The subject matter of the discussion, besides being of deep interest, is timely. True to the Marxian observation that, contrary to the law of bourgeois revolutions, the law, obedient to which the revolutionary movement of the proletariat acts, is to "criticize itself constantly; constantly to interrupt itself in its own course; to come back to what seems to have been accomplished in order to start over anew; to scorn with cruel thoroughness the half measures, weaknesses and meannesses of its first attempts; to seem to throw down its adversary only in order to enable him to draw fresh strength from the earth, and again to rise up against it in more gigantic stature; to constantly recoil in fear before the undefined monster magnitude of its own objects - until, finally, that situation is created which renders all retreat impossible, until the conditions themselves cry out: Hic rhodus, hic salta ! - true to that Marxian observation, the Labor Movement of America is today thoroughly criticizing itself.
Daniel DeLeon, As To Politics, 1907
When I was a little boy, I went to Grand Rapids with my family; there was a department store there like no other I had ever visited, and I had been to the various varieties of Macy’s (at that time, solamente NY and SF); fascinating fixtures outside, ovoid elegance within, delicious food of a type not available at the Battle Creek mall or Abraham and Strauss or even Gourmet Gulch. I thought to myself, what a strangely cosmpolitan place this city on the east bank of the uninviting Lake Michigan is — the wooden paneling of the Chicago rail terminal was a piece of alte Amerika shit, one’s learning about faits worse than Sheetrock, comparatively.
Then we went back a year later, and we couldn’t go to the department store; we went to the Gerald Ford Museum, an imposing building all of steel, where we learned what there was to know about the great man who somehow unmade Nixon without killing him stone dead or dying in such a “process”. Have I seen that again, molybdenum of the mind stronger than GENERAL MOTORS HEADQUARTERS? In Cheeelay, in Argentin, in Brazil amongst the erotetic mulatos and the straightforward outros. No, of course not; but yes, I ever have, and plus I never will. The “silent majority” knows whereof it cannot speak; and I don’t know about Grand Rapids, a place I was, supposedly in my country, in the ’80s, with the killer clown in chief.
Bedtime reading these days: Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. I’m going where thousands of Borders customers have gone before, but, as with my aforementioned cessation of Lacan-reading, I previously didn’t think my “febrile” mental illness would be improved by dipping into Marxist antipsychiatry. (An “identity-political” reclamation of the schizophrenic status is rendered impossible by the fact that the schizophrenic is not only not an expert on what it is to be a schizophrenic, in certain cases they are not considered to even be experts on what it is like to be one.) However, as I learned when I picked up Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze is not that Marxist and Guattari not that antipsychiatric; in fact, the works can profitably be read as adumbrating a loose-texture analysis of the form rationality took during the 1970s — this loose texture (only mildly critical of late capitalism and open to the idea that some people are just mad) being essential to avoiding the ‘hysteria of reason’ one might well attribute to over-enthusiastic taking-up of Althusserian or Habermasian ideals.
I’m only about a third of the way through A Thousand Plateaus, but I want to say something about Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term “pragmatics”. “Pragmatics” came into use as a linguistic term in the early 20th century, the result of pragmatist semiotician Charles Morris’ tripartite distinction between syntax, the non-context-dependent features of meaning treated by semantics, and the context-dependent features not previously studied as an independent class: “pragmatics”. Early essays by logical positivists like Rudolf Carnap gave formal treatments of “indexical” or “token-reflexive” terms like “I” and “here”, and this strain of thought persists to this day in the work of Montagovian semanticists; there are also those who have attempted to provide overarching rules for pragmatics to some philosophical point (e.g., the “universal pragmatics” of Habermas and the “normative pragmatics” of Robert Brandom).
Pragmatics in the hands of Deleuze and Guattari, however, is fully identified with their program of “schizoanalysis”; taking “regimes of signs” and nonreductively tracing their “rhizomatic” lines of filiation and influence upon the subjectivity of the subject. In the hands of a Sokal this instantly could become laughable (without any desire to, say, read David Kaplan instead cropping up) but it seems to me there is a perfectly acceptable point D&G, who are not ignorant of the history of semantics, are trying to make. Their schizoanalysis is an insistence upon the material reality of language, not a Platonism akin to Frege’s third realm but (as with Agamben) a Stoic-influenced awareness of the two-sidededness of the scratches and sounds that incarnate language. Unlike Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari are not fighting to liberate the text from constructions, but to situate all utterances as part of the total social matrix; the “schizo’s stroll” or his ravings are not part of some Robinsonade of the neurologically unfortunate, but interact with the dominant regimes of signification and the social systems which they enable in material, real ways.
In this sense Deleuze and Guattari’s pure pragmatics is a socioanalysis as well: the eclipse took place even though Dean Swift said it would not, but his declaration was clearly not ominous Unsinn of the sort those who assimilate every linguistic failing — including the famous “failure to communicate” — to dementia or aphasia might desire it to be.
Six months have elapsed, and I’m now available for parties. However, much that the Democrats say and do still displeases me, and there are less jovial questions to ask about the viability of other left formations at present; I might try to join the CPUSA again, but I can already read the People’s Weekly World and vote for Dems by myself.
Short note: I recently went to see Synechdoche, New York — an enthralling experience in its own right, but perhaps even more notable as a culmination of a trend in moviemaking I’ll call (with some right, I think) schizoid cinema. The narratives of movies like The Royal Tenenbaums, The Science of Sleep and Kaufman’s pictures just don’t hold up, absurdly so: anyone with half a mind will laugh at the “375th Street Y”, but the visual signatures are just as strange, mixtures of “technologies for living” that never coexisted and impossible spatialities. Compared to this intentional nonsense, the Coen brothers’ jerking-around of film theorists (the “letter that never arrives at its destination” in The Hudsucker Proxy) is tame, and yet people of the very best mental equilibrium enjoy the movies: which makes me wonder what, exactly, is being said about real mental illness by their circulation.
Traffic has calmed down since the big surge related to Mark Rothko (and due, apparently, to his being featured on an episode of Mad Men – not that I’ve seen any of those). However, those of you still following along longer than necessary to grab a JPEG may be interested in knowing that although I walk the streets with impunity and write mini-essays on hot new intellectuals I kind of understand, I am still committed. This is perhaps due not so much to my expansive delusional and behavioral problems, as it is due to a ‘quirk’ of Oregon state law and its interpretation by the various counties.
I live in Washington County, comprised of most of the western suburbs of Portland and farmland beyond the Urban Growth Boundary. As far as I can tell from visiting their website, Washington County mental health is about two things: 1) families and 2) locking up dysfunctional members of functional families for as long as possible. The Oregon civil commitment statutes, which are rather vague, aid in this second goal.
Under Oregon law, a civil commitment ordered by a judge lasts up to 180 days. According to Washington County employees, “up to” means “exactly”, which would seem to render the further proviso in the statute that a psychiatrist can terminate the commitment when the person under commitment has sufficiently recovered a bit moot. Perhaps it is in fact moot: perhaps psychiatric consensus has evolved to the point where anyone needing extended help taking their “meds” and working on not “decompensating” (although this latter turn of phrase appears not to involve compensating for other people’s inadequacies) ought to run a six-month course, being gradually stepped down in supervision and stepped up in the amount of money they are personally contributing for the treatment.
However, I doubt it very much. This seems like a brazen attempt to wrest a criminal-like punishment for bad behavior and general lack of “seaworthiness” out of the medicine-based civil status, which could always be changed but should not be enforced as though it already has been changed. Although I had a perfectly nice afternoon showing someone around the Belmont district, it would be even nicer if I was not effectively sidelined from life for half a year based on phun phacts about my “hearing voices” and trajectory through life, supplemented by a clearly defective interpretation of state law. But hey, at least I can’t have everything.
Bei meiner Aufnahme in die 1969 gegründete Fakultät für Soziologie der Universität Bielefeld fand ich mich konfrontiert mit der Aufforderung, Forschungsprojekte zu benennen, an denen ich arbeitete. Mein Projekt lautete damals und seitdem: Theorie der Gesellschaft; Laufzeit: 30 Jahre; Kosten: keine.
Luhmann, “Vorwort”, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft
Although generally speaking the commitment has been filled with excitement (that is, alternating periods of bureaucratic terror and mild if real self-amusement) today was just a bummer. I was to have lunch with my partner in psychical research Kit, but I ended up barely having money for lunch myself; the meal, a Czech version of spaetzle interspersed with sausage pieces, left me as cool as it was served and things didn’t improve much from there. In fact, the day was so depressing that my enthusiasm for achieving a long-awaited goal — finishing the 1150 pages of Luhmann’s Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft — was significantly dampened. However, finish it I did, bringing to completion ten years of a desire to read those pages; a desire that was thwarted in 2003 when I had Sam at Powell’s order it from Schoenhof’s (back when I had money to spend on such things and was relatively more welcome at Powell’s, but had neither the will nor the way to make it through).
This year began by finally wading through the Wissenschaft der Logik, and ending it with Luhmann’s survey of world society and mechanisms historical and materialistic for describing its systems seems rather fitting: Habermas’ attempt to upbraid Luhmann by calling his social theory “Hegelian” has outlived the enthusiasm for “postmetaphysical thought” (mythologemes rung on earlier, “modernist” work) and awareness of Hegelianism’s conservative tint, and so I sometimes I wonder whether I ought to translate the thing — this being one of the few tasks my “poor judgment” would qualify me for, although I can always hope the recursion and type theory I will turn to mañana will pay off in some relatively short term. Strange that what by all rights should have been considered the most important sociology book of the late ’90s has never made it through the Stanford University Press; I think that perhaps a samizdat translation of whole or part accomplished with the help of a dedicated blog (blogger, commenters) might help the sick man of academia out a little.
However, although one can always hope the future will be relatively brighter, I think that in all honesty I have strong reason to consider 2008 a “year of miracles”. Although perhaps it resembles another ‘episode’ in the so-called life of a schizophrenic from the outside, lots of good things happened this year: a serious melioration of my cognitive and writerly abilities, an increasing sense of safety, truth spoken between me and my real (i.e., distanced) friends, psychiatric help that took a suitably skeptical attitude towards events in contemporary society and provided me with medications that actually seem to help a little, a “romance of ideas” that ended peacefully but not too soon (and even a date or two with what I guess is called a “bobby dazzler”). Oh, and some black guy won the Presidency.
Based on my condition in the past few years I had no reason to expect any of this, but happen it did (!), for very good if slightly obscure reasons, and part of having a full life is realizing when things are happening that will probably never happen again. So, although in my position as “Early American crank” I find the concept of Thanksgiving questionable — a part of Lincoln’s dubiously sincere Christianization of the Republic’s functioning, it was — and in my position as latter-day saint I’m not going to have a very special holiday (hearkening back to Thanksgiving hotdogs eaten at 7-11, the only thing open in Pittsburgh on that day) I think I’m more or less in tune with the spirit of the event this year.
In the spirit of things, I’d like to direct people’s attention to an American film that was once a central reference-point for discussions of mental illness, but which many people party to the arrangements currently made may not be familiar with: the 1950 Jimmy Stewart movie Harvey. Adapted from a play by Mary Chase, Harvey tells the story of Elwood P. Dowd, a small-town dipsomaniac who spends his days introducing people to an invisible six-foot-three rabbit named “Harvey”. Although the critical-theoretically minded have been told “It would perhaps be possible for a good movie to be made according to the Hays Code, though not in a world where the Hays Code existed” Harvey is a carefully-crafted and delightfully entertaining look at the way mentally ill people interface with the world: some people may dismiss it as “fantasy”, but those people may indeed not be party to the social compact of American rationality it (or the expression “looney-tunes”) sketches out.
Now that we’ve had our election fun, I’ve got something to say about underlying social conditions. Recently I achieved one of my lifetime goals, recognition as a “committed intellectual”: only the commitment has to do with court-mandated inpatient mental health treatment for a period not exceeding six months from mid-September. Long story (serialized here and elsewhere, though the information imparted in the latter case is still gruesome for me five years on) short, shortly before the Republican National Convention I got picked up by the cops for causing a non-violent domestic disturbance and replacing my Risperdal solution with whiskey: one of Beaverton’s finest drove me to the local hospital, and the process began. Once this sort of thing gets started the schizophrenic is in for a fairly lengthy hospital stay, and if you compound it by pissing off the (incompetent, malicious, and prone to slightly less than true statements at law) county mental health investigator it’ll be a while.
But when the order of nature and the overlay of social mores close a door, they open a window, and it’s not necessarily just the medication window. I had a chance to have my medication changed to the gentler Zyprexa and the prescribed dose adjusted downward, my former “roommates” and I finally made something resembling an amicable separation of living arrangements and finances, and my county minders got an earful about what was and was not “reasonable” to think about persons and places in my past; I got an HIV test (the same old story) my HMO would deny me and put on some much-needed weight. I eventually settled down in a residential facility, where after a few weeks I’ve been allowed to do what I do so well, wander around in Portland.
The only thing missing is alcohol, which I added to my daily regimen after my old friend and failed short-story writer Rick Grush signed an email to me “Cheers”; I thought the UCSD cheerleaders should get an up-close view of the writing of a schizoid in an alcoholic haze (for purposes of comparison with people on neuroleptic treatment, or people who neglected to mention their “neurocomputational” theories are fundamentally crippled by basic facts of recursion theory). Drinking isn’t really a favorite of mine when I’m being myself, and as a result of all this I’m more or less being myself; perhaps not an improvement in the eyes of some, but decidedly more pleasant for me. So wouldn’t you know, it’s sometimes worth it just to double down, let the chips fall where they may, etc.
It’s crazy to think you made a crazy person crazy. One can certainly weigh heavily on a mentally ill person and exacerbate their problems (and you’re a moron if you think environmental stimuli don’t make a difference), but if you think you’re controlling someone else’s thoughts and making them in-sane there’s some nice men and women you should go talk to.
Another forty-year anniversary: the slogan “Nixon’s the One” from the 1968 Presidential campaign, which I used to find amusing for philosophical reasons. One of Heidegger’s main concepts in Being and Time is that of das Man, the inauthentic self of fallen existence in which we take our understanding of life over from what is “proximally and for the most part” intelligible. Das Man was translated by Macquarrie and Robinson as “the they”, and by more recent Heidegger aficionados as “the anyone”, but it always seemed to me that the correct rendering of it in English was a no-brainer: man in German is the exact grammatical equivalent of “one” in English expressions like “one ought to do this”, and expressions like man sagt… are clearly exactly what Heidegger had in mind in coining the substantive.
Although it’s hard to tell whether it would have pleased Heidegger to hear it, I used to find the idea that Nixon really was “the one”, an exemplar of phony normativity, enlightening. (Alternatively, you can find a critique of this sort of Heideggerianism in Nixon pal James Brown’s dictum “Funk is on the one”.)
You could also do a Heideggerian work-up of Nixon’s 1972 campaign slogan:
but I wouldn’t recommend it.
UPDATE: Do you suppose this was a “one-off device”?
