Greetings Economists,
I will reach into Carrol's comments on depression to make a point about
rationality which leaps out at me from Carrol's comments,
Carrol,
..."Most of us, when "depressed," are unable to do sustained reading (of any
texts). I own a stationary bicycle, and while suffering a siege of
depression can read while peddling, but will be unable to read immedieately
on dismounting. (I read the whole of Smith's Wealth of Nations while
peddling.) I have had the same difficulty in sitting through a whole movie
or TV show -- I went to two movies this summer for the first time in about
15 years. Complex articles of any length I can read only by skipping around
in them, ultimately only reading them "once" by reading them half a dozen
times in overlapping segments."...
Doyle
If one looks at how an emotion, clinical depression, shapes reading, or
watching a movie, it must seem obvious how important emotion is to that kind
of labor process. To summarize, Carrol is saying that in order to do what
one might call rational activity, primarily reading, but perhaps viewing
movies also falls into this statement, Carrol had to shift from a body
immobilized mode of being to a body active mode of being.
Let's broaden that comment a little bit, when thinking of rationalism we
don't think about the body centered structure of doing cognitive work. Many
times when a disability comes up it forces us to see that a structure we
build in order to do kinds of work, in this case "rational" labor processes,
which are primarily reading, but moving toward "multi-media", that that
structure has components within it that are not acknowledged, or not
conscious. In other words going to the principles of disability
consciousness, when we acknowledge the reality we see in how disabled people
have to cope with current social structures, we see the deeper forming
social processes that shape class structure.
In order to understand these things it helps to ground the discussion in how
the brain works. In fact here I want to laud how Carrol does do this very
brilliantly. He tries very carefully to make the experience grounded in
some degree to the specifics of the disability. So that by using for
example the labor process of the exercise bicycle one can see that
depression does something specific to a labor process of reading. But I
want to point out here, that in a more detailed way, knowing that the
cerebellum, and parietal lobe are involved in motor control, and that this
motion versus frontal lobe and limbic system static oriented cognitive
processes (the division between magnocellular and parvo nuclear ganglion
circuit channels in the perception systems) tells us a great deal about how
to go in a direction of thinking about rationality.
Rationality cannot be separated from emotions in terms of the brain.
Politically, emotions are really what carries the weight of commitment.
Some researchers have begun to advocate a system of laws to feelings. By
this it is meant that emotions have a logic to them. It seems to me that we
cannot talk about stable commitments to a political position, or paradigm in
the positivists wording, without understanding how emotions really do shape
that process. To de-couple emotions from say written political programs
makes the construction of sound and stable social organization an arbitrary
and ad hoc process of the best guesses educated and experienced persons have
to putting social structures together. This fails us in the complex issues
of understanding how disabled people need access to social structures,
because the persons who make the ad hoc judgements of what works for them
will assume an able bodied perspective since they can't know for example how
chronic depression shapes consciousness.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor
