while in capitalism money and its obvious
prosthetics, ancillaries, and symbols are the regime’s official currency, any
regime must – by the laws that govern laws – have a shadow currency that
(through its capacity to out-flexibilize officiality, through its dimensional
surprises, through its greater orientation toward energy) circumscribes the
official – in this case money – and confronts humanity most deeply with the
sacred struggle of its age. in
capitalism, this greater currency is sanity.
only the sane are permitted access to the
corridors that manipulate, circulate, and define money; in such a way building
and maintaining assets of sanity precedes physical acquiring and accumulating.
sanity is a matter of defending certain
geometrical configurations over others.
thus ‘marginalization’ – a term not infrequently used by those claiming
to be nearer the center or middle of something humanity values (and yet the
meaning of this something is uncertain, contradictory: take knowledge, justice, power, goodness) –
is typically and covertly a plea for certain orbitings.
yet in some worlds of the mad, a ground is no
fixed orbiting – there are no margins, for margins are everywhere. humanity itself is no center – despite
various religious, philosophical and populist attempts to wish-claim otherwise
– but yet another orbiting: elliptical,
thoroughly transient, even the star it once claimed gone, and that star, in the
presumed memory of its presence or the palpable appearance of its absence,
still hardly humanity.
money and sanity are related as the
biological sexes are related: each can
express various genders but the binary relation remains required to perpetuate
the species.
many paths exist to be deemed mad by the
sane; a rare but occasionally fruitful path is to conform as wholly as possible
(or attempt to conform) to one or more of the sane’s ideals.
since we know we know how to assemble
spaceships, to cook falafels, to theorize and write texts, to manipulate
ourselves, other members of the species, and objects throughout the planet, to
play horseshoes with competence, but know we hardly know what wisdom is and
even whether it exists – and without this knowledge and its practice what are
we other than another shooting scream – sanity’s definitions, their
institutionalizations and enforcements, are melancholic in their brutalities
and injustices, faintly comic in their strewn caprice.
that sanity requires madness for itself and
to be itself is obvious. and so too is
sanity’s need – without which it would be lost – to manufacture madness, to
forge and reproduce it from whatever materials are at hand. for a human to observe this process and
choose to be such material-at-hand for further observation – what discipline
might we call this? and would it be a discipline of the mad or sane? an interdisciplinary venture, a new alliance?
while we might be tempted to distinguish
between pathological and productive madnesses – even as we might distinguish
between pathological and productive sanities – this temptation, while not
necessarily misguided, assumes pathology is unproductive, productivity superior
and good. a question inhabits this, as
all, temptations – whether pathological madnesses and sanities are in fact a
different configuration of mad and productive madnesses and sanities of sanity,
or the reverse? and another inhabiting question – whether
these questions of sanity are nested endlessly, whether the moats that surround
it are mirage-moats, its fortresses of sand?
i ask questions of the oracles hidden in the fallen
temples of the luminescent city, see them point to darkness, write in
hallucinatory nights tangled, alabaster visions. for this i am deemed mad. and the one who pays its taxes and owns a
home and has a career in the official taxonomies and carries out the necessary
appearances of love is deemed sane. yet
is there not a conflict of interest in the naming – are there not governance
issues in the management of the world and the structures and processes of
names? is not an audit lacking of
humanity? or rather has it not been
made, and filed far away, and down?
