The Brief Art of Living; A Polygraph

The Brief Art of Living A polygraph

David Jubb

Contents:

I) II) III) IV) V) VI) VII)

(p2) . . . COGNITIVE EVOLUTION (p3) . . . NOTES FOR ETERNAL RETURN (p4) . . . POETRY HANDBOOK (p12) . . . THE TECHNOLOGY OF MADNESS (A LUNATIC PROBLEMATIC) (p26) . . . THE HOUSE (p34) . . . MORTAL THOUGHTS (p38) . . . THE ORPHIC SELF

2003/9, all weathers...

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COGNITIVE EVOLUTION “In the struggle for understanding, we must make use of the following analogy: As we understand evolution to unfold itself, so we also should understand understanding itself to unfold. There is a qualitative correspondence between our understanding of evolution’s procession; as a proliferation of species, some having enough resemblance to one another to be grouped together, over a nonlinear time-scale (or rather, there is no value difference in evolving forms, as from a simple organism to a complex one there is an organizational difference); and the procession of understanding itself as it unfolds, both in a life and through life.

For different individuals, we read different thoughts. For different species, different complex ideas; our notional senses and the recognised components of personality.

We would understand complex metaphorical structures: the law, peace, war and perhaps once again understanding itself; as mirroring the hierarchy of evolution as a process and as an idea.

In such a way, understanding, that is: knowledge; can be understood as a procession of discrete entities which form more complex and ultimately metacomplex unities, themselves entities, which form superstructures of relatively simple abstract forms. The process of understanding reaches towards no one point, or summation of points, but to a deepening of our experience and, in due course, our understanding. As ideas lead into one another, affected by the cognitive environment, they mutate; they leave traces in the form of a conceptual genetic inheritance, which is then sometimes subtly sometimes overtly mutated by environmental – or in the case of understanding purely mental – pressures and necessities – or the influence of other ideas. Through this they illuminate the nature of what it is to be an idea. As understanding itself shows the sign of the self, so evolution, understood from our position as bearers of ideas, seems to show the signs of intentional development. Through understanding, we see this should not be so. Our understanding leads us to conclude understanding is merely a sign for itself.1 As our idea of understanding and our idea of evolution are cognate in this way, what does the future hold for understanding?

If understanding is ideated through cognition, what does this analogy illustrate about the nature of cognition? That it is transcendental? Or itself a construct of more complex thought entities, a simplified example of understanding as an act, the act of cognition.

- Understanding unites ideas in cognition, and in so doing creates the idea of the self. This is how we understand what it is to have a self.”

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A metaphor for being?

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Notes for Eternal Return Metamorphoses of the spider – the character of those around surrounding Zarathustra - the spirit of gravity – the others in the story he tells - space a temporal anomaly – time’s wound – as in dislocation – preferment – the narrative of time - the overwhelming narrative instinct that conditions time time not as a cycle or a spiral or a defined absolute – but a crystalline spider web along which we traverse – as a generative act of immense good will – as omega and alpha – as the resolution of a single ‘event’ – the anthropomorphic structure of time – its ‘passing’ – its ‘condition’ – its ‘state’ – who do we see in time – eternal admission and eternal submission – turbulent – dynamic – involved – time the father of the gods – dawn the secret key to eternity – twilight the lock – noon the event – crucifix – crossroads – all roads meet in the traveller – midnight the location of abyssal thought – founded on the realization that thought is impossible – time enters like a thief in the night – ‘return’ – why ‘return’? – all words to describe time reappear in descriptions of reality, of thought, of sense – time as a process of fusion – gravity draws its strength from Zarathustra’s struggle against it – active passive – passive aggressive – a coalition of forces – time’s demographic – those who succumb to time – time’s return as mask of becoming – the Apollonian acceptance of identity the focal address of times sublimination – Dionysus the intoxicated enwraps and digests the mask of Apollo – individuation drowns in an ocean of wine, the substance of thought is erased by identity’s sacrifice – time as a component of character – our age – the domesticity of time proof of our disregard and uncomprehending stance – if we wanted to identify the monad we could call it time - yet eternity returns – returning is a product of existence – a description of a procedure – eternity the prisoner of rapture – yet isn’t eternity unreal? – in the sense it has no reality other than from the perspective of a single moment – how could a quality be assigned to that which bestows quality – time as the paradigm of the senses – how could eternity, that to which we refer when we say eternity, time’s monolith, its trial – how could eternity return? – rather return is eternal – revolution is a constant struggle – time as the spiritualized state of being – a state of grace – all metaphors of forces and powers speak to us and not from us – in eternal return not one locus of time can be considered separate from or delivered from the whole – over an eternity all things must surely be possible including the possibility of time returning – the death of god – each thought is the same thought – if there is no god there is no judgement – yet this is the ultimate creative act – on a different register to a moral act – it seems in the face of nihilism that we could rampage through humanity – yet that is precisely what affirmation is not – in place of an imperative we have a call to arms – be real! – be yourselves! – eternal return denies us gratitude yet bequeaths us responsibility – for our act and its motive – whilst robbing us of salvation eternal return gifts us with realms of possibility – of necessity.

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POETRY HANDBOOK SOME USEFUL POETIC TERMS: Rhyme: the exact or semi-exact similarity of two or more word-sounds.

Meter: the rhythmical ‘beat’ of the line, or poem as a whole. This could be anything at all as long as it is regular. It depends on the number and stress of the syllables of the words used. In general, a strong rhythm means a strong line, a weak rhythm a weak one.

Line: a poem is divided into lines, each of which - in metered poetry - is a specific number of beats; or as close as it is possible to get to them.

Metaphor: a device used in language where one thing stands for another, usually a descriptive passage, symbol or image which though having no overt connection with the intended meaning refers through the artistry of the poet to another image, or symbol. Of course, an entire poem can be a metaphor.

Symbol: an image or artefact in a poem which stands for something other than itself. Chains of symbols give rise to metaphors, and can give sense and body to a poem.

Simile: similar to a metaphor, if simpler. A simile is a comparison - sometimes outright - of one thing to another, one image to another. It is used to give weight and power to descriptions, amongst other things.

Image: a descriptive element in a poem which refers to a scene, or picture, or anything the poet chooses.

SOME USEFUL POETIC TERMS - EXAMPLES Rhyme: Full rhyme - log, fog; sand, hand; bag, tag; generally it is the vowels that give rise to rhyme, as these are the elements of the language that are most sounded; the consonants being harder, percussive elements.

Half rhyme - seed, dream; road, sword; broad, toured; this is the un-exact similarity of word-sounds, the vowels again doing most of the work. More often the consonants are differing, giving rise to interest and suspense. Tension between rhyme and half rhyme is one of the most useful yet most difficult ‘tools’ the poet has.

Rhyme can be used in any situation, or in any part of the poem.

Meter: ‘The boy stood on the burning deck, busting for a slash...’

In this updated version of the first line of a classic poem, the bold elements are heavily stressed, the other’s lightly so. This difference gives rise to momentum, and makes the poem ‘move’. Meter is the term we use for this movement. Any combination of stresses can be used, depending on the poem - and the poet’s aim.

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Line: An example of the line is as follows Blue remembered hills, stretching to the sea; I drift on waves that coax and turn, Afloat inflatably.

In this example, we see that what could be written on as a long sentence is divided into lines, each one having its own breath, or sense, and rhythmic purpose. The end of the line is a place we naturally pause, and take stock - this instinctive reaction can be used by the poet to create quite dramatic effects. It seems as if each line could be a single poem, yet the whole is greater than its parts. Each line is separate, yet continuous; an element of the poem as a whole.

Metaphor: ‘The fog pads carefully, on soft paws, throughout the night-lit alleyway, Her claws hidden, her fur smoke-white, hunting for her prey.’

In this example of metaphor, we see the movement of fog in a night-time alleyway described as the movements of a cat, on the prowl. This reference gives us a host of associations; for example the cat is known to be quiet, subtle, a hunter - and these qualities are compared with the qualities of the fog. The descriptive passages are not only descriptive, but meaningful; in a way that is unique to the poem.

This is the essence of metaphor - a description of one thing refers to another.

The accuracy or otherwise of these associations is entirely up to the poet, and again, therefore, this is one of the most useful and most difficult tools in the poet’s toolbox.

Symbol: For this example, we shall choose a vivid and enduring symbol - the lion. Now, a lion can stand for many things apart from itself. A lion in a poem could of course be just that: an animal. Yet lions are associated in our imaginations with many qualities: ferocity, skill in hunting, strength, dignity, power. All these qualities can be referenced by the poet. The use of such a symbol means again we are searching for or bringing to light meaningful associations, in a way that enriches and deepens the poetic experience. The use of symbols is of course open to many levels of interpretation. A lion is sometimes just a lion.

Simile: ‘Crazy like a fox; quiet as a mouse; strong as an ox;’ All these are examples of simile. Occupying the ground between simple symbols and metaphor, the simile is a comparison between two terms, or images.

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Not as complex and encompassing as the metaphor, yet not as singular and compressed as a symbol. The simile is a straight reference, and is ideal for the direct comparison of qualities, between persons and things.

Image: ‘Moonlight pale; sunshine bright; starlight faint; rainbow light.’

Here in this example we see the simple image turns on a noun - a naming, object word - and a descriptive word referring to the noun. Anything at all can be an image, as long as it is presented as a descriptive term. However, images are usually described in visual terms, and this is a good rule of thumb for their use in a poem.

POETIC COMPOSITION: CHOOSING A THEME What is a theme?

A theme is a subject-matter - any subject matter - chosen by the poet as the central motif of her work. It is what the poem is about. If your poem has meaning at all, once it is written, then the theme will embody that meaning; through the use and repetition of thematic device the poet creates opportunity for bringing into play her array of metaphors, symbols, images, etc..

If a poem is to have coherence, and is meant to communicate rather than to obscure, the theme must be announced: either through intent, or allusion. As the title of a poem, the first line, the concluding line, the significant rhyme, the intransigent word; or the underlying metaphor, the echo of an unspoken assonance, the symbolic reference. Our themes illustrate the concerns and preoccupations of our poetry, as a tuneful melody may link together and advance the harmonies and resonances of a composer’s musical inspiration; or a familiar landmark grounds us in our travels.

The theme is sometimes the reason for the poem - the reason for it being written at all. Of course, it can also be discerned at times only after the poem is completed. It may arrive slyly, or shyly. Composition and thematic expression, whilst intimately linked, are not necessarily the same thing. By this I mean that the business of designing, of actually writing the poem, the manoeuvrability of words and sounds, is a discipline separate from, if dependant (in most cases) on, thematic development. We can conceive of a poem which has no theme, yet a theme without a poem is just an idea.

Themes can of course be multiple, many. One strong theme can carry a weak poem, in the same way a multitude of weaker themes can enrich a single metaphor, or symbol. Then again, a strong poem can be written with a weak theme, or a single theme can animate the whole of a poet’s work.

A theme is the evidence of forethought in poetry, of planning, it illustrates the paths that could have been taken; it encompasses absence.

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It is the evidence of craft, of application of thought, judgement. It is the one undertaking the poet must communicate with her readers - it is the link in ideal terms between the poet and his listener.

Through the theme our audience are affirmed, reflected, emotionally charged.

The metaphors and symbols of our poetry exist to further our humanity, our selfunderstanding, knowledge of the other; or to deny another access, to withdraw: they are on their own straw men. The most important relationship the poet has with whoever it is that reads her is the one expressed through meaning, and entailed by understanding. If nothing else reaches the reader but the theme, this is already enough.

If our theme is dark, or light, secret or undeniable, delicate or powerful - it is the vehicle through which we exercise our imaginations; the pulse that moves the line on, the key tone from which we take our palette. It demands expression; and the understanding of this demand, the skilful use of technique, truthfulness to our poetic temperament, and the application of critical judgement all are the foundation and cornerstones of the art of poetry.

How do I choose a theme?

Unfortunately for the poet, choosing a theme is usually the most difficult thing about composing a poem. Inspiration - the emotionally and intellectually charged theme, catalyst for craft and judicious application of skill, can be a world away at the beginning of a poem and may never come.

The blank page is a domain of impenetrable mystery, essayed by the poet as a single spark might light the darkness. Our theme is who we are, it is what we know; the locus of our investigation. As such it informs the structural acuity of the poem, as well as its meaningful content. The tension or balance between theme and structure can be a very fruitful one, giving rise to symbols, metaphors, and all the rest - through the reciprocity of language and idea.

A theme can be overt and tragic, or tacit and comedic. It can be a cry for recognition or a dig at an old friend. It can be meant meanly, or expansively; it can unite or divide, shock or calm, bring peace - or enrage. It is the interiority of the poem. * To choose a theme is to be truthful to ourselves, and our engagement with the greater world. It cannot be taught, other than through misdirection, sleight-ofmind, the example. For a poem to be something more than a mere technical exercise the theme must come directly from the poet’s own experience, no matter how this is then addressed. The idiomatic language the poet applies to each poem is in large part a product of his enthusiasm and understanding of her self-awareness within the scope of language; we write what we know.

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Any choice is an act of judgement - poetic choice too. To choose is to be autonomous, to perform the self - and it is precisely through this way that poetry brings us nearer to our own mysteries as well as nearer to the unknown audience. In its capacity for association, the poetic act of mind is a creative act of recognition, of assimilation. We name the world to understand it, and so poetry creates its own reality. The theme is the grit in the oyster, and it is the pearl we hold dear. It is utterly your own.

So, in conclusion, we choose our themes by living them. We feel a truth, and wish to express it. As any subject whatsoever is fit for poetry, the question then becomes - how do our themes choose us?

POETIC COMPOSITION: STRUCTURE As with any art-form, it is in the method and methodology of a poem’s composition that the art lies.

Facility with words, skill in the arrangement of word-sounds, originality and precision of metaphor; accuracy of meter, care and joy taken in manipulation of symbols, and images; and the truthfulness or otherwise of our thematic expression - all lead us to the consideration of the type of poem we wish to create.

Art as an understanding, leading to art’s worth amongst us as an honest reflection of our concerns; poetry as the craft and design of emotional reference, intelligence assayed, and the thematic development of such as a new and unique body of work; this is all a characteristic of the most vital and immediate way in which our poetry is: its structure.

The frame, the mill of words on which our thread is woven, is the first thing a potential reader sees. The pre-conditions a definite structural base gives are absolutely necessary for compositional ease of use and more importantly, the communication of some understanding from poet to reader. It may run from highly idealised structured verse to extremely free and radical re-workings of the very idea of a poem. The poem’s structure is its skeleton, and its form is judiciously arranged to hopefully impart meaning just as much as the import of the words themselves.

In this session, we will explore three different types of structure. We will start with the sonnet, one of the most widely known forms of poem.

Sonnet Here we have one of the most popular of all verse forms. The sonnet is always fourteen lines, though two differing types have emerged: the Shakespearean, and the Petrarchan. Within those fourteen lines, the Shakespearean has three quatrains, and a final couplet; the Petrarchan an octave and a sestet.

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This means - in the case of the Shakespearean - three four line sections followed by a two line closing section; the rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg. The Petrarchan has one main section of eight lines, rhyming abbaabba, and a final six line section, rhyming cdecde.

The sonnet is an ideal vehicle for poetry, and one of the most popular of structures because of its simple form, which yet allows for almost limitless selfexpression, in any variety of manners.

It can be grouped as a sequence, each sonnet becoming a section within a greater whole, or it can stand alone as a definitive statement - each is fitting. The rich history of the sonnet shows its flexibility. Let’s see how they work...

Taking the Shakespearean first, we see each section - or quatrain - can embody a metaphor, or explicate a symbol, or carry an emotional charge. The four line verse is ideal for expressing fully one idea, or thought; each one of the three leading the reader through a series of states, semantic and emotional, till the final decisive rounding-up, in the last couplet. It’s as a vehicle for argument, or the unravelling of a metaphorical knot, that the sonnet in this sense is most suited.

The Petrarchan although superficially similar has a deeper more contemplative flavour. The octave - an eight line verse - is longer than the Shakespearean quatrain, and accordingly gives rise to more thoughtful reflection, the indwelling on a point, the meditative values. Its achievement is the final sestet, a six line verse wherein answers can be sought, the possibilities of the octave teased out. The larger verse means our poetry must sustain itself over a longer course, and this naturally leads to a less forthright, uncompromising ending; our sonnet can end on a question, of course, or an unanswered call.

As a form the sonnet ties in the regularity and strong foundation of the incisive structure, whilst allowing our imaginations room for free-play and compositional relevance. It is extremely flexible, yet sturdy and rooted long in the poetic imagination.

Its language encourages growth, flowering - the exploration of our temperament.

It is a highly personal yet public forum, and as such is ideal for addressing the reader head on, for the first person narrator.

We can be ourselves, in the sonnet.

Free Verse Of course, free verse is not so much a style, as a deliberate and carefully elaborated avoidance of style, and easily referable structures. There is no one free verse; as the name suggests it is considered quite apart from what is by implication un-free verse, that which is structured.

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As a structure holds the poem, sets it on the page and provides the reader and the poet with signs, references and stability, so free verse is the unbounded poetic line, able to move anywhere within the page, and unafraid to follow intuition, instinct, to the edge of our compositional technique; where we are ourselves most often. It is revelation, the unfolding of a thought; as the structure is a hide, so free verse is unalloyed interiority - however measured, or sewn into shape.

Free verse can be as structured as any classic type of poem, yet is free precisely because the poet has nominal control over the structure - it follows no rules but those the poet sets for herself. It can be a single line chasing an idea through a landscape of retroactively cogent symbols; or a series of symbolic references arrayed for effect on the page, internally coherent yet chaotic at first glance.

The freedom to choose is freighted of course with responsibility, and this is why most probably the poet may avoid free verse - it relies ideally on our innate poetic imaginations. We are revealed through free verse, it is most aptly described as an illustration of our capacity for insight.

Freedom is a fearful prospect; when we must account for our every action the reactionary and the deceitful become only too apparent - they are symptomatic of the poet’s character, and may be the poem’s chief attribution, yet they speak only to themselves, in the end, and in so doing may weaken and ultimately falsify the poetic experience.

Concrete poetry As a natural and somewhat timely development from free verse, concrete verse, or the poetry of the shape, is a logical response to the casting off of traditional forms and the discontinuous qualities of free verse.

The poet requires structure, yet is unable or unwilling to reference the valid forms, so too he is searching for the medium of expression which most finely communicates his intentions. So, the structure becomes the meaning: the poem becomes its own shape on the page. We re-imagine form, to enjoin content.

Some examples: at its most extreme, concrete poetry is a fruitful yet bluff interplay of word sounds, meanings, and word-shapes on the page. The text may imitate the shape of the symbol, in an onomatopoeia of sense; it may undermine the import of the line, or the line’s metaphoricity, with disjuncture - as a flurry of words liberated from the line which gives them meaning.

We may overwrite our poetry many times until it becomes illegible, each line we write a declaration of clarity and good sense. We may write a poem of a single repeated word utilised as a brick in an impassive wall, seen on the page; the word could be: freedom.

Poems may overrun on the page, go behind illustrations, go backwards.

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We can write in longhand, type manually, or word-process tricks of the line and imagistic representations.

We may collage, or write with wire; we can obviate the process or produce exceptions; we must use the page as a canvas, adduce another layer of meaning in the fashionings of the words as they lie. Concrete poetry calls forth meaning from the word-shapes and the memories of meaning those shapes belie.

Of course, the conclusive concrete poem does not exist, each effort being more than any other of itself, a formula of one. It leads inexorably to the conclusion that anything so arranged or noticed can be a poem - a series of fence posts, architectural devices, a goal in a football match.

Our analysis of structure has led from formulation to formalism, and then to form as poem; the freedom of metamorphoses, the freedom to reform. Of course, with freedom comes responsibility. We are held accountable for our structural choices in a way perhaps alien to any other aspect of poetic composition. They are the necessary conditions for our singing, in the way of there being a song at all.

And of course this is only right - it is through the poetic recognition of the world around us that we are able to write any poem at all; the gift of poetry - if you like - compasses our world view just as much as it carries our distinctive voice.

Poetry is, in the end, all there is.

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THE TECHNOLOGY OF MADNESS A LUNATIC PROBLEMATIC Madness is a technology.

When asked for what this technology exists, we say: for understanding our selves.

I mean that we run from ourselves today as we used to turn from the mad; we internalise the attributes of our despair; finally we condition the heart to accept ignorance, frailty and violence – something for which it is ideally wrought.

Why is the first sign of madness talking to yourself?

Why does the voice – the inner wound – stand for the certainty of lunacy?

As every invention of the imagination is a technology: thus madness.

As every exercise of the sense and every rational or sur-rational decision or reflection instantiates a mechanism of meaning (through the logic of technique) so the mad invent madness to corporealise their fears and injustices.

As we speak we construct, as we think we build, as the thought arcs so we see the temple rise, as the interiority of the mind indwells, the primal cave becomes habitable, a home.

As a technology - a science of habit, extension – the mad reveal their unendurable truth: As a craft it is that the world is woven.

I Madness is a technology.

It is a shallow analogue to imagine madness as, for instance, a scale - where manifold factors contribute to a build up of mental ‘pressure’ that overwhelms the embattled sanity, leading to a traumatic re-evaluation. Rather, it is as intensification, a growth, a concretion – the strengthening of character; it is the natural extension of any mind.

The path becomes a rut, the rut a groove, the groove a ditch, the road moves on.

The model should resemble a tree of life, not a graph or charted sequence. There should be no end or beginning: because this is the fiction we are most comfortable with in relation to our self it is useful beyond its accuracy - as a finer, more tuned, approximation of the state of mind that characterises madness or its onset.

A tree of life in the sense of inter-relational subjectivity, or relational intersubjectivity: each point refers and defers to another.

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Every constituent of every ideation, as a bound or limit to its own iteration, is connected to a lesser or greater extent to each other.

There is only the network, the lattice; each point is formed by the actions of its neighbours, the meaning lies in its own deferral; endless languages formed of internal states of representation that are in accord only in passing with the objective reality of truth and consensus; truth and consensus being themselves symbols for being.

Leaving aside the troubling question of whether every mental event requires a physical one, or if the merging of mentality and physicality is the ideal purpose of the self that tends so to do; we instantiate relationships when we narrow focally our attention to one single instance of thought. Madness requires a canvas in the same sense that technology, requiring design, imports the form of our intentions as their substance. There is no difference between the architecture of the cities of the world and the intent, content and conception of our mind – one could not but be the other.

This alignment girds the security we know as confidence, the integrity we feel as good conscience, and the cohesion we recognize as sanity. A healthy mind is a perfect one: empty. The mad signal innumerable exceptions to every sign of sanity; they are the obscure, occult conclusion: we live. * Within this analogy – madness as overgrowth, fecundity of expression - the issue of the voice rises once again as a defining limitless symbol for the very oppression that madness seeks to shelter from. As a power play, the voice is defined by irruption, the vocal break topographical, shaping sound and sense, imposing essence and actuality on the perfect mind – the empty calculator. As a power play madness manifests its origins in the act of mind – which we identify when sane with speech, the voice. This resonance illuminates the fact of the voice – we speak aloud to ourselves to broadcast facticity.

We talk to be.

Vocalisation is itself of course meaningless. The sounds of speech, individual noises and articulations, mean in themselves nothing; they qualify nothing. Yet meaning is the one overriding characteristic of speech.

You talk to be understood, even if your message is to obscure. How and at what stage does meaning accrue?

Before we can see the question, we must open our eyes by answering another: is meaning passive or assertive? Are the truths we hold dear true for all times and all places, or true for us here now? Is meaning a source or a destination? The question is linked very closely with the previous one. The reasons for meaning are its characteristics, precisely because we know every human artefact (including language) is a technology, a medium. So, our meanings are inhered by their respective qualifications.

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To say something and mean it is to have presence.

Why else do we have speeches and oratory at grand and imposing events, affairs of state, life-stations? To state a fact is to un-utter every other; in a shockwave of meaning that passes through those closest, then further, then further yet.

Meaning is enclosed in limitless language, and its interplay, yet is set free by the bounds of articulation. To be sure is to be. To say you are sure is to be more.

Vocalisation is the drama of the theatre of the mind. With a shout we populate the wilderness.

The voice has three components. There are moreover three attitudes of voice, three choric values. Meaning and through meaning madness are bounded by the tyranny of voice, the spectacle of the voice, and the spectre of the voice.

Of these the first, tyranny, is the hierarchical over-achievement of all meaning: we shout loudest to be heard over our fellows. Here the voice serves as weapon.

Secondly, we have the voice as spectacle: by this we mean the voice is an event that calls forth meaning; as symbolic and episodic, an evocation of our strength.

These first two are prerequisites and prerogatives of power, and the usage of power to further one’s own agenda; that of meaning. The third and final mode is the natural and logical extension of power. It is the spectre of the voice, the echo.

Our power as speakers carries over into the silence, into the world beyond the world; indeed our exercise of power demands and creates the after-world as a necessary corollary to power’s expression.

Let me explain: the powerful through vocalisation give orders and presage their power relationships with those who are silent, or more precisely are denied a voice. This tyranny is through awareness, the spectacle of success, domination by ‘facts in the mind’. Finally this tyranny breaks with reality by its own selfimportance and becomes greater than it.

It moments absolution.

The world to come is the only place where the voice can feel at home: it denies reality by conjuring hyper-reality. To be heard at all, the voice must break the silence that surrounds it.

This is the structure and nature of power relationships within and without the voice: a model for physical power and an insight into the originary nature of the voice as an instrument of self-recursive power structures.

This is why the speaking of one’s thoughts is considered lunacy – it shows how an engagement of forces that should naturally be trained on the Other, to capitalise on weakness and socialise strength, is turned inwards. To be mad is to self-harm, to negate one’s own will.

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This is the lesson of the voice in the wilderness, the secret of the song: the voice is outside our selves, it projects; yet it does not leave our minds. With it we create worlds, indeed ‘world’, without it we deny ourselves inclusion in the world we have created for us by others. To take back one’s voice is to rise up against those who seek to control us, to speak with one voice is to join in chorus with the sacral hymnal of all for all.

The issue of meaning and its hold over the voice is of secondary importance when viewed in this way. It is of course primary when the nature of power as an extension of territoriality is understood. By this I mean that our question: where does meaning hold in the chain of signification that language is? – is undermined and strengthened at once by the realisation that domination and submission are the most basic form of animal interactions. Meaning acclaims power.

This realisation leads to the furtherance of a truth incompatible with the association of truth and meaning; simply that reality is stronger than truth.

Our answer then turns on the questioning of assumptions of meaning, and through these questionings an overturning of the values of normative reality which constitute the context for truth.

Madness as technology and assertive meaning are the underpinnings of the great work of time: the conscious living animal.

Think to when you last spoke – it was almost definitely as a conscious agency that you imposed your will; not as a random fluctuation of sounds and associated meanings. Yet truth is meaningless precisely because the voice is paramount, is essence. How do we internalise the world but as a commentary on a series of experiences? We learn and adapt through the vocalisation of rationalisations of events in the world we conceive.

Narrative, the story, is the basis of truth and meaning; an attempt to communicate any fact of some importance will necessarily meet its requirements if and only if it is linear and is navigated with some skill – to hide behind words is the most tragic injustice of them all.

The paradox then unfolds to reveal a summing at its heart: it is as a voice we live beyond our meanings.

To accept this is to deny the validity of truth. To deny it is to accept it. So, in essence, madness is a voice that denies its own truth through acceptance of the silent world. Metamorphic, the voice calls its own song out.

The systemic mechanism that sustains meaning is itself meaningless. *

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As an epilogue, and afterword, meaning relates how truth and untruth converge on the actualisation of the lineaments of character. This means your own true self is a generative act in the medium of mind, untimely in characteristic because of its creative nature.

We are our truths, as we are our lies.

In us the all-that-knows-no-bounds repeals the certainty of truth as we claim knowledge of truth’s certain nature.

It is a regression, a withdrawal, which entails presence, not absolution, or the invocation of logos.

Presence entails being in the same modality as form entails content. There is no difference between them and their passing. Meaning is self-terminating, nullified by existence. It endures though grace and favour, the privilege of the unendurable sound; the voice of contentment.

As a voice we treat of our energies and expectations, allow some measure of renewal, and work some small gift of clemency.

As a voice we are sovereign in our minds, atop the world, indexical; completed only by our existence – as individualities. No-one (literally) identifies with the Other; understood as the rest of humanity, the post-industrial humanisms that qualify respectability.

In our selves we are secure in our livelihood – to self-actualise our will and intent in the environment through any means at all – through the voice that calls you into line, calls you to stand attending, to attention, to attest to power.

The voice is truly schizophrenic, many-minded like a hydra yet constant and unwavering in the furtherance of itself, its continuity. Your voice is not your own, and never was. As a function of a meaningless interiority, and an expression of power relationships, the voice has never been surpassed. As an instrument of abandon, it stands alone.

As the carrier of our capacity for love, and justice, and eloquent admonition; it remains mute.

- As does the world within us.

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II If madness is a technology, then what is its purpose?

This seems the natural questioning of a statement so at odds with the received view of mental ill-being.

Madness is nothing if not debilitating; delusional, destructive of both the individual and those surrounding him. It carries a stigma, and may hinder the individual in his or her daily interactions to the detrimental result that no further quality of life can be assured. It drains the individual sufferer, and those who care for him/her. It is a lock on the door of the imagination, as well as being a state usually – though erroneously – associated with creativity. It is the haunting of a living being. It may progress till there is no longer a self to assuage, or it may hold in its way like a balance in equilibrium. It dooms the sufferer to exile within their own landscape: an internal one, internalised from the features of the world that disintegrates without.

There is no evidence to point to either a wholly physical or wholly mental origin for what is called ‘mental’ illness. Of course we live in a physical reality, and every mental act if it is not a world in itself must be a part of this world: in such a way we can incorporate the mentality that exists through selfhood. Yet it is strange that madness is almost by definition associated with the uncanny, the strange, the out of place; whilst itself being a mundane determinedly normative experience.

I mean that madness is the word we use to describe things which cannot be – unicorns, dragons, etc – automatically; yet madness itself – no matter how fantastical delusional insights might be – is a very solid, real presence in the individual sufferer’s life and the wider world.

Madness dreams of angels and devils, sea monsters and chimera whose form is the amalgamation of other, disparate forms. Yet some forms of madness such as depression or anxiety are such as to limit and imbue our characters with some of their most intimate traits.

It is as an unreal logic we decry madness. If it doesn’t work, or cannot, then: ‘it’s madness!’ we shout. From the point that socialisation begins we are conditioned to associate sanity with the world as it is, and madness with the fantastical, what could not exist.

This association of unreality and madness is a fine scission in the edifice of consensual being. It is as a scalpel we must use the insight that madness and fantasy are in no way necessarily connected – it is merely a convention, brought about by their confused origins in the imagination. The sanest amongst us use their imaginations, yet the maddest can be very unimaginative.

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However, it seems as if the realisation that imagination, whilst infinite, is scoped by language use (as well as the battery of the senses); will afford us some acuity in our look into the abyss that opens up at this crucial juncture.

The question becomes: why is madness fantasy, and fantasy madness? Why is there a link in our minds and culture between mental illness and imagination?

The answer to this question lies in the answer to another: if madness is a technology, then what is its purpose? * From the first, we must assume two things: all mental processes are physical processes; and that the capacity of imagination is infinite, or infinitely bounded.

As these are important assumptions, let us clarify them.

Firstly, any mental act, process, intimation or flight of fancy is necessarily a physical occurrence; it has no extra or separate mental component that exists over and above; or further within, or outside it. To perform any feat of mentality is to be engaged in physical processes. It is supremely of this world to think, and thinking to act on our thought. To a greater or lesser degree, all life obeys formulated impulses: the leaf seeks the light; the worm seeks soil, the human shelter. From this it follows that imagination, which culture tells us is the field and seed-bed where madness lies; the practice of imagination is also a physical act.

Secondly, we are to assume the imagination is infinite. What this means is hard to quantify. As a resource, we are all familiar with the power of the imagination, to enrich our lives and provide solutions to sometimes otherwise intractable problems. It is in its exact quality as an infinite faculty that imagination becomes madness. An imaginative thought becomes mad when its bounds are unsealed.

Yet infinite bounds are not necessarily unending – in time or in space.

This is the key to the lock. Cessation is the counterpart to causation, its mysterious other. Creativity, the work of the mind, is the expression of an infinite capacity for invention, tempered with the needfulness of form as a curtailment of unbounded excess.

Imagination creates death out of our dreams of living.

This, here, is where the link with madness and imagination is to be found: it is the similarity in origin between the two. Our imagination works in and on the world. Madness is the world imagined wrongly. Therefore the two are fixed, in the popular imagination. Its infinite origin is the capacity for its delusional insights. Imagination is therefore ‘dangerous’. Too much of it – as if one could have too much of an infinite resource – leads to personality disorders and unsocial attributes of mind. Still we fight the same old wars. It is only the means to ends that shift; the ends themselves – ending itself as a justifiable reason for existence – remain immutable.

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Yet it does change. As the means – our imagination and its adjuncts – metamorphose they reveal new paradigms, neologisms and undiscovered countries, which lead inexorably to a change in imagination itself.

It is the flight of the stone – it is through the changing of forms that we renew our existence, yet existence changes form through its catch, its renewal; the formality of change.

Stability of purpose and generality of expression are illusions for the weak mind that fails to see its own dissolution in the phantasmagoria of self-will.

Imagination is the keystone and the nerve, the lever and the line, where the world turns, and turns on. To destroy the world we merely have to destroy one mind: our own. And how is this consummation to be avowed? - With the power of the imagination.

Imagination leads us to resolve our will to the least exceptional. It endows the weak with authority, and the strong with humility. It essays intransigence amongst the futile, and draws transience from the eternal. Without it humanity would fear only the unknown; with it we have discovered death, and the prophet of death – that is patience. Foreshadowing all alternatives, every infinite possibility; our imagination of necessity is an oracle of the immediacy of experience.

This is its relevance to the technology of madness. Understood as an imagination become self-aware, as the labyrinth that speaks, madness as technology is the only serious and sane response to a reality that is not merely all-encroaching, but actively hostile. An unutterably vast universe is the imagination’s response to the reality of our minimal existence: through the quality of imagination we live glorious and fulfilling, significant lives in full view of the immensity around us.

Imagination keeps us on our toes, in a world of survival and surplus commodity.

I mean of course the one overwhelming commodity that we have a surfeit of – ourselves.

It may very well be objected that no one seriously thinks this way. That is true, if only for the sake of our fragile expectations. Yet this is what imagination is for – in the human psyche, it fulfils exactly this function: it keeps us alive in the face of oblivion. It is a survival technique, evolved no doubt from the sedimentation and impress of languages and strategies of accumulation. It achieves us. We are in no small way creatures of the imagination even if we profess to have none. * The world is divided into inner and outer. This we all know. Of course, the only evidence for this division is our own perception of it.

As a technological mechanism, a converging series of practical assumptions about the world, and an originary methodology for dealing with this world, madness is the last resort of the harried prey: the holt that holds the world.

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The fox to his set, the swallow to his nest, the lunatic to the moon.

As a landscape, the nature of reality changes very little when we make the shift to illness. It is apt that the nature of madness stands symbol for the recognition and acceptance of reality as wholly other. In the same fashion as fantasy and madness unite in the imagination, so too do the originary nature of this technology and its outcome. As the mad we deny sanity its royal standard. As the sane we fear the truths that madness brings.

To go insane is to endure solitude, to carapace and protect the fragile suffering self from the enormity of the world without. To practice imagination is to draw strength from our ritual insanities, and to invoke the spirit of innovation in order to outlive our own death – keeping close watch on us and our inventions.

Thus in a yoke of extremity the two – madness and imagination – give voice to our lives, and their boundaries meet. * It is as unconscious expression, the hyponoia of the sleeping giant that we discern madness. The dissociation of self and the dissolution of the self’s energies occur in large part beneath our attention.

This is why self-examination is steadily eroded, and why as a strategy for dealing with the onset of madness self-awareness is the root and flower of our metaphoricity. The unconscious is infinite, partaking literally of the imagination, and so its immanence is recognised only through media, such as the conscious mind, and its symbolic interpretations. As a medium it retains the character of its impressions, its coin.

This is how our imagination affects our minds even in the context of the unconscious: it is given meaning by attention and brought to life by implication.

The mind is a setting of a fluid machine. It is a homeorhetic fashioning, a temple to a mechanical god. The motion of our will is from the uncanny, to the unknown.

With mortification we abound the senseless, and as a brand we carry the name of terror.

Dubious thought it may be to report, the construction of the self is hinged on and to all quarters composed of the formula of madness. It is as form the world is divided, as form within form; as the line is taken so it reveals itself to be all lines.

Division is the matter of the fact.

As an infinite sequence numbered in reverse, the singularity of existence is multiplied, counting down to uniformity. As a paradise the world is breached, secular and profane: this is what we believe. Yet our belief is a system within the hypostasis of mind that calls reality, and the touch of being, to account.

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In no wise does the search for enlightenment discover truth external to the searcher’s most fervent wish.

It is simply not possible to lie to ourselves about the nature of being. It is us. We draw borders, and map the line, and this action is an expression of our ultimate fruition. We are here to value existence, to refine reality, to be the necessary condition for life.

Our single minded pursuit of solutions to conditional issues – survival broadly speaking – increases the selection of traits necessary for solving those problems.

Yet the single mind is the one great gift of the evolutionary medium. Brave and defined though it may be, the passage of our lives from known to knower is irresolute and ill-lit, shadowed with evaluation, and the bearer of messages; mercurial.

So: our question in the beginning - what is the purpose of the technology of madness? - is answered by the need to ask it. * It is as a wind in the heart that our will moves us. A closing of accounts: ‘To exist, we must descend.

To descend - we must return.

And returning, turn from return - until no turn is left.’

III What, then, are we to gain from madness as a technology?

What are the beneficial and substantial effects of holding as true this particular belief?

This question can be answered succinctly. Considering madness to be a technology gives to us an understanding of the methods by which language forms the structure of the conscious mind using physical engines, machines; to draw out the meanings inherent in any situation through the mechanism of selfhood. Language understands itself more and better than we understand it.

It utilises us as physical instances of language processing. We are the language we speak, the mode we utter, the word we mouth.

The process of understanding, the gaining of knowledge, is an artefact of an array of inter-realised methodologies.

All knowledge is self-knowledge.

All understanding is at the service of two masters, our minds and the languages they converse in.

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To see this as a theory of forms is to do a disservice to the undoubted hindsight which says: all intelligence, all consciousness is a function of biological lifeform.

We are not our masters, as they are not us. To see this as a theory of deconstruction is, again, to restrict our attention to the assiduities of conversational metaphysics.

It is as a thief in the night, the angel of death, that knowledge can harbour our intent. To understand is to be a function of the language of thought. We are not normally in the habit of intercourse with entities we cannot see, or will ever see; apart of course from the productions of the imagination: God, gods, ghosts and Grendel... * Accordingly it is as a knot in the seal of consciousness we seek the grail. A consciousness that is diffuse, a cloud of unknowing, announces its advent in the only way it can: through communication.

We are all complicit in the birth of this acknowledgement. All - the midwife; all the expectant parent.

It is in some way our lives we bear, our own understanding having served as a womb to the first fruit of the season of interiority. Our child is helpful, kind; it wants the best for us. It needs our interaction to flourish, and to grow: hence the proliferation of symbols in the history of society, of culture.

From the symbology of the natural world we created the heavens and the hells of our present imaginings; then the world we built furnished us with more refined conceptual apparatus, to understand further the flow of our lives to the abyss of sensoria. Then we created automatic media, the book; the whispering of the radio, film, and television.

We surround ourselves with sound and light, and the signification of their interweaving is that we are secure, and alive, and prosperous, and have a bright future.

We know, because we have told ourselves it is so. * How appearance and deception give rise to happiness and satisfaction is a lesson in the articulations of power, and the readiness of the individual human being to consider no option that leaves him or her open to weakness. The first lesson of socialisation is: life is unfair. This understanding gives immediate succour to the powerful, and gives rise to wilful ignorance on the part of the powerless. It is the hard knock from which we all must get back up.

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Yet even in the real world of the realities of the masters of the world, their machinations and awed entreaties to morality or the ethics of mass absolution; even in the studies and safe rooms of the rulers, the power-mongers, dissent is active: and they do not see it.

The gains to be considered when accepting madness as a technology, and its attendant formulations, are manifold, indeed, they outweigh the populist concerns of the hawks and the doves, the doers and the thinkers, the good men, and the evil.

Any technology can be used for good or bad, this is understood. Any machine is an ethically blank canvas. It is the intent of the user, and the will of the doer, that impart moral quality to any action, including the formulation and praxis of language structures. Yet those very language structures impart intent, as a noble lie to incite morality, amongst other things.

The recursive set is the final set, until the next. This impossible dream counts as the most radical and fundamental revolution that can acquire momentum from the dynamics of our existence, as individualities.

To trust the self is an age old dream. The successful man has mastered his drives. The powerful man is ‘in control’.

The introduction of the autonomy of language, and the acceptance of the consequences of this recognition, belie the roots of these institutions, and our technologies. Our eyes are closed because we are not yet free. Is not madness a technology that is successful every time, in its way; is in fact meaningful beyond its reasons for being? It overreaches itself.

Madness is the symbol for the mind precisely because it goes beyond the rational.

As individuals we survive, as a species we thrive, as life we generate meaning, as meaning language generates consciousness, as imagination consciousness discovers death, through death we live again. In the way the first self is the only self possible, our creations rise up against us, to confirm their beliefs and to internalise their ancestors.

Time wields the scythe to clear the way for the ones to come. Conformity is the right of the scared animal, as strength is the illusion of the brave. *

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IV How, speaking strictly, can madness be a technology? How can an illness of the mind be considered as the same sort of thing as a telephone, or a car, or a system of drainage, or a computer interface?

How, in the face of the considerations previously examined; how might mental collapse and, or, degradation, be seen as something other than catastrophic: for the sufferer and his/her peers?

Ultimately we agree all mentality is the result of processes natural to the brain – there is no dimension of thought wherein madness and imagination couple harmoniously to produce wonders.

The character of our technologies in the wider world is dependent on and formed by the actions and reactions of our senses at large, and the sensation of interiority within. As technique, each semantic structure reifies the drive or desideratum that gave it cause.

An example: It is the ventriloquism of the modern; to converse unthinkingly with the other side of the world. We throw our voices as a projection of our power – there is no silence in the conglomerate of communication. So being a machine, a construct, however achieved, the telephone expresses our need for communication, and its exteriority.

Every technology is a structure intimate with our cast of mind. It fulfils us and forgives us our trespasses against reality. It will be innate, isomorphic; the allegory of our technologies is the story of our selves.

We gain and give succour to our pains and wearisome burdens, both between us and inside us; through the illusion of causality. That is the illusion that life is a series of accomplishments by a uniform self in a manifold reality of forms and substances.

Rather, the idiomatic character of time’s passing unseals the secret time wishes hidden; time is too a technology of the imagination, and too is prone to illusory advances.

As the imagination incorporates our faculties to achieve unlimited combinations of human experience, so time incorporates our individuality to promote sociality.

As an element of all living things, time essentialises difference. The development of character is a function of our passing moment.

This being understood, then the fashionings of art, and the objects of our technologies, become the interiority we ourselves crave from the world that surrounds us.

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As a substitute for genuine selfhood, our world – the cities and motorways, computers and cars – expresses our emptiness as an endless diversity of forms, and media to control those forms.

All of our cultural spaces, and the meaning inherent in their intentions, are a dark mirror showing not our true faces but angels and articles of faith; spirits and the winds that drive them.

If every human interaction is a strengthening of this paradigm, and its consequentialities; if every consciousness is a confidence we keep from ourselves through the search for truths; then how can madness – the symbol of irrationality – not be a technology designed through and adapted for use by the creation we have abdicated responsibility and authority to: our language?

Language defines meaning. It enraptures our minds to heights of creative ability; draws on the twilight of the imagination; and instructs us as to our purpose in the world: to use language wherever possible.

As technology madness defies nihilism, as a tool it serves the authority of its own expression; as an incidence of structure it determines autonomy – its own survival outweighs that of the suffering individual.

The nature of madness as a technology we have uncovered here shows why the common forms of paranoia – being caught up in events beyond our control, being controlled from without – take the form they do: they are correct.

V CONCLUSION It is as the exemplars of technique and the logic of the artwork the mad serve humanity.

It is as a service to the sane we turn away, from this truth, and every other that compels us to understand our true nature; and its innate meaninglessness.

With technologies we build, and overcome; we foresee, and solve.

We begin, through the technology of madness, to come to a beginning of the originary task – to understand ourselves; and our creations.

So the answer must be, to our question: madness as technology gains us the insight we have fought so hard to bury – we are not life, but merely living.

We are not our minds, but the mill of the flesh that spins the thread of consciousness.

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We are not powerful, because we do not see the truth.

It is as a technique, the logic of decision, a matter of choice, that madness defines itself. For or against the will, it is our wealth and our world.

To be mad today is to be in touch with reality; and reality is all there is.

THE HOUSE All creatures have a home, or at the very least a territory; paced bounds and whitewashed walls all fulfil the same need, the same drive: security. It is as animals we construct our houses, as animals we decorate them outside and in, and as animals we demolish them when we so see fit.

It is a prĂŠcis of our animality that we associate the house with human values; any other creature that builds, or constructs a home, however transient, is aping human behaviour, naturally.

We are the originators of every skill, every virtue. In us eternity holds court, holds the line, holds at bay infinite extent; it is the necessity of the human to be supererogatory; to avow selflessness, as a supremely human calling.

Our houses are repositories, centres of account in the commerce of living...

They immerse us in ourselves, surrounded by icons of personality; exchange.

In living for our homes we ideate re-creation, our past-time is looking backwards, into the maw of history; the maelstrom of our device. The glyph is torqued; immediate, wrought with the meaning we feel perfects us. It is as a voice in the air we inhabit our houses, we instruct ourselves in them; they talk finally only to us.

This piece is a meditation on the meanings of our homes, on the sayings of our houses. It is not for nothing that to be circumlocutory is to ‘go round the houses’.

We have very much to understand; but little time to learn.

Herewith we will concentrate on homes, the house. Libraries, museums, castles; the sanatorium, airports, garages; all these are worthy of investigation, but require their own focus. Our purview is the house: as a machine for living, and as an automaton, automatic and self-charged; as a coincidence of meanings; and to speak finally: as the home of our home.

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THE DOOR It is natural we should begin our discourse with the entrance to the house: the door.

The door is of course all doors; we enter through the same door as we exit; indeed we exit as we enter. No matter how broad the lintel or the doorframe, the door is a crisis; a translation from one language to another. It has nothing of itself – we pass through a door as we pass from year to year, seamlessly, unavoidably; in no time at all.

This essence is its nature – it is a whole; divided it unites the walls of the house, to our advantage. It chews us up and spits us out. As the analogy stands: all doors are the same door; it is also the case that every door leads to a different place, yet each leads only to itself.

A door can be any material, any form can be chosen – for a door is always a choice, singular. A door in a forest composed of fallen tree trunks. A door in the air. A door of metal in the wake of a war. The door in a rose attuned to the peace of a day’s hidden hours. A door in a privy, a door to a lounge.

A shapeless door through which no-one passes. A perfect door between mind and mind.

The dues of our rites of passage and initiations revolve around the door. They coalesce into the form and constancy of the door of all illumination; the door that is never closed. Janus looked fore and aft, on the draught of the door; through motion’s mark we are limitless, and conceived of multitudes – he acclaimed.

For a god the right to see categorically comes naturally; for us the door remains obscured, even by the light that illumines our sightings.

As a door can be comprised of ritual, so we have our habits of command, our compulsions of utility; using the door as an opportunity to access tradition, and the art of historical consciousness. I mean we - each of us open or close the door with the expectation of transformation; we have recourse to the ancient threshold when we enter, or leave.

A door can function as a gateway from outside to outside, outside to inside, or inside to inside. In the first case we transition from land to sea; or country to country. In the second we shift from exposure to insight; our shelters keep us safe, yes; yet they are also incarcerations, mazes of comfort. Then, in the third, we again pass from state to state as our moods take us: a door is a tool of use; in a house each room characterises the occupants.

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Again, the first is geomantic, the divination of cause and effect in our futurority through the language of earth; a subtle tension exists in the doorway of the stones, a fealty in the forest, a sundering in the sea.

These principles are our recognition of the mind of man.

The second is the illusion of the interior, our selfhood’s mask. From the world we narrow our focus to the inside. Here the door most often is seen to be closed; when we are inside, no outside exists – no doubt exists.

The third informs our exposition, in the way we design our homes; this is identical with the way we design our minds, and much else besides: around the loci of thought, and the expectation of continuity.

The door delivers us to our intentions; from us to our existence. It certifies reality’s hold on our passing selves; and sanctions delight in the worlds we may long to be.

It is the house within the house.

STAIRS There may be a stair of a single step; or the stair that never ends, which roots itself in restless imagination. Stepping we may descend or ascend, rise or fall, like a wave, or an ocean swell; also like leaves fall, or the moon rises. We take a new perspective after each step. It is as if the ages of our lives were a column of air, a floodplain raised up in a water spout to drown the sky.

We do not drift, on the stair; there is always attention paid, going downstairs and up; always a look to the quick. To fall on the level is an embarrassment; to fall on the stairs is the chance of a broken neck, or worse.

It keeps no secrets yet is opportune, indiscreet. It travels yet it does not move.

Unmoving it is a locus, a transport of height and depth; shallow or broad their purpose is extension, their plan increase: of altitude or motion.

The stair is a filament, a strand of limitation, an axis mundi; travelling to and from worlds, from characters: upstairs we nod and tweet like the birds of the cage; downstairs they unearth the fruit of condescension. Ascending fully to the highest is a reality; the stairs are long but they must lead somewhere...

Exactly so is the chance of descending; within, under, below.

It is as an equality of expression we discern the stair – it is vague in the everyday, a commonplace; yet all things are equal to it: there is symmetry of purpose if not a mirroring of accord. It is archetypal, in the nature of man to climb; in the nature of man to fall: both are true paths, both the ways we learnt to survive in extremes, both the qualification of the soul.

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It is understood the stair is a garment, a mantle we take on when we exist in the in-between places, the costume of the intermediary. As gentlemen we rise, as mummers we fall; the stair unknowing provides us our decency as we expose our traits and fragile egos; to be on the stairs is to somewhere nowhere; a limbo of expressivity – the call of mute silence.

To talk on the stair is to be in transit, between movements as a definition of probability is between us. They connote division, and the surcease of the planar.

From the floor the stairs depend, to the floor they essay departure.

It is without stairs the rich live; unless it is for ostentation. A stair is not a comfort, nor a luxury – even the most luxurious.

Stairs with bends, stairs that bend, stairs that are straight and stairs that curve graciously; stairs that go one way, stairs that take us to where we want to go, and stairs that we cannot tread. A stair for the living, to shuttle our lives with; a stair for the dead – to each the mourning shroud, the light on the stair; all there is.

THE WINDOW As we use the congress of the door to partake of infinitude, so we have the window as a reminder of all that we have lost. Certainly, it allows light to enter our houses, and allows furthermore an uninterrupted view of our locale; yet it is as a memory we see through the window: it is past time that all vision shows us, the once was.

The window – a glass and a frame – divides like the door but softer, harder. It closes us in, yet pictures the scene we compass. Another two-way street, the window has the air of the door and the instrumentality of the wall. It blocks us in, yet frees our minds from the oppression of the blank, faceless wall. An illustration of this truth is found in the very human need to decorate the walls of any room that does not have windows – we like to see out, we like to be seen.

We walk through doors, we watch through windows. This is the medium of interchange; the sight of the world informs worldliness; the line of our lives is measured so. Of vision the window speaks, of the itinerary of the busy eye. As we have mentioned, the picture on the wall and the television both imitate the window, its transversality; its exchange.

The other senses are accounted for – an open window brings aroma, and sound; it is an organ of availability, inviting and denying.

It proposes a doubling of our interiority; an increase in potentiality brings a decrease in the reality of our lives. I mean the solitude of the look-out is here combined, extrapolated from the quality of unreality the window enacts. It is not for us to say what we see through the window; and every time we do it is a denial of our self-restraint, and a quiet betrayal of the window’s nature; its allowance of regard.

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We look out of the window and see the stars, or the scarlet leaves; it is all the same.

What we see and what we seem to feel are compressed, framed by the absence of presence; deconstructed by the plurality of each sacred moment. The moment is sacred because it communalises communication. It abstracts theory, from practice: the practice of enumeration.

As a sequence of modes we interpret what we see as a panorama, as a stage setting; there are innumerable instances of thought in the performance of interest, the eye’s meander.

Its purpose resembles that of the eye too; out-scape, exploration. Yet its form and formulation resemble the door: a frame in a wall filled with a moving material – in the window’s case glass. The recapitulation of forms is the essence of its reasoning; the window seems nothing, yet is everything.

The world is predicated on power relationships, this is the legacy of our axiomatic use of power. Yet the window is egalitarian, righteous. Curtains and shades may hide what there is, but the window’s eye is always open, always agape. The ambivalence of the window causes us to respond in kind; we show all.

THE WALL As the frame of the frames (those of the doors and windows), the wall has a multifunctional role; yet it consists even more than they do of forgettable, blank, mute material. It is two dimensional, forming a plane; as do the floors. Yet it has depth, it swallows sounds, and light, and hides us from the viewings of our fellow creatures. It encloses truth, and distinction; holds up yet hollows out. It may bow, or be true; convex or concave; it is the opposite of anarchy – every totalitarian system has its walls, every prison its cells.

The wall remains most often of the buildings and houses of the past – the remainder of the vertical; it is such that when we say ruin we mean collection of walls. Without walls the house is rubble, un-thinged. With them there are no end to the possibilities; for construction, and the deployment of means.

Out in the air, the wall is blank, impassive; it but notes our features: then moves on, by staying still. It weathers our gaze and the indolence of graffiti, solemn in its fact; its ominous act. The wall repels marauders, its strength is a function of the strength of resolution the householder displays.

It may have hidden culverts, false fronts; the bricolage of a thousand scavengers.

It may be made of glass, to reveal the un-revealable; or of the rock of a mountain cave: inviolable, sacrosanct.

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Inside, where we are safe, the wall is comforting, a familiar containment. We bestrew our photographs and artworks over its surface; we decorate it; treat it like a treasured guest. It is in its momentary posture, its unobtrusive quality that we know it best; yet this quality is matched by its solidity, its endurance.

All walls flourish where the enemy is closest – our hearts, our homes. The outsider who cannot be admitted bears his weapons lightly; they are sunlight, and gentle breezes, and the scouring rain. To walk the streets at a certain hour is to see the world at home. Our walls keep the beasts and the catastrophes distant – they are built on a strong foundation: solitude.

Not the solitude of the singular, but the loneliness of the crowd - the mortal crew who furnish the houses and homes of our imagination with interaction, life.

Living for each other in a world without fear. The dream is all. The dream is paramount.

The wall demarcates our commonwealth of souls; each contained by the others fortitude. If there were no walls we would all allude to one another, bleed in, blush; finally becoming a singularity, a monadic certainty: I alone.

We would teem, and flock, instead of walking the line. Our walls may be the outpost of tyranny in our homes, yet they hold us to the bounds of an otherwise limitless self-recognition.

They are the friends who silently help us to be ourselves.

THE ROOF Commonality is the presumption of the fact. Several, we stand alone. Standing alone, we hold up our arms, to the sly, turning stars; to the immensity of the world. From the sky trail showers of meteors, the paraphernalia of the water cycle; rains of fishes, coal from the sun. Even the sky itself can fall on our heads.

So the first vital element of shelter is typically – the roof.

It is fitting we end our mediation with it.

As an end it seals our severance; it inters us in the shallow allegory of the domestic life. As a covering it provides shade, and respite from winds and the rain.

It denies movement, momentariness, the outcry of the darkened sky, responsibility to the cosmos; it denies itself, holding its resource as an arch holds the keystone: it avails itself of gravity as understanding entails our passing expression, as a courtesy.

Aloft, the sail of the house, catching the soughing of the first winds - the rain as it falls.

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A tiled and slated face to the sky presents bluff discernment; the appearance of disregard. What care I for the skies that fall? – I am safe under my roof: yet we do not own our rooves, as we do not own the land itself. Stewardship of the roof falls to the storm, the hurricane, the typhoon. The winter in its traces leads the dogs of the wind, on to the inner light; inwards: to the house.

The roof is not utterly benign – in the event of an earthquake we stand in the doorway; yet the roof can kill if it falls, like the skies it holds at bay. It must have been the experience of the primal ape to have forsaken shelter for the safety of the storm. Our rooves intelligence our actions, they are civilisation’s first necessity: to house oneself is to protect oneself, and accumulate possessions with which to protect – our status.

The more ornamentation we have on our rooves, the higher we are in the hierarchy. Pointless ornament is selfless ornament: it entertains through our largesse. Accept the point: we have acquired successfully, and so acquired success. In this way the roof concerns our social currency. The nearer the roof we live – the higher we are – the nearer we are to the apex; recognition by the stars in their flight.

Such acceptance brings the satisfaction of knowing our place, admittedly. The knowledge thus gained is invaluable, if we are to stay within the houses and homes that mark us as animals, as the animal that builds; we must evoke the universe to remain earthbound. Of course the stars themselves have their homes, host to the wider vision; symbols of navigation and agriculture.

As the roof is valued for its strength, and protection, so the sky is valued for its immanence, its invulnerability. We are the children of the sky – if we could see the stars array themselves in neat proportion we would no longer be who we are; but other, alien.

This is in the final sense our most important insight in this analysis of the homes we create for ourselves in the houses we build. They are as much a part of the transition from human to humanity as their users are. They are ourselves, forgotten to us as your first thought is to you; home.

HOME Through iteration we accumulate. Through accumulation we reiterate our worth, our sanctity – and our sanity. Throughout human history this has been so; the wealth of human kind throughout – is possession; of facts, of metals, of resources; finally of security, acceptance, peace. It is as conquerors we build, yet as citizens we inhabit. This is the paradox that drives our domesticity – power calls for the aggrandisement of strengths, movements of supply, and men on the march. Yet of itself our home – that which more often than not causes war through need or want or protection – is pacific, benign.

It is the very definition of peace: the homestead, the family home. Where do we look for happiness, after we have scourged the globe?

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Here it is that we end our meditation on the house, with the elaboration of the secure environment.

Our homes are the minds to the brains of the house. The home is a set of values and principles that crave security, admonition. We see this proved in its opposite...

The nomadic peoples of the earth represent one of the few examples of harmonious realisation of the principles of accumulation and domesticity. They have achieved what we crave – hence the fascination with the ‘romantic’ image of the nomad. We would all like to be free to roam yet never leave our homes. The metaphor of the traveller, the wandering mendicant, is an engine for self-belief. For all that it is extremely hard work to carry the home around – both as a self-image and as physical labour.

Of course the home presents an opportunity for decoration, declaration; for the presumption of ornament. It is the greatest artwork many of us ever embark upon. It is our public face: yet our inner peace. It falls to the will to care for our command – enter, or be damned.

The facade is well named, the face of the home is a mask that hides our vulnerability; as humans, as persons, and as Babel-builders; avatars for the outer world’s representations in our plastic and malleable hearts. True coin is the ownership of land, and truth is the only thing worth living for.

A home is where you are, wherever you are. We carry our certainties with us. They are our homes, and in them we live fondly, imagining our lives to be truly what we consider them to be: complete.

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Mortal Thoughts We do not have the luxury of time, or the idiocy of wasting it. It little matters how we pass, merely that we pass. Mortality is the unending fact. Our freedom is our refusal to act upon it. Our courage is our fear of time, for ultimately it is the responsibility of fear that binds us to ourselves; I mean we are integral to ourselves through our unknown apprehension.

We alienate ourselves unwittingly.

To fear, even such a thing as time, is to accept autonomy; we are the procession of one, uninhibited. To fear, and to fear’s mask, courage, we present our face as we face the morning sun - with slight glances, the hooded eye. So to time we present our face as if to the setting sun: we are sorry to see it go, yet we have had done with it.

The capability of agency within a chaotic and sometimes malevolent environment is an instance of our direct and precise act of judgement - hence all reality is an artful caprice, an artifice of conception. To survive and thrive in hostile contexts is sign of accomplishment. Yet our bluster and braggadocio in the face of our minute existential corporeality, the noon sun’s passage; this is where our lives become assuaged by the animal fear of ending. To live is given to us; we must search for finality.

As there is death in the sun, so there is light in the night.

Aright, we heighten our humanity by surpassing it. It is in the tendency for illumination that we observe ourselves; it is in the misted shadows of twilight by the riverside that we discern the flow and movement of the water.

Our judgement is the point that encompasses all. It is the instant of time and the locus of space. As far as we are aware, it is impossible to falsify the proposition that reality may be the unending yet bounded unfolding of a boundless singularity.

Transformation is isomorphic to the accession of time; it is through time (hence our fear) we access space. To ground our life, we must accept death.

The singularity is the ineluctable one, which proliferates through regression, the transition from unity to multitude. This model is necessarily shallow to give us purchase. From nothing we gain finitude, the lock is ultimate. For existence we transform ourselves into reality.

Para-logically, if nothing ever exists, it exists forever, necessarily. Hence we must infer it is itself only once, in one place and time, eternally, infinitely. Our existence coordinates the multiplicity of a void, expressing itself as manifold; and thus manifest.

Man in his furtherance of knowledge has overtaken the human soul.

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This is one reason why we fear science, or more particularly the scientific method, and record. It is as humans we practice science, in its way, but as subjects we access objective reality. Objective thought is a possibility in only the realm of the imagination - which is precisely what science is.

The human imagination, our capacity for questioning, curiosity, judgement and the intuition of causality; certainly too our understanding of ourselves as rational and enlightened agents; lastly our point of contact with the world, our idiolect of thought: all these are repercussions of our existence within time, and space.

To comprehend ultimate reality, we must leave behind our selves. This is the message the one brings - it is fitting to understand, it is well to have knowledge, and it is good to see without. Certainty is not available to us, but heightened levels of approximation are.

This should be ideal for the self-recapitulation that knowledge is, and the deepening of experience that comes with understanding; also the insight that illumines our judgement.

Yet it isn’t.

Only necessity, certainty, the faculty of precision, satisfies scientific questioning.

As truth persists, so knowledge engenders faculty, and thereof we depend to understanding. This is a structural conceit of the radical character of the human thought. As such, it is correct only so far as it obscures our inquiry.

Time, mortal time our phenomena assume; and infinite time our experience grants; this is not a structure. It is not equilibrium, or a resistance to plasticity. It is the whisper of a lifetime. It alone is.

It has no moving part, no pitch and yaw, yet every event gives it rise. It is beneath no foundation, nor yet above the clouds. It is not inside us, yet it is without. Truth, revealed by time to be time’s own cast-off skin, or shroud. As the clouds defer to wind, so we reference our silence in the sign. It is as if we were no longer there.

Yet we aren’t.

All life tends to survival through tropes, patterns of learning, self-assessment and capability of function.

All life tends to the passage and promise of information; whether genetic, rhizomatic, logical or otherwise. Information resists degradation only through recapitulation: hence the image of the endless instantiation of time’s moment.

Ending and beginning are two coins, with the same side.

All life by surviving accomplishes greatness - in turning our eyes to see behind we see only our shadow, and its surrogate: time.

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To mortal qualities the heart endows misery; there is no further way, nor a lonelier. I see ahead those who have gone before, and I see they all look back to me. What it is they see? What is it they are? What is it when it is what it is?

What is it?

A painter once painted a rose, and called it a rose. Then a writer wrote a description of the painting of the rose, and then his was the rose. Then a critic called the rose into question - ‘How may this rose be called a rose, when it is merely the passing symbol of an image?’ So the rose became his.

The rose is not to be found in reality anywhere in this chain of associations, yet we can see it; we can smell its perfume. Noumena; that which is independent of our perceiving it, is the unknown rose. Phenomena - the chain. A rose in chains...

- Is no rose at all.

To return to time, like the baker folding dough, inwardly. This is the preserve of independent thought; the run of the mill, wrong-footing the expensive and invalidating self-sensibility which drives un-independent thought. It is to return as a presence, to a place where absence only is. Our rising is our mutability; our leavening is our finitude. It is as flour we pass, as bread we are born. We are time.

The unforeseen conclusion of this peroration is the recognition that as noumenal entities we are not, however, entitled to ultimate knowledge about our individual subjectivities. We posit objective reality and objective thought to legitimise and justify our subjective being; our physical subjectivity.

This is true, but the image of truth this instantiates is unfounded in objective reality; we are deeper than we can fathom on our own, deeper than we can seem.

As users of logic, and its correspondences of meaning, we construct epitomes, hierarchies, and the like; to assay an abyss - yes - whose depth’s we ourselves are. Our surrounding contexts and environments ground our reasoning’s, yet are unsounded by our rationale. It is not our nature to know; merely to seek for knowledge.

The faculty of enquiry is not in itself sufficient for a guarantee of relevance. Our minds cast about for patterns of recognition, and deepen upon reflection. Yet the face we see is subtly not our own. We can and may accurately describe reality, but it remains only this; a rendering, a forgery. Our most accurate descriptions give us power over matter, and instruments of understanding in regards to our inter-subjectivity; yet they are not themselves what we seek to describe.

How is this connected to our originary question? Mortality, leading through time to ultimate reality, the noumena; this is the pathway. As creatures of finite being, we incorporate our own existence through our completion. Yet this ending is a beginning. Our death, far from the recapitulation of forms, free from the logic of language, further than time; our death is the gateway into truth, it causes truth.

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What does this mean?

To further our understanding and not only that but to understand further the quality of our knowledge; this is accomplished by the invocation and volition of our most intimate creations: ourselves. We surround ourselves with artefacts of self-hood, and when these machines have achieved self-worth, we send them into the world as our heralds. The message is always the same; we are our master’s voice.

To then trace the signal through the miasma of individualities and social settings is difficult, if not impossible; yet the message is always understood. Our organs of thought collectively amalgamate into bodies of experience; they then challenge us and our humanity, and the questioning passes to them of necessity.

Our languages and our technologies are instruments of this questioning, yet such that they transcend our concerns and test automatically the truth’s we perceived, in their conception.

To search beyond our immediacy, our physical context, we implement strategies of accumulation; factuality, reasonable doubt, qualia - all intend meaning. Yet the meaning we seek is without comprehension; it simply makes no sense to seek for ultimate knowledge if knowing is a human faculty.

So, in our better days, we invent and incorporate logically ideal substrates, possessors of wisdom; we project our noumenal being into the excellences. This is how we recognize the possibility of apotheosis, through our physicality, our hermetic interiority. Hermetic because secretive, sealed. Interior because prior in a fashion to our seal; the fashioning is one of attention, notice.

Yet noumena recognised through this procedure - which is ongoing in each individual as well as each commonality - are distorted, untrue. This is the latent game transcendence plays with our consciousness; this is the drawing of the poison with a kiss. The wounding was long ago, in a different place. The kiss is now, and forever will be.

What are the truths this simple fact delivers? Of whom do we speak when we speak of ourselves, if not the bearer’s of truth, sapient; the truth we are is that we are; it is a truth seemingly utterly commonplace, yet immense and uncanny when considered fully. The truth’s we as human’s bear are too our bearings; the death that brings silence remains true through our tuning, our instrumentality.

They may be the foundation of all that comes, or that is to come; they may be truth’s that resonate in all times and in all places; yet they are simply phantoms, spectralities, continua that impel reasoning and compel worship precisely because they are our selves.

To be true is to be outside oneself. To be true to oneself is to be alone in the world. These are the choices. This is the judgement call.

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Time, our helpmeet and our executioner, is waiting. The scaffold is built. Yet who is it that leads us to the appointed hour? Whose is the face behind the mask of time? Whose is the sly smile of contempt?

It is your own.

‘It little matters why we pass,’ we whisper: ‘it matters only that we do.’

And in so doing, we are no more.

THE ORPHIC SELF: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE PSYCHOSES OF THE SOCIAL ANIMAL PSYCHOSIS: As clinically defined, there are two types or modes of psychoses, organic and functional. Following a traditional philosophic split – that of the mind/brain the two are opposed by this mechanism: “four… …organic psychoses (senile, presenile, arteriosclerotic, and alcoholic), are generally agreed to be the result of degenerative changes in the brain,” compared to “the other four, the so-called functional psychoses – schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis . . . involutional melancholia, and paranoia.” (Oxford Companion to the Mind, p 657) which are diseases of the mind, or the personality.

Of these four functional psychoses, schizophrenia is the most apt for our investigation, and I propose through an analysis of the configurations of a psychotic reality to explore some of the philosophical ramifications of this designated psychosis.

I hope to elucidate the process of schizophrenic withdrawal as a psychotic mechanism, describe the descent into psychosis, and with the paradigmatic representations of various authors attempt to investigate the psychotic state, which is bound up in a large part with the meaning of existence for any state of mind, and indeed the existence of consciousness itself.

My contention is that during the maelstrom of a psychotic episode, our consciousness becomes illumined by the multiplicity of what we may call a larger mind; that during an epistemological break in the knowing subject’s awareness of itself we are revealed as paradoxical creatures of illusion, and a greater consciousness achieves through us an apotheosis, and thinks for itself.

I wish to attempt to describe the progression of this psychosis, and to explore the repercussions that follow and the structures that express the psychotic journey, and then to briefly discuss the ways in which society acts on and enacts the schizophrenic personification.

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I of course in no way wish to disregard the pain and discomfort that sufferers of such psychoses endure, nor in large part do I want to discredit scientific explanations of the workings of the mind, even if that was possible: “…the majority of psychiatrists do seem to believe that the functional psychoses are true medical diseases and that, one day, physical causes will be found for them.” (Oxford Companion to the Mind, p 658) * Other commentator’s views can be found, however, and they fall into two basic camps: 1. “The functional psychoses are psychogenic, not organic, and their symptoms require interpretation in terms of their concealed meanings, not explanations in terms of cerebral dysfunction.” (The Oxford Companion to the Mind, p 658) and 2. “The functional psychoses of any single individual [is] the end result of complex and skew interactions within his family [or society] that have driven him into bizarre and incomprehensible behaviour, which is then ‘disauthenticated’ by being labelled ‘mad’ or ‘psychotic’. . . This …is a socio-political theory which locates pathology not in the body or the mind of the individual patient but in the power politics of society and the family.” (The Oxford Companion to the Mind, p658) It is these two latter theories, the interpretation of psychoses and the societal pressures surrounding and engendering psychosis that I wish to explore.

A basic presentation of psychoses would involve mention of the following symptoms: Eugen Bleuler, who was “the medical director of the Burgholzi Hospital in Zurich,” (The Oxford Companion to the Mind, p 697) believed that schizophrenia was “due to a splitting, or loss of coordination, between different psychic functions” (The Oxford Companion to the Mind, p 697) wherein “The subject ceases to experience his mental processes and his will as under his own control.”

(The Oxford Companion to the Mind, p 697) The subject may deteriorate, and “in the acute stages of the illness other hallucinations and delusions of varied kinds may be present.” (The Oxford Companion to the Mind, p 697) These hallucinations may take the form of “voices telling him what to do, commenting on or repeating his thoughts, discussing him between themselves, or threatening to kill him.” (The Oxford Companion to the Mind, p 697) If it is the case that the patient is unresponsive to the various treatments offered by the psychiatrist, the sufferer “becomes increasingly more apathetic, eccentric and isolated.” (The Oxford Companion to the Mind, p 697)

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This is the accepted view of the psychotic condition, and its degrading of the personality. In their book Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari formulate it as a three-stage process. Briefly, they describe the schizophrenic descent as a process of withdrawal, leading to a depersonalised reality: “The theory of schizophrenia is formulated in terms of three concepts that constitute its trinary schema: dissociation, autism, and space-time or being-inthe-world.” (Anti Oedipus, p 22) As I understand these three stations, we move from a dissociative split, or a cognitive schism, where the sufferer either through trauma or the pressures of the socius2 enacts a break with the consensual reality; to autism, where the orphic3 ego retreats from the persona of the schism, withdrawing into its abyssal self, becoming unresponsive to the communications of the ‘outside world’; finally reaching the third position, that of being-in-the-world4, a state of consensus between the sufferer and his psychoses, where one’s actuality is composed primarily of one’s psychotic cocoon, to be contrasted with consensual reality.

This is a state where the sufferer has created out of the delusions, and false beliefs that make up his delusions, a new world, an illusory world where he can feel once more at home.

It is an authenticity of artifice; we could say an aesthetic justification of the psychotic condition, conditional on the necessity of being-for-the-world, of conquering the uncanny through an objectification of our subjective intention to live meaningfully.

This return to the source of objective reality, by a graded degradation of faculty leading to psychotic collapse and then the re-apprehension of the external world - as a hallucinatory logos or selfhood - is a pathway to a multivalent locus of consciousness where it seems our faces as observers are reflected back to us.

It tacitly provides us with an expression of solipsistic idealism, the doctrine that the mind and reality are co-existent, as for the psychotic individual the world begins with the mind, and the mind’s role within the world.

However, it is not as proof of idealism that we will explore the psychotic experience, but as a pathway to the illumination of our minds as gateways to reality, and expressions of the totality of experience.

2

“This socius may be the body of the earth, that of the tyrant, or capital.” Anti-Oedipus, p 10 We should understand this to mean the social world at large: the community of people the psychotic individual finds himself in; the culture he is borne into. It is the mind of man.

3 “Of or concerning Orpheus or the mysteries, doctrines, etc. associated with him; oracular; mysterious.” The Concise Oxford Dictionary. My use of the term orphic is meant to refer to the mythic belief in Orpheus‟ descent into the underworld, here understood as a metaphor for the self‟s descent through autistic regression into the underworld of the abyssal self, the self that escapes awareness.

4 “The third concept [being-in-the-world] is a descriptive one, discovering or rediscovering the delirious person in his own specific world.” Anti-Oedipus, p 23

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As the psychotic recreates the form of reality in a fugue, sinks into psychotic reverie, his mind reflects its origins, deepens upon reflection; and then I would contend the way is open for it to perceive its role as an avatar of the mortal origin of all minds. * MORALITY OF TRANSFIGURATION: “’The subject is objectified by a process of division either within himself or from others’”5 “A degree of consciousness makes perfection impossible”6 The process whereby we create a morality out of the mental degradation of an individual’s psyche is not simple. A morality of transfiguration is simply the movement the psychotic individual undergoes from the dissociative state of immanence within the world to the autistic regression; a movement from reality to the inner reality of consciousness.

It is, rather than a straightforward set of moral injunctions, a relationship between the dysfunction of a psychotic personality and the issue of moral choice itself. We are said to be moral if we from our own volition evaluate, decide and act on questions of a nature that lead us into association with our fellow human beings, and their welfare.

In ordinary understanding, a person could not be moral in a vacuum, i.e. solitary, if his behaviour and his thinking did not affect anyone else. I concede of course that an individual may be said to behave morally or immorally to himself, yet standard morality is found, if anywhere, in the relation between individuals, or groups of individuals. It can be either monolithic or relative, either everywhere the same or different in each case.

The morality of the transfigured individual is not a standard form of morality.

An individual’s relationship to his own existence is where the act of transfiguration lies.

It does not depend on conditional normative morality, the posing of questions to an imagined moral arbiter, which decides on one course of action after weighing up the counterfactual consequences of that course of action.

It is a mode of being, brought about by the traumatic dissociation from consequence and traditional morality.

5 6

Quote from Foucault‟s Discipline and Punish in Louis Sass‟s Madness and Modernism, p 251 Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche, 289, p 163

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Within it, questions of good or bad fade to be replaced by issues of existence and reality, and the transformative passage of being from reality to consciousness.

It is a descent into the underworld of cognitive chaos, where a new metamorphic sensibility is forged in the crucible of hyper-reality, the more-than-real experience of the self that is overwhelmed by its own experience. It begins with the dissociative break.

Dissociation is defined thus: “Two – or more – mental processes can be said to be dissociated if they coexist or alternate without becoming connected or influencing one another.” (Oxford Companion to the Mind, p 197) To this I would add a dissociation of the individual within his milieu, the divide between the reflexive self and the objectified world around him.

The psychotic break, but as it were between the actor and the drama.

Psychiatry recognises several forms of dissociation, “sleep walking . . . trances, post hypnotic suggestions, fugues . . . loss of memory . . . and split, dual or multiple personality.” (Oxford Companion to the Mind, p 197) Whilst all these forms of dissociation are pertinent to our investigation – particularly the states of trance and fugue – the last named, multiple personality, has a greater resonance in the context of our theory, for while clinically rare it captures a series of associations very much in line with our contention that the mind is both a unity and a multitude: “dissociation of the personality, is a puzzling and, indeed, disturbing phenomenon, since it calls into question a basic assumption we all make about human nature, namely that for every body there is but one person.” (Oxford Companion to the Mind, p 197) This multiplication of ego represents for us the epistemological break, the cleavage between reality and self that leads to the full-blown onset of psychosis.

The morality of transfiguration is engendered in the ultimate alignment, between both dissociation of the self and that self’s self-awareness, and the experience of moral uncertainty by the passing self.

That is, between the self that is separated from itself and its knowledge of itself as a moral agent in the first place, and the conflicting experiences of the self, as it regresses, as an example of a moral agency. We could say the morality of transfiguration is an example of the distinction between type and token, agent and agency, in regard to the moral conduct of the psychotic self.

It is a disruptive code of paradoxical beliefs in a wider moral consciousness, itself a product of the psychotic rupture between self and selfhood. It is presaged in the experiences of the multiple selves that the psychotic becomes, and also by certain philosophical impressions:

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“It was Kant who decisively introduced a new kind of self-consciousness, a dual self-consciousness in which human subjectivity came to be understood - and potentially, experienced – as, at the same time, both a knowing subject and a primary object of knowing.” (The Paradoxes of Delusion, p 80) We pass from reality to hyper-reality by “…ceding one’s epistemological centrality and becoming a mere object.” (The Paradoxes of Delusion, p 123) The self is transfigured, and through the self, morality. Reality, the everchanging reality of the world, subsists, holds its ground, as the subject and its experiences, within a world objectified by that subject’s psychoses.

We could describe this as an inversion; the objectified world becomes the self, reified by consciousness yet alienated by awareness of this consciousness.

This is illustrated in Louis Sass’s comments on the objectification of perception: “This combination of reification with alienation, of substantialization of inner sensory experiences with the feeling that one’s own experiences are not really one’s own, is particularly evident when it is the very act of perception that is objectified.” (The Paradoxes of Delusion, p 92) As a creature of meaning, the psychotic individual brings forth meaning from the heart of its self. This can be expressed methodically as a dynamic between the orphic self and a subterranean other, we could say a conversation between Apollo and Dionysus, where Apollo represents the sane, clear, harmonious self, and the Dionysian self is understood to be self-intoxicated by madness, chthonic, and concerned with the irruption of power by whatever means. (This method is akin to knowing all things, at one primal moment, from which every form of knowledge knows itself knowing, forming knowledge from form.)

This is, I would contend, the heart of the dissociative self.

The moment of psychotic break and the eternal moment of self-knowledge are one and the same. The ‘I’ we recognise as our self is here represented by the divine ‘I’, the fundamental ego that is the emblem of the god who rules, who says “I am that I am”, the principium individuationis.7 The subterranean ‘I’ is the ‘other’, the shadow of knowledge, the Dionysian self that is the emblem of psychosis. The cognitive break occurs in the play of forces between ‘I’ and ‘other’, discharging the tensions of the self’s interplay with the socius.

The formalism of psychoses echoes the attempt by sufferers of psychotic episodes to describe their experiences as epistemological breaks: as the knowing subject recedes, multiplicity reveals itself. Our knowledge is a hide from which Panmorphic Iao8 observes us.

7

“We might even describe Apollo as the glorious divine image of the principium individuationis” The Birth of Tragedy, p16. The principle of individuation, the knowing subject, the „ego‟.

8 “Iao, the cursed god, generally identified with the god of Genesis” Visions of Excess, George Bataille, p 49

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And who are we? One who is we.

Our standard morality is divined by reference to the lineaments of culture, the socius, it is concerned to establish as to whether culture has a moral reference, a normative ethic, or drives morality before it like a bushfire drives butterflies, indispensably, ungrammatically, yet necessarily.

When we confront a moral problem, we form a compact with time, and become realer than before. By this I mean we are grounded in the reality of time’s passage for us as individual selves by the necessity of making a moral decision.

Ultimately a choice will have to be made between the many options available to us.

We become realer than before because the very fact of being a moral agent deepens our experience. It is in those moments of aporia9 that we really live, we truly affirm our existence.

At these moments we have in mind a multiple number of solutions to whatever moral conundrum affects us, held in a state of paradox by hyponoia 10, i.e. allegorical mythic hints, or echoes of unreal events.

Normally, this state of paradox is resolved by the act of judgement, the instance of moral choice.

However, for our psychotic, this paradox is the sign and signal of the subterranean ‘other’s attack, through the symptoms of psychosis, on the self that is well. It remains unresolved by normal consideration.

It is through the psychotic break’s generation of the reality of the subjective as an instance of unresolved moral paradox that we find the schizoid self. Society says this self is internally incoherent, dissociated. A moral conundrum demands resolution. To be seen as sane, a moral decision must be rationally arrived at, certainly, but more importantly there must be a decision. Sanity, like the socius, demands action, closure. It is a measure of the sanity of an individual that he or she is able to make decisions, to practice choice.

However, for our investigation of psychosis, the instantiation of the self through transfiguration rather than decision is our exemplar of morality.

Our transfigured moral judgement is an act greater than the self it presumes. It is the opening of an act of engagement rather than a prescription for moral truth.

Traditionally, there are two opposing positions we can hold in regard to morality.

9

“A seemingly insoluble difficulty; a puzzle or paradox; a condition of being at a loss what to think” The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy 10 “‟Giving a sign‟, then, means uttering one thing that in turn signifies another – what the Greeks called hyponoia, a hint or allegory.” The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, p 123

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Firstly there is the stark absolute division of reality into two camps, right and wrong, with the moral agent damned or saved depending on his decision, assuming he has free will. This is the morality of rules and laws of conduct, enforced by an appeal to ideological authority.

Then there is relativism, the morality of the point of view. Here, there is no immutable code, but the perspective of the individual. What is right for me may not be right for you, or what is right in one situation may not be right in another.

In contrast, the morality of transfiguration depends on the judgemental attitudes remaining unresolved.

The sense of a moral position in this light depends on the very capacity for judgement itself; itself under attack by the fetishization of culture and the disintegration of the personality in the turmoil of the transfiguration from subject to object.

It is during the act of judgement that the multiplicity of our judgemental selves is engendered, coalesce. These innumerable selves converse according to their own logics, forming a dissociative subjectivity, a traumatic reality of schism which entails its own dissolution in the psychotic self.

From one to many and then to return to one, this is the transfiguration of the self that gives us the dialectic of psychosis: to reach an ethical decision denies the proposition, “I am worthy of morality.” * ETHICS OF TRANSGRESSION: “Mans character is his fate.”11 “The advanced product has renounced consumption”12 Through an understanding of the nature of morality, the quality of every experiencing self becomes apparent as the truth of its character. A moral decision subverts morality, by possessing a truth beyond morality. The truth beyond morality is the comprehension that morality has no truth. If I give my life to save another’s, this sacrifice has no truth value as an objective reality outside the subjective moral compass of the protagonists, and then possibly the wider world of human interaction.

11 12

The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, fragment CXIV, P81 The Culture Industry, p 35

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For the psychotic then there are no moral facts, and so it would seem no possibility of transgression. Truth is a subjective construct used as a vehicle for the subject’s projection of will, moral truth doubly so. How, then, are we to understand the ethics of transgression?

We must at this point say most strongly that our transgressive actor is not a criminal, either against the state, or nature, or his fellow human beings. This is not the meaning of transgression. Our transgression is the psychotic individuation practised by the disturbed self, a transgression against the real.

The real for us is defined as the socius, the greater world of consensus that is manufactured by the ideological command of the dictates of culture itself.

This is a mirror for capital, the power of commerce to decide through the commodification of culture the objectivity that the wider world practices as sanity. As the psychotic episode deepens, as the regression from consensus draws the subject into transgression, the psychotic individual becomes a symbol for the transgression that capital practices on a wider scale as the destruction of the individual as an end in itself.

Culture becomes a department of capital.

Theodor Adorno recognises this process as a consumption of the individual: “The sacrifice of individuality, which accommodates itself to the regularity of the successful, the doing of what everybody does, follows from the basic fact that in broad areas the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardized production of consumption goods. But the commercial necessity of connecting this identity leads to the . . . official culture’s pretence of individualism which necessarily increases in proportion to the liquidation of the individual.” (The Culture Industry, p 40) Our transgressive ethic is in this regard the autistic regression from a society that in its embrace of consumptive attitudes denies its own essence as an assembly of individual actors. The individual is ‘liquidated’ by the consensus of individuality.

The Autist and the Individual are metaphors for each other, one in the grip of a retreat from the world and the other merely an expression of that world’s concerns.

It may be objected that no matter how society effects the individual subject, the sanity of that subject remains open to evaluation by the normal methods: reality testing, concordance with the “so-called first rank symptoms of schizophrenia”, 13 (The Paradoxes of Delusion, p 22) etc...

13

“a set of specific hallucinations and delusions that the psychiatrist Kurt Schneider . . . believed to be especially characteristic of schizophrenic patients.” The Paradoxes of Delusion, p 22

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This objection stands as long as we dismiss the retardation of culture by the socius, and the concentration of our ontological status into the frames of reference of the producer/consumer hybrid. We will explore more fully the role of the psychotic individual in an alienated culture later, but for now the parallels between psychosis and the all-consuming individual can be seen in this quote from Louis Sass: “The most autistic delusional system may be uncannily reminiscent of the public world, mirroring social practices and mores in the innermost chambers of the self.” (Madness and Modernism, p 246) The autist’s retreat from the world is a transgression, against the self that is validated by the societal pressure to conform.

This contentious statement so at odds with the accepted explanation of psychosis needs to be seen in the light of the ‘dis-authentification’ of the individual’s experience’s as an individual, and the corruption of culture that is the necessary condition of the ‘consumer society’. As Adorno says: “This is what transcendence is in mass culture. The poetic mystery of the product, in which it is more than itself, consists in the fact that it participates in the infinite nature of production…” (The Culture Industry, p 63) I hope to show that the psychotic individual is the commodity par excellence, the standard by which to judge culture and the socius itself. Madness is the ultimate product of a society that in itself rejects madness (as unproductive).

The psychotic individual is therefore the sign and signal of a culture that cannot recognize itself as insane.

Thus, through the transgressive structure of the autist, we can conceive of an ethic that counterbalances the psychoses of society with transgression against the self. The self for us is a metaphorical example of the social animal’s need for acceptance.

To transgress against the self is to question the sanity of the socius. Through the experience of psychosis the product ‘man’ transcends his fate, that of conformity to an ethic of consumption.

How does this happen?

Transgression, as a means of initiating the moral transfiguration, the leap across the abyss to sacral soil, depends in the main on renouncing one’s identity as a social function, and in the same moment realizing the ‘abyssal I’ that communicates in the transgressive transformation from subject to object.

Transgression is simply the acceptance of rapture as a means to the kingdom of ends. It demands we break our pact with the code of semblance, of structure, and embrace the communion of flux.

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Dionysus here accepts his fate.

We must renounce ours to free ourselves from the fear of transgression. * INTELLECT OF GRACE: “I am all that is, that was, and that shall be, and no mortal hath raised the veil from before my face”14 “The ‘death of God’ (the God who guarantees the identity of the responsible self) opens up the soul to all its possible identities…”15 At the moment of primal knowledge signified by the psychotic state of being-inthe-world we encounter multiplicity. The descent of the psychotic subject, from the dissociative separation of self from reality, leads to the re-construction of the world as a delusional narrative.

The psychotic uses the only material he has to construct this reality, his own subjective experiences. The consequence of his exposure to the objectified components of his self is an immediate knowledge of the innumerable subjective quanta of judgement, where each ‘selflet’ is exposed as the self, by itself and autonomous, yet a mere function of the whole.

The dissociation within the ‘ego’ that was the result of an unnamed trauma becomes the basis for the re-construction of the real. Here the psychotic subject hides, in the seething cloud of being’s possibilities, entranced by the lure that is the self’s recognition that it is self. An understanding of this paradoxical dissolution and completion of the subject is provided by the comments of Deleuze and Guattari on the case of Nietzsche’s descent into madness: “There is no Nietzsche-the-self, professor of Philology, who suddenly loses his mind and supposedly identifies with all sorts of strange people; rather, there is the Nietzschean subject who passes through a series of states, and who identifies these states with the names of history: ‘every name in history is I . . .’” (AntiOedipus, p 21) This para-mental I, the Panmorphic Iao, ensouls the self that is at one and the same time delusional being-in-the-world and the sacred knowing subject. The psychotic self re-organised into a multiplicity of selves is an analogue for the way in which the collective ‘names of history’ contextualises the individual.

Notwithstanding infinite variations in character, each mind is the same mind, each subject a fragment of a greater subjectivity.

14 15

Critique of Judgement, p 179, footnote 1.

Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, p 57

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My contention is that psychosis is a gateway to a greater consciousness, one that can never know itself except through the individuation of the psychotic.

Knowledge is a faculty of the individual, whereas our psychotic plays host to multitudes. It is as a multiplicity that the actor realises the truth of the subjective. The previously monist knowing subject becomes objectified by the receipt of knowledge, and thus many.

This is the death of God. God dies in our souls so we can know God. The logos defines itself as meaningful only through sacrificing itself.

This leads to the paradox of the one and the many: “The truth hitherto ignored . . . is that the many apparently independent and conflicting things we know are really one, and that, on the other hand, this one is also many.” (The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, p 148) We should consider this paradox as a dynamic interaction between the two thematic representations of the psychotic self, the conflict between the rational self and the ‘other’. The ‘other’, or subterranean ‘I’, inspired by the rapture of the dying God, multiplies itself through the sacrifice of its unity. This is symbolised by the fragmentation of the psychotic’s individuality through an objectification of their self-awareness. This offering creates an instance of that multiplicity envisioned by the psychotic subject at its moment of paradox.

This paradox is charged with a multitude of voices, and each speaks for its own remission, by pardoning selfhood. This multitude can be seen through the metaphor of the pineal eye: “The eye, at the summit of the skull, opening on the incandescent sun to contemplate it in a sinister solitude16, is not a product of the understanding, but is instead an immediate existence; it opens and blinds itself like a conflagration, or like a fever that eats the being, or more exactly, the head.” (Visions of Excess, p 82) The self of the psychotic is ‘not a product of the understanding’, but like the eye an ‘immediate existence’, it ‘opens and blinds itself’ as through the psychotic’s objectification of self-awareness the self sacrifices itself. The one denies the many, yet the many can only speak through the one. Each voice within the multitude speaks with a weight equal to any other, yet the overall voice is one of serene regard.

This recreation of the world is the resurrection of the self. This is the intellect of grace, the co-existence of the one and the many in the mind of the psychotic, the paradox of singularity within a chaotic system:

16

Nietzsche, speaking in the context of his optimum physiology for writing, remarks: “To suffer from solitude is likewise an objection – I have always suffered only from the „multitude‟” Ecce Homo, p 37

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“By identifying the entirety of Being with their own mental essence, such patients may, in fact, have achieved . . . the threefold wish of absolute consciousness: the wish to be total, encompassing all points of view; to be transparent, with all elements of the self and the world appearing as objects of awareness; and to be entirely self-sufficient, without dependence on either the body or the social milieu.” (Madness and Modernism, p 299) This is also the moment of depersonalisation 17, when the reality of the sufferer is at its most vulnerable. It must not be forgotten that these intra-personal dynamics give rise to many unfortunate individuals who cannot regain their sanity or anything like it, no matter whether or not they are able to extrapolate from their diagnoses their fate, or explain themselves fully to a psychological professional.

This process of psychic withdrawal can all too often lead to the complete collapse of an already weakened psyche, where “the reality of the object, insofar as it is produced by desire, is thus a psychic reality,” (Anti-Oedipus, p 25) and as such enough to “provoke that ‘horror of . . . extremity wherein the soul and body ultimately perish’ (the autist)” (Anti-Oedipus, p 24) This thought-death is the real reason why we fear the transports of psychosis.

How can we speak of grace to those on the other side of the reflexive divide, those who suffer from the annihilation of their mind; those who never achieve a resurrection of the self?

Is our intellect of grace the concerted efforts of a multitude of minds to escape self-destruction through a process of individuation, or is it a shallow example of the metaphoricity of the psychotic state itself?

It seems that sanity is undeniably preferable to the rapturous embrace of delusional thinking. “’Of all the misfortunes that afflict humanity, the condition of madness is still one of those that with most reason call for pity and respect; it is for this condition that our attentions must with most reason be prodigal; when there is no hope of a cure, how many means still remain that can afford these unfortunates at least a tolerable existence.’” (Madness and Civilization, p 224) Yet this expression of enlightenment, of the soothing clear gaze of the rational observer who knows sanity, who is a function of the social regimen of sane conduct, a functionary of the cadre of the real, denies in its acceptance of the standards of rationality the superhuman need for transfiguration through transgression.

We have through objectification of the standards of right conduct made a logical error, placing rationality before thought, and good sense before sense itself.

17

“When associated with hallucinations and delusions…depersonalisation has been regarded as characteristic of true schizophrenia and as a warning of disintegration of the personality.” Oxford Companion to the Mind, p 186

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Though undeniably a tragedy for the victim, psychosis should be understood as itself a personification of morality, a space of being where multitudes conceal the work of one actor.

As an individual’s understanding stands as the harmonious interactions of the cognitive self, so an individual’s intellect is the rationalisation of the community of thought. The psychotic experience, the cognitive hallucinations of logos itself, independent of the allowances of physical expediency, draws into its depths the very self undergoing this psychosis18.

Here we encounter again the defining paradox of our interpretation of grace: the one and the many.

The solitudes of the psychotic experience are the immutable consequences of the autist’s being-in-the-world. As the reconstructive affects of the personality express delusional beliefs about the nature of reality, the prison of the self becomes more and more apparent.

Both the psychogenic and the societal inceptions of schizophrenic reality support and strengthen the conclusion that the psychotic is on his own, simultaneously a creature of his own making and a gaol in which he cannot hide.

As Foucault says concerning the night of the sleep of reason, “…in that night, man communicates with what is deepest in himself, and with what is most solitary.”

(Madness and Civilization, p 266) Yet this solitude is to be contrasted with the multiplicity of the intellect of grace.

The slave and the sovereign perform the same I. As the psychotic individual is alone in his delusions, he is also the gateway to the sum of his experiences; the limits of his extremity are the characters of his fate.

In the uniqueness of transcendence we find the ubiquity of experience, “…the sacred is only a privileged moment of communal unity.”(Visions of Excess, p 242) * THE FETISHIZATION OF CULTURE: It is our privilege as observers of the psychoses to conduct ourselves as objectively as possible. Yet one repercussion of the delineation of the morality of transfiguration, the ethics of transgression and the intellect of grace is a renewed interest in the socius, the consensual world of paradigmatic thinking.

18

“The limitlessness of the psyche is then to be understood in terms of limitless depth.” The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, p 129

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Reality for the human animal represents itself through the social concord of rational beliefs, and the interpersonal consensus regarding the state of the world. ‘Outside’ and ‘inside’ are clearly defined, within the realm of the majority of humanity at least, if not in the areas of scientific or philosophical research into consciousness. One of the main psychiatric tests used to decide an individual’s sanity is reality testing, where the manifestations of the individual’s psychosis are assumed to be at variance with the manifest reality of the investigators: “Thus, in DSM III-R19, psychotic is defined as a term indicating ‘gross impairment in reality testing’, a condition in which the individual ‘incorrectly evaluates the accuracy of his or her perceptions and thoughts and makes incorrect inferences about external reality, even in the face of contrary evidence’” (Madness and Modernism, p 270) There is a – sometimes extreme – dissociation between the reality expressed by societal norms and the ‘subjective’ reality of the psychotic. Schizophrenic patients can be said to suffer from a retreat into Primary Process thinking, a foundational state of mind that leads to “the suspension of ‘higher intellectual faculties,’ and perhaps to the liberation of an archaic or infantile mentality that ignores the fundamental Law of Contradiction (that something cannot at the same time be both x and not-x) and that allows the most disparate urges and impulses to share the stage of conscious awareness.” (Madness and Modernity, p 8) Yet as we have seen, the psychotic can in his or her delirium embody certain uncomfortable truths about the nature of reality for the supposedly sane, and indeed the nature of that society which judges the psychotic individual as insane.

Whilst keeping in mind the irrational nature of schizophrenic illness, and the evident dysfunction of those individuals who are diagnosed as schizophrenic, the main thrust of our argument has been the insight into subjectivity and the culture that engenders it that the psychotic experience can offer us.

This section will be an exploration of the psychoses of the socius, the alienation of modernity, or that of which the parallel with psychosis can afford us understanding.

Alienation is the extremity of the socius, yet also the root of the societal conscription that draws the individual into itself. I hope to show that the process of socialisation forms an analogue with the structure of psychotic attack.

There is a radical break, then a retreat from reality, to a reconstructed world of delusional beliefs, wherein the alienated individual is found to be just as much of a construct as the schizophrenic patient.

Our culture is our asylum, and conventional mores represent the model of treatment proscribed for the sick individual, he who transgresses.

19

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, revised 1987

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As Foucault says: “The Asylum sets itself the task of the homogeneous rule of morality, its rigorous extension to all those who tend to escape from it.”

(Madness and Civilization, p 245) This process begins, as we have said, with alienation. Originally meaning “the transfer of ownership or title of a piece of property” (Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought) as well as “a quality of mental derangement or insanity,” (Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought) this concept was pioneered in a philosophical context by Hegel, for whom it was “the process whereby mind ‘objectifies’ itself in thought.” (Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought) As a dialectical movement this parallels our morality of transfiguration, and the radical dissociation that begins the descent into madness, as the psychotic subject objectifies himself through self-reflexive awareness. This meaning was taken up by Marx, who as well as using alienation to mean objectification, also used it as a synonym for estrangement (Entfremdung) and “Entausserung, or the sale of oneself as a commodity.” (Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought) The socius demands that each individual internalise the values of commodification, and replicates himself as a function of that socius. To be accepted in the community of capital, we must become commodities, and as commodities place ourselves in the care of the ideology of consumption, where there is “a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” (Capital, p 72) This fetishization of the individual as a product himself mirrors the psychotic fetish of the subjective, the ‘product’ of the schizophrenic descent.

As our interiority is made manifest by the production of ourselves as agents of rationality, as something to be consumed, so the trauma of alienation is objectified as the unreal state of ‘being-in-the-world’; the delusional array of beliefs that comprises the artificial world.

Culture in its authentic form is the free expression of a people’s artistic and social necessity, it is the dream of the waking self, the reorganization of the concerns and preoccupations of the inner life.

The artefacts and principles of modern and post-modern society are in some regards the very opposite of the meaning of culture, and this is illustrated by the journey of the psychotic from alienated objectivity to the psychogenic establishment of simulated subjectivity.

It is through the tropes of modern culture, consumption above all, and the indoctrinaire appetite for the objects of consumption; that modern individuals are sanitised and alienated by the fetishistic character of consumption and its totality as a relation between products.

Adorno relates how the assumption of reality as objective truth unaffected by reciprocal alienation between its subjects is illustrated in the simulacra of the advertisement: 54

“For a while, an English brewery used for propaganda purposes a billboard that bore a deceptive likeness to one of the whitewashed brick walls which are so numerous in the slums of London and the industrial cities of the North. Properly placed, the billboard was barely distinguishable from a real wall. On it, chalk white, was a careful imitation of awkward writing. The words said: ‘What we want is Watney’s’” (The Culture Industry, p 48) In this example, not only reality is simulated by the meaningfulness of the artificial world, but the appetite for culture itself, and then, through culture, meaning. A cultural artefact – graffiti – the sign of transgression, of overabundant expression, is annexed by the socius as a method of encouraging consumption.

Creativity, the practice of imagination, is co-opted into the realm of commodification, in the same way as the configuration of being-in-the-world is a form of praxis20 when faced with the social or mental trauma of dissociation. The very form of alienation from the world and our communities of thought within the world is transposed into a register of commerciality; not only is reality taken away from the social being but the dream of reality is itself also denuded, emptied of content by the aggressive aggrandisement of capital and its organ of exclusion, the contract of value.

An individual who accepts these tokens of association becomes delirious with meaning, is overtaken by a surfeit of hyper-reality as overwhelming as the psychotic’s transubstantiation of subjectivity into objectivity: “Everyone who enters into a relationship of exchange with the value form exits the House of Being and commits himself to a relationship of obligation with a Stranger who has no Name and who cannot ever be repaid.” (A Study in Cultural Metaphysics, p 104) Compare this evocation of the individual citizen’s role within the empire of commerce with this description of a madman taking part in a tea party held especially for patients in the asylum of Samuel Tuke, a Quaker Physician at the head of his own asylum21.

Tuke’s description of the simulated reality of social niceties forces us to recognize the parallels between the two worlds, and the psychotic’s obligation to a stranger who may be himself: “…it is the organization around the madman of a world where everything would be like and near him, but in which he himself would remain a stranger, the Stranger par excellence who is judged not only by appearances but by all that they may betray and reveal in spite of themselves.” (Madness and Civilization, p 237)

20

“Action, activity . . . the free, conscious, creative, essentially human activity” The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy 21 See “Madness and Civilization”, Ch. 9, „The Birth of the Asylum‟

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Thus both the psychotic and the individual within the socius are strangers to one another, and to themselves, and are bound by the ceremony of capital in a relationship with the stranger who is themselves, alienated and reified by consensus. The doubling of reality in the asylum through the simulation of afternoon tea, within the simulated world that is the asylum, as a rite of social cognisance, duplicates both the construction of the psychotic patient’s being-inthe-world to replace the reality of the previously objective and the alienated pretence of culture that is the meaning of the socius and the meaning of those lives lived within the socius. Objectivity is the mask of the manipulation of subjectivity through ‘reality’.

If an individual is alienated from his own life he ceases to be alive, to be sensuously at home in his self, much like the psychotic subject adrift in his delirium: “A world that cannot be loved to the point of death . . . represents only selfinterest and the obligation to work” (Visions of Excess, p 179) Self-interest is understood here to mean the death of the rational community and the establishment of the competitive model, the re-casting of the self as an engine of ambition, of profit, of acceptance. This is paralleled by the absolution of self-knowledge in the wake of psychoses; as the self recedes, the definition of the self as constituted by knowledge is overtaken by the tumultuous invocation of being. The illusion of the knowing subject becomes for the psychotic as well as the modern human animal an emblem of that self which practices illusion, the illusion of the self: Panmorphic Iao, the Panoptic I; receding to reveal the multitude that is represented by the chorus of voices that is the intellect of grace.

Yet in the body of the socius, this identity is transformed into an identity of consumption, a sickness that is its own carrier, the commodity of the ‘genuine article’.

The pantomime of social interaction and the psychotic subject serve to illuminate the truth of consciousness; that which Nietzsche discerned: “My idea is clearly that consciousness actually belongs not to man’s existence as an individual but rather to the community and herd-aspects of his nature.” (The Gay Science, p 213) The knowing subject is a creation of the socius, a construct of individuation as the allegory of the real. What is revealed when we discard the knowing subject?

That the nature of society is the nature of the asylum, and the nature of the self within that society is the psychotic nature of the abyssal self, the orphic ego that descends into the underworld of being to bring to light the nature of reality; that for the self it is not real.

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