III.Subjecthood and Hypersemia

  One of the disorders that really nudged me into considering the meaning of madness, in an unprofessional way, was paranoid-schizophrenia. This was because schizophrenia — more than things like mania, depression, or obsession— was the most easily to dismissed as falsifiable delusion. As an observation of untruths. But I had always been struck and perplexed by the consistency of the schizophrenic vocabulary: the shadowy role of government, the ever-presence of cameras, the metaphorical equivalence of thoughts and radiowaves, auditory hallucination, the oversaturation of subjecthood, the eye for detail, and the hypersemia— or hypermeaningfulness— of our general surroundings. They were cliches, but I kept stumbling across them in real life nonetheless.

The unanimity couldn't be just a funny coincidence. Nor was it some consensus reached at their annual convention. It was, I thought, very obviously a form of thinking. To approach its details literally and empirically was ridiculous. But the question was: what would have to shift in our own thinking in order for it to make sense? In order for it all to click in that Aha-Erlebnis, that Aha-Moment?

I remember winding through the Charlottesville night, around Jefferson Park Avenue, years ago, swooning on psychedelics. Not a creature was stirring. The trees, cars, and stadiums were softly wrapped in a worknight silence. I nevertheless found myself caught in dialogue with all the world. The surroundings seemed compelled to speak or indicate to me. Objects became subjects. And remarkably enough, some objects became more subjective than others. It was during this stretch of pervasive subjecthood and hypersemia that I first fell into a better appreciation of the paranoid-schizophrenic worldview... only without the Menace that prompts the paranoiac to do something like fearfully wallpaper their living rooms with scotch tape and garbage bags.

First of all, I did not hear or see— openly observe— automobiles speaking to me, as an empirical observation. I was overwhelmed by the sense of nearby subjecthood... Then nearly forced, by cognitive dissonance, to blame it on innocent objects— usually the objects most comparable to subjects. Trees, paintings, televisions, large words, the grinning faces of automobiles.

What we generally consider the balanced mind knows deeply the difference between an It and a Thou. It is a mechanism, a mode, a deeply-embedded category. We are in a very different state sitting in a room alone versus sitting among even one other human being. For the paranoid-schizophrenic, this mode blurs a little leftward, toward subjecthood and the dialogical, even when in the company of inanimate objects. Ad extremum, the world will differentiate into a hellworld of eyes and ears and mouths and hands, in which every last object is categorized according to the most appropriate sense-organ. An awful panoptical awareness. A total McLuhanistic equation of media and organs... This is the paranoiac Hell.

Paranoiacs never taste the sweetness of solitude. And solitude, I'm trying to say, is as much an inner state as an outward fact. Just imagine the exasperation...

Psychopaths, I realized, are the very opposite. Their mode blurs the other way. Even among people and other beings that can suffer and reciprocate, they act as though they're alone among objects. They can split people in half like loaves of rye bread. They do not feel the anger radiating off others. Whether by faulty wiring or terrible malformation, their minds never flip the switch into true, empathetic Thou-ness... Sometimes even failing to consider themselves as subjects, treating the high-pressure subjecthood of courtrooms and electric chairs with detached curiosity.

This conditioned mode is not arrived at through an accumulation of errors, however. For as bad as it sounds, the psychopath is not really falsifiably wrong. Humans are objects. Housepets are objects. Prostitutes are objects. And if, unfortunately for society, the psychopath ultimately doesn't buy into the shibboleth of human sympathy, or the entire discourse of intersubjectivity, as most of us do, he's pretty much a lost cause. A matter of finger-crossing and quarantine. But there is also a body of insight there— the monstrous vantagepoint of the psychopath—derived from the modality of universal objecthood. This is the perspective, I imagine, that we would find in narratives of Earthling destruction at the hands of Martians or Astrozombies, when mankind is treated as a pest. But it is also, we should remember, the inhumane perspective that is required among men at war.

We might profess a greater kinship with the paranoiac; easily and unanxiously seeing paranoiac mechanisms in our own behavior. We scream at machines, traffic jams and the weather, then excuse our behavior as a form of venting. We express our love for baked goods and articles of clothing, then write it off as figurative. We talk to ourselves— only we call it "thinking out loud." Or we might leave the television on for its glowing pseudo-companionship. I would speculate that this diffuse subjecthood, or even looser Lebensgefühle— life-feelings— are the background radiation of all meaning-making, related to numerous deep meanings and personable divinities. In the paranoid schizophrenic, it just happens to be slightly more foregrounded, with a somewhat lower signal-to-noise.

Again, these disorders— these dialects of Experience— do not just reveal things about the human psyche, but about the world and its possible interpretations. These ostensibly skewed schemata are like a step to the left that provides us with greater depth of vision. They also tell us specific stuff about specific things. Schizophrenia can tell us something interesting about dental fillings, radios, codes, governments, and every other one of its popular fixations. What is it about these things that get them wrapped up in schizophrenic meaning-making?

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