R. D. Laing - The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise
23.12.2023
The first book of Laing's I heard of (and intended to read) was The Divided Self. I do wish to read it, and am waiting on its arrival. However, it is a long wait, and I have now also been encouraged by a sociology teacher to engage generally with Laing. I downloaded this book, as it seemed potentially interesting, which was confirmed to me as soon as I began reading it. It is also potentially quite relevant to a philosophy project I will have for uni, so I will be focusing much on that as I read this book.
In truth, I began reading this book several days ago, but haven't had time to sit down and write anything on it until now. So now I will be going through sections I highlighted and writing down anything that sticks out to me as I do so.
We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.
We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
Laing aligns a lot with my own views on madness, although he takes a much more humanist approach. But it is true that there is always an ideal viewpoint which we can never adopt, even as we view ourselves through it. I would say that even humanity is such an ideal, which is an area where I break with him. He is right about the outrageous violence. The Tetsuo films (at least the frist two—I have not seen The Bullet Man, I would argue, heavily concern this. It requires violence upon us, and it requires us to do violence. The car of the salaryman colliding with the body of the metal fetishist. A certain humanity preserved, at a certain human cost. An alienating of oneself from one's own potentiality. A body which has enveloped and contained itself with metal confronting a body holding metal within itself wanting to expand ever outwards... Somewhere there must be death and violence.
I experience myself as experienced by you,
Laing writes. He is right. And I have such a horror of being experienced.
He asks if human beings can be persons today. It is a relevant question. To what extent have we become merely echoes or organs of our surrounding socil structures? Is love possible? he asks as well. Not if persons are not possible. How can we love a person who is not a person, but merely another organ of a machine functioning to reproduce... something?
As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavour; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world: we barely remember our dreams, and make little sense of them when we do; as for our bodies, we retain just sufficient proprioceptive sensations to coordinate our movements and to ensure the minimal requirements for biosocial survival - to register fatigue, signals for food, sex, defaecation, sleep; beyond that, little or nothing. Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest, and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of un-learning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.
Like the salaryman in Body Hammer who has forgotten the violence of his childhood, forgotten that he has been made into a weapon. Or the "New World" in the original Tetsuo, much like this world experienced afresh, which requires the salaryman to give up all he knew before, his existence in which he forgot his own potentiality in service of capital and family reproduction (a career and family, supposedly in his self-interest). Only then can he experience love togetehr with the metal fetishist. I'm almost reminded of Stirner's spooks, ideas which we may adopt and treat as identity, but in doing so, alienating ourselves. Health and self-care culture has always been about the maintenance of a productive body, not the body as it is or would like to be.
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man.
Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.
Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
Our behaviour is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things.
If our experience is destroyed, our behaviour will be destructive.
If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.
Laing reminding me just how much I really need to rewatch Body Hammer. Unfortunately, he is right. The normal man acts according to norms and not his own desire. He is not himself. He is an organ.
It is hard sometimes (often, even usually) to maintain hope. I can only cling desperately to this thought of Laing's:
Yet if nothing else, each time a new baby is born there is a possibility of reprieve. Each child is a new being, a potential prophet, a new spiritual prince, a new spark of light, precipitated into the outer darkness. Who are we to decide that it is hopeless?
Such thought is perhaps the only reason I have not still given up. If I condemn human violence, it is because I believe that this violence is unmerited. If I believe that this violence in unmerited, it is because I believe that, somewhere, there is some cause for hope, something to be valued, no matter how small and destroyed it may be.
He cites a Goffman quote: There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shrivelling up the reality in which one is lodged.
Rather Kafkaesque, and a quite good quote in general. I will have to read Goffman myself at some point.
The distinction between the absence of relationships, and the experience of every relationship as an absence, is the division between loneliness and a perpetual solitude, between provisional hope or hopelessness and a permanent despair.
Much to think about in the context of Crash and the schizoid experience. The characters have their relationships, but there is nothing in them. Only an absence, an inability to experience any sort of being with the other (being through the other). Unfortunately it leads to such destructive consequences: the car crash fetish, which can only bring proper satisfaction in death. For otherwise the car still constitutes only an extension of the self, there is no true reciprocity... but death is when it affects them, when it gives them the final release of experiencing themselves.
We are afraid to approach the fathomless and bottomless groundlessness of everything.
There's nothing to be afraid of.' The ultimate reassurance, and the ultimate terror.
We experience the objects of our experience as there in the outside world. The source of our experience seems to be outside ourselves. In the creative experience, we experience the source of the created images, patterns, sounds, to be within ourselves but still beyond ourselves. Colours emanate from a source of pre-light itself unlit, sounds from silence, patterns from formlessness. This pre-formed pre-light, this pre-sound, this pre-form is nothing, and yet it is the source of all created things.
There is something here of the relationship between self-destruction and self-creation. The birth of one self only made possible through the death of countless others. We maintain out fragile social life attempting to forget the very death from which it emerges. I cannot help but recall Łukasz Musiał's ZwierzoczłekoKafka and the pre-world he describes, one of death and terror from which humanity nevertheless comes forth.
The silence of the preformation expressed in and through language, cannot be expressed by language. But language can be used to convey what it cannot say - by its interstices, by its emptiness and lapses, by the lattice-work of words, syntax, sound and meanings. The modulations of pitch and volume delineate the form precisely by not filling in the spaces between the lines. But it is agrave mistake to mistake the lines for the pattern, or the pattern for that which it is patterning.
I am, actually, reminded of Roman Jakobson and his writings on poetry. One thing he paid attention to was the ambiguity of meaning which poetry allows (in which, really, it flourishes). There is that, and how he wrote that languages are distinguished not so much by what they allow one to say, but rather which they do not allow one to leave unspecificied. We have to say something, and to say that we have to give specifics, to divide and delineate. We can only play something while we express something through the unspecified. The necessities of specification which occur when translating 鉄男 (Tetsuo) as "The Iron Man" are a deep shame. No plural or singular tranformed into the isolated singular, one singular Iron Man. No more than strange oneness of the body shared at the end of the film, both Iron Man and Iron Men at the same time, together and separate beings with no distinction.
The experience of being the actual medium for a continual process of creation takes one past all depression or persecution or vain glory, past, even, chaos or emptiness, into the very mystery of that continual flip of nonbeing into being, and can be the occasion of that great liberation when one makes the transition from being afraid of nothing, to the realization that there is nothing to fear. Nevertheless, it is very easy to lose one's way at any stage, and especially when one is nearest.
Here can be great joy, but it is as easy to be mangled by the process as to swing with it. It will require an act of imagination from those who do not know from their own experience what hell this borderland between being and nonbeing can become. But that is what imagination is for.
Very close to my own experiences. Laing expresses this here wonderfully.
I think of both Crash and Tetsuo. The former—so horribly mangled. The latter—just barely having escaped from this. I am only glad that Cronenberg's film so masterfully allows one to imagine.
Words in a poem, sounds in movement, rhythm in space, attempt to recapture personal meaning in personal time and space from out of the sights and sounds of a depersonalized, dehumanized world. They are bridgeheads into alien territory. They are acts of insurrection. Their source is from the Silence at the centre of each of us. Wherever and whenever such a whorl of patterned sound or space is established in the external world, the power that it contains generates new lines of forces whose effects are felt for centuries.
Laing is more optimistic than I am. In most cases, I doubt that there can be much effect at all, much less for centuries. But that is the goal. Insurrectionist, and not revolutionary—I agree. At the very least that is what I would like my art to be. Something resulting from my own desperation. A way for others to realize their own desperation. I have to remember how Kolnakiewicz writes of Artaud, describing his wish to have everyone else samotny i desperat
. I am the same. There is something of a connection to Artaud's wish to express the unconscious through art here. Deeply personal and deeply silent. And of course this Silence is much like Kafka's pre-world as described by Musiał.
From the point of view of a man alienated from his source creation arises from despair and ends in failure. But such a man has not trodden the path to the end of time, the end of space, the end of darkness, and the end of light. He does not know that where it all ends, there it all begins.
So one hopes.
Much in the second chapter beautifully written, although much similar to that expressed in the first chapter. Undoubtable that Laing has a certain poetic talent. Still, he begins to get into the concept of an inner world here, which I know is essential in his conception of being schizoid and schizophrenic. The necessity of both. And sometimes the outer world is so unberable. It threatens so heavily to destroy the inner.
I enjoy how he writes of mystification. Violence survives by pretending to be love. And so the family reproduces itself. He quotes Marcuse; I will have to read him.
From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful. By the time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves.
A half-crazed creature, more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age. Love and violence, properly speaking, are polar opposites. Love lets the other be, but with affection and concern. Violence attempts to constrain the other's free- dom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other's own existence of destiny.
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
Laing and I have a shared fascination with potentiality. He is right. There are so many potential forms we could take. But we have been reduced to organs of self-reproducing power. Capital, the family, and so on. The salaryman constrained in the car, travelling along the road, versus Tetsuo, strange metal creature of potential, travelling on their own.
Love has become something to fear. Violence wears its skin. It istrumentalizes, and calls this realization of the potential of the instrumentalized (it is not). We cannot even desire any more. We are supposed to love in a certain way. And a coerced love cannot be love. The ultimate alienation. Desire mandated. It is no longer ours. Nothing is.
But the result of such adjustment to our society is that, having been tricked and having tricked ourselves out of our minds, that is to say, out of our own personal world of experience, out of that unique meaning with which potentially we may endow the external world, simultaneously we have been conned into the illusion that we are separate 'skin-encapsuled egos'. Having at one and the same time lost our selves, and developed the illusion that we are autonomous egos, we are expected to comply by inner consent with external constraints, to an almost unbelievable extent.
...
We have all been processed on Procrustean beds. At least some of us have managed to hate what they have made of us. Inevitably we see the other as the reflection of the occasion of our own self-division.
The others have become installed in our hearts, and we call them ourselves. Each person, not being himself either to himself or the other, just as the other is not himself to himself or to us, in being another for another neither recognizes himself in the other, nor the other in himself. Hence being at least a double absence, haunted by the ghost of his own murdered self, no wonder modern man is addicted to other persons, and the more addicted, the less satisfied, the more lonely.
Once more there is a further turn of the spiral, another round of the vicious circle, another twist of the tourniquet. For now love becomes a further alienation, a further act of violence. My need is a need to be needed, my longing a longing to be longed for. I act now to install what I take to be myself in what I take to be the other person's heart.
He describes everything so painfully well. The obligation to love, which is not love but violence. The desperate attempt at affirming a self which was only a ghost to begin with. A supposedly independent image depending so desperately on others. But it can't acknowledge this; it can't acknowledge itself. And until it realizes this it will commit such desperate cruelty in the name of love.
We have to being by admitting and even accepting our violence, rather than blindly destroying ourselves with it...
I think he is right but I still want him to explain!!! The violence that we all require to define and protect ourselves? That is what I see. In pretending violence is love, we hold ourselves back from the violence we need to defend ourselves and our love. I always should have been more violent.
Laing's very right that "consensus" reuires intolerance of different fundamental structures of experience
. One reason for my distaste for consensus-based identity. You can do what you want forever. No need to seek permission or demand the recognition of others. They are "pseudo-things" in Laing's words, otherwise described as specters, ghosts, or spooks. He's right, too, that we create a Them to re-create an Us. The inherent non-consent in consensus.
The group becomes a machine - and it is forgotten that it is a man-made machine in which the machine is the very men who make it. It is quite unhke a machine made by men, which can have an existence of its own. The group is men themselves arranging themselves in patterns, strata, assuming and assigning different powers, functions, roles, rights, obligations and so on.
The group cannot become an entity separate from men, but men can form circles to encircle other men. The patterns in space and time, their relative permanence and rigidity, do not turn at any time into a natural system or a hyperorganism, although the phantasy can develop, and men can start to live by the phantasy that the relative permanence in space-time of patterns and patterns of patterns are what they must live and die for.
It is as though we all preferred to die to preserve our shadows.
Laing predicting the plot of Body Hammer. More generally, though: we have possessed and instrumentalized ourselves in the name of ghosts. No wonder then we are so eager for the deaths of others and even ourselves.
Perhaps the only love possible: Saints may still be kissing lepers. It is high time that the leper kissed the saint.
We must go beyond the idea of a person whose very being needs to be forgiven and made holy.
He goes on to discuss "the schizophrenic experience". I know this is more of a focus in The Divided Self, for which I'm still waiting, but this is a good chapter so far. He's right about the cruelty of the attempts to exact proper behavior from the patients. And I think it is necessary to understand how this develops as a method of interacting with a fundamentally intolerable ("outer") world.
He is writing more about the inner world and the journey of it. I'm reminded of some of my attempts at exploring my inner world through writing. What he says of it as a "going back" once again recalls the pre-world.
Wait... this connects so well with Kafka's internal god...
But since society, without knowing it, is starving for the inner, the demands on people to evoke its presence in a 'safe' way, in a way that need not be taken seriously, etc., is tremendous - while the ambivalence is equally intense. Small wonder that the list of artists, in say the last 150 years, who have become shipwrecked on these reefs is so long - Holderlin, John Clare, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud. . . .
Those who survived have had exceptional qualities - a capacity for secrecy, slyness, cunning - a thoroughly realistic appraisal of the risks they run, not only from the spiritual realms that they frequent, but from the hatred of their fellows for anyone engaged in this pursuit.
I would list to hope that I belong to those who survive. At any rate—here is the source of one of my own ambivalences to art. It seems one way to allow an interection of the inner and outer worlds which does not threaten the creator. But we cannot pretend to ourselves that it is for this reason accepted. When it is accepted, it is accepted because it remains unreal, not a material threat to the social fabric. It does not change existing relations of power. It is merely a dream which can be recuperated.
That being said, Laing is perhaps more transcendental than I am.
24.12.2023
Thinking of what he wrote about psychosis as a journey which we shouldn't necessarily try to stop, and which may even be beneficial when treated as a journey. An unorthodox position, but I can see why he takes it up. Such a break may allow a new outlook uopn the world. There are times when I've wished for the space to break down and make something new of myself rather than tenuously hold myself together in order to survive as is mandated to me.
The final section of the book, The Bird of Paradise feels almost too sacred to comment on. A stunning prose poem.