Hypochondriac Culture (5)

What happens when you eat junk food? Although most diets in the United States and Canada are based on a variety of prepared and junk foods, the reality is that people continue to eat as if their actions will produce no effect. The contrast between the fetish for health and the disregard for nutrition is one of the central paradoxes of Hypochondria.  

Part Six

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 (2)

Hypochondria is an insidious disease because it is a silent and often invisible part of the suffering of so many people. It is centred on fear and misinterpretation. Hypochondriacs are constantly worried about a variety of symptoms that they read into their bodies. A minor pain is scripted into a major illness and leads to thoughts of death. Yet, to describe this process as a disease is perhaps a grave error. The psychology of fear is not easy to pin down. Since so much of medicine is concerned with cause and effect, the idea that someone could imagine an illness seems to be outside of the pragmatic medical context of searching for cures. Imagination is the key here as is a process called projection. It is easy to imagine any number of problems in the complex biology of the human body. It is easy (but the consequences can be dire) to project an external problem into an internal space. At one point in some "jottings" that were found among Sigmund Freud's papers, he made the comment that "space is a projection of the psyche". What if the hyponchondriac body is an aesthetic projection? I will respond to this question in greater detail tomorrow.

Part Three

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