all is said and done; but usually its less aimed at future generations remembering what I have done, and more so I can. Thus I can only conclude that societies enjoy rituals and holidays for very similar reasons. It is a personal point of relief, and a public point of frustration, observing how quick society forgets things.

However: is it worth it to remember? what can memorials possibly give? A chief irony and use of memory/memorials is that they re-present things which no longer exist. They are performances, like fictions and fantasies. They are not the things they claim are important and for which they claim to stand in. Hence the horror many people feel for seeing statues carved, portraits hung or biographies delivered on their lives, while they are still alive. It is not simply a matter of humility, its often a matter of threat. By remembering me and encapsulating me in this way, are you not eschewing all that I am/doing right now and in the future? Are you not erasing me as you inscribe my memorial?


This is the concern which prompted Plato/Socrate's discussion in the Phaedrus, which Jacques Derrida took up in Plato's Pharmacy. Articulating his objection to having his teachings written down, Socrates explains to his interlocutor(s; including us) that putting words down into a more enduring material has the double threat of encouraging the loss of memory and the loss of control over the text by the author. This perhaps argues against Shakespeare's argument in the Sonnets that a poem shall live forever while the poet fades; and that we should prize the eternal over the temporary.

The formation of these "two" sides seem to depend on the issue which I have discussed often of alienation versus identification. Where the consider the poem a part of our body, our mental network, then it does in fact have the power to last longer (although not forever) than our brain tissue and to engage with other networks in far off places. Where we consider the poem separate from ourselves then we would not take comfort at its publication because it is no longer "in" us or our control. It has a life of its own now (which it had before but in a subjugated state) and may do "us" as much harm as good, as any other thing externalized to us may. Thus it may be said that in the ritual or memorial, we are brought together with those that we have lost. It is also true that the ritual, an event of the now, has become something very different from what it was. Not all rituals or memorials may bring the honor, use, or joy we might claim they deliver, and so we may chose to change the map of the past which we have created.


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III. Reliving the Past


The past is a queer thing. Normative visions of the past paint a picture of home. "Remember where you came from" and "Never forget who you are," things like that. What this seems to tell us is that things transform. That is a disorienting experience. You go home and you look back (at yourself), and it seems unfriendly or otherworldly beautiful. We don't need to fall into cliches about idealizing the past to account for this. The past is wonderful and awful. It is something familiar yet strange. It is something we cannot look at, speak about, or hold. We are its inheritors, and it is with us, but no longer what it was. Jonathan Gil Harris talks about Untimely Matter and Temporally Explosive Matter. In a sense, both in the Derridian sense, but also how Harris articulates the concept, all matter is in a sense untimely or explosive. We have discusses the Hole or the Chaos which in a sense constitutes what we can speculate is the material universe, which depends on a kind of timelessness. Things become multi-locational, in time and space and quality. Physicists such as Einstein and Hawking likewise suggest that Space-Time behaves in such a material, folding, mixing manner. This is to say, that the past is a queer thing in more than how we remember it, but in how it remains present to us. It is "lost" but more like how knight errants may be lost in the fairy realm of our present reality.

Thus dividing this place, in time, space, and quality, is performative. It is undermined as we assert it but it is difficult (if possible) to become constituted without the performance. With different ecologies/maps of space-time ever competing and interpenetrating, "home" or "here" serves like the pronoun "I" insofar as it defines a space which Sara Ahmed says we expand into and saturate; thus expelling and asserting "others" in the process. Memories then can be seen as the "other" in us, because it speaks to a place and a person which has been abjectively rejected from the here and now. It is little surprise then that we may look on them with wonder, fear and awe. We have no escape from the past, because we cannot become impenetrable. We have no essential exteriority to the past. Although we cannot escape the past, we may learn how to find a life livable with it.

This is in a sense, one possible way to conceive of "Hell" without necessarily asserting an "after-life" or "judgement" as such. It merely requires the assertion that all time is in a sense always-already present with us. Every act leading up to, participating, and reverberating off from our present actions are bound up together. We cannot escape our past or the futures it created. Nor can we escape our present. There is suffering, insofar as there is suffering. But there is also the hope that together, there may be a sense of goodness (or at very least justice) however it might be understood. Thus, defining what may be a livable, good, or just life is a project for many many more attempted projects. And yet for the moment, we may tentatively say, that there is some sort of ethical imperative to find a way to live the past and I would hope in a way which "betters" both the past and present. It requires in a sense recognizing the past for its stark identity, but also its mutability and activity in the present which may lead to forgiveness, even self-forgiveness.

We may see this in such performances as Renaissance Fairs or Sci-Fi Conventions, both play with the idea of the past as a hard thing but also play with it as a present thing which we can transform to suit our needs. Having a Queen Elizabeth I which defies documented gender/racial/etc data may not be "historical" but it is a type of memory; memory as a map which may be remade or altered to perform the ethical demands of the present rather than enforce a perpetuation of traced/inscribed violence. We give up one way of knowing the past for another. Sometimes and places we need the past to be hard and distant. Other times and places we need the past to be soft and close. Looking back on a semester of academic and non-academic trauma, memory and performances, I can say as CS Lewis did, that what it means will continue to become itself as I become cognizant of more past, presents, and futures. What joys and suffering I experienced then, what joys and suffering I experience now in recalling it, and how I will experience them when I see the fruit (or lack there of) that came from it will undoubtedly change. I take a certain amount of comfort that it will continue to be with me and thus be in a sense at my disposal. I also take a degree of frustration that, yes, even while on vacation, the labor of the past sticks with me and I cannot escape it. Or at least, what I can remember.


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More on the Space Trilogy
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