When the drugs that made you sick are the drugs that make you better
You, or someone you know probably has problems with their digestive tract. Not to get too personal about it (we’re friends, right?), but pretty much everyone these days either has GERD, IBS, bloating or some other combination of symptoms that is identified as a functional gastrointestinal disorder (FGID). Somewhere in their body, there is a contradiction between the homeostatic drives of organs like the esophagus, stomach and intestines, and their environment. This then manifests as any number of painful, uncomfortable, and embarrassing symptoms, such as diarrhea, acid reflux, or bloating. Here, I want to follow in the footsteps, admittedly slightly askew, of Thomas Moynihan (2019) and his apocryphal luminary Daniel Barker, and their project of Spinal Catastrophism. Their work covers an impressive breadth of ideas and impressions, and there are a few I will hone in on over the course of this article. If Moynihan’s project is the recapitulation of the secret history of the human spine, then perhaps this article is my own recapitulation of Spinal Catastrophism.
Before we go any further, it’s important for me to recognize that this article is born from a series of great conversations with a friend and their reflections and experiences with numerous FGID’s that have been difficult to diagnose. A key part of this story and my thoughts here is their relationship with SSRI’s, and their impact on their FGID’s, and subsequent reflection on that subject, for which I’m immensely grateful. Thanks for letting me steal your valor here pal.
Since Spinal Catastrophism clearly plays a big role in the upcoming discussion, what are its main points. or at least the ideas I want to develop? There are more than a few ideas touched on in the book, all of them interesting, so I’m going to have to be picky. I think if I had to identify the main thrust of the book, and the idea I find the most useful, is the understanding of human posture and it’s relation to the psyche. The book has an odd sort of materialism here, that the upright posture of the human form induces a certain way of viewing the world, and relating to it. Bipedalism frees the forelegs to become arms, and with them hands that can operate tools, freeing the mouth of its role as primary interlocutor with the world. Now the mouth has a much more arcane function, that of language and speech. Burroughs, cited in the book, claims that in this fashion language parasitized the human tongue, and dragged the human form upright, in a circular sort of logic. The human body is pulled by the tongue to stand in an orthograde posture, and that stance enables the rationality that now plagues the human. This is what develops rationality, the imperious upright view of ones surroundings, setting all that stands before it as territory to be conquered and controlled. What I propose to examine, is decidedly less expansive than Moynihan, but certainly oriented along the same principles.

I feel as though everywhere I look today, both outside and within myself, I see the evidence of FGID’s ravaging the denizens of the western imperial core. GERD, IBS, Crohns, and more un-diagnosed ailments plague my friends and family, myself included. At its core, I think Spinal Catastrophism is interested in the dialectical relationship between the brain’s simulation of reality, and the antediluvian territories that precede it, and the contradictions and revelations hidden therein. This is precisely what I’m interested in, but instead I want to reflect a little on that specific relationship between brain, the current state of social reproduction, and that ancient den of snakes, the intestines. I think maybe the most evocative imagery here is that of inflammation, of internal distress provoked by incompatible terms.
I have a pet theory that ultimately all fear and distress is caused by the inability to properly metabolize new circumstances, be they physical, mental or otherwise, and I think it is apt here. Indeed, authors like McLuhan and Moynihan contend that the entire process of developing a subjectivity is a process of “pruning off” impressions of the world, cutting off the huge array of possible sensory inputs that could overwhelm the brain and the body, and instead maintaining a rigorous homeostasis. You’re doing this right now, as you ignore the sense of the clothes on your skin, or the conscious management of your organs. This becomes exacerbated in the modern telecommercial environment, where the medium “is now intangible, diffuse and diffracted in the real” (Baudrillard, 1983 p.54). You simply cannot metabolize the current deluge of symbols and emotions that define the digital era, but we have paired that with a “vigilant and insomniac rationality” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972, p.112) which begins to fracture. This manifests in all sorts of schizophrenic and irrational psychological behaviours, but I think it also exercises itself in the body.
The constant irritation of the intestinal tract in postmodernity is an elegant metaphor for the failure to metabolize information and symbols mentally. The human body has been forced into its specific organization by this upright rationality, and now it begins to suffer the blowback of that rationality, progressively isolated. This cutting off of impressions and senses isn’t just an autonomic nervous response, it becomes a central focus of that rationality, as we further adapt our environments to better suits ourselves. As we have done this though, we have increasingly isolated ourselves, and destroyed many of the fundamental relationships that once allowed this delicate homeostasis. Essential nutrients become deprived, alien chemicals and substances invade us, and our mental lifeworld becomes alienated. All of these meaningful relationships become starved, and in order to maintain homeostasis, different measures have to be taken to fulfill them. This takes a lot of different forms, it might be something like constant use of Twitter in an otherwise lonely social life, an overreliance on sex as substitution for meaningful connection, or use of drugs, even our cultural obsession with caffeine. A particularly evocative case of this idea is SSRI’s, I have a friend who has been struggling with fairly major FGID issues, debilitatingly so. They recently made the discovery that this was likely initially irritated by their use of anti-depressants, SSRI’s in particular, causing an entire host of physical maladies, and subsequent mental ones as well.
In a particularly pithy bit of gut to brain catastrophism, my friend also reported that upon ceasing the use of their SSRI’s, they began to notice a loosening of muscles in their back, releasing after years of rigidity. While thats not exactly the intestines, I think it speaks to this desperate compensation for relationships that no longer exist, which is the result of our own rationality. Its interesting to think that a “loosening” of the brain by releasing it from the SSRI (at least that’s how I’ve sometimes heard SSRI’s described) quite literally loosens the structures responsible for that upright stance. Furthermore, the internal nature of this irritation is key, it speaks to this agonizing interior world where the outside poisons the inside. Many of us, myself included, struggle with seething cognitive dissonances, often a direct result of those relationships that seemingly better us. In a setting where we have complete control over our environment, we discover that we have lost any control of our interior, of our bodily history and flora. We suffer this irritation because we have made this inhospitable world for ourselves. We worked so hard to make our environment suit us that its fucking poisonous to us.
I wrote this while listening to Territories by Locrian
Special thanks to Drew for editing
Works Cited
Baudrillard, J. (1983). Simulations. Semiotext(e), Inc.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
Moynihan, T. (2019). Spinal catastrophism: a secret history. Urbanomic Media Ltd.