The late Victorians had hysteria, then other neuroses, at least according to Freud. According to Deleuze and Guattari (not to mention R.D. Laing), yet more symptomatic was schizophrenia. And who are we or what is the syndrome marking us to ourselves? Aspergers.
Topicality: it's made the cover of the NYT magazine. One of the featured hedge fund managers in The Big Short has Aspergers. A model on ANTM has had it (well, maybe not exactly, but she had something on the autism spectrum). A leading contender on American Idol seems like she may have it. With academics, it's easier to identify those without Aspergers than those with it.
Applicability: Aspergers is characterized by difficulty in social interaction, difficulty in reading and responding to the emotions of others, and focused interest on seemingly odd topics. These traits could also be thought about in terms of the decline of symbolic efficiency wherein we are unsure about social norms and expectations, lack collective or symbolic identities, and become fixated on anything that might help us stabilize our fluctuating, unstable egos. Who doesn't find social interaction ever more challenging? We are unsure as to how others will respond to what we say and do. What some of us read as justified anger, others dismiss as irrational violence. We are also daily confronted with the specificity of others'--which strikes us as strange, foreign, oddly focused on matters we don't understand. This aspect could also link up with the overall climate of anti-intellectualism such that any expertise seems like a fixation. Pressures today, then, demand conformity but cannot articulate a norm to which conformity is expected. The poor subject doesn't know what to do.
That was very insightful. Anti-intellectualism, and paranoia abound.
Posted by: Alexandre Belleau | April 19, 2010 at 04:42 AM