Month: February 2019

Increasingly, I am interested in what social factors are responsible for widely increased experience among a great many people of ‘mental instability'–including mental stress, anxiety, and, at its worst, even more than that, panic and depression.  I have noticed, with deep concern, this rapidly accelerating among my students in recent years and I have wanted to better understand how and why it is happening in order to aim to counter it, and to do so much more effectively and proactively than merely responding with empathetic understanding and compassionate support once individual students individually and (semi-) privately identify to me this is what they are, or have been, experiencing.  As I work on both of my book projects, 21st Century British TV Detective Series: a Critical Guide and Ian Curtis, The Myth and The Music–Critical Theoretical Perspectives I recognize a common major emphasis is understanding and confronting historically contingent social factors responsible for serious challenges to especially mental but also physical health.  I am seeking to understand what historically contingent social factors explain ready tendencies toward crisis and how and why the need for empathy and solidarity is increasingly so desperate yet simultaneously increasingly so overwhelmingly inadequately met.  I am interested in how in one case a particular life story, and a particular body of artistic work, alongside an incredibly daring yet also incredibly overwhelming artistic mission, can help illuminate issues of fundamental and ultimate concern, as they are experienced in relation to distinct continuous–as well as developing and transforming varieties of discontinuous–shaping forces  particular to, even perhaps peculiar to, modern to contemporary capitalist society.  I am interested in the same in relation to a body of fictional TV series ostensibly concerned with crime and detection but ultimately attesting and responding to a much deeper and more urgent set of grave concerns–indeed of decisively contingent as well as markedly exigent socially shared fears, anxieties, and traumas.

 

I am currently reading Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, London: Profile, 2019.  Zuboff argues we are now at an historic point where a new form of capitalism has become increasingly dominant: surveillance capitalism.  Her book offers powerful arguments, theoretical constructions and elaborations, as well as research and documentation to support her thesis.  As Zuboff indicates, in an initial summary “Definition,”  Surveillance Capitalism means the following:

 

1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales; 2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification; 3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history; 4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy; 5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth; 6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy; 7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty; 8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people's sovereignty.

 

Although Zuboff appears to be an adherent of a reformed and highly regulated capitalism, involving a careful balance between the powers of capital and the powers of the people, not in other words of socialism per se, her argument does offer much of use to a democratic socialist politics, and she does draw upon Marx as well as a variety of other classic social theorists–along with many compelling contemporary sources.  I am highly interested in reading more work like this (which, in Zuboff's case, has been acclaimed by the likes of  Naomi Klein, Robert Reich, and Joseph Turow, among numerous other prominent figures, as one of the most important books of our time), especially in relation to understanding the late 20th through early 21st century social construction, social enforcement, and social reinforcement of anxiety, insecurity, and instability, at the level of psychology and physiology as well as political economy.

 

Certainly I note well, once again, contemporarily pervasive cyber-existence often feels much more dystopian than utopian and is often draining of vitality (while shredding survival spaces) from within lived experience and as part of genuine social connection.  When this cyber-existence becomes overdetermined by the interests and needs of surveillance capitalism it is not hard to recognize why I among many others might often experience periods of considerable mental–as well as physical–fragility.  Much of these discontents are representative of frustration at what is not enabled (within an internet social media environment along with a vast array of digital ‘apps' that promise so much) but much of it also is representative of resistance to what it does enable, even if this resistance is far from all that effective and is still quite embryonically inchoate.

 

I am striving to find my way back to a more confident and stable position.  Two days ago I posted the following on Facebook, although I do recognize the irony, as posting virtually anything on Facebook is hardly likely to be helpful in this quest:

 

I am cautiously optimistic. I am focusing deliberately on what I am doing and can do that is meaningful and valuable while refusing to criticize myself for not being other than I am and can be. All three of my classes this semester are going exceedingly well. We are learning together while having fun and we are developing a strong collective rapport. I enjoy everything having to do with these classes a great deal and feel myself always totally relaxing while directly engaged in this work and these interactions. I am meeting my exercise goals. I am reading and writing. I am doing what I have set out to do in relation to institutional and community service. I am learning. My immediate family is wonderful. I am listening to and learning a lot about a great deal of music which I enjoy playing selections from on my weekly radio show. I do have much to be thankful for. And I appreciate, respect, and admire the many impressive contributions, accomplishments, and simply ways of being themselves I recognize among my colleagues and friends across campus and throughout the community. And I am thankful as well I recognize I maintain the strength to aim to do yet much more of value and use yet ahead, much to be determined, and to know that I yet can and I yet will. Every day presents opportunities as well as challenges. I am going to rise to meet them and accept that I am ‘good enough’ to do so. I am working hard to make myself truly feel all of that and to just get on with life day by day and even moment by moment as best I can while valuing the immediate experience for what it is, for all that it is. Since I always tend myself not to judge other people, and always instead imagine everyone else is multiple, complex, contradictory, and dynamic and it is useless to ridiculous for me to speculate concerning anything about other people where I don’t have good reason and ample evidence to do so, I need to give myself the same kind of respect. Repeatedly in my life I have been shocked to discover a good number of other people do tend readily to quickly judge and speculatively fill in elaborate fabricated ideas of what yet other people around them supposedly are like and what supposedly is and has been going on with these yet other people, based on the relatively superficial and with otherwise little support to do so, and this has also scared me because it is a mindset so foreign to my own it is still extremely hard for me even to begin to imagine what it is like to be like this, to think like this. I have long readily and easily distinguished critique of positions and practices from criticism of persons and felt like it was an obvious and almost ‘natural’ distinction but I understand that is by no means always the case for everyone, not at all. But instead of perceiving that mindset of mine as some kind of serious personal shortcoming I think I should accept it as the way I am and tend to be, and respect what is positive about being as I am and tend to be. Instead of worrying excessively about being too naively idealistic, romantic, intuitive, trusting, and so on I am moving to the point of accepting this is simply what I have to offer. In conclusion, I hope what I share here and elsewhere in relation to ‘overcoming depression’ might prove helpful to others, whether experiencing this struggle directly themselves or struggling to know how to be helpful and supportive to others they know and with whom they are close when these others are depressed.

 

The struggle is ongoing, and cannot be simply wished or willed away, but I am definitely committed to the struggle.  Much of what is required is seizing control back, as best and as far as I can, from what is too easily robbed from me, and recognizing what is responsible for the latter so I can work around and as possible against (that, is, circumvent) it.   I am indeed working on it.  And I am ready to use whatever resources might prove helpful, no matter their otherwise apparently considerable limitations.  Since according to the Meyers-Briggs' personality test I always come out INFP–Introversion-Intuition-Feeling-Perceiving–and I do find many of the tendencies ostensibly associated with this kind of personality type do make ample good sense, of my own experience, and of what I have found hard as well as easy in that experience, I am willing to make use of this classificatory schema, with qualification, as I remain skeptical about it and do at times consider it to be little better than astrology.  Much of what is required for me moving forward is determining an array of focuses for life-praxis that make sense, that are fulfilling, that balance each other well, and that are practically possible, while refusing to conflate useful and necessary self-critique with harshly judgmental self-condemnation.  Accepting what is and has become the kind of person I am, and working with and off of this, is crucial–and, even if and when I desire to be different, I need to learn to accept the necessity of being highly patient in the process of attempting this kind of change.  Also, oddly enough, this process of ‘recovery' toward ‘redetermination' involves recognizing and accepting tendencies toward anxiety and even panic and depression, as well as toward a variety of chronic physical illnesses, for what they are, and reconceiving these tendencies not solely as weaknesses but rather as signature features, or signature characteristics, that can indeed be highly positively useful.  Do what I can, as I can, as whom I am, from when and where I am, and take comfort and seek contentment in simply that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am making it through and pushing forward as best I can.  I am convinced deciding early on to share publicly recognition that I was actually experiencing real depression has proven most helpful in preventing this depression from significantly worsening, all too quickly. and in enabling me to begin to fight back effectively.  I have learned, a lot, from past experiences–and from helping a great many others, as well as carefully studying and reflecting on the experiences of a great many others.  I have kept active, determined to do whatever I can, as much as I can, and not pull or draw back unnecessarily and ultimately most likely largely entirely unhelpfully.   I am tired, definitely, it has felt like a tremendous fight, and I have struggled hard with powerful feelings of wanting to pull back, withdraw, give in, and give up, but I am winning that battle, at least so far.  I recognize the source of what I am currently struggling with as feelings of deep self-dissatisfaction reflective of a sense I can and should be doing much more and much better with my life, especially in relation to areas of real and even urgent social need where I have skills and talents to offer, yet I am not finding sufficient outlets or avenues at present to do so–and finding myself continually thwarted by chronic physical illness and daily struggles to try to manage and control what is happening in these areas of my life, which is, in and of itself, often incredibly exhausting, and most definitely taxing of any inclination toward optimism and hope.  Also, I feel quite feisty about aging, which means I don't like it at all, and resist it full force, which is not always the best response, even though I do think that response maintains much to commend it.  Perhaps at the root of it all is the simple fact I am committed to some extraordinarily highly ambitious and I believe most exceedingly worthwhile (book) projects yet they are immensely draining and enormously difficult, and during a regular semester it is hard to find sufficient blocs of free time and undistracted energy to do the deep thinking I need.  So much else needs to be done, and so often so immediately while so many others' needs are often indeed desperate and intense.   I will never give my students less than my best, never less than all I can possibly muster.   I nevertheless desperately want to write these two books, and I think if I don't no one will, but I need a lot of time and energy which is often in far too short supply–not to mention good physical health, which I seemingly can hardly ever count on.   We experienced a longer Winter Break than usual but I was really seriously worn down by the end of last semester, and the physical health difficulties I experienced last semester were much harsher than I realized even right in the immediate aftermath of them hitting me with full force.  So it has felt like I didn't get as much done as I wanted and as part of me believes I ‘should' have during this longer than usual Winter Break.  All of this self-dissatisfaction connects readily with deep-rooted tendencies, dating back to early childhood, to take on far too much sense of personal responsibility for far too much and to be too excessively and relentlessly self-critical, as I wrote about in my previous blog entry.  I am working, again, on those tendencies, and to try to appreciate, respect, and value myself for what I am, for what I am doing, for what I have done, and for what I honestly practically can truly do–and be.  I am also taking advantage of this experience, this current bout of depression, to deepen my engagement with ‘Ian Curtis, the Myth and the Music–Critical Theoretical Perspectives' and with my commitment to attempt to carry on an intellectual, artistic, spiritual, and I believe political project he had begun, without fully recognizing or understanding this, yet which is nonetheless enormously consequential in potential (while all too readily potentially self-annihilating).  Colleagues challenged me to make this project a personal memoir, a work of creative non-fiction, and I am beginning to find ways to do that, as strange and perplexing as I at first found that recommendation to me.  It's not always easy, by any means, and what I find in the course of this effort is often highly emotionally difficult and psychologically disturbing but eventually I can transform that into much more than the merely highly difficult and disturbing.   And, yes, shared vulnerability can be the source of enormous strength–although ultimately it must be reciprocated, and I must remind myself I am ultimately arguing for the necessity of truly revolutionary social transformation so as to create a culture genuinely founded and structured according to entirely different first values–values of true solidarity and true empathy.  This must be made materially concrete and substantial at the root, at the crux, of the structures of feeling and the modes of social interaction according to which we live out our everyday lives.  My role is only to contribute that argument to ongoing discussion, debate, and creative as well as critical praxis which will, of necessity, extend far beyond the duration of my own individual life.  We have too far to go.  It won't happen in my lifetime.  And I will face many to most of the pressures Ian Curtis did, without even as much direct support as he had (and which was ultimately tragically insufficient), but hopefully with greater life-sustaining wisdom gained from hard experience and from perhaps even greater hard-won or at least stubborn resilience.  I am trying to find my way through the immanently and transcendently dystopian yet without avoiding venturing directly into the heart of it, and without neglecting registering it for how thoroughly dystopian it truly is.

 

From 2003 through 2008 I struggled with serious, clinical depression. It took me awhile to realize it back then as I thought what I was experiencing could not possibly compare with what my sister has experienced and how severe I knew that could be, as well as with what I had also witnessed with a number of other close friends and less close acquaintances. Eventually, however, I went through the intake process and received my official diagnosis: I was truly depressed and seriously so. From that point forward I met with multiple psychiatrists, tried multiple anti-depressant drugs, and worked with multiple counselors employing multiple divergent styles of and approaches to psychological counseling. I also read quite voraciously about depression–theories, treatments, and experiences–and undertook an ultimately extremely thorough process of self-inquiry and self-exploration, encompassing yes much I had forgotten or repressed and finding ways to rethink and re-feel experiences of deep trauma while absolving myself from taking undue and excessive and unjustified responsibility for violence and pain I had experienced and was unable to effectively process and cope with at the times in which I initially experienced their immediate, direct impact. From an early age I had internalized an immense sense of personal moral and ethical responsibility and a strong tendency toward relentless self-criticism. It had got way out of control and was causing considerable damage. By the end of the Spring 2008 semester I had recovered to the point I was no longer depressed at all.

In the immediate aftermath of that recovery I thought I had put depression behind me once and for all and would never experience it ever again. However, with a little time I changed my mind and determined it was much more helpful and much more realistic to accept I maintain significant and recurrent tendencies toward depression that arise from a complex array of biochemical and experiential roots. This recognition has also helped me extend considerable empathy to a great many people and bring this commitment to empathy fully into the heart and soul of the work I do.

Nevertheless, I have tended to perceive my tendencies toward anxiety, including panic attacks, also recently clinically reconfirmed as evidence of ‘generalized anxiety disorder', as a more serious problem for me, with depression in my case happening only when anxiety has become so extreme and unrelieved for so long that I am exhausted in trying to fight through. I have also tended to perceive chronic physical illness, including invisible disability, as ultimately a more serious issue, concern, and threat, for me.

And yet, just a couple days ago I felt I needed to face up to the fact: I am depressed. Yes, this is an incredibly frustrating recognition as I feel like I have gone through all of that and have knowledge of and experience with and practice in an enormous array of means and methods not simply to respond to such tendencies but also to prevent them from reaching this state. And yet what I have felt recently is indeed a deep and overwhelming sense of emptiness, of hollowness, of worthlessness, and, increasingly as well, of detachment from life around me, including from my own life. I have felt like somehow I have failed, in some grand cosmic sense, and it is furthermore futile to imagine it might in any way be possible to overcome the impact of that failure.

I wish I could fix this quickly and easily. I wish I could forestall and prevent this altogether. But I am finding I can't. I need to strive to be patient, even when that feels extremely tough, and ride it out while rebuilding my life and my sense of contentment with myself slowly and carefully, working from what continues to feel meaningful and satisfying to me, while gradually extending outward from that base or core. Right now that includes working with my students in my classes, including reaching out directly and individually in empathetic solidarity to every single one of the great many of them who have shared with me they struggle with anxiety and depression too; listening to music (a lot) and doing my radio show; exercise; and spending time with Andy, Casey, Jet, and Star. From there I need to find new and renewed reasons for hope, satisfaction, and fulfillment in the rest of what I am doing, aiming to do, and considering doing.

I do feel, oddly enough to write this, ‘sad' to recognize I am depressed. I don't want to be this ‘down'. It is hard. I would never deliberately ‘choose' it or anything like it. I would never want anyone else ever to have to feel this way or even close to it. Perhaps some hope arises from feeling somewhat detached from myself. Maybe I can get to the point where I really break through and can viscerally feel this communication for all it can mean: ‘Bob, my friend, it breaks my heart to recognize this is what you are going through, yet again; you deserve so much, much better. And I care so much about you that I am truly ready, willing, and able to do all I possibly can to help you get there'. Maybe that will come, and soon. I hope so.

We returned to Eau Claire late afternoon on the 10th of January 2019 after a trip far away from here: five days and nights in Honolulu and five days and nights in Kona, with one full day of traveling before and one full day of traveling after. Visiting and spending time in Hawai'i is always very much Andy’s doing, and a reflection of and response to the influence of Andy’s family. But I do appreciate the opportunity and am always ready to do whatever I can to make Andy happy as well as to strive to continue to learn more and more about Hawai’i, past and present, including ‘off the beaten path’ and where few tourists venture. I like to learn more about Hawaiian history, culture, spirituality, and religion as well as explore the natural beauty.  I get restless though on trips not directly connected to ‘work’ I am doing or aim to be doing and often find it hard to impossible to ‘just relax’ (while as Andy says I tend to ‘de-stress uncontrollably’) but I did reasonably well overall on this trip, including reading nine books, six directly ‘work-related’ and three not. We also took some long walks and adventurous hikes both throughout and around Honolulu and in North Kohala as well as at and around South Point (and the nearby Green Sand beach) on the Big Island. More often than not my health was fine but when it was not it was a lot of trouble, including on the long way back. I was so tired I went to bed at 9:30 pm the evening we returned and got up at 10 am the morning after.  I worried about how much I needed to do before the start of the spring 2019 semester, which I couldn't easily while in Hawai'i, but in a short time I did get back in the flow and accomplish a lot.

I have been incredibly fortunate to be able to travel to and spend time in Hawaii on 14 separate occasions.  It is a deeply fascinating and in many respects most definitely wonderfully–and wondrously–beautiful place.  ‘Paradise' does come to mind.  Yet Hawaii does unfortunately at the same time epitomize much of what is worst about 21st century capitalism, especially huge socio-economic disparities and rampant commercial exploitation along with persistent deprivation and marginalization of indigenous Hawaiian and Pacific Islander populations.  The history of Hawaii becoming part of the United States remains outrageous–imperialism at it most arrogant and most racist.  The entire history of Western contact, and not just the overthrow of the monarchy, the annexation of Hawaii as a US territory, and the evisceration and commodification of Native Hawaiian culture, remains all too horrific.  And Hawaii maintains extremely fragile ecosystems under often great stress.  I try to continue always to be as respectful as possible of all this encompasses, while also recognizing and appreciating how in many areas Hawaii today offers at least opportunities for potentially cutting edge work in forming genuinely ecologically sustainable, multi-ethnically inclusive, and spiritually fulfilling ways of individual and communal living.  I feel like, as little as it might well mean, in and of itself alone, it is my ethical responsibility to use the extraordinary privilege I maintain, to take these trips to and to spend time in Hawaii, not only to do work in preparation for upcoming teaching, and related kinds of upcoming projects, and not only just to rejuvenate and recover health, strength, and stamina for that kind of work, but also to aim to consider deeply what is the meaning of my existence, what is my purpose, and what is my relationship to life around me, past and present, human and non-human.  It is also a sense of ethical responsibility that prompts me as well, while in Hawaii, to think deeply about what does spirituality mean to me, and what is it about my own life and what I am doing with it, good and bad, that I can and should re-imagine and re-create as I move forward.  Hawaii is, what's more, a place in which I reflect deeply and experience most powerfully what it means and has meant to be in a long-term, immensely loving relationship with my absolutely fantastic and truly beautiful life-partner and husband, Andy Swanson.  While in Hawaii we like to walk far and wide, for long periods of time, up to 15 miles or more a day, and to do a lot of hiking as well as spend time enjoying the oceanfronts and the sunsets and sunrises.  We aren't all that inclined to spend too much time just sitting or lying on a beach, and I tend to sunburn all too quickly even with high SPF protection.  Every time we go we try to discover something new, as well as to reconnect with what is happening, and what are immediate and pressing concerns, within local communities, as far as we can.   I also try to learn steadily more about Native Hawaiian spirituality and Hawaiian music each time as well.  I am going to continue from here simply with photographic images.