RE Caloric Calculation and college jogging: from The Consumer Society
III. Adderallabor [Work on Progress]
n+1, a biannual (not to be confused with the recent biennial, although somehow related...) literary journal from Brooklyn, has apparently come the closest out of any journal in print to re-instate the legitimacy of Wilhelm Weichardt's "antikenotoxin" fatigue vaccine synthesized in 1904. The German alchemist's fatigue vaccine was officially discredited in 1914 after European physiologists and the Austro-Hungarian army found Weichardt's evidence wildly exaggerated. Yet, like so many revelations of pseudo-science, the search for the fountain of energy significantly bumped up a notch (followed by injecting subjects with caffeine and cocaine) after Weichardt's experimentation. As should be common knowledge, but has found new disguises, “fatigue” is one diagnoses of many derived from the ideal of a 19th century worker maintaining optimum energy conservation for maximum production within an expanding concept of the hourly work day[1].
Historians James Beninger and Anson Rabinbach, in the tradition of Marx, witness the dialectical tendency of entropic digressions after periods wherein the material relations of a society undergo intense rapidization and dispersal through technological revolutions in the way societies produce and process information. The crash of Industrialization's pathbreaking momentum was expressed through thermodynamic terminology as “entropy” by scientists, while pathologized as “fatigue” by physiologists, labor-scientists, and capitalists in order to control the effects of an exhausted work force. Such a well-managed response to tired societies kept a pace of (over)production supplying and expanding Industrial-State economies, managing integrated distant markets, often state-unification or colonial projects, and fueling the frontier-market horizon. As was appropriate to the type of labor involved in industrial societies, the calculation of fatigue and its attempted correction were concentrated on the proletarian body[2]. In a further defense of work, the psychophysical diagnoses of the fatigued upper classes were written as evidence and consequence of their decadent and idle lifestyles, in effect, their absence of labor. Whether you were working too long or too little, it wasn't enough. While the bourgeoisie had their coffee and tea, biomedical remedial research on the anti-work plague turned to chemists before labor lawyers, desperate for a drug to restore proletarian workers’ automated muscles.
Weichardt's first experiments were ironically conducted in the schoolroom where students excelled on their math performance, cutting time in half, focusing more, and getting better answers. Yet the "antikenotoxin" gas could not restore over-worked muscles that were repeating the same activity all day, probably due to the fact that the relaxed muscles absorbed the stress of the worked muscles, producing kenotoxins all the while. The study was debunked for the physical worker and soldier while refined stimulants in the form of caffeine and cocaine were experimented with as a possible antikenotoxic simulant. Yet coffee and tea, the main proprietors of caffeine, as well as cocaine were only available to the elite due to their commodity status as exotic import. The upper classes, who mainly engaged in intellectual production created a fetish of stimulation for the unstimulated, non-laboring 'worker.' Perhaps on a more insidious level, Weichardt's study enabled the scientific precedence for experimentation of psychoactive stimulants on schoolchildren in order to measure their performance[3].
Adderall as modern fatigue vaccine for the intellectual laborer.
"Kickstart my Heart," the n+1 news brief from young Brown University scholar, is obviously one hip class warrior experimenting with exhaustion through intellectual expenditure as pleasure principle. Adderall is, depending on whether the prescribed version is Extended Release (XR) or standard, respectively either multiple strands of amphetamines set to absorb at different times to sustain the effects, or pure amphetamine. The pill is purported to boost the ADD, ADHD, or Depressed patient’s attention span, productivity, memory, mood, time management, and overall energy. While popularly marketed and consumed by children and adolescents, and widely covered in privileged health insurances plans, the black market of the pink pill goes for one dollar per milligram on Wall Street, and depending upon the University, a few bucks on campus.
Adderall provides the scholar not always increased productivity, but the amphetamine high of desiring the drive of labor and connectivity: increasing your discursive capabilities, providing unparalleled focus, and capability of data-processing and storage akin to a flashdrive. The n+1 Adderall Diaries attest to the frivolity of theoretical labor, while reaffirming the 24-hour work ideology produced by capitalism’s requirement of surplus-labor in order to exponentially increase production, a pathological condition of capital as old as the concept of work itself[4]. The 24-hour work-day of the intellectual laborer subsidizes the task of reabsorbing consumption into production, integrating the waking hours into a seamless circulation of information—our hottest commodity these days.
| Work | |
| If I have to do something that requires a lot of thought or planning, I put it off for as long as I can. | |
| I have trouble wrapping up the final details of a project. | |
| My mind sometimes wanders or "drifts away" when I'm reading. | |
| Despite all my effort and preparation, my performance is not consistent. | |
| I find myself easily distracted by noise or activity around me. | |
The overloading of information follows the overloading of stimulation: heart races, reads faster, types quicker, sleeps less, works longer.... crashes harder. Amphetamine stimulation follows the tragedy of borrowed energy. The anxiety-crash after "pulling an all-nighter," or mixing exercise and amphetamines resembles the panic in the scientific community following the discovery of the 2nd law of Thermodynamics. The law of “entropy” as Rudolf Clausius identified in 1865, revealed the loss of energy in heat when work moves from a warmer body moved to a colder body. Since all motors, whether human or not, must regulate their energy so that they do not exhaust in over-heating:
“Countering the limitless energy of the conservation theory, the second law of thermodynamics raised the prospect of the cataclysmic ‘heat death’ of the universe, the gradual dissipation of energy into an icy, lifeless void[5]."
The reliance upon borrowed energy deprives the body of reproducing its own energy—alike to the parasitic reality of a fever when the body cannot heat itself—racing towards a heat-death, cardiac arrest, exhaustion occur in the form of physical collapse or mental blackout. Yet, due to the relatively physically-inert character of intellectual labor, the sustenance of borrowed energy can last a lot longer... Nervous energy works more electrically than mechanically.
The Control Revolution introduces the origins of the Information Society through tracing the evolution of information as control mechanism for industrialized production to information as the labor and commodity itself. The model of "society as a processing system, one that sustains itself by extracting matter and energy from the environment and distributing them among its members,” is an image of living systems in a productive exchange between resources and their conversions. ‘Society as processing system,’ in an Information Age becomes the feeding ground of capital, dominating information control in order to safeguard the reproduction of itself[6]. Adderall inserts itself as a smooth-operator in repairing the lines of fried nerve-wires, re-integrating isolated units of inefficient production, and connecting information processors to the grid at the moment of their conception. Pre-K for some in this country means 20mg of amphetamine with their Cheerios every morning.
"Living organisms, for example, convert energy originally from the sun into forms more useful to the processes of life: body heat, chemical energy for metabolism, electrical energy to fire nerve impulses, mechanical energy to contract muscles and move about (luminescent organisms can even convert the energy back into light)[7]."
Adderall's epidemic arises at a new phase in the Control Revolution, one where we are dealing with a crisis of information-traffic, nervous stimulation-overload, and increasing mediation of our daily work and leisure lives through information circulation. Our mental ecologies are witnessing psychophysical statistics similar to the creation of fatigue and neurasthenia pathologies of the 19th and early 20th century of the over/underworked body. We too are overheating: Depression, Anxiety, Tourettes, OCD, ADD, ADHD, Alzheimers, Shaking Leg Syndrome... are all medical fictions and lived realities of processing information in an ever accelerating society (reflective in our obsession with online social networking and our exhausted dollar). Adderall’s ab/use on the college campus signifies the crisis of assimilating into a production-line where the meeting of deadlines is only a symbolic gesture in the timelessness of intellectual labor as a ‘lifelong pursuit of knowledge.’
| Family | |
| I sometimes completely forget about special occasions or scheduled family events. | |
| I tend to "tune out" in the middle of conversations. | |
| I have difficulty managing finances: bank accounts, bill-paying, etc. | |
| I put things down at home and then can't seem to find them. | |
| I just can't seem to unwind or relax, even when I have the time. | |
In 1883, the US Government authorized the division of the U.S. portion of the continent into five separate time-zones in order to better regulate distribution and communication, particularly making time for railway and telegraph coordination. So too does Adderall further divide the intellectual laborer’s workday into a to-do list grid, making easier the crossing off of tasks and finished products by integrating the time of their production[8]. As Molly testifies in “Kickstart My Heart,” one not need separate exercise and studying, or the worker’s reproduction through maintaining health in the midst of a relatively un-muscular line of work. As for sleeping on Adderall, the student finds that every professor with a deadline makes a cameo in their dreams. Ignoring the solar clock around ‘crunch time,’ is not a choice but a mandate, signified by the cruel mantra of finals: “sleep when you’re dead.”
Pastoral idleness inhibits the headspace of the information-superhighway, the pace of life of electro-academia: always awake, on the go, with a cup of coffee and now, with a little blue or pink pill…never stop moving, exchanging, networking, connecting. The recent surge in Blackberry and Ipod devices acquired by college students of America testifies to this addiction to information consumption, social networking, and super-efficient processing. In an era when every worker has homework, the combined planner, phone, computer Blackberry and Iphone are the perfect connectors to scheduling in social hours when free-time must be calculable and results determined.
| Social Life | |
| I make decisions too quickly, without thinking, and then regret it later. | |
| I feel impatient when I have to wait (e.g., in line or when stopped at a red light). | |
| I sometimes talk too much when I'm around others. | |
| I fidget or squirm with my hands and feet when I have to sit still for a long time. | |
| I have trouble managing conflicts or making compromises. | |
The image of Molly on a treadmill, on adderall, negative caloric expenditure, reading Spivak.
[1] Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy, Faitgue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
[2] While many other pathologies were at stake in this discourse, fatigue may be most appropriate as a collective signifier.
[3] Rabinbach, 142-145.
[4] Rabinbach, 46-47.
[5] Rabinbach, 47
[6] Beninger, James. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 32.
[7] Beninger, 37.
[8] Beninger, 16.
Another Possibility of Entropic Energy,
Tired of Work
Idleness, fatigue, hysteria, and psychosis—the mechanical failures expressed as essential pathologies of the woman-condition through her ‘weaker constitution,’ her poorly designed motor. Such biomechanical deficiencies constructed around the turn of the 19th century became the predominant rational etiology of the female-workers’ tendency towards entropy (perhaps produced by the over-production of blood caused by her menses.) The pseudo-science of neurasthenia (et.al) was backed by Scientists (frontiering the much-demanded bioenergetic field research) to Industrial Capitalists/Taylorists (creaming over any excuse to reduce wages while maintaining the most calculable and generalizable worker: nearly-alive, barely-dead) to Big Daddy (dying to keep her in the cave). These bimodal physical and mental pathologies haunt the female worker beyond the 19th century conception of her labor power. The epigraph of woman’s intellectual labor begins, consistently, with an excuse. From the Emilys (both, the schizophrenic sister and the spinster) to Avital, women write themselves in, through, and out of madness, weakness, and insufficiency. From the hysteric rant of the literary feminist to the compulsive suburban mother’s to-do list to the over-time punch card of the factory seamstress—the order of the laborer’s list enumerates the potential energy of her motors, while each reminder of her expenditure brings back the fear and calculation of net-loss in heat-energy, never able to re-circulate through the blood of capital. Cybernetics is ‘woman’ as the control-function of man’s production—how fast he may replicate and with what efficiency—regardless of whether we are interested in the cybernetic system of the factory, the office, or the home: “That women regularly sustain daily life partly as a function of their enforced status as mothers is hardly new; the kind of integration with the overall capitalist and progressively war-based economy is new” (Haraway, 1991:167). If capitalism, therefore, has no limits except its own scandal: the exhaustion it requires in the form of surplus-labor (Rabinbach, 1992:74), then ‘woman’ becomes the control-limit when her surplus-labor as head domestic unit is crippled through psychophysical pathologization, or better yet when Nature herself is exhausted in the exploitation of her limited resources… The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere… The closed circuit of her reproductive motor-organ at once makes possible the production, and limits the potential energy of Man. In his disseminatory-driven competition of semen (liquid capital), woman arrives as the entropic expenditure of man’s excess-value and heat-accumulation. At once ensuring a limit and insinuating the eschatonic arrival of the ‘heat-death’ of the planet, with the threat of her dead-labor as an icy, lifeless womb.
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