S M O K I N G

[Guybrush]

I’m not really questioning your questioning the definition of health. It’s more where some of you seem to be driving at; there’s always a disquieting undercurrent of pro-drugs bunk whenever health is discussed here.

It’s fairly common knowledge that, as with much everything else, our conception of health is deeply culturally rooted, the culture of our time of course being defined primarily (or thoroughly, depending on whom you ask) by capitalism. That does not mean, however, that everything is up in the air. Medical professionals can still give a reasonable estimation of which human bodies are more well-functioning than others, which substances are probably going to harm your bodily functions more than others, and so on, so unless we want to play the relativism game ad nauseam it sure looks to me like this isn’t remotely the moot issue you make it out to be. Again, I’m not saying that the common definition of health is irrefutable by any means, but if there is an observable difference in functionality between the body of a former drug addict and that of a straight-edge pole-vaulter, the latter’s body functioning better (no quotes), it’s reasonable to deem the pole-vaulter’s body healthier (no quotes).

Which is where common sense enters the picture. Common sense, as it relates to this matter, is not about swallowing the mainstream definition of health hook, line and sinker, but about making prudent estimations based on likelihood: if every doctor tells you that ricin will kill you, it probably will; if every doctor tells you that crack messes with your body in any number of ways, it probably does. Easy-peasy.

I would like to add that a few catch-as-catch-can google searches, bringing forth statistics on why this or that notion of what is a healthy body is doubtful, does not a forceful debunk make. It’s like global warming: the science is in.

 

[gek-opel]

I’m not really questioning your questioning the definition of health. It’s more where some of you seem to be driving at; there’s always a disquieting undercurrent of pro-drugs bunk whenever health is discussed here.

It’s fairly common knowledge that, as with much everything else, our conception of health is deeply culturally rooted, the culture of our time of course being defined primarily (or thoroughly, depending on whom you ask) by capitalism. That does not mean, however, that everything is up in the air. Medical professionals can still give a reasonable estimation of which human bodies are more well-functioning than others, which substances are probably going to harm your bodily functions more than others, and so on, so unless we want to play the relativism game ad nauseam it sure looks to me like this isn’t remotely the moot issue you make it out to be. Again, I’m not saying that the common definition of health is irrefutable by any means, but if there is an observable difference in functionality between the body of a former drug addict and that of a straight-edge pole-vaulter, the latter’s body functioning better (no quotes), it’s reasonable to deem the pole-vaulter’s body healthier (no quotes).

Which is where common sense enters the picture. Common sense, as it relates to this matter, is not about swallowing the mainstream definition of health hook, line and sinker, but about making prudent estimations based on likelihood: if every doctor tells you that ricin will kill you, it probably will; if every doctor tells you that crack messes with your body in any number of ways, it probably does. Easy-peasy.

I would like to add that a few catch-as-catch-can google searches, bringing forth statistics on why this or that notion of what is a healthy body is doubtful, does not a forceful debunk make. It’s like global warming: the science is in.

If you read any of my posts you would read that I'm only interested in drugs on a conceptual level, and certainly do not advocate them in any sense as an actual practice as they are deathly dull (or at least only interesting to the extent they are deeply unpleasant). And I'm not really talking in terms of relativism, just in terms that "health" is quite distinct from health... and at no point did I discount scientific views on health per se whatsoever... that is not my target, merely unqualified views of "health"...

Although to that I would add again that an endlessly extended life is not something I am personally interested in (nor destructive "hedonism"...)

 

[hundredmillionlifetimes]

... there’s always a disquieting undercurrent of pro-drugs bunk whenever health is discussed here.

The 'commonsensical' medical profession and pharmaceutical industry, among many others, are up to their %%%% in 'pro-drugs bunk'.

... but if there is an observable difference in functionality between the body of a former drug addict and that of a straight-edge pole-vaulter, the latter’s body functioning better (no quotes), it’s reasonable to deem the pole-vaulter’s body healthier (no quotes).

Especislly if he/she is on performance-enhancing d r u g s (let's all go become really fit and ... devote our whole healthy lives to pole-vaulting! Ya never know, might come in handy in a war zone)

[Sport and athletics are now unimaginable without drugs and 'regimes of medicine']

if every doctor tells you that ricin will kill you, it probably will; if every doctor tells you that crack messes with your body in any number of ways, it probably does. Easy-peasy.

Doctor knows best! (Daddy is always right). Prescription drugs, painkillers, exercise regimes, diet-fixations, ideological rhetoric, 'commonsense', etc 'mess with your body' [and mind] too ... easy-peasy.


[The clearest sign of the reign of biopolitics, and the medicalization of the human subject, is precisely the obsession both with drugs and sanitized notions of 'health': take, for example the middle class paranoia about "stress" [now a vast medico-pharma-corporate industry]: how to avoid stressful situations and environments and activities, how to "cope" with them. "Stress" has become our name for the excessive dimension of life, for its over-powering invasiveness, for the "too-muchness" to be kept under control. It becomes labelled a 'medical condition' rather than, say, a legitimate ontological expression or response to the pressures of 'commonsensical' capitalist realism (For this reason, today, more than ever, the gap that separates psychoanalysis from therapy imposes itself in all its brutality: if one wants therapeutic improvement, one will effectively get a much faster and efficient help from a combination of behavioral-cognitivist therapies and chemical treatment (pills).]

All politics now reduced to [medicalized] aesthetics (what Benjamin termed the aestheticisation of politics - fascism).

 

[zhao]

Guybrush, the combination of your avatar and signature is... really weird.

Zhao has been OTM for most of this thread, and above — depressingly so.

if you think what I'm saying is depressing, try "sickness is what makes people interesting".

Obviously romantic notions of inspiration through mental illness are pernicous bullshit. However Zhao is repping some seriously simple-minded ideas here... his being precisely as romantic....

not so obvious to some i guess.

which simple-minded ideas? that people not sick and not fucked-up, who have time and energy to devote to what they want to do with their lives, are more interesting compared to sick and fucked up people? you are right, it is simple. very simple. but is it romantic or is it just the truth?

Im not saying give up on health, just "health" the rarified category of body-obsessive desire...

ok this clears up things a bit. the difference between "health" and health.

i think this entire time Gek and Nomad are critiquing a Consumer Capitalist construct of "health", while I'm talking about the real thing. (i suppose next they will deny that the real thing exists, but one thing at a time yeah?)

this:

Also, capitalism doesn't tell us to be unhealthy, it tells us to be "healthy"--"healthy" in the sense of being completely without any physical or psychological diseases or viruses, infections, etc. This notion of health is not a "natural" state-- in nature it is vital that organisms create antibodies to viruses and diseases are an inevitability, not a physical weakness or downfall.

is not my idea of health. this is some OCD germ-freak false notion stemming from fear, sealed off from the real world, which is, as nomad rightly points out, "impure", full of germs and and anti-bodies.

Capitalism has commodified everything, so that even being healthy is an object.

i agree. and this commodified construct of "health" make people more sick, more neurotic, more cut off from themselves, more dependent, more weak.

OK moving on:

interestingly, in the same statements above, nomad does admit to the actual existence of nature and a more natural state. (a round of hearty applause everyone! )

any idea of "return to nature" (on an individualistic basis at least) is simply laughable (and an idea which animated a variety of fascistic thought).

it is laughable because... you don't think it's possible to detoxify your body? you don't think it's possible to ever get rid of proscribed consumerist addiction? so you don't think it's possible to return to a more natural state by, say, cutting out an expensive coke habit? or turning off the television? (unless the Wire is on obviously )

and i suppose the "fascist thought" you are referring to is Fight Club. again. sigh... ok, again: not exactly my notion of disciplined resistance. it is not "fascist" to turn off the television and go for a walk in the park. it is not "fascist" to choose to eat a big home made salad instead of Burger King. it is not "fascist" to take care of one's own body. (which goes hand in hand with cleaning one's mind of capitalist false desire/control).

well if you are adament about calling it fascist, then so be it. i would rather be a "fascist" and error on the side of militant rebellion, and cultivate a disciplined resistance to capitalism, than complacently perpetrating the addictive patterns enforced by the system, while romanticizing illness.

 

[dominic]

your claim is entirely groundless and ludicrous.

some of (maybe all) the most breath-taking, amazing, and interesting works of art are made by autonomous beings in possession of themselves.

if you meet and talk to, or read the writings, biographies or autobiogrphies of some of the most creative contemporary people you soon realize how entirely juvenile, at best first year art-college, your romantic notions regarding "sickness" and "fucked-up-ness" is.

EDIT: i have in mind people like Gerhard Richter, Tim Hawkinson, etc.

also sure there are creative people who make worthwhile work who are fucked-up and miserable (or pretend to be, like Trent Reznor), like the Spectral composer who commited suicide. but this in no way means that relatively "healthy" people are boring. that is just absurd.

fucked-up may have been a poor choice of words on my part, in so far as you seem to think that i was referring to, i don't know, some drunken would-be poet in rags -- a bukowski/kerouac/jarry composite figure???

what i was trying to refer to was human beings in general, the general human type, as a mess of tangled, contradictory, irrational, largely unsatisfied desires -- in short, as fucked-up creatures -- although my cat is pretty damn mad as well . . . .

now i do not doubt for a moment that the most successful people -- whether they succeed at art, academic research, business, sports, whatever the endeavor -- are highly disciplined in at least some respects

and i also don't doubt that all the great writers spent many a dull hour banging away at the typewriter -- though it seems quite a few, at least in modern times, did so under the influence (hegel on snuff; freud on cocaine; edgar allen poe on heroin)

but to refer only to cigarette smoking alone, think of all the great writers and artists from the past 200 years who were chain-smokers -- obviously these people were highly focused, disciplined, trained -- and yet in another respect total slaves of the demon nicotine

i once had the pleasure to know a highly accomplished jurist, a man who worked on behalf of the poor and downtrodden -- and he now sits on the highest court of one of this nation's fifty states -- and yet the man is quite literally a glutton -- disgustingly so -- it would turn your stomach and blow your mind -- and yet in so many other respects a completely admirable person

as for Gerhard Richter, i haven't the slightest idea who he is -- but that is neither here nor there

for again, it was not my intention to refer to the exceptional case -- not the drunken bohemian poet case (is this the 1st year art school fantasy?) or the great thinker/great man case -- but rather the general typical case, homo sapiens as most often encountered, a tangled mess of desires

a society of flawed narcissistic perpetually unsatisfied and confused creatures is to me preferable than a society of supermen un-wracked by iirational desires, addictions, etc

and last, are not most concrete desires irrational?

or rather, are there any rational desires?

is there any man who was a purely healthy desire for another woman? or do all men not have some weird dirty kink that colors and intensifies this vanillla desire?

and is not even the pure healthy desire to copulate, moved only by fair features and curves, a bit brutish even in the best case . . . .

a lot to talk about here, so i'll let the discussion unfold

 

[dominic]

i also had in mind houllebecq's latest novel, to be honest

i.e., where the post-humans do nothing but rewrite the biographies of their human ancestors (or forget his term for it, i.e., members of a sect get cloned, and then the copies of the humans, x-1, x-2, x-3 and so on, do nothing but rewrite the human protoype's biography)

and so houllebecq's position, as i understand it, is that, yes, modern people are stupid, sex-and-drug addled creatures incapable in the main of leading satisfactory, happy lives, and therefore as a species deserve to go extinct . . . .

but as an object of literary interest, surely the humans hold more interest than their descendants who lead antiseptic lives untainted by desire . . . .

 

[dominic]

plus, dominic, have you ever had or met people with serious problems? who are clinically depressed? fuck. talk about BORING!

the miserable artist/genius is like rain-man among autistic people - very rare. most depressed people are a fucking drag to be around.

the middle-class tabloid myth of the "miserable artist" is SO fucking stupid. grow up.

again, i think you misunderstood my point

perhaps you should slow down and not be so eager to rant and rave

 

[dominic]

and to clarify, yes, i do think that most modern people are depressed to one degree or another

and, no, i don't find most people interesting when taken as individual cases -- i.e., the man on the street bores me in real life

(though my current plan in my otherwise floundering and all-too-dreary and drab existence is to get out of student debt -- accumulated for all-but-abandoned reasons -- so that i can return to grad school to become a psychologist or the like)

 

[mistersloane]

the answer is no.

i would rather be Richter than an "interesting" and fucked up bloke on a message board.

and i cant say because Ive never met Richter before. in person he might be a little different from when he's answering questions for Art Forum. you think maybe?

however i have met Tim Hawkinson before and he is very witty and funny and fun to be around. more so than some self pitying neurotic self obsessed loser full of negative energy tell you that much.

Lol. Obviously you can't tell too much from interviews - but this book was long (in the street sense and the book sense) and, for me, it shed new light on his work, in that he was completely clinical in his approach. I found the contradiction between his clinicality and the -for me- pure unadulterated joy expressed in some of his (mid-period) painting to be contradictory and surprising. And no, I don't think he gives a fuck but I wasn't talking about him, more about his representation, it was like reading interviews with session musicians, and I iterate that I do think he's one of the greatest artists to ever have lived so it came as a surprise and disappointment to find him so contrite.

There's some stuff about him here dominic

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/R/richter.html

if you get the chance to see any of his paintings in the flesh, I'd recommend it. I don't like his installations though. One of his paintings was used by Sonic Youth for the Daydream Nation cover.

 

[dominic]

if zhao's gonna turn us (me) on to gerhard richter, maybe i should turn him on to italo svevo?

 

[dominic]

oh, ive seen these paintings before -- just wasn't familiar with richter's name

and of course know the daydream nation cover

i rather like "meadowlands"

 

[gek-opel]

Guybrush, the combination of your avatar and signature is... really weird.



if you think what I'm saying is depressing, try "sickness is what makes people interesting".



not so obvious to some i guess.

which simple-minded ideas? that people not sick and not fucked-up, who have time and energy to devote to what they want to do with their lives, are more interesting compared to sick and fucked up people? you are right, it is simple. very simple. but is it romantic or is it just the truth?



ok this clears up things a bit. the difference between "health" and health.

i think this entire time Gek and Nomad are critiquing a Consumer Capitalist construct of "health", while I'm talking about the real thing. (i suppose next they will deny that the real thing exists, but one thing at a time yeah?)

this:



is not my idea of health. this is some OCD germ-freak false notion stemming from fear, sealed off from the real world, which is, as nomad rightly points out, "impure", full of germs and and anti-bodies.



i agree. and this commodified construct of "health" make people more sick, more neurotic, more cut off from themselves, more dependent, more weak.

OK moving on:

interestingly, in the same statements above, nomad does admit to the actual existence of nature and a more natural state. (a round of hearty applause everyone! )



it is laughable because... you don't think it's possible to detoxify your body? you don't think it's possible to ever get rid of proscribed consumerist addiction? so you don't think it's possible to return to a more natural state by, say, cutting out an expensive coke habit? or turning off the television? (unless the Wire is on obviously )

and i suppose the "fascist thought" you are referring to is Fight Club. again. sigh... ok, again: not exactly my notion of disciplined resistance. it is not "fascist" to turn off the television and go for a walk in the park. it is not "fascist" to choose to eat a big home made salad instead of Burger King. it is not "fascist" to take care of one's own body. (which goes hand in hand with cleaning one's mind of capitalist false desire/control).

well if you are adament about calling it fascist, then so be it. i would rather be a "fascist" and error on the side of militant rebellion, and cultivate a disciplined resistance to capitalism, than complacently perpetrating the addictive patterns enforced by the system, while romanticizing illness.

I never said sickness makes people interesting! I said mental and physical illnesses could be conceived of as a level of unique identity in some senses outside of consumable image creation. Its not necessarily something to take pride in per se, that unique pattern of ageing and deformation, the precise forms of memory loss etc a form of non-consumable individuation. Not necessarily in any sense benign of course...

I'm all for a disciplined resistance to Capitalism, but so far most straightforward ones have actually lead to a strengthening of the very system they oppose for they understand too glibly the subtleties of its mechanisms. A total return to nature is advocated by guys like this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentti_Linkola) not sure where you would stand on that Zhao...

I have no expensive coke habit and walk everywhere I can Zhao, I'm all for the broadest aims of what you have been discussing... its just that you rely on naive assumptions which in failing to critique harshly enough the grounding of your argument leaves it fatally exposed to modish error-- a mere detox is exactly what is PRESCRIBED by Late Consumerist Capital-- along with a regime of gym membership, expensive dietary supplements, human growth hormone etc etc... holistic "healing"... Zen meditation... then when we are bored with consuming these images we return to something else... the detox only ever prefigures the retox...

So we need to move away from this hyper-falsely-moralised field of binaries and into somewhere more productive. Its not the way consumerism makes us sick and excessive which is its most fundamental activity, but the way it makes us relate to reality as a whole, they way it reconfigures everything. Merely switching product is not enough, that is no choice at all really...

 

[gek-opel]

[The clearest sign of the reign of biopolitics, and the medicalization of the human subject, is precisely the obsession both with drugs and sanitized notions of 'health': take, for example the middle class paranoia about "stress" [now a vast medico-pharma-corporate industry]: how to avoid stressful situations and environments and activities, how to "cope" with them. "Stress" has become our name for the excessive dimension of life, for its over-powering invasiveness, for the "too-muchness" to be kept under control. It becomes labelled a 'medical condition' rather than, say, a legitimate ontological expression or response to the pressures of 'commonsensical' capitalist realism (For this reason, today, more than ever, the gap that separates psychoanalysis from therapy imposes itself in all its brutality: if one wants therapeutic improvement, one will effectively get a much faster and efficient help from a combination of behavioral-cognitivist therapies and chemical treatment (pills).]

All politics now reduced to [medicalized] aesthetics (what Benjamin termed the aestheticisation of politics - fascism).

Precisely! And hence an aesthetic response to this Zhao will result in neo-fascism as a matter of course... we need an avowedly politicised response...

 

[Eric]

Obsessive concern in either direction seems useless to me. I have recently quit smoking because I got tired of having to think about it all the time. I exercise daily and am relatively healthy but I am not willing to not have that nth drink because it would make my body impure ... don't we really want some kind of intermediate solution: do what you want, within reason, which means performing the exercise your body wants, and also doing the `unhealthy' things your complicated side (to paraphrase dominic) wants? I can't get with the divorced-from-life health nazi thing at all, as Gek says.

 

[mistersloane]

if zhao's gonna turn us (me) on to gerhard richter, maybe i should turn him on to italo svevo?

Hell turn me onto him, he looks great. Anything down with Joyce is down with me.

 

[zhao]

each time he had given up smoking, with the iron resolve that this would be the "ultima sigaretta!!", he experienced the exhilarating feeling that he was now beginning life over without the burden of his old habits and mistakes. That feeling was, however, so strong that he found smoking irresistible, if only so that he could stop smoking again in order to experience that thrill once more.

 

[zhao]

another thing that made/makes this debate confusing is that there are multiple dynamics at work which are seemingly contradictory at first glance, but actually are not. nomad's claim that "capitalism wants us to be healthy via fear of germs and adherence to its program" certainly rings true; yet simultaneously my claim that "capitalism wants us weak, addicted, dependent, sick, lonely, and diminished" is also real. (has to do with the "unatainable fantasy vs. reality trap" loop) but at the end of the day, these dynamics work together, and are actually just different parts of the same control mechanism/process, which we are all trying to, or at least thinking about, fighting against.

and yes gek, i hear what you are saying. but just because capitalism has commodified "health" into its manipulative and ultimately repressive and subjugating system, does not mean that we should stop trying to be healthy. (just because capitalism has commodified ___insert music style we love here___ doesnt mean we should stop listening to it)

i still maintain that the only way to start resisting capitalism is by striving to attain greater levels of self reliance and autonomy from the grasp of its addictive consumerist patterns; and in order to do so, to break free, one small step at a time, strength of body and mind is necessary.

 

[gek-opel]

another thing that made/makes this debate confusing is that there are multiple dynamics at work which are seemingly contradictory at first glance, but actually are not. nomad's claim that "capitalism wants us to be healthy via fear of germs and adherence to its program" certainly rings true; yet simultaneously my claim that "capitalism wants us weak, addicted, dependent, sick, lonely, and diminished" is also real. (has to do with the "unatainable fantasy vs. reality trap" loop) but at the end of the day, these dynamics work together, and are actually just different parts of the same control mechanism/process, which we are all trying to, or at least thinking about, fighting against.

and yes gek, i hear what you are saying. but just because capitalism has commodified "health" into its manipulative and ultimately repressive and subjugating system, does not mean that we should stop trying to be healthy. (just because capitalism has commodified ___insert music style we love here___ doesnt mean we should stop listening to it)

i still maintain that the only way to start resisting capitalism is by striving to attain greater levels of self reliance and autonomy from the grasp of its addictive consumerist patterns; and in order to do so, to break free, one small step at a time, strength of body and mind is necessary.

The dynamic runs precisely that Capital creates a problem, then has the damn cheek to sell us the solution to that problem too! For example, it creates a culture where the norm is to adopt a fairly sedentary lifestyle, driving not walking, leisure time spent in inaction etc... then sells us the product of health via gym membership... the true perversity of the dynamics involved underlined buy the fact that we drive to the gym, to go on a running machine... and that we then later give up on the gym when we get bored of the idea... the real solution being not to buy the product of "health" here, but to alter your life at a more fundamental level (ie give up the sedentary lifestyle). Now whilst it is possible to do this as an individual to some extent, HMLT is absolutely 100% accurate when he identifies that the real solutions can only come from the political. Not in the sense that the individual avoids responsibility and blames the state say, but rather that in order to change the conditions which inculcate the unhealthiness in the first place (ie- in this case the sedentary lifestyle is set by the system of infrastructure, town planning, the strains of the kinds of jobs available...). This is why health (no quotation marks) requires a broader view than the merely individual, and must be grounded always in the explicitly political

 

[swears]

Capitalism doesn't "want" anything. You have shitloads of different lobbies and businesses competing for various markets, some of them have an interest in you stuffing your face 'till your arteries pop and some of them have an interest in turning you into a neurotic health freak. Whatever shifts units. You could throw these products in a skip after you've bought them as far as they care. "Capitalism" isn't a league of supervillans who all cackle around a marble table at their secret lair.

 

[STN]

"Capitalism" isn't a league of supervillans who all cackle around a marble table at their secret lair.

Not even Tea and vimothy?