The Schizo-Stroller

I’ve just been reading the section of Phenomenology of Spirit where Hegel talks about Socrates. Now whenever you get lists of famous people who hear voices Socrates is usually on it (charities often do this to normalise the experience). Here’s what Hegel writes about what is quite clearly Socrates’ method of dealing with his voices:

“Just as that wise man of old searched in his own thought for what was good and beautiful, but left it for his ‘daemon’ to know the petty contingent content of what he wanted to know – whether it would be good for him to keep company with this or that person, or good for one of his acquaintances to go on a journey, and similar unimportant things; in the same way the universal consciousness draws knowledge of the contingent from dirds, or trees, or the yeasty earth, the vapour from which deprives self-consciousness of it’s self-possession.” (Phenomenology of Spirit, 1977, p. 431)

Outside of bio-social models of schizophrenia, radical groups of psychologists and ex-patients have been looking at successful therapies for voice hearers. Two of the most successful models are Voice Dialogue and the Finnish Open Dialogue. Both rather than treating the experience as pathological encourage the voice hearer to engage with their voices. These voices often have personalities of their own. This method became popular after a Dutch voice hearer read Julian Jaynes’ Bicameral Mind and used it to recover, Jaynes’ Bicameral Mind is a controversial book that argues that until the time of Homer, the ancient Greeks literally heard and saw their Gods. Now whether they did or not or whether it is true in this literal sense, if one studies social theory we come across both Adorno and Horkheimer’s discussion of the creation of the subject in Ulysses as a distinct break in the history of the individual, and recently Sloterdijk in Bubbles argues that ancient people had a more ‘telepathic’ existence, their socius was less discriminating and they could more or less hear each others’ intentions if not thoughts.
Returning to the success of voice dialogue that treats these voices in schizophrenia as sub-personalities that have something to say, in the literature that surrounds this they are often referred to as Daemons. If we look at Greek mythology the Daemons, or daimons were often emotions or ideals, for example Aporia or Apechania (helplessness), or Penthos (grief), Aletheia (truthfulness). When voice hearers are helped to come to terms with their voices, empathic communication is often used as a tool or skill to help them hear their voices without upset, that leads to a change in the nature of the voices where they change from vengeful Furies to guides (more the Furies with whom Oedipus found peace and sanctuary) and this is often done by helping connect feelings and needs, a link that can be broken by trauma or poor communication, as argued by Bateson. This has a biological basis in the evidence base that has looked at links between the formation of the ordo-frontal cortex and attachment theory.

Same as dat, yesterday, today, tomorrow
There will be no reprint, repress, suppress, oppress, compress
Same as dat, today, tomorrow, yesterday
No compression, oppression, repression, suppression
This is no mp3
This is not a copy of a copy
There is no original,
An original implies a copy
this is unique.
Stinky, human shit.
Everyday shit
Revolution of everyday shit
This shit is only suitable fertiliser for growing vegetables for human consumption after 10-20 years
About the same time as an original thought takes to get into academic discourse
Or for that discourse to affect policy.
And, then, only after you take the heavy metal out.
Mash it up with hardcore
Then break the scene.
Create those vacuoles
Elude Control.

Bad boy bubba
Double trouble
Bubble Trouble
Momma Can I Go out And Kill tonight
I was a teenage werewolf
But I don’t wear shades, not even after dark
Look into my eyes… deep into my eyes
MOTHERFUCKER.
Shut the fuck up and listen
Cos I wanna tell to a story.
Of how I was mummy’s golden boy.
But that golden boy was’na me.
Was name,
Was good boy bubba
Toil and trouble
Protestant ethical fucker
Victim blaming cunt

Same as dat, tomorrow, yesterday, today.
No reprint, repress, suppress, oppress
Same as dat, today, tomorrow, yesterday
No compression, oppression, suppression, repression
My bonny lies over the ocean, my bonnie lies over the sea
My bonnie lies trapped in the Other, and no-one can fucking here him but me.
Mirror in the bathroom you and me, help me gain some sanity
Don’t look at me bruv
I’m just you looking at you looking at you looking at you looking at you…
You need a knot eye
Not who?
Not you, another mother’s fucker
Any old fucker, any old fucker, any old fucker will do.
Young or old
Beautiful or not
Girl or boy
Just not you, do you see?
I see you, looking at you, looking at you, looking at you…
But not me
That’s cos you’re looking at you, looking at you, looking at you.
A knot eye to see your knot.
Tell your not to get knotted.
De-not. A not knot.
Get your punk arse out of the subjective and get some bastard to prove you wrong
High noon, guns at dawn
Dusk till dawn,
Better argument after negation after better argument after negation after better argument after negation…
Better than you looking at you looking at you looking at you…
It’s the knot eye, bleary eye till dawn and the wine flows like sweet, sweet nectar.
No vampires here.
Unless it’s the night you can’t get a word in edgeways
Never mind, you’re no virgin
You’re doomed to die in the horror story of your mind
At least you might get a fuck out of it.
Living in the love of the common people
Smiles from the heart of the family man
Papa’s gonna buy you an ideology to cling to
And you’ll never have a proper conversation til the day that you die.

If you’re worried you might have depression
First check you’re not surrounded by wankers
If you’re worried you might have psychosis
First check you’re not surrounded by narcissists.
Hard to do in the consumer society
Zombie land of the living shopper
Braaaiiinnns
Think, think it ain’t illegal yet
The zombie sniffs the air.
Brraaainnns. Thinking braainns.
Whoop whoop it’s the sound of the police
Censor that thought
It’s not fit for human consumption
It has inherent value.
Same as dat.
Dat shit. Bat shit.
That’s not for reprint, reprocess, redistribution.
Same as dat
I’ve got nothing to say
Nothing of value
Other than my truth.
My inherent value.
Whether it has any objective value, objective truth, can only be decided by others.
That’s a you, another, not the mirror,
Lest we slide into mental illness.
It is you ooh hoo, oh yeh yeh yeh
It is you ooh hoo, oh yeh yeh yeh.
Pressure drop, oh pressure drop
Pressure’s gonna drop on you.
And it cuts both ways
Sunshine
Solar anus
Uranus
Not Janus with his two face
Scarface
Don’t get high on your own supply
That shit ain’t ever gonna be good enough
Bat shit, dat shit,
Guana, g’wan a
You wanna
Same as dat.

Now distribute quick
And fuck off.

The general intellect and the general bitch are opposed.

The general bitch has other names, the general carry-go-bring-come, the general gossip, general ignorance (if you like QI). It is fed by hearsay and is thus opposed to Law.

The general intellect and general bitch both work at the edge of chaos.

However the general intellect draws from below, from chaos and creates its own democratic order.

The general bitch fears chaos and polices it.

The general intellect tames the Beast, plays with it, converses with it freely; the general bitch fears the Beast and thus unconsciously works for it, the general bitch is the Beast’s slave. Its willing slave, due to its willing repression of its own desires and thus is unable to become fully conscious.

Working for the Beast the general bitch uses police tactics, censorship, negative solidarity to feed the Beast it fears.

The general bitch invokes fealty and obedience to the Law whilst simultaneously forecloses its own ability to create it and therefore is not the Law.

The general bitch tries to be a parent whilst failing to be an adult and so becomes a child.

This statement is a bitch. This is a general statement. It does not belong to the general bitch.

If you don’t want to be ruled by fear and aggression.

That’s the job of the mammalian brain. As that bit was trained by suckling, one needs to find the mother-lode.

If the mother-lode is lacking, and even if it isn’t, one needs to find the significant-other lode. Or more precisely the significant-others lodes. For they are multiple.

Then language can move from a command ethics to a knowledge ethics.

An idea of reference usually refers to the experience of a phenomena having personal significance. The mild version is when for example one finds oneself being embarrassed by a slightly narcissistic moment when we realise a celebration is not for us. However more psychotic versions are the classic TV or radio talking to us, or the paranoia that the people on the train are talking to us. Of course there are mythological versions, one could put augury in this realm – the geese are flying north when they should be flying south, therefore war is coming.

Now i do get the TV and paranoia in a public place thing regularly, but I am aware that this is me projecting how I’m feeling.

So when re-reading Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, I came across the paper “On some motifs of Baudelaire”, Benjamin is talking about Proust’s understanding of aura. Benjamin has been using Proust to explore memoire involuntaire. “To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return”, “experience of the aura rests thus rests on the transposition of a response common in human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man”.

And with respect to a familiarity of the aura, Proust states “Some people who are fond of secrets flatter themselves that objects retain something of the gaze that has rested on them… they believe that monuments and pictures present themselves only beneath the delicate veil which centuries of love and reverence on the part of so many admirers have woven about them. this chimera… would change into truth if they related it to the only reality that is valid for the individual, namely, the world of his emotions.” (Benjamin, 1999, p.184)

The problem is that I do KNOW this truth. but that doesn’t stop these ideas of reference coming even at the slightest hint of stress.

It seems my ant has a raging bull elephant under its charge. I need to get it to fetch wood and water. to do that though it seems I need to soothe my reptile first.

For over a year now I’ve been hearing voices saying ‘Hayek’ or ‘Nozick’. Since last March in fact when my daughter was first hospitalised, these two along with ‘Foucault’. I realise as single words they are empty signifiers and I can fill them with what I will, but as they are a communication between my Other, created by my unconscious projecting onto the real, I guess I’ve got a better chance of gaining some meaning from it as any.

The ‘Foucault’ I have always associated with the experience of Great Ormond Street, and the fact that I had just finished the Birth of the Clinic (by then though I had moved on to the Order of Things). My therapist, who fortunately had also read the book, reminded me how Foucault talks of clinical discourse turning the subject into the object. And realising how it was my baby daughter this was happening to, and i was observing from two removes (later in the CDU of my local hospital a nurse with much experience of working with children and families in intensive care, and whose own child had been in intensive care talked to us about how, when a child ends up in intensive care the mother is pushed at a remove from the care of her own child, and the father, who is often pushed at a remove from the relationship with the mother, becomes separated from the child by a further remove. She stated her own husband had had issues with this). So with all this it made sense that I would hear this signifier. As our relationship with the hospital infrastructure became less intense and our own familial relationships improved this voice became less intense and prominent.

However, the signifiers naming the two right-wing theorists has continued. I can only associate this with the fact that with the burgeoning awareness that I would have to rely further on a state that under Tory rule was increasing its draconian governance and surveillance not just due to my own disability, which was at this time already under attack in the media, but now through my daughter.

The ‘Hayek’ I associate with my belief that the Tories know that they are likely to lose the next election and are stripping the state bare for theirs and their friends own pockets. The dominant ideology clings to his economic theory but the reality of the events from 2007 onwards meant that his ascendance is on the wane. The ‘Nozick’ i associated with the reality that to keep this post-Hayekian economic dominance the rich would have start to dismantling the state leaving only a skeleton state protecting private property. The floating of policies to privatise roads and the police confirm this for me.

As the infrastructure of water, gas, electricity, the railways and social housing had been sold off under the Thatcher government, what else is there left? Our genes?

But why do these signifers keep coming at me? I am aware they come when I am upset at the complacency of a world that feels powerless to do anything. But it also comes when I feel negative solidarity, mis-directed energies of the powerless towards the powerless and I feel isolated and alone. These voices seem to come from intelligent but deluded others who stemming from a middle class unaware of the real conditions of an underclass, who are busy setting themselves up with resentful carry go bring come simmering, underneath, bleat their desperate belief in their assuredness in a Robinson Crusoe selfhood, unaware of their own emotional cripplehood.

I associate this with my loss of connection with a more emotionally substantial left-orientated middle and working class, leaving these lost constructs, soft bodies projected onto a cold Real that is best represented in my mind by these emotionally dead philosophies that are unable to recognise the lives of Others, most prominently the lives of those others that they exploit.

‘Fuck ‘em’ said the ex-Black Panther.

But i still find it hard to keep my dignity.

After so many years of them refusing my right to peace, as they refuse so many others’ rights. So many human rights refused. Again and again.

Why? Because they refused themselves their own rights? Can we try to empathise with them for that?

When I am strong and well… perhaps. I can try. But the bastards have tried to grind me down for years.

The meek shall inherit the earth, but the fucking ignorant can go fuck themselves.

I’ve read book after self-help book telling me the only thing i can do is to take responsibility for my actions. and I try to, oh, i try to. But my crime seems to have been to be forced to shoulder the burden of others’ emotional responsibilities. And like an abused mule, stricken with one too many emotional bags to carry from yet one more emotional shirker, I kick. Buckaroo!

But do I get my own Society for the Protection of Abused Mules?

Do I fuck!

Instead i get contained by those who would blame the whipped dog for biting in frenzied self-defense.

I’m sick of being the holy scapegoat. Even the strongest get overwhelmed when there are too many cunts around.

Fuck’ em!!

No more keep calm, carry on.

Get angry! Fight back!

Let us take a scenario, oft told, of the language of the child abuser.

“I am doing this to you because you made me” being the most obvious.
We also have “I’m doing this to you because you are bad”
Or “I’m doing this to you for your own good”

In this structure we can see a pattern: “I do this to you because you…”

So the abuser blames the abused for the reason they are abusing them.
The prejudiced blame the people they are prejudiced about for the reason they are prejudiced.
The persecutory blame the people they are persecuting for their persecution.

This is the linguistic structure of abuse.

The language of those who blame the person who left the door open for the abuser’s act of walking through it.

The trauma is the event. But the experience may seem the worse the more the abused is blamed for it, either by the abuser, or by those they turn to for succour.

According to some sources the amount of time it takes to recover, with appropriate support, from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a year to two years (although some events like CSA where the abused is too young to understand the experience and is more inclined to believe the words of the abuser, this is not the case).

It would suggest that the rate of recovery depends on the amount and quality of support. However if this language of abuse has a structure then one can argue that post-trauma the more one is exposed to this linguistic structure in one’s everyday life the harder it is for the victim of the abuse to understand that in fact they are NOT responsible. The longer it takes to recover.

First thought: The phrases ‘I feel judged’ or ‘I feel excluded’ are emotionally incorrect in a logical sense. The correct phrases are ‘I think I am judged’ or ‘I think I am excluded’, even, ‘I seem to be judged’ or ‘I seem to be excluded’ but as words that end with an -ed are most often judgements or observations that happen to the person (although there is a grey area as they may be observations of affects, hence ‘I feel outraged’ gives a sense of feeling, hence the affects will more likely illicit emotions to do with anger (although not necessarily) but are still not specifically defined), they cannot be feelings as emotions are processes (chemicals if one wants to be neuroscientific) that happen in the body. As regards words ending with -ed, one has either been judged or been excluded or not, whether one feels or for that matter thinks one has. However if I say ‘I think I’ve been judged’ it is a matter of agreement and can potentially be settled, however if one says ‘i feel I’ve been judged’ and someone says ‘Well you haven’t been’ it is harder not to take the disagreement personally, as one is evidently feeling something (there is some definite neurochemistry going on) but as an emotion has been confused with a judgement that has a truth value (emotions are qualities not truths, therefore have a different validity) then what is left when the feeling is denied One can say ‘I feel paranoid because I think I am judged’, or ‘I feel upset because I think i am judged’, perhaps ‘I feel angry because i think I have been excluded’ (hence one will most likely feel angry at being outraged but perhaps also sad or hurt). This is not to say the observation of judgements does not come with a corresponding feeling, but these feelings have multiple possibilities, hence if I say to you ‘i feel judged’ you might think I am paranoid when in fact i am feeling upset and anxious.

Second thought: Rhetoric is the skill of persuasion, often politically, using emotionally laden language. This language need not be, in fact perhaps necessarily is not, in conformity with the logic above. Hence if a politician suggest that they ‘feel slighted by asylum seekers getting a free ride’ you are free to insert your own emotion with regard to this ‘slight’ which indeed is a value-laden observation and judgement, not an emotion of its own.
The classic statement would be ‘I feel this is the right thing to do’. Really, do you feel happy, do you feel slightly conflicted, do you feel angry because you have no other choice, do you feel guilty because you think its right but many will suffer, because you know its right for only a few? It’s a very powerful statement though, as although there are limits to the possibilities for emotion set by the context, they are multiple and therefore can grab the attention of and perhaps persuade far more than if the statement had been more emotionally honest.

Third Thought: How does one deny rhetoric without either an ad hominem (perhaps a straw man) or more rhetoric?

I’d always assumed that the reason my dad could afford to send me to the school where I spent night on night, year on year of emotional abuse was because he’d done well in his business, shopfitting, in the eighties.
It turns out he struggled like many others, and my mum had to work a second job to pay the fees.

The irony of course was that the job she worked to pay the fees was at the psychiatric unit where I would end up after I left the school she paid for.

My experience may not have been CSA, but I’m writing this having tried to watch Festen, after too many family gatherings of my own, the reputation of which my schooling was supposed to further. I broke down and had to turn it off when Michael broke down. Gbatokai seems to wonder why the staff treat him so well. And I realised then the way staff treated me at those gatherings, the way the guys at my father’s work treated me, was the same.

Yet outside that knowledge; knowledge of my family by those outside, my treatment has been cruel. A cruelty that as far as I can gather is a complicit admission of the right of the bourgeoisie to rule, and the abuse they administer, and get others to administer on their own for breaking ranks. You get understanding from people when the abuse is witnessed but at no other time.

It is for this reason that my thesis was on the language of abuse implicit in the current economic ideology focussing on the administration of the insane. As well as the resistance to it, and the complicity that then grew from within that resistance in the name of recovery.

But yesterday I applied for intermission, my daughter’s disability along with the lack of support I have received means I have had to take the next four terms out.

Like Michael, people seem to have wanted to shut me up, control me, silence me. Nobody is listening. The truth is too shocking.

I know there are people fighting back out there, but i am too isolated, I look outside and experience only negative solidarity, only the cold, even in the hottest March for years. No worse, I experience violent emotional suppression, but not by the bourgeoisie. As always they haven’t had to lift a finger. No dirt under their fingernails. They got their working class boot boys and girls to do it for them.

I’m going to spend this year rebuilding my life, with my family. I’ve been too fucked over too fight back. As Bifo Berardi suggested, we’re exhausted.

Good luck to those fighting back. I wish I had your strength. Your sense of community.

But for now I can’t finish my thesis. For now I can’t finish the film.