My Life as Marionette, or Hamlet goes America
Manipulation (Hamlet goes America)
The doctor said that they always are manipulative, but it’s for your own good. The important thing is to recognize what they expect of you, and do it. That way you show you understand. You must not, though, say it, as that would make it seem like you are not sure. That could even pose problems from the standpoint of security.
He recalled all the recent manipulations. Indeed. Would anyone believe any of it? Probably not. The lawyer went right to the point: "It is the police you wanted here. And you must not talk not about that, or they will say you are 'paranoid', claim some danger that warrants overriding any right in the matter you might otherwise have, and next time, they will keep you for a very long time." Others are not so lucky; the cops merely shoot their pet; which is of course to say, next time, maybe, we come for you. People are best controlled with vague threats; keep them guessing. The naive will wonder, what did I do? But maybe it's not what you do but how you say it.
The lawyer also had very useful advice for meeting with the doctors: "They must not see you frustrated." He had also realized by now that every statement you make to them is not read as a possibly true statement about any matter in the world, your relationship to which they have essentially severed, but can only be evidence of this or that symptom. They want to know what is your problem and how they can fix it; only, it cannot be a worldly problem that involves you in anything you might want to have or do, that others might, or that you love or care or worry about. The intentionality or "aboutness" that links thought to objects has been severed.
Cares now cannot be about any thing or person other than you, nor any situation other than your madness. Thus, you must be a little Buddha. Your life has been reduced to the private theater of your mind, and there all representations are aspects of your problem, in a theater emptied of live spectators. You have died and gone to heaven, where it's only you and God, baby; the world is for the others, not yet enlightened of all their burdens.
Curious events with an aura of what will be called "redirection" were numerous enough to entertain many a writer. These included a hospital “social worker” who spoke like an undercover agent. They addressed him by name when he entered the ER. (You did know, surely, that any police agency can track your movements from your cell phone, even when it is turned off?) They directed him to speak to this man. In a little office, none else present, the social worker spoke of “elimination,” to be avoided except in “life and death matters.” This was after starting a causal chat about how French restaurants on the Lower East Side are associatively linked to terrorist attacks in French football stadiums. Soon he was referred to uniformed cops who said they knew he was a writer and liked film, asking him about “la dolce vita” and mentioning another film about a wartime emergency rescue effort on a submarine. You could wonder if the point was not to lead him to thinking about their violence, so they could legitimate it by attributing to him. Sick minds are by definition security risks, and so appropriate referents for talk of violence, war, terror, death, etc.
He recalled the Protestant minister lady who moonlighted as therapist as well as choirmaster. The song she had her group of kids sign was "Love is Surrender to His Will." In the sessions, he increasingly "got in touch with" his feelings, but anger was not the one ordered. Sometimes one tells a third party what would be only said to a second. But when this passed her limit, she realized that he had committed the ultimate sin, saying, "My God, you have no faith!" In many systems, the one thing that is unforgivable is placing yourself above it. Careful, they may say you are outside "Society," or even start referencing "People" in general, and you can bet they've cornered a market on theory of that. The sin of hubris or pride has technical names now. People who invoke names of God are especially dangerous. In general, a person in authority who sees that you see the possibility of their violence, will ascribe that violence to you, so as to authorize themselves in wielding it, which they will say they do in preventive defense. Slavers call violence the rebellion of the slaves, and rebellion is perhaps one kind of thing thought and said in many ways. In the extreme, this helps create that security state whose general state of mind is psychological. The political reduces to the personal. The Republic of Cowards is one where all dissonance is crime, or psychical illness, which is simply the capacity for crime, often the sole remaining potentiality persons as such have, that of authorities being to act in accordance with what is written and can be said. The new religion of this society is "therapy," which is the old universal church in new clothes whose liberating truth may be that they have no emperor.
Like many people then, he sometimes had flashes of fear that the police would knock on his door to deliver a harmless message, or so to say. And suddenly, he is a presumed enemy combatant, in his nightshirt, facing a valiant squadron of what in some other story he could be forgiven for thinking executioners: to all appearances, a foreign occupation army, and you thought that in the Bronx you were still in a first-world country. Four of five high-powered rifles, the kind a bullet from which tears out a plethora of organ tissues, a noisome and squalid death, which may even not be recorded; “elimination” would, further, erase the fact of you having existed. The guns pointed at his head. Orders to not move. A nursery rhyme for children of our time: Scratch your head, die and be dead. All his life he had believed in scratching where it itches; how else could he write? Especially in times where things happen, like people dying without reason, as if anyone died with reason; just imagine living that way, if you think you can.
But there was more. His roommate was making signals with things like a storage locker key left on the floor of his room, to which he apparently had gotten a key, or a (laughably crude 1960-style electronic bugging device, which vibrated when he touched it). He allowed himself eventually to get unnerved when seemingly trapped. He could not get out emails, or phone calls; his roommate took his only clean shirts; he was out of money and could not reach family or friends to ask; soon he was also out of food and medicines; and his computer, which was now in a permanent state of crash, was "responding" to things he wrote, in an aggressively noticeable form of the autocorrect that reduces many statements to clichés to fit a dictionary of the sayable, by rewriting certain words before his eyes. He began eventually to think he was going crazy, trapped inside his still messy room inside his apartment. Can they not imprison people while working like a puppet master from behind the scenes? He got a letter from his father, with his father’s handwriting; he noted that the letter came addressed by hand, as usual, but somehow delivered underneath his room door with no stamp. Actually, it was a brochure advising hard of hearing people on how to “communicate” to be understood. Hastily, he thought this was a prodding for him to leave, though by the time he finally left the apartment, not knowing quite what to expect or where it could make sense to go, he would surely have had to do so anyway. He thought of walking to a friend’s house, but he found himself getting confused whenever he walked outside a certain path. There are devices that can confuse a person like that, but we won't go there. That path took him to the hospital by a surprisingly direct route considering he did not know where it was exactly.
In some of their “patient notes” that constitute a person's permanent record, doctors would speak of “redirecting” patients who would talk about something other than what was expected. He wondered about different possible kinds of direction and redirection. But it scarcely mattered.
There is a simple truth about states like paranoia: Their existence, however verified, does not necessarily invalidate what the person subject to them says (or notices, or believes he does). Yet the general theory of paranoia does assume that. Indeed, he recalled doctors who would reply to his claim that he had been wronged by the hospital by simply pointing to their computer screen and saying, “But it says here you are a mentally ill. (So, we cannot have treated you unjustly, because we had reason for what we did.)” In fact, that does not follow. Consider: A teacher has a pupil whom he tutors in a subject, and she gets an A on the exams and goes to a great university. But someone forgets to point out that this teacher also fucked this student, off the books. If she is angry about being fucked, most of us hope that she still gets into the college but without him getting the credit; or something like that. Some people say that there is one way of looking at it, and then another: paranoia then becomes "parallax"; that’s one way of looking at it. Another is tragedy, which is like a life except for the pointedly demonstrative fact that in the end, you die. There is tragedy anytime one can be at once greatly right and horribly wrong. Or when I can be right about you being wrong and you likewise; that sounds like never, but it's not: it's Antigone and Creon, who together so inspired Hegel he made up the dialectic.
Paranoias are unauthorized knowledge. So don't go getting ideas. The State has a monopoly on the legitimate use of thought.
The admitting doctor thought his self false. You have an accent, he said. I just came back from living in Europe, he replied. Well, said the good doctor, leaning forward, spreading his arms, and with great emphasis: I welcome you to be American with me. Jesus: Suffer the little children to come onto me. He was being convicted in preventive absentia of an un-American personality. Ideas and meaningful activities are no longer required. Changing tack, he was asked, "You are feeling anxiety?" No, he was not being asked; he was being told. An illustrative anecdote or performance was being called for. Finally, the doctor looked at a paper and said, I see that you have a history of mental illness. That is no doubt exactly, no more and no less, what that paper documented by saying. Finally, he simply said that he was admitting him "so that you will be safe." From, he would soon learn, security guards called nurses who will put down any least sign of rebellion, for the better of his health, or because they are indoctrinated into believing that the patients are there as potentialities for violence (there is no need for anyone to have any ‘positive’ potentialities).
On the unit, numerous interesting things happened, including an avuncular Jewish nurse trying to give him tutelage in the need to avoid committing the moral error of the Rosenbergs. Not considering the question of the guilt or innocence of the Rosenbergs relevant in the present circumstances, he demurred replying. Inner redirection moves from idiotic speech to silence. When there is no visible strategy, choose that of silence. Let them think you are meditating; they like that. Once the doctor in charge, on one of his rare visits down among the people, approached him in the hallway and said, point-blank, “This is a good country; and if you don’t like it, you can sue me.” Was he being kept there for denying a Spinozist metaphysical truth about Being, or for suspicion of not supporting flag saluting?
That he was released the day following the receipt of what looked like another interesting accidental message does suggest that it was said as provocation and not the report of a fact or belief. (If it’s not a message, it’s not paranoia, right?) The social worker was the one assigned to ration him out useless writing paper: on the reverse side of, 100 pages of Racine's Phèdre obtained in shamefully endogamous passion from the Biblliothèque Nationale de France on Day 1, and on the sequel, 10 pages to suit the austerity regime (with only $2000/day that they would demand from him for their “medical” care so they could go on taking blood pressure before and after every meal, chairing therapeutic town hall discussions about traumatic news items happening in an elsewhere, for the rule is, nothing happens here, and in this regime the 50 cent cost of such paper was considered a gratuity). On the back of these 10 blank pages for writing were complete, detailed instructions for admission for long-term psychiatric care at a facility conveniently located in the county 200 miles distant where resided his father, who had sent him the inexplicable communication advice. He knew of course that it could be fatal if he took this as a threat and so said. They were “proposing” to place him permanently in a place where he would have likely no access to books of his choosing, or that would be controlled, none at all to a proper writing device (a keyboard with a framed window linking the lisible to the visible, the said to the seen, had been his preferred window onto the world that was now considered "outside," since that ripe age when rebellion transforms into that strange work of estranged passion and tortuous thinking that is called writing), no direct access to friends, at least not of his choosing, and with no access to Internet, nor any way to publish or exchange ideas with other living persons.
For here you are in a space outside "society," scorned of people about their business who want to, or did, join the real world, dream of those lovers of people who cultivate charity with a reassuring caritas, place of people moving out and in, oh what delight, your tired and refuse. Here people are placed outside society because it is said that they have so placed themselves. And he could at least have had the decency to be not un-American in his affects and passions, though there are no passions here. It is a dead zone where the sole permitted statements are obedient declarations that one hurts needing them and their treatments and procedures, I nearly said methods and tactics. Move the file with that discourse into the Wastebasket. Human rights may protect you bloodlessly, and while blood is endlessly not shed but merely taken and noted down, from anything happening, to you, that might be dangerous, to you, as they say, and so to them. Welcome to the Warehouse of Souls. If nothing happens, is it a hell or a heaven? Tragedy is a dangerous way to live a life. Though to the answer, do you know any better, they can only say, the life without danger.
They also seem to have a fondness for getting you to think that everything is about you. Indeed, with self and world, or self and society, self and others,the Other as such, the Other, Incorporated, same story, we could say that these exclusions are downright Cartesian. If everyone gets what they deserve, then places said to be outside society and its world will be places where all you can do is recognize that you are in a place to be judged on your performance, but with "communication" with an outside strictly blocked and forbidden, just as the corridor leading to the door opening onto the world outside the unit is guarded like a fetish, people warned away from it as if it were some special zone defended by some deadly radiation, just so, they may ask you to believe that you are now the true solus ipse. A "nurse" or other operative whom they seemed to have brought in briefly to make certain statements, usually looking at him, said, "I came to realize that everything is about me." "That is sad for you," he replied, "since it means that you do not and cannot love anyone." No reply. Later in a "group" in which he turned out to be the only patient with three staff members including this man, the provocateur said, "I only began recently to 'communicate', after 40 years." This followed other comedies, beginning with a patient approaching him where he was sitting in the lounge room the first day; the man said, "How do you define this word?"
The word was "industry." He said something banal and the man with the question rapidly moved back away. Was this a warehouse for workers who have, like tools, broken down, so that they are no longer working, and the temporary relocations are to see if this man-tool can be salvaged and put to use again? The cases beyond repair may be ones of "elimination," as that erstwhile social worker had suggested, but people not only can be dropped out of airplanes, or disappeared while having fingernails torn out or water poured down their threat or some other poetic threat; they can also be warehoused until and unless they are deemed useful citizens once again, as if the function of a citizen were to obey and be useful. Which may be why "neurotics" and "psychotics" always seem agreed that state and family model each other. God; enough. He remembered the grand principle of faith and hope, that those of us who merely work experience, think, and make things and meanings, while capital appropriates, possesses, controls, and worries about gains and losses, opportunities and risks. The all-knowing deity is now incarnate in information systems, and the great universal archive of statements. Now, as in Godard’s comic dystopia "Alphaville," knowledge and facts are as immediately recognizable as they are banal and stupid: all you need to do is consult the dictionary, which records received ideas and legislates the sayable, separates what exists and can be said from what does not because it cannot be. Meaning-making is reduced to representation of what is there. But there is no there, as such knowledge is only power and not potentiality.
There are also the ‘beautiful souls’ among the doctors and their accomplices. One more likely meets them when living in ostensible freedom. He found especially delightful in its amusingness the doctor who proclaimed that he did not believe in normality. In Bertolucci’s "1900," there is a scene in which a peasant trial is held at the end of the war of the padrone, the landowner, who had colluded with Fascism. De Niro as the padrone, dressed in causal elegance, says, "I never hurt another person." Soon the trial is interrupted after the participating citizen peasants have all told a story sung as a line in a lyric, when a truck of soldiers representing the new government drives up and more or less ends the peasant proceeding. De Niro gets the last word pronouncing in identitarian fashion: "The padrone is alive."
They let him go home after the near fiasco of saying, and then retracting his claim that he was afraid of his roommate. A woman afraid of men or things is a perhaps victim, but a man afraid is a coward, and the only violence his anxiety discloses is his own. This unfortunately black liberal warrior for a personal if not social justice had finally backed him into the wall, literally, after months of complaining that whenever spoken to, he the hapless and oppression-challenged liberal would feel that his feelings were hurt and would thus be justly catapulted into a principled and unlimited violence. “Does that bother you?” he queried, grabbing his forearms firmly but not painfully. Not wanting to appear wimpish or unserious, he replied, simply, “No,” “What about this?” and Mr. Black threw Mr. White against the wall. “I do not like that, sir.” “Well, now you know what I am capable of.” Yes, and this is the curse and challenge of our generation and some few before it: Sadly, horrifyingly even, we know today that there is virtually no limit to the amount of horror, degradation, and suffering human beings will endure or cause others to. God. What (else) can one say? What objects of striking beauty would compensate, if they staged a revolution, and all you got was a guillotine?
* * *
This neighbor had flattered himself that his hatred was enforcement of a vanity justified by oppression, for this violent man defending his inner woman-child. Free blacks, they asked for your lives; they let you extort your pride. Assigning to those with Oppression Points impunity, exception from moral subjectivity: what greater insult could one dream of?
He spent a season in Hell, among the raging ones.
Of course, he wondered what he had done, what was the matter, the thing in question. Che cosa, qu'est-que c'est, what is it? Though always the iconoclast, he had always refused on sacred ground to believe in "It." That's how it is, they say; that's it, I've got it: no, no It, no thing. The only question is, perhaps, are we still in Being once we renounce It? I suspect God no longer knows such answers.
Paranoid fears may be of enforced accusations: The Other thinks you're guilty. It's a lie, but what is? Could it have been careless remarks spoken or written maligning something sacred? But that could only be the nation, or some such. True, in an earlier story about experiences of the genre he had his character saying with disgust on leaving a frightful scene, "I hate America!" Did the relevant police, who also detect plotted stories, need informing on the theory of story? Or did they suspect anti-patriotic sentiments from passion alone? In another life he was a hard-core operatic type from the Mezzogiorno. And once, it was after one of their frequent awful wars, he had written of a certain nation armedly allied, privileged in some quarters though maligned in others, that he supported its existence, and condemned its crimes. Of which nations and howso armed and allied, lived in and loved, might this not be said? Innocence, for nations and other collectivities no less than individual legal persons, exists only in ideologies.
Or what about the curious friend, and known fellow art aficionado, who gave voice to the neoliberal nicety that all values are unproven, as well as the surprising claim that since non-being must be, whatever else it is, less painful than life, it would be a good idea if the world self-destructed? Imagine the police surrounding this one: nihilism, destruction, um, you get the idea....
Yes, he had some strange friends, some of whom had acted strangely. And now he felt pressed to begin taking stock. We will pass over singularly the homeless transsexual that a friend who now seemed the nebbishy switchboard connecting him to crazy loser men. (Hint: she had lied about "the thing itself," after making some remarks worthy of comic actors including that making Aliyah would make her feel like the natural woman the papers she would leave behind said he already was.) Which is a thought that could drive some men to drink, or guilt, or, side-splitting laughter. "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness," said the Irish Resistance bard; so when are deadly matters comic or the reverse?
Worry was one thing, intemperate rage another. A deadly sin inflicted by another. But why in fact be angry? It fits their purposes, not his; it is a way to trap someone. Lesson, then: Don’t be angry, be calmly paranoid. Thinking is indeed the only cure. All the therapies and spiritual exercises, with or without physical apparatuses attached, are nothing up against the thinking mind. It’s not superhuman, like the Raging Ones. But unlike them, it works.
Why not, if I can figure out their manipulation, give them what I think they want as much as possible? But evacuate my thinking from the world of representation and willing action. Do not express what you are feeling in these situations, and so, too, since these are inseparable, not what you are thinking.
As for paranoia, it proffers explanations that rarely suffice; usually, the functional coordination of actions through ideology works much better. I said usually. What is usual is not so interesting, which is maybe why I don’t write about it.
Now, it is interesting to consider what people do and do not consider paranoid. If the police wonder whether someone has committed a crime, that is not paranoia (because it is a legitimate business); if a citizen wonders whether the police suspect him of a crime, that is paranoia. The judgment of paranoia does turn largely on judgments of plausibility; we generally think that suspecting that something happened or was performed by a particular person with a certain motive, this is paranoia only if the thing is unlikely. But that is deceptive. In fact, certainly in psychological terms, epistemic questions are irrelevant.
Psychology now just wants to know if you are in an unhappy state or a dangerous one. Of course the two are assimilated. That’s one reason those wards are so boring.
The Rolling Stones had it right when they posited Satan as the ultimate principle of nefarious causation; they added, “What’s puzzling you is the nature of my game.” The real question is not whether God, Satan, or both are behind whatever happens, if at all uncanny, but what this Mother of an Other wants. What does the Other want of me? But we can answer the question: the prince of darkness and destruction plays the game of uncanny demise all around. Certainly, God as explanandum is just as much object of an irrational need for connections. Futiley, since we all will die anyway. One kind of paranoia is an attempt to defy death; another is an attempt to defy lesser dangers sane people do seek avoiding.
That’s it. God today is a switchboard operator, or network service provider, or he is the live agency that rings all along the line. A telephone line that rings everywhere, constantly: like a drug that burns out all your synapses.
So maybe there is no “big” Other, but there are plenty enough little ones around to cause havoc. One person wonders (if we believe Freud, were it not enough to read him) if God is fucking him in the ass through feminizing solar rays, another just wants to know why you called and what you wanted. Ultimately, paranoia is this: an anxiety about meaning, leading to epistemic constructions credible or not, whose essence is: A does X, and B wonders, what does that mean? Or simply, there is an X, presented somehow, and someone asks about this X some troubling question, like, are X’s really Y’s, or what is an X, or are there other things, worlds, minds, persons? (Yes, Descartes was mad, or else, as he says, worried about the possibility). Paranoia then at root is a worry about things, considering that they are, and might not be. Paranoia is anxious wonder. If Being is the answer, paranoia is the question. Paranoid people ask too many questions. No wonder they say many “madmen” are intellectuals, though that is only sayable from within the same logical grammar.
Sane people of course only ask normal questions. This can be slightly vitiated by abnormal situations. In the manual for patients, one advice is to beware the warning signs of traumatic experience, which can be painful. When you have that experience, you are supposed to question your health. Someone hits you, and for a purpose of their own; but the truth that you must avow about your experience is only that you are hurting. They ask where it hurts but not who hit you are or how. If they provoke you to disorientation, only your state of mind matters.
But while we are on the subject of manipulation: I heard (somehow) that the chairman of the board of (re)directors or something like it only speaks in performative utterances. That is, he says “This is that,” and what he means is “Do this.” When he says that this is that he doesn’t mean this literally (come on!), as if saying that this is that simply meant that this is that. He makes it clear that it doesn’t matter at all whether what he says is true. He intends it, certainly, to be taken as true; but what does that mean? It means that he is indicating something that you are supposed to do, which, as for schoolchildren, can also mean what you are supposed to believe. He is in fact not saying anything at all. And that is the liberating fact to recognize. All the poor poser is doing is telling you what you must do. Knowledge comes down to this: giving orders. And what you must do (to put it, in fact, circularly) is obey. Now, is that so hard?
Something of great moment is at stake. Be on the safe side: ideas clear, distinct, and stupid. We have the great chance, finally to: Make American stupid again.
And yet. We do know what can happen; pain, where is your surprise? Death and evil are common and have no mystery, life and beauty do. Knowledge is mere power, thought a work of making. The language game is imperfectly rigged, for as lovers know, the gods do play dice. And while persons are born, a life is a thinking. The good is predicated on its absence, and hope is given to the desperate. And words are not for telling, believing, or knowing and showing, but for that strange painful work of thinking by making. We still do not know what our thinking bodies can do.