I once knew a young man called John, previously put in a psychiatric hospital in North America for mute defiance of his parents, shutting himself up in his room and barricading the door with a chair on which he had piled a huge family bible and a mass of religious pamphlets, reinforced by piles of popular newspapers full of heavy stories of scandals and sensational crimes. He was hospitalized the second time after a brief 'good response' to electroshock and chlorpromazine, because he proclaimed the fact that he was John the Baptist (his name was John and his family were literally Baptists) and that it was his duty to baptize the world to make a new race of people.

In his 'thought-disorder', a technical psychiatric term for a flow of speech with nonsensical associations (non-sensical for the normal psychiatrist and his fellow 'non-believers'), John said: 'The world's full of shit, people-shit shitting people, I'm going to pee in the only place where no shit is. It's like being alone in the desert for a long time. The gospel was written with shit on shit-house paper. The world is ready with its arse blocked. You talk about democracy here - it's not here; it's locked up with me in my room - the room where I am. I'm not here, you think you are. You're at home and I'm at home too. We're in the same home - it's my room here. Mum and dad knock at the door. You know what knocking means. Then they all knock at the door all the time for all the time all who knock knock and knock and knock at the doors and all the doors of all time for all time every time, knocking they knock and make time, making time is shitting like knocking. I know the cure for constipation, that is my great discovery, it's not knocking, no more knocking no time for all time which is now that time which is now forever.'

'The next time someone knocks on the door I'll throw them down the stairs.'

John broke out of his ward when the door was locked. Being big and strong he simply broke the door down and escaped to return to his home quarter some eight miles away. He did not return to his parents' house, but broke into a meeting of Jewish church elders which he called the Sanhedrin and spoke at length about how he, he alone, was going to introduce new people into the world and that they must not stop him any longer. Of course no one could listen to this nonsense when there were serious and respectable things to discuss, and the police were inevitably called and he was duly returned to his psychiatric home.

It was nearly a year later that I learned that, after a reversal of the 'libertarian' policy of the hospital, John had died in a closed (locked and closely supervised) ward. He was not a popular figure since he was identified with the dangers of permissiveness (e.g. with the nurses who did not notify the police after his 'violent escape' even though he was not legally detained). I learned indirectly that his body when found in the 'seclusion room' was covered in bruises and that the hospital pathologist diagnosed death due to heart failure following a coronary thrombosis. A medical rarity in a healthy young man of twenty-seven years.

It would be ridiculous to consider all this in terms of symbolic re-enactment of St John the Baptist, who, after years in the desert, started dipping people in water to bring about internal conversion (metanoia): if you wash the outside of people the inside changes because the difference of 'inside' and 'outside' is illusory (interpreted in Christian mythology as a preparation of people for the coming of the Messiah). Or that his psychiatric murder was in response to the demand of Salome, on her mother's instructions, that in reward for her famous dance for her uncle Herod Antipas, John's head be presented on a silver platter. John would have nothing to do with this sort of accounting for his reality, any more than he would have with any psychoanalytic reduction (in terms of the link between anality and aggression or whatever in his spoken language and non-verbal acts). He was concerned only with the political issue, in total despair and in total joy, of taking the shit out of people, making people real with words and acts and words that were acts and acts that were words. How many western political dissidents find themselves in the same situation of being murdered - suicided by the society because of their original aim of realizing language - of introducing the necessary, vivifying political insertion of unreason, which has its own rationality, into the coherent, instrumental and manipulative discourse of the normal ones.

What an outrage it is, such an incestuous union of language and action. What a just fate for a political poet who refuses domestication. What a threat it is finally to make language real.

The language of madness is nothing more nor less than the realization of language. Our words begin to touch the other and that's where the danger of madness lies: when it tells its truth. One danger, the only danger of madness, is violent denormalization of trivial words and worlds of security.

In Price's Text Book of the Practice of Medicine, 9th edition, the following example of thought-disorder is given:

'If I should return during my absence, keep me here until I come back.' 'I have a lot of forced thoughts. My thoughts are all drawn out words, they ought to be pin-pricks. There is an unnatural stoppage in my thoughts, too…I have heard voices say, "he is conscious of his life" . . . To get my feeling back to normal I feel like changing motor cars into battleships, to be superior to them.'

Well! One can imagine the psychiatrist seriously writing down the 'evidence' of madness. What more beautifully precise statement of actual non-meeting could there be than the madman's first sentence. And of course he 'heard voices saying' that he was 'conscious of his life' (that's really why he was put away in the first place - becoming conscious of his life he was aware that others were aware of this subversive fact). Whatever neurological correlates may be found, or not found, for the state of 'hearing voices', the language of 'hearing' means that one becomes aware of something that exceeds the consciousness of normal discourse and which therefore must be experienced as 'other'. And how could one find a better metaphor for normalization than the last sentence. Moving from one situation of grotesque, anguished non-comprehension (home) to another (the hospital). What other language is relevant? What else can one say?

It is, as in the 'problem area' of 'not speaking' (autism and autistic withdrawal) a question of 'what 'is there to say?' (in a context of unvarying non-comprehension and interference). Fernand Deligny, who works with autistic children in the Cevennes in France (without any clinical, psychiatric context - he is not a doctor and was originally a school-teacher), has asked, why, instead of trying to get them to speak, do we not learn silence from them?

*

Having considered the threat posed by the language of madness to normal structures of security, there is another sort of security that emerges through the destructuring-restructuring movement of madness. This has nothing to do with the primary security of the mother-child relationship that some psychoanalysts like to talk about, or 'ontological' security as some primary state of existence that becomes lessened or lost in the 'schizoid'.

In general in psychoanalysis there is the view that security is developed in and through the earliest relations in the family, especially with the mother. The infant originally is in bits and pieces and good early experiences unite the bits and pieces. On the contrary, from the fertilized egg onwards there is a'more or less' original organismic unity that gets dismembered not only through the early child-parent experiences and intra-uterine experiences but through all the things before conception (parents' courtship, their own origins, ancestry, history, pre-history, evolutionary origins and beyond) that are mediated to the embryo through male and female gametes and the mother's body. We can consider these things through correlative systems of knowledge like genetics, biochemistry, embryology, but we can also consider them and express them through all art forms, poetry and the language/acts of madness. The 'correlative' systems of scientific knowledge (though they may correlate between themselves) are understood here as objectifying-objectified systems correlative to the organism-consciousness - an original unity that may be split into objectified organism and objectifying consciousness but which remains a unity in all forms of poietic activity (the discourse of poetry, other art forms and of madness). The dismembering of the original unity is one expression of alienation.

This dismemberment instead of being actively 'remembered' is simply patched together into a conglomerate, the pseudo-totality of normality with its family-conditioned security. Too much of this patchworked security, as I've suggested, should make us feel really insecure.

An excess of security should make us begin to feel unsafe.

Feeling an excess of awesome doubt about every aspect of our reality should make us begin to be real.

But there is another sort of security which is not trivializing. It is however very hard-won and is based on a promise that one makes 'to return'. It is not a matter of consciously promising or of knowing what the promise is about but rather an awareness that one is not directing one's life (or having one's life directed) into crisis, but that one is directing one's life through radical change towards a less alienated way of being. The political signification of madness becomes clearer if social alienation is grasped as being most evidently an issue of the class-division of society between exploiters and exploited, with more and more people being caught up in systems of mystification between the two poles - and also recognizing without wasting 'sympathy' that the exploiters are exploited by their own system, though the exploited are always simply exploited.

Madness is permanent revolution in the life of a person. Sometimes this revolutionary process becomes evident as a major change in the way that we live, a change in the direction of greater autonomy that may be accomplished without the intervention of other people, but sometimes it becomes socially visible as a crisis in which other people intervene. If the intervention falls into the fatal closed circuit of family and psychiatry, or friends who behave in familial ways replicating one's own and their bits of experience of mother, father, children and amateur psychiatrist (who can be even worse than the real one), one can get stuck in a lifelong crisis that is certainly not revolutionary for anyone.

Having introduced the term 'crisis' I had better say something about crises that have nothing to do with madness or with mad discourse - before defining the present sense of madness. One encounters crises amongst friends and friends of friends almost every day - or at least I do, despite having stopped doing any form of psychiatry or therapy. The remarkable thing about these crises is that they always seem to be happening more clearly in the people, family and good familial friends, who surround the person 'in crisis' - who often just wants to be left alone but left alone in the right way. One right way is not rejection but simply defining the limits of the situation and one's own needs. Most victims of crises of supposed madness, suicide and so on are made victims by those who compulsively have to help, when it's really a matter of the friends helping themselves to participate safely and victoriously (for them) in a process of psychiatrization or suicide attempt. Many such victims would prefer a week or two or three with other victims and down-to-earth nurses in an ordinary bin in the country - were it not for the stigmatization, the institutionalizing process, and the interference of doctors who have to justify their existence by the medical game of diagnosis, shocks and chemical 'euthanasia'.

Most of these everyday crises are family crises; even if the person is living away from their family, the family can act at 'long-distance' and there are always only too familial friends. Most crises would get the label of 'neurosis' - which simply means that the person behaves in certain deviant ways that are psychiatrically classifiable but accepts the social definition of normality (i.e. she/he has 'insight') and the discourse of normality (i.e. talking in such a way that one bores other equally boring people in an unhappy family-like situation). The essential contradiction of the 'neurotic' situation is that one protests against the social shit that one is immersed in with the only tools that are apparently too hard, i.e. 'symptoms', but at the same time collusively reinforces a familial, 'oedipian' way of being in the doctor-patient - and thus one obligingly sabotages oneself.

Other crises would be labelled 'psychopathic' or 'personality disorder'; here the emphasis is more on overt protest but the protest is easily recuperated by a familialist ideology (acting out against authority, 'figures') because it is politically illiterate and needs (like every other micro-social crisis) political education - not principally of the victim but of the whole microsocial situation around him. Yet other crises are called 'manic-depressive psychosis', where there is a split in the unity of madness that I shall describe later; the important thing however is that the person should explore the depression as far as they can without the accompaniment of people who are afraid of suicide (in any case it is when people are starting to be or stopping being elated that they kill themselves). The 'mania' is the expression of a protest against the capitalist ethos - spending money rather than making it, starting wonderfully good enterprises rather than the normal ones that, as simple legal robbery, accumulate capital. Someone in such a crisis of impracticability has every right to use an ordinary doctor, in collaboration - not as the object of the exercise of medical power to help him modify the biochemical correlates (when we know enough about these) of his state of existence to suit him. He does not need a psychiatrist to defend his property and his life - the 'price he would pay' in autonomy (because this is all in the capitalist metaphor) would be too high for him to afford.

Then of course there is the typical 'schizophrenic' crisis. So-called 'schizogenic' things happen in families, involving double-binds and other mystifying things, that produce a state of 'madness' in one of the family members which gets labelled as schizophrenic. In fact this situation of mystification does not 'produce madness' and is gravely in need of demystification itself. What it produces are the conditions for invalidation as schizophrenic, usually for relatively trivial signs of deviance. A few people so invalidated may enter into a madness, like John the Baptist on his second admission to hospital, but most do not and are simply invalidated and proposed as madmen to be contained preferably by long-acting drugs in the family asylum outside hospital ('community psychiatry', the 'psychiatry of the sector' in Europe).

In fact in the asylum there is a remarkable dearth of madmen. The mystifying strategy is to hospitalize masses of people with organic brain disease (where occasionally there is a danger of physical violence), senile, head-injury victims, mentally subnormal, etc. to produce a false image of madness. But even with these medical problems the political action of their social recuperation is paramount.

It is not madmen who murder but the normal ones¹¹ especially the cases of hypertrophied normality and certain neurotic caricatures of normality. Murder is an act of compliance with a murderous system and has its base in familial obedience. The only question is 'how do we produce disciplined disobedience?' Control on the one hand is compulsive, sets 'moralistic' limits and more or less subtly destroys life in so far as it limits it. Control says 'No'. Discipline frees us in so far as it is that which guides us through the most total and totally necessary disordering of our alienated existences. Discipline is the right way to say 'No' to the 'no' of control. It is also the promise to restructure the destructured.

Madness is the destructuring of the alienated structures of an existence and the restructuring of a less alienated way of being. The less alienated way of being is a more responsible way of being. Responsibility means answering with one's own voice, not with all the voices and their messages that have been planted in one's mind throughout one's history (the 'schizophrenic symptom' of alien ideas being planted in one's mind is a true realization of this alienation). Alienation is the invasion of what we regard as 'our' 'selves' by deformed human otherness - the otherness consisting in the whole mass of human relations from the micro-social 'personal' experiences in relationships to the institutional and the macro-social. The deformation arises because human social existence is perpetually perplexed and shattered by the relation exploiter/exploited with the whole zone of mystification that comes in between the poles. The destructuring I'm talking about involves the elimination of these traces of otherness which, if thoroughgoing enough, passes a zero-point, a point of emptied out existence, the nullifying of mind that marks the beginning of the next phase; of restructuring.

Destructuring/restructuring follows a dialectical rationality, a rationality of depassment.¹² This is the logic of every form of creative activity; it is also the logic of madness and the language of madness. There is another logic, antagonistic to the logic of destructuring/restructuring, which in this age we may call capitalistic logic - a logic of destruction: a state of affairs exists or it is simply negated. In destructuring as in destruction there is negation (of alienated experience in the former case), but inherent in destructuring there is the negation of this negation, the actualization of the 'promise' that leads to restructuring.

In the destructuring moment of madness there is a paradoxical union of ecstatic joy and total despair and it is on the basis of this experiential union that the words and acts of mad discourse arise. Language is denormalized to express urgent truths that are normally unsayable and, to the normal people, unspeakable. Without interference a transformed discourse and existence is produced; the problem is the mode of insertion of this transformed existence into an untransformed world because the restructuring is never towards normality but towards sanity. Sanity means the preservation of elements of the former normality, albeit transformed, that facilitate the elaboration of self-defensive strategies that keep at bay the craziness (noting the distinction between craziness and madness) of the normal world. But the problems of surviving as sane are immense.

What usually happens with socially visible madness is that there is psychiatric intervention, and the development of community psychiatry (of the sector) and the general increase of surveillance of the population makes this more and more likely. What psychiatric intervention achieves is a split in the paradoxical union of madness; first the joy is destroyed by treatment and then even the despair is annihilated, leaving the optimal 'good result' of psychiatry - no person. The non-person may function for the system either by becoming profitable, though working perhaps at a reduced level, or as part of the sub-population of 'mentally ill' either in a hospital or in the 'family asylum' maintained outside but in any case serving as 'negative reinforcement' of the definition of normality for the system and the interest in the unlimited control of the population.

The attainment of the paradoxical union of ecstatic joy and total despair in a synthetic moment of existence is the pre-condition for transformation. It is in contradiction with the norms of social 'reality' and this contradiction is an expression of the general contradictions of bourgeois society. Paradoxes are intrinsic to any form of creativity and are not supposed 'conflicts' to be 'resolved' but real situations in existence that have to be lived through. Mad/poetic¹³ discourse is the 'living through', in language, of paradox by paradox. The only other way is the way of submission - with a certain margin of viable pretence.

Of course there is suffering involved in psychiatrized madness but this suffering is entirely imposed by the intervention of techniques, family techniques, other microsocial techniques of evasion and elimination, and then the biggest, most technical and most medically respectable evasion and elimination of all - psychiatry and its adjunct professionalisms, psychologists, social workers, nurses, etc. (though there is a usable gap between the medical and the non-medical power). But there is a world of difference between this socially imposed suffering and a despair that one chooses, even joyfully, to live through. One knows, and they become more and more recognizable, people who have discretely, with total social invisibility, lived through this madness of the paradoxical extremities of joy and despair. They are not 'gurus', the gurus have a long way to go (out!), but they are people who are also the internally secreted person in each of us - our madman. Our madness inserts itself into our talk only in the rare moments when our talk matters as the being of change in the way that we actually live our lives out. The way that we make our being in the world here, by total fluke, its own justification.

What has to be done historically in our society is to take madness out of all clinical context, which has no function apart from repression and social control, and find its place in a world of universal creativity. This implies a political action. Mental illness and psychiatry can have no place in a genuine socialist society. More than a precise analogy there is a precise logic that unites the struggle of any one person against alienation, for the full expression of liberty and autonomy, with the struggle of any oppressed group, nation or class.

Pursuing the inevitably devious logic of this book we shall proceed to re-examine what it is that we really need, and what is the nature of collective experience, before considering what has been done and what is to be done.

But already, anticipating one of the last lines of these pages, one can say in its own language that the word madness has no future. Nor has madness.

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