The Schizo-Stroller

A collection of his audio works including the 7″ ‘Recorded Delivery’

Janek Schaefer Audio Works

I was recently approached by a US charity to promote them on my blog. Their mission statement is a grassroots campaign uniting advocates, mental health professionals and organizations into a single coalition creating a public forum advancing the need and benefit of increased mental health research. They also state that they were fighting stigma. I support this.

Unfortunately I cannot say I support their solution, which is Better preventions and treatment can be provided by Predicting who is at risk for developing mental illness, Pre-empting the disease process, and Personalizing interventions. The opportunities to make scientific discoveries have never been better.

In email conversations with them, this is in part based on genetics, and my worry is that this smacks of bio-politics (my regular readers will not be surprised). The surveillance and subjectification this implies is in my mind, precisely what can cause the psychotic cry of the schizophrenic or the affective alienation of the depressive.

However as this is only in part their mission, and ultimately the aim is to prevent suicide, something I have to applaud I want to post a link. As much as in conversation they have welcomed debate on this issue which I agree is of utmost importance.

So as you are all intelligent people and can make up your own minds, (this blog too is to inform debate) and the charity may help alleviate the stigma surrounding those who are in a state where they may consider suicide and therefore help people ask for help, here is the link: http://www.everyminute.org/index.html

Give them your support and/ or let them know what you think.

I have been wondering recently whether postmodernism (in the sense described by Zizek here Resistance is Surrender), and it’s practical capitulation to capitalism is like a Jester in the court of the King (French Theory in America (again!)). Traditionally the Jester was the only person in the court who was allowed to poke fun at the King, yet ultimately, although he could point out the inconsitencies of the King, the King or the Sovereign was ultimately the only one who could act on this. The Jester for all his critique was powerless to act. In capitulating to capitalism, seeing it as inevitable and insurmountable, postmodernism has set itself in this position.

However my fear is, but perhaps the postmodernists intention is, that it is more like Monkey, yes that eighties Japanese TV series, based pretty accurately on a Chinese myth of the Monkey god. Monkey was a powerful but mischievous immortal. But he was unable to escape the hand of Buddha, and as a ‘punishment’ for his insolence he was to escort the Buddhist monk, Tripitaka (Hegelianism? Kant?), to India to pick up holy scrolls that would lead to Enlightenment. To keep him under control Monkey had a crown (language?) that Tripitaka could cause him to feel pain and so not stray to far from the true path that would lead to Enlightenment.

Well my external hard-drive that stores my .mp3s has gone kaput, fortunately I have put a lot of them on DVDs and given them to friends so can get them back but for now it is other devices for audio playback. The thing is that’s a whole library of music gone in one go. Not quite the burning of the Alexandrian library, but in my world, almost. However I do have other, more ancient artifacts to pursue the musical genealogy that is my musical profile. There’s my CD player, or there would be… my CD player has been playing up for a while, sometimes it spits the CD back out, sometimes it jumps back a few tracks. But today it too decided it had breathed its last, it jumped, it spewed, it basically threw a hissy fit. So I had to dig back to the grandfather, my turntable. It worked fine. I have a fine record collection, I just bought a new record the other day, my tastes are far enough from the mainstream that many of the artists I like still release vinyl fomat versions of their releases. The turntable is not perfect, a while ago, the needle went, it goes every two to three years, but hey, guess what, I buy a new one. A hell of a lot less than a new CD player or hard-drive. But it means I still have music, and amusingly, it means my musical tastes are not surveilled by Last FM. Perhaps in a socially formed habit, I’ll write my playlist on this blog so my listening habits may continue to be observed. Maybe not.

It got me to thinking though on the on the idea of progress in technical innovation. The idea that technological development is necessarily speeding towards some idea of a Hegelian absolute, well not spirit, but technological perfection. How would we know this perfection when we get there? I quite willingly put my listening habits up on Last FM as it, Last FM, finds me other artists similar to the ones I already listen to, just slightly different. It has already brought shared musical experiences between my wife and my tastes by comparing all our musical tastes and finding artists somewhere in between. It has also (there is a toggle that allows you to set the recommendations as more obscure) found me the delights of Russian bedroom noisniks, a pleasure not to be sniffed at. But it is the same surveillance technique that, were I to have a Nectar card, would allow advertisers to pinpoint what I may wish to buy based on what i have already bought, Nectar cards I believe now hold more information on us than our governments: (Anti-Nectar card T-shirt). The difference is when Last FM recommends me something I download it for free. Would we be as opposed to Nectar cards, if we were freer to steal what the advertisers suggested we might like?

Is part of the problem within private property? Most laws are to protect private property; Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations suggested that if there were any purpose to governments it was to protect the rich from the poor. Is this why when economic crises loom states veer towards more draconian laws, both capitalist (in the form of fascism) and socialist in it’s forms (which in the liberal lexicon does not have a seperate word for its totalitarian forms) states do, based as they are on an economist rationality. Yet the mechanisms for the implementation of control are developed in times of plenty when there is less resistance.

Back to my hi-fi and audio documents, I still listen to vinyl, i prefer its warmth but that is for aesthetic reasons (not that that isn’t a-historical), but as I have found out the progress in storage does not seem to be substantiol, CDs scratch too, and mp3 files degrade or can be corrupted or lost (just as our data seems too). How much more rational is this? As a rationality it has become more atomised, yet, in a way that helps us understand Foucault’s cynicism towards humanism, it helps us communicate smaller and smaller pieces of information about out individuality, within this is the potential glimpsed within Web 2.0, but the extra surveillance that it brings in, that creates unequal, irreversible power relations is due to the input in the most part of the right to private property, that ultimately denies that liberal argument, the level playing field (and all the limits that analogy suggests). Habermas has been under a lot of pressure recently to comment on Web 2.0 not least due to its relevance to his theory of communicative rationality, but any absolute spirit that may lead to will always be one of domination as long as some people have a greater differential due to their stock of private property and all the influence on our shared rationality, the nearest thing that we have to true Zeit-Geist. Yet take away private property and we remove the impetus for that teleology and thus any absolute in the spirit, we no longer progress.

Although we may well be freer to choose our direction of movement, individual, social or both.

I went to the toilet earlier (thankyou for sharing Schizo) and one of my voices, a cousin of ‘annoying pissant twat’ I think, decided to share with me that he hated me. ‘ Thankyou’ I said, ‘but I’m not so sure; you constantly share this with me, in fact you find it your duty to inform me. However were I to hate someone, I would spend as much time as possible avoiding them, yet time and time again you feel the need to come and share your feelings with me. I think you like me really.’

‘You’re insane’ my voice said ‘And you’re quite possibly stupid’ I thought knowing full well that as my thoughts broadcast he would hear me, although considering I was having a conversation with a disembodied voice generated by my piss splashing the toilet bowl, perhaps he was right.

My voices have always told me to shut up, or more scarily, to stop thinking, from the very start of my breakdown. I always think of the line from an old Funkadelic song, ‘Think, think, it ain’t illegal yet’. But it always brings to bear the totalitarianism of suggesting someone stop thinking.

However recently my voices have started getting angry with what I am thinking about, having finished my Masters i still read philosophy and political theory books, the result of which I have always naturally assumed is to think about the subject matter you have just been reading. This seems to upset my voices (it is even upsetting them right now).

‘Shut up’ they tell me. ‘That is stupid, stop it.’ ‘I’m fed up with listening to you’.

‘Then don’t’. I suggest to them. It seems a reasonable suggestion. I don’t particularly like my private thoughts being listened to, I have never asked my voices to listen to me, so tell you what, if you really, really don’t like what I’m thinking, then, hey, here’s a suggestion… Don’t listen!

They don’t seem to like this idea. Despite the last thought argument was after my pondering on choice or the illusion of it, they seemed unable to acitivate their own ability to choose, and choose not to listen.

I keep coming across the argument, often directed against the post-isms (post-structuralism, postmodernism, post colonialism etc) but ultimately to be found universally, although of course not a universal argument. The argument usually seems to amount to: ‘I do not understand it therefore it is wrong/ stupid’.

Some examples can be found in the comments after this article by Stanley Fish: French Theory In America

I have always found this, if I may be frank, to be a particularly stupid argument itself. That it is it implies the arguers own stupidity. A question; if you do not understand it how do you know it is wrong? Surely to be able to confidently declare something wrong you have to first understand it? Thus the statement seems to imply the following: ‘I do not understand it therefore I am stupid.’ However seeing as few people like to admit to being stupid (unless perhaps they are trying to be ironic by attempting a mocking self-deprecating humility) the result is often a projection onto the Other as cause, in this case the particular post-ism or similar theory they have failed to grasp, hence the slightly more aware use of ‘therefore it is stupid’ as opposed to wrong. And although this brings to bear the spectre of non-sense, one assumes that there must be some understanding of its linguistic structure to declare it as making no sense. Thus ‘this theory is nonsense’ is not a stupid argument, however it does assume one can explain why it is nonsense, which the arguer has already informed us he/she is unable to do having claimed that he/ she does not understand it.