Psychasthenia

Definition

Psychasthenia is Celeste Olalquiaga's name (in Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities, 1992) for the specifically urban and contemporary form of a malaise "defined as a disturbance in the relation between self and surrounding territory" — a condition in which "the space defined by the coordinates of the organism's own body is confused with represented space. Incapable of demarcating the limits of its own body, lost in the immense sea that circumscribes it, the psychasthenic organism proceeds to abandon its own identity to embrace the space beyond. It does so by camouflaging itself into the milieu. This simulation effects a double usurpation: while the organism successfully reproduces those elements it could not otherwise apprehend, in the process it is swallowed up by them, vanishing as a differentiated entity" (Olalquiaga, quoted in Soja 2000, pp. 150–151).

Soja deploys it as the psychological face of the postmetropolitan transition: one of the syndromes "associated with life in the postmetropolis, where the boundaries of identity are rapidly changing and many of the old spatial specificities of urbanism seem to melt into air." Its slogan: "Bodies are becoming like cities, their temporal coordinates transformed into spatial ones. In a poetic condensation, history has been replaced by geography, stories by maps, memories by scenarios. We no longer perceive ourselves as continuity but as location, or rather dislocation in the urban/suburban cosmos" (quoted pp. 151, 330). Identity is tied increasingly to "the topography of computer screens and video monitors," which provide "the language and images that we require to reach others and see ourselves."

Crucially, Olalquiaga does not present the condition as wholly negative: the psychasthenic dissolution can be turned — "taking advantage of its expanded spatial scope, its blurred boundaries, its breakdown of rigid hierarchies, its flexibility and fragmentation, to engage in a more creative spatial praxis of transgression, boundary crossing, border work, and commitment to the right to be different" (p. 331). This is the hinge Soja builds on against baudrillardian closure: the choice between enjoying the dissolution and "turn[ing] the process around" into a creative spatial praxis of transgression — Latin America's "iconic radicalism," Tupinicópolis, Superbarrio.

Key Thinkers

• Celeste Olalquiaga (referenced, not paged — see log) — Megalopolis (1992): the syndrome, the body-city transfer, the iconic radicalism.
• Edward W. Soja — the concept's postmetropolitan placement: psychasthenia in the Introduction to Part II (pp. 150–151) and the Simcities chapter (pp. 330–332).
• Jean Baudrillard — the position Olalquiaga "disagree[s] completely with": the disappearance of the referent; psychasthenia as the embodied counter-diagnosis.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty — the body as "the geography closest in" (via Adrienne Rich, quoted p. 7) — the bodily ground whose demarcation fails in psychasthenia.

Related Concepts

• simulation-hyperreality — the representational regime psychasthenia inhabits (the map preceding the territory).
• postmetropolis — the sixth discourse's psychological register.
• embodiment, corporeal-inscription — the body-space theories psychasthenia complicates: the body as "both a product of culture and a creation of biology… a lived space" (Hooper's caveat, quoted p. 362).
• urban-imaginary — the conceived space the psychasthenic body fuses with.
• transbodied-space — Hadjiyanni's "transbodied" register: a cousin concept for bodies crossing spatial boundaries.
• milieu — the Deleuzian milieu the psychasthenic organism camouflages into.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the definition quoted in the Introduction to Part II (pp. 150–151) and elaborated in Simcities (pp. 330–332), with Olalquiaga's critical choice between enjoyment and praxis.

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

Open Questions

• Olalquiaga's psychasthenia makes the body the site where the postmetropolitan transition is registered — can the concept be operationalized phenomenologically (a disturbed body-schema) rather than only culturally?
• The camouflage-into-the-milieu can be read as pathology or as tactic — does the wiki's appropriation register (de Certeau's tactics; the homeless' recomposed niche) describe the praxis-side of the same dissolution?
• What would a psychasthenic interior be — the interior whose coordinates are fused with its representations (the Instagram-selfie interior)? Does the wiki's interiority cluster have a diagnostic for it?