kulturbrille:asymmetry

Last night, as I was driving a dear friend home, I found myself sick to my stomach as I thought of all the people I am about to meet in the course of work. Just as I hear, on a daily basis, horror stories, the theme of which I have learnt in my heavily-watered down module in applied linguistics (masquerading as pedagogy) has far more significance in its existence than in its telling, the future is bleak, and as I have been doing all these years I will be grappling with the indifference, incompetence, smallness and insufferable subjectivity and impenetrability of all mankind, I will be fighting to be understood, accepted and left alone. I felt for a moment the entirety of all that has come and was crushed under the weight of the knowledge that it will be painful. It takes an immense willpower to contemplate those around me and not admit that someday they will cease this contrived truce of mutual respect and sufferability and become figments of the past and of my increasingly weary imagination. There was a time when I thought of people that had come to fade away, and I wondered if there was not something that been perceived in error, or performed inexactly, such that they had become shades, names, ethereal constructs of a troubled mind. But I know now that the absence of these people, enforced or otherwise, conscious or inadvertent, stem from an inevitable, inexorable progression of an escalating discontinuity in the flux, in the continuum of that which links me with you. I cannot stop it, I will not try.

So if you are not here now, you will never be. Absence has never felt so immediate.

I know someone who will have an answer for me.

When the British psychoanalyst John Rickman - who was, incidentally, a Quaker by upbringing - remarked that madness is when you can’t find anyone who can stand you, he was asking a couple of questions. Firstly, what makes us feel that we can’t stand someone? And this becomes, for the sake of diagnosis as it were, a question about how we know, about how we describe what it is about them that we can’t stand. And secondly, what do we tend to do when we can’t stand someone? Answers to the second question constitute to what we now call the history of madness, which is more or less a history of fear, at least in the modern era. A history of forms of classification; and of how the so-called mad create an unease that cannot be ignored, and for which they have often been punished by the state, and other bystanders.

The hatred of this unease has sometimes needed explaining - and hatred itself always makes us fearful - but the mad have traditionally been those people we have to do something about. It has been assumed that, like criminals, we must do something with them or they will do something with us. Unlike criminals though, they are not always people who have committed crimes. They are either felt to be harmlessly strange - withdrawn, out of reach, out of touch; or gifted; or potential criminals, capable, perhaps of crimes we have never even dreamed of. But in so far as they don’t break the law - it’s not, for example, against the law (yet) to hear voices or not to speak - they are more like people with disturbingly bad manners. People who, by not playing the game, make us wonder what the game is. And indeed why the rest of us have consented to play it. So the mad have also been available to idealise as cultural outlaws or odd prophets, as though madness was a glamorous misery and not a monotonous one. As though to be treated as an oracle was not itself a form of scapegoating. What we call madness - like what we call pornography - is that which we cannot remain indifferent to. It is, in other words, something about which everyone has or takes a position.

So there is a certain relief (along with the terror) when the mad commit crimes, or when the criminal is described as mentally ill, because then their behaviour seems intelligible, straightforwardly transgressive rather than horribly eccentric. The law (like medicine) is always trying to keep up with the mad, keep track of them - and modern political regimes (like modern psychiatric approaches) have shown just how easy it is to recruit the language of mental health for diverse political objectives - because those people referred to (however loosely) as mad are always people who seem to be unable or unwilling to follow rules. Their language, their beliefs, their bodily gestures, their hygiene, their hopes and expectations can be wildly at odds with some putative form. They remind us of what it is to be normal. As Rickman’s comment suggests, what is called madness is all to do with sociability, and all that sociability is to do with.

- Adam Phillips, Around and About Madness, in Equals