Mad as Hell: The Violence of Education, and [t]werking 2wards uh Mad poetics

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Mad as Hell: The Violence of Education, and [t]werking 2wards uh Mad poetics

presented at SDS@OSU: Troubling Binaries of Academics and Activism

April 7, 2020

Phil Smith

philrobertovich@gmail.com

 

“…madness participates in the poesis,

the general sense of making, creating…”                                                     (Cooper, 1978, p. 84)

Madness

[and the knewly crafted/crapted

field and meadow and pasture of Mad Studies
and da work of deez/dem/doze who identify as Mad]

“is a way of knowing…”                                                                               (Cooper, 1978, p. 155)

because

if for no other reason:

Mad gain.

aussi:

“…the method of studying the field of madness

must itself be involved in that madness.”                                                  (Cooper, 1978, p. 157)

sew:

i amma mad man

a madde elder.alder.older

altered and othered

a madden man

a man made/maid mad

a midden man

a mitten man

a ridden man

a hidden man              hiding in closets

of saneist architookcher

i           wander

wonder through           lifetimes

lifelines

down the waze of a Mad poesis
a Mad Turn
that offers a way outta
the dead-end of academic and educational logical     posi tivism

posi schism

posi chauvinism

posi racism

posi neoliberalism

posi homophobia

at the margins of         disciplined

(whipping us all on the ass uv)                       neoliberal haberdashery.

some daze

i put on a jacket

(strait) (never tie) (tied up, tied down).

sum days

i walk barefoot

through the haul-ways and stare-weighs

of colonialist white     privilege

privacy-phage.

always wearing, proudly, my handmaid(en) tinfoil hat

made mad by a world stranger

than even aye could possibly imagine

both befloor and aft of the COVID-19 27 32 hike!

a stranger

a strangled one

(voice tied up, tied down)

a                                      bricoleur

searching for mad/      neuroqueer

travelers,

travailleurs

tall-king and thing-king and writhe-ing

about how to find and thread the capitalist needle

through a world that   impoverishes

institutionalizes

torments

tortures

silences

us,

annihilates

sedates

truncates

medicates

negates

wastes

collates

stagnates

inmates

hates

US.

i wri{t}he

through            per-      formance and

trans-   formance

and poesis and pieces and peaces and pisses

an explication of the   meaning

of                                 being a non-viole(n)t mad elder

(t)working and (t)witching and twirling and Turning

in the surface/service

uv an “in/discipline”                                                                                                  (Ingram, 2008)

anti-founded
on/in/through/out/about
an academic and educational Turn towards the         irrational
unreasonable
surreal

nonlinear
inappropriate
unmanageable
incredible
illegitimate.
an        anti-methodology

opposite

2 increasingly commodified educational academe
it is a new kind of outsider onto-epistemology

that is, frank(bob)ly

crazy as a motherfucker.
it izza weigh to ex(im)plore the bawdy lustiness of untoward bodyminds
threw the outrageousness of impossible new educational imaginariums.
opposed to the typical neoliberal academified corporatizm

– be-cause/pause/caws/paws

all “forced learning is violence”                                                         (Coperthwaite, 2002, p. 54)

this Mad poetics

dis Mad tern

is out{in} de/re-signed

to raise Mad children and grand children

and nephews and nieces

to become and inhabit(ual) the next (re)generation

(and the next, and the next)(of kin)

of a new [neu]rodi(uni)versity.

hear, i twerk a madde turn

on da udder sighed uv

normative onto-epissedemoffemology

against the                   psy-complex

against the modernist psy-clops –

creating an anti-

oppositionally-defiant

disruptive non-viole[n]t

life/live/love.

saneism and adultism and ableism

force children

into the            psychiatrized

segregated

carceral internment camps

that we caul schoolz.                                                                                              (Liegghio, 2016)

there, they are criminalized

and deprived of even the remotest semblance of

autonomy and self-determination.                                                                        (Liegghio, 2016)

Instead, “Mad Studies offers

a metacurriculum

of unlearning”                      (Snyder, Pitt, Shanouda, Voronka, Reid, & Landry, 2019, p. 486)
through opportunities to create

“nonlinear course structure and arts-based assessment;

and the mobilization

of a mad positive pedagog” (Snyder, Pitt, Shanouda, Voronka, Reid, & Landry,2019, p. 486)

in solidarity with

deze|dem|doze Madzters

stoodents and teacher-creatures

knowledge-gatherers and manoor spreaders

i wander through the wilderness

uv diss-closure.cloture (un)closet.crochet.corset

too uh plaize where

we are all naturally free(dumb).

i describe and inscribe the meaning of this bodymind soulheart

in da saneist whirled/whorled

that the lying bureaucraps make uninhabitable for all.

wutzit look like?
if we knew/gnu/new/true/blew

and could do-re-me-fine it
it wouldn’t need tuh bee whuddevuh id iz that it wants to brie, wood it, brown cow?

 

referential art i fact [Hemmerh] oids

Cooper, D. (1978). The language of madness. NY: Penguin Books.

Coperthwaite, W. (2002). A handmade life: In search of simplicity. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

Ingram, R. (2008). Mapping “Mad studies”: The birth of an in/discipline. Disability Studies Student Conference, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY.

Liegghio, M. (2016). Too young to be Mad: Disabling encounters with “Normal” from theperspectives of psychiatrized youth. Intersectionalities, 5,(3), 110-129.

Snyder, S., Pitt, K.-A., Shanouda, F., Voronka, J., Reid, J., & Landry, D. (2019). Unlearning through Mad Studies: Disruptive pedagogical praxis. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(4), 485-502. doi: 10.1080/03626784.2019.1664254

 

Truth

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“…there is no such thing as ‘truth.’ There’s only language. There’s no such thing as a ‘fact.’ There is no truth or falsehood, just dominant processes by which reality is socially constructed. In a world made out of language, nothing else is even possible… There is no objective reality… There’s no way out of a world that’s made of language. We can never reach any bedrock reality. The only direction we can move is into different flavors of the dominant social discourse, or across the grain of the consensus narrative…” – Bruce Sterling

calendar spring

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calendar spring
cold night and warm
day means I’m
boiling sap
a torn oak leaf
butterfly skips
around the field
in the wind
a squadron of robins
searches intently
for whatever robins eat
in the neighbor’s field
ducks land on the pond
as they do this time of year
but never stay long
whooping cranes and geese
fly over never stopping
sap boils and bubbles
slowly gaining strength
tree’s life turned
to a new year’s sweetness

The line between neurotypical, neurodivergent, Madness, and Disability

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A colleague recently sent me some questions about my thoughts as a disability studies and mad studies scholar. Here’s some of what I wrote:

There are two models of disability: medical and social. I am firmly in the social model camp; physicians, for the most part, are not. While physicians (psychiatrists) and other psy-complex professionals have given me lots of labels, those labels do not define me, nor do they adequately describe me. For me, and many of my Mad and Disabled colleagues/friends/allies, Madness and Disability are identities, and reflect a (sub, minority) culture. What makes me disabled is what is done to me by society, not something that is innate (and broken) in me. The same is true with madness. Still, they are identities that I claim, as a way to resist ableism and saneism, and as an identification with other Mad and Disabled people with whom I have much in common.

Madness and disability are socially constructed, and identities. The government and its psy-complex operatives (physicians, for example) reflect and operationalize these (and other) social constructions. Madness is disabling when culture disables Mad folx. Mad folx are said to have mental or psychiatric disabilities, descriptors that I find problematic, but haven’t found terms that are better. I am not mentally ill – that is a term that I reject. I am not sick or diseased, and reject biomedical explanations for Madness. The psy-complex creates taxonomies of difference, sorting disabled from abled, sane from insane, normal from abnormal, defining who is and is not deviant. These taxonomies reflect underlying, institutionalized ableism and saneism, both part of a wider and deeper matrix of oppression. I reject, abhor, and fight constantly this matrix in other people, institutions, and myself (through internalized oppression). Given notions of self-determination, and a broader understanding of identity and identity politics, only Mad people  can define their identity. Others outside that identity group, who do not so identify, can never fully understand it.

From an identity perspective, the line that someone has to cross to be considered disabled is accepting a disabled identity, a crip identity. Thats the line that matters. Socio-cultural institutions, most especially the eugencist psy-complex that operates in neo-liberal, Eurocentric, White, colonialist, patriarchal culture, seek to define that line, as a way to sort and create taxonomies of difference, to exert hegemonic power. In accepting my Mad, Disabled identity, I create my own line, one that rejects the psy-complex, and seeks to undermine ableism, saneism, and other elements of the matrix of oppression.

In order to understand Mad and Disabled identities, it is critical to read the work of and talk to Mad and Disabled folx. The neurodiversity activism movement has given me many tools to think about these identities, as has Disability Studies, and, increasingly, Mad Studies. Know, too, that Mad and Disabled folx do not reflect a monocultural perspective – they are polycultural, as, for example, reflected in c/s/x identities.

start from theory

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my speaking here
of a maybe-not-quite-an-answer
a response-of-possibility
a thinking-through
says more probably
about who i am
and where my head is at
than anything else
but i don’t know
(perhaps can’t know)
any other way to do it

because i don’t know what i’m doing
i don’t know what i’m doing
i don’t know what i’m doing

how is it
that the greater-than-human
(this unimaginable
unknowable whatness
stretched out
across a snowy field
from an old farmhouse
to a line of trees
that form the edge
of a darker wood)
is illuminated
lit up like the brightest
of all possible stars
in the darkest
of all possible nights
by the glowing ember of
your Mad heart
your Mad soul
your Mad life

i don’t think it’s meant to be
a simple question.
questions, of course
are more important than answers.
answers mean you’re done
finished with it
(whatever it-ness is)
completed.
questions, instead
are about
always-coming-to-know
growth and learning
striving and grasping for
that which is never quite
can’t possibly be
in reach.

and the answer
to the questions
is not to simplify
because the world is not simple
but to complexify
because only in holy complexity
outside monocropping
is the world whole

the answer is not in method.
method is the false hope.
the handle of epistemology
(the method
of knowing
how we know what we know)
leaves out ontology.
simply being.
just shoveling snow.
just slicing carrots.
just hauling water.
knowing can never be separate from being.
knowing, i am.
being, i know.
do; be. do-be-do.
know; be. do. know-be-know-be-do-be.

onto-epistemology.

stepping on from method
means, yes,
stepping away from autoethnography.
which does not mean moving on from the poetic
or from story
(stories, the best ones,
are never far from the self).

autoethnography was the first step.
but only the first.
it’s not the final step.
not the last step.
there’s another step
(and likely more beyond that).

instead of method
(and this is the hardest part)
(the part that is hardest to hold)
(because you can’t
it’s like holding water)
start from theory.
theory will tell you what to do.
what to be. know. do.

this is the place
of the post-qualitative.
a place that Patti and Betty
(Lather and St. Pierre)
two extraordinary feminists
have led me to.
it is no place.
no where.
there is no here
here.
an always-coming-to-know
and
never-quite-getting-there.
it is a going
a traveling
a stepping
not a stopping
(by woods on a snowy or any other evening).

Polonius said
that there is Method
in Hamlet’s Madness.
when i write Method
i mean something more
like the work of Stanislavski
than that of Shakespeare.
Madness IS the Method
(but really
a post-qualitative anti-method)
through which the Mad bodymind
can come to knowbedo
the greater-than-human

(though here i want to stop
and suggest that it’s not
a greater-than-human
but rather the collective all-persons
that human-persons have forgotten
that they are part of
equal to
one of
with-alongside-in)

Madness is the anti-method
through which we
crazy muthuhfuckas
can come to reclaim
and re-member
our place with the
personhood of pine trees.
the despair
desperation of separation
disparate separate degenerate
of being apart
from being a part
of that which has always been whole
until the thing inside us
(the thing that’s REALLY crazy)
tore us apart
from the water people, the stone people, the star people, the tree people
of which we’re all maid-made.

(i’ve said else-when
that this thing inside us
that tears us apart
is the thing we do
of making taxonomies
which at the root of creating hierarchies
a function of our start on the savannahs
to know predator and prey
before we get eaten
and who we will eat)

make a Mad theory
a theory of Madness
a pissed-off anti-method
about the desperation
about being pulled apart
from our sisters and mother

start from Mad theory
create Mad theory
make Mad theory
tell Mad theory
(let it be your tell)
be Mad theory
be the best holy Mad mind of your generation
(“burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night… who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated… because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas”)

write your Mad theory
in a story-pome
and act (it) out
regenerate

i woke in the night

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i woke in the night
as i often do
and walked in the dark
through the house
across old oak floors
whose boards were crossed
in their time
by artists and farmers
dead now for years

i went to the pantry
and looked out
the one small window
that faces west
out past the studio
gardens flower and food
tool shed and corn crib
drying yard
two solitary maples
the field spreads out
white and shining
under ice-crusted snow
all the way
to the trees
that begin the dark forest
(oak and sassafras
maple and cherry
a single beech, deep in
no pine, spruce, or hemlock
ash all dead, lying on the ground
killed by the borer)
stars and sky
covered with gray clouds
as it usually is
this time of year
and thought of grass
and sunshine
and the birds you fear
and of spring
that will come
in its time