Change Is Why We Exist, Composing a History, 06/08/2018

You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting quite as frequently lately. This is because I’m in the process of amping my philosophical social media beyond a new threshold. Can’t say anything at the moment because all the infrastructure isn’t yet in place, but it’ll be a pretty radical project.

The blog itself will keep going. I’m not sure if I’ll port all the entries over to the new main home of my online philosophy and activism. For one thing, I kind of like the retro feel of continuing to publish first-draft versions of some content that will appear in a more high profile place.

For another thing, there are nearly 1300 posts in the entire history of this blog and I suspect porting all that content to the new site will be fucking hard.

Yes, I know. Even lower overhead than this. Have you seen my apartment?

I started this blog with a specific purpose of simply motivating me to write something creative every day. At the time, I really needed that motivation. The conventional paths of a university career were shutting down for me, and what I thought was decent preparation to find decent work outside that sector turned out to be incredibly inadequate. I had no idea what to do.

Short version – I was mad depressed. There was a period of three days in May 2013 where I literally didn’t leave my bed except to go to the bathroom. I hardly ate. All I knew was that I still loved creative work, I still loved philosophy. Philosophical thinking, writing. Same with narrative storytelling. So I needed something to focus my mind and keep me feeling like I was doing something more than treading water.

Since then, Adam Writes Everything has been an essential centre of gravity that my creative life could orbit. It was a machine that kept me thinking, that kept my brain active. It became a tool that helped transform my own thinking and research process, and make it a lot better.

Blogging introduced a kind of recursiveness to my thinking, encouraging me to experiment with how concepts and techniques could fit together. It helped me refine my writing style into something less burdened by academicians’ conventions. It helped me figure out what kind of writing I could do that I hadn’t tried before. It helped me learn how to write for the internet.

It’s taken a long time, and there have been a lot of setbacks along the way. But I’m now at last in a situation where I can centre myself, feel confident in what I’m doing, and have enough financial security that I can put a small investment into a business like the media project you’re about to see by – I hope – Labour Day weekend.

I’m not the first with an idea like this, and I won’t be the last. But it’ll be good listening, and a strong model. My overhead is lower than my predecessors, and we can reach more people than ever before.

Cracking at the Paradox of Fascism, Composing, 29/03/2018

Sorry it's been a while. I was actually in hospital for a few days since the weekend, but I’m back in reasonable health now. And as of yesterday, I have a new position as an instructor at a new college in Toronto. So the past few days have been really disorienting.

So getting back to this blog today is very much an exercise in grounding myself again. Returning to a regular research and writing routine, as a habitual part of my day, making sure that even on the messiest days, I’ve got a calm space.

Ludwig Wittgenstein said that philosophy had a therapeutic purpose – He wasn’t the first one to say so, of course, but he was the first one I happened to come across who did. Therapy wasn’t the only purpose, of course. But it could serve that function if you needed it – a minimum expression.

By Brunhilda

Meditation. Focus the mind. Think. An activity that sometimes is much too difficult.
• • •
Here’s a paradox for you. It’s a political and conceptual paradox. Call it the paradox of totalitarianism. Those who are most afraid of losing their individuality will shed it themselves.

It doesn’t make much sense on the face of it. But it’s an old problem in political philosophy – not always phrased explicitly, but quite old. Spinoza was the first to ask it.

Why would a person fight so strongly for their slavery as if it were their freedom?

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari tackle that problem themselves, thinking of the political context of their own time. It was dominated by the same currents as ours. Globalized liberal capitalism was kicking into gear. Ecological pollution was reaching crisis points. States, corporations, and other institutions were developing far-reaching control into the everyday lives of citizens.

In the 1970s, what did people in the heart of capitalist countries fear? Communism. The creeping embrace of an ideology that fused us into a unified, undifferentiated mass. The state and related institutions had total control over your life, down to the smallest details. Individuality becomes forgotten. Conformity is all that matters.

Not all people, of course. But it was a cultural tendency, which the right-wing politicians of many generations opposed violently and intensely. The North American examples are clearest to me, because this is where I live and this continent is the epicentre of the current movement in this direction.

Joseph McCarthy, William F. Buckley, Andrew Breitbart. These are just a few prominent people who aggressively advocated against any political or social ideas that would reject or curtail our individual freedom.

Above is a perfectly reasoned argument.

Not about individual cases, of course, like criminals.* I mean in the sense of the civic contract, the way all citizens of a community regard each other – as individuals, free to pursue their own lives as they wish.

* Heavens to Betsy, we must never think of treating criminals with dignity! If we did, they wouldn’t be criminals. I kid, but sometimes I hear of something so sickening that sarcasm is my only way to keep from breaking down.

Here’s Ian Buchanan’s take on how Anti-Œdipus expresses the paradox of totalitarianism today. You become so afraid of an authority stripping you of your individuality that you suspect all political, ideological, or moral difference from your own individualist thinking.

If people have communitarian beliefs – like a notion that making a promise binds you to keep it – stamp it out as a betrayal. It’s taking advantage of your freedom to give yourself over to the enemy.

And in enforcing total discipline to defend yourselves against the enemy that would rob you of your individualities? There’s your answer.

Too Much Reality, Research Time, 20/03/2018

When I was first reading Anti-Œdipus and really getting into it, I didn’t fully understand all the book’s arguments about psychiatry. I could follow the political philosophy well, but a more experienced researcher on Gilles Deleuze’s thought told me I needed some more background knowledge on the psychiatry before I could really dig into its concepts.

It’s been about 12 years since then. I think I’ve got this down reasonably.

Now, quite a lot of academic philosophy departments don’t consider Deleuze and Félix Guattari credible voices on scientific or medical issues. This is because they’re French philosophers whose major works dropped in the 1970s, so are associated with dreaded postmodernism.

Flying from reality? An excess of reality? By Mathieu Laca

Many university philosophy departments have characters more like Petersonian reaction than popular stereotypes about the discipline would have you believe.

As I’ve said before, Guattari was a groundbreaking psychiatrist, whose clinic La Borde was at the leading edge of creative new ways to treat psychotics and schizophrenics. The reason is because of his thorough materialism.

Under the influence of Freud – as well as Jung and pretty much the whole psychoanalytic model of thinking – you conceive of psychiatry as a rationalist practice. Your paradigm is what was literally called “the talking cure.”

So psychiatric practice is about the patient themselves analyzing themselves – the actual analyst acts as a guide so the patient learns the tools and understands the arguments and inferences to cure themselves. The patient understands the causes, conditions, nature, and the steps to follow in their daily lives to overcome their mental health problems.

That works for some mental health issues, but when Freud himself dealt with schizophrenics, he could do nothing. He described such patients as falling away from reality. Reality on his thinking was a material order of things and processes which you understood with rational human thought, language, and discourse.

Figure out the nature of a problem in clear thinking, after self-consciously exploring it. You can always fix your own mind if you understand its mechanics. Schizophrenics fall or fly from this because they can’t understand the world’s mechanics – empiricism is impossible.

Guattari had a totally different way to describe the schizophrenic state of mind – an excess of reality. Functioning people perceived and understood with a powerful focus. We cut away so much of a chaotic, messy environment.

Everyone is a machine. How fine is your tuning?
By Nychos

We sit on a busy bus without being overwhelmed by the activity around us – people moving back and forth, weaving through crowds in all directions, fumbling with bags and boxes, announcements of the next stop or slow stretches, cute puppies poking out of purses. We can keep our eye on a couple of things at a time.

We’re also doing this actively – making sense of all this mess on the damn bus. We remember who sat where, when our stop is, waddle to the door two or three stops in advance, stick our gloves deeper in our pockets so we don’t lose them, keeping an eye out for seated riders about to move. We can use this focussed attention as a basis to understand what’s going on and what we should do.

Schizophrenia explodes our focus. We can’t discriminate among possibilities because we spontaneously understand more causal processes than really exist. The imagination flies radically from the most trivial details. A passenger on the bus snorts out a sneeze, and it means that he’s part of the clandestine CIA plot to replace citizens with plastic machines.

We generate an excess of reality – an explosion of causes, explanations, and conditions. Unable to cut away any of our thought in perceiving or understanding, we overwhelm ourselves.

Funny part is, neurological research has a good angle on the causes of schizophrenia. It’s a destabilization of inhibitory signalling processes in the brain’s neural transmission. Destabilizing a process that should be in a proper range of inhibition.

Unable to regulate our reality – our thinking and world.

The Emptiness of Meaning in an Exploded Life, Research Time, 22/02/2018

Jean-Claude Polack once wrote a wonderful essay about Félix Guattari. Polack is a French psychiatrist who worked with Guattari at La Borde for more than a decade. His essay in The Guattari Effect volume blends philosophy, psychiatric theory, medical practice, and memoir of an old friend.

My personal favourite in the volume, even more than the essays by Guattari himself. I love Guattari, but I can never expect him to write in a straightforward way.

For that reason, Polack explains a bit better than Guattari what the core principles of their practice were, and why they constituted such a major break from Freudianism.

We are material assemblages all functioning together, and sometimes
those functions can break down or overheat.

Polack describes in very clear terms the experience of working in an indefinite-term, in-patient, live-in communal facility for the most intense psychotics in France. Their patients literally were totally unable to control their minds.

The mainstream schools of psychiatry in France in the 1960s and 70s were shot through with a rationalism that was utterly inadequate to deal with such people as psychotics.

Polack describes Freudian rationalism as the quest for the one true meaning of all the deranged and delusional behaviour a person expresses. If I can put it in the language common to semiotic and postmodern philosophy of the time – because Polack did – it’s a quest for the signifier.

This is why, from this important epistemic perspective, I find a lot of postmodernist philosophy a bit tiring compared to the concepts of Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. The emptiness of the signifier as necessary ground of meaning was a serious philosophical issue to so many – Jacques Lacan, Jean Beaudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze.

Hang on. Yes, I did just say Gilles Deleuze. The Logic of Sense included a lot of inquiry about the signifier-signified relationship, how solid meaning in language and communication always slips away. In his creative philosophy, I consider Deleuze to have been in danger of slipping into the same lostness that so much postmodernism fell into.

We shouldn't be so afraid to conceive of ourselves as machines. No
matter how scary the prospect might be to us sometimes.

Not much danger, but a danger nonetheless. Then Guattari showed up to demonstrate that none of this signifier stuff was really all that important to the human mind and thought. It fit well with another set of concepts in Deleuze’s work – expression.

Each body has a range of potential activity that you can explore. Some of that activity is productive, helps augment and strengthen a body. But that kind of productive activity depends on restraint – channelling, controlling activity.

A seriously schizophrenic psychotic isn't able to channel her activity at all – she can only act, or follow an obsessive central idea to its endpoint. When that’s the kind of mental illness you're dealing with, a narrative explanatory technique like psychoanalysis isn’t going to work as therapy.

Guattari and Polack – and never forget the contribution of La Borde’s chief, Jean Oury – designed therapy regimens that literally retrained psychotics to control their thoughts, moods, and actions.

The stroll through the clinic gardens built relaxed spaces in experience. The grid – a communally-managed timetable of chores – reintroduced patients to performing tasks, focussing on the practical world, and responsibility to others.

It didn't work for everyone, of course. Some people’s neural systems were too damaged. Guattari often combined these re-socialization therapies with anti-psychotic drug regimens to keep people physically on an even-enough keel to function. But they worked far better on schizophrenics than the “talking cure.”

It was therapy that repaired the machine.

Chaos Is the Natural State of Your Mind, Research Time, 20/02/2018

Researching Utopias, it's a book of ethics as well as politics and political theory. As it should be. Any political inquiry mixes questions of ethics and morality – Who are we? and What do we owe each other? respectively.

Any comprehensive book of ethics will need a conception of the subject underneath, an ontological one. If I’m going to explore questions of character, I’ll need to know what the limits and potentials of the human character are. Or at least, I’ll need a solid, dependable picture of those limits and potentials that will – at minimum – be a decent set of premises someone can consider for the sake of the wider argument.

This post comes from some notes I took on an old essay by Félix
Guattari called "Schizo Chaosmosis."

So where did I develop my general conception of the subject, of selfhood? Well, in my case, I’m picking up what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari threw down.* It’s a fairly complex concept, but holding it doesn’t prevent me from engaging with anything else in philosophy or broader human science.

* Not wholesale, but with a suitable grounding in the basics of medical, neurological, and psychological science, as well as some input from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological thinking. But those converge more closely than you might think from stereotypes about the field.

If anything, it gives me a better grounding than researchers in the humanities whose knowledge is more discipline-bound. Guattari has a reputation among the more closed-minded majority of North American scholars as a freak opposed to real scientific inquiry.

But that’s a ridiculous stereotype – Guattari wrote like a freak, but he was a dedicated medical scientist.** He was a psychiatrist who worked with near-permanent in-patient schizophrenics. Severe schizophrenics.

** See, Merleau-Ponty researched The Phenomenology of Perception with detailed help from cutting-edge neuroscience research in the major research hospitals of Paris. He built his materialist phenomenology from some of the most influential studies of brain injury in the 20th century.

What did Guattari learn about the nature of human subjectivity from working with schizophrenics? He understood the chaos that’s always roiling inside each of our supposedly rational minds.

Learning the scientific knowledge and skill of so many thinkers
who too many mainstream North American philosophy departments
consider anti-scientific helped me realize something in my own
writing. I can be as experimental as I want in my own philosophical
work, and how I express myself. But not all the time. And carefully.

This isn't a matter of Freudian sub-conscious. The Freudian model of the mind is inherently rational – the talking cure is cure by understanding the origins. As soon as you figure out the root cause of your neuroses – the driving principle of your personal narrative – you’re cured.

Add to that, the whole point of Anti-Œdipus. Freud and the Freudians mistook the images that arose from Sigmund’s contingent practices – these patients from this city at this time in history – for universal organizing principles of human consciousness.

At La Borde, Guattari saw something much more obviously visceral, animal, dangerous, and fascinating than symbols and arguments. Schizophrenia – especially in the midst of a serious, intense breakdown – is the removal of all restraint on thought. It’s the closest humanity can get to pure chaos.

Guattari worked this out from studying his patients’ actions – how they thought and lived. Contemporary neuroscience has uncovered an appropriately literal cause of the condition – schizophrenics have a severe shortage of the neurotransmitter that inhibits our thoughts.

He saw the raw, unfettered force of the human personality. It was the liberation of a person from every constraint they had – everything they learned through enculturation and education was inconsequential. The schizophrenic was totally free.

Guattari also saw that the schizophrenic was a total basket case, unable to function in the world at all. His therapy – aside from stabilizing drugs – was accustoming them to social life through routine involvement in the operations of the clinic. Doing laundry, cleaning up, playing games, helping make meals.

Literally re-socializing them. That’s why it’s always a mistake to read Deleuze and Guattari as saying that to deterritorialize is freedom itself. Being totally deterritorialized is to become chaos – pure high-energy entropy with no limits. That’s no life. It’s an explosion.***

*** The cutting-edge neuroscience research at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy couldn’t have happened without so many patients with so many different brain injuries. France had plenty – war veterans who had shrapnel slicing up different parts of their brains. No need for a dubious ethics board application to study serious brain injuries – the Second World War gave them all the patients needed and then some.

Guattari's was an ethical and political medical practice. He treated schizophrenia by re-socializing people – rebuilding their characters as better versions of themselves. Versions less likely to fly apart again.

Lights at the End at Last, A History Boy, 04/05/2017

I think, feel, and sincerely hope that the direction of this blog will change over the next little while. Permanently.

I mean this in an optimistic sense. And I’m very happy that I can say this optimistically. You might have noticed that I added a new link under my professional links, Cestar College. This is a career college in northern Toronto where I’ll be teaching Business Communications and Leadership Ethics for the next however-long-I-decide-to-stay-there.

And I may stay there for quite a long time. After all, I trained for years to be a teacher and researcher. I’m still a damn good researcher, and writing this blog over the last nearly four years has improved my writing tremendously. Both for argumentative, casual, and fiction.

I started this blog not just to build a small online profile for myself as an independent writer, but also to keep myself going as a person. The call centre job I’d had since late 2012 spent the winter and spring working me for sometimes 50 hour weeks. I quit around the same time my disastrous round of university sector job hunting exploded. I was acutely depressed and barely left my bed for three days.

My own experience with severe anxiety over the last four years has
made me realize how inappropriate it is to medicalize anxiety as if it
were a disorder entirely in thought and individual neurochemistry. Yes,
it can be treated with medications and therapies. But its causes most
often are social and environmental. Anxiety is a body and personality
reaching its breaking point in being able to handle chronic insecurity.
It's the mental expression of a social and economic disorder. Go read
Anti-Oedipus and see the basics of the dynamic.

I spent the following year working for an online editing farm, where my piecework wages amounted to less than minimum wage. I trained in communications because I thought that was the best business certificate I could get where my talents as a qualitative analyst the writer would be put to the best use.

But I was so out of place as a personality with the culture of the Toronto PR agency that I could never find steady entry level work. I was a bookish nerd in a world of aging frat bros, Lean In archetypes, and a kind of amoral approach to client acquisition and services that I never felt comfortable.

My first paying job after graduating – writing work for the Business Owners’ Council, a spinoff of Inc. Magazine – only ever gave me work on such short notice, I was practically on unpaid call 16 hours per day. And they never even paid me. Nor did they ever send me a non-disclosure agreement, so I can describe their human resources practices without restraint.

I’ve never been able to make a living wage from my business training in corporate communications – only picking up occasional contracts that got me a few hundred each month at best.

For four years, I’ve lived under constant stress from financial insecurity and anxiety over whether I’d ever be able to find a decent job. It hammered my personal and professional confidence so much that I thought my only path to a secure future was working my IKEA job at $13/hour.

I loved the people I worked with, but the job itself was so stressful and draining that I broke down after a year. It didn’t help that I had a therapist who I trusted to help me, but who seemed more intent on condescendingly ordering me not to feel stressed or agitated instead of helping me deal with these states of mind.

The GF and I have been watching Thirteen Reasons Why, since it seems
to be one of those generational touchstones in progress. It's a powerful
narrative, and I deeply admire how camera and lighting blends time
periods and memories into a single flow of imagery. Also how
intricately and precisely the show reveals its labyrinth of relationships.
It's the best mystery show I think I've ever seen.
But I think it's giving me nightmares. And as a 34 year old professional
teacher and writer, I'm decidedly not its demographic. My anxiety
and depression issues make the storyline hit me very profoundly. I can
believe that people whose current experience is closer to the social
media embedded hell of modern high school go through far
worse sympathetic depression.

I actually think my brain has been affected somewhat by the years of continual worrying. I’m now one of the many people who has to take mild anti-depressants to stay focussed. I’m probably not even the only one at my new job who does.

Cestar is the first time since 2013 that I’m actually being paid a good middle-class salary. It’s the first time since 2013 that I’ve been paid a decent living salary at all. It’s the first time since 2013 that I’ve been paid at all for the type of work I spent my 20s training for. The type of work that I’m good at.

I mean, administration stuff is going to be a pain in the ass. But that’s true universally. The point is, I’m a teacher at last. And I’ll be a teacher with a pre-tax salary of around $35,000. Pretty reasonable if you ask me.

Four years. I had to go through four years of anxiety, depression, hopelessness, and worthlessness before getting started. Yeah, a lot of people have it way worse. I see them begging on street corners and in subway stations pretty much every day. But it’s far from fun.

Yeah, those were the years when I met the GF. She’s the love of my life, and I shouldn’t regret anything about that time with her. Without her help, I don’t know if I wouldn’t have made it through at all. But I do have one regret.

I regret that it’s taken me so long to be in a position where my situation won’t stress us both out. I regret all the pain I caused with every career setback, every anxiety attack, every opportunity that turned into a kick to the balls. I regret that I’ve never been able to show her what I can do, only how I can manage.

For the last four years, I’ve been a failure. Not anymore. But all I’ve been able to show her is failure until pretty much the last month. That still hurts me.

Now I have a good-paying teaching job and I’m making my first film. I'm getting married in a couple of years to a woman I love more than I thought I could love anyone. That’s fantastic.

But the scars and pain of the last four years feel like they’re never going to leave me.

The blog, however, will probably take a new direction. I'll be talking about teaching techniques here sometimes, and continuing to work through ideas in my research and writing for different projects. Also, writing about more experiences in my artistic work.

My blog started as a means to keep myself alive and motivated through a depression that I didn't see a way out of. Now, it seems I'm in shape for it to become a chronicle of growing success and happiness.

How About Let’s Talk About Our Mental Health Language? Jamming, 25/01/2017

Today is a Canada-wide corporate-sponsored day to talk about mental health issues. The event does a lot of good work in eroding the vile myths about mental health issues, and our culturally-ingrained tendency to demonize and isolate people with mental health issues.

I’ve certainly had my own mental health issues. Sometimes, I discuss them here. But today, I want to talk about how I’ve often heard mental health issues discussed. Canada has done a good job integrating the serious treatment of mental health into workers’ rights, employment standards, and legal rights.

For all that success, there’s still plenty of popular prejudice about people’s mental health problems. But I see that prejudice as rooted in deeper places than stereotypes and our spaces of ignorance. It’s rooted in the language we use to talk about ourselves.

Basically, popular conceptions of how human behaviour works leaves us either total robots with no moral accountability or fully responsible agents entirely in control of our own actions.

Clarifying before I continue – There are actually a ton of different models of thinking that develop many different concepts of human agency, power, responsibility. They’re bound up in different ways of thinking about the relation of humans and our environment – many degrees of lockstep firmness in causation and conditioning.

I’m pretty familiar with these different models of agency. I wrote a book that used quite a lot of them in theoretical development.

But I’m talking about popular ideas right now. The ideas that creep into our thought when we talk or think about mental health.

And I mean mental health in two contexts. Think about the casual conversations you have when you’re specifically using words like ‘mental health,’ referring to psychiatrists, and the relevant science.

You find yourself talking about mentally ill people as victims, as passive before their conditions and their treatments. If they’re in treatment, they’re doped up. If they’re undergoing problems in their lives, they’re helpless, adrift, caught up in their illness.

They aren’t responsible for their actions – they aren’t even really seen as acting. Just flailing about. And they’re always the objects of pity.

Later, you find yourself talking about someone you know. They’re having mental health issues – depressed and a drag, anxious and worried, or hostile and annoying. And this is all in their daily life. Going to work, running errands, meeting friends – it’s all tinged with this character of lower quality than yours.

Of course they’re responsible for their behaviour, you think. They’re out living their lives just like me – they’re just irritating, or assholes. Fully responsible for their shitty behaviour.

We have no way in our popular conversations yet to talk about that middle range of responsibility in everyday language. Someone with a mental health issue – in those ordinary expressions of pity or annoyance – remains either totally passive or fully responsible. A victim or a jerk.

This either/or of extremes is still how we think about too many health issues. You’re perfectly healthy until you need treatment – then you’re suffering, afflicted, at the mercy of some condition as if it were a contagion.

But most people with mental health issues are quite functional – they just have unfortunate tendencies. A tendency to worry too much, to become acutely agitated in some situations, to dwelling on the worst possibilities. What began once as unfortunate habits become ingrained ruts.

We’re responsible for our actions, yet it takes more effort to break the habit of these tendencies than it does for someone who doesn’t have them. My tendency to anxiety isn’t nearly as intense as some others.

Only very overwhelming situations set me off – being overbombarded with so much stimulation that I can’t concentrate my thoughts even enough to be a person. It takes having to do literally 20 things at once for close to half an hour or more to bring me here. But there are some who reach that threshold just walking down a busy street.

We’re responsible. We’re conscious and self-conscious. We go about our business like the rest of you. But in the course of the day, we’re in some ways just a little more fragile.

How Much Is On Me? Occupational Therapy, 13/10/2016

Well, that turned into a much longer break than I’d planned. Originally, I was planning to throw up the third post in that "Obsolete Democracy” series last Friday, take the Thanksgiving weekend off for a gathering with friends in St Catharine’s, then finish it with a fourth entry yesterday. 

Instead, those are going to come tomorrow and Friday, after a delay of nearly a week. 

I'm going to be honest on this space – it was the result of another mental health crisis. A panic attack whose repercussions I’m still dealing with. In my own person, in my relationship with my partner, and at my work. 

It’s been difficult to reorient myself, and income insecurity continues to gnaw at me whenever I think about it for too long. Which is unfortunate, because I need to think about it if I’m going to solve it.

What’s helping, is that I’m getting myself accustomed to some mild anti-anxiety medications – though finding the optimal dosage is probably going to take a while. Another thing that’s helping – if slowly – is my cognitive behavioural therapy sessions.

Wallace Stevens, from “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad”

Horizons, full of night's midsummer blaze;

Perhaps, if winter once could penetrate

Through all its purples to the final slate,

Persisting bleakly in an icy haze;

One might in turn become less diffident,

Out of such mildew plucking neater mould

And spouting new orations of the cold.

One might. One might. But time will not relent.

And I’ve been reaching out to some old friends. Not just friends in general, but friends who’ve had experience with depression and mental health problems. And friends who’ve been more successful at the post-doctoral career transition than I’ve been so far.

My current mental health issues are the product of a career transition that’s honestly been rougher than I had always planned. Soon after my teaching opportunities dried up, I realized that I had fewer resources than I originally thought for my Plan B outside the university sector. And despite my investments in retraining, a corporate or public sector career hasn’t really taken off.

Several parts of my life are going well – my research, writing and publishing, and film festival work. But none of those are actually making me any money at this point, and those financial worries have compounded over the years. That kind of constant stress doesn’t do nice things to a person’s mind.

The blog is called Adam Riggio Writes. And I do. But even though Adam Riggio Makes a Decent Salary wouldn’t be as interesting to read about, it’s something that I’ve wanted for quite some time. And for the last four years, it just hasn’t come together. 

So the years of stress, worries, missed opportunities, failed chances have all added up. The result is a powerful sense of shame, and all the feelings of worthlessness that implies. 

Shame that my first chosen career, the one that I dedicated my 20s to training for, the one to which I devoted myself to the detriment of a lot of other aspects of a well-rounded life, fell apart. Shame that I’m nearly 34 and still hustling to get a career and financial solvency together. Shame that I'm a failure. A non-starter. Shame at my own economic impotence. Shame at messing up. Shame that I’m ashamed instead of being an optimistic go-getter who gets results.

And always the worries that there is only so much time. That the more time I spend struggling, the more like a perpetual failure and a loser I'll appear to more and more hiring committees and human resources evaluators. The continual message from my therapist is that I must focus on what's in my power to change. 

But the forces and decisions that make the biggest impact on all our lives lie beyond our powers. That's the source of my fear, stress, and anxiety. Worse is that others all too often judge our character as if those forces and decisions were in our control. We're blamed for them. Attempts to name them as beyond our control are written off as 'avoiding responsibility.' And we feel ashamed.

I know it can get better, that there are plenty of opportunities that I can still take hold of, if I can find them. But I also know that life rarely feels that way anymore. 

And I worry that being honest about my mental health struggles will alienate me, and drive away possible opportunities. “Why would I want to work with someone who has to take anxiety pills? Who has these mental health problems? Who admits to feeling stress and lacking constant confidence?” Everyone who suffers from any mental health issue is afraid of that.

And I’m sick of being afraid.

True/False & What Else? IV: Thought Conditions Life, Composing, 10/08/2016

Continued from last post . . . As much as I opened up Louis Althusser’s theoretical works for enlightenment, I’m more than a little disappointed. There are a few reasons why, but a I found a distinction of ideas that will probably be useful.

Thinking about his structuralism, I don’t think it works well as a framework for the more ecological priorities that I want my philosophical writing* to pursue. Reality is assembled from feedback loops – mutual affectivity. That makes no sense in the strong structural determinism of Althusser’s thinking about the nature of reality.

Today's post is about the mental health problems of
professional academics, with one prominent example.

* And human civilization more generally, if I can sound more than a little pretentious.

Then there's the reputational damage. Even though Althusser is generally acknowledged as an insightful and influential figure in left-wing and marxist political philosophy, some pretty terrible clouds hang over his career and thought. Literal and metaphorical. 

For one, as I wrote about yesterday, he murdered his wife in the depths of a bizarre psychotic-manic-depressive-bipolar-maybe-schizophrenic episode. We can separate the artist from the work however much we like, but ultimately, character does inform ideas – if only implicitly and contextually.

Then there are the allegations of fraud. The ones he brought on himself, that is. In his autobiography The Future Lasts Forever, Althusser admits to having read very little of the history of philosophy. I’ve read more of the canonical texts at age 33 than he had by his late 60s and retirement from a lifelong career as a professor and lecturer.

While I don’t truly believe that his fraud was complete, his collapse makes it difficult to draw on. After killing Helene Rytmann, he collapsed into a profoundly intense neurotic state. Althusser was a neurotic for most of his life, lacking self-esteem and plagued by sexual hangups and doubt.

Consumed by self-hatred and self-doubt, I can see how the hazy memories of a life before the total shattering of his personality can transform the impostor syndrome common in academia into a full-on delusion of intellectual fraud.

I don't believe he was a fraud. Just an immensely troubled
man. Who murdered his wife. Let's not forget that. He
also killed the woman who'd been his companion for
literally half his life.

I’ve experienced life with a close family member whose personality had been shattered by a powerful mental-neurological trauma. Such people are detached from reality, socially isolated by continuing mental derangement even when in regular contact with people. 

They believe their own delusions about the present and past because they can no longer process the present as factual. For the severely traumatized, the world becomes immaterial, and only the personality – narrative memory constantly rewritten, edited, rearranged – is real. 

Nonetheless, I find Althusser too dangerous a thinker to adapt as a fellow-traveller, whether for Utopias or wider political activism and writing. Althusser so deeply gave in to the horror of his life and political compromises that it infects his writing – from his structuralism to his lifelong defence of Stalinism.

You can have a mental collapse without it tainting the rest of your life’s work, as Nietzsche did, becoming an organic mannequin for his proto-nazi sister. You can be ridiculously neurotic but still develop a philosophy of joy and creativity, as Deleuze did with his six inch fingernails, unwashed hair, and maddeningly boring personal life.

Oh, were you surprised that Althusser defended Stalinism? Well, even though he devoted long, technically dense essays like “Overdeterminism” to a defence of communist thinking against accusations of Stalinism, he regularly defended the USSR and even the Stalinist regime throughout his life.

The entire last section of his essay “Marxism and Humanism” is a full-throated defence of the USSR in 1963 as an emerging utopia where there would be no want and all would be free. Where the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and the “cult of personality” necessary to maintain it were quickly transitioning to the paradise of full communism.

Yeah, not so much.

So what did I ultimately gain from reading Althusser’s For Marx? I’ve rambled in my preamble too long, so I’ll have to save it for tomorrow. . . . To Be Continued

True/False & What Else? III: Terror in Powerlessness, Research Time, 09/08/2016

Continued from last post . . . Louis Althusser is the first author I came across to have discussed that undercurrent tradition of political thinking. The materialist democrats – Baruch Spinoza, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Karl Marx.

Now, I discovered this not in one of his books of philosophy, but in his autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever. This is in many ways a very disturbing book – I recommend it highly. 

Althusser wrote two autobiographies. The first was a fairly straightforward description of his life up to his general retirement from teaching in the mid-1970s. The next was The Future Lasts Forever, a blur of memories, traumatic terror, fragmentary recollections of the collapse of his subjectivity, and philosophical reflection on society and individuality.

One major concept of horror is that unspeakable terrors
exist under the comforting fabric of ordinary life. I've
been thinking a bit about horror tropes lately.

He was prompted to write that second, much more fascinating, autobiography by a need to set the record straight. See, Althusser had a catastrophic mental breakdown in 1980 and murdered his wife Helene Rytmann, strangling her. He was in such a state at the time that the French courts declared him unfit to stand trial. 

So not only did Althusser never face punishment for the killing, but there wasn’t even a detailed investigation into the causes of the act. He was remanded to a psychiatric institution and stayed there for about four years. 

When he was released, he wrote The Future Lasts Forever to set the record as straight as he could, and at least take some of the power over his public image back from the tabloid press. 

It wasn’t a matter of mounting a counter-argument to the press’ allegations that Althusser was a killer who got away with it. You can't really take that book as anything but an unfolding portrait of a broken mind. It was a demonstration that Althusser as a subject was in a far different, more disturbing world than the terms of sensationalist hackery could understand.

Some of his claims I can’t take seriously. I can’t consider his claim that he never finished reading Capital, never really studied much Marx in the first place, as a straightforward confession. He writes and interprets with too much creativity to plagiarize or spin his wheels. 

The Althusser of The Future Lasts Forever is a collapsed person, shattered completely. You don’t read that book looking for facts – you read it looking for the moments of lucidity. 

What kind of horror does a person experience when they
try to reckon with their own mental breakdown? When
that breakdown was so intense that he strangled his
wife and lifelong companion to death?

Their emergence is the most terrifying tragedy in the story, the moments when he realizes the magnitude of what he did, even if he’s talking about something else entirely.

One of the many terrifying threads in that autobiography was his devotion to that tradition of political philosophy – materialist democrats. In this tradition, the world was incredibly complicated, unable to be reduced to any simple schema and have your ideas remain at all adequate. Politics was rough and gritty. 

Society could be transformed, but it would mean literally revolutionizing the terms in which that whole society lived and understood their own lives. 

And what was Althusser’s contribution to that? To me, he makes for a profound challenge. By removing agency from individuals, he made each person a function of their society. 

He presents a conundrum that I don’t really see any way out of, unless you simply reject his terms. If individuals are functions of their societies – expressions of an ideology – then you can’t really be a revolutionary. Even though he was a communist activist his entire life. 

When he’s talking about the structure of an ideology – the social imaginary and moral framework of a people – Althusser provides some valuable insights. I'm going to get into that next post. 

But the paradoxes of his thinking – when you look at them on the large scale of his entire corpus and life – are all vicious. Such a deterministic structuralism – macro determining the activity of the meso – just can’t fit with being a revolutionary. You can't think that changing the world is possible if you think that the world always has agency over you.

Even with being a philosopher. It's an individual's conceptual creativity that lets us understand events and processes of universal importance. Individuality as an organism can't be denied without a kind of willful ignorance of real life.

The parts have to shape the whole just as the whole shapes the parts. Activity is a feedback loop among all constituents. Either everything is active, or there’s no activity at all. Passivity – being the object of an action – is only relative to the action itself. Not determining, but overpowering. 

Individuality can’t be escaped. The belief itself would be a false ideology. But what does that even really mean? False ideology from true ideology? Or is it more complex than that? Of course it is. . . . To Be Continued

A Year to Remember Because We Shouldn’t Forget, 31/12/2015

This being New Year’s Eve, there are plenty of articles and thinkpieces floating around the internet summing up 2015. I originally didn’t want to clutter that already-packed space with my own thoughts, but I felt like I needed an exorcism. 

Because personally speaking, 2015 was pretty damn hellish for me. Up until the last couple of weeks, really, it was a cocktail of near-constant anxiety. It’s supremely difficult not know how long you’ll be able to keep paying your rent. 

Long periods of unemployment and working for free have become taken for granted, and they really shouldn’t. We’ve gotten so used to this state of affairs that underemployment and poverty have become normal. 

If they aren’t normal to you (whether from your own experiences or from your social circle), then you’ve become dangerously disconnected from your own world. But just because it’s normal doesn’t mean it isn’t serious. It doesn’t mean people don’t suffer from mental health problems or terrible stress in their relationships and friendships thanks to unemployment and poverty. 

January 2016 will be the first month where I’ll have actually made enough to cover all my basic expenses (food, utilities, rent, transit) since April 2014. Since 2013, I’ve either been unemployed, employed in jobs that didn’t pay enough, retraining in college without work to support me, or looking for work.

Yes, my best opportunities for next year came from my internship and volunteer activities over this year. And those opportunities as a communications consultant, in Toronto’s film community, as a labourer, and in political activism make me extremely hopeful for my future in this city.

But there have been a lot of crises and breakdowns along the way. And I’ve been very lucky that I’ve been able to support myself on savings and the support of my family for this long. If not for some very fortuitous luck, I wouldn’t even have had a home.

I don’t say this for pity. I say this because there are a lot of people out there like me, struggling simply to survive. Many of those people are losing that struggle and have already lost. 

And whenever I see an article or a meme mocking the Millennial generation for its laziness, self-absorption, or sense of entitlement, it enrages me because it encourages people to look away from poverty and suffering in their midst. This is especially true in Toronto, where fantastically wealthy and horrifyingly poor communities exist in easy walking distance of each other. 

What truly saddens me is how often people who suffer the mental health issues of the struggle to escape poverty and perennial underemployment are told to hide it.

“Why are you in those online groups for people who have panic attacks? No one will hire you if they think you’re unstable!”

“Why do you talk about mental health on your social media? People can google that! They’ll think you’re crazy.”

“No one wants to hire someone who’s unreliable and who’ll need to take time off for stress.”

“Look at all those job ads asking for someone who can handle fast paced work and stress. They won’t want someone who has to take time off for medical appointments. Especially if it’s for therapy.”

“You’ll never get a job if you admit you have anxiety. They’ll think you’re weak. What are you, stupid?”

Sometimes, that’s what I’d tell myself. Sometimes, it’s what people who loved me would tell me. Because it’s in my best interests never to admit that being underemployed and low-income for a long time causes stress and anxiety. 

I sometimes feel as though very few people understand that making someone constantly afraid to be honest about their health makes that person less healthy.

This was my 2015. This back-and-forth between the stress of having too much to do and the anxiety over never earning any money from it to support myself. Now it seems this will finally end, and I’ll be able to begin a real career instead of just hoping things will work out.

There are still plenty of people around us who are struggling. Many are worse off than me – they’ve lost their loved ones, their homes, as well as their jobs and careers. Some have even lost their countries. Though the determination of those people to regain what they lost can lead them to greater success than ever before, but not if we abandon or refuse them.

We’re people. We live in communities. We all begin to prosper, the more of us we help to prosper. We’re not each other’s competition. We’re stronger when we support each other. 

This is true at the personal, political, national, and global levels. 

We will win.