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07:10:03 pm on May 5, 2009 |
Hi Everyone,
Here’s my contribution to the “what is a case?” video editing. I’ve watched two clips, one of P. Rabinow, the other of Monica Eppinger. If you are going to cut down all of these “what is a case in X?” videos to 10 minutes in total, meaning all videos cut, edited, and combined into one 10 minute clip, there is a lot we can cut out of this video. Here’s what I’d keep and how I’d set it up.
As I’ve edited them the themes are as follows: for Rabinow, what is a case in anthropology, what was it once, and what is it now in an anthropology of the contemporary, and is there a venue for this kind of work in anthropology today? For Monica the themes or issues are, what is a case for an attorney, lawyer, someone practicing law, etc.?
I’ve tried to stay close to the clips themselves, but it will be interesting to see how we can make these clips work conceptually, given the conversations we’ve had in seminar about problem/event/case, etc.Paul Rabinow—What is a Case?
WHAT IS A CASE IN ANTHRPOLOGY?
First here’s what I’d keep: Starting at (00:38—01:15)“..in anthropology I don’t think there’s any clear sense of what a case is……So I think it’s one of the interesting an challenging dimensions of contemporary anthropology to rethink in a more explicit fashion what a case is, because, in part, there’s been a breakdown.”
(01:16)
So in the past, in America, a case was an exemplification of a culture [cut to stills in motion—you know the effect—of Coming of Age in Samoa, or Geertz on Bali, etc.], in England, more of a jural system [cut to stills I’ve included of E-P’s the Nuer, etc.] “…and truth claims that you knew existed already.” (01:37)“So that’s broken down. And with culture and society and mentalité in disarray all the traditional dispositions and habits—of drawing boundaries, knowing what’s significant, and the rest—are somewhat in chaos.” [01:57, you need to cut here quickly because Prof. Rabinow starts immediately on Writing Culture, which while interesting, is outside the scope of a 10 minute project.
Then cut immediately to:
[02:42]
“We’ve spent the last 20 years in rather impoverished and inchoate discussions which haven’t gotten any great traction about, ‘well, what replaces that?’”IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE CONTEMPORARY WHAT IS A CASE FOR?
[03:02]“It’s partially to replace examples in theory. Which since there’s really no theory in anthropology, it’s more science studies and the domains we work in, where the Latour or others have a very strong set of theoretical orientations and then they have examples. If you don’t think that kind of theory is the way to go then those kind of examples aren’t the way to go. [Cut ‘so we need to rethink that.’]
IS THERE A VENUE FOR THIS KIND OF THINKING IN ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY?
[17:12]
“ [cut “so”] I don’t think there is much of a venue in anthropology these days. There’ve been little attempts—Marcus, George Marcus, for sure, has tried a number of times, A.R.C. [cut to a still of something from the ARC website, so people know what he’s talking about] has tried a few times, and there are some others, New School is trying again—but there’s no disciplinary convergence on that. That strikes me as dangerous, perhaps creative, but if that goes on indefinitely, one of the things that happens is that cultural studies takes over this chunk and medical something takes over that chunk and the core of the discipline becomes nostalgia for the great days of ethnography and not much else. [cut: 17:27]This cut’s the what is a case in Anthropolgy down to approx 3 minutes.
WHAT IS A CASE IN LAW? MONICA EPPINGER
WHAT IS A CASE IN YOUR PROFESSION? [4:30]
“In the legal profession the authoritative resource of first resort, at least in the Anglophone tradition, is Black’s Law Dictionary [cut to the dictionary because monica is reading, you might even cut to the page entry on ‘case’]…blah blah cause of action [cut to cause of action] “…in court from another person.” [05:18]
Then cut to Monica looking at Gaymon at [05:18]
“a case basically is what arises out of a cause of action.”Then cut at [05:27] to other defitions in the law dictionary—Monica can find these for you since she owns the book. “a case is a criminal investigation. A case is an individual suspect or convict…or a case is an instance an occurance or situation, so that’s more like the plain English definition.” [05:55] cut.
[06:44]
so that ‘s the dictionary diction of a case, when I was thinking about the question I also thought that to a good litigator a case is an opportunity…blah, blah…
So a case is for a good litigator a chance to shape the future.” [07:18]PARADIGMATIC VS. INSTANT CASE
Monica throws this in while she’s talking about the dictionary definition, so you’ll have to cut it out and put it later. The paradigmatic vs. instant distinction is an interesting one esp. given our discussion the other day about the case: problem: event series. Keep if you have time, cut if you don’t. but in any case, cut out monica talking about Pierce’s type token distinction, because the analogy doesn’t help clarify it in a 10 minute clip.Cut out Monica’s discussion on Performance. Interesting but not helpful analytically or thematically with outlining what a case is. Not that it couldn’t be helpful (like thinking about what “keys” a case in anthorpolgy—see Lyle’s question to PR.), but it isn’t clearly thematized here.
ARE THERE CRITIQUES OF WHAT A CASE IS IN LAW? (13:10)
“It’s interesting because in some ways every case is a critique of “what is a case?’…they’ll dismiss it.” (13:43) cut
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08:50:14 pm on April 15, 2009 |
This week James and I have decided to blog about attention. Not surprisingly, given that my own research deals with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), I’ve had to think about attention as a category of observation. If I were more ambitious I would give you some account of the ways that attention has been in motion at various moments/locations. You could choose your favorite method here—genealogical, historicist, etc.—but in any case it would be the classic contextualizing move (Alan Young’s work on trauma and PTSD comes to mind here and Andy Lakoff tried something similar with ADHD a few years back). And I have no doubt that such inquiry would be both interesting and fruitful, but despite my best intentions I’ve never gotten around to it. This is partly due to my being overwhelmed by the enormity of the project—how does one single out attention in its specificity against the sheer unindividuated backdrop of history? Do you treat it as a signifier—attention is first employed at such and such time and place—or as something signified, like behavior? Medical, sociological, and popular self-help literature on ADHD tends to slip between these two poles without being particularly reflexive about the problem. This, of course, has been immensely frustrating, but it also leaves a lot of space for a critical function in my own work on the subject. Thinking about attention as a signifier or something signified is a false distinction, but hopefully it gives you some appreciation of the challenges in trying to pin it down. I’ve done plenty of historical work on the problem of ADHD but have tended to show where, when, and in what ways the domains of school, family, and clinic became linked together in operation. Until recently, attention hasn’t been a category to think through child psychopathology, though contemporary narratives of ADHD frequently isolate and romanticize early efforts to study attention. Rather than tracing attention in itself, part of my research is to locate the thresholds, bifurcations, and zones of sensitivity where this change was taking place.
More importantly though, I suspect I’ve never gotten around to tracing attention, per se, because my own research aims to underscore the ways that ADHD is a process—a set of functions and operations—rather than a thing. So the fact that ADHD has attention in the name is important, and it’s significant, but it’s not, in my mind, the place to start inquiry. It’s like when Alan Turing famously posed the question “can machines think?” It was less-helpful, he suggested, to define what “machine” and “to think” mean, but rather to ask whether it is possible to imagine an “imitation game” whereby a computer might or might not be able to fool a human interrogator into thinking it is human. Likewise, I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to ask: so what does attention mean, what about deficit, or hyperactivity, or disorder (although, in point of fact, my research must deal both implicitly and explicitly with all of those things). Because then you run into thorny, inescapable, and ultimately, vexed types of questions that have plagued the human sciences for a long time: “attention for whom?” when, where, how, etc. This is classic anthropological terrain. My own research deals with the problem of ADHD from many different sides and I include among my informants patients, parents, doctors, psychologists, teachers, pharmaceutical reps, etc.
Alright, enough hedging (insecure grad students abuse the privilege), let me just talk about attention as it’s treated in some of the more recognized literature in clinical psychology on ADHD as one way of thinking about the question that James asked “what is attention?”
Why attention in ADHD? The etiology of the disorder is still unclear. This has led to charges that ADHD is a bogus diagnostic category. Many in the psychiatric community counter that like other psychiatric disorders, ADHD has clinical rather than etiological validity. The symptoms and markers form a statistically significant relationship at the group level, even if the underlying mechanisms or causes aren’t completely known. It follows that with more research these too will become known. In the DSM-IVR there are three sub-types of ADHD (four types if you count, n.s., not specified): ADHD, predominantly hyperactive-impulsive type, ADHD predominantly inattentive type, and ADHD-C, which is a combination of the previous two. Many psychiatrists and psychologists I’ve talked to think that one day, once the mechanisms become clearer, ADHD will be seen as two or more separate but related disorders. But If for most of its history hyperactivity was too much activity more recently it’s been thought of as too little. Particularly, clinical psychologists have given special consideration to parts of the brain responsible for attention and arousal. Maybe you’ve heard about brain scans being used to point to the cognitive difference of ADHD. . In November of 1990, a team of neurologists lead by Alan Zametkin of Columbia University published an article in The New England Journal of Medicine on the neurological basis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Using PET scans Zametkin and his team observed that a control group of ‘normal’ adults showed higher levels of cerebral glucose metabolic activity in key regions of the brain responsible for functions like attention and inhibition than adults who had been diagnosed as hyperactive as children. The results were later contested but there have been a whole slew of subsequent studies that show similar results, and many doctors I know swear to their validity. Brain scans can be used to show differences between groups but they aren’t helpful in diagnosing individuals. I’m rambling but the point is that in professional psychiatry, at least since the 1970s anyway, attention is, and has been, conceptualized is a series of neurological events.Of course, the upshot of this has been that one of the biggest challenges facing clinical psychologists working on ADHD is finding ways of operationalizing things like attention and arousal. Basically we can talk about three kinds of attention related to ADHD: selective attention; orienting attention; and vigilance and arousal. Selective attention deals with filtering and what one pays attention too. Should you pay attention to the teacher or parent or other things going on in the environment? If hyperactivity and inattention are often seen as deficits in reward-response systems, it should come as little surprise that people with these symptoms seem less likely to filter out highly rewarding distractions and give focus to low-payoff things like books or the blackboard. Orienting attention doesn’t seem as relevant for ADHD as the other two types of attention. Orienting attention is attention to and of space. Attention of something is always attention of something in a space (like a book in front of you, or something outside the window). This is more important in sports or driving for obvious reasons. Finally, there’s vigilance and arousal. This deals essentially with alertness, paying attention to the now or near future. If you sense something momentous is about to happen you are more likely to be alert and attentive. Likewise, by that same token, ADHD is seen as a problem of arousal, and low intrinsic motivation, which helps explain why people with ADHD have trouble with this kind of attention. Attention covers both automatic and volitional acts and disentangling them poses both methodological and epistemological problems for psychologists and psychiatrists. I’m overly simplifying here, and I’ve skipped over the details, like what parts of the brain are responsible for these functions. But hopefully you have some sense as to how ADHD is a heterogeneous disorder.
So then how does this translate into diagnoses? It’s not that difficult to get a prescription for Ritalin today (although most physicians I’ve spoken to they don’t prescribe it without prior psychiatric diagnosis). I’ve spent a lot of time talking to teachers, administrators and parents about navigating the education system with ADHD. To get special accommodations for a learning disorder or disability a child usually needs to have a series of neuropsych tests run (the testing often costs thousands of dollars).
There are a number of tests that target attention, most notably the TOVA (tests of variables of attention; continuous performance task). Basically a computer flashes a symbol on a screen at random intervals of time. When this happens, the subject presses the mouse button or I suppose keyboard if you don’t have a mouse.. The test lasts for 20+ minutes and alertness, inhibition, and impulsivity. The data is scored, but another important aspect of the test is the qualitative data captured by the psychologist. I remember taking this test as a kid and getting pissed-off at the computer (20 minutes is a long time when you are 10 years old). The psychologist then scolded me for abusing the mouse (rather to my surprise), but in any case, you can see why from a data perspective this observation is important. You can look for boredom, lack of inhibition, hyperactive behavior, frustration, etc. Obviously, you can say, well anyone would be bored looking at a computer screen for 20 minutes. The people who give the test counter that while that’s true, people who are hyperactive or inattentive score significantly lower on the test and exhibit more behavior consistent with ADHD-C or ADHD-HI (remember, hyperactivity is relative, no one, including doctors would argue with that).Eh, I’ve run out of steam…and attention. There’s a lot more to be said here, but for a blog entry this is running a bit long. Hopefully, this gives you some sense of the attention in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
