🏮🐓 02 Pentember 2023 🌖 Cold Moon 🥶 10,062 ⛩️

at a cafe to work on essay and job applications for first time in i don’t know how long.

..

02 January 2023

Feeling anxious, weird. at cafe. going to try to do the impossible task exercise and gather references for job application to the apothocary. 

Today the cats need their meds and Boyfriend and I are cleaning out some cabinet space. 

I also want to find the Borges demon-god passage. 

Freewrite

You are a demon. You are a secretary in the psyche of a politician. the politician has recently been offered a bribe. its your job to evaluate the pros and cons. 

Pro: you could use the money. your last campaign has left you strapped for cash, and the big donners smell change in the air: they don’t think your party is going to win the next general election, and they are eager to win the gratitude of the Opposition by letting you and you’re fellows snap in the wind. 

Pro: the crime boss offering you the bribe is eager to bring you into his orbit. he’s up and coming in the underworld where rivals have recently been curtailed by a multi-gang sting. once he considers you his asset he’ll put resources into your protection. the Opposition has street gangs and fanatics uninterested in waiting for an election 

Pro: you could use the money to build your own network to ride out the coming reprisals. If your party loses the next election but you manage to hang onto your seat, there’s a good chance you’ll be in the top two or three spots in the opposition, and from there you could establish a network of patronage for junior delegates and provincial magistrates.

Con: the risk of getting caught is not insubstantial. your own party is on an anti corruption crackdown in a flailing effort to appeal to a souring electorate. the boys over in the ministry of prosecutions would love an excuse to throw you under the bus, since their boss the commissaar of justice is a longtime intraparty rival of yours, and your main competition for leader of the opposition after the next election. 

Con: the condition for accepting the bribe is…strange. not a vote on a bill or nomination. not an endorsement in a contentious election. it would be simpler in such a case. instead, you’ve been offered a fortune more than enough to bankroll your next campeign and that of any colleagues you feel so inclined in exchange for sleeping with the wife of the First Secretary, an aging, possibly senile functionary who has never won general election in his life but who has twice now been tapped to lead the government after scandal and intraparty civil war left the front benches compromised. his mental and electoral faculties not withstanding, the man is not a power to be reckoned with, having survivied decades in politics by combining an artful mastery of timeful retribution with a faculty for manipulating the government and party burracracies, their interests and weaknessses, keeping himself always an irreplaceble lynchpin in the negotiations of their operations. 

if his wife wants to sleep with a deputy floor leader in the legislature who was snubbed when the ministries were dolled out over the last two cabinet shuffles, what kind of signal does that send?

…

Impossible Task

1. Write my thesis

1. Of course it is impossible to write my thesis because 

1. I’ve been trying to do so from 2018 onwards. what’s different about January 2024?

2. I have despaired over and over and over of ever making progress on it

3. I have not read so many essential texts on self harm, technologies of the self, political demonology, history of psychiatry, and many other topics

4. I am anxious and feel like throwing up whenever I think about trying to write part of it

5. I don’t know what its about. 

6. I have drafted so many different versions of it that they all pull me in different directions and to commit to any one arguement or sentence or word would be to betray all of them, including and especially the platonic perfect impossible version of the thesis which reconciles them all

7. I am so far removed from school that they probably would not accept it even if it was perfect

8. I don’t feel worthy of writing something so important

9. my parents won’t support me and i am doomed

10. self harm is incomunicable. no one thinks I can make it make sense, and others have already placed it in their context

11. my inversion to try to make self harm and political theory illuminate each other is contrived

12. the split self/self destructive self understood through the lens of Schmitt’s Political Theology goes against his explicit statements that its not about psychiatry or metaphor

13. Foucault’s figure of the medical authority who decides what is real, normal, etc., has already been excavated and I have nothing to add. 

14. neoliberalism, self regulation, biomedicallism, behaviorism and the other part of the iron triangle already theorize self harm without recourse to the phenomonological-political and by introducing a study of my own expirence in the area I am probably only engaging in a confessional exercise as opposed to political mobilization, intervention, critique proper

15. i can’t remember all the things I’ve read that i need to cite and draw upon and explicate and situate and contextualize

16. i’m not good enough to write anything that would let me pass and get my degree

17. I’m too sick to write consistently

18. i’m too lazy to write consistently

19. i don’t know what i’m talking about

20. demonic self harm, being trapped in flesh, Lent, Terra Ignota, Borges, Mark, all of these texts, they are too disparate and don’t add up to an academic paper

21. i don’t know how to structure the biographical, theoretical, textual overviews, historical, stuff so that it all adds up to something comprehensible

22. i don’t know what i’m doing

23. i’m afraid

24. i’ve forgotten everything i knew about the topic

25. i don’t want to stress myself out

26. i’m in mourning for the version of me that already wrote it and graduated on time. 

1. Although I cannot complete my thesis today, I can [list three ridiculously small things]

1. find my copy of A History of Self Harm in Great Britain

2. engage in the impossible task exercise

3. find the part of Self Harm where i say ‘that’s what i’m trying to do’

4. do the above items. 12noon is when we need to move the car. 

quote: A History of Self-Harm in Britain, Chris Millard

“This historical method is paired with a very tight focus on the subject matter of the articles: unpicking lines of argument, searching for mentions of practical arrangements, evaluating the position of various professionals (PSWs, police, etc.). It does not leave very much space for the ‘patient expirences’ of self cutting or overdosing. This features in a small way, when patient testimon yy is uysed and deployed by psychiatrists as evidence. This is especially useful when patients confound expectations (as in Watson’s 1970s study) or requires significant intellectual work to make it fit (as in Waldenberg, 1972). However, this is principally a study of specific hospital practices, a certain set of psychiatric ideas about the social setting, and how these might resonate with a wider political context: a shift from a welfare-based, socially interventionist consensus to one of individuated, market-oriented competititon. Roy Porter champions ideas of the ‘patient’s voice’ as central to the history of medicine, but it is not my principal area of interest.[note 9] I am far more concerned with how ideas and research practices interact and produce the concepts and shorthand that humans use to understand themselves and others. Basing this book on the expirence of the patient would make it a very different project. In addition, Joan Scott writes persuasivelly:

“When expirence is taken as the origin of knowledge, the vision of the individual subject (the person who had the expirence or the historian who recounts it) becomes the bedrock of evidience on which the explanation is built. Questions about the constructed nature of expeirience, about how subjects are constittued as different in the first place, about how one’s vision is structured—about language (or discourse) and history—are left aside.”

I am most interested in how ‘vision is structured’ in how ideas and practices come to influence what is possible and explicable behavior, and how these change. It is not to demean ppatients or their stories, expirences or identities, but to say that this history attempts something different. The patients and their expeirences receede in this telling, as tdo the psychiatrists to an extent. what is left are practices, arrangements, ideas, conceptss—all the the thingss that recur in psychiatric  journal articiles and government documents. This, like all history, must resemble its sources, but remains useful—hopefully to people other than myself—because it enables new connections to be made around self-harm, society, psychology and politics. It might make the various individuals involved in the story less visible (in terms of their expirences), or flatten them out to their research contributions, but it also allows new links: between categories of identity and the rise of professional groups; between broad political contexts and clinical categories; between an intilectual climate in psychology and psychiatry and the ways in which we understand self-damaging behavior; between politics and the ways in which people understand themselves and their identities.”

198-199

…

something something the construction of the subject under neoliberal medical, academic, and economic modalities