'I have heard voices say:
"He is conscious of his life".'
Exemplary schizophrenic patient quoted in Price's Text Book of the Practice of Medicine - 9th edition

The prevalent romanticization of madness has no future.
The politicization of madness is indispensable if we would create a future.¹
DC

The madness about which I'm writing is the madness that is more or less present in each one of us and not only the madness that gets the psychiatric baptism by diagnosis of 'schizophrenia' or some other label invented by the specialized psycho-police agents of final phase capitalist society. So when I use the word 'madman' here I'm not referring to a special race of people, but the madman in me is addressing the madman in you in the hope that the former madman speaks clearly or loudly enough for the latter to hear.

The 'language of madness' means the way that this universal madness is expressed not only in uttered, audible words, but in a type of action, running across experience, that is 'mad dis-course'.

One would erect a mockery if one were to attempt to write systematically about a discourse that dismantles systematic thought. Perhaps however one can show the truth-force and finally the periodic necessity of this dismantling by alternating apparent rigour of expression with significant moments of its ridiculization.

We exist within the context of a language that is our own invention but which controls us in so far as we have lost sight of its origins in our day-to-day practice, and that of our forebears, extending back in history over some 6,000 years or so ... a very small bite out of time's apple, but that is the sort of time it has taken for our language progressively to control us.

This 'language', which means all that is in common, and present communicatively, as regards structure and the ways of forming new structures, includes all the actual languages that we speak like Icelandic, French, English, Japanese. But it also includes large elements of sound, the ways we look at each other, ways of moving, guessing in our actions, that introduce an uncertainty, a necessary uncertainty, about exactly how and how exactly we are expressing ourselves and what this expression, whatever it is, means for the person who we suppose receives it or who supposes that they receive it. We act as if we understand much of the other person's communication as if it made sense whereas for us it doesn't at all - that is to say we make our own sense out of the communicated non-sense (to us) of the other.²

Perhaps 'exactitude' is the problem. One considers certain structures that imply definable laws of logical ordering (laws perhaps not clearly formalized that are special to these types of structures as well as more general laws) in a sequence in which the laws in turn imply the structure themselves. This closed system as a basis for analysis defeats itself when it denies the variability of history (recorded willed human change), which makes any sort of exactness impossible, not even desirable.

We live not on the certainty of structures but 'on their precise immeasurability'.
Too much security makes one feel unsafe. If it doesn't perhaps it should.

The logic of a full sexuality, for example, does not follow any translation of Aristotelian-like rules such as 'you can't be in one state and the opposite state at the same time'. Nor does this curious logic exist as the opposite - that you can be both things in one and the same moment - that you can have your cake and eat it.

The anti-logic is to take one's cake and eat it because that is the only way of ever having it and of being the 'having of it' (as well as having the eating of it). And that, precisely, is where mad discourse comes in. The language of madness is the perpetual slipping over of words into acts until the moment is achieved where the word is pure act. Psychoanalytic discourse reduces the normal verbal state of expression with all its deformities (including academic discourse in all the scientific disciplines that begin to become truly speculative, wondering about and doubting themselves) to the expression of earlier states of expressive being. Mad discourse skirts around, reaches above all this to regions where it finds nothing - but an important and specific nothing that is creative precisely in the measure that it is not destroyed by the normalizing techniques of the society.³

Many psychoanalysts, having already heard the last post being intoned, have heroically given up Freud's mechanistic-biologistic reductions in favour of something more like a dialectic of personal transformation. But there is ever the numinous 'It' that speaks (Ça qui parle). 'It' is the mysterious region that only psychoanalysts have access to, at least as regards comprehension, when (which is most of the time) they want no relation with the other person, the analysand. 'It' is what you want when you don't know what you want (or 'it slipped my mind', 'it went over my head', 'I'd never have thought of that ('it')'). The psychoanalyst, initiated into the symbolic order where the great Phallus is the supreme signifier (of all the concrete things in the experience of the analysand), is engaged in a quasi-dialogue with the 'It' - a dialogue that in principle passes over the other person's head.

The madman will have none of this!

As for the Phallus he reaches over the 'It' and seizes it (the Phallus!), makes it - and It - his own.

He reduces the Symbolic Order to ruins by making the Phallus and any other signifier either touchable or nothing! He refuses to have his existence reduced to nice proper grammar and has no use for the psychoanalyst three yards away, staring into another space, listening only to 'It' and not to things said about real collective social experience. For the madman it is of no interest that the 'unconscious is structured like a language' -- it is language that must be structured like the 'unconscious' (in the sense that I shall try to define later in Chapter 4)!

But then we know how wicked and dangerous it is to exceed the contractual limits of the psychoanalytic situation: the limits of time, money, non-presence, built-in submission and obedience, the implicit goal of normalization and conformism (however much this may be denied theoretically), and above all the implicit family model. The subtle reinforcement of familial ways of experiencing is one of the worst psychoanalytic traps. An anti-psychoanalysis,⁴ which is a form of political education functioning without any of the microsocial context of psychoanalysis, is concerned with the defamilialization of discourse moving out of the family model of experience (the model implicit in the notion of transference) towards the political analysis of actual current relationships (as well as dreams and waking reveries), seen in their macro-context, the family being merely one mediator of macro-political repression.

Madness (contrary to most interpretations of 'schizophrenia') is a movement out of familialism (including family-modelled institutions) towards autonomy. This is the real 'danger' of madness and the reason for its violent repression. Society should be one big happy family with hordes of obedient children. One must be mad not to want such an enviable state of affairs. And one is punished for madness (the teutonic origin of 'mad' is 'maimed').⁵ If you go mad, by normal social definition, in psychoanalysis your likely fate is the usual psychiatric incarceration with all the violent trimmings - at least until your language - words and acts - becomes normally 'grammatical' - and normally banal once again.

Mad discourse, as opening to the world, moves in the opposite direction to psychoanalytical discourse. I shall return to the theme that all delusion is political statement (and that all madmen are political dissidents) later but would here simply add some pertinent observations on psychoanalysis more generally.

Psychoanalysis is revered, feared and criticized as a watertight system that cannot be refuted since any refutation can in turn be psychoanalytically demolished, or it is seen as a bag that you have to get into before you can get out of - but once you are in you are in for good.

In fact the position is quite different: psychoanalysis has the choice of being either a truth told in bad faith or a lie told in good faith. The option is not enviable. The usual oscillation is both endless and vertiginous. When it is 'done' by a philosophical dramaturgue like Jacques Lacan it may be treated with affection, fascination and poetical respect. Or not, of course. The option is open. When it is 'practised' by 'scientists' it must be treated with non-personal political contempt. The real problem about psychoanalysis is that so many people behave as if it were true.

*

If people behave as if psychoanalysis were true perhaps they should get into it if only to be sure that they can get out. Having some 'good experiences' in psychoanalysis I am certainly not 'advising' anyone against it in any case it is an a priori impossibility that anyone can advise anyone else what to do with their lives, lives not being like broken-down motor cars.

My criticisms of psychoanalysis are:

1. In terms of the mystification of its reductionist theory (see Chapter 4, 'Links', first section);

2. In terms of the micro-politics of the analytical situation - the money, time, etc. contract involves an acceptance of capitalism as embodied in the analyst's situation of work and way of living. Is this the necessary acceptance of 'reality'? It is not a question of accepting capitalist reality but of becoming conscious of its oppression in the only way possible: in the work of changing it.

3. In terms of its familialist ideology: no one is 'against the family', but one is against the reduction of real problems of life and work to the personal problematics of oneself and family, or family-like others. Psychoanalysis, in so far as it produces a familyprotective system of production of non-orgasmic imbecilization of people, becomes a para-fascist reinforcing ideological device. It is all the more able to recuperate young 'intellectuals of the left' by its sensitive gliding away of meanings (glissements), especially in the latest authorized Lacanian version. Start in a clear space of meeting; end where you find no one to be.

Lacan, that human expert in the domain of the nonhuman 'grammatical', has said enough good things to exculpate himself from the moralizing, normalizing discourse of talking in family terms. For example, in 'Propos sur la causalité psychique' (Paris, 1947), he talks of madness as, far from being an insult to liberty, following liberty like its shadow. And, then, being human means that we can't after all be human in the way that we talk amongst ourselves if we ignore madness as the limit of our freedom.

In very practical terms it means 'how do we live still and have children without re-inventing the bourgeois nuclear family, the foundation of the Oedipus?' That means that the couple are prepared to lose themselves in themselves in a mutual symbiotic zoophilia, being animal enough to put their human aspect aside. Children find their right to form their own relationships outside the schematization of the biological parental couple. In even more practical terms it means that we make our revolution in solidarity finding the sense of our crazy discourse in this common action.

4. In terms of its increasing macro-political functioning in repressive institutions, e.g. special schools, law courts (see the trial of Pelosi for the murder of Pasolini, Rome 1976), psychiatric 'therapeutic communities' and in community therapy (see Robert Castel, Le Psychanalysme, Paris, 1973).

5. The psychoanalyst cannot function, even survive, without his contract of non-meeting and his heavily defensive theory that, with a certain seductive internal coherence, depends on a false and falsifying version of childhood experience and a pseudo-knowledge about human beings. With the strategy of the contract and the securing theoretical defences his practice induces an ultra-repressive normalization. There are also the 'failed lunatics' (the 'successful' ones are almost entirely destroyed) who have a need to speak about themselves since their failure is exactly that they can't do themselves (and, therefore, can't do 'it' themselves). This is the 'psychoanalysable' area of the 'neurotic'. A young psychiatrist whom I met recently said that if he stopped talking he would die. So he went on talking through the night and when the rest of us woke up the next morning lie was still talking. So I suggested that he went to see a good friend who, without irony, happened to be a psychoanalyst. After a few months he talks a little less. When he does perhaps he begins to listen to himself. Then, hopefully, he would talk even less. If 'good things' sometimes happen in psychoanalysis they are not related to the technique and training of the analyst but rather to the human quality (a political state of affairs) of both the people involved.

Recognizing that most of us have very few things to say about ourselves in the course of our lives (perhaps four or five things, or two or one things), we had better, perhaps, invent some sort of summary about where we are 'at'. Our educational and familial conditioning might make it necessary that we make an immense intellectual detour (e.g. Sartre's Critique o f Dialectical Reason and so many other peoples' prior and subsequent philosophical voyages) to arrive at a single almost simple point of departure which is also a disembarkation. This is valuable and necessary for many of us but the madman will have none of it. He stays where he is as a manner of moving. What heresy! There are so many people who talk about their need to make 'a voyage' through madness to 'liberate' themselves, discover 'who' they are, to find a place of 'rebirth', and so on. It is time to say bon voyage to the 'bon voyage'.

This spectacularly banal though fashionable project eludes the madman, who lacks or who, rather, has given up not only literary but even grammatical expertise and never speaks of 'voyages' because he doesn't have the normal 'cash' (= techniques of non-being) to make the down payment but really because he doesn't experience the need to pay anyone precisely for precisely nothing.

Such are the metaphors of capitalism. Metaphor means the change or carrying over of meaning from one situation in which things seem to be literally what they seem to seem ('be'), to another in which one term is changed to make the discourse less literal but more exact - in the sense of a poetry of madness (or madness of poetry).

But then what is it in the language of madness that makes it different from the discourse of poetry? And what curious sense, perhaps revolutionary sense, can we find in this absurdity?

We find that metaphor,⁶ metonymy,⁷ synecdoche,⁸ the figures (faces) of speech are in fact a radical denormalization of language, or 'demystification' of the normal language. Speech is 'defaced' but in a particular way. In poetry there is a multiplicity of specificities - the poetic discipline defines itself specifically by the breaking in a specific way of certain specific rules that would normalize language - rules that would make language either instrumental or diversionary and enslaving rather than simply relevant to autonomous human needs.⁹

The poet none the less retains a self-preservative contact with the world of the normal ones, the madman does not because although like the poet the ancient origins of his thought come from a prehuman history he has been deprived of present strategies. We are somehow back in the age of the great apes reborn with less auto-genocidal impulsion than we have. An ideal of recuperation of anthropoid and pre-anthropoid ways of living is not like the Rousseau idea of the 'noble savage' - it's just about the opposite. We go back all the time not to be back but to recuperate our evolutionary origins and then to throw them into the face of a future - that no one occupies - that no one has - because it is that sort of empty future that terrorizes us in each moment of our approach to it. Because we have no clear sense of class, because we lack all conscious definition of the ways we are oppressed in the present. And precisely because of our total lack of the consciousnesses we don't know how, amongst many other things, to produce a society of minimal technology which means a society of minimal pollution (in every sense) and of maximal free time.

The madman, like the poet, would refuse Wittgenstein's proposition that 'that of which one cannot speak one should be silent'. It is precisely the unsayable and unspeakable that must be expressed in mad and poetic discourse. All this comes down to the choice that one listens by habit to the banalizing chatter of everyday normality (which includes most printed words), or that one hears certain occasional big words uttered in obscurity or even fewer certain small words uttered in the light or in the darkness of delight - words that thoroughly break through normal discourse.

In the tension between the compulsion to fix things - human and non-human - in concepts and the need to free things in images, the need has been terrorized by the compulsion to the point where we are left with nothing but a sterile security - that should in fact be the ultimate terror.

Our madness is with us all the time, though the madness of the totally normal ones has committed suicide to leave a statistical cipher. Sometimes our madness becomes visible to us for a short time, perhaps discretely and in solitude, and we transform ourselves. Sometimes it becomes socially visible and then it runs the risk of being murdered. We each have our own way of living our own madness, there are no preformed paths. We each assume our own responsibility to blaze our own trail - and what a responsibility it is to see that no one takes our responsibility from us.

*

When I was mad briefly, but for enough weeks to begin to know a little, in Argentina five years ago in a place on the Atlantic coast south of Buenos Aires, I found it possible to experience in total solitude a 'philosophical problem' in all the concreteness of embodiment. Stopping all drugs like normal eating habits, normal ways of being with other people, tobacco, alcohol, I lived materially on water and nourishment that flowed and roots and rhizomes from the ground. Rushing naked as always into the sea I nearly got drowned by the famous undertow of that bit of the coast, in the heart of a tempest that transformed miraculously the sand dunes into amiable and terrifying other humps, dinosauric monsters that put the inorganic finally on the march. Stopping normal habits, however, was entirely secondary to the fact that it was the right moment in my life to destructure and then painfully to restructure an altered existence.

I began to experience the world across a whole range of transformations. First, words lost all abstract structure and became physical objects flattened, spread out, angular or conic, founding a mathematical beyond in all that 'should be' articulated, piecing together, possible. The language stretched and new words ('neologisms') were planted in my mind by alien good or evil powers. In this autonomous cosmos there emerged the 'omnipotent delusion' of being extra-terrestrial and that there were among us other extra-terrestrial beings, allocated a function for good or for evil in their being in the world but appointed from another region, widely remote, in the cosmos that is not 'our' astronomic cosmos.

There were experiences of howling, hurling myself around even with a faintly disguised joy to find a true solitary way of experiencing one special death fully enough, in life, before the other human ones took even that away, like acting a word when the word conventionally should be said, for trying to make a circus in a 'space' where small dogs are not allowed. I underwent many metamorphoses of shame that finally proved irrelevant. What a job this disculpabilization is - getting rid of ancient and irrelevant guilt, seeing the final absurdity of all the aggression that exists on a personal, anti-political level.

After the descent from all that, I found all the cosmic extra-terrestrial things, transformed, here on earth in an animal banality, but I felt inscribed on my body the realization that there is no human subject (which is different from working this out theoretically); 'human nature' is fictive because, however hard we try we can never repeat ourselves - every return is to a new place. In our materiality and our animality we are unique enough; human enough, in our social reality, we risk becoming identical with our exchange value.¹⁰ No further tragedy is imaginable. The only thing to do with absurdity is to realize it because, grasping it, we are truly in motion. No further transformation ('therapy' as technique of changing consciousness and action) is necessary - or possible.

And, then, the question: how do we live our lives so that even if we could retrospectively eliminate any of the most anguished, painful experiences, we would choose not to? If we reach this position any future pain, without losing its character as pain, will become totally transformed in its value.

... to page 2