Bipolar Expeditions (8 page)

1. A living human … 2. An individual of specified character:
a person of importance.
3. The composite of characteristics that make up an individual personality; the self. 4. The living body of a human:
searched the prisoner's person.
5. Physique and general appearance. 6.
Law
A human or organization with legal rights and duties … 9. A character or role, as in a play; a guise:
“Well, in her person, I say I will not have you”
(Shakespeare).

—American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language,
4th ed., 2000

W
hen one is diagnosed with manic depression, one's status as a V V rational person is thrown into question. What it means to be rational or irrational depends on what notions of personhood are in play, notions that must be understood in their cultural context.
¹
In Western culture since the seventeenth century, a particular kind of person, the “individual,” has been the norm. In the writings of John Locke and others, the individual was defined as “essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them. The individual was seen neither as a moral whole, nor as part of a larger social whole, but as an owner of himself.”
²
He was a being capable of conscious awareness, deliberate choice, and independent volition. His actions were generated from his own desires, desires that grew out of his individual intention to grow, develop, or acquire.
³
In due course, I will make clear what it is about manic depression that seems to challenge this conception of the rational individual person. For the moment, I will say that a manic-depressive person takes these desirable traits to extremes: when depressed the person is profoundly dejected and turned inward, unable to act or love; when manic the person is consumed by his desires and acts on all of them, whether for sex, or money, or power, at once. Freud described the “maniac” just released from the inhibition of depression as someone who runs after his new desires “like a starving man after bread.”
⁴

Taking things to such extremes seems like being out of control. But is being in control always considered desirable and normal? Historically, the individual “owner of himself” has not always been expected to exert continuous control over his actions. In the United States in the late nineteenth-century, psychic states that might erode the edges of the disciplined and aware self, make its borders permeable to other selves, or allow it to drift into discontiguous psychic spaces were given positive value. In 1889, when William James carried out his “Census of Hallucinations” in the United States, he, his collaborators, and many of the over six thousand Americans interviewed regarded states such as hallucination in a variety of positive ways.
⁵
However, by the twentieth century, mainstream popular culture in the United States had largely come to denigrate “forms of experience not characterized by self-consciousness.”
⁶
Even experimentation with mind-altering drugs, popular in the 1960s, was generally valued for heightened
self-consciousness
rather than loss of self.

The ideal that a person should be disciplined and self-aware came about partly through the requirements of work in industrial settings and the growth of a consumer society. The moving assembly line with its dedicated machinery enabled efficient mass production and paved the way for profitable mass marketing based on increased consumption of commodities. Corporate organizations were hierarchically structured bureaucracies whose ideal employee was conformist, passive, stable, consistent, and acquiescent.
⁷
More broadly, scientific planning was brought to bear on all kinds of human groups, yielding rational social organization and rational thought. People and the groups they formed were devoted to development (in a linear way) through time, toward goals that not all could reach, but which all should desire, because they represented the lofty heights of abstract thought.
⁸
For the adult person, stability and solidity were at a premium. Early in the century, identity was described as something that was “forged”: like wrought iron, a per son's identity should be strong.
⁹
This solid sort of identity was akin to the older concept of “character,” which was a more or less given quality of the person manifested by working hard and honoring the dictates of duty. However, at the same time, the locus of a person's stability was changing. The term “personality” came into common usage only in the early twentieth century, bringing with it the potential for more flexible self-presentation. In his classic book
The Organization Man,
published in 1956, W. H. Whyte gives satirical advice on how to get a high score on personality tests: always choose the most conventional word in word association tests, so that you will be classified as a person who has normal ways of thinking rather than abnormal emotional ways of thinking.
¹⁰
But Whyte's advice contains the possibility for other ways of defining the personality. One could now strategize about presenting one's personality in different ways for different purposes.
¹¹

In
American Cool,
the historian Peter Stearns argues that Americans experienced a major change in emotional style in the 1920s. In the late nineteenth century, influenced by Victorian values, Americans placed great importance on the intense emotions attached to romantic love and to the passions necessary for great deeds. After the 1920s, the emotional climate shifted to restrained coolness: management was the key across the board—“no emotion should gain control over one's thought processes.”
¹²
Since my argument develops from a recent resurgence of interest in strong emotion-like states, Stearns's argument has particular salience. How exactly might Americans have gotten from the restrained cool that was the ideal in the beginning decades of mass production society to the unrestrained heat that ignites our cultural heroes today?

One explanation lies in an understanding of recent political and economic changes that have begun to make themselves felt in the United States, as elsewhere, changes with important implications for understanding contemporary concepts of the person. The differential internationalization of labor and markets, the growth of the information and service economies, and the abrupt decline of redistributive state services (among other things) have meant that access to the world's wealth has become much more difficult for most people. In the United States, concentration of wealth and income at the top of the social order is more extreme than at any time since the Depression, and poverty has grown correspondingly deeper, despite the persistent myth of social mobility toward the American dream. Successive waves of downsizing have picked off, in addition to the disadvantaged, significant numbers of people from occupations and classes not accustomed to a dramatic fall in their prospects and standard of living.
¹³
The imperative to become the kind of flexible worker who can succeed in extremely competitive circumstances has intensified, and the stakes for failing have greatly increased. In one sign of the unforgiving nature of increased competition, references to the “survival of the fittest” have increased exponentially in the popular media since the early 1980s.
¹⁴

Everyday experiences of time and space themselves may be shifting, too.
¹⁵
Activities that were once localized—education, work, and family life—are now increasingly being spread over space, changing the spatial and social dimensions of human interaction. “Close” and “distant” once applied both to relationships and spatial distance, and usually were coincident. No longer. Space seems to loom larger as it intrudes into relationships (a couple, of necessity, holding two or three jobs, parents and children following available jobs away from their extended family, grown siblings scattering to the four corners of the globe). Simultaneously, space disappears through electronic technologies (cell phones, the Internet) that make time speed up and communication happen instantaneously.
¹⁶
The stable time-space grid described in many earlier accounts of the disciplinary control characteristic of factories, prisons, military barracks, mental asylums, or schools since the onset of modernity has altered beyond recognition.
¹⁷

The factory, which has often served as both a laboratory and a conceptual guide for understandings of human behavior, is also changing. The hierarchical factory of the mass production era, with its worker drones and foremen, is being replaced (at least in the elite sectors of the global economy) with new forms: machines that process information and communicate with “self-managed” workers, who are in turn invested with greater decision-making powers. Corporations are flattening hierarchies, downsizing bureaucracies, and enhancing their corporate “culture,” becoming nimble and agile in hopes of surviving in rapidly changing markets. Relentlessly, corporations are also sending manufacturing divisions to cheaper labor markets overseas (where most laborers do not have the resources to follow them). To enable these activities, corporations seek organization in the form of fluid networks of alliances, a highly decoupled and dynamic form with great organizational flexibility.

Six million manufacturing jobs have been shed in the United States over the last thirty years, and many workers who lost their jobs have skidded down the socioeconomic hierarchy.
¹⁸
As my previous work has shown, workers and managers are expected to meet this threat by “evolving” with the aid of self-study, training courses, and an insistence on self-management when they are lucky enough to be employed inside a corporation, and then aggressive entrepreneurialism during the frequent periods they now expect to spend outside it.
¹⁹
Although from the beginnings of capitalism, firms and individuals have had to innovate and improve or decline and perish at the hands of competitors, competition in the present climate has become extremely fierce. Because of policies guided by “neoliberal” ideas, the individual must now creatively pursue his or her own development with the aid of fewer supports than ever before.
²⁰
The role of the state, according to the theory of political economic practices that fosters this climate, is to establish strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The state should ensure the free functioning of markets, and expand or extend markets to areas such as education, the environment, or social security. But the state should not provide social safety nets that would protect individuals whom markets exclude or defeat.
²¹
Corporations, too, are increasing the risks employees must bear, not only by cutting jobs but also by stopping their contributions to the pension plans of the workers who remain.
²²

In this environment, the individual is responsible for his or her own success or failure in a high-stakes and ever-changing set of arenas. The person now seems to be made up of a collection of assets, as if she were the proprietor of herself as a stock portfolio. In the 1990s, there was an increase in “home-based work,” based on telecommuting or the “You, Inc.” phenomenon.
²³
“People need to invest in their development as if they were a corporation,” said Anthony Carnevale, chairman of the National Commission for Employment Policy at the Department of Labor.
²⁴
Individuals, like mini-corporations, were supposed to “shapeshift” in their changing environments, accumulating and investing information and resources.
²⁵
There is a sense in which, as the U.S. government withdraws from provisioning individuals, the individual moves from being a citizen, oriented to the interests of the nation, to being a mini-corporation, oriented primarily to its own interests in global flows of capital.
²⁶
In preparation for this endeavor, as I will describe in coming chapters, American children, teenagers, and adults are doing many things to develop their mental capacities in specific ways, taking on self-management practices with or without the help of mind-enhancing drugs.

In one popular formulation of the state of things, Virginia Postrel's
The Future and Its Enemies,
“stasists” will be left behind by “dynamists” who celebrate “emergent, complex messiness … an order that is unpredictable, spontaneous and ever shifting, a pattern created by millions of uncoordinated, independent decisions … these actions shape a future no one can see, a future that is dynamic and inherently unstable.”
²⁷
In the radically atomized world Postrel imagines, there is an imperative for people who are always adapting, scanning the environment, continuously changing in creative and innovative ways, flying from one thing to another, pushing the limits of everything, and doing it all with an intense level of energy devoted to anticipating and investing in the future.
²⁸
High school and college-age children in the United States and globally appear already to be entering this future.
²⁹

Given this procession of dramatic changes on many social, cultural, affective, economic, and political fronts, what concepts of the person are enabled by and enable these conditions? As the mechanical regularity demanded of the assembly line worker gives way to the ideal of a flexible and constantly changing worker, what will happen to the value previously placed on stability and conformity? A new attitude toward change is emerging: continuous retraining for workers at all levels is becoming normal.
³⁰
Today it is not just that individuals circulate among different jobs or careers, nor just that the conditions of their work change over time. In addition, the individual comes to consist of potentials to be realized and capacities to be fulfilled: self-maximization and self-optimization are the watchwords. Since these potentials and capacities take their shape in relation to the requirements of a continuously changing environment, their content, and even the terms in which they are understood, are also in constant change.