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Dialects of Experience,

On Drugs and Madness.

Index I II III IV V VI VII
II. Twilight Orderings


In Madness and Civilization, Foucault famously described how madness, as Unreason, got bound up with our Enlightenment conceptions of Reason, as its Other, as its foil and dysfunction.

Now whether or not you buy the details of his story, it certainly seems that, historically, our definitions and redefinitions of Madness have been embroiled in our definitions and redefinitions of Reason— at least since the Enlightenment. But let's go further and say that— then as now— all the philosophical definitions that we hear bandied about in regards to Truth and Rationality— like coherence, correspondence, or instrumentality— will eventually find their way into the meaning of Madness, as obverse or absence... That is, Madness has been the obverse of an entire discourse, with its own contradictions and controversies. And the same goes with all other manner of derangement, including not just drugs and madness, but countless fleeting or foggy states as well, such as pain or physical illness or the first moment upon waking.


They are all classified as forms of derangement— a house out of Order. But, they don't lack Order. Far from it. They merely bespeak another Order, with its own signature forms of Truth, Meaning, and Rationality. Orders that, for better or worse, do not easily dovetail with modern life in the Western world. We shouldn't romanticize though: these Orders may not be very pleasant or healthy ones. They may not be socially or personally useful ones. But they are meaningful Orders nonetheless. Orders that even have something to tell us, as self-assertions.





We usually listen to the follies or details of the deranged, only then to interpret them with our own weighted shapes and capital vocabulary— our own categories— as a kind of irrationality, untruth, or meaninglessness. We listen to schizophrenics rant about miniature cameras hidden in screwholes or suckers on their brain, then file it away the whole thing as nothing more than Error, undeserving of further investigation. We read notes handwritten in a hallucinogenic fury, but in our morning-after recollection, feel disappointed than the doorknob no longer radiates like the Sun and that last night's "axioms" have been reduced to a pile of drug-addled garbage.


These little postcards, as silly or imbalanced as they may seem or be, are not jibberish, however— any more than Japanese or Korean are jibberish. There is a truth in every narcotic and class of madness. A truth in every dialect of Experience. A truth in its self-assertion that deserves recognition... Recognition in that heavy, Hegelian sense, Anerkennung. But it can be difficult to recognize them outright. These truths require compelling story-tellers, straddlers of realms, who can expand these pseudo-mistakes into an entire body of philosophical insight. Story-tellers who, in order to master its meanings, will sit and patiently listen to every particular. Slowly crawl into every undercooked metaphor. Take note of every trope or figure. Pin together synonymies... whatever it takes to have the sensibility speak through him.


This person can ask the really tough questions, like...What do paranoid-schizophrenia or certain hallucinogenics tell us about meaning and anxiety, in general? What do mania and depression— or stimulants and depressants— tell us about desire and energetics in general? What do addiction and compulsions tell us about need and control? But most important of all, what do these disorders tell us, not just about themselves or ourselves, but about the world?


Dialects of Experience.
I. Interpretation.
II. Twilight Orderings.
III. Subjecthood and Hypersemia.
IV. In Secret.
V. In Letters.
VI. In the Forum.
VII. The Axiom of Mood.
VIII. Quick Visions
IX. Lines of Force


2009



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