mad studies

whiskeyerdottard u

faculty of me

department of mad studies

edifice non compost mantis

lecture hall y911

we’re pleased today to have sadoo pooper … is that the way i say it?

sadoo diaper. as in die prrrrrrrrr

great, to have sadoo diaper here with us to talk about madness. it’s important in mad studies that we listen to and read not just those who have established credibility in studying the mad – we experts and experts-in-training – through the rigour of testing our minds against the best in the world but that we occasionally have in our actual presence those who claim to be mad and have no credibility. this also of course serves our research purposes in having a live subject right here in our laboratory for study and those of you who have chosen the alternative stream for assignment B can if you wish choose our session today with sadoo pooper for analysis according to one of the approved theoretical frameworks

thanks doktor gugel-hüphendortz. i’m here to talk with you today about madness. as you’ve pointed out i am not a scholar of madness, nor a journalist. i’m not even a scholar. the authorities wanted me to become a scholar and i had three degrees already but they wanted me to get another so i applied to a scholar certification program – commonly known as a phd – but i got rejected and didn’t try anymore. if i had thought about it – which i hadn’t really, presumably to subconsciously sabotage the process as the academy by then for me had become primarily an industry specializing in not knowing how to relate sanity and madness, notknowing and knowing – i knew the application was doomed. i wrote in my own language what i wanted to explore – some idiosyncratic interdisciplinary vague romp through myth and modernity without any reference to any of the dominant current theories or names. i didn’t really know the proper names. and isn’t madness in part about not knowing the proper names? so my act – as i look along the paths i’ve walked, one among many – was an act of madness, a proclamation of not knowing, a lived manifesto of not naming, an active disavowal of what the environment ubiquitously tells me is sanity

the scholarly response of course is that there is always knowledge, always naming, and from certain perspectives this is not untrue. and we’ll happily leave their truths (or not untruths) in those scholarly compounds. the debate they wish to draw me into is not necessarily an unworthy ring but it’s only one ring and there are others that draw me more

so i won’t be giving you the latest in theories from mad studies, the history and analyses and seminal works of madness research – these are all there and some of you know some of them and some of them are good, at least in the sense of legitimizing some basic doubts in the professional academic military of some erroneous assumptions (regardless of any tangible effect in their lives). none of this makes my perspective (if that’s what it is) more true. i’m not in competition with them. we perhaps can all be all right at once. and this all being all right at once is maybe madness. madness as i see it is a bottomless welcoming whirring blender of definitions

it is not as if madness starts with anything. theory, concept, experience, sensation, text, wonder, anger, cranberries, betrayal, discipline, loyalty, consciousness, sine waves, ignorance …   but that it starts in anything and starts again. you might know a complex of feelings when you’re lost or reconfigured or subdued or devoiced. you might know the conversations with flesh that take place in the rolling pyramids of pulsing molecules. you’ve stood before a tree maybe as a tree has stood before you. in mute equality. you’ve entered the empathic indifference of fly slaughter and laughed the way you do at the news or when a chisel accidentally lacerates your leg. a human is here, breathing, talking. these are ideas and the negation of those ideas. i am i and not i. these are now clichés. we are humans and not humans and not we and not knock who’s there?

there is that space before we knew or know the names. that space after we thought we knew the names, after we came to know then doubt we knew the names, after the names returned to the space before we knew them, spaces of names in all sorts of elemental states, running around the tables like those animate forks you see in cartoons, spaces of names tumbling over themselves like lava lamps. and who would map these spaces? who would walk in the maps as if they too tumbled?

hypernaming counternaming unternaming laminaternaming compternaming copternaming amingaiminggamingnaming … is the nascent or faddish madness studies in the academy a study of how the academy presents its maps of knowledge, how it must be bffs with sanity … is madness studies mirror studies but with deflective mirrors and so it studies deflection? is mad studies not bent but studies bending and so in studying and not bending it turns aside from reflecting and refracts not light or sound or water but something else we want to bend?

i was hoping to come here and try to translate into the expected tongue but it gets wearisome for me to speak in it for too long

the mad are a people of land but a people who have never had a land, for whom the maps of the state and the academy, science and religion, business and technology are, if anything, arguments for death. it’s no wonder we mad often take on death as our land as an alternative map to the death presented us. sometimes of course, if the tension is too great between the official maps and the unofficial ones, the mad get killed (or more frequently suicided, in a thousand different ways [honing and expanding these ways a core task of the sane]). but sometimes, as nature would have it in its indifference, a few of these get through and leave records and these are the known geography of the mad

visible minorities – and we hardly discount the horrors and absurdities inflicted on them by the gross officials – are typically linked, however distanced by time, to land and their story is often of their land being stolen from them and/or their being stolen from their land. the mad may share similar fates to the extent they are noticed and perceived to threaten the professional sane but they can also escape attention – the state fortunately is still limited in its ability to see, enforce, and capture. the mad have even been able to receive roles, even officially prestigious ones, in other societies on other calendars, though ours, now, is too insecure and estranged from contextual wildness to know how to even begin doing this

the mad live in hidden cities – those supple and staccato and subversive enough to adapt to the stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, the slow and sudden leaps and falls, gasps and gaps of consciousness – and a task of the mad is to map their cities with as little regard as possible for the maps bequeathed to them by their physical birth cities (states, histories, worlds)

the mad are maps but not ones produced by the state and so anything not produced by the state

the mad don’t just compose maps. they compose calendars too, of time as they experience it. they combine maps and calendars and make caps and malendars, malencaps and capendars. these stand outside by virtue of being more inside than that inside on their outside and it is this uncanniness, this warped disregard of recognition, that keeps the mad the mad

i speak many languages within english. grammars of my flesh speak through me with noxious buttercups 18 metres tall wandering about in the anonymity of the borealis

esoteric studies leads to mad studies – all these in the genealogical taxonomy of formal knowledge are direct descendants of theology … for as god died – that is became immanent as a corpse in humanity – that which was god still demanded study but obviously with new names, protocols, journals. and so esotericism and madism study the decomposition of god in the human species and the mad body is the compost for this decreation and the laboratory for the branch of the academy that must dissect new phenomenon. but when the dissection is a decomposition … what then?

the mad may say – everything psychology and therapy and wellness are supposed to rescue you from is our material of health, everything productive normal society attempts to force us into is our disease, all your modes of analysis and critique are toxins to us …

i’m interested in the considered destruction of identity as unprocessed fuel and ransacked stage for creative enterprises

what do we listen to? everything. our babbling on the streetcars is an abstract of that everything

it helps – if we are not going to be killed, incarcerated or drugged – if we can understand, read, write, and speak (particularly understand and speak) at at least a basic level your language … that is, the language and languages of the dominant, forceful, the strong. this enables us usually or sometimes to transact for our survival, for we cannot buy or sell outside of your language. but because it pains us to talk the way you talk we try to live as much as possible outside your buyings and sellings

i don't ask you to go out there and be mad. i ask you to dream of the mad, what they have staged in and around time, how they see with their ommatidium today and with what no-names, how they rejoice beyond the bounds of time though the world may shudder at our joy and in its coarseness know not what we mean, how we hold within us certain variegations of possibility that transfigure hierarchy and domination, that question in its black heart even that most holey of whollies : human supremacy

but is this true? no. i also ask this of you : i ask you to not simply study the mad but to go mad ... for only by going shall the study be worthy of its name ...

... thanks for listening. thanks doktor gugel-hüphendortz for having me