{ Thursday, May 29, 2003 }
Slavoj Zizek welcomes the prospect of biogenetic intervention in the London Review of Books, Bring me my Philips Mental Jacket. If you could take a pill instead of spending 12 years getting your high school diploma, you would, wouldn't you? Or would you, by doing so, lose your dignity and freedom as a human being?
Another wide-ranging Zizek essay encompassing Habermas, Dennett, Viagra, "steered rats" and the new Philips phone and music-playing jacket, a "quasi-organic prosthesis." (There are more Zizek essays on the LRB site: "You May" on the postmodern superego, Attempts to escape the Logic of Capitalism, and Are we in a war? Do we have an enemy?)
LINK | 12:02 PM | TB
way to go with the rufruf link! too cute.
denise | May 29, 2003 3:01 PMI was going to make the case that if we just popped pills, it would take all the game out of life, but then I realized that popping pills would be the new game.
Emily | May 29, 2003 8:58 PMOnly if it comes in Flintstone shapes and fruity flavors.
PS | May 29, 2003 10:55 PMSo, what would you do with those 12 years if you didn't have to go to school?
ho ho HO!
Caterina | May 30, 2003 1:49 AM[Caterina, it seems that your dog ate my homework. Let's see if I can reconstruct my comment.]
My objection to high school equivalency in a pill has to do with what else would be packed in there besides facts and figures and algebra skills. I believe that any curriculum contains ideology (hence the terrible fights over textbooks which rage in Texas and elsewhere). One of the few virtues of our present ineffective educational system is that it's also ineffective at transmitting ideology. I wouldn't want to pop a pill containing an indoctrination in Bushism (or Chretienism or Saddamism or Kim Jong-Ilism or any other ism). If I don't trust the government to control my computer, why would I trust them to control my wetware?
Which may all be a moot point. By the time we get to education in a pill, we'll also be at the point where programming viruses or nanobiobots is off-the-shelf technology, much easier than today's crude WMDs. Every time I hear people waxing poetic about better living through nanobioinfotechnology, I recall the principle of entropy. Just as it is easier to blow up a house than build one, it will be easier to engineer a pandemic than a cure for cancer (or for dropping out of high school).
Prentiss Riddle | May 30, 2003 11:35 AMWe already take pills to become someone we're not. At least kids my age do. Feel inhibited, take some shots. Want to space out, get emotional, and have sex with a stranger: take e at a rave. Want to think about the meaning behind it all, and see all the connections for just a few hours: take some acid. The point is, it's not scary to take a pill and get your high school learning. Sure it's much longer term, and it's a permanent change in who you are. But we're already willing to be different people on a weekly/nightly basis, and some of us would keep those changes if we could.
Tom | May 31, 2003 7:18 AMYeah, not to mention Prozac and the rest of the mood and brain-altering spectrum of anti-depressants. Plus Lithium, Xanax...
My examples are "normalizing". Yours are for creating out-of-the-ordinary experiences.
Caterina | May 31, 2003 5:14 PMFreud said that we had to get used to the idea that there were more than two people participating in every sex act. Something like: who we are, plus who we want to be (not to mention who we think they are, who we want them to be, mom, dad, the house pet, etc). Normalizing or exoticizing there's always some desire to be totally different from who we are. Just like we suspend our disbelief to enjoy movies/theater, we use substances as a crutch to suspend disbelief in our own lives, so we can enjoys ourselves even. Perhaps this is why the mere mention of wine brings romantic thoughts: there's some libidinous connection between dressing yourself up as someone else and sex.
That being said: I'm a little stressed taking finals right now, and if I could just take a damn pill that would teach me International Law I would have the time to take a train down to Surrey to see my ex-girlfriend. Life's a bitch.
Tom | June 1, 2003 4:33 AM"There [are] more than two people participating in every sex act." Don't anybody tell the Texas legislature!
Prentiss Riddle | June 4, 2003 8:29 AMhttp://www.ethelmae.com/yourvoice/messages/39010.shtml garyhoodlumnow
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{ Post a comment }
What makes me who I am - my actions & reactions or the history which led me to them? If my history has any significance, isn't it only in the effect it has had on me and what I remember about it?
I think the "take a pill instead of a class" is the weaker approach mainly because of our inability to mimic not just one intended result but the almost infinite complexity of experience that takes place when humans act and interact. We cannot help but be affected by that complexity; simple effects make simple people and I see that as a handicap.
However, that presumes that nothing takes the place of the avoided activity. Suppose I took the "feel energetic and well-coordinated" pill instead of the yoga class; what would I use the time to experience with that state of mind and body? It takes more than a pill to take the "being" out of human beings.
Dinah | May 29, 2003 12:46 PM