Brent Robbins | The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture

“In this book, I will examine anesthetic consciousness as a cultural habit ingrained in White European and North American colonialist culture, and that can be traced to habits of comportment that emerged in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance as a response to a confluence of social and historical events. As a cultural habit, anesthetic consciousness is characterized by tendencies to objectify self, others, and the natural world. Through an attitude of dispassionate concern, anesthetic consciousness is associated with empathic disengagement and tendencies toward exploitative attitudes toward other people and nature, violence, and expressions that range between the extremes of hedonism and asceticism. As a state of mind, anesthetic consciousness tends to express itself in quasi-dissociative attitudes in which mind and body are experienced as split off from one another, which amounts to a kind of self-objectification. As a perceptual habit and epistemological attitude, it orients itself to the world through ongoing attempts to gain mastery and control, and it seeks to manage risk through the acquisition of power and domination. Beneath ongoing and paradoxically counterproductive attempts to control, lurks the unexamined fear of death and sophisticated and elusive strategies to deny mortality. Cutoff from the embodied, experiential wisdom of the living organism through psychic numbing, the victim of anesthetic consciousness fails to appropriately orient him- or herself toward enriching and nourishing intrinsic needs, instead remaining insatiably geared to extrinsic goals, such as the acquisition of material goods, power, and status, which ultimately fail to satisfy and therefore only amplify desire toward destructive ends.” Brent Robbins