http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/health/research/06hyper.html?ex=1189828800&en=0ae934b1e68385ed&ei=5070&emc=eta1
(Again, I had hoped that the friend who sent me this article and some comments would post here, but apparently my powers of persuasion require an upgrade. I raise here what I take to be her major points with an extension of my own.)
Like much of the work done in sociology, one needs to proceed with care. One is probably advised, for example, to separate Glassner’s thesis of the “culture of fear” from its connection with the power elite. In so doing, what is left is a useful rubric for understanding the generalized fear (pre-dating 9/11, which probably contributed to the subsequent depolitization of discourse under the Bush administration) disseminated by and through information systems (or what is usually, fairly imprecisely, termed “the media”).
This article is no exception, since only two responses are possible given the information provided; these two responses, however, while practically different, are theoretically equivalent. On the one hand, since the article only names one additive, one can react with a generalized suspicion of food additives and proceed to the nearest Whole Foods to look for organic labels. On the other hand, one can for the same reason ignore the information altogether and eat all the soda, chips, and candy one wants.
In both cases, what is taken for granted is a naïve conception of what “healthy food” is or, better, what the relationship between food and health is. Instead, one doctor (from MGH, no less) is quoted worrying about whether the clinical significance of increased hyperactivity outweighs concerns of social ostracism if children don’t eat the same foods as their peers. Aside from being too stupid for rebuttal, one wonders what this doctor would say to the schools who have already eliminated vending machines and junk food from their buildings in favor of juice, fruit, and vegetables after finding that these latter foods improve students’ energy and focus.
Or, perhaps we need further to separate the “social” aspect of these kinds of questions from the “science”. That this study found that some food additives raise hyperactivity already begs certain questions and, in so doing, masks certain presuppositions in the discourse concerning health. Suppose, as an intelligent skeptic ought, someone faults the method of the study or a particularly belligerent rival performs a counter-study. Nothing in the business of conducting studies provides a measure for theoretical judgment. So much is banal. But what is not as easy to see is the active work of ideology that bloats practical judgment at the expense of theoretical judgment. Taking studies such as this one seriously requires a certain frame of intelligibility according to which the important issues are things like assuming “hyperactivity” is a coherent category, that the relevant focus group is children, and so on.
2 comments:
thanks again, mk, for caring about my thoughts. i guess i didn't feel it was worth blogging about: i guess i feel blogs are for thoughts that are more original, and not an activity for me to be reactionary and to vent my increasing disenchantment with the nytimes (and all forms of news)--since they have become tools for fascist mind-control.
that people are entirely complacent about their ignorance--to this i cannot say, 'oh well', since that would be just another victim giving up to the system. knowledge is not simply = to power, you must + an ethical imperative to speak up
j.
Is not the first moment in the contestation of ideology that point of nonidentity or contradiction in the subject of capital? and, more often than not, does not this moment often come from the outside--outside both the figure of self-consciousness (that we usually know as identity) and the objectivity of capital that consists in nothing else but the very existence of ideology (i.e., is not contestation the opening of a gap in the identity of subject and object)? Or, to put it another way, must there not first be the negative, cathectic moment of conceptual shock or revulsion? And must not the appropriate response not also be necessarily political?
My own favorite example along these lines is ACT UP in the 80s (one could also add any number of alternative strategies for resistance and collectivities formed by so-called 'new media' and 'hypertexts' in the last decade). Did not the very aesthetico-political activity of ACT UP, at least initially, transform the medicalized ideology of AIDS under the Reagan administration? And, notably, it did so precisely not by being a 'discourse' about AIDS or even about the media (I personally am increasingly convinced that discourse is intrinsically ideological).
That is one option. One hopes, perhaps naively, that places such as this contribute to another.
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