Psychiatric diagnoses double as worries about social cohesion

Evidence

Yet how could we not think that there is conjointly a psychiatric question, bearing the same sense, which testifies (and perhaps only testifies) to a worry about social cohesion? How could we not think that depressive or disaffiliated individuals represent threats of turbulence, of breaks in transmission in the fluidity of the network? ”In a connectionist world, where high status presupposes displacement,” write Boltanski and Chiapello, ”the big shots derive part of their strength from the immobility of the little people, which is the source of their poverty… . Everyone thus lives in a state of permanent anxiety about being disconnected, rejected, abandoned on the spot by those who displace themselves.” This anxiety creates precariousness, that is to say, ”the increasingly drastic privation of links and the progressive emergence of an inability not only to create new links but even to maintain existing links (separation from friends, breaking of family ties, divorce, political abstentionism).” — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 173

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s goal of tracking whether the brain-society analogy is argued or asserted: here depression is read as a symptom of network exclusion — mobility as moral economy. Connects to Boltanski & Chiapello’s ‘new spirit of capitalism’ and to Foucault-style critique of psychiatry as social control.
• SEED: Catch-the-substitution angle: how ‘depression’ into ‘disconnection anxiety’ recodes class position as brain defect — a memo-ready warning.
• DEFINE: Defines precariousness as privation of links/social ties rather than material want.