Frantz Fanon’s Way

Frantz Fanon. A figure that has, to a large degree, faded into the mists of time.

He was, of course, a Martinican psychiatrist and author who later went on to join the FLN in the Algerian insurgency.

I recently read one of his books ‘Black Skin, White Masks‘ and I must say, it’s one of the most harrowing books I’ve ever read. Beautifully written in prose, scrupulously honest and with a theme that you simply won’t find elsewhere.

Some background before we discuss.

The French were proud throughout the 20th century of their ability to assimilate blacks – this in contrast to, say, the US, where black people were seen as second-class citizens. However, Fanon claimed that the process of assimilation was far more painful than was commonly supposed. He claimed that if one was to live as an ‘assimilated’ black in France, one would have to deny the very fact that one was black.

He writes of how people would try to assure him that he wasn’t one of ‘them’ – the ‘savages’ – but one of ‘us’ – a Frenchman. He writes of how alienating this is for the assimilated black. The book pulls no punches – he writes of how both black men and black women in France at the time avoid each other and aspire to marry whites. ‘To get some whiteness in their lives,’ he writes.

This ‘mask’ of ‘whiteness’ leaves a void at the heart of every black person living assimilated in France, a void that Fanon – the psychiatrist – compares to mental illness.

After writing the book Fanon wandered from place to place in search of a solution to his problem. Eventually he found himself working in an Algerian mental institution. Here he heard first-hand of the brutalities that were taking place outside the asylum walls. The French, while they may have been very civil when it came to assimilation, were particularly brutal colonisers – and they tortured and killed those Algerians that hadn’t been assimilated at will and in the most brutal of ways.

In the unassimilated Algerians – who, Fanon claimed, the French saw as ‘dirty Arabs’ – Fanon saw a reflection of the black man whom he had been writing about. In the Algerian he saw a person without a home – alienated and oppressed in their own native country. Yet unlike the assimilated blacks of Martinique, these people had… well… nothing; nothing but their bare lives.

In this Fanon saw promise. In these people, with nothing to lose, with no identity, Fanon saw the potential of a New Man – more specifically, Fanon saw the colonial equivalent of Marx’s proletariat; people who also had no fixed identity, who also moved from place to place always under the gaze of their oppressor – and, most importantly, who had nothing left to lose but their chains.

Naturally, Fanon joined the FLN and helped fight the coloniser. Until he died an early death from leukemia.

Fanon left behind a new idea – or, at least, an idea that hadn’t been fully articulated before. In the identityless colonial subject Fanon saw a primordial violence. These people had no voice and their only way to communicate was through direct violence – ‘acting out‘ in the psychobabble. Yet Fanon saw this ‘acting out’ as a positive and liberating articulation of their struggle. He thought that it would cleanse and heal the psychic wounds of colonialism – giving the colonial subjects their dignity once more, which they could then use to construct a new national identity.

This was in direct contrast to what Fanon’s psychiatric training would have taught him. There he would have learnt that ‘acting out’ was, in fact, a dangerous manifestation of a failure to communicate… one that could end in self-harm, murder or suicide. Yet, for some reason Fanon saw this as liberating.

This was an idea that would gain traction with many groups; sometimes directly – as in the case of the Islamists – sometimes indirectly – as in the case of Pol Pot and the Red Army Faction.

Yet, for all this I cannot help but think that Fanon’s work raises extremely important questions. One’s that are ostensibly raised by contemporary cultural studies – but are watered down, whitewashed and, indeed, masked in the process. Fanon’s argument is violent and uncompromising; his solution was no such thing – but for all that, I still think that he poses the problem correctly.

Here’s a film on Fanon that was made in the 1990s and named after the aforementioned book ‘Black Skin, White Masks‘. The acting is of a very high standard and I was struck that the cultural theorist Stuart Lee – who I regard as usually trading in sterilised platitudes – frontally and honestly engages with Fanon’s work. That alone, is worth the price of admission.

(I’d also recommend checking out Adam Curtis’ film ‘The Power of Nightmares‘ on how these ideas were taken up by the Islamists – as well as reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s short but beautifully written and powerful preface to Fanon’s most famous book ‘The Wretched of the Earth‘).

Black Skin, White Masks

Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V

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Are You REALLY Happy?

The Irish Labour Party, after giving up trying to appeal to the citizenry's sense civic duty and the importance of the public sphere, revert to the lowest common denominator in the last election

Slow day so far. So I thought I’d write about James Kwak’s recent blog post on what he calls ‘Happiness Research’ – which, he claims is closely related to contemporary psychology and hence to certain forms of behavioral economics research. I disagree, ‘Happiness Research’ goes right back to the utilitarian philosophers – probably starting with Jeremy Bentham who wrote:

The principle of utility or the principle of utilitarianism :  I ought do that act which will bring about the greatest happiness (pleasure) for the greatest number of persons (the community).

This was then later formalised by economists into the principle theory of value in contemporary economics: the theory of marginal utility, which assumes that people will rationally seek out to maximise their own happiness by purchasing garbage (note, that this implicitly assumes that people KNOW what makes them ‘happy’ – so, for this theory, advertising, for example, is a bit of a boondoggle).

Happiness research is insidious. Why? Because although it may seem benign, it actually enforces a standard upon us that we cannot live up to. Try it yourself – ask someone you know are they happy. If they respond that they’re sort of happy or something else that sounds vaguely positive ask them: are they REALLY happy. Now, your unfortunate interlocutor – if they haven’t already suspected you of being a scientologist and run a mile – will begin to question what happiness actually MEANS.

“Have I ever been happy?” they ask themselves, “I mean, truly happy…” Then all those missed opportunities will surface and the person in question will begin to feel discontented (this is, as I alluded to above, how cults recruit members from among the insecure in the population). What occurs here – to put it in psychoanalytical terms – is that you are appealing to the person’s ego-ideal, which is an ideal image of oneself that we all carry around in our heads and is closely tied up with our sense of narcissism (that is: self-love – which is always only partial and open to disappointment). The online dictionary of psychoanalysis puts it well:

The person seeks to regain the narcissistic perfection of its infancy under the new form of the ego ideal, which is deferred as a goal to be attained in the future. Thus the ideal ego could be seen as the nostalgic survival of a lost narcissism, while the ego ideal appears to be the dynamic formation that sustains ambitions towards progress.

And so the person harks back to that sense of narcissistic omnipotence that the young child feels – when they are waited upon hand and foot and glorified by all those around them. This is what people seek in the self-conscious pursuit of ‘happiness’ (it is also this state that advertising often appeals to). Of course, being unattainable, thinking about trying to grasp this state necessarily ends in even greater frustration. But then the happiness researchers – and their brethren in the cult movement and the advertising industry – gain even more traction by pointing out this new frustration and claiming that they can alleviate it.

In his post Kwak makes a wry observation:

For much of its history, psychology had a pathological bent: it was concerned with figuring out why people had psychological problems and how to cure those problems. A few decades ago, however, some psychologists decided they would try to figure out what makes people happy, and they started a wave of happiness studies that continues today.

Freud, who knew a little something about happiness and misery, wrote in 1895:

I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.

Perhaps the happiness researchers – and their economist friends – would do well in taking a lesson from that…

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Hey There, Pigeon Brain!

"And I will tell you, O my brothers - they tried, but they were unable to control your humble narrator"

The brilliant BBC filmmaker Adam Curtis wrote what I consider to be a very important article over at his blog recently. I would strongly encourage people to read/view it in full here.

Curtis points out that Behaviorism is back – and this in a rather big way. David Cameron has employed a team at Downing Street called the ‘Behavioral Insights Unit‘. This team use what were thought to be the outmoded psychological theories of Behaviorism to attempt to control citizens. They dress this up in the garb of social responsibility – but, at base, it is what it is: an attempt to manipulate people psychologically.

The aims of the Behavioral Insights Unit cannot be thought of as promoting social responsibility – as their theories evade the notion of the responsible individuals. Behaviorism sees people not as moral agents, but as machines that can be programmed through the manipulation of their environment.

The theory has its beginnings in a lab. Skinner used to put pigeons in a box – a box ominously named the ‘Skinner box’. Skinner would then train the pigeon to act in a certain way by feeding it when it undertook certain actions and withholding food when it performed others. By doing this Skinner found that he was able to exert some control over the animal.

From this Skinner then took an enormous theoretical leap and assumed that humans act in an identical way.

This, of course, is nonsense. Humans sometimes do respond to incentive – but then, sometimes they do not. Humans are far more complex creatures than pigeons – and their environments are far more complex than Skinner Boxes. Take a simple example:

Let’s say that I can derive immense financial and material satisfactions by acting in an unscrupulous manner – this is not simply a thought experiment, many people do this on a daily basis. According to Skinner’s theories there should be nothing stopping me from doing so. In reality, of course, there is: my conscience. Because I am a relatively free moral agent I will be directed strongly by my conscience in these circumstances.

This is only one of many examples of why Skinner’s Behaviorist theories simply don’t weigh up. As the linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky once wrote:

“[Skinner’s] speculations are devoid of scientific content and do not even hint at general outlines of a possible science of human behaviour. Furthermore, Skinner imposes certain arbitrary limitations on scientific research which virtually guarantee continued failure.”

Curtis asserts that this new resurgence of Behaviorism marks a turning point in how people will be controlled by the government and the market. Curtis claims that this new turn to Behaviorism will be the death of the old individualism – which he traces back to Freudianism. Here, Curtis is wrong on a number of counts.

First of all, individualism – a constant theme running through Curtis’ work – is not traceable to Freud, but to an intellectual movement known as Romanticism that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

The excellent British philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin (who appeared in one of Curtis’ programs – and whose work I would encourage Curtis to become more familiar with) traced this history in his excellent lecture series now printed under the title ‘The Roots of Romanticism‘. This long history, I would argue, makes notions such as individualism and liberty far more impervious to being overturned than Curtis seems to suppose. This can even be seen  in the way the Behaviorists don’t claim to want to control individuals – which would be heresy – but to ‘nudge’ them to take… what else… but moral action.

Secondly, Curtis doesn’t seem to have any conception that a theory can simply be wrong. Behaviorism rests on demonstrably false premises and due to this we can be confident that any attempts to enforce it will fail – and fail rather spectacularly at that. The Behaviorists offer Cameron a means of control – but this is illusory and history will prove this… mark my words.

A final point. While I believe that Behaviorism stands little chance of gaining traction in the management of public affairs, it is certainly becoming more prevalent among psychologists and psychotherapists under the name Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. But I don’t believe that this marks an intellectual victory. Behaviorism is popular among psychologists because it is cost effective. It produces effects quickly – even though these results are unlikely to last very long. For this reason people with low and medium incomes will come to Behaviorists rather than other forms of psychotherapists. But the well-off generally wouldn’t be seen dead around a Behaviorist – they have no desire to be treated like pigeons. These people are far more likely to avail of a more expensive, more effective and more theoretically sound form of psychotherapy.

Curtis is a fine filmmaker and I would encourage everyone to check out his films – but I believe that his conclusions are often wrong. And this, I believe, is because Curtis doesn’t appreciate certain aspects of man that can adequately be termed his ‘Nature’. Ideas may change, but the people who produce them don’t – at least, not very significantly.

And on that note I’ll leave you with a real horrorshow version of the theme from A Clockwork Orange, my little droogies. Give your old glazzies a rest from viddying this online gazetta and slooshy this dobby music.

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Creepy Science Men

So today another apology came out of the US government for their Naziesque experiments with syphilis on mentally ill people in Guatemala.

Just to remind everyone – because these events have an awful tendency to sink into the historical archives rather too quickly - in 1997 President Clinton apologised on behalf of one of these hideous experiments that took place on US soil which targeted underprivileged blacks:

For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,”1 their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all. The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”

All too often the general public are under the impression that these sorts of sick experiments only take place under totalitarian regimes – but this is not the case. Sickening medical experiments and procedures have a long history in the US.

Usually there are two main groups that can be found lurking somewhere in the background of these awful experiments: eugenicists (who found their ‘scientific’ theories on the findings of ‘modern’ genetics – essentially viewing human beings from the vantage point of their genes… sound familiar?) and the CIA.

The latter are perhaps a little more colourful, so we’ll take a look at one of their more infamous experiments.

As part of their dubious ‘mind control’ program – initiated out of a growing sense of paranoia among CIA operatives – one psychiatrist, Dr. Donald Cameron, tried a particularly disturbing technique called Deep Sedation Therapy on some of his patients; both those who suffered from serious psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia; others were simply obese or suffering from PMS.

Deep sleep therapy involved inducing patients into a coma lasting between one to eight weeks. Many patients either died during the sleep or awoke from it with varying degrees of impairment, ranging from permanent amnesia to chronic panic.

Here’s some video interviewing a woman whose life was completely devastated by these CIA funded experiments.

It’s stories like these that make me think twice every time one of my militantly atheistic friends tries to convince me that religion is at the root of all irrational barbarism. All too often science is so much worse.

[Footnote: Interestingly it was thanks to the Church of Scientology that some legal proceedings were taken against the perpetrators of Deep Sedation Therapy. Before prosecution was passed on Australian psychiatrist and Deep Sleep practitioner, Harry Bailey, he took his own life. In his suicide note he wrote: "Let it be known that the Scientologists and the forces of madness have won". This coming from a man who used to hold competitions with his colleague to see how deep a sleep he could keep his patients in without killing them (Bailey was responsible for some 26 deaths due to DST). I ask you: even though Scientologists are certainly a cult, and probably a dangerous one at that, who are truly the forces of madness here? Is science, held up as a religion itself, given extra-judicial power over life and death and absolved of all moral responsibility in the name of 'objectivity' not a more dangerous and, indeed, insane force than any religion or cult?]

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