L3. Modernity As Whiplash And Spondylosis

The nineteenth-century preoccupation with the backbone’s ‘private life’—whether as pylon of phyletic memory or relay of the cosmic unconscious—explains the flourishing of novel, now ‘extinct’ nervous disorders during the Victorian era. It seemed that Nietzsche had been correct in his prognosis when he viewed the densification and acceleration of information as creating a Europe-wide ‘over-excitation of the nervous […] powers’ and foresaw that, in modernization, ‘the demands on the nervous system are too grand’,1 the implication being that the expansion of our mental powers via telegraphy also extended our scope for neurosis.

The most prominent of these modern ailments was ‘railway spine’: a post-traumatic condition attributed to the abrupt lurch of the global transport networks then piecing themselves together. Caused by the ‘significant jolts of acceleration’ sometimes experienced in early train carriages, railway spine was—just like whiplash during the automobile age—an elusive and baffling illness that was more the invention of contemporary medico-legal incentives and cultural fears than a real neural disorder.2 Railway spine was characterized by a miasma of unsettling post-traumatic symptoms, ranging from malaise to immobility, from chronic pain to a full-on state of nervous collapse. First diagnosed by John Eric Erichsen in 1866, much was written on the topic in the ensuing decades, with heartbreaking case studies of lives destroyed by phantom damage to the spine.3 Most terrifying of all for the prudent Victorian mind was the implication that there were no real lesions or concussions, the condition bringing about such a ‘state of collapse from fright, and from fright only’.4

Based on the contemporary theories examined above, we might perhaps venture that these invisible ‘railway injuries’ were triggered by a form of ‘colony collapse’ inflicted upon the bodily commonwealth, an unravelling of time-step contiguity across CNS segment-psyches as the deep temporalities of Victorian spines became pathologically desynchronized from their sensorium’s speeding present, resulting in conflictive heterochronies. (Whiplash, after all, is produced by conflicting tempos: a simultaneity of acceleration and deceleration, lurch and inertia.) It is precisely the acceleration of modern technology that makes the archaic past reassert itself, more and more, as a drag upon the present. (Ours is a mind ‘with a past’, trawling a saurian tail, after all. And caudal trawl only comes from forward motion.)

This reading, moreover, is not at all anachronistic: railway spine was seen as precisely an illness of time, a chronobiological ailment. For example, the English psychologist James Sully (1842–1923) had written that since the ‘nervous system has been slowly built up’ out of older forms, it follows ‘that those nervous structures and connections which have to do with the higher intellectual processes […] have been the most recently evolved’:

Consequently, they would be the least deeply organized, and so the least stable; that is to say, the most liable to be thrown hors de combat. […] And, in states of insanity, we see the process of nervous dissolution […] taking the reverse order of the process of evolution.

Quoting Sully, Herbert Page (1845–1926) used this model to provide an aetiology for railway spine, claiming that ‘when by the profound shock of a railway collision the “higher intellectual processes” are thrown hors de combat’, older evolutionary forms of neural functioning ‘step out of their natural obscurity, and become the foci of [the] mind’. One thereby neurofunctionally recapitulates ‘the lower animal, whose brain is hardly differentiated from the other parts of its nervous system, or which has no brain at all’. Railway spine is a whiplash caused by the lurch of an accelerating present acting against the historical inertia of a spinal past. It is on speeding along the tracks of a time made constantly anew that we realise we have always been off the rails: for every lamina of consciousness is pathological from the ‘functional perspective’ of the other layers.

An interesting implication of this is the abandonment of ‘normativity’ as criterion of medical diagnostics and its wholesale replacement with chronology and heterochrony. Here, time does all the explanatory work. Madness is a temporal recidivism of the nervous system, whereby neural operations that are perfectly healthy in lower organisms recur and recrudesce. ‘Healthy’ becomes a relative term, and so too does any notion of ‘the present’. (As with all recapitulatory notions, this approach relativizes all unified notions of the present: ‘nowness’ is, like the bodily commonwealth, an agonistic union of disaggregate time-series.) Neuronal pathology is, therefore, not so much pathophysiological as it is pathochronological. Injury requires neither lesion nor any erring from ‘normal function’, but merely time-state desynchronization.

The key figure behind this nosological model that both Sully and Page draw upon was the English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson (1835–1911). Superimposing evolutionary hierarchy onto cerebrospinal anatomy, in his approach to nervous disease Jackson spoke of the ‘evolutionary hierarchy of [our] nervous centres’—from the lowest ‘horns of the spinal cord’, through the ‘corpus striatum’, upward unto the ‘prae-frontal’ and ‘occipital lobes’—and saw nervous malady as ‘loss of function’ in these ‘topmost’ and newest ‘anatomico-physiological layers’ along with attendant reversion of command to the lower, and older, centres. ‘Different kinds of insanity are different local dissolutions of the highest centres’, he inferred, and the type of affliction is thus ‘dependent on disease at various levels from the bottom to the top of the central nervous system’. Insanity is a question of vertebral echelon.

Jackson called this process ‘devolution’, defined as a ‘reduction from the most voluntary of all towards the most automatic of all’, the inevitable conclusion being that nervous disease is effectively an anomalous regression, a ‘local reversal of evolution’.

Jackson spoke therefore of delusions and manias as lapses into the past—in the fashion of neurological time travel—as the patient loses ‘function of the highest [and] latest developed’ cerebrospinal centres and lapses from ‘his present “real” surroundings’ into ‘some former “ideal” surroundings’ (as in Freud’s invocation of the ‘prehistoric landscape’ inhabited by the schizoid; it comes as no surprise that Freud admired, and was inspired by, Jackson’s work).5 Jackson explicitly highlighted and commended the fact that his spinally striated model of madness removed normativity from medical diagnosis (just as Darwinism was removing teleology from morphology), emphasising that devolution is never absolute but only relative. With ‘the lower level of evolution [always] remaining’, it is, from this perspective of lower functioning, nothing other than ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’. In other words, when one exhibits mania or delirium, it is only pathological from the perspective of the human parts of their nervous commonwealth: from the point of view of our inner lizard, everything’s just fine. Talking of ‘devolutions’, therefore, Jackson noted that ‘we must also take into account the undamaged remainder—the evolution still going on in what is left intact of a nervous system mutilated by disease’. He thus concluded that:

We must not speak crudely of disease ‘causing the symptoms of insanity’. Popularly the expression may pass, but, properly speaking, disease of the highest cerebral centres no more causes positive mental states, however abnormal they may seem, than opening floodgates causes water to flow.

The present provides no absolute standard or criterion against which to measure what is ‘pathological’. Disease is merely the past clamouring to get back in. And who can blame it? What appears as diseased isn’t deviation from some lawlike biological norm, but instead an implex in time: and, as Ballard, Reich, and Ferenczi would concur, the ‘higher’ cerebral centres oppose only the flimsiest of levees to this threatened inundation by the past. But if bodily time is relative, and the same goes for what is considered healthy, then unilinearity becomes hard to discern and to hold steady. From one perspective, pathology is the inertial drag of the past on the moving present; from another perspective, such drag can only be caused by acceleration, which is itself nothing but the future arriving sooner. (Once again, whiplash is acceleration and deceleration combined.) Precocious futurities and recidivist pasts merge at the limit. Modernity’s schizophrenic tendencies—concentrated in a sickly railway spine—are an ailment of future perfection, of a precociousness of posterity, which is nothing other than a past outstaying its welcome. One could call it posterus praecox. ‘Railway spine’ broke out when our ancestrally attuned backbones simply couldn’t keep up.

Of course, we are now so acclimatized to modernity’s G-LOC—upon what Ballard called the ‘highways’ where we meet our ‘deaths’, those ‘advanced causeways’ to ‘global Armageddon’—that we barely notice the lurch of temporal decompression sickness any more. Maybe these made-up diseases didn’t go extinct, but the ‘condition’ has become a permanent (chronic) one.

According to Jackson, though, devolution, and its relation to residual layers of evolution, could take many different forms. Illness and wellness, and even temporal positionality itself, is just a ratio between evolution and devolution, and there are as many maladies as there are relative ratios. Presaging Bleuler’s ‘schizophrenia’ and speaking of a condition he called ‘mental diplopia’, Jackson even claimed that neuronal ‘devolution’ can create a ‘new person’ residing within the same body.6 (Of course, without an absolute frame of reference, the question of which soul is ‘original’ or ‘primary’ here becomes moot.) Jackson did note, however, that there are ‘complete dissolutions’ in which ‘no lower range of evolution remains’: and here ‘there is no person, but only a living creature’ left. One can only think of a further threshold of devolution, but this would surely only ever be—from the perspective of the living—a death. (Perhaps it was these types of chronosthetic breakdowns that Barker was attempting to report upon in ‘his’ final manuscripts from the MVU period: ‘A chittering tide. Devouring my hide. Starting from the Outside. This is the slide’.)

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