03 Pentember 2024

03 January 2024

Catching up on some journal entries.

Picking up milk and meds at store after this.

Freewrite

Youre a fraud. you think you can do this. you can’t. you failed firar, false father other brother burn smother. i don’t know what i am what i am going to do what i can do what i should do for now just write

writing this thesis is like cutting myself because cutting myself is a kind of writing. it posits its own theses, tests propositions against a logic of pain and dissociation and recognition and uncertainty. like running barefoot on the gravel and asphalt, cutting up my feet. had a dream where the grass cut up my feet and i hollered and begged to go to the ER and my parents just kept insisting on me having to take family photos i hate them i hate them i hate them do you hear that R i hate them i hate them and i don’t want to hear any argument from You.

i am worried. i am afraid. i can’t let us be homeless i have to ffind a job i have to find somewhere where rent is cheaper i have to i have to i have to i have to

i hate the capitalists i hate my father i hate i hate i hate

Hatred is an identity it provides implies iterates a whole matrix of significance of alliance and enmity context and cause Hatred makes itself known it speaks with its own voice for its own content and causes.

i am afraid. fear is also an identity. the empty howling void of despair is the entropic alternative absence of identity

breathe.

..

How my project differs from Chris Miller’s

In his invaluable study of suicidality and self-injury over the last century and change, Chris Miller traces the the psychiatric concepts and practices related to clinical subjects who hurt themselves. His approach is grounded in the use of “psychiatric journal articiles and government documents,” tracing “the practices, arrangements, ideas, concepts—all the the thingss that recur in psychiatric journal articiles and government documents.” In doing so, Miller follows the methodological school of Ian Hacking and Michelle Foucault, seeking to show how phenomena which may appear to be natural or innate are historically grounded and constructed. In the course of this research I closely read Foucault’s Madness and Civilization and Hacking’s Rewriting the Soul [doublecheck title]. Like Foucault and Hacking, Miller is not only interested in the evolution of “practices, arrangements, ideas, concepts” for their own sake—that is, understanding how the theorization and treatment of the self-injurious has evolved, but how it maps onto, and in its own way contributes to the broader political millieu

[intro or conclusion, there’s a passage where he says its just such (capilary?) instantiations which make up the larger culture]

to oversimplify, these effects flow in at least two directions: outward-macroscopically, how the culture understands and treats the self-injurious, but also inward-microscopically, how individuals understand themselves, including—especially—those who self-harm. Put bluntly, self-injury, like any activity, is neither reducible to nor independent from the discourse—clinical, academic, legalistic, informal—which seeks to understand, regulate, justify, explain away it. to give an example used by both Miller and X article, self harm in adolescents is traceably social. children and adolescents in therapeutic wards where others are engaging in self-harm exhibit ‘outbreaks, epidemics’, and both children and adults in the wards specifically point to copy cat behavior, wherein one or more children will, to a high degree of specificity, mimic and reproduce specific injuries in the same locations on their bodies as others [ which article, find quotes]. the reasons and significance of this pose something of a intractable problem or point where thought runs up against a limit

Like Miller, I am interested in the social context and history of self harm, but where Miller prioritizes the history of the development of practices, ideas, concepts, etc., to the exclusion of ‘the patient’s voice’, I have the opposite starting situation: begining in the summer of 2018 and lasting multiple years, I developed a practice of self-injury in parallel to acute suicidality, including two suicide attempts.

Miller notes that these concepts, practices, ideas, influence how we, the members of this polity broadly, understand ourselves, [“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.” 198-199] but in the case of the self-injurious and others directly connected to self-harm (clinical staff, for example) the ways these concepts shape us, and the way we shape ourselves to respond to, overcome, fight against such concepts, is rather more outsized. While I do not begrudge Miller for foregrounding practices, concepts, ideas in order to write a history in which “patients and their expireinces receede” [“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,”], I do maintain that histories like Miller’s are critically insufficient, and accounts which foreground patient expireinces are just as necessary.

This text in its small way contributes to that repairative history by highlighting my own expirences and those of patients and clinicians intervied according to the principles of [phenomonological study, look up title]. It is not anything like a comprehensive account of such expirences throughout the history of self-harm, or even a comprehensive study of the expirences of those who live in the conceptual-practical world of the last 19th-21st century which Miller analyzes. Such a project would require far more length then this, as well as acesss to archives and research resources beyond my present means. what i am trying to do here is both narrower in scope and different in orientation: to discuss self harm and its accompanying clinical-theoretical apparatuses as [objects of political theory?]

In this regard, I follow Miller somewhat more closely, especially as it relates to the final chapter and Conclusion of Self Harm in Great Britain, by focusing on the relationship between the way we understand and respond to self harm in particular and the political subject in general. Put another way, I am interested in the role self harm occupies in political ideology, especially but not limited to the ideological position of self harm following the neoliberal turn, which Miller discusses in depth, as it is of particular insight as an [edge case? a point where the concepts of the self are put in crisis, where they break down and need to be reformulated]. [see also the conundrum of self harm ]

sometimes we talk about ideology as if it were the same as dogma, a party line or memorized creed, but self-harm is one of many cases where the distinction becomes clear, ideology differing from dogma as an array of ‘positive’ methods, assumptions, but also uncertainties, lacuna of thought. the work of Zizek is helpful in discussing the negative structure, as it were, of this difference.

…

Theoretically speaking, I’m particularly interested in how self-harm interfaces with the concepts of the state of exception, the friend/enemy distinction, and the dictator in Carl Schmitt, especially once we introduce the intrapersonal framework for self-harm: that self harm occurs in a social relationship, with the self and its components. the multiplicity of the self has a rich and growing literature, but in order to keep the focus on self harm and its political theoretical implications, I will avoid becoming too enmeshed in metastudies of multiplicity. certain texts and tendancies have contibuted to my projects more than others, but these should not be taken as exemplarary of all multiplicity studies, much less all political theory. the point, rather, is trace certain movements, problems, fixations, points of failure where self-harm makes certain political schema no longer make sense, be applicable, even untenable, and conversely, allows other schema to advance, to make counter-sense.

This counter-sense is Important. Understanding one’s own mind, body, brain, behavior patterns, and how the psychiatric world’s concepts map or fail to map onto them, is not only an intellectual exercise: it can be a matter of life or death. [thinking about restraints, being under surveilance in the ER, the decision made by nurses that me hurting myself, while providing among other things relief, structure, focus, was nonetheless unnaceptable, and that physical restraints, being forced to undress, etc. and the greater crisis they would produce would be prefereable, from the point of view of medical authority-as-dictator in the Schmittian sense. ]

more generally, it is invaluable to producing strategies for living with/as/through a self that wants to kill me, and/or that i want to kill, and that wants to kill itself with me as a bystander/collateral damage.

..

note on termonologies, etymologies

injury: in-right, a wrong

harm: Old English hearm (noun), hearmian (verb), of Germanic origin; related to German Harm and Old Norse harmr ‘grief, sorrow’.

Oxford languages.

..

Freewrite Resumes

bBefore you ask me what I am doing, what I am intervening what question i am answering please let me speak of what i am what i feel what i have been doing, how i have been surviving.