Power-to and Embodiment

Gabor Mate (2003), When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection

• "Higher levels of stress cause higher cortisol output via the HPA axis, and cortisol inhibits the activity of the inflammatory cells involved in wound healing" (pg. 36). 
• "The higher the level of economic development, it seems, the more anaesthetized we have become to our emotional realities. We no longer sense what is happening in our bodies and cannot act in self-preserving ways. The physiology of stress eats away at our bodies not because it has outlived its usefulness but because we may no longer have the competence to recognize its signals" (ibid).
• "Emotional competence is what we need to develop if we are to protect ourselves from the hidden stresses that create a risk to health, and it is what we need to regain if we are to heal" (pg. 38).
• "The body's hormonal system is inextricably linked with the brain centres where emotions are experienced and interpreted. In turn, the hormonal apparatus and the emotional centres are interconnected with the immune system and the nervous system, These are not four separate systems, but one super-system that functions as a unit to protect the body from external invasion and from disturbances to the internal physiological condition. It is impossible for any stressful stimulus, chronic or acute, to act on only one part of the super-system" (pg. 61).

Franco 'Bifo' Berardi (2009), The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy

• In Italy in the late-1970's, happiness, rather than depression/alienation, became the best weapon against capitalism: "rich, aware, productively and culturally autonomous, liberated individualities deviated with rage from the ideology of sacrifice and the work ethic: work was denounced as a pure hierarchical repetition, deprived of any intelligence or creativity" (pg. 93).
• From an Oedipal to a post-Oedipal paradigm: "The dominant pathologies of our times are no longer neurotic, determined by a repression of libido, but rather schizo-pathologies, produced by the expressive explosion of the just do it" (pg. 175).
• "It is true that biology dominates human action, but human action also determines biology. The question is to understand which choices (epistemic, technologic, and finally instinctual and aesthetic) a conscious human mind will make" (pg. 198).
• "Control over the body is no longer exerted by molar mechanisms of constriction, but by micro machines that are incorporated into the organism through psychpharmacology, mass communication and the predisposition to informatics interfaces. This means that control over the body is exerted by the modeling of the soul" (pg. 200).
• "Overcoming depression implies some simple steps: the deterritorialization of the obsessive refrain, the re-focalization and change of the landscape of desire, but also the creation of a new constellation of shared beliefs, the common perception of a new psychological environment and the construction of a new model of relationships" (pg. 217).
• "In the days to come, politics and therapy will be one and the same. The people will feel hopeless and depressed and panicked, because they can't deal with the post-growth economy and they will miss our dissolving modern identity. Our cultural task will be to attend to these people and to take care of their trauma showing them the way to pursue the happy adaptation at hand. Our task will be the creation of social zones of human resistance, zones of therapeutic contagion" (pg. 220).
• "The process of autonomy should not be seen as Aufhebung [sublation or overcoming], but as Therapy. In this sense, it is neither totalizing nor is it intended to destroy or abolish the past" (pg. 221).

Jon Beasley-Murray (2010), Post-Hegemony: Political Theory and Latin America. Reprinted ed.

• "Affect marks the passage whereby one body becomes another body, either joyfully or sorrowfully; affect always takes place between bodies, at the mobile threshhold between affective states as bodies either coalesce or disintegrate, as they become other to themselves" (pg. 128).
• "Resistance is no longer a matter of contradiction, but rather of the dissonance between would-be hegemonic projects and the immanent processes that they always fail to represent" (pg. 136).
• "Politics is no longer a matter of the consent and negotiation implied by the hegemonic contract; it is a (non)relation or incompatibility between processes of capture and affective escape" (pg. 139).
• "The politics of habit is not the clash of ideologies within a theater of representation. It is a politics that is immanent and corporeal, that works directly through the body. Yet habit is primary; it is not an effect or a consequence of political processes that take place elsewhere" (pg. 181).
• "Power's most successful strategies are precisely those that will never emerge into discourse, that go without saying in everyday life's routine rhythms (pg. 187-8).
• "What habitus reproduces is our corporeal assent to power's legitimacy and to the unequal distribution of capital that it secures" (pg. 192).
• "We stand, walk, feel, and think to collective rhythms synchronized and orchestrated at a pace set by social institutions. But it is also in these everyday practices that we might realize the potential opened up by the temporal slippage inherent in habitus and by the dissonances that result. Even in the most routine activities, a new autonomy arises, and new habits" (pg. 202).
• "The immanent, guiding principle of the multitude's self-constitution is fluidity and flux, but this is not a seething mass of atomized individuals; instead, mobility and motility maximize opportunities for contact and encourage the formation of habitual patterns shaped by affect rather than the force of law. The multitude is eminently sociable: as the subject of constituent power, it produces society itself" (pg. 250).

Richard J.F. Day (2005), Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements.

• One concept of community (from Hegel) is a unified totality, based on a universal morality; however, "just as the rejection of coercive morality need not necessarily lead to passive nihilistic relativism, so the rejection of Hegelian community need not necessarily lead to an anti-social individualism. In poststructuralist theory, it leads to something quite different that can be approached via the concept of singularity" (pg. 180).
• The coming communities: "at their radical limit, they present that which cannot be represented, that which must not signify - they are the disavowed, unconscious underside of globalizing capital, the Real that, just as it must be repressed, must just as surely return" (pg. 183).

Catherine Malabou (2008), What Should We Do With Our Brain?

• Epigenetic changes are possible because the brain and biology are not fully determined: the anatomical structures of brains are completely genetically-based, but the neurological organization is dependent on experience.
• We make our brains, but we do not know it.
• Brains are plastic, but not infinitely flexible: they are not blank slates that can be simply molded at will by employers.
• “Humans make their own brain but they are doing so” (pg. 8).
• “Today, the true sense of plasticity is hidden, and we tend constantly to substitute for it its mistaken cognate, flexibility” (pg. 12).
• “What flexibility lacks is the resource of giving form, to invent or even to erase an impression, the power to style. Flexibility is plasticity minus its genius” (pg. 12).
• “Even if all brains resemble each other with respect to their anatomy, no two brains are identical with respect to their history...Repetition and habit play a considerable role, and this reveals that the response of the nervous circuit is never fixed. Plasticity thus adds the functions of artist and instructor in freedom and autonomy to its role as sculptor” (pg. 24).
• “The concept of plasticity has an aesthetic dimension (sculpture, malleability), just as much as an ethical one (solicitude, treatment, help, repair, rescue) and a political one (responsibility in the double movement of the receiving and the giving of form). It is therefore inevitable that at the horizon of the objective descriptions of brain plasticity stand questions concerning social life and being together” (pg. 30).
• “Plasticity, between determinism and freedom, designates all the types of transformation deployed between the closed meaning of plasticity (the definitive character of form) and its open meaning (the malleability of form). It does this to such a degree that cerebral systems today appear as self-sculpted structures that, without being elastic or polymorphic, still tolerate constant self-reworking, differences in destiny, and the fashioning of a singular identity” (pg. 31).
• “The primary qualities of assemblies of neurons are their mobility and their multifunctionality” (pg. 44).
• “The absence of centrality and hierarchy evoked above...the absence of clear and localized conflict, and the necessity of being mobile and adaptable constitute new factors of anxiety, new psychosomatic symptoms, new causes of severe neurasthenia” (pg. 48).
• Proposes a "biological alter-globalism."

Social Beings

• Sociological critics of modernity argued that large cities produced anonymity: a kind of 'generalized otherness' is caused by having such a large mass of people who have never met before, which was contrasted to rural towns and settlements where communities were closely knit. Urban metropolises were supposedly anomic and impersonal. Today, that analysis is no longer valid: within urban centres, distinctive neighbourhoods have developed with close relationships. People's consciousness and habits are more developed through the closeness, which produces affect rather than detachment. The place where the real anomie and alienation exists is in the suburbs, with the added twist that it the isolation is due less to of the density of the population, than to the sprawl of street, shopping, and housing design. People don't normally talk to their neighbours or develop close ties. They don't develop local mores and aesthetics like urban communities do. They are less ethnically diverse, and more likely to be dominated by mass-culture. The numbing of human potential through mindless routine makes communication static and boredom the norm. Thus, is no coincidence that the majority of social movements bypass suburban residents, or force the more conscious ones to travel long distances. And suburbanites are rarely socialized enough to effectively participate: the need for easy-to-consume solutions produces a lack of energy and inability to effectively struggle. But since the majority of the population lives in suburbs, no movement that seriously seeks social change can ignore the plight of people living there.
• It's enjoyable to have as many good interactions as possible, to build and share social worlds with other people. And there is no substitute for face-to-face, fully-embodied communication for that. I don't want to hide from real people behind a computer screen, mediated by thousands of meaningless signs and identities. There's no responsibility for your actions in that: it is complete freedom, but complete alienation. Reality can be coded, but the code needs to be balanced by one's actual experience. If that experience is the problem, if it's not possible to have good interactions, then as painful as that is, it will constantly derail living life unless some progress is made. You can start from anywhere in a virtual reality, but every moment spent is taking away from the value your life could potentially have now. I promise that being in the present will be vastly more meaningful than anything the virtual world could offer you, and will open new paths. Interpersonal skills, like technical skills and the ability to act on your own needs, are essential to making life more enjoyable.
• I admit my flaws and remain aware of them. I do my best to change the little habits and behaviours that reproduce them, when it is possible. If it isn't, I don't get frustrated, but I do have an image of where I should be that I would like to achieve. If someone points out a flaw, I don't get hurt or offended, but I ideally respond: what could I really have done otherwise, given the influences on my decision-making abilities so far? To put this another way: if you get defensive when problems are pointed out that affect you, would you really want other people to suffer from the same condition? Would you really recommend it, for example, if you had children you were trying to raise?
• Even the most serious or stoic person has a less serious unconscious playing beneath the surface. It is amusing to see this undermine their pretenses.
• One of the most important goals the left can follow is the care of the self: affective expression, emotional well-being, and personality development.
• Being healthy, by developing good habits, and avoiding self-destructive behaviour, such as depending on TV, food, sugar, etc., solves many problems.

The Effects of Stress

- I accept the biological model of human potential, but not biological determinism. It is important to minimize the sources of chronic stress in life, including the internal(ized) ones, and how it can affect other people around you. Chronic stress leads to an over-stimulated hypothalmic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis system, which leads to a weakened body. Science has only just become aware of the difference between chronic and acute forms of stress, and the ability for similar 'stress profiles' to be passed on between generations. If worldviews, communication styles, and problem-solving strategies are all part of peoples' coping mechanisms, then in learning and being socialized, we are also acquiring certain stress-responses that embody and signify our ability to achieve things.
- You don't even have to be constantly active or coerced to be stressed. It's stressful just to sit around and do nothing all day: you are wasting your ability to do things, to learn new things. TV watchers: if you're not going to at least watch a show with a friend, or have it be relevant to some sort of human connection, do you honestly watch TV because you enjoy it, or because you have nothing left in your boring, fatiguing, unfulfilling life?
- Never be content with processing information about the world. Experience should always be significant and always create resonance between people. Affect and imagination are intrinsic to the human conditions, in which we are ecstatically projecting the new against the background of what we already know about ourselves. Self-knowledge is only the starting point, and very provisional: if you tried to get all the 'data' about yourself in view, you'd end up fitting it into one or perhaps two very small boxes (paradigms, models, etc.) that only reveal certain aspects of your life. You are an ensemble of social relations: as long as you're part of that, affect and imagination will always be with you, because society isn't a closed network of information. But if you alienate yourself from your social creativity, boredom will hit you.
- I showed some autonomy. Oh, I'm so sorry it put you in a manic state!... In the future, I will immediately make myself docile and incapable, so that I don't make you uncomfortable. Because I know you care about me that much. Seriously, can I be more than just your object of concern? If you can only understand me in your terms, and make no effort to imagine me beyond the scope of your conception, you aren't doing what is best for me, aren't allowing me to become all that I could. What is most frustrating is that the category you use to understand yourself implies you are perfect at this, and always have good intentions, but neither of those things is always there. This isn't a criticism, it's just a statement of fact. But your ego prevents you from seeing that you betray your good intentions. You say things are going well, because you want them to be, while you hide the reality: this normalizes a pathological state. What if relating to you in your terms inherently limits my potential? If you see the world as a depressed/stressed person would, not fulfilling your full potential, and you agree that is not the ideal way for people to develop, then wouldn't the authority you have over me just be reproducing that same condition?

Being Honest With Yourself

In searching for a better life, some people cannot see the problems they have now. A sense of failure, or of unconstructive criticism by others, can activate a very defensive mentality, where a person jealously guards the little they feel they have achieved against all 'threats.' The result is that this person might try to reduce others down to their current psychological condition in order to reaffirm that it's 'not so bad' for themselves: they have to question everyone else's achievement, always with scepticism and a lingering sense of fear. They unfortunately see opponents and challenges - which everyone needs to some extent - as enemies, or as potentially oppressive. Because awareness of an issue is too painful for them, the person loses themselves in mindless distractions, hoping that the issue will not come up again. This is very sad to see. Bad things happen to people, things they are not necessarily responsible for, but that they really should struggle against. For example, chronic stress, such as from job and financial insecurity, usually has an impact on the quality of the home environment for children growing up, because peoples' moods will lead them toward anger/irritability, impatience, and/or confusion. However, because most parents want to love children and provide for them, they blind themselves to their own shortcomings. Likewise, if you're younger, you shouldn't necessarily expect more mature people to treat you as a real equal - realistically, you are only potentially equal in the future. Another example is: when someone doesn't have a likable personality, they shouldn't resent others not wanting to spend time with them. It's nothing personal, really, just a reflection of human needs. If someone is not capable of meaningful interaction, it doesn't mean that they don't have the potential to achieve it in the future. Faults are not eternal, but they do require effort to avoid. We need to live in a society where criticisms and personal development won't be perceived as attacks on individuals. I also think it's very useful to strive for "power-to" (doing/relationships) against "power-over" (control of things) even though one always has the potential to change into the other, and even though we all can relate to both at the same time in different ways.