Sometimes I wonder if there is a kind of subject position that emanates out of living with mental illness, but I don't know exactly how to describe this, since there is always the danger of using some kind of umbrella-concept to cover whole swaths of experience that don't belong under the shadow of that umbrella; and usually when you cover such swaths with too-broad strokes, you kind of neuter whatever it is that you are talking about. That said, I do feel like there is something about living with mental illness that can be described, and I want to try and describe aspects of it here.
I should say off the bat that my thinking about a kind of subject position in relationship to mental illness started to form when I was reading philosophy - specifically works by Wittgenstein, his Philosophical Investigations, as well as two books that I am still working through, Sartre's Being and Nothingness, and Heidegger's Being and Time. What I've gleaned from reading these books, other than that philosophy can be very hard, but also very satisfying, is that mental illness - the living of it, or from it, or through it - seems to constantly serve as a kind of litmus test for the ideas I come across in the works of these great philosophers. It is a form of innate skepticism. What I mean is that mental illness - in my experience, delusions, hallucinations, alogia, mania, depression - is a kind of anomaly that changes the data, like a black swan that makes you rethink all the other swans you've seen, to invoke the metaphor from black swan theory.
What do I mean by "a kind of anomaly"? We start from a subject position. Everything, from the most mundane experiences, to the most transcendent - our perceptions, our stylistic stamp on the world, the innate and social learning and bearing that we bring to our stance in the world, or that our stance brings to our experience of the world - goes into our subject position, like an overly stuffed but well-functioning valise. We lean in the world, and behind our leanings, like the ground behind the figure, is a veritable constellation of presuppositions that we take for granted, but without which we'd have a very hard time forming anything like beliefs and values and things. What are these presuppositions, and what do they have to do with mental illness?
Let's take an example from Heidegger. Here he is, writing about Dasein and temporality:
But the primordial ontological basis for Dasein's existentiality is temporality. In terms of temporality, the articulated structural totality of Dasein's Being as care first becomes existentially intelligible. The Interpretation of the meaning of Dasein's Being cannot stop with this demonstration. The existential-temporal analysis of this entity needs to be confirmed concretely. We must go back and lay bare in their temporal meaning the ontological structures of Dasein which we have previously obtained. Everydayness reveals itself as a mode of temporality. But by thus recapitulating our preparatory fundamental analysis of Dasein, we will at the same time make the phenomenon of temporality itself more transparent. In terms of temporality, it then becomes intelligible why Dasein is, and can be, historical in the basis of its Being, and why, as historical, it can develop historiology. (Being and TIme, 277-278)
We are made out of time, we are historical through and through, and a major mode of our temporality is everydayness. But what if we start thinking about mental illness? It seems to immediately serve as an anomaly, and to drive a kind of "But yet" wedge into the argument being asserted. For mental illness creates different modes of temporality and everydayness; or, to put it a different way, mental illness erodes our modes of temporality and everydayness, like setting on fire enormously important pieces of paper. But how do we talk about that? What types of contexts should we evoke, or paint, or describe to get at the experience of mental illness within the temporal, the everyday; and do these accounts differ significantly from Heidegger's, for example?
There are two accounts of reality that comes to mind, that we might invoke to make our description here thicker. One is an account of reality - or, better yet, the absence of an account of reality, the refusal to say anything about reality whatsoever in a cataphatic way - by Richard Rorty. The second is Charles Taylor's, and his discussion of reality in his recent book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. Here is Rorty speaking about the absence of any intrinsic nature of reality, here under the guise of "essence":
The utility of the "existentialist" view is that, by proclaiming that we have no essence, it permits us to see the description of ourselves we find in one or (or in the unity of) the Naturwissenschaften as on a par with the various alternative descriptions offered by poets, novelists, depth psychologists, sculptors, anthropologists, and mystics. The former are not privileged representations in virtue of the fact that (at the moment) there is more consensus in the sciences than in the arts. They are simiply among the repertoire of self-descriptions at our disposal. (93, The Rorty Reader)
But if there is no privileged representation - Rorty writes in the same chapter, "Only if we assume that there is a value-free vocabulary which renders these sets of 'factual' statements commensurable can the positivist distinction between facts and values, beliefs and attitudes, look plausible" (93) - or, in Rortian terms, if there are no neutral starting points for thought, then how exactly do we understand the difference between sanity and insanity, or madness and reason? In other words, when I was illl, I was "out of touch with reality." When I became less ill, I was back in tune with reality. But what is this "reality" that we are describing, if it does not have a privileged representation or an intrinsic nature? What was reinstated when I became better? A form of sociality? But that's it?
I suppose what was reinstated was my ability to see more clearly, without being clouded by hallucinations and delusions. But isn't that a circlar answer? And to say I was seeing "more clearly," doesn't this suggest a convergence theory of truth? If someone is struggling to know what is real, and when they are better and more healthy they are told that there is no privileged representation of the real, or more radically that the real itself is up for grabs and is more poetic than objective, what are the implications of this for the subject position that has experienced mental illness? Are there implications?
What is (gulp) reality? Taylor talks about it quite differently. "The human being is a rational animal," he writes - "this involves a mind which can map reality, but much else besides." (169) But if human beings can map reality (is he referring to GPS's?), and, according to Rorty, there is no intrinsic nature of reality, then what exactly can human beings map? Is reality the physical world? If so, wouldn't Rorty argue that we are privleging a certain representation? Earlier Taylor writes, "So art reveals something in the world, and at the same time connects us to this something, which is intensely meaningful for us, "a joy forever" (Endymion)." (147) But what is this "something"? Isn't Taylor imagining a something, ascribing a reality to it, then celebrating it as something real, when it is actually imagined? How much of our world came to be through the imagination?
I'm not sure there are easy answers to these questions, but I think doubt is one enormous legacy of living with a mental iillness - doubt, or skepticism, or questioning. How so? Rather like Rorty's refusal to land on one representation, the experience of living with mental illness means we are often pivoting to describe what we see from the perspective of our lived experience, where certain presuppositions that others take for granted, like sanity and reason, are not things that we take so much for granted. This pivot, this dance, this stepping back, seems to make people with lived experience of mental illness into natural anthropologists who intuitively adopt the insider/outsider perspective because of the nature of their experience. There is something about the participant/observer status that is wired into living with mental illness, because we are constantly needed to refer back to our experience when thinking about something that often comes from the perspective of someone without experience of mental illness. I don't know if this makes us special - we all do this in some sense, because our experience is idiosyncratic, and therefore we all test what we see and hear against the judicative and evaluative voice of our conscience and experience - but I think mental illness provides an extreme case of such participation and observation.
If skepticism is one legacy of living with a mental illness, what is another? I think, for me at least, that an appreciation of the everyday, its ritualistic nature, in the sense of experience described by Dewey as something with a meaningful beginning, middle, and end. For there is not enough written about meaning in the context of mental illness. When I was psychotic, I was experiencing what Clara Humpston calls "ontologically impossilbe experiences." I thought that I was telepathic; I thought a shaman was viewing the world through my eyes; I thought I was in touch with a thought-world beyond time and space that emanated everything that happens in our universe; I thought I had to protect the inner child of the shaman, whose voice I heard, etc. These experiences are ontologically impossible, and yet I paradoxically and viscerally experienced them. Now that I have returned to myself, I do not take lightly making coffee in the morning, or sitting down to have breakfast, or driving to work, or having the weekend to write and read and catch up with friends. When I was psychotic, the meaning of the everyday radically changed; the logic of calendars broke into two; the sense of the seasonal change, the day into the next day, the give-and-take of relationships that makes our lives both hum and stall, all of this shattered. The meaning that I made - with the shaman, with telepathy, with delusions of reference that I ascribed reality to - was itself ritualistic, some kind of atonal composition based on the more customary scales - but it was not shared. It was like a bunker I made within the everyday, where I hunkered down and marvelled at the creations of my own mind, thinking these creations were real. I suppose we could read the Allegory of the Cave in the context of madness, and say that the light is the social, shared world?
Aside from skepticism and an appreciation of the everyday, another aspect of the subject position I think for those living with mental illness is a preoccupation with finding the language to describe one's experience, because that experience, like experiences of mysticism, seems to belong to an area of conceptual, emotional, and imaginative space that is hard to describe. To discuss this, I want to share a cartoon I drew when I was psychotic. The cartoon is about making the world asemic, which meant for me then, I think, an attempt at conveying the loss of meaning I was experiencing, and my need then to share this loss of meaning with other people. Let's look at the cartoon, and then we'll talk briefly about it.
I didn't know this then, but I think when I was describing an "unintelligible intelligibility," I was getting at the paradox of Humpston's "ontologically impossible experiences." To make the visual world asemic was to describe how I was seeing the world, everyday. Like the flower that seemed to speak a language behind language, I was trying to describe how the world had lost meaning, as though it had lost color; but in losing color, it also assumed a new and different color, since I was still alive and experiencing color through the lens of mania and delusion. When I read about the city of colorful lights in the cartoon, I was trying to find a metaphor for what the experience of mania and delusion felt like. And when I ended with the notion of the world as a whistling, I think I was trying in some sense to convey how my world had been reduced to a kind of imaginative poverty, and that everything had both lost meaning and gained a different meaning. I think Wouter Kusters, in his A Philosophy of Madness, is right to find parallels between mysticism and madness. Madness is a vast projection onto the world; and I believe, contra Taylor, but with Rorty, that there is no intrinsic nature of the world, and therefore that mysticism too is a form of projection, rather than something that "gets us more in touch with the world," the "something" that Taylor alludes to. Perhaps, with my metaphor of the world as a whistling, I was attempting to say something like that as well.
Comments