Vibratory Recall

Our daughter was trying on some zombie make-up, and when I saw her I broke into song: “Hey there, Zombie Girl.” It was a slight lyrical variant on a sixties pop song of a similar name that I hadn’t heard for years and years, a song I never liked all that well but which I heard so often on Top Forty radio that it lodged itself indelibly in my brain. When I tracked down the original on Youtube, I found that I had been singing it in the right key. This happens to me frequently: I remember not just the tune but the key it was recorded in. I couldn’t name the key, but I spontaneously start singing it with the right starting pitch. I don’t know if its an aural memory or whether, when singing an old song again, it just feels right in my throat when my vocal chords vibrate at a particular frequency.

PSATs

It’s eight o’clock Saturday morning and our daughter Kenzie is back at the high school taking the PSAT. The SAT, or Scholastic Aptitude Test, is the standardized entrance exam used by most U.S. universities as part of their admissions criteria. This is the pre-SAT: a practice version of the real thing taken by many if not most college-bound high school juniors. The fact that Kenzie and most of her pals, only sophomores, are sitting over there taking the test has to say something. I don’t believe that Anne and I drove her to it, but we didn’t dissuade her either. Hey, it’ll be fun, I told her the other day as she was deciding at the last minute whether or not to sign up. I happen to find these tests amusing and I suspect she does too, since in her free time she often tracks down mini-IQ tests on the internet and reports her results to us.

Should you guess if you don’t know the answer to a question? This was the focus of the family breakfast discussion this morning. I said yes, but then we wondered whether the test scorers simply count up the right answers or if they impose a penalty for wrong answers. Anne did a quick internet search, and it turns out there is a penalty for mistakes. But how big a penalty? The testers’ recommendation: if you can eliminate one or more options, guess; if you can’t, then leave the question blank. So let’s say each multiple-choice question presents 4 options from which to choose: if you guess randomly you have a 25% chance of getting it right. If you can eliminate one clearly wrong answer then you choose from the remaining 3 options, leaving you with a 33% chance of guessing correctly. That means the penalty must be somewhere between 0.25 and 0.33 per wrong answer. Problem solved.

But this formulation of the problem seems awfully logical, awfully Bayesian in its solution space. What if you’ve just got a feeling that one of the answers might be right? Should you go with your instinct, your gut, the vibe coming at you from the test booklet?

(a) yes
(b) no
(c) only after you’ve eliminated any obviously wrong responses
(d) it depends

For extra credit please explain your answer.

On Ops

Lately I’ve found myself toying with the possibility of making myself more useful to society. Fortunately I caught myself before doing anything drastic — this time. But the risk remains real.

There was a time when I evaluated empirical data and expert performance in order to specify so-called “best practices” in fields ranging from financial underwriting to medical care. This sort of work is vulnerable to critique on any number of grounds, but then so is all work. Skepticism is mostly what motivated me: to understand what passes for expertise, to subject its claims to careful scrutiny. By separating the real expertise from the hype it would be possible to make the former more widely accessible in society while relegating the latter to the shitpile. If certain aspects of expertise could be codified, then it could be taught to paraprofessionals or encoded in computer programs. The real experts, no longer having to spend so much of their time performing routine tasks, could devote more energy to thinking, imagining, experimenting, inventing, collaborating — pushing back the boundaries of their expertise.

But the experts always find themselves squeezed by the money guys. The codification of expertise becomes a means of saving operating costs through hiring cheaper labor or automation. Push the boundaries? Let somebody else invest in R&D; we’ll steal their demonstrated successes later. And then there are the marketing people who want to loosen the standards in order to crank up sales. When finance and marketing gang up — as was the case in the mortgage lending fiasco — the operations people don’t stand much of a chance. Businesses exist in order to generate profit for the investors. When push comes to shove the products and services are just “content” — useful for generating a revenue stream, but essentially interchangeable with other sorts of content. The experts are just content providers: ultimately their job is to lure money into the conduit. When every ops job is reducible to finance and marketing, it’s no wonder that operational expertise gets compromised.

So in light of the financial meltdown I’ve started thinking about getting back into the ops world. What would it take to sustain the practitioners of operational expertise when confronted by the persistent onslaught of finance and marketing? Wouldn’t some sort of intensive and collaborative effort among ops workers help shift the balance of power from capital to labor, at least a little bit? Even if most of these ops jobs aren’t particularly glamorous or personally fulfilling, they’d still need to be done even if the businesses they work for suddenly became owned not by investors but by the workers or the citizenry. As Dominic observes:

productive participation in the economy, even as part of a profit-making enterprise, nevertheless adds something to the common good – even if the profits made are subtracted, qua profit, from the commons.

I think I could make a case that supporting operational expertise would be a worthwhile contribution I could make to the common weal. I’d supplement my background in outcomes and best practices with my more recent work on passion and calling and agency. The main obstacle? I’m just not that into it any more.

The Return of the Socioeconomically Repressed

Recently k-punk wrote a post entitled Be Positive… Or Else, in which he points out the association between the positive-thinking ethos of cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT, and neoliberal capitalism. In his post k-punk links to this article by Lacanian psychoanalyst Darian Leader. Since k-punk’s blog doesn’t support comments, I’m simultaneously emailing him my response and posting it here…

There’s empirical evidence supporting CBT’s effectiveness in reducing symptoms, but in most cases the results aren’t any better than for other therapeutic praxes. The same holds true for psychoanalysis: it achieves neither better nor worse symptom reduction on average than other therapies. Therapists with more training and experience don’t get any better results than novices. In fact, just having a sympathetic person to talk with on a regular basis is nearly as effective as going to a professional in achieving symptom relief. On the other hand, any treatment is better than no treatment: symptomatic individuals who are left on waiting lists typically show no improvement, whereas any treatment modality yields significant and fairly sizable symptom reduction. (See e.g. Creating Mental Illness by Horwitz for summaries of effectiveness studies.)

Darian Leader wants to listen to symptoms instead of just treating them, and that’s fine. But he expects the symptoms to tell him to look inside the self for clues about their causes and their possible resolution. In this respect psychoanalysis and CBT are allies: both modalities regard the self as the source of his or her own misery. So too does neoliberalism: if you suffer from economic symptoms like unemployment or poverty or alienation it’s your own fault. The cause may be a shallow one correctable by quality improvement techniques or coaching, or the individual may be hamstrung by deeply rooted flaws that will take a long time and a lot of money to correct through retraining or serious attitude adjustment. But make no mistake: it’s your individual problem.

That establishing a relationship with an untrained but sympathetic listener can help alleviate psychological symptoms provides evidence compatible with Leader’s observation about how therapy works:

[T]herapy is not like a plaster that can be applied to a wound, but is a property of a human relationship. Therapy is about the encounter of two people.

If establishing this sort of interpersonal relationship can be curative, might not the lack of relationship be causative? I believe it is. Individuals are the basic economic unit of neoliberal capitalism. While individuation seems to promise unfettered freedom to pursue one’s own version of the American dream (even if you’re not American), people find themselves increasingly isolated from one another. This of course offers a strategic advantage to capital: isolated workers don’t organize themselves; isolated consumers can exert no leverage in driving down costs or improving quality.

The economic threat posed by letting psychological symptoms speak is that the symptoms will direct people’s attention not deep inside themselves but outside, to socioeconomic conditions that provoke depression, anxiety, rage and alienation as natural reactions to sick situations. It turns out that the same psychotherapeutic techniques work equally for all these conditions. It also turns out that the same mood-enhancing medications are prescribed for all of them. Leader regards this convergence as evidence that diagnosis isn’t all that important, that the same underlying intrapsychic condition can manifest itself in a variety of symptoms. But couldn’t the same conclusion be drawn if you listen outside the self for causes? Workplace stress, alienation from coworkers and customers, exploitation by management and capital; the pressure to compete as worker and consumer; the nearly universal demand for presenting a facade of relentless optimism, as k-punk cogently observes; the expectation that you can buy your way into happiness; isolation from others in the community and even from one’s most intimate friends — aren’t these ongoing external sources of unhappiness at least as likely to cause symptoms as are traumata experienced long ago in infancy? If we let socioeconomic symptoms speak, if we experience a collective return of the repressed, what sorts of interventions are liable to suggest themselves?

Trinitarian Labor Union

I concluded my post about calling by suggesting that, when a cook goes beyond merely satisfying appetites and begins trying to create something like culinary beauty, then perhaps the cook’s passion goes deeper and the calling higher — as if it were the Holy Spirit working in and through this cook. This low/high, shallow/deep distinction between appetite and art is an elitist one, where God is more concerned with pleasing the food critics than with feeding the hungry. But a cook who makes food more readily available to the hungry who otherwise might have to do without: isn’t such a cook performing an act of justice? So let’s democratize the possibility of divine calling: not just deeper and higher but wider might distinguish the Spirit’s summons.

In this mystified model of Passion and Calling the Holy Spirit has a job to do, but for the Christian Trinity that’s only a 33% employment rate. How about the Father and the Son: what useful work might they perform? Here’s a tentative outline of trinitarian job descriptions:

The Holy Spirit generates the energy that activates Passion and Calling, through which the self maintains a dynamic connection to the other and the world. The Spirit’s force is immanent, generating the drives and desires that propel human action, as well as the environmental attractors and affordances that draw human attention to themselves as possible satisfiers of desire. In Deleuzian terms, this Spirit-force is the source of all multiplicity, shooting rhizomes through the world that merge and collide with and counteract each other, churning up a dynamic force field in which everything takes shape. It is through the widespread and complex interactions and attractions affecting these immanent vectors of multiplicity that the Spirit also generates transcendence: the structures and collective forces which accumulate into a medium in which all this dynamic activity takes place.

The Son is the force of incarnation, where body interacts with spirit. This is the force of individuation and subjectivity and personal agency. It’s the force through which the free self paradoxically emerges from the interacting tyrannies of biological determinism and sociocultural hegemony. The incarnate self is inspired, channeling the passions that flow through him or her in order to shape the rhizomes of multiplicity shooting through the world. The incarnate self cultivates expertise and taste and standards in order to shape the world in particular ways. Through interaction with others and the diverse calls they issue, the incarnate self moves toward identity within flux, toward individuality within collectivity, toward meaning within absurdity. The Son represents human agency both individually and corporately: the senders and receivers of passion and calling, the individual worker and the workforce, the impetus for discrete works of creation and for the cumulative works of human culture.

The Father is the force of plenitude and perfection. Truth, Beauty, Justice — these are standards that exceed passion and calling, that go beyond individual self-expression and difference. These standards cannot be prescribed by law nor are they universal and eternal: they depend on the movement of Spirit shaped by the agency of incarnation in specific places and times. The Father also establishes the standard of subjective incarnational excellence which manifests itself uniquely for each individual. The Father is the horizon toward which all creation and every creator moves.

I haven’t compiled specific Scriptural references to justify this framework. As a materialist I don’t even buy into it myself. As I said, it’s a tentative formulation, possibly providing a basis for further conversation and collaboration.

Calling as Transcendence

A friend of Anne’s recently asked for my opinion as a Ph.D. psychologist about the idea of a “calling.” She clarified: there’s the person who feels a calling to be a chef, and then there’s a calling from God to undertake some sort of mission on His behalf. She was interested exclusively in the latter, and wondered whether those who experience such a calling might be classified by professional psychologists as schizophrenic because they claim to hear voices telling them what to do. This woman apparently believes in divine callings and hearing God’s voice. I told her I mostly believed in the idea of being called to be a chef so I couldn’t be much help on her project.

Just as the word “passion” carries connotations of sexual desire, so does “calling” imply mystical communion with the transcendent — but I think that’s not all bad. Here’s how I’d make the distinction between passion and calling. If I I derive pleasure from my own cooking — I enjoy the process and the results — then I have a passion for cooking. If other people derive pleasure from my cooking — they enjoy eating what I make — then I have a calling to cook.

Framed in mystical terms, the relationship between passion and calling is a relationship between immanence and transcendence. Like everyone else, I have an innate biological need for nourishment, and I’m genetically equipped to satisfy this need by having a desire to seek out food and to experience the olfactory and gustatory pleasure of eating digestible and nourishing foods. My passion for cooking is “fed” by a desire to conjoin my biological needs to certain features of the environment that can satisfy my needs. This linking of organism to environment via desire is immanent in the sense that comes up from underneath who I am as a conscious and intentional agent in the world, both preceding and shaping my preferences for particular types of food and my efforts to prepare it according to my tastes.

But my immanent desire for nutritious and tasty food isn’t unique to me; it’s a desire I share with every human. As a species we are linked together by the internal need for nourishment and the external attraction that draws us to nourishing foods. In a sense, then, the desire for food transcends me as an individual: it’s a force that links all of us together. Seeking food is a primary reason either to cooperate or to compete with one another; eating food serves as a main reason for getting together communally; cultivating divergent tastes in food becomes a basis for conversation. If other people happen to enjoy the foods I prepare, they are likely to express that enjoyment by wanting me to repeat the performance. This is a “call” — a summons issued from outside me to satisfy others’ desires. If I have a desire to satisfy others’ desire, then I’m likely to respond by cooking for them again.

Things work out wonderfully if immanence flows into transcendence and vice versa; that is, if others issue a calling for me to exercise my passion. When I like to cook I do it better; when I do it better others want me to do it; when others want me to do it I’m more likely to oblige. Passion and calling reinforce one another in a circuit of desire linking me to others through our mutual attraction to something in the world that we need and like.

I’ve presented the desire-calling circuitry almost entirely in terms of biology. It starts getting mystical when we start moving beyond instincts and appetites, beyond personal and common tastes, into something like culinary excellence and sophisticated palates and the sheer aesthetic multisensory beauty of the food. Then the passion becomes infused with something deep and rare, and the cook heeds a higher calling that perhaps at first no one but he can hear. Then the cook becomes a chef and an artist of la haute cuisine; then the desire that flows from instinct and food through into the higher human culture him begins to feel like the mysterious workings of the Holy Spirit…

{On a related subject, see Erdman’s post on the Pay-as-you-go Church.]

Passion as Libidinal Investment

One Sunday morning while waiting for Anne to get out of church I struck up a conversation with a woman whose kids used to attend the same primary school as did our daughter. This woman was worried about her daughter’s future, which from the mom’s perspective seemed to hinge on the girl being accepted for enrollment by a prestigious university. The girl was getting excellent marks in high school, but lots of kids do well in school. According to the compiled wisdom of guidance counselors and other moms, a 4.3 GPA and great SAT scores aren’t enough. To get into Princeton or Stanford or wherever, the girl must have something extra that sets her apart from the other bright high achievers flooding the applicant pool. That something extra is a “passion.” On this particular Sunday morning this particular mom was at her wits’ end about her daughter’s prospects for a successful life. She lamented, “the only thing my daughter has a passion for is boys.”

My first reaction was to think: that’s fine — plenty of novelists and filmmakers build careers telling stories about that kind of passion. On further reflection I found it unfortunate that the word “passion,” which is a perfectly good word for describing someone’s emotional attraction in some sort of activity, has to be tainted by sexual innuendo. But now I’ve changed my mind: maybe the connection between work passion and sexual passion ought to be acknowledged.

Freud regarded all personal activity — work, play, art, war — as energized by sublimated sexual drive, or libido. If your libido can find a satisfying outlet, then you stick with it. But the outflow of libidinal energy can be stifled through failure, criticism, trauma, repetition. Then the libido backs up on itself, becoming a force of repression and self-destruction. No longer experiencing the flow of energy necessary to engage actively in the world, you become bored, sluggish, emotionally numb, static. In short, the person suffering from a short-circuited libido no longer experiences a “passion” for anything.

I think Freud’s model remains a useful one. If you’ve got a good flow of libidinal energy going, you may find yourself vigorously pursuing any number of activities. If the flow is stymied, there’s no pleasure to be found anywhere and every activity becomes a fatiguing chore. I don’t know that it’s necessary to attribute all libidinal energy to the sex drive, but when I think about it, is the kind of energy that makes sex worth pursuing really all that different from any other sort of passion? The pursuit of any passion is pleasurable in its own right. The pursuit becomes infused with even more energy if your passion seems to be reciprocated by someone else. The energy fueling the passion isn’t dissipated by having that passion satisfied; instead, you feel renewed and recharged, so that pretty soon you’re ready to go at it again.

According to the libidinal model, it’s not really appropriate to say you “have a passion,” as if it were a kind of personality trait. Nor is a passion just a strong interest in and aptitude for and expertise at doing one particular activity. Rather, having a passion is experiencing an outflow of energy that you can pour into an activity that renews rather than depletes your energy. Considered as a source of potential energy, passion is free-flowing and unchanneled — you can find yourself passionately engaged in any number of pursuits that happen to present themselves to you. You’re more likely to concentrate your libidinal attention on a particular outlet if that activity continually re-energizes you. If you perform a particular activity successfully, if your passion is reciprocated by others who also enjoy pursuing this activity with you, if others value your performance, then this activity may grow into a “passion.”

You might be engaged in many passions at once, or you might pursue a series of passions over the course of a year or a lifetime. A passion isn’t a thing you either have or don’t have, as if it were a piece of yourself or a growth attached to your ego. Rather, a passion is a source of energy that flows through a channel directing that energy into the world. Passion is more a way of concentrating your energetic engagement with the world and with other people. It’s a force that lets you become an active agent, a subject rather than just an object. It’s a paradoxical kind of force that is replenished by the act of expending it. Cultivating a passion means learning how to recognize ways in which your libidinal energy is continually reinvigorated instead of being continually drained out of you until there’s no juice left.

Listening to Work Symptoms

Don’t get me wrong: workers really do have legitimate gripes about inadequate pay or overwork, about poor working conditions or abusive bosses. Just because I’m a psychologist doesn’t mean I want to psychologize workers’ complaints, refocusing the problem away from the job and onto the worker. Quite the opposite, in fact: people who have problems with their work have problems with their work.

I’m focusing mostly on knowledge workers, creatives, professionals, managers, and others who have some responsibility for what work gets done and what products are produced in the capitalist economy. A case could be made for all such workers to quit their jobs immediately, inasmuch as they’re contributing to the extension of an inequitable, exploitive, wasteful, and generally tacky economy. Maybe everyone holding these jobs really would do something else — art, preaching, revolutionary politics — if they could afford the pay cut. But even in an economic system owned and run by workers or the public these same kinds of jobs would need to be filled. One could argue that performing these jobs poorly would undermine the current system, hastening its demise and its replacement by something better. But doing crappy work and turning out crappy products seems like a counterproductive move under any socioeconomic regime. I’m assuming that a different work system runs in parallel with and overlaps the system defined strictly in economic terms. In this other system work isn’t defined in terms of costs, prices, and profits — what in my last post I called the Green Path — but in terms of passion and calling, of expertise and standards — the Black Path.

Sometimes the Green and Black Paths coincide, and the design and distribution of the best products generate the most profits for the owners. Usually the overlap isn’t 100%: qualitatively better work might generate less profit; crappier products generate higher margins. Sometimes, though, the misalignment is jarring. To the extent that a worker is fully reconciled to working on Green Path, to that extent s/he is committed to realigning the work in accord with the owners’ interests; i.e., with maximizing profits. If, on the other hand, the worker is fully committed to the Black Path or is ambivalent about the trade-offs between excellence and profitability, s/he is likely to experience subjectively the gaps and frictions and collisions. In other words, the worker’s symptom is a response triggered by a tangible misalignment between the Black and the Green Paths.

Sometimes the symptoms are obvious — the worker just doesn’t like the nature of the work itself. Does this person already have something else in mind that she’d rather do? If so, why isn’t she doing it? Or is this person mired in chronic indifference, not really passionate about anything. Is this person really so indifferent, or has the flow been short-circuited by the indifference of the world? Sometimes what gets repressed is trauma and sometimes it’s passion, but often as not it’s both: the trauma stifles or castrates the passion. With the return of the repressed might come both exuberance and rage. Then you might actually get a passion for destroying the destroyer, the Big Other who stands between you and your passion holding the bloody knife — think about “Jack” and the rest of the guys in Fight Club. It might turn out that letting the passion flow again actually increases the symptoms, because make no mistake: the Green Path does put up a mighty resistance. Think about Officer McNulty in The Wire, an easygoing family man when he’s just walking the beat, but an obsessive, foul-tempered, boozing, cheating, lying law-breaker when he’s giving free rein to his passion for justice.

Black Path, Green Path

Lately Anne and I have talking about how work works. Here’s a photo of some jottings I did on my whiteboard the other day:

There are two paths, each characterizing a particular kind of relationship between self and others relative to work. The Black Path (named for the marker I happened to have in my hand at the time) constitutes a vector or rhizome that links Passion with Calling. There are sensations, desires, ideas, kinds of objects, meaningful themes, etc. that trace multiplex paths through humanity. You may find yourself particularly attracted to or inspired by one of these paths. in keeping with contemporary parlance, this personal response is a Passion. But you aren’t the only one who’s attracted to this vector: others too experience the same passion. If you encounter someone else who shares your passion, a kind of interpersonal energy field is established. This energy field is bidirectional: it flows outward from you, and it also draws you toward others. This draw exerted on you from others who share your passion is, using old-fashioned religious terminology, a Calling.

Someone who works on the Black Path isn’t just going with the flow. She positions herself in the flow and is inspired and called forward by it, but she also acts on the flow, transforming it into something other than what it was. Call this transformation of flow resulting from work a product. To effect a transformation — to make a product — requires the adept exercise of personal agency, or Expertise: knowledge, technical skill, artistry. To effect a good transformation of the flow — to make a good product — requires exercising expertise in the service of a set of Standards for distinguishing the good from the bad. Expertise and standards set up an intrasubjective flow field within the worker: through the exercise of expertise the worker propels the work upward, while standards call the work upward toward excellence. This intrasubjective expertise-standards force field operates orthogonally to the interpersonal flow field characterized by passion and calling:

Standards

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—– Passion ———— Calling —–

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Expertise

Even if work is performed by individual workers, it’s still true that the expertise they exercise and the standards toward which they aim aren’t purely subjective. They are also intersubjectively defined. Work is typically performed in organizations and by teams, requiring expert coordination of multiple agents and convergence on agreed-upon standards. Also, what’s regarded as expert work and an excellent product is to a great extent defined by the profession to which the worker belongs. But expertise and standards also approach objectivity: the nature of the flow itself determines what sorts of actions must be taken to effect transformation, as well as what constitutes a good transformation.

The Green Path (again, the color of the marker is definitive) is characterized by a flow energized not by Passion and Calling but by Money and Power. To an extent these forces operate within the dynamic of the work itself: workers want to earn money for exerting the kind of personal power it takes to transform raw flow into products; buyers want to spend as little as possible while exercising their power as consumers to establish the standards for distinguishing good from bad products. However, Money and Power are also exerted from outside the producer-consumer dynamic by those who own the means of production and who hire the workers. In our society the owners are likely to be outside investors, but they might be the government or the workers themselves. The owners insist that the financial exchange between producer and consumer generate a profit that is siphoned off to them. From the owners’ perspective the final standard of a product’s excellence consists of the profit it earns for the owners. The owners wield power over the workers such that the workers must exercise their expertise in service of the owners’ standards of profitability.

Because the flow of money and power defines the Green Path, ultimately the worker’s subjective agency is defined accordingly. Every worker’s expertise is defined as the ability to contribute to owner profitability. Intersubjective standards of the organization and the profession, as well as standards dictated by the nature of the work itself, become secondary to the primary standard of profitability. As owner of his/her own labor power in the marketplace, the worker too defines his/work in terms of money and power. Am I paid what I believe I’m worth, based on comparison with others? Can I exercise authority over my job and that of others? Do I receive personal recognition from bosses and co-workers? Do I benefit financially from contributing to corporate profitability? Do I like my self-image and the image I project to others as a worker in this place? Instead of evaluating him/herself in terms of contribution of expertise toward the achievement of product excellence, the worker establishes him/herself from outside the workflow itself, as an entity toward which money flows and from which power emanates. In short, the worker becomes egocentrically self-absorbed as owner of him/herself, paralleling on a smaller scale the more massive narcissistic self-absorption exercised by the corporate owners.

More later, but surely it’s obvious that I think the Black Path is better than the Green Path. I’d like to position myself on the Black Path in some capacity, both for myself as a writer and for the benefit of other workers as a psychologist.