Saying the Unsayable Every Time

When the unspeakable occurs, where do we turn for answers?

Whenever a politician or pundit — the two rusty gears of the great national blah-blah-chatter-machine — informs us that a shooting is an inarticulable tragedy — an unspeakable event — one can be sure this statement will be followed by excessive explanation.

In the wake of yet another mass shooting event in the US, journalists struggle to find answers as to how or why these keep occurring. Perhaps too many people have guns, or America is too violent, or maybe we’ve just lost our faith in God.

Through all this chatter, one answer is consistently appealing to all sides: the killers are crazy, psychos, lunatics, deranged, deluded, psychotic, mentally ill, Mad. Trump only said what everyone was thinking: Devin Patrick Kelley is another symbol of a national mental health crisis.

CNN reporters Emanuella Grinberg and Eliott C. McLaughlin believe that “the warning signs were there.” [1] Which warning signs? “Domestic violence. Sexual assault accusations. Animal cruelty. Escape from a mental health facility. Threatening text messages. An obsession with guns and mass shootings” they tell us.

This continued obsession in the biographical, the subjective, or the personal, means that the systemic and the historical will once again be swept aside. Hegemonic normative systems can only reproduce themselves if they can prove that the incident of extremity and ultra-violence are explainable solely by reference to the particular and not an expression of the system itself, even if it is an extreme one.

With this in mind, there is something profoundly disturbing about that list from CNN above. Each characteristic is listed as if we the readers ought to register them as Other, as abnormal and incorrect.

Their statement contains two dangerous errors in this regard: 1. none of these forms of ultra-aggression and terror are “outside” to Western values, rather, they are integral to them; and 2. escaping from a mental hospital does not belong on a list of assaults. Wrong first because they fail to see how these forms of aggression and hostility towards perceived weakness grew out of his experience as a normal, white, straight male, and not as some bizarre abnormality. Wrong also because they lump these forms of aggression in with the drive to escape from the controlling environment of the mental hospital.

The smooth integration of this supposed proof of mental instability and abnormality in their list is a sly trick and one which serves a specific purpose: if they can point a finger at the psychos, they can continue to ignore the violence we all let fester within and around us.

More Than Just Normal

We find ourselves incapable of reading Devin Patrick Kelley’s “warning signs” as exactly that, as warning signs. Rather, they seem like the normal objects of our collective psychic environment. We see it like this: the nice, pleasant, normal, environs we live in, and the nice, pleasant, normal young men who most confidently move around in them were produced through acts of terror and aggression; they maintain themselves through these, and the act of locating the source of these hostile tendencies in the “mad” is a part of this structure.

White identity was/is produced through both legal and discursive acts of separation on the one hand and acts of performative domination and actual terror and destruction on the other. It was constructed in the Plantation era to separate the low, the nonhuman or partly human, from the high, the Whites. When whiteness came under threat — whether from slave insurrections, mixed race revolts in the pre-revolutionary era, or black organizing in the 60s — it was reconstituted with acts of extreme violence: mass executions, bombings in the South, re-enslavement and public torture. These events clearly had a performative and demonstrative element: they demonstrated that whiteness was untouchable and perceived encroachments would not be tolerated.

Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch, wrote extensively on the physical and psychical violence committed against women in the construction of what might be called the “modern” form of Western Patriarchy. [4] Patriarchy for her isn’t some wisp or spook, nor a spectral abstraction used only for pointing out the meanness of men. Federici shows that it’s a real material process of degradation and terror leveled against the autonomy and abnormal behavior of women. This process didn’t occur merely through forms of discourse, but also through the physical destruction of medicines, degrading representations of women, the burning of “witches.” In other words, through systemic terror and aggression.

Terror — the severing of limbs, the wanton violation and destruction of bodies, the performance of absolute domination and control — is more than just a normal part of our normal value systems (what many call White Supremacy and Patriarchy), it is the ritual element required for their continued existence. It may be extreme to hurt animals, to beat your wife, or to obsess about tools of murder, but it isn’t abnormal, not here, not in the West.

The designation of a class of “mentally ill” is part of this structure itself. As Erma VIP did in her critique of Susan Du’s City Pages article on strippers, we must ask ourselves who benefits from the further stigmatization of the mad? Who will suffer on account of Kelley’s portrayal as “mentally ill?” Probably not us (Sasha), at least not directly. Because we look the way we do (i.e. white and male), our abnormalities are not often read in public (although not never) as “dangerous schizoid behavior” but more often as drunkenness, or just weird. Certainly, we could suffer on account of this perception. It all depends on how we are seen in the moment, and Kelley’s portrayal as “crazy” won’t help.

Of course, that doesn’t yet take into account how these public accusations fit into a psychic economy. The self-representation of our differences as illness and the self-doubt around our own “threat potential” are not nothing. Concern over our “condition” (at this point of cognition, the condition is already separate and no longer simply a part of who we are) and whether or not we are perhaps actually a danger, or will be perceived as one, means that we, and others in our position, will be less likely to want to reach out and either share experience or seek care when needed. As some begin to publicly argue that increasing the rate of forced commitment is necessary to solve the “mental health crisis,” suicide suddenly becomes, in the moment of distress, a more tenable and attractive option.

But “madness” and “mental illness” themselves are constructed and traversed by contradictory lines of race and gender. The further stigmatization of the umbrella group “the mentally ill” will only foster the mentality of fear, which makes a life-or-death situation out of the encounter with a “schizo” or “psycho.”

Whiteness, in the context of the insecurities it itself has reproduced through its exclusions, lives in perpetual fear of retribution for its history. The darker the skin, the more likely the White Man will feel himself existentially threatened, and the more likely he is to call the police, who, as protectors of white society and its values, themselves perceive danger at every turn.

Even though Kelley himself was white, the “mentally ill” appellation cascades hierarchically downward, increasing the chance for others — those who are already primarily under threat — of being even more heavily policed or murdered.

Calling someone “mentally ill” is also a favorite weapon of misogynists, who see difference or vulnerability in expression as further proof of feminine weakness. Men like Devin Patrick Kelley think difference is a sign of inferiority and justify their own acts of terror with this fact.

Unfortunately, it isn’t as easy as saying “we all must love each other” or “why can’t we just accept everyone for how they are?” We can’t take refuge in beloved universals. “Civilized” is a word-weapon we Westerners have used to elevate ourselves above and separate us out from those we see as beneath us: the savages, the primitive, the diseased and pathological. [2] “Humanity,” as Achille Mbembe has shown in his Critique of Black Reason, despite its seeming universality and biological foundation, was historically never supposed to represent all living things who talked and lived in communities. “Modern ideas of liberty, equality, and democracy are . . . historically inseparable from the reality of slavery” he writes [3]. This has been true since the Ancient Greeks established the form of government we still claim to practice today. Democracy for all! Except, of course, for women, slaves, children, the insane, foreigners.

The understandable anger of those who ask why white men are never labelled terrorist quickly turns into a demand that they be seen as such. In this way, they perform the same universalizing gesture but in reverse: we are united in seeing his behavior as so abhorrent and inexplicable that we cast him out from humanity. But in the West, terror is all too human, and the more we search for “terrorists,” the less we search around and within for the foundational source of that terror.

The radical acceptance of difference means being capable of being silent, of listening, of not over-hastily subsuming the other in your ideas about them. It means valuing receptivity above performance and communicability. Those excluded from the beloved universals have been forced to learn this skill. The so-called crazy people must do it, lest they get locked up again.

It’s time the ones doing the excluding do so as well.

Why We Love Throwing Lunatics to the Dogs

Sometimes a “progressive” journalist will meekly question the dominant belief that the schizo will kill you, flay you, eat your face off, or whatever. He or she will surely cite statistical reports from the Annals of Epidemiology or the US Department of Health and Human Services that show that only a tiny percentage of violent crime is attributable to those with a mental illness diagnosis.

We refuse to play this game. The mad, the “mentally ill,” as we are now called, do not exist as a permanent, stable group.

The mad have been women who wanted to escape what had become a boring, domestic hell. Maybe they wanted to sleep with other women. Maybe they didn’t want kids. Maybe they hated their husbands. Maybe they altered or even refused the gender assigned to them at birth.

The mad have been children who found it impossible to sit still in school. Maybe their teacher was unbearable. Maybe she found his lessons degrading, insensitive, and pointless. Maybe he didn’t want to hear about the accomplishments of Europe any longer.

The mad have been black and native men and women who decided to resist unlivable or unacceptable conditions whether in 1960s urban centers in America [2], or in New Zealand [3]. This is a global phenomenon. Maybe they were too loud, too black, too scary, or too strange to be understood by the white doctors who ultimately decided who was mad and who wasn’t.

The mad have been those experiencing extreme mental or physical distress who require care. Not the expert care that originates in the minds of those who pathologize them, but situated care, deeply aligned with their world and their desired place in that world. The exact same kind of care we all need.

Yes, we need to talk about specific intersections of mental health and care, but not uncritically. By automatically assuming the existence of “the mentally ill,” the criteria for identifying them, and the need for “treatment,” and by not asking any questions about who gets to decide who is mad, about the effects of stigma, about the various labels’ historical functions, about the power relations within which they exist, about the structure and formation of the medical knowledge that make up their foundations, or about the diverse experiences of those who receive these labels, even the most progressive calls for “care” can unthinkingly reproduce power relations of domination, scientific racism, gender policing, and the isolation of the suffering.

The crisis is not insanity, nor mental illness. The crisis is our normal way of thinking and acting itself; its hegemony and our inability to admit the legitimacy of another way of thinking and living. The mad have been those who think differently, who have organized their thoughts in their own way. This act of insolence must be punished in the eyes of the normal, hence they are a natural scapegoat for society’s most extreme perversions.

The mad, whether as insolent housewife, as rebellious subject, as “bad kid”, as sufferer, or as abnormal freak are not essentially the unreasonable, the nonspeaking, the abnormal. We represent another kind of reason, another way of speaking, a different norm, and for that reason we must be represented as the truly Outside, as unpredictable violent brutes capable of random violence.

We are a threat, true, but not because of a heightened physical capacity for murder or violation of consent — that belongs more so to Jeff and John down the street — but because we live according to other standards, whatever they may be.

Notes

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/06/us/devin-kelley-texas-church-shooting-suspect/index.html

[2] Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process.

[3] Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason.

[4] Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch.

[5] Metzl, Jonathan. The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease.

[6] Cohen, Bruce. “Passive-Aggressive: Māori Resistance and the Continuance of Colonial Psychiatry in Aotearoa New Zealand.”