Stage & Screen 4

This post is part of a series. Please start reading at ‘Stage & Screen 1’ below.

In the ‘Essays’ section of Strength Weekly is a piece titled ‘What We Talk About’ in which I write about a series of experiences I had at the Anti-University of London (see the ‘1968’ entry here) in the late 60s. I supply a link to the essay here in order to develop the idea, raised in the previous post, of the schizogenic society – one which makes some of its denizens schizophrenic. The essay is largely concerned with an article that Patrick Schofield – a ‘schizophrenic’ inmate of a British mental hospital – wrote for the hospital magazine. The article was the product of a fierce and lucid intelligence focused on an analysis of hospital life. Patrick was mad therefore whatever he wrote was worthless. This handy rule of thumb fell apart so spectacularly that Patrick was abruptly ejected from the hospital in order to preserve the sanity of its staff.

I invite you to read the essay before considering some extracts from Patrick’s article.

06.08.2009

Continued in ‘Stage & Screen 5’…

Stage & Screen 3

This post is part of a series. Please start reading at ‘Stage & Screen 1’ below.

Laing’s radical psychology provides a means of reclaiming the narrator of the ‘surveillance theatre’ document (see ‘Stage & Screen 1’ below) from the dank cul de sac that is the terminus for the barking nutjob. Clearly the narrator is unnerved by city life and has concocted a narrative that makes it manageable. After all, he did hand a copy of his treatise to my friend Trevor who, presumably, was deemed exempt from membership of the secret police and their legion thespian minions. With support from Laing it becomes possible, at the very least, not to rush to judgment, wherein judgment is synonymous with incarceration accompanied by invasive, often physically harsh, treatments.

If the city has been made manageable by cladding it in an exotic narrative premised on conspiratorial surveillance – which latter strikes one as a thoroughly nightmarish prospect – then we can speculate that the prospect of a city that is not centrally organised and therefore not predictable – a city in which shit just happens – is truly terrible. Conspiratorial surveillance could be seen as comforting by comparison – it does, after all, put considerable resources behind a single individual, who must, surely, be rather highly esteemed to merit such scrutiny.

The question arises as to whether there is any insight of value to be found in what the narrator actually says – as distinct from any insight that we might have into his reasons for saying it. Laing, as already suggested, would insist that beneath the mad talk resides an articulation of pain that has internal coherence and descriptive truth. He was, though, referring mainly to schizophrenic speech rather than paranoid speech i.e. a speech which makes little sense sentence by sentence or phrase by phrase while the paranoid mode – as in the ‘surveillance’ piece – is entirely clear and, indeed, would pass as decent journalism in a world in which such schemes were the norm. That said, if the narrator’s view of city life is to be taken seriously – after a degree of interpretation – then it is as a critique. It has some political force.

In a book written in 1964 with Aaron Esterson, ‘Sanity, Madness & the Family’, Laing analyses a series of interviews with the families of schizophrenic individuals and concludes that a subtle scapegoating process is going on in which the schizophrenic is being burdened with the unacknowledged fears, anxieties and potential madnesses of family members who have, without consulting each other, nevertheless ‘elected’ one member to the status of madness in order to relieve the pressure on those left ‘normal’. Laing and Esterson’s thesis enabled them to develop the notion of the ‘schizogenic’ family – the family that would produce or induce schizophrenia in one of its members.

If families can drive you mad then what of the societies within which those families have developed? It was a relatively modest jump from the idea of the schizogenic family to that of the schizogenic society. The society that drove you mad. The psychology designed to heal troubled individuals now had a broad social and political application.

08.06.2009

Continued in ‘Stage & Screen 4’…

Stage & Screen 2

This post is part of a series. Please start reading at ‘Stage & Screen 1’ nearby.

New ways of looking at the mad were supplied by the radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing and his colleagues in the 1960s. Madness was seen as a reaction to an impossible situation and treated as a crucial stage on a developmental journey that should not be aborted with drugs or electroshock but encouraged to unfold. This unfolding might be protracted and would depend on the constant, almost sacrificial ministrations of sympathetic therapists. The idea of the ‘asylum’ – a benign place of shelter – was revived and in 1965, at Kingsley Hall, in the East End of London, Laing, Berke, Redler and others began to offer residential support and radical therapy to a number of schizophrenic patients.

Mary Barnes is probably the best known of those who were recovered from – or guided through – extreme disorder by the methods of the Laingian group, which shortly formed into the Philadelphia Association. Barnes lived in a state of terror and distress much of the time, smearing her faeces on the walls and speaking incomprehensibly. Her therapist, Joseph Berke, refused the notion of the schizophrenic as as a gobbledegook-spouting loony, preferring to see both the unsettled speech and the erratic behaviour as unconventional but consistent, readable codes that might be deciphered by one who was prepared to listen and learn. Barnes was given a space in which to regress and eventually emerged from her psychosis to become a painter. She and Berke wrote of their work together here.

Everyday life at Kingsley Hall was documented by the film-maker Luke Fowler, whose work is exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in London until June 14th. In his film ‘What You See Is Where You’re At’, showing continuously at the gallery, Fowler examines the world of David Bell, one of Laing’s most floridly expressive ‘mad’ patients.

I used to seek out, in the 60s and 70s, lectures and conferences at which Laing spoke and grew accustomed to the Q & A periods in which Bell would rise from his seat and hold forth. He had the aplomb of a seasoned orator and the mischievousness of a standup comic. His speeches, usually in response to a point Laing had made, were very hard to understand. They could be compared, probably superficially, to passages from ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ but at least with the latter came the option to read and re-read at one’s own pace. Laing would listen intently to Bell and, in front of the conference crowd, embark upon dialogues with him. He would, apparently, answer ripostes from Bell in his own slow, hesitating but thoroughly lucid manner leaving the audience impressed but rather wishing they, too, had understood the question.

What sticks in my mind as much as the spectacle of Bell’s fluent but arcane declamations was his habit of sweeping his hand compulsively across his left brow whilst speaking. So frequent and forceful were these actions that he had created on his temple an area of self-inflicted male pattern baldness.

Laing’s radical psychology did not only demystify the madman, it implicated the madman’s family and also the society in which the family found itself.

05.06.2009

Continued in ‘Stage & Screen 3’…

Stage & Screen 1

A man came up to my my friend Trevor in New York in the early 80s and handed him a sheaf of densely typed foolscap. The man told my friend to read the document because it was very important. It turned out be a detailed account of an extraordinary project involving what could be called ‘surveillance theatre’.

The account opened harmlessly enough: the narrator – who is never named – is hiking on the Appalachian Trail, seventy miles north of Bangor, Maine. He spends the night in a log cabin and is befriended by a man named Duncan Boland who asks him questions about politics, the nature of reality and God. It immediately becomes clear to the narrator that Duncan ‘had been chosen to be my companion by government intelligence.’ Descending the mountain the next day the group meets a muscular woman who offers to guide them down. She advises them to avoid some boulders and leads them to a narrow ledge overlooking a one hundred foot drop.

When the narrator has traversed the ledge he realises that the correct and safer route led over the boulders. ‘Despite over four years of harassment and threats,’ the narrator remarks ‘I hadn’t realized until that moment, how determined the secret police were to scare me.’

His uneasiness was not allayed by the fact that, as he hiked on, ‘my companions were four moose, a bear, several deer and at least forty secret police and collaborators.’ Returning to New York he sought accommodation. The secret police had already selected and prepared an apartment for him on East 11th Street. As he ruefully observes ‘The apartment provides me with a place to live but it also provides the secret police with a living environment they control’.

The full and startling scope of the narrator’s misfortune is then summed up. ‘The building where I live, the surrounding buildings and the neighborhood serve as a theatrical set; and the ‘tenants’ of my building, neighborhood characters, and intelligence agents stage a theatrical production.’ Not only have the secret police located him where they want him, ‘they calculated that everything about the apartment building, neighbors and neighborhood would make me feel as if I had reached the end-of-the-line.’ ‘The neighborhood is an oppressive scene of poverty and desolation: great piles of uncollected garbage line the sidewalks, litter is strewn everywhere…’ ‘For several months, whenever I entered or left the building, two angry German Shepherds on the second floor would howl furiously and claw at their door.’

It wasn’t just the animals and the dilapidation, however. ‘The number of tenants seems to change every month but approximately fourteen people pretend to live in the building… a mad looking bag lady, a sleeping derelict, a sleeping teenage boy…a topless fifty year old woman wearing only white panties, a man waving a knife…I believe I am the only person who lives in the building, but there are probably rotating twenty-four hour guards to provide protection and to prevent any unauthorized visitors. Among the attempts to make the building seem “real” and inhabited are: putting phony mail in the mailboxes, collecting garbage from elsewhere and filling the building’s trash cans,and placing people in various apartments to make a variety of noises as I pass by; frequently playing radios, televisions, and musical instruments; and staging loud conversations or arguments.’

The scheme was nothing if not comprehensive. ‘The secret police have imposed upon me a substitute reality; they have dismembered and appropriated the real world and placed me in a labyrinth of intelligence operations… At any given moment several intelligence agents work together choreographing street theater and surveillance operations.’ The operations are carefully designed to simulate ordinary street life, and they require large casts of actors. ‘As I approach the intersection, a signal is given and people, most of whom are young men, start crossing the intersection from every direction; people walking on the sidewalk, boys riding by on bikes,and other people driving by in cars. Intelligence agents frequently use this kind of collaborator saturation placement at other intersections.’

The narrator continues in this fashion for several pages. Hundreds of collaborators are employed to create the street scenes through which he walks daily and he must learn, amongst other things, to resist eye contact with handsome young men who may entrap him or dealers who attempt to compromise him by offering him illicit drugs. Not a single aspect of everyday city life has escaped the choreographic machinations of the secret police.

I guess I first read the document back in the 80s, possibly not so long after it had been written. It is, by any standard, remarkable and it elicits assessments that clearly equip the reader with a small number of available attitudes: the writer is raving mad; the writer is a good, articulate writer with an exceptional imagination; the writer has an illness but could be treated in such a way that he would see the misjudgments he is making; the writer sees truths that are too painful for him to confront; the writer sees truths that are too painful for us to confront. These various positions were current in the 80s and persist today. What has changed is the level of eccentricity attributable to the individual who generates such a body of perceptions. In Part 2 I’ll look at this in more detail.

04.06.2009

Continued in ‘Stage & Screen 2’..

You Are My House Now

There’s where I was born, still fairly recognisable. And there’s where we moved to when I was about nine. And here’s where we are now. I expect my car is parked along the road somewhere but I can’t be bothered to persuade the cumbersome navigational apparatus to take me down there to check it out.

Google Street View is settling in at the moment. Once the privacy fusspots calm down we can look at our houses for the rest of our lives. That they will calm down is not guaranteed but given what Google knows it’s pretty inevitable. Google knows that we know there’s something wrong about Street View but we can’t quite put our finger on it. This vague unease is more than compensated for by the vague feeling that there’s something right about it. On examination, however, the latter sentiment proves to be a bit odd and we shouldn’t let Google know about it or else they’ll invent a camera that looks through curtains

The trouble is that when you can see your house on Street View you know it’s your house. Without this massive, globalised, external system of ratification you wouldn’t know it was your house. I mean, of course you’d know it was your house because that’s what you wake up in most days of the week. But sometimes it’s very hard to feel that life in the world, and its attendant material accoutrements, is real. I mean, of course it’s real because you can discuss it with friends and you can agree that, more or less, probably more, you are having similar experiences, which tends to validate the proposition unless you are drawn to philosophise.

Anyway, it’s to do with identity. If the world was any good you could look at your house, by standing outside in the street, say, and the experience would be simple: “That’s my house.” This isn’t to do with mortgages or ownership, by the way. If the world was any good you could stand outside your rental accommodation and something simple but important would still just happen. But it doesn’t.

I mean, you see it, you could touch it if you wanted, you know it’s yours, rental or otherwise, but the angle is wrong. As in film or photography: you have to get the right angle. Angles are, however, premised on a divergence of lines or planes from a common point. In this case the common point is oneself and its pointedness has deteriorated. Identity is found wanting. Its criteria have deteriorated.

Hot air balloonists, especially on their first flights, are often taken over their houses in order to look down upon them. Same with light aircraft flying lessons. You can see how you fit into the scheme of things. Very satisfying. It does wear off though. It may be memorable but its significance fades. In this case, however, the angle is ideal. The greater the vertical distance from your house you can get, within reason, the more it is yours. And the more it is yours the more you are. In the scheme of things.

It’s to do with consumerism. We’ve been taught to test reality and our status in it by evaluating the strength of our feeling for inanimate objects. The feelings have to be good feelings, which they will be if there are sufficient objects and these objects take our love without complaint. The stronger those ties the stronger you are. Again, this isn’t to do with ownership so much as getting back what was yours anyway. Because you deserve it.

Street View flattens the world, both literally, as a screen image, and figuratively in the sense that it subsumes it into an arcade game. It is superior to the holiday snap because it permits, or seems to permit, the sensation of being able to engulf an object rather than be engulfed by it. It allows us, in conjunction with Google Earth, to approach the object from above and from the sides and all perspectives in between. In so doing we are simultaneously aware of its location in a scene or a scheme to a far greater degree than the holiday snap allows. The holiday snap, as has been widely noted, has the power to confirm that an experience actually occurred. Unless supported by a physical trace, apparently, the memory of an experience is unreliable. Street View has the power to confirm our parity with the object by dramatising an ideal relationship with it. My place in this world of objects gives me a common point.

My house looks like my house if I go out into the street now. But if I hunt it down on Street View it is a jewel sparkling with heightened houseness. It is seamlessly integrated into the Bayeux Tapestry of the digital arcade. I am a citizen of that arcade. The arcade includes me. It also includes everybody – all the more reason to claim my residency. If, for a moment, I doubt my substance, I can refer to the arcade and it will consolidate, in its virtuality, that which is unsolid.

Another piece of metaphysical electronics that heightens the sensation of being what you already are is GPS. Any mobile phone worth its salt is equipped with a Global Positioning System. Activate it and it will tell where you are wherever you are. It won’t tell you what country or street you are in but it will give you a string of figures that some people, probably not you, can translate, with the aid of maps, into a position. If you had a map you could go from your position to another position. If you had a phone, which you do, you could tell someone else your position. They could rescue you. If you were not in any particular trouble they could say “That sounds like a lovely position.” And you would not suspect you are about to become lost as a result of having developed weak relationships with objects.

27.03.2009