Black Madness :: Mad Blackness/Anti-Oedipus

(Originally discussed 5/19/20)

I hope everyone had a good week. Next week, we will discuss the conversations "A Mad Black Thang" and "Abandoning The Human" from Therí Alyce Pickens' new book, Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (2019) and the sub-sections "“The Imperialism of Oedipus," “The Process," “The Inscribing Socius," “The Social Field” “Psychoanalysis and Capitalism” from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972). Pickens is writing at the intersection of disability studies, Black studies, and Black women's literary studies. Deleuze and Guattari are writing at the fringes and against the grain of psychoanalysis and continental philosophy, specifically within the context of 1970s France in the wake of the May 1968 student revolts in Paris. 

Though Deleuze often metonymically represents or overshadows Guattari within the academy, Guattari's training as a psychotherapist--initially under Jacques Lacan (like Irigaray) and later with Jean Oury at the psychiatric clinic La Borde--was an essential site of praxis which gave rise to many of the theoretical ideas in Anti-Oedipus, including the idea of "schizoanalysis." It's important to note though that Guattari began to distance himself from the idea of schizoanalysis very soon after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, moving instead toward practices such as institutional psychotherapy (in which patients operate and govern the asylum) and institutional pedagogy (in which classrooms must exist as dynamic spaces in which the socio-cultural, economic, neurological, and psychological differences of students are recognized as essential parts of the process of collective learning). In the follow-up book to Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari replace the schizoid with the figure of the nomad. The nomad, like the speaker of Erykah Badu's "Bag Lady," is able to move between many disparate spaces, but only if they leave all their baggage (including language, sense of identity, history, etc) behind. Mapping Deleuze and Guattari's fraught relationship with the terminology they use in their work makes it easier to understand the often seemingly-impenetrable and constantly-invented language of Anti-Oedipus. It might help to read Anti-Oedipus as a carefully-staged performance of madness--and specifically schizophrenia. When Deleuze and Guattari propose schizoanalysis as a method of critique or discuss the figure of the schizoid, they are not actually talking about people with schizophrenia. Or maybe they are, which is the crux of the problem that Deleuze and Guattari have with psychiatry and philosophy. For Deleuze and Guattari, the analyst only becomes an analyst by identifying with and filtering his life experiences through the dual prisms of the figure of Oedipus and the mommy-daddy-child triangular relationship. This, of course, presents a major contradiction: the plot of Oedipus Rex, the Greek tragedy from which the psychological figure of Oedipus emerges, hinges upon the violation of the incest taboo within the mommy-daddy-child triangle. Oedipus kills his father (the former king) and marries his mother Jocasta; upon realizing what they have done, Jocasta hangs herself and Oedipus gouges out his own eyes. Oedipus comes to signify or represent not only the failure of the mommy-daddy-child triangulation model, but also the absolute and singular validity or truth of that model within psychoanalysis. This contradiction is reinforced and made into reality through critical literature on psychoanalysis and through the training and performance of individual analysts. 

Thus, Deleuze and Guattari are taking aim at the linguistic, philosophical, and psychoanalytic infrastructures that allow Oedipus to be "good" even when he is "bad" and "right" even when he is "wrong." They are looking at the subtle moves through which a society justifies its methods of discipline, control, and organization. The fact that "Oedipus" is allowed to signify a mythical narrative, a psychoanalytic model, and the embodiment of analytic (and therefore white and male) authority indicates to us that there is a direct link between the stories that a society records to represent itself, the disciplinary apparati used to separate "normal" from "deviant" individuals, and the idea that there is a correlation between someone's appearance (particularly their race, gender, sexuality, or class) and the amount of power or authority to which they are entitled in a society. 

This also ties into Tressie McMillan Cottom's discussion of her inherent lack of authority within formal academic writing because of her identity as a Black woman. She cannot embody Oedipus, therefore she cannot fully participate in the mechanical reproduction of the myths which justify his power. The mythologies Cottom signifies upon require a completely different set of terminologies which may appear "mad," irrational, or threatening to a reader who is interested in the preservation of what Pickens calls the "normate" and Sylvia Wynter calls "Man." For both Pickens and Wynter, these categories come to overrepresent all human experience and establish arbitrary methods of distinguishing the human from the non-human and the mad from the neurotypical. The contradictions embedded within Oedipus, the normate, and Man come to constitute the foundation of how we talk and write about identity. As Pickens notes, ocularity and linear time are the dominant Western modes of interpreting meaning. However, those concepts are only the dominant modes because it privileges the idea that it is possible to identify Man/Oedipus/the normate in the flesh with our eyes and in our history books. Every cishet, able-bodied, neurotypical white man must be visually recognizable as Man, the template for the human. Otherwise, everything falls apart.  

Pickens exploits this loophole beautifully precisely because she refuses to close it. Just as Pickens designed the structure of the book to model an alternative to the traditional academic text which prioritizes linearity, objectivity, and closure,  Pickens' framing of her arguments in conversations 2 and 3 model alternative methods of tracing intellectual genealogies and narrating the experiences of Black people with mental illnesses and cognitive disabilities. Rather than interpreting the presence of contradictions or lacunae as threats to her academic authority, Pickens structures her intervention around the idea that the  contradictions and gaps that she confronts when trying to think about blackness and madness are specifically the product of the disciplinary language and history of Black studies and disability studies. The structure of these disciplines implicitly requires scholars to identify primarily as either Black or disabled/mentally ill so that their work will not illuminate the limitations of the field. Pickens, a scholar who is simultaneously Black, disabled, and a woman, must subsequently perform a series of textual acrobatics to stitch together a grammar which is capable of speaking to the specificity of the many embodied experiences of Black disabled people even as Pickens is hesitant to use the Black mad as a "bellwether" or representative of the broader Black American experience. How can the fetishized speak and be heard without reproducing the original conditions of their fetishization? 

Also, I thought it might be useful to offer some historical context on the relationship between blackness, femininity, and schizophrenia in the 20th century. During the 1950s and 1960s, large prescription drug companies such as Smith Kline & French purchased ad space in psychology magazines and journals to market antipsychotic drugs such as Thorazine and Haldol to psychiatrists. At the time, these anti-psychotics were routinely prescribed to patients who had been institutionalized (often against their will) with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. These drugs promised to make patients more compliant, less aggressive, less paranoid, and more productive. From the vantage point of 2020, it becomes painfully obvious how the psychiatric processes of identifying symptoms of schizophrenia in patients during the 1950s were also tied to a larger social goal of making unruly, promiscuous, and deeply resentful women more accepting of their "natural" roles as housewives and caregivers. Here are a couple examples of drug ads targeted at controlling women: 





It's also important to note that even white men who seemed to exhibit irrational, aggressive, or socially inappropriate behavior could be diagnosed with schizophrenia, sedated, and controlled: 




By the 1960s, the marketing of anti-psychotic drugs pivoted to target Black activists who participated in the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panthers. Ads often featured images of cities destroyed by riots, primitive or tribal imagery, and angry, out of control, and paranoid Black people: 




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