Thoughts after seeing the Laura Poitras film, “All the beauty and the bloodshed”

(DRAFT/in process)  

This is not a film review, so much as a personal response in the form of a riff, on a film that I read as suggesting even more than it says.  What I want to expand on is what the film rightly attacks, or if you prefer the more genteel expression, what it calls into question.

Three recently screened films brought me repeatedly to tears: Jean-Luc Godard’s ambitious masterpiece Histoire(s) du Cinéma, about the relationship between the art of cinema and the massacres of the 20th century; the legendary Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, a dark tour through today’s Europe loosely linked to the peregrinations of a hapless donkey; and Laura Poitras’s film about the artist Nan Goldin, “All the beauty and the bloodshed.”

That capitalism sucks is not news, but what can one individual, or a small group of persons, do about it?  The heroic cause that is a focus of this documentary, from the director of the film Citizen Four about Edward Snowden, is of such undeniable importance that, if that were the film’s sole subject, it would merit being widely seen for that alone.  

For, superficially, this film is a heroic tale of how one individual was able to use her prominence as an artist to take on some very powerful people in order to combat an injustice perpetrated by them.  In the context of the narrative tradition that is historically so dominant in American cinema, one whose terms are hero and villain, obstacle and quest, and that in broad terms is effectively Oedipal, that sounds like an exciting gig to pass a couple of hours in.  But this film yields much more.  

In telling the story of the artist Nan Goldin, the film connects some dots in a way that enriches our understanding of what is at stake in the film’s ultimate and very real dramatic conflict.  To formulate this in a statement is to abstract from it, but let me start by noting that how much is at stake is a great deal.  

Simply put: today, attacked are the precarious (those who live precarious lives), when what should be attacked is precarity, the systematic, organized structuration of opportunity and risk that subjects so many people to destruction in various forms. Differently put, a war is conducted against persons in their role of exploitable activity or labor power, instead of the system that exploits them.

That conclusion may seem so obvious it is boring, but I think the details of the story in this film are as interesting as the facts that lay behind them. More than half a million Americans have died in the recent opioid crisis, a number that may soon exceed the more than 700,000 who died of AIDS.  (Both figures dwarf, for example, the number of Americans who died in Vietnam, approximately 58,000, for all that it famously, and rightly, divided our country, making people like me teenage antifascists, all the more as we were faced with fathers who would sacrifice rebellious youths to their own ideology).  These deaths were mostly preventable, with the toll largely due, according to Goldin and her group, P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), to Big Pharma, and particularly the manufacturer of the drug Oxycontin, Purdue Pharma, a company owned by the billionaire Sackler family, which, as it happens, was known in the art world as a major philanthropic donor, giving Goldin an opening to spend some of her own cultural capital as the activist that many artists today are.  Their goals were to get museums to refuse Sackler money and take their names advertising their prestige, and if possible to prosecute them and take their money to be used for a better purpose, like helping addicts.  They failed in the latter, and succeeded in the more spectacular triumph of the former.  The company went bankrupt, after the family siphoned out most of its money, and suffered neither financially nor criminal but only reputationally, leaving them a bit more respectable than the mafias engaged in not dissimilar business, who mostly seem immune to the pain besetting the unscrupulous of ill repute.   

You don’t have a doctorate in drawing conclusions from such data to reach the conclusion that these deaths are casualties of something like capitalism.  Or even the form of it that we have.  

Though the focus of the film is not on that, so much as the “bohemian” world that Goldin was able to document in the photographs that made her famous, including the “Ballad of Sexual Dependency” series, because, as she makes very clear in the film, she was part of it.  

From the juxtaposition of this world with what we glimpse of the people Goldin and Poitras frame (seen only briefly) as its antagonists, one could almost conclude that what happened was a kind of civil war, of classes or something like them.  The interesting fact in the structuration as such of this juxtaposition as a conflict is that, on the one hand, the people whose lives are affected are not necessarily against anything, and if they share a fault, it can only be to have chosen to live lives with a certain intensity.  While the force that is ranged against them, and us, is composed of people who, if asked, will surely claim, and hide behind, their own “normality,” and say that they are just trying to make an honest living (though in fact the Sacklers did so by making claims that are plainly dishonest, as Goldin makes clear: they knew their drugs would kill many people, and marketed them claiming the contrary), or that they in pursuing their own interest with no other consideration, they were acting like “normal” business people in a capitalist society.  That is true, and the fact that it is is an even greater scandal than the dishonesty and thus “corruption” of said business people.  

Today disasters of natural causation, including epidemics, kill many people, and their governments may wash their hands of the matter and say that it’s not their responsibility.  Thus, for example, the non-response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or the contamination of tap water in Flint more recently. In the age of neoliberalism, government has withdrawn from most social functions except war and policing (which are assimilated to each other), and with such social services as exist provided only as also a form of policing.  Maybe our society is not one, or is little more than the economic system at its core; individuals and communities are abandoned to private initiatives, which they must pay for, and if they can’t it’s just too bad. The political philosopher Giorgio Agamben has argued that our societies have moved from the ancient policy of “let live and make die” to “make live and let die.”  In so many ways today, the poor, the unlucky, those who seem to portend some unassimilable different set of values, or whoever is a “casualty” of indifferent activities of economic self-interest, are not directly murdered by a government, as many were during the last world war; they are simply allowed to die.  Capitalism allows this, because it is driven by an ethos of self-interest, which supposedly works to the benefit of everyone, though that is less and less true in some ways, and the unintended adverse effects of this on environments or populations are what economists call “negative externalities.”  In this logic, the people who in fact do things that cause great suffering for other people are not considered responsible.  A judge or prosecutor who sends a man to spend the rest of his life in a prison is not responsible for what happens to him there, whether he is raped, as many men in jails and prisons are, or murdered, or just forced to live a lot of dead time, as if a merely wasted life is a suitable redemptive or correctional treatment when it is purely destructive.  And a doctor who has a patient locked up as “mentally ill” is not responsible for what happens to her or him on the ward; there are many other examples of this logic.  It is even built into many administrative and technical systems.  A police officer’s body camera may record what you do when he threatens you, but not what he has said and done, for it is pointed only at you.  A psychiatrist writes down his or her casual observations of you, magnifying whatever are your seeming faults, since it is abnormal psychology and deviant behavior that is their profession’s major concern, and if that doctor threatens you, or says something incredibly stupid, that you or a lawyer representing you (if you are subjected to enough trouble that it would appropriate for you to engage one) could use in making a case against them, as they certainly did with me, that will not be written in the record, and of course the scene probably took place without witnesses, so the doctor or other professional can pretty much say and do what they like; they have a high quotient of impunity.  And if they wrong you in some way, your ability to claim this is limited, in the eyes of most people, by the possibility that you yourself really “are” “mentally ill” or crazy, making you an unreliable witness, and justifying what they do in any case.  Social power generally works this way; it may take into strategic account the inevitable resistance of the person subject to it, but it is nonetheless essentially unilateral, something people of one class or type are able, and with justifications that are normally believed, to do to another.  Bureaucratic domination has made this a truism: the victim is responsible, and what is done to her or him is the appropriate treatment to be given to people with his or her presenting problem.  All too often, having authority over others partly means that they and not you are responsible for the consequences of your actions upon them.  Things like “professional ethics” in now way change this. Our society is made up of systems that separate administrative and other managerial personnel from awareness and responsibility for the consequences of their decisions and actions, and if this is true within specific institutions, it is all the more true of companies that are only responsible to their executive officers and shareholders.  It is thus entirely fitting that in the film, the two Sacklers who are seen, apparently for the first time, by Goldin and other PAIN activists, and by us as viewers, just stare ahead and say nothing.  They seem to have no reaction.  Is that the truth?  What more damning image could there be of a society’s rulers, for the class of billionaires certainly is that or part of it, than one of people who in the privilege they certainly enjoy, are unable to be affected even by the effects on masses of people of what they do?  These are not just profiteers; they are profiteers who are killers.  Cold and impassive killers.  But that too is a quality of the system; it would be a mistake to pass it off entirely on “corruption.”  What does it mean to speak of a corrupt capitalo-fascism?  Were Franco and Mussolini, Pinochet and the Argentine colonels corrupt?  I think we should take seriously the idea of people wielding such power and with the effects that they have, deliberate in some cases, as normal.  Such normality is a real problem.  Corruption would be a deviance from business as normal, but the problem is much more with that. Another way of putting this is to say that corruption and business as normal become in some cases indiscernible.         

But aren’t people responsible themselves for what happens in their own lives?  And might someone less sympathetic to Goldin, her friends, and their cause, not just demolish their argument by means of a simple ad hominem?  Maybe it would take this form: You are not a credible witness because, look at you, you are disreputable.  You are crazy, you are a drug addict, you were a whore, you were thrown out of orphanages, you were not prudent, you’re to blame… in short, you’re not a proper bourgeois honnête homme or something like it.  The counter-argument to this is not, oh but I am respectable, but: it doesn’t matter.  Why should it?  Is it only a crime, or more of one, to murder respectable good citizens than dirty poor ones who don’t go to a church and worship and obey?  

That such considerations are irrelevant is made refreshingly clear from Goldin’s photographs, which, set to stirring music, play a prominent role in the film.  The question of the status of the victim as witness (is he or she respectable enough to accuse anyone else?) is not argued; rather, there is simply no place in the world of her art to pose such a question.  They make no attempt to appeal to any kind of respectability, but because she is part of the world she photographs and the people are her friends, they are also without the distance that could make them seem pitying and moralistic.  She doesn’t defend anyone, but sees no need to.  The film in fact documents a systematic victimization of people whose only “crime” is to want to live intensely at the hands of people whose alibi is respectability.  The focus of the film is on the former and its confrontations with the latter.  

A brief summary is in order.  Goldin’s older sister, coming of age bookish, rebellious, and gay in suburban America in the 50s, shown in one photograph standing confidently in front of her parents’ house, was treated as “mentally ill” and essentially rejected by her family, finally committing suicide at 18.  Goldin, who denies that her sister was “mentally ill,” runs away from home, eventually settling within a community of artists, many of whom (this is the late 60s and 70s) are gay.  She is proud of having been kicked out of most of the places she lived, until she begins to find herself and choose her own family of friends.  She becomes an artist and starts photographing the people around her.  She begins to become a figure in the art world, with gallery shows.  She supports her art by doing sex work, then working in a bar for women who want to get out of it.  At one point she realizes that her friends are all dying: it is the AIDS era.  She curates a major gallery show by artists affected by the AIDS crisis, which was a lot of the art world in the 80s.  The great writer and artist David Wojnarowicz she acknowledges as a kind of mentor.  She shows and describes artist friends, some famous, all eventually dying in the face of all the indifference; they are the beauty in face of the bloodshed.  She says at one point that it was like World War 2.  It’s quite a one-sided war, since the people doing the dying could only fight back by making art or engaging in protests.  Conservatives in our government were more alarmed that an art show could be put on with public funds that involved obscenities or seemed to confer respectability, or a demand for recognition, on gayness, on the part of people who need to hate those who are “deviant” by their lights so that they can enjoy the satisfaction of believing that they are holy and normal.  The government did very little, many people could not afford medical care or health insurance, it devastated the art world, and a lot of people died.  People were angry, and even more than that, sad.  It is a strange kind of civil war perhaps, but it is one in its awful way.  I doubt anyone who was young and lived in any major American city or college town in the 80s could fail to recognize in her images something elegiac, the loss of something resembling a generation, or a world.  In the New York that I have called my home for a quarter century, it is a world that was both decimated by a disease in the face of an indifferent nation, and what was left of it displaced by gentrification.  The curious thing about today’s art world is that it no longer seems connected in the way it was to a subculture of the, usually, urban poor.   

The recent opioid epidemic clearly was for Goldin something of a repetition of the AIDS crisis. The populations affected were not quite the same, but similar were the death toll and the indifference.  And this time the crisis itself was caused by particular actors.  It was caused by the pharmaceutical industry.  

Explicitly connecting the dots presented in the film readily reveals even more damning facts.  The involvement of Big Pharma should make obvious what some of those dots are, and one that Goldin mentions, while it is underplayed in the film, is that of “mental illness” and its pharmacological treatment.  She explains that Valium, prescribed for anxiety and all kinds of things, was the first drug mass marketed by the Sacklers, whose firm hit on the brilliant idea of marketing such drugs through doctors.  This fits Goldin’s narrative in that the first victim she discusses is her sister, declared “mentally ill”; Goldin asserts plainly that this was a lie.  Her family couldn’t accept her sister, and needed to pretend that there was no real problem.  They wanted to protect their own respectability.  

I remember a funny commercial from the 90s.  With a straight face, it showed an image of one of Picasso’s paintings, and stated that if the celebrated painter had had Prozac, he “might not have had to have a blue period,” condemned to the miserable fate of making paintings like this.  In other words, psychiatry will save artists, or their public, from art, which is itself the result of some kind of malediction.  In retrospect, it seemed to me that the commercial blatantly presented a real contrast that was like opposing sides in a war pitting normality and quiescence against social criticism and creativity.   

Of course, the idea of representing some kind of counterculture as existing in an even unwitting opposition to a dominant culture is hardly a new thing; some of us remember when this was massive, as in the 60s, or a very pronounced trend in some places, as in the punk era.  Goldin’s images to me pose this as a question, because they are images of everyday life among people who may appear distinguished by little more than their youth and the relative urban poverty of life in places like New York’s East Village then, before it was gentrified.  I find the question worth posing because it’s important to grasp what is at stake.  In retrospect, it’s partly death, as much of the world depicted in her photographs was wiped out, in a war driven less by hostility than indifference.  As it happens, you didn’t have to have any kind of alternative lifestyle in order to be a victim of the opioid epidemic, but Goldin is portrayed in the film as fighting back from the perspective of something like an artistic counterculture, and I think that gives the film much of its power.   

Countercultures are partly a marketing phenomenon, and the most successful ones can become identified with a whole generation, as happened in the 60s, or simply seem to mature into (a part of) the mainstream as they confer upon it some of their colorful character.  That artistic culture is never quite mainstream and probably never will be, is a point driven home to me by having spent a decade working in New York offices as a secretary; that world is so driven by conventional minds and the expectations of (a mostly feminine) servility, that just thinking of this, and how I recall being treated, is enough that I could in reaction spend the rest of my life inventing an absent counterculture if I were not satisfied that there are perhaps half a million people in this city who share the same disaffection, or would if they strayed a few feet into the corporate office world that almost killed me, with its boredom, and the sapping of the energy I needed to do anything interesting or creative.  Said countercultures can also get attributed to things that are less central than they are made to seem, like drug use or deviant sexualities.  They are marked more than anything by artistic movements, because it is artists and people drawn to art, like music, in the milieux associated with them, whose lives often reflect an ethos associated with strong social criticisms.  Some countercultures outgrow themselves by giving rise to popular styles that exceed their one-time substance.  The importance of homosexualities to deviant or oppositional subcultures might well prove to be a passing phenomenon that ends happily in social acceptance marked not just by the kind of marriages that are suitable for ending a comedy but all manner of official recognition.  You don’t have to be a sexual deviant or any other kind to be an artist, but there is a production of social disaffection whose salutary side includes a perhaps growing number of people who associate with tendencies in the arts, and who will tend to look awry at much of the business of supposedly “normal” society, and that is not likely to cease to be true any time soon.  In fact, capitalist modernity produces disaffections and deviances, and that is a good thing.  It motivates a lot of high art, as it has for centuries, and certainly increasingly so in our time, at least since the first world war threw the old European social order into crisis.  Those artworks may get canonized, as Goldin’s have been (giving her a useful point of counterattack), and some are even taught in schools, but respectability and legitimacy do not stop the production of disaffection.  Among the things that do change over time are that people used to risk being burned at the stake, and now they may just be allowed to die, perhaps with some encouragements that make that easier to do or suffer.  (Most opioid addicts who die of it do so by accident and not choice.).     

The voice of normality in which powerful and ruling elites cloak much of their domination enables them to name this disaffection illness.  Therefore, by definition, a person is “mentally ill” if they experience or manifest some disaffection, deviance, disobedience, or dissent with respect to those expectations of normality.  As happened to Goldin’s sister, and a lot of other people in so many ways, even if less fatally.  If anyone is unhappy about anything in the life they are living or the environment or world they live in, then it is supposed that something is wrong not with that world or environment, but with them.  Thus, they are “mentally ill.”  Perhaps this is true by definition: illness = malaise = not being “well” = not happy = disaffected = …. novelistic and poetic subjectivity as such?  (We can of course make exceptions for the successful among the writers and artists. Success, at least if it is monetized, is always legitimate; what is in doubt is those persons who lack respectability. Some will naturally turn to narratives of identity politics and oppression — ideally overcome through hard work and “hardships”, but if that is not availing…. bad luck, you lose, you die.)  

So now there are armies of the mentally ill.  Indeed, if we believe the psychiatric profession, by virtue of its very definitions, a figure that can conservatively be set at 20% of the population is subject to this fault.  What an enormous financial bonanza this could be — and is — to certain industries!  Including the medical profession with its doctors who are paid far more than the often equally competent and more altruistic ones in many other countries; including hospitals private and public, all managed on a corporate business model; including the insurance industry; and including Big Pharma.  For most psychiatrists offer their patients only medications, and they do so on the assumption that you will be taking them the rest of your life, as they have also defined mental illnesses as innate.  They prescribe medicines to what they think are dysfunctional brains just as one might fix a broken machine.  Face it: they think you are sick in the head (why not say this?  For that is literally what they believe), and were born that way, as part of a class of people who are biologically inferior and need to be specially managed because of this — and the threat they, we, are imagined as posing — not so unlike the Jews and others in the Third Reich, who were defined as a biological entity, a race, by a regime that is exceeded historically only by our society today in being devoted to promoting health and normality, of bodies and minds, and policing — or discarding, warehousing, perhaps literally eliminating them. (An obvious undercover police officer used this word, “elimination,” to threaten me as part of an ultimately successful effort to gaslight me and get me into a hospital ward where I could be subjected to a relentless harassment and other threats, mainly against my liberty, which they might have stolen from me on the pretense of protecting my “health,” profitably, I am sure.)  Feared are these people with supposed diseases or unassimilable nonconformist values now thought to be so by an unchangeable genetic disposition.  Jews no longer play this role in Western societies as they still did then, and they never did in quite the same manner or degree in America (though this exceptionalism should not be overestimated as the same marginalizations and hatreds do exist here, too, though in ways that the conservative Jewish world is ill-equipped to very effectively counter, since now all they can do is promote religious traditionalism — largely because it seems comforting and “nice”—, family, and nationalism), but that only means that other groups and identities must be placed in a similar role - which after all is very profitable.  Policing and social exclusions meet greed and profits in the mental health industry, much as war is bred by both weapons industries and other profiteers and common human hatreds.  And blaming victims is nothing new, especially when victimization is mass produced.  

I am not sure I don’t prefer the identity of artist to any of the others on offer to the officially (?) disaffected, even if I am on the margins of artistic creativity as a small-time writer, sometime actor, and film critic, to any of the other group-membership-based identities that are available.  I insist that it is a status that anyone can claim based only on interest and not on any achievement, necessarily.  Gayness seems to me not so interesting, in fact, though I remember when it was the go-to label for people who seemed in any way “different” and thus objects of social ambivalence, people maybe to be accepted in spite of the hatred that made them conspicuous.  For it ends, we can now see, in a logic of transforming deviance into normality, by way of marriage and the Christian universal love ideology that is the cause of so much blindness and ignorance of social justice, as people are told that they should stop being angry about injustices since that isn’t loving, like your presumably wonderful family was, or should have been, as if that and the good feelings that result were all you needed.  As for Jewishness, it is conservative today, let’s admit that.  I think I have learned much from Jewish traditions, including even the religious ones, though the secular and often left-wing tendencies, which can only be called that, as they answer to no restriction on membership, always seemed to me far more interesting, particularly when I took a glance at the people involved and what they were doing.  But what would I do with such an identification?  I think I’d want to use it for some useful purpose.  And then there’s the mental illness thing.  Why not that?  Note at least one similarity between these three demographics: all three were subject to “elimination” in the death camps, a reality now fading from living memory.  What a nice identification that would be, don’t you want it?  Get your “personality crisis while it’s hot”; maybe you can claim it as a tax deduction.  Let’s face it: people who openly declare that they are mentally ill are basically just asking to be accepted for a handicap that may make them bad persons — and it’s not their fault, because they aren’t responsible persons, and just need expensive medical care that amounts to policing.  It’s not so different from a Christian perspective in which one asks to be treated with grace even though one is an undeserving sinner.  Much of the discourse about the so-called mentally ill is a police discourse little different from the most violent forms of fascism, particularly since the so-called mentally ill are blamed on social disorders, including the violence even of mass killings, which are actually caused by the combination of racism and guns more than illness, as well as by forms of disaffection that could be better explained in other terms, except that those terms would inculpate aspects of our society rather than blaming individuals, which is so much easier to do in a society like ours.  The identification of someone as mentally ill is the profitable and policing-oriented way of saying that they are dangerous and should be given some special care, in default of which they may “need” to be locked up for their own good, and even more for ours.  It is a lie in fact: most people with any psychiatric disorder do not commit crimes, and most crimes cannot be explained by a mental illness of the perpetrator, unless that is simply claimed in a general way that would make it a tautology.  But the lie appeals to lots of insecurities on the part of people who want to feel normal while the police state protects them from their fears in the form of people imagined in the very mirror of these anxieties.  Deviance, the lack of normality, is the imaginary cause of violent crime, and the control and suppression of deviance its imaginary solution.  Our system is organized to exploit violent crime and other disorders, not address their causes.  The gun industry, for example, is not made less profitable (but if anything more so) every time there is another school shooting.  Powerful monied interests have a stake in their being lots of such crimes, and having a response to them based on lots of police and prisoners.      

It would be a great achievement if our society, instead of supposing that everyone is or might be mentally ill — for that is the obvious direction in which it is going  — considered that everyone is or can be an artist.  But to instead focus on illnesses of the mind, soul, or person: every indicator would show that this is the conquest of a great new market, and one that only needs to be extended maximally to reap the highest profits.  Everyone therefore must need “mental health care.” The whole society is sick, but only in the sense that individuals are (not anything affecting the social fabric, or those of us for whom the objects of ambivalence are not ourselves but others), and therefore everyone must pay for their care by the mental health industry.  And of course, the more of it, the better.  The economy may depend on it. So why not declare a general crisis and try to put this regime into place?  Your cell phone can be not only a more effective form of ankle bracelet but also your connection to what you need for your health and sickness, and God knows everyone needs health and is subject to sickness, just as they are to dying, just as everyone may be in a general pandemic.  

This new total government does not have to offer people much.  It offers only to give them some protection against the loss or damage of illness.  No wonder no psychiatrist I have ever seen, out of scores of them, has ever expressed an interest in my life as a writer (though some have wanted to see my writings, which I have so far managed to refuse, generally with a quiet demurral or suggestion of delay), nor has any of them wondered about my personal and professional creative ambitions in any way.  Why would that be important?  What would a “mental health care” system be that were oriented towards helping creative people be more creative?  There seems to be more of a market in managing possible death, disability, or medically treatable dysfunction than any such more “positive” potentialities.  Goldin’s group PAIN has called for money to be spent on harm reduction, including helping heroin and opioid addicts either get off it or use it safely, which a society and government that cared about its people in more honest and less mercenary ways would consider a matter of some importance. 

One question I had in watching this film was, where are the doctors?  What are they doing?  Mostly what Big Pharma and other capitalist interests except of them.  Where are the courageous doctors who want to work against this?  How many of them are there?  Obviously, not many.  Medicine is a very conservative profession, and since Purdue Pharma started using doctors to prescribe as much valium and other psychotropic drugs as possible, with financial rewards going to the doctors to do so, an entire profession has dutifully followed the money and not asked many questions.  Your doctor may be a nice person, but probably never has questioned this, whether or not he or she ever took the ancient Hippocratic oath to “first do no harm,” which is not mandatory of medical school graduates in America today and no longer taken by most of them.  And psychiatrists are police officers of medicalized normality, and little more than that.  Those who would like to be more useful to their patients are likely prevented from doing so by their employer, if they work for a hospital or clinic.  For one thing, they may only be assigned a few minutes to spend with you, in which time they must decide what horrible illness of soul or mind with its enormous dangers you likely have, with the most damaging ones being diagnosed in roughly inverse proportion to the amount of time they spend getting to know you.  Clinics that treat poor people also tend to regard them as having behavioral problems; this is part of a culture of hatred of poor people that goes back to the Progressive Era a century ago and even further, to the use of social workers and others to police the urban poor drawn to cities to work in the factories, who were regarded as uncivilized and dangerous, breeding diseases and manifesting all manner of social ills, to be combatted with some combination of “help” and policing.

Certainly, one criterion of any acceptable social policy in a society that is supposed to be even minimally democratic is that it should be run by the poor and others affected by the meliorative programs themselves.  Hence, the idea, which must seem remarkable to some people, of helping addicts make sure they aren’t ingesting fentanyl (which is so much stronger that when mixed, it has made heroin and cocaine often murderous), instead of locking them up.  Locking up drug users and not corporate drug pushers!  The Big Pharma companies are, like the mafias, acting like the business people they are, dressed up in suits and corporate office suites.  They make money selling people things that will very likely kill them, and they figure that isn’t their problem.  The money the Sacklers and others made should have been redirected towards helping people.  But that is not the way of our thanato-capitalism, which is maybe its most apt name.  

The mental health system is thanatological because it tends to only see potentialities of persons that are negative or destructive. It then posits them as definitionally incurable but needing to be managed. This keeps doctors busy and is profitable. But it creates classes of persons who are treated as losers who must therefore be surveilled and managed.

The attempts to legitimate the practices and thinking of psychiatric medicine by assimilating mind to body can never quite succeed because states of mind are inevitably associated with qualities of persons in ways that physical ailments and disabilities are not. It is best disingenuous to suppose that one can be a person who merely has a mental illness, which might, as it were, be located in some “part” of their person, rather than being a person who is mentally ill. States of mind are states of persons. We have a mind in a different way than we have arms and hands, one obvious difference being that a person could be without an arm but hardly could we call anyone a person one who lacks a mind, and the reason is not that you need one to be alive, for a person normally could not live without a heart and several other internal organs, yet we must say that if a person could live without a heart, they would not then cease to be a person, while if they were without a mind (of any sort) they would, in all the usual senses.

I looked at the two Sackler family representatives as they sat their impassively in the online hearing, where they were required by a settlement to face some of their victims.  They said nothing, and seemed unaffected.  The famous coldness of heroin addicts themselves scarcely equals their impassivity.  I suspect that they went home a bit bewildered by the “political” opposition to what to them obviously was just business.  I thought of people I have known or encountered, including people in my family, who seem to me to resemble these all too normal people more than they did anyone pictured in any of Goldin’s images.  I don’t blame them for that, as bland normality may be boring or annoying but is not itself a crime.  What bothers me is its use.  The normality should be defamiliarized when it is blind to suffering that it either witnesses and does nothing about, or actually causes.  It is in a comparison that we can inculpate this “normality.”  

But the idea of normality is already a negation of something else; that one is normal is meaningful to assert only in at least tacit contrast to something supposedly deviant that you deplore.  I think I am one of a very large number of persons who grew up treated with suspicion only because of the fear that suspicion was directed at, which was simply the possibility of my being different from some expectation.  I was blessed with divorced parents whose anger at each other drove them both to treat me as a bastard who was always expected to prove that he was legitimate because not like the other parent.  My mother never fully accepted my being at all like my dad with his critical disposition, and whom she associated with some of the several traumas she never found any honest way to deal with, while my father was afraid that if I read books and wasn’t sporty, I’d be gay like my mother’s oddball brother.  My mother turned to her second husband my stepfather as policeman to enforce her every annoyance at me, which led him into violent punishments for which to this day I wish they had both been tried and sent to jail, at least long enough to be taught a lesson.  Otherwise they would go on assuming that my disobedience is a problem while their injustice could not be, being merely a result, or an expression, of the hierarchy of social power, which I could see was in the end all that they were enforcing.  Kids at school were mostly uninteresting to me, and my memories of them have more to do with being bullied than any friendships, which I began to make easily just as soon as I left both the families and high school, meeting young artists and other people around the local university. 

I think my own story is not very unusual.  Our society mass produces social disaffection, even if it doesn’t quite affect everyone, nor those it does to the same degree.  And it offers the disaffected, what?  Drugs?  Is the question, as it was for the Nixon administration, how to use criminalize dissidence by declaring a war on drugs?  Or a war on sexual freedom waged partly by making bearing children a legal duty for women, dereliction of which is a crime?  Or some vague idea of experience, that might be very different from the “nothing happening at all” of your suburb?  Or even art, literature, interesting music, film….?  Now, so many years later, I would say maybe that I have my own normal, and I’m interested in studying art and theories relating to it, in learning what I can, and in what I can do about the fate of a society that is for me anything but something to be taken for granted under the sign of something like the assumption of a normality, the society I have lived most of my life in, and that I both love and hate.  I think if you cannot hate your own society, then you are not free at all, and if you don’t hate it in some ways, you are an idiot, or a coward, like most of the many American super-patriots.  Maybe the question is just this: what is it to have grown up and lived in a society that in some sense is at war against huge numbers of its own residents and citizens?  I think the ultimate driver of this is the profit system we call capitalism, and the proximate cause is various ideologies that drive people to say and do all kinds of very stupid shit that has as its consequence a lot of stunted or ruined lives, unnecessary early deaths, and in so many ways a huge toll.  “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation,” said Thoreau, and that is why.  It is intolerable!  Given that, what do you do?  How do you live with what is intolerable, when that itself is an absolute contradiction?  The despair that many people today feel for just this reason is of course a contributor to the toll in lives destroyed, which is the problem that the symptoms are actually symptoms of.  Our disaffection is not a problem, which is to say we are not the problem; the system is the problem.  It’s a terrible, horrible system, it ought to be replaced with something better, and so many people know this, because it’s obvious, only we don’t know exactly what is to be done.  Maybe taking down a company that is directly responsible for much of the carnage is not a bad place to start.