Miranda (Excerpt)

 

How then to understand this psychosocial structure? I have argued elsewhere that this
structure can be understood through the concept of situatedness (Befindlichkeit). In particular, I have argued that, “De-situatedness…captures the ground of experience for Africana people in antiblack environments” (MIRANDA, 2018). Turning to the works of Matthew Ratcliffe and Anthony Vincent Fernandez will here be helpful insofar as both thinkers employ phenomenology to understand depression as being intimately connected with de-situatedness. For Ratcliffe, depression is a fundamental shift in mood. As such, his positive account argues that depression is the result of a degraded shift in mood (Stimmung) with consequences for one’s situatedness (Befindlichkeit). Both Ratcliffe and Fernandez illuminate the connection between depression and situatedness by drawing on ideas from Martin Heidegger. With regard to situatedness, Fernandez states:

Befindlichkeit is, for Heidegger, an essential structure of human existence. That is

to say, being always already situated in the world is a fundamental, categorical 

characteristic of human existence. This situatedness, however, is always manifest

through some Stimmung, some mood or other. Situatedness, then, can be

understood as the category (existential) that includes any and all moods, or

particular ways of being attuned….[Each mood] plays the role of situating us in

the world. In light of this, it is situatedness in general that makes up an ontological

structure of human existence (FERNANDEZ, 2014, p. 600-1).

In this respect, both Ratcliffe’s and Fernandez’s account relies on a pre-given sense of the “world,” since all human individuals are situated within a world. However, how one experiences one’s situatedness in the world is dependent upon one’s particular mood or capacity to feel moods. For Ratcliffe, depression is not a situating mood. Instead, it is experienced as an erosion of moods. For instance, in depression, feelings of happiness, joy and sadness are instead transformed into indistinct blobs incapable of eliciting their previous pull of excitation. This incapacity or degraded capacity to experience moods fundamentally affects one’s relationship to the world. As Ratcliffe states:

[T]he “world,” in this sense, is not an explicit object of experience or thought but

something we already “find ourselves in,” something that all our experiences,

thoughts and activities take for granted…. [However, this] ordinarily pre-reflective

sense of “belonging to a shared world”…is altered in depression…[since it]

involves a change in the kinds of possibility that are experienced as integral to the

world and, with it, a change in the structure of one’s overall relationship with the

world (RATCLIFFE, 2015, p. 2).

Depression thus involves the fundamental disturbance of what we can experience in ways that are “seldom reflected upon and poorly understood” (Ratcliffe, 2015, p. 10). For Ratcliffe, it is misleading to characterize depression as sadness or melancholy—as these are themselves just general moods that color our sense of situatedness. Depression is rather the erosion of mood itself and with it our ability to sense that we belong to a shared world. However, this ordinary sense of “belonging to the world” is not apparent for Africana people. Take for instance the fact that many Africana people have no sense of their being able to bring about significant changes to an antiblack world, then their mood can erode. In this case, not only is there an erosion of mood there is also an exaggerated sense of one’s lack. In an environment that constantly degrades and dehumanizes one such alienation can all too easily lead to depression. In speaking of the loss of hope experienced in depression, Ratcliffe states, “Insofar as something is pointless and also inevitable, passive hope is equally unsustainable. Where something is inevitable, nobody can act so as to avoid it; alternative possibilities are absent….The future is there, but it offers nothing of the kind that would allow one to form hopes” (RATCLIFFE, 2015, p. 112-13). When the future or the world is seen as inevitably meaningless and with no significant possibility, then there is almost a doomed certainty that only bad happens. However, this existential erosion of hope is not only experienced in Africana depression, it has the added effect of being an actual project of an antiblack world. This type of socio-political disarrangement constantly seeks
to produce futures that are hopeless for black people. In this sense, de-situatedness is the ordinary form of situatedness (Befindlichkeit) for Africana people.


Moreover, if one takes a look at the Heideggerian conception, which influences both
Ratcliffe and Fernandez above, depression seems to function as a ground mood. Ground moods in Heidegger’s work are also known as fundamental attunements: “Attunements are the fundamental ways in which we find ourselves disposed in such and such a way. Attunements are the ‘how’ [Wie] according to which one is in such and such a way” (HEIDEGGER, 2001, p. 67). As such, ground moods are ontologically revelatory. For the de-situated Africana subject, could one then not say that depression is one of the main or fundamental attunements in finding oneself living an antiblack world?


Here it is perhaps best to look at Heidegger’s examination of anxiety in Being and Time
due to the centrality of anxiety undertaken in the book. As Fernandez argues, “Anxiety falls into Heidegger’s category of ground moods [Grundstimmungen]. These moods are foundational, disclosing the world in such a way that they both open and constrain the possible range of meaning, significance, and feelings that can manifest within the world” (FERNANDEZ, 2014, p. 598). As such, attunements are not mere emotional events or states but rather ways of being that disclose one’s being-in-the-world. In other words, anxiety detaches one from an ordinary sense of belonging such that one experiences one’s life as indeterminate and without coordinates. It is for this reason that Heidegger argues that, “In anxiety one feels ‘uncanny.’ Here the peculiar indefiniteness of that which Dasein finds itself alongside in anxiety, comes proximally to the expression: the ‘nothing and nowhere.’ But here ‘uncanniness’ also means ‘not-being-at-home’ [das zuhause-sein]” (HEIDEGGER, 2008, p. 233).


Heideggerian anxiety is in some ways uncannily similar to de-situatedness. For instance,
when thinking of depression one can easily think of the statement by Lewis Gordon that “black melancholia…is the condition of being rejected by the world to which black people are indigenous (Euromodernity)” (GORDON, 2017). This not-being-at-home is particularly relevant for Africana people. Moreover, it would seem appropriate to categorize depression as a fundamental attunement for Africana subjects given the preponderance of de-situatedness. However, if depression were defined phenomenologically as the experience of de-situatedness from the world, would it not then hold that all black people are depressed most, if not all, of the time? In other words, if one were to use this phenomenological approach to diagnose depression, would not all Africana people be depressed? If that is not the case, we need a different, or at least additional, set of diagnostics that have a different relationship to...experience and feelings about the world. In an earlier work, Ratcliffe argued that depression and Heideggerian anxiety have many similarities: “Severe depression can involve a radical transformation of the ordinarily taken-forgranted sense of belonging to a world, where the usual sense of things as practically significant is gone from experience. In addition, both depression and Heideggerian anxiety involve not only a loss of possibilities but also a conspicuous awareness that something has been lost” (RATCLIFFE, 2013, p. 172). Under this account, depression is a ground mood because it radically discloses and
forecloses a sense of belonging and possibility for an individual. However, what is distinctive about Ratcliffe’s later phenomenological account of depression is its ability to incapacitate. Depression is fundamentally defined by the eroded capacity to feel moods. Thus, if depression is not identical with Heideggerian anxiety, even though they
share many similarities, how do we rethink Africana depression beyond its etiological causes? One must begin to perceive how depression, as an eroded capacity to feel moods, is connected to desituatedness, an eroded sense of belonging, within Africana experience.
At the same time, this connection reveals that de-situatedness is not fundamentally
determining even as it remains a pre-reflective structure of experience or psychosocial structure. Rather de-situatedness and eroded moods are coterminous but neither synonymous nor equivalent. As mentioned previously, Ratcliffe argues that depression erodes one’s capacity to feel moods thereby altering one’s sense of belonging, whereas Fernandez argues that depression alters one’s state of situatedness thereby eroding one’s capacity to feel moods. Both theories fail to account for the structural de-situatedness that marks the “everyday experience” of Africana subjects. For Ratcliffe, this failure to account for structural de-situatedness result in an inability to see how Africana de-situatedness is an achievement of an antiblack world and not simply the result of eroded moods. For Fernandez, this results in a misreading of de-situatedness as being equivalent
with depression. Thus, when Fernandez states, “Many people diagnosed with depression are, in a sense, de-situated” he fails to recognize that many Afro-diasporic people who are de-situated are not depressed (FERNANDEZ, 2014, p. 605). This means that even de-situatedness can cultivate a range of responses within individuals to depressing circumstances. It is perhaps best then to see desituatedness then as a “first cause,” following the work of Nassir Ghaemi. A “first cause” reflects an underlying structure, such as genetics or early life environment, which makes one susceptible to depression, whereas an “efficient cause” describes a triggering event, such as those detailed by Axis IV of the DSM-IV. Here it is necessary to quote Ghaemi at length. He argues:

The first cause is necessary for later depression though not sufficient; it usually is

not enough to lead to the actual depressive episodes of adult life. The efficient

causes are not necessary—depression can occur without them, and the same life

events occur without depression in other people, and even in the same person they

do not invariably produce depression—but they sometimes are sufficient: in some

persons they can lead to depression whenever they occur. So first causes are

necessary but usually not sufficient; efficient causes are often sufficient but not

necessary. One usually needs both, and neither alone is the cause of depression

(GHAEMI, 2013, p. 16)).

Here I would argue that de-situatedness, cultivated by antiblackness and coloniality,
remains a “first cause” of depression. Racialized violence, as well as other psychosocial stressors, are “efficient causes” of depressive episodes. As Ghaemi would argue, it is a common, but tragic mistake to see efficient causes as the cause of depression. Rather it is only when the two are taken together that one gets an accurate picture of Africana depression. For instance, an Africana subject who constantly experiences slurs and microaggressions may live in an environment that is thoroughly inflected by disorder. It is through this lived-experience of racism within an antiblack world that transforms one’s capacity into an inability to experience moods. This transformation is, however, manifested uniquely by an individual. As Fanon argues, “The neurotic structure of the individual is simply the elaboration, the formation, the eruption within the ego, of conflictual
clusters arising in part out of the environment and in part out of the purely personal way in which the individual reacts to these influences” (FANON, 1986, p. 81). De-situatedness although necessary, insofar as it acts as a psychosocial structure, is not sufficient. This is due in part, because an individual is confronted by discrete experiences that are distinct and non-identical to others. To that end, my model of structural de-situatedness is always cognizant of the unique, existential choices that Africana people face by the ever-present possibility of depression. In this sense, one can understand Africana depression as operative through the psychosocial structure of de-situatedness. The de-situated subject experiences non-belonging in the world, but this does not automatically translate into periods of dysfunction or mood erosions. A depressed subject might enact performances to regain a sense of belonging and normality. Or a subject may still vigorously try to collapse the disorder present in socio-political orders so that depression is only recognizable as a personal dysfunction. Moreover, some depressed subjects may still experience an erosion of moods, while maintaining a healthier metastable relationship to their mood disorder. This then is the radicality of Africana depression. Not all forms of depression are indicative of dysfunction or mental illness: “Illness situates the patient in a world in which his or her freedom, will and desires are constantly broken by obsessions, inhibitions, countermands, anxieties” (FANON, 2018, p. 497). Africana depression, insofar as it tied to black alienation and “disordered” social structures, can also be an acknowledgement of a reality which has to be overcome.

4. Reanimation

Thus, by utilizing sociodiagnostics, one is able to not only trace the socio-etiological causes
of depression, but is also able to understand the triadic connection between black alienation, social structures, and the mental state of Africana people. At the same time, Fanon was also immensely concerned with disalienation. In fact, Black Skin, White Masks was originally titled “An Essay for the Disalienation of Blacks.” For Fanon, disalienation was also necessarily a process of reanimation insofar as it consisted precisely in assisting colonized people to become actional, while also restructuring society. The psychiatrist’s job is thus twofold. Recovery or “repossession” is only accomplished once Africana people are capable of social participation and transforming the material and cultural conditions of their world: “There will be an authentic disalienation only to the degree to which things, in the most materialistic meaning of the word, will have been restored to their proper places” (FANON, 1986, p. 11-12). Fanon demands the reordering of society, not only because this goes directly against the mandates of colonial psychiatry, but also because wellness cannot be achieved in a dysfunctional environment. This is why this reordering can never be confused with adapting patients to an ill society. Fanon does not demand for re-socialization
even when, “Society asks the psychiatrist to render the patient able again to reintegrate into society” (FANON, 2018, p. 517). For if the psychiatrist aims to reintegrate colonized people to colonial orders this would simply amount to further acculturation to a racist society. To understand the colonial world, the antiblack world, or the modern world requires that psychiatrist perceive the vast derangement and unfreedom undergirding such structures. Without this perception, psychiatrists further fail to treat mental disorders. The dysfunction that must be treated is not only of the patient, but also of the world.

Dana Francisco Miranda