The Schizo-Stroller

“I am not a man! I am a free number!”

I recently failed an Employment and Support tribunal on the grounds that if I can do a PhD, albeit part-time I can work. Apart from the trite protest I make, to translate what I say into ‘common’ language (thus losing something in translation and relying on generalised suppositions) that “I have a mental illness not a learning disability”. Something that I was not able to come up with until after the decision. I was unable to say, being unrepresented legally at the tribunal for reasons partially due to government regulation on legal aid, that the reason that I can do a PhD is that being theory based I can practice a Socratic method with my voices in the comfort of my own home whilst studying, something I would not be able to do in the majority of jobs I can think of.

I will do reading, then cogitating on what I have learnt will think about it as I wonder around, at which point my voices will interject. They are usually, pointless, prejudiced and narrow minded and not considerably academic interjections however what they do do is allow me to come up with a suitable defence thus streamlining my thought process, determining to myself that I understand what I am reading and writing about.

This considered, I was fascinated to read in an unpublished PhD thesis of Terence McLaughlin, the late Hearing Voices Network activist and editor of Asylum magazine, comments from his voices, which he included in his thesis whilst writing, the voices thus becoming part of the thread of the text.

It seems it is not just me who is capable of this, or who has done this. That is nice to know. Thankyou Terence.

For various reasons my wife and I have been looking at a form of communication called Non-Violent Communication (NVC) developed by Marshall Rosenberg. It is used and taught to counsellors, military personnel, aid workers, corporations around the world. It is at its base level a counselling technique that aims to allow one to fulfill  needs (based largely, but extended, on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) through identification of the feelings triggered by these needs not being met. It also teaches one to empathise with others, which ultimately requires learning to listen – properly i.e. not giving your opinion; not telling someone what they are doing/ feeling wrong but accepting that what they are saying is based on what they are feeling and thus one can hear their needs. Combined these techniques allow one to communicate effectively with others.

However my wife and I have found this difficult. I can empathise, it’s a struggle, I fall into patterns of saying ‘Oh well you should do this’ or I end up being defensive and making excuses rather than saying for example, ‘Oh you’ve been looking after our son all day and you are feeling tired and you would rather I didn’t ramble at you as soon as you get home about what I’ve been reading  because it makes you feel irritated.’ But I can do it although sometimes it takes the shit to hit the fan for me to realise I haven’t been listening and I need to do so, quickly. However I am getting better, and it is amazing what just listening to what someone has to say can do to their self-worth.

This of course has relevance to Hearing Voices Groups and their efficacy but this is not the aim of this post. As I said I can empathise, but expressing my feelings is hard. Perhaps that is why I facilitate the groups in an NHS setting rather than participate as a member of HVN? Now I must say both my partner and I find the language awkward, unnatural and unwieldly, although we get the principles and try to use them in a more colloquial way. Own your feelings, don’t say ‘you’ say ‘I’ etc. However, my difficulty is not so much the language but actually identifying my feelings. We have printed out a list of feelings and we refer to them when we need to express ourselves but I seem to be unable to actually identify them unless looking at these sheets. If I read them then I can go yes that is what I am feeling, if you ask me without the sheet, then it is ‘I dunno’. Currently my partner is reading Why Love Matters by Sue Gerhardt and she has identified this as a disregulation between the emotional and symbolic parts of the brain. I’m not keen on the term ‘disregulation’ but for lack of better knowledge I’m stuck with it. Language is often no more than the failure to express our thoughts and emotions and thus becomes the use of what is available as the next best thing, something that comes from a shared experience but is never truly our own. Anyway, it seems I am perfectly at ease at identifying my emotions in text but not in verbal language, according to Gerhardt this is due to early experiences often due to a significant other having a similar problem.

I have to point out right now, this is not ‘blame’, I do not like that word and is often bandied around as a censoring accusation due to an inability to take responsibility for our actions. If I cannot learn from my history, my psychological make-up, my experiences, my life and all that has occured in it then I cannot develop, I cannot move on. As Habermas suggests without learning from our mistakes and those of others then all learning (copying, memory, rote etc) is merely accidental. We make this world and this world makes us. Deal with it. We are both responsible for our actions AND our actions are affected by others. We have to deal with the consequences of our actions but we should not be expected to predict perfectly what they are, we WILL make mistakes. As Hannah Arendt points out if we cannot forgive then we are stuck in a circle of vengeance. Of course it does bring up the important question of how we can have action, political or otherwise, that does not stem from ressentiment or the position of a schöne seele, a belle âme, a beautiful soul.

So at this point I jump. Why bring this up? I’m reading Giddens’ Capitalism and Modern Theory at the moment, primarily as revision for teaching and while reading Weber’s ideas on forms of social conduct I started thinking on his views on rationality, primarily as I am trying to apply Habermas to Hearing Voices Groups. Weber has four basic forms of social conduct.

1. Purposively Rational Conduct, the individually rationally assesses the probable results of a given act in terms of the calculation of means to an end.

2. Value Rational Conduct, is directed towards an overriding ideal.

3. Affective Conduct is that which is carried out under the sway of some sort of emotional state and as such is on the borderline of meaningful and non-meaningful conduct.

4. Traditional Action is carried out under the influence of custom and habit, and as such is also on the borderline of meaningful and non-meaningful conduct.

So if we return to NVC, we can understand our affective conduct as an expression of unmet needs. Weber understands it as action for its own sake, if we are to understand NVC this is not strictly true, but it is not purposive or value rational, it may borderline traditional in the sense that we often return to learnt habits from others when acting emotionally. However I would argue that NVC brings purposive rational conduct, or instrumental action into this by having as a goal the fulfillment of one’s needs (I would argue however that it is not strategic action, NVC requires plain language that avoids perlocutions). Thus it brings a reason to affective conduct, or a source of reason. Psychological blocks, or as I now call them having learnt the etymology of the word from the Ancient Greek for ‘obstacle’, satans, are what gets in the way of purposive action. And as such, if not rational in the sense that rational is often contrasted to affective behaviour, are reasonable forms of conduct. Interestingly enough this is attained through communication, but contrasts, as instrumental behaviour, slightly from Habermas’ ideal type of communicative rationality.

Of course Weber’s concept of rationality stems from Kant, who wished to divest all emotional or affective thought and behaviour from reason. Thus we have a form of alienated soul, where the ideal of pure reason, the transcendent external God is separated from its emotional blocks, its satans. If this is the case, how can political action escape from the subject as beautiful soul? How can we subjectify ourselves if we don’t drag along with us our blocks in communication our emotional outbursts? Perhaps Deleuze was right when he stated that in resistance to the Control Society ‘the key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.’ (Negotiations, p. 175)

Have new blog for my PhD stuff: Madness and Theory

From now on, all my theory in that area will be published there. At the moment there is just the conference notes crossposted, some more will be added soon then we’ll see how it grows.

Everything else will remain on here.

If the Napoleonic code in 1804 was one of the first attempts to create a legal code that would introduce the notion of absolute ownership, and this in essence was an actual codification of an attempt to control the woman’s phallus, then can we allow capitalism to take a woman’s form as metaphor?

So what of late capitalism, in Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism he suggests that Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History was much derided but the message quietly assumed. I would like to play with this idea a bit further using the metaphor of Capitalism as a woman, and at that as an attractive woman who had been in an unhappy and antagonistic marriage with State Socialism.

We can see Fukuyama as the guy who realising she had won the divorce with what looked like a particularly fortuitous settlement, not least because it looked like she got all the kids (although Uncle China had an eye on the family), decided to fuck her. Unfortunately he suffered premature ejeculation and was widely laughed at. However others had always seen her beauty and progressed to sleep with her, many of these men, and women, were more virile.

Her orgasm increased, however due to the psychological attentions of so many abusive lovers she had a breakdown, many of these lovers tried to medicate her in an attempt to get her up and fucking again, but perhaps if we move the metaphor back to people, a woman who had been through so much abuse would require someone to treat her respectfully and listen to her, she may well be full of self-hatred form earlier abusive relationships, thinking she was worthless and deserving of such treatment. Of course, in a professional relationship, but the best care would come from those who don’t want to sleep with her lest the relationship become abusive once more, perhaps those who don’t find her particluarly attractive but respect her rights as a human being. But most of all from those who see her as just one woman among many, all of whom are equally worthwhile.

[Edit 06/04/10: What the fuck was I on about there? But to flog a dead analogy; bank bailouts as maintenance payments? No fuck it, I'll leave this as a reminder of what utter shite I can come up with. Also concerned about my own allusions there that women only want to sleep around because they're damaged, which ain't strictly true.]

[Edit: The old link died, here is new link]

Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition

Continuing the book readings I have been putting on, next up is a book reading by Mark Fisher aka k-punk, upstairs @ the Open House on Springfield Road in Brighton, next to London Road station. From 7.30pm on Thursday 26th November, entrance £2.

Mark will be reading from his new book ‘Capitalist Realism’

Here is publishers blurb:

• Capitalist Realism
  Is there no alternative?
• ISBN:
  [978-1-84694-317-1]
• Price:
  £7.99 || $14.95
• Publishing on:
  27 Nov 2009
• Pages:
  92
  Format:
  Paperback
• Size:
  51/2×81/2 in ||  mm
• Category:
• Political/ Popular Culture
• Author(s): Mark Fisher

• It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system – a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. But it also shows that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the capitalist reality program – endemic mental health problems, the proliferation of new forms of bureaucracy – capitalism in fact is anything but realistic. How can capitalist realism be challenged, and can we begin to imagine the unimaginable: an alternative to capitalism that is not some throwback to discredited models of state control?
  Capitalist Realism includes striking new readings of Children Of Men, the Jason Bourne films, Supernanny and the fiction of Le Guin and Kafka.

• Mark Fisher writes for The Wire, frieze, Sight & Sound and New Statesman. He teaches philosophy at the City Literary Institute in London and is Visiting Fellow at the Centre of for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. His weblog, k-punk, is highly regarded.

• Endorsements:

  Let’s not beat around the bush: Fisher’s compulsively readable book is simply the best diagnosis of our predicament that we have! Through examples from daily life and popular culture, but without sacrificing theoretical stringency, he provides a ruthless portrait of our ideological misery. Although the book is written from a radically Left perspective, Fisher offers no easy solutions. Capitalist Realism is a sobering call for patient theoretical and political work. It enables us to breathe freely in our sticky atmosphere.

  Slavoj Žižek

  What happened to our future? Mark Fisher is a master cultural diagnostician, and in Capitalist Realism he surveys the symptoms of our current cultural malaise. We live in a world in which we have been told, again and again, that There Is No Alternative. The harsh demands of the ‘just-in-time’ marketplace have drained us of all hope and all belief. Living in an endless Eternal Now, we no longer seem able to imagine a future that might be different from the present. This book offers a brilliant analysis of the pervasive cynicism in which we seem to be mired, and even holds out the prospect of an antidote.

  Steven Shaviro Author of Connected and Doom Patrols

I had an interesting moment. I was reading up on some theory, Habermas to be precise, and I had one of those moments where a lot of what I’d read previously slotted into place. Not just course work but pleasure reading. That moment where you get the point of not just what you are reading at that moment but the connections with all those other things – to be specific in this instance but not exclusive histories of social/ communal-religious puritan groups such as the Shakers and Weber/ modern thought – that you have read piecemeal in the past because they looked interesting. But of course unless you live in ‘I can be a purely objective scientist’ fantasy land, at least in the social sciences – Habermas again has something to say about that to do with the necessary use of the ordinary language being studied – you sometimes think how it relates to the evolution of your own thought, your beliefs (or you should – the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’). But that was not the breakthrough, it was a breakthrough, a minor one of sorts in my own theoretical preferences, but not the one this post is about.

As I was thinking to myself, ‘now I understand all those things I’ve read’, one of my voices spoke up: ‘You mean, we’ve read.’ At first I had my normal paranoiac/ telepathic moment – that’s someone telepathically linked to me letting me know they’ve read up on this too, stop fucking preaching (a weakness of mine) – but then I realised, no, for the first time, that I was aware of, or rather, or perhaps, the first time I was aware that, my voices were telling me they were a part of me.

Then I looked out of the window and a guy was walking past giving me the evils – did he know I was being so foolish? But no, he was the same guy who had been delivering leaflets while I was walking my son to sleep earlier, he was delivering pizza menus. He put one through my front door. I don’t eat pizza.

[edit] Rereading this I got a voice saying ‘Oh jeez, we’re not’  but was it telling me it was separate or was it the voice’s own terrified realisation that they are a part of me?

This is an unedited recording I made of a panel discussing noise, improvisation and other experimental musics hosted by David Keenan at the Colour Out Of Space festival in 2007.

At somepoint I shall edit this properly and re-post, but for now here it is raw via podomatic

Dave Keenan – COOS

Simon Reynolds conducts a brief history of the use of theory in music writing and concludes it gets you high.

I don’t need drugs anymore because I have my friend sweet psychosis but I don’t mind getting intoxicated on a bit of theory.