Annals of Biopolitics: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Edition

I usually like to tell myself that although press coverage of neuroscientific research lends it such a simultaneously naïve and dastardly profile, the neuroscientists themselves must be nuanced, humane, upright and rigorous researchers, with occasional exceptions. Then I read something like this LA Times article, which informs us in its headline that "erasing traumatic memories may soon be possible," and I nearly choke on my coffee. For sure, the article proceeds by way of the usual formula of neuroscience journalism, in which the bold pioneer (in this case, Richard Huganir of Johns Hopkins) informs us that what we took to be an intractable problem (in this case, post-traumatic stress disorder) is in fact reducible to the manipulation of proteins in the amygdala, as demonstrated by some stuff he did with rats; we then get the predictable array of caveats about the practical applications of this research, in this instance from a mental health professional in addition to the obligatory bioethicist (it is really high time to launch a campaign of dada terror against these bioethicists, perhaps by releasing armies of cyborg rats or mutant fruit flies into their offices). But what is remarkable here is the way in which this line of research by all appearances spontaneously offers up a concrete solution to one of the few stumbling blocks faced by the current military industrial complex, viz. that although it has become possible by various means to almost entirely shield the general populace of the aggressor country from the impact of war, such that military actions are experienced primarily as a media event, there is still the sticky problem of the soldiers themselves. Since they are in general drawn from poor and marginal sectors of the population, and since the reigning political discourse shrouds their activities in an aura of the sacred, their experiences usually do not enter into the public sphere except in a highly sanitized form, but the fact that those experiences exist at all represents a problem of sorts, to which Huganir et al are proposing a no doubt elegant solution. We all recall Baudrillard's scandalous claim that "the Gulf War did not take place." The only obvious objection to his argument that war has been reduced to a media event was the testimony of those many thousands of soldiers and many millions of civilians for whom it was not; we may now look forward to the day when that testimony will have been reduced to a few manipulable proteins and duly obliterated. I should add that these efforts offer a convenient way of dispelling the ever-troublesome specter of Freud once and for all. In other words, the official conviction of the psychiatric and neuroscientific establishment that the relevant determinants of mental and emotional disturbances are primarily biochemical and genetic, and thus that such conditions are therefore best treated by direct chemical intervention often runs into trouble in the instances (like PTSD) in which the role of subjective experiential determinants is indisputable. Once those experiential determinants themselves become subject to direct chemical intervention, this little difficulty would appear to be solved.