Re: [Marxism] Chris Hedges on [schizophrenia] the military-industrial-academic

[Max Clark <poeticaleconomy@xxxxxxxxx>]

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: 'The schizophrenic deliberately seeks out 
the very limit of capitalism: he is its inherent tendency brought to 
fulfullment, its surplus product, its proletariat, and its exterminating 
angel..'

As a clinically diagnosed schizophrenic, I must judge the following 
(reiteration of Adorno) from Chris Hedges an malicious fallacy: 

"those manipulative people [i.e. capitalists], who actually are incapable of 
true 
experience [?], for that very reason manifest an unresponsiveness [?] that 
associates them with certain mentally ill or psychotic characters, 
namely schizoids."

Hedges would do best here to recall his earlier warning against the sadism that 
manifests itself in 

'our lack of compassion for the homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the 
unemployed and the sick." [schizophrenics are, at one point or another, usually 
all these 'things']

Indeed, raw schizophrenics are anything but, or indeed the precise opposite 
of, 'manipulative personalities', 'incapable of true experience', and 
unresponsive to social needs. Schizphrenics are today the most 
thoroughly *manipulated* personalities in their being denied all their civil 
rights and hospitalized (i.e. imprisoned) arbitrarily, and, moreover, forced to 
accept the most debilitating medications (i.e. subjected to autism). It is only 
the "autistic", or medicated, schizo who is 'incapable of true experience' and, 
let us concede provisionally, *unresponsive* -- although I am currently on a 
regime of forced autism (and asphasia), i.e. anti-psychotic medication, and 
somehow manage to respond (however pitifully) to Hedges's injustice to my 
community of interest.

Zizek: 'In the good old Soviet times, Serbsky Institute in Moscow was the 
psychiatric flagship for punitive political control; its psychiatrists 
developed painful drug methods to make detainees talk and extract testimony for 
use in national security investigations. Underpinning the ability of 
psychiatrists to incarcerate people was an invented political mental disorder 
known as vyalotekushchayaâ ("sluggish schizophrenia)". Psychiatrists described 
the disease as a person appearing quite normal most of the time but who would 
break out with a severe case of "inflexibility of convictions," or "nervous 
exhaustion brought on by his or her search for justice," or "a tendency to 
litigation" or "reformist delusions." The treatment involved intravenous 
injections of psychotropic drugs that were so painfully administered patients 
became unconscious. The overriding belief was that a person had to be insane to 
be against Communism.'

One could as easily rewrite Zizek's last quoted sentence as:

"The overriding belief in the contemporary US is that a person has to be insane 
to be against capitalism.'

Against capitalism, furthermore, not only ideally, but in everyday practice 
(however individual). Although I am going far out on a weak limb here, a 
refusal to accept capitalist work discipline, a refusal to be gainfully 
employed, seems to be the rule among my psychotic peers. The whole trick of 
'recovery' from psychosis is to become a wage-slave again. 

Please excuse my stylelessness. --Max Clark


      
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