How the political figure of the artist can replace the policing one of "mental illness"

Consider if you recognize yourself or people you know in the following scenario: You have a job, and it’s boring, or you don’t, or worry that soon you might not, and either way, this is stressful. It may or may not have occurred to you, depending partly on things like your educational and, thus, social class background, that there are positively joyful uses of the human intelligence that you, too, are capable of, and your job doesn’t come anywhere near providing much satisfaction in that regard. Or perhaps it does or did enough, but your grasp on the opportunity to do meaningful work with much of the time and energy in your life is tenuous and uncertain.

So what conclusion do you draw? How about this one: Your work and life may seem to make you sick, and the burden of this lies on you. The stressed out and unhappy feeling you often have is a sign of an illness. You have “mental illness,” and moreover, this really comes from you. It comes from inside you, your past life history or a deviant biology. Yes, people, maybe as much as half the population, depending on how people are counted, is born with dysfunctional brain circuitry, and while unhappy living conditions may bring this out, it is intrinsic to you. You are sick and born that way, and the sickness makes you deviant, behaving abnormally, badly, like a sinner who could expect endless punishments, except that it isn’t a moral recognition you are invited to. Yes, you are responsible for your condition, but it really is a sickness, and it’s organic. Your moral inferiority, for despite all the denials, no one can really wipe away the fact that being “mentally ill” means your feelings, thoughts, and behavior are — well, wrong. It’s only not called guilt and morality because, although you are responsible enough to be subjected to all the appropriate sanctions, you cannot correct it.

Here is the place to point out some uncanny resemblances. In Europe and America in the second half of the 19th century, after Darwin, the idea arose that various social inferiorities and exclusions were actually due to innate biological differences. The most spectacular result of this was the Nazi Holocaust. Social Darwinism made it possible to regard Jews, for the first time, not as a social deviance defined by a religion, from which people could once be cured by accepting conversion to Christianity, a schema that had been operative since the early years of Christianity. Now Jews were a race, and that meant that they were born with the social traits that were considered undesirable. Something similar was said of blacks, homosexuals, and the “mentally ill.” Actually, the biological treatment of mental illness in psychiatry predated the new dispensation, and may be considered one of its models. Now there was a new focus on race, and in the emerging ‘biopolitical’ paradigm, homosexuals began to be oppressed by way of being recognized as a type of person and not a type of behavior. Perhaps the oppressiveness of this ends when the behaviors are accepted and thus having that as your identity is as positive a thing as being of any national or ethnic grouping, or identifying with your gender, the one that you are supposed to have according to your body type, or the one you choose instead. I think it can be regarded as something of an open question whether seizing on these identities and asking that they be liberated from disregard is really the conquest of some great freedom, but it does now look like it was destined. Blacks, incidentally, were victims of the idea of intelligence as a quantitatively measurable mental capacity, since tests could be designed, that inevitably contain all kinds of cultural biases, and they then appear to consign some people to social inferiority via the myth of race. All of these phenomena are surely linked, and one factor linking them is colonialism and the way the thinking of colonial subjects and the need to control them was brought back to the metropolitan centers to be used against workers, the poor, and people generally. And one of the consequences was Nazism, which applied a colonial logic to Jewish subjects, though not them only. It is an interesting question what role discourses of mental illness together with rhetorical, metaphorical uses of notions of disease and contagion, together with ideas of ethnic purity, played in making possible the destruction of European Jewry and the form it took. Arguably, it is not so much that the “mentally ill,” homosexuals, and certain other national and ethnic groups, such as the Gipsies or Roma, who were despised for their nomadism and equally exterminated as a race, as well as Communists and other political dissidents were subjected to the same logic of degradation and destruction used against the Jews. But rather that a program of medical euthanasia based on the exclusion from “society” of the so-called “mentally ill” lay behind the extermination of the Jews. Certainly, the two factors must have affected each other, and we know this if only from the extensive use of therapeutic and immunitarian rhetoric in the Nazi ideology.

Nazism ideologically was as much as anything a form of the modern totalitarian state that based itself on notions of health and sickness, what the philosopher Michel Foucault and his followers in Italy (Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito) and elsewhere have been calling “biopower” and “biopolitics,” sometimes linked to “thanatopolitics”). (It is not enough remarked that the unsaid topic that did not need to be remarked behind Foucault’s researches, no less than those of Agamben and Esposito, is the experience of Nazism and its death camps, and the Continental civil war that was fought alongside that of the Allied powers against it. European philosophers since the war have known that it did not happen “to them,” “over there,” but “here,” among us). These invocations of health and illness are metaphors, but ones that are disposed of real objects, and re used also in the fundamentally non-metaphorical regimes that are bureaucracies. One of its objects of exclusion was art itself, at least on the romantic model that had allowed and treated positively its association with abnormality and sickness. The Nazis liked art when it was monumental, heroizing, and celebrating the powers and beauty of strong and youthful bodies and organic conceptions of social life. But they hated all forms of aesthetic modernism, because they saw its works as troubled and troubling, and to them that only meant sick. A social group identified with illness can be either treated and perhaps cured (or kept in control), or eliminated. One of the first things they did after coming to power was to stage an art exhibit titled “Degenerate Art.” Today’s psychiatry doesn’t think art itself is to be excluded, but it suspects artists themselves as persons. In the early 90s there was an advertisement on American television for the new “anti-psychotic” drugs (which are widely prescribed to people who have no such extreme diagnosis, though psychiatrists rarely shrink from inventively applying them; I have found that how sick I am said to be seems to exist in inverse proportion to the amount of time that these often hurried people spend listening to me). The ad showed an image of Picasso’s “Man with a Guitar,” as the announcer declared that if he had prozac, Picasso might not have had to have a blue period. I am surprised that this commercial did not appeal more widely to people in the art world.

What does it mean to say that someone is “mentally ill”? Consider: this is not at all the same as saying they have a particular neurosis or psychical syndrome, even if it is part of a system of classification of illnesses, on the model of physical illness, and with the imaginative transfer that is involved here. For, whether or not organic brain differences are posited theoretical or identified, and surely the drive to do is part of the paradigm, the fact is that mapping any kind of behavioral, cognitive, or affective deviance or difference onto a notion of illness is an imaginative procedure of a form of governmentality or social control.

To say that someone is mentally ill is to say that they are abnormal and that is a problem, and this can only mean that the person is potentially excludable from the spaces of normal social life. Saying that someone has a particular neurosis is saying that they are, from a medical point of view, like this rather than like that; but the larger, implied, judgement that they are mentally ill is not saying that they should be given this treatment rather than that one, but that they can be regarded as excluded from the society, since the concept of illness separates the sick from the healthy, which is to say the medically normal from the abnormal. Which is why societies should not be thought of on medical models. Doing so is part of what defined the Nazi form of fascism.

Further, the treatment, in both sense of the term, that one can then expect is above all, fundamentally sad. The treatment one is subjected to is drearily boring. And in so many ways it is as if authorities have declared that you are unhappy, and therefore should be treated like someone whose destiny is to be unhappy.

Related to this no doubt is how ethics has been replaced by “spirituality,” the idea of which is fundamentally therapeutic, though it is an alternative (to business as usual, and thus to normal work and life routines) that is thought to be “higher” rather than morally inferior. This spirituality is simply the shadow of the mental health system and its ideology, as usually expressed in more medical terms. The psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan argued that mental illness essentially is about “problems of living,” and thus, therapists and doctors ought to help people with them, so that they can live more fulfilled lives. But is it about problems, and in a sense that would involve an autonomy, whereby the things that I may want or feel troubled by are determined first of all by myself, with some movement to “get help” with them being secondary? The idea of problems of living is the very idea that drives all philosophical ethics, which is the question of the good life, what it is, and how to live. Its political form is the questioning of an actual, existing form of life, as to what are the problems we can find with it, in order to, not cure or provide supportive treatments to individuals who deviate from its norms, but problems we can find in the entire form of life of a society or culture or something like it. Now ethics itself may allow of medical and therapeutic metaphors, but it is clearly irreducible to any therapeutic practices, and partly because of the political situation, which is that it is not a a matter of norms and normal behaviors and attitudes that can be enforced, but of question the norms and normative patterns themselves, and questioning them in an openness towards the unknown possibilities they might eventually be transformed into. Ethics also classically is an affair of reason, and also one that has been consistently nourished by artworks and reflections upon them. The study of literature is thus an ethical enterprise, whatever else it might also be.

To speak of art is to speak of potentialities of freedom and joy, and of a work that does not follow predetermined patterns or norms, while it works to transform what the world we find ourselves in to be or be like, including ourselves and our role in it, since of course these are of a piece, at least ultimately. What if, as some people have suggested, we consider that everyone is an artist, or can be, an artist of themselves, and a spokesperson for what they think is true, good, or interesting, what the world they live and the people and situations they encounter in it are like, and how they might be both described and transformed?

This has some things to recommend it in contrast to the mental health industry and its presuppositions. Those presuppositions are sad ones, and they amount to the judgment that life is dreary and sad, because not only are the things most of us are supposed to do often unhappy, but the lack we sense in recognizing this, however dimly we do, is one we are asked to attribute to ourselves, so that, bizarrely (if you think about it), you are led to think of the situations you find yourself in and their apparent demands, the compliant life you are expected to live, this is the essentially neutral, but uncriticizable, norm, against which each of us can be judged as lacking. And this lack is then performed through the procedures of both enduring it and seeking treatments for it. For these treatments are sad. Your doctor most likely does not wonder what you might need to be more joyfully creative. He or she wonders what you need to be less of a sad lacker, and to cure this disposition they apply sad treatments.

Now, everyone has problems of living. The discipline of ethics, in philosophy, and the procedures of ethical reflection on and in the arts, all assume the universality of the proposition that to live a good life is both a question (what is it and how do we do it?) and a problem that every thinking person faces. The questions involved here are not uniformly sad, but can be quite joyful. The reason for this is that the norm of adaptation to work and life tasks that are performed because they are necessary and not out of love and joy, this norm disappears as soon as the ethical question proper emerges.

And once this potentiality is seized in its universality and necessity, the idea that almost everyone is sick and needs medications or correctional treatments of some kind, or training in how to manage their life in all its difficulties and sufferings, which is now what most psychotherapies amount to (cognitive-behavioral therapy, and variants of it like dialectical behavioral therapy, are nothing else), this begins to evaporate.

What keeps that in place? The same set of forces that keep in place boring jobs that people are still, even in this age of automation, which is vastly reducing the necessary labor time to produce the commodities and services most people can want,. And the same forces that now exploit disaffection, so that everyone can be buying expensive medicines to control their state of mind, so that they will have a managed unhappiness.

Let us say: We are not “mentally ill,” we are disaffected. Which is to say, affected. Emotional states are ways people are affected by things that happen to them. There is no reason to think of this in medical rather than political terms. Unless of course the way things are and the things that happen partly because of it a priori cannot be changed, and as a result persons who are affected by the way things are or the things that happen to them and say that they don’t like it and want it to be otherwise, they are the ones with the problem; they ought to feel contended about the way things are. Perhaps talk therapies can be used to promote this contentment. The fundamental claim of Cogntiive-Behavioral Therapy is that trauma doesn’t exist; it is, like reality in the Hindu/Buddhist world view which is unsurprisingly popular among mental health workers and afficianados of their system, unreal. You think things are terrible, but only because of the way you think. There is nothing a person cannot deal with. Thus, social conditions of precarity, that affect people as vulnerable minds and bodies, find their answer in a kind of neo-Stoicism. There are no traumas or catastrophes; instead, one only has to face things as they are, as Buddhism (one that is defanged from its ethical components to become a business ideology) teaches. Cognitive therapy teaches you to persuade yourself that you can manage things you thought were excessive in the way they affect you. Fittingly, one of the theoretical ancestors of cognitive therapy is Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survival who authored “Man’s Search for Meaning”; contrary to the thinking of Primo Levi and, reflecting on his writings, Giorgio Agamben, Frankl advances the humanist notion that one can always remain in touch with what we may as well call God if one has the right attitude. (This is, of course, a tautology.). Frankl is eternally popular among liberals because he seems to be saying that you can deal with anything, even a Holocaust. So what about those of us who are disaffected and feel bothered by things that are, it seems, real, and not merely projections of something whose origin as posited as inside one’s brain or one’s conditioned habits and painful memories, and that might just be thought to be in essence a biological defect? And what about when the oppression you encounter, and that you might think of as such when you are more lucid, most often so weighs you down that it makes it harder to think clearly about the meaning of your experience, and what you desire and what must oppose? Yes, there are things that bother us, but this is both an ethical and political task, not one that calls for correctional treatments for deviant behaviors. This means that no amount of unhappiness or difficulty with any aspect of living either the life you want to live or one that you must live and find dreary and oppressive, none of this justifies calling any of “mentally ill.” In fact, what is the artist’s task and how is it performed, in our world which has so politicized art that it is in fact a widely available means of coping with and responding to trauma?

The artist’s task is what once was imagined as devolving to the citizen, in idealizing notions of democratic and republican political spaces: the task of the artist is to think. And thinking is something that management and bureaucracy generally do as badly as businesses trying to minimize their risks and maximize their gain. Management is not thinking, and when it pretends to be, it always falls short. Where cognitive therapy falls short of a philosophical dialectic is its questions. Its question is always, (how) can I deal with this situation? This question exists within a circularity and closure that are given by the fact of what one must answer: Yes, I can. But I can, do what? Just do it, whatever is given as the task appropriate to the situation or problem? Philosophy teaches us to ask open-ended questions, to which we don’t already know the answer. One such question is, What does this mean? This question is answered not by finding a thing that is the ready-to-hand referent of a conceptual name. It is answered through a work of imaginative construction. The question of meaning is, as question, always about what else the thing or event or situation might mean. What else can do we do, besides just “bring me another brick”? It is art and thinking about it that performs this other task. Bureaucracy, like business, is just about getting things done, when it is given what are the things we are or should be concerned with. Business and management ask only, bring me another brick or, what is your problem, why aren’t you bringing bricks, or picking up your own straw? Art and thinking say, what are we even doing in this place? What does it mean that they ask us these things? We may know what we are doing, but why do it? Auschwitz with its famous gate saying “Work makes free,” was the institution of a parody of a prison labor camp; it was both that and its parody. But parody is a genre that shows up the falseness of the paradigm. Work does not make free, and people can be removed to correctional spaces only, considering them irremediable, to destroy. It was also an experiment in how persons slated for being murdered can first be destroyed as persons, transforming, or trying to transform, them into merely suffering animal bodies, slowly dying through degradation and the removal both of the persons from the normal social world and the life of the society, and the concomitant removal from their own grasp of their own world, or place of habitation, and anything else that might be called one. In all these respects, the Nazi camp was itself a paradigm. Our prisons are not bad places because they resemble a little bit the Nazi camps, though they do; rather, Auschwitz was a hellish place built to resemble ‘normal’ prisons. The paradigm is exemplified in what are mostly lesser cases. If the liberal model of government is limited powers in order to limit our civilization’s constitutive barbarism, than it has served as grand narrative of injustice justification. Management discourse always justifies, largely through attributions of necessity to some aspect of the way things are. Questions in this field solicit answers that maintain things as they are; art instead solicits questions in a field of contingency.

Exclusionary social control sets up prisons and massacres. Our prison system is, admittedly, less horrible than a Nazi death camp, but what kind of recommendation is that? In fact, the Nazi camps were not models for extensively destructive though less murderous camps of internment, concentration, or refugee warehousing, nor for our prisons. Rather, modern prisons were the model. Auschwitz was a prison. That is what was wrong with it. It was made possible by colonialism and racial capitalism, and the social exclusions that were developed simultaneously. Being a supposedly “mentally ill” person is also being identified as a potential prison camp inmate, as someone who can be excluded from “society,” typically with the judgment that they already “are” outside the society, by virtue of both their deviant behavior and an imputation of biological origin. Once a doctor writes in your record that you have a mental illness, you can be locked up basically at any time, under rules not unlike those of the terroristic state claiming to be a war on violent crime and terror, and this can be done based on hearsay. These statements are used to control subject populations. It is “your” record, though you don’t get to write in it; someone else who is said to be an expert writes the “true” statements about you. This record is said to contain truths about you, though they are the opinions of the police and probation or parole officers that are medical psychiatrists, statements that are made true by their possessing a license to enunciate these statements and have them considered true as part of the record on persons.

Our society then, is not a form of the fascist Nazi state, but only because it is a form or variation of a model that is part of our mainstream and moderate society. The alternative may not be socialism, which would be a managerial state that takes care of everyone’s needs, including and especially in cases where the economy to which they are subjected leaves them somehow marginalized. The condition of precarity that is recognized in this regard is certainly real enough. And that is why, under neoliberal conditions, more and more people are subjected to special treatments designed to manage their social and behavioral deviants. The solution that we must seize as possibility is anarchy. It is the passage into an absence of government and governmentality, or management. The most urgent question today is not how all the world’s economic and environmental problems will be solved. The specter is real of their being solved with a universal state that is profoundly repressive, because it imagines and enforces a notion that everything and everyone is risky and dangerous. This will doubtless be articulated in ways that may seem quite liberal and progressive. The urgent question and challenge of politics and political thinking today is how we can use the world’s increasing material abundance, including the relative novelty that now all artistic, intellectual, and informational goods and resources are available at essential zero cost, so that we can inhabit spaces of freedom and not ordering and management. The challenge is how to create a world beyond governmentality and economy. At question may well be the boundary and difference, or possibility indiscernability and indifference, between the absence of economic governmentality, with its logic of need and necessity, and something like a self-governing world based on the old figures of democracy, or the republic with its participating citizens. This hopefully vanishing limit would be that between governmentality and the political, which seeks not to manage a world but to call it into question. The figure that we need to newly invent and generalize or make generic is not so much that of the citizen or even the worker, but the artist. We certainly already know today that the figure of the artist is a political figure.

This may be a world without sacrifice, without law and justice, without investment and labor, without bodies that must be contained and managed, their movements limited, and without the medical or therapeutic modeling of the work of art. It is a question that can be well posed of the art of theater, and that of cinema which is a recent variant of it, since theater had its origins in sacrificial and therapeutic rituals and legal proceedings. Theater in antiquity was the space of transformation between religion and the political. It reconfigured the ‘spiritual’ away from the monarchical models it still has in the major religions. Whether they can survive it, and if so how, is another question. When they ask your identity, consider being not a member of a designated group but the worker of social transformation who is what today is represented in the figure of the artist.