Hypochondriac Culture (4)

In cultures devoted to the body, there are any number of different ways in which hypochondria manifests itself. One of the overwhelming cultural concerns of the moment is what is being described as an epidemic of obesity. The response has been an epidemic of diets, diet movements and articles in magazines and newspapers about weight, body shape and health. I am not suggesting that a population that is generally overweight is a good thing. I support healthy living and exercise and so on. The challenge is how to explain weight, the body and biology in such a way that people do not get scared and worried about their health. Fear of the consequences is only one of many possible ways in which individuals will come to grips with the challenges that they face. But, fear can overtake the process and in fact lead to a defensive or stoical response. A fatalistic attitude is not the answer, but if the odds seem too great, and the fear too strong, why attack the core of the issue? Weight is as much about overeating as it is about an inability to "see" the body, to see our own bodies.

The aesthetics of body image -- how we hold to and understand our own sense of self, will not be solved by just losing weight.

Hypochondriac Culture (3)

What if the hyponchondriac body is an aesthetic projection?

Lets for a moment assume that our daily experiences are continuously in a kind of flux between awareness and loss of awareness. We engage with the world around us without being fully aware of our intentions, often without understanding what motivates us to do certain things or react in specific ways to people and to objects.

When someone looks at us we take that look and project it onto our bodies and into our minds. This is not a mechanical process and has no particular sequence to it. Nevertheless, a particular look can lead to any number of thoughts and from those any number of different projections.

Now, lets reverse what I just said. What happens when the feelings you are expressing towards a friend for example, don't play out in the way that you anticipated? How does your body deal with the impact of that experience?

Another way of thinking about this is to reflect on the fact that our bodies represent and express our histories, both personal and public. Pain becomes an interface between the internal and external images that we have of our biological selves. Irrespective of whether that pain is real or not, our bodies express and represent our thoughts—the internal becomes visible.

If the pain is a fiction, the only way to make it real is to rescuplt the body, remake it in the light of the artifice, mark it with evidence, in other words, transform it into an aesthetic object.

Part Four

Hypochondriac Culture (1)

What happens when the boundaries between the artificial and the natural break down? Jean Baudrillard said the following in his book on Simulation (p. 167) "To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't." Baudrillard then extends this statement and talks about hypochondria. The hypochondriac generates all of the symptoms of disease while not having it. The result is that the hypochondriac becomes ill . Baudrillard goes on to say: "Psychology and medicine stop at this point, before a thereafter undiscoverable truth of the illness. For if any symptom can be 'produced', and can no longer be accepted as a fact of nature, then every illness may be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat 'true' illnesses by their objective causes." (Sim 168) This artificially induced disease cannot be treated because it has no apparent cause.

The challenge of this metaphor is a profound one. What happens when the hypochondriac loses control of their simulated disease? Baudrillard suggests that the threat posed by the counterfeit, by reproduction, by any simulation process (Sim 182) is that it may take on a life of its own. Suddenly, control can be lost.

In a hypochondriac culture any number of claims can be made about reality. It matters little if those claims are true or not. What then happens is akin to what happens with disease. The claims take on a life of their own and it becomes very difficult to trace the origins of the claims.

Part Two

How Images Think

The quote below is from the introduction to my book, How Images Think. I have put this quote here in order to open up some debate about what we mean by the human mind in the 21st century. In this context, most of the book is about human consciousness and the impact of digital culture on ways in which people think, act on the world and create. The book examines the public space within which new cultural formations develop and are sustained:

"Throughout this book, reference is made either directly or indirectly to debates about perception, mind, consciousness and the role of images and culture in forming and shaping how humans interact with the world around them. However, the relationship among human beings and the cultural artifacts they use and create is by no means direct or transparent. Human consciousness is not passive nor is it simply a product of the cultural, social or political context within which humans live and struggle. Although the cognitive sciences have dreamed of developing a clearer picture of how the mind operates and although there have been tremendous advances in our understanding of human thought, the human mind remains not only difficult to understand, but relatively opaque in the information that can be gathered from it. (Searle, 1998) Notwithstanding numerous efforts to ‘picture’ and ‘decode’ the ways in which the mind operates, profound questions remain about the relationships among mind, body and brain and how all of the elements of what we describe as consciousness interact with a variety of cultural and social environments and artifacts.

How Images Think explores the rich intersections of image creation, production and communication within this context of debate about the mind and human consciousness. In addition, I examine the discourses about images in our culture and the impact of the digital revolution on our use of images in the communications process. The digital revolution is altering the fabric of research and practice in the sciences, arts and engineering and challenging many conventional wisdoms about the seemingly transparent relationship among images and meaning, mind and thought, as well as culture and identity."