"Postcards from the Fourth Reich": An experience with the 'madness' of police terror (revised)

I.

The following are excerpts from a true story. It happened in America, in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

* * *

When the lawyer at the agency heard my name, she knew all about my case.  “It is the police who wanted you in the hospital here,” she said.  “And you must not talk about it, because if you do, they will do it again, and then they will keep you for a long time.”

People said some funny things to me then.  Almost always with no one else present.  The facts about me to which they were responding were all easily known: I had recently returned from studying philosophy in France; I had decided to become a writer; I am a person of strong opinions who considers himself a man of the left, though I was not then, and am not now, very much of, a political activist. And the man I had been staying with, the editor of an online magazine that had published one of my film reviews, had tried and succeeded with a provocation in starting a fight. He called the police, they listened to his story and not mine, and took me to the hospital. I was not handcuffed but taken in the rear of an ambulance, while a fire fighter of about 35 told me an improbable story about studying in France and writing on the events of May 1968.

At the ER, I was told a series of lies in order to engage my willing compliance. Soon, not telling me that I was being incarcerated, a security guard demanded I surrender my laptop, which I had with me. He did not say why, and no one told me what was actually going on. When I refused on principle, he lunged forward and quickly grabbed the laptop from me, and I was swiftly thrown to the ground by a group of personnel who had emerged instantly out of nowhere. They poked me all over, especially in my midsection and groin, and then held me up twisting my arms behind me. My plea that I was not resisting them and they were hurting me was obviously taken as an indication of resistance authorizing them to continue and increase the pressure. I angrily tried to speak to a female doctor, who returned my anger by making it clear that I was the bad guy and she would not hear what I wanted to say. Then I was taken into the examination room.

The scene with the security guard and the others would later be repeated when I was punished for seeming to persist when I asked a nurse as usual for more writing paper, and she demurred momentarily. Surrounded by a group of nurses, I was informed, “Yes, indeed, you do have the right to refuse treatment, but you must take this medication now.” In other words, this is a state of emergency, and you must obey our orders, or else we will hurt you. I take a perverse pride in what I then did, though it surely was imprudent, given the way these people have patients like me framed as liable to violence, or what they will call by that name. I lunged forward rapidly and grabbed the cup of water from the hispanic female nurse’s hand, crumpled it, and retreated. I did not touch anyone, or say anything else. The response was swift, though the nurse who pronounced me “violent” was uncertain enough about this judgment to repeat it three times. She even repeated the argument: I had spilled water on the nurse’s trousers. My “violence” was symbolic. They understood that, as I did. And they knew they had to respond in force.

The main enforcer was a six-foot-six black man. He threw me to the floor in a hand lock on my neck. Then I was taken into what I call the punishment room. There this man, from a distance, shouted at me with a rage that seemed to me a true hatred, to shut up. Shut up or else what? Would this man try to kill me? When I complained about it later to an outpatient doctor, she dutifully wrote in my record that I had accused a black nurse of using violence, and so was obviously racist.

(I should perhaps note that these events occurred in one of my city’s poorer neighborhoods, which is mostly black and hispanic. I also have no reason to believe that much of what happened to me here was a consequence of race relations; though I have no lack of sympathy for victims of official violence, economic disadvantage, underemployment in jobs enforcing social antagonisms, or even attitudinal prejudices who are members of these minority groups, I think we can suppose that other dynamics were at play here. Whether something of very different purpose and meaning was being done partly under the cover of being able to appeal to some common political notions of who can be said to be ‘oppressed’ and by whom, is, I would suggest, a separate matter. I would submit that, as Fassbinder showed in many of his films, much injustice is committed by people who in some other context or manner may be victims of wrong themselves. And there is no contradiction in saying this. Much would be clearer and simpler politically if more people stopped assuming that what ‘I’ say about ‘you’ is true if and only if what ‘you’ say about me is false, and vice-versa. This also touches on the question of the meaning and possibility of statements, of who can be authorized in a given situation to say something deemed likely true, and whose speech is de-authorized as part of these situations and the domination they perform. Who can speak the truth and whose speech is presumed to only evidence what is wrong with them. Who is authorized also to act, and who is left only with the potentialities of compliance or the ‘violence’ of disobedient or unruly behaviors. There is a power of speech that implies that: “This statement is ‘true’, which means that we can utter it and enforce its sayability. And further, this statement being sayably true, it fills the field of the sayable, so that no other statement could be.”)

Bureaucratic domination of the kind we have under capitalism has a tendency to be at once, and at times indiscernibly, idealistic and cynical. People whose behaviors can only place them politically on the far right, which is we must say of the police when they are being violent as, especially in America, they quite normally are, can seem to be equally on the left-wing inhabited by official liberals, when it comes to mouthing pious platitudes about racism, sexism, and other rhetorically obvious and simplified forms of oppression that reduce to the defense of some pre-packaged identities while assaulting others, notions that good people not exercising the cynicism of power will sometimes believe, and can perhaps be counted on to tolerate the appropriate abuse. For liberalism is that.

Liberalism is at root an ideological ‘humanism’; that is, a politics that bases itself on claims to affirm ‘humanity’ and communitarian identities, whose embattled character is exaggerated, in opposition to forms of ‘alienation’, incivility, or the failure of Christian kindness; a false tolerance that denies its identification of vulnerable persons with their claims, positions, and statements, so that these cannot be criticized, especially when they touch upon matters of power and whatever is in fact politically contested and contestable; and it does this above all through a symbolic hypertrophy of claims of “violence.” The liberal state promises and pretends to protect everyone from alienation. (“Don’t stand so close to me! Don't speak to me like that!” “You make me feel unsafe when you disagree like that”; “What makes you think you have the right to say that as if it were true? God knows you have the right to your (irrelevant) opinion.”) It regulates those statements and actions that constitute the political as such, and does so affirming identities and their inclusion, made into enforceable moral norms, above all on the basis of claims to oppose all, and especially imaginary and symbolic, forms of “violence.” In other words, liberalism is a kind of political and ethical belief, an ideology.

That the police state is very concerned to limit or sanction racism, or protect minorities from the oppression of being insulted, might surprise many Americans, especially today. I think one should be wary of enforcers bearing claims of justice.  They would love to be able to say of someone like me that he or she is a right-wing racist, and they would love even more to get you to appear to think and say that, or apologize for being the ‘kind’ of person who might. Is justice or injustice what is done, or “who” does it and has it done to them? More likely relevant was the first thing that was said to me after my being placed on the ward. A young black man, apparently another patient, approached me rapidly with a torn piece of paper, on which he had written the word “industry.” He asked me what it meant. I said, I think industry is the work most people do, when it is organized in a certain way. Apparently satisfied, he just as quickly withdrew.

* * *

The “social worker” the officer in the ER directed me to was a man seated in this small room.  I entered and he closed the door.  He asked me if I had been abroad.  I said, yes, I had recently come back from living in France.  “There are some nice French restaurants in this city,” he said.  “Yes,” I affirmed.  “But dangerous.”  “Huh?”  “Well, I mean the terrorist threat.”  “What are you talking about, at French restaurants in New York?”  Sometimes, newspaper stories seem to decide how people are inclined to interpret whatever they hear or see, and some stories are good for that. My roommate would sometimes reply to something I had said by showing me videos of lynchings in the South; it turned out he wanted me to think that my asking him for his share of the rent was racism. In this case, in late 2015, there had been just a few weeks earlier that horrible stadium attack in Paris by Islamist terrorists, which itself followed the killing of journalists at a magazine that had caricatured ‘The Prophet’. 

This matter did not get clarified, and he passed to other topics.   I told him I wanted to see a psychiatrist (I was out of the medication that had been helping me sleep), and he replied that actually he would not advise that.  That, he said, “would be appropriate only in case of a life or death matter, and then it would be a matter of elimination.”

I should have just smiled, thanked him, and left.  It’s unnerving, but in fact, why be unnerved?  Ostensibly, they suspect a million people of being “terrorists”; like me, most of these people are really suspected of quite normal, if eccentric, political actions or sentiments and dispositions.  

But I was worried about the harassments from my race-baiting roommate, which had gotten ugly and violent.  There are procedures that seem to work by provoking a person to move from one situation of danger or threat to another that may actually be worse.  This can be a way of controlling people.  On the ward they seemed to do that by placing me in a series of rooms with rather threatening men, and then making it clear that they did not appreciate my complaining about it.  Psychiatric hospital nurses do not usually like your bothering them about anything.  

One of these men was apparently a maniac who said nothing but would periodically jump up suddenly in his bed to the position of an erect torso. It was as if he were a wind-up instrument of some kind. And presumably now he was ready, to do what I did not know, and he did not say. There were no security cameras in the rooms. I imagined a man like him could kill me with his hands, and think nothing of it, as if it were a just job he had been given to understand he should perform. A maniac with some inexplicable rage. I reflected also that while I was looking for a place to sit down and call my father, before finding myself at the hospital for lack of other options, I had walked into a bar only to see a big black man staring directly at me from a spot alongside the bar counter, and wearing vinyl gloves. When I complained about the maniac, they moved me to a room with a black man who loudly protested that he would not share a room with a white man. When I complained about that, they first put me in a room with four men, two speaking Arabic with each other, and one young black man with a Bob Marley t-shirt who just stared ahead, saying nothing, always looking at me when I was around, with a look that seemed to me a cold and studied hate. When I complained again, the black nurse in charge gave me to understand that the fact that these men were black meant that if I were afraid of anyone, I’d be treated as the bad or fall guy. She also threatened me with the isolation chamber, which was represented as the only other place to put me. I guess I could be a timid fool. Living in New York, a Deleuze scholar I once knew reminded me, “toughens you up,” which might be good advice. If the question at places like Auschwitz was, what does it take to destroy a person, the question for my handlers must have been, merely, what does it take to intimidate an ordinary man who seems disposed of both a political will of some unknown kind and some imagination.

The officer calmly told me I should go to the police station in my precinct with the matter of the scary roommate.  He added that after it is over, “There will be a clean-up operation.”   

* * * 

When I first entered the Emergency Room, I was ordered by a young white male nurse at the desk to give a urine sample.  I had not drunk anything all day, so that proved difficult.  I returned to say that I could not.  He replied that if I did not give him the urine sample, they would insert a catheter to take it from me by force.  Obviously, he had been told that I was a disobedient person (is crime disobeying authority in America today?).  I call this medical violence: the use of a medical instrument to inflict bodily pain or injury. 

* * * 

“You are speaking with an accent.  Are you not an American?”
I should perhaps have said that I had just recently returned from living in Europe, but I found his question so bizarre (for what did this have to do with his trying to decide whether to incarcerate me on medical grounds? Was I being accused of an un-American personality? — a curious contemporary variant on the McCarthy’s era’s “un-American activities”?)

“ I am a U.S. citizen.”

At this, he stretched wide his arms and leaned forward.
“Well then, I welcome you to be American with me.”

I was stunned.  It was as if he were a petty Christ, saying, “Suffer the little children to come unto me.”  Show me yourself in full innocence, and open yourself so that I can penetrate you with my benevolent interventions. 

I said nothing.  He then said, “You are feeling anxiety.” I mistook this for a question.  It was not.  In fact, I think he was cuing me to give him an account that would fit his judgment of me as in an emergency mental health crisis, which I would have been doing if I had detailed or tried to explain any feeling of anxiety.  

I denied it, undoubtedly a mistake.  My response was sincere; I said, I can certainly recognize when I am feeling anxious, and at the moment I would not say that.  I realized later, it wasn’t a question, but a statement. 

It was a mot d’ordre, an order-word.  I was being ordered to acknowledge, or think about, myself as anxious, and whatever I said would be written down and used in verification. This man had to find something on me, and was determined to do so.  Perhaps I should have made his job more difficult.  Of course, nothing I could have said would have changed the outcome.  I don’t see that these encounters are very different from a police interrogation.

And of course, I could not help recognizing this as hostile, a fact that could only be used against me.

There is nothing of his questions to me, nothing of his behavior or that of any of the other professionals I encountered, in any of my medical records.  And of course, before entering the examination room, with no one else present, all of my possessions were taken from me, so that, among other things, I could not record, such as on my cell phone, what he was saying.  They do not record anything they or anyone else there does or says, only what you say or do in response, which is treated as if it simply comes from you and expresses your own deviance. In this way, a patient’s speech and behavior will likely appear all the more irrational, since their context has been deleted. 

The anxiety he wanted to document would have expressed my concern about what they might do, and that would be attributed to me. It would serve as explanation for the criminal disposition he thought he already knew I must have, since that is what a finding of mental illness, in what has already been framed as an individual state of emergency, amounts to. I would be anxious about something unpleasant that might happen, and that would either be attributed to me, or that I would be presumed to feel the desire to do something criminal about.   

* * * 

On the unit, there was a tall, avuncular man, who let me know he was Jewish.  I will suppose that his speech was part of a role he was playing, and I will call him (I do not recall his name) the Kapo.  In a tone of admonition, as if he were taking me aside, to give me some wise counsel, for my own good, he decided to share with me some of his political opinions. 

First, it would have been better if the ‘Whites’ had won the Russian Civil War, because that would have kept things from getting really out of hand.  

Secondly, the Communists in Germany were to blame for the triumph of Hitler.  Because of course Nazism only came to power because the German (and international) bourgeoisie favored it over the Communist threat. 

Finally, one should be careful not to do what Julius Rosenberg did.  (He mentioned only Julius and not his wife Ethel, presumably because I am a man.)

If you add in the fact that he claimed to be Jewish, I took him to be saying something like: 

“Our people have always had to face being ruled by murderous tyrants.  But you cannot rebel against them; that you must never do.  For they are stronger, and will win.  If you rebel, they will defeat you, and you will only have yourself to blame.” 

This is a credible statement.  Since this man was volunteering himself to offer me lessons in a specifically Jewish ethical propriety, it is worth noting that there were Jewish leaders during the Holocaust who acted this way.  The Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg has documented this, and Hannah Arendt speaks about it also in her landmark book Eichmann in Jerusalem.   Jews had been accustomed for centuries to getting by with bribes, accommodations, and diplomacy.  Tragically, most did what they were told. Their leaders organized no resistance as they were targeted individually and as families. The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity and the Holocaust argues that the Jews and their leaders in Nazi-occupied Europe were placed in a situation where rational action undertaken with careful thought in the interest of surviving, took place within a situation that dictated that such efforts would only be used to tighten the trap they were in. Noticing that you are apparently being singled out as a target of official violence who will be attributed its causal origin, and then trying, as I had found myself apparently constrained to do in the events leading up to this, is not likely to have salutary consequences. That this man is a Jew and believes the things he said to me, is the kind of thing that will never cease to astonish me, but I think it is entirely credibly today, unfortunately, at the same time that his statements to me were clearly of little importance apart from the effort to provoke me, apparently to see if I would speak like the political extremist it seems I was being attributed the worrisomely possibility of being. He had obviously been given earlier to understand some things about me, since one does not draw such statements out of the air, and I had said nothing to him that could have served as such a cue.

* * * 

In what turned out to be my next to last day there, the social worker, a young hispanic woman, gave me for the second time in a row a set of blank sheets of paper for writing, in response to my request.  This time it was fewer sheets than before; it was explained to me that they have austerity and paper is expensive, amounting to what I suppose is a fairly small amount of the $2,000/day that they would try to bill me.  When I got back to my room I noticed that there was writing on the other side.  It was a complete description of the procedures for involuntary admission to a long-term psychiatric facility in my father’s county in Virginia.  She had in fact also called him, I later learned, and ‘informed’ him that I might need that.  I took it as a threat.  Whatever I was being warned to do or not do, the sanction if I failed the test might be that I would be sent to what in effect would be a hospice.  Where, while fully in possession of my intellectual and ethical senses, I would be painstakingly cared for physically while I could only slowly die, since of course everything I have wanted to do in this life and all of my interests, and friends, and loves in the film and art world and elsewhere, would be taken from me.  

* * *

My medical records include the repeated declarations by the doctors who saw me, very briefly, that I was a “danger” to myself and others and “needed” incarceration.  They do not say in what way they thought me dangerous.  They do not cite any evidence.  They do not supply any reason.  Just the judgment.  Apparently their professional licensure makes their statements true by authority.  The rest of the records say a few things of supposed interest, not much, about me, but include no information relevant to the point about my supposedly violent character. 

Articles of faith. I get this text from my Reform prayerbook, which I have slightly adapted. God, keep me from the temptation to say what I am thinking. Help me to be silent in the face of fuckery, thoughtfully concerned and rightly troubled about oppression and injustice both here and elsewhere, to myself and others, cautious in the presence of all. Keep my heart and will open to the thinking by which we try to make sense of our experience, and I will hasten to do what is just. In time of trouble, let this be my answer, in the hope that those who love the justice and happiness of the promise will give some rare thought to what they are doing and what is happening, even in the face of the stupidity and barbarism of the state of things and its enforcement that goes by the name of common sense. And let me not forget that in the way you think it is always better to be wrong than boring.

Once, the tyrant’s empire was limited by the ability of men and women in resistance to say, over my dead body. But bodies are disposed of, and people who would participate in some reformations of the social world as if they were citizens and not mere subjects must be controlled. Yet, no one can ever demonstrate that the ‘It’ of ‘how it is’ must be kept holy, and that resistance is only futile and not fertile. The good is a contingency, and as Pascal said, one must wager. Power always comes armed with the disposition to make statements that affirm its self-evident justice, cynically judging those it must confront and bend to itself as wrong somehow. These declarations are almost never very interesting, though often some statements and things they do when uttering them are.

Paola Maratti, in her book on Deleuze’s Cinema studies, argues that there is a political philosophy as well as an ethics in Deleuze’s finding that postwar cinema presents characters who cannot react to the situations they are in, but only register their sublimely overwhelming character as stunning, and revelatory, in an aesthetic vision.  Perhaps these outrageous statements that some people make do indeed leave one unable to respond except by recognizing a certain irremediable strangeness. That this state of mind is redemptive is rather less clear.  

What if one or several people find a way to say to you things that are both frighteningly hostile and truly bizarre?  Not all harassment is bizarre, but trolling harassment can be.  And suppose that they also say it behind closed doors.  This will give them deniability.  In that case, what happens if the person wants to repeat what was said to them?  Most people will not believe them, because it’s so bizarre they will attribute the statement’s strangeness to the madness of the person who said it. 

* * * 

I handed her the papers, face up, and said, “I think you must have given me these by mistake.  For I do not need this.”  That is what I should have said.  

I was let go the next day.

II.

Why did I continue to find this so unnerving? It seems I was gaslighted, with a roommate and a house guest both acting strangely, and the hypothesis that a police agency was involved seems almost incontrovertible. So? That my communications systems would be interfered with, I would find myself without money even for food, my roommate would steal my clothes and toilet paper, trapped incommunicado with a terror of what I knew was happening, I might start to feel as if I were going crazy, and all this would be used against me: none of this is all that strange, really. Is it that what they eventually did was just to say that I had gone crazy, and to arrange things in such a way that my experience would be denied? As if I had been eliminated already from the life of a public mind, on the basis of a lie that the perpetrators would maintain, the truth known only to them and the victim.

Imagine that you or someone you know is the victim of a horrible crime and everyone you mention this to replies with static noise drowning out your speech, as happens to Anna Karina in Godard’s film “Made in U. S. A.,” when she interviews officials to ask about the murder of her partner. You are the victim of a crime apparently committed by people in official authority, and no one will believe you, because it was so arranged that if you try to talk about it, people will say you are crazy. And that clearly is exactly what they wanted. Most people would find this terrifying, in part because we all want and need to have the recognition of others in which our beliefs and experience are validated. Only part of the problem is that crimes and injustices that are not acknowledged may be expected to recur or continue. I think that is a secondary problem; there is in the denial of evil something more fundamentally horrifying. Indeed, this reveals something about judgment and why it is important to us, for judging and judging rightly is the very heart of justice; always more important than any legal retribution, payment, or punitive consequences is, in cases of purported wrongdoing, the judgment that this happened (and it matters), and that it is wrong (and it matters). And these statements are made by a court of record, which establishes a publicly recognized knowledge of fact and right. Perhaps it is in this sense that Dostoevsky’s statement that if there is no God, anything is possible is true. A world in which anything is possible is one in which nothing is real. There is then no necessity that something that is said to be or to be happening or have happened is judged true or false, and no reason to think it has to matter. This would be the virtuality of a hell. It could bury us all in documents of supposed truth and importance, but that ultimately have no meaning, a set of archives of statements that ultimately are without interest, like shit. People might believe them absolutely, until their shift ends or they retire, and then they are forgotten. If such a self-falsifying world existed somewhere, and some of the persons finding themselves, perhaps unwittingly, in it, were observed describing such a hell, the plain madness of believing in the existence of a reality that seems impossible and so is denied, would be ascribed to them, as if their own malaise or a malfunction presumed originating in them were its origin and meaning.

One reason literature exists is that people need to tell and hear stories, which confer meaning on experiences by saying both that this or that event happened, and it has the meaning the writer gives it. In the film “Under the Sun of Satan” by French director Maurice Pialat, when a young woman who has accidentally killed a man who had threatened her is told by her lover that what has happened never happened and will not be avowed, she lets out a scream of horror. To live in a world where deaths and killings, experience and its fatality, are denied, said to be as they are not and not be as they are, would be a horror in a way far exceeding that of any particular suffering or mortality. It would be like the despair of a soul who experiences not his own disappearance from a world whose womb of time still conceals futures, in a time that can be trusted as it goes on, but the disappearance of the world with a solitary mind surviving it. Fancifully, we might suppose that it would be like the despair of God if he were to see destroyed the world he created and whose people he had invested so much care in, while lacking the courage to create another. Imagination would not come to your rescue, as it could be used against you. Your experience is as if deprived of material support.

In Biblical and Western literary traditions, worlds are created by words, and speech announces and confirms realities, conferring reality and meaning on what is experienced. If we did not need this, perception and habit alone would suffice to orient us as it does the other animals, memory of what has been and imagination of what might be would never uproot us from a thick entrapment in a world of situations and their obvious demands, the discourses and disagreements at the heart of democracy would be effaced or unknown in a dumb and universal assent, art and literature would have no power, records and documents stating what exists or has happened would be enforced and credited amid disbelief or unconcern for whether they are false or true, no authorities would be trusted (yet just for that reason, none either would ever be doubted), and speech itself would play but a secondary role in social life, perhaps only confirming in what is supposed a representation of something more reliable ‘said’ in perceptual ‘body language’ and unreflective ‘communications’ within the ambit of everyone’s just doing what is there to be done.

This is why rape victims are re-traumatized when police or courts do not believe them. It is why Holocaust victims insist on declaring the simple truth that this incredible thing that no human being with a recognizably proper sense of what it is to be a person living in a social world could, or should, ever do or experience — to say, “Yes, this happened.” This is the meaning the Russian poet Anna Akhamatova’s realization, when asked by another woman in a line waiting for information about imprisoned husbands and sons, if she could describe this, that, “Yes, I can.” God created the world, it is said, by issuing statements over what was still a formless chaotic mess; we humans create meaning by giving language, or its analogue in well-wrought perceptual form, to perceptions, experiences, and sufferings so that there is the actual being of things and situations that are, of what can be named, described, or talked about. In countries with a tradition of secret police that keep files on citizens and engage friends, family, or neighbors to spy on or harass them, stories like this one are common. But everyone to whom something that to them is truly horrible has happened will fear the denial of it as a kind of erasure of their public selves. The paranoid doubts that Descartes first placed at the heart of thought’s own few certainties in the conscience of modernity, and that appear in fantasies like the “Matrix” film series, get at something important about the life of our species: We participate in a common social world through language, which we use both to get things done and to say what is true or real. The totalitarianisms of the last century saw perversions of the use of language that raised the specter of an organized social life sustained by or based on collectively endorsed lies. The lie wrongs because in denying the real, it denies justice. Frightful it would be indeed if we saw an emperor parade naked and no one could, or would dare, say that it is so. Language itself clothes the objects and reality of experience, and we need its use to affirm what is true and deny the false, as Aristotle put it, to say of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not. In 1984, Winston makes the condition of his metaphysical and moral freedom that in the face of a government that rules by lies, he can at least think the thought that 2+2=4; for thought itself would be destroyed in an instituted mass madness if its use to make true statements that correlate a named or described situation with a really existing referent were somehow lost.

So what if something awful happens to you, and it is the kind of thing that most people would only contemplate in a dream or fantasy that they know to be impossible, and then you are told, no, this did not happen to you, you imagined it, and your thinking is crazy? And you know that it did happen, and it was done to you, purposefully, in order so that those doing could say exactly that, that you are crazy. The threat that may come with such declarations of removing you from ‘society’ is already prefigured in the violence of a language that declares that what you believe is true and know has happened to you is impossible. And it did not happen because it is impossible, and because that impossibility is declared and enforced. Ideologies are instituted fictions; figures of the psyche are social paradigms; and there are forms of madness that are little more than enforceable fictions whose shame is displaced onto their victims by the judges who fashion and attribute them, while pretending to only be reporting what they observe and classify.

Of course, nothing I could say, even if I were believed, could have had any affect on the medical personnel involved. Their thinking is not moral or legal but purely technological. You are effectively liable with them for your state of mind, but no one is exculpated, and no claim of injustice can be of much interest to them. They will imprison you on medical auspices if they judge you abnormal. Nothing they observe about you will be discounted by virtue of something unusual that you say has happened to you, even if they believe you. They are as likely to imprison victims of violent acts as their perpetrators, and while they consider that the many illnesses of the mind are all potentialities for crimes or mishaps, these are on the same level of the only negative potentialities that persons as observable by them have. The dictionary they use to classify their observations includes no traits or syndromes that may be considered desirable; they are unknown to the psychologies proper to medicine, which is about correcting illness. The essential category, of which dispositions to crime are only the most likely to be inferred form, are failure and lack, or fallibility. The person is a tool that may be broken, a machine that must be malfunctioning; thus the dreaded psychoses that they have multiplied (neurosis, that tame and middle-class category of ailments, was abolished in their congresses of defining mental states some time ago) are said to occur as “break-downs.” They have the right to their pursuit of what they consider your well-being or happiness, this overrides your own right to any autonomy or liberty, and notions of justice are irrelevant; truly, they are not understood. Legal rights are scorned even more than they are by the police, by professionals of health sworn to the particular god of their domain. By the time you start to worry that they are keeping you against your will, you will have been ordered to sign documents you could not even easily read if they let you (and they may not like it if you ask), because now in public institutions the clientele is told to sign an electronic signature paid that only the worker giving you orders is able to see. Belief in legal liberties is now a quaint and old-fashioned conceit that is disappearing in the societies once founded upon them, and institutions that manage people with social technologies are staffed with people who are prepare to call ‘violent’ anyone suggesting any of this is improper. Your job is only to be ‘compliant’. Rest assured that any observable state of mind is a documentable illness in their exhaustive diagnostic catalog. While citizens of a democratic republic may be expected to think, subjects of a technological bureaucracy merely behave, and while statements are true or false, behavior is judged by norms as more or less incorrect. They look at you, and wonder what your problem is, not likely concluding that none can be found.

***
III.

I sent an earlier version of this story to the New York-based, left-wing literary magazine n+1.  I soon got the reply, “We don’t think your piece is right for n+1.”  As this seemed ominously to suggest that they thought my politics unacceptably divergent from theirs, I asked a friend who is a book editor, a Comparative Literature grad, a Marxist who likes Brecht and Lukàcs, if he had any clue to their reaction.  He read it, and I guess I could not be surprised that he wasn’t, but besides being underwhelmed, he seemed to understand what might be their reasoning.  

“First,” he said, “no self-respecting left-wing magazine in America today will want to touch a piece like this, because, at the very least, it raises the question whether you are a racist.  I mean, you take some care to mention the race or ethnicity of a number of the other people involved, and one might wonder why you think that is important.  Yes, I know,” he said, waving down my incipient protest; you expect that some sensitivity to the racial, gender, or other marks of oppression can just be taken for granted, while as a voice on the left who would remark a difference from corporate liberalism, you think it’s worth making the point that liberals will use discourse about race, gender, and other things in a cynical way to support their behavior that basically is just about capitalist policing.  But….”

As he paused, I recalled several people who appeared to have been brought in to play some dramatic role, at least partly with me.  One of these appeared to be pure harassment; another was meant, like the Jewish kapo nurse, as a provocation, partly to harass me and partly to try to bait me into saying something that could be used against me; and then there was a man who was on the staff in some ambiguous role but apparently there to say provocative things specifically to me and gauge, and use if they could, my reaction.

One day the social worker lady asked me if I wanted to speak to a lawyer.  I said, sure.  Indeed, I had called a number listed on a wall poster to speak to a lawyer advising patients.  The two lawyers the social worker was setting me up with were unconnected with that.  I met them in a room across the hall from the social worker’s office.  One reason I don’t think they were lawyers is that the social worker pointedly came and knocked on the door, and when one of them opened it, she said, you have to leave the door open here.  So she could see and hear.  A lawyer would have said this violates attorney-client privilege, but an actor pretending to be a lawyer would of course go along with whatever was demanded by the desire to create some appearance.  They were a team of two, seeming a little bit like a good-and-bad-cops routine.  One was young-looking, with medium long hair, he seemed like he might be Jewish, and reminded me of the Polish comic film actor Zbigniew Zamachowski, who is in some of Kieslowski’s films, including White.  The other was older and had a more conservative appearance.  His gaze seemed keen, while the other man looked affable.  He told me this was his last day on the job, and the straight man gave me his business card at the end of our brief talk.  They did not ask offer to help me with anything I needed or wanted, but instead, the older man told me that they believed I might need to have a guardian appointed for me.  Why I should want or need that they did not say.  This was just mentioned right out of the blue.  I knew that sometimes guardians are appointed to control someone’s finances.  I took this as a threat.  Who wanted this, and why?  Would someone in the police department want to control what I read? 

Though I did take the business card.  The conversation did not go anywhere else.  That night, I went to sleep with the “lawyer’s” business card in my pocket; in the morning while still wearing the same sweat pants I went to bed wearing, the card was conspicuously missing.  A few minutes after I noticed this I was brought to see the main psychiatrist and some of his associates in the room where they question patients.  He pointedly asked, this time only, “How did you sleep last night?”  He seemed to cast me a special knowing glance as he said this.  It wasn’t hard to figure this out.  I was obviously on this ward for the purpose of subjecting me to a number of harassments, all of which, no doubt, they thought of not as that but as a valid part of some regime of treatment.  I was being let in on a game that I had to play rightly or else things might go badly for me.  This was also true no doubt of the instructions for admitting someone to permanent patient status that the social worker gave me on my next to last day.  Imagine what would have happened if I had let on that I knew what they were doing.  Of course they would deny it, and I would be punished, and that punishment called a treatment; they would say I was paranoid.  These people never take responsibility for the consequences of their own actions; the prisoners, or patients, under their gaze are the only ones whose behavior is in question.  This is a kind of permanent war that is usually won by arranging skirmishes that can only have one viable outcome for the targeted party.  Now, they did not necessarily know that I knew that the card had been taken from me in my sleep; they wanted to know what I would do and say if I figured that out.  I did not need this card, though I might have used it later on, after regaining my liberty, in an effort to try to investigate the harassment and see who was involved.  Of course, such efforts usually come to naught.  But I think it is safe to say that the doctor, and probably his colleagues in that room, knew very well that the card had been taken, and that the conference with the “lawyers” was faked (they would say that it was part of my “treatment”).  They wanted me to understand that I am subjected to a power stronger than my own, and that if I have to show that I am compliant, or I will never go home and live in liberty again, or not for a long time, after much more harassment and a lot of unpleasantness in hospital wards that are, after all, prisons, which is recognized whenever they wield the possibility of placing you in one as a threat.  So how would I show that I got the message?  I certainly could not say what I understood.  We will see in a moment that the demand for proper “communication” in these places is in some ways quite particular, with some curious properties.  If I said what I knew, I would be, first, making clear that I believe something had happened that they would have to deny, as otherwise they could be subjected to a malpractice suit or other sanctions, including bad publicity.  If I had asserted what I believed had happened, and they were to say, right, that’s what we did, they would be opening themselves up to possible public criticisms that could undermine all the work they were doing with me.  Therefore, we must conclude, as I did then, that they expected me to acknowledge somehow that I knew what had happened, and also that I was not going to talk about it.  Why would I not talk about it?  Because they would play dumb and accuse me of being paranoid, and without having to necessarily make that accusation public, though they easily could do that, since hospital records only show what the authorities observe in patients, not what these people supposedly doing their job do.  If I talked about it, they would keep me until I gave a clear sign that I was giving in, based on the recognition that I cannot talk about it and get anyone on the outside to believe me.  I would have to say, perhaps, “Yes, thank you, I slept quite soundly” (enough that someone could pick my pockets while I slept?), and somehow give a nonverbal or semantically vague indication of getting what they wanted me to get but not make explicit, so that they could reasonably expect that I would not try later on to say something. 

These situations are like game-theoretical ones where people are strategic actors who use what they say not to say what they believe is true, but to get some practical result.  And in strategic situations, you have to try to decipher what people say and figure them out; everything that isn’t obvious is concealed, but in neither case is anything ever made explicit, perhaps because to do so is to lay it on the table, open for disagreement and challenge. We wind up wondering often what people’s motives are, or what is the nature of their diabolical game. And this is part of how a society under authoritarian governance works.  The police in such societies regularly operate on the basis of lies that everyone involved knows is a lie but one they are committed, perhaps out of coercion, to keep silent about.  There is an agreement to sustain a lie.     

Of course, this is an imperfect gamble on their part, but these professionals also know that they can broadly count on most of the American public, and certainly almost any court room judge or jury, to believe what they are supposed to think.  Stories like mine face a steep uphill climb to gain much if any credibility.  The discourse of the mental health establishment is a solidly accepted piece of the American ideology.  In the 60s, there were some people questioning it.  Now almost no one does.  

More relevant to my friend’s objections to my writing about these events, there was also a poser who presented herself as a graduate student at a local college where she was involved in some study project in black female radicalism, which she presented as her political position.  She was also reading a book.  I did not remember the title, but I glanced at it, and quickly discerned that the book was a political tract by some journalist arguing that our criminal justice system fails women victims of sexual violence, because it allows alleged perpetrators a legal defense.  Instead, argues this “radical” book, cops and courts should “believe women” and simply assume that men accused of sexual assault are guilty until proven innocent.  Since we know that most of them are, and victims, especially women victims of sexual assaults, never or almost never lie. 

This happened before some of the other apparent harassments, and I only vaguely sensed that this could be some kind of provocation, something I could also suspect from the glance she threw me.  But I also noticed that she had been walking around the unit with a younger man, a black teenager, for whom she was apparently acting as some kind of mentor or guide.  She was giving him advice, having befriended him, but obviously she was an employee on the payroll of the police or some related agency, and he was a young man who had committed some misdemeanor.  He had been assigned to this place, where this slightly older adult would help him with guidance.  She was a cop of some kind employed to offer him some kind of counseling or support.  They were conspicuous as they walked around the unit, talking.  Now, in learning what she was supposedly into, I stifled my own inclination to say why I disagreed with the simplistic and police-oriented politics of her book.  Indeed, that some people claiming to be on “the left” will make arguments like that is true and real enough.  But I vaguely sensed that I was being fed a line of bait, and disdained to reply.  

“So race is one thing you get wrong,” said Isaac.  “And this is like a serious grammar mistake, like in France where social faux pas and grammar mistakes are treated as the same kind of thing and equally not tolerated.  Your disclaimers won’t do much to change the antagonism a journal’s readers will feel towards you every time you mention the race of someone who acts a bit thuggish, and all the more as they will think, but these are people with jobs, they are part of the holy working class, and you have to respect workers and labor, etc.  And of course this is on top of the simple fact that if you have a negative portrayal of a black person, that counts as prejudiced, and it doesn’t matter if the facts are true because the implicit claim to the portrayal being representative of a set or class makes you guilty of purveying a prejudice.  It doesn’t matter that you think you are portraying something that is representative of something more particular, perhaps a certain way of thinking; but your readers will mostly just understanding you as making a claim about all black people.”

”What, a sophisticated semi-academic journal is going to have readers who think like that?” “Yes, because the left wing in this country is dependent on the Democratic Party liberals, so they shade into each other; and they want to gain, not lose, readers and subscribers. The thing is, you’re a white male, and an aggrieved one at that.  You can’t deploy your own subjectivity as intrinsically revolutionary as others can, and you’re not even liberal, because ordinary liberals and left-liberals don’t worry about the authority of people in institutions that are supposed to help people.  You almost seem to wish these institutions did not exist at all.  And what kind of politics is that?  

“Secondly, you don’t seem to even recognize that in America today almost everyone takes psych meds, believes they are helped by them, frequently needs to talk to a professional about their problems in living, and when it comes to mental health services, they just want more.  And most people on the left now are not anarchists but social democrats; they want the big state and want it even bigger, all that they care about is that it gives them the things they need.  

“And there’s another reason.” He was on a roll, so I let him.  “You are an aggrieved liberal with some lefty ideas who is implicitly defending an individualist subjectivity that desires minimal government and would appeal to legal protections and civil liberties, while opposing state oppression on an Oedipal-paranoid basis.  You’re no more modern than Sophocles.  Such a stance can very well denounce injustices, and maybe expect some readers to be scandalized to discover them, although Marxists and other leftists are usually unsurprised by such things and would rather focus on strategy, which doesn’t interest you, at least here.  Affirming the pretended sovereignty of the individual, as in your wish that people handed electronic signing pads actually be permitted to read the contract — or, which would be even more absurd, contact an actual lawyer — this can only serve as a call for enforcing a liberal rights regime based on limited government.  And what is so very different from this approach, actually, is what magazines like n+1 do so well and constantly, which involves an almost requisite engagement with personal questions of identity or subjectivity.  Like in some queer writers, like Kathy Acker or David Wojnarowicz.  Or in theory what you get from people like Guattari, whereas your position is closer to that of Thomas Szasz, who is a Hayekian right-wing liberal who just wants government off our backs.  You take this beautiful soul stance of what is in effect an innocence, that is implied in all the outrages you recount one after another, a kind of picaresque journey through a world of outrages that will only appeal to those people who imagine that you could be rotten enough to be locked away in a place where they send human refuse but without having to take off the white gloves you wore at your lunch at the country club a bit earlier.   See, if all you do is criticize injustices, and in ways that seem obvious, not interrogating your own subjectivity, then you wind up on the right with its postures of confident individualism.  Look, why don’t you send your piece to some conservative libertarian magazine?  They will probably want to edit out some of your commentary, because if n+1 doesn’t want to believe that people like you are on the left and not the right, neither will journal editors who are on the right and will like you if you are.  I think you might want to try this and see what kind of reaction you get.”

“I admit,” I replied, “it would be interesting if my story winds up puzzling some readers, who will wonder whether I am on the left or the right.  I would like nothing more than to throw a wrench into the ideology of some people at the leftist cocktail party.  Remember when we all said that what is most vital is arguing not with our foes, who are obviously wrong, but with our friends?”

“This question of what is and is not obvious…..”

So maybe the most authentic and politically interesting story is just about yourself.  Describe what you have gone through.  Explore your identity, personality, subjectivity.  Would I, my friend asked, complain if I had been the target of queer-bashing, that I don’t think this is an occasion for exploring all the possible queer or gay corners of my personality, on the grounds that a real politics is something like a generalized masochism, where what you say about yourself and how you deal with shit is more interesting and important than the shit itself (which we take for granted as normal, even if it’s a normal we don’t like)?    

Before my encounter with the “black woman radical,” a female on the nursing staff had said something to me to which I replied, and she took out a little notepad to take notes on whatever I said.  It doesn’t take a lot of this to realize that you are dealing with provocateurs.  It is true enough, as this woman obviously figured, that I like to talk.  I suppose the best survival strategy in places like this is to socialize enough to not let the place drive you mad (obviously, it can, they know that, and they are prepared to blame you if it does, and if they do) but to take care to say only inconsequential things.  But no, says my friend, say these things in what you write, but at the same time, no need to fear that they will use what you say against you; that’s just paranoia.   

What, then, to think and say? That is the question. The other provocateur was even more interesting.  He wore a badge of some sort and was obviously an employee, though in an unclear role; he did not appear to share in ordinary nursing duties.  Twice he spoke, in a group, but directly to me, turning to address me as he did so.  Both statements were in ‘groups’ of patients, of the kind of mostly discussions on trivial topics that they pretend are a form of ‘therapy’.  In the first case, he said, “I found here that everything is about me.”  Well, he was wearing a badge and so was not a patient.  But the statement is absurd — even if also a propos — so I called him on it, figuring that this is probably a good response, since it meets the criteria I have for good retorts that both conveys a refusal or negation, and does so in a way that would be difficult to punish.  I said, “That’s too bad, because it means that you cannot love anyone, or anything.”  He did not reply.  His second performance was during a group that actually had only one patient in it, myself, along with a regular nurse and this man.  He said, again more or less out of the blue, “I did not begin to ‘communicate’ until I was 40 years old.”  He said this while looking at me; I was the only patient there.  It’s ridiculous, and in a way that does not have to be explained, so I laughed.  I inferred that his success in making this statement was in getting me to understand that that was one of their messages for me, of what they expected or wanted me to believe, either about myself, or my situation in that place then, or even what they wanted me to be horrified to hear, in supposing that it must be that that is how they want patients like me to think.  The idea of communication as a norm is a popular one these days.  Some theorists speak of “communicative capitalism.”  Philosophers like Habermas, whom I once studied, think communication is a good thing and is the medium through which societies or communities are governed when they are democratic.  People make claims about what they want and need, and admissions of their guilt or responsibility or of what they agree to consent to or not.  As for everything — in a place like this — being about yourself — and this being horrible, that is fairly clear as an indicator of one of the ways in which these places are oppressive.  As Foucault argued, individualization is not necessarily liberation; it might be a way of punishing people or exercising domination over them.  You could have everything that matters to you — things, people, devices, artworks, conversations, objects of study, even, for some lucky people, their actual job — taken from you and then thrown back upon your self, nakedly, without all the things that make up your “world.”  And prisons do that, and that’s why places like this or prisons.  It seems that in this case, and I know that this treatment is not used on most psychiatric in-patients, they had targeted me for some special harassment.  Its purposes would include both trying to gather information about me, that could be used later if need be, and to frighten me.  They succeeded, obviously, in that.  

As I puzzled over a possible strategy for pursuing publication and trying to get attention to some of the problems I try to present, I recalled, shortly before I left the unit, espying two young men, both black, talking and gesturing to each other in the dormitory room I had been in.  I did not catch the drift of their conversation, which I seemed to come in at the end of.  But I noticed they concluded by agreeing, “Yeah, let’s do that!” “I’m with you brother.” 

Let’s do what?  What is this mysterious concord about? Could they “reform” places of incarceration like this by introducing democratic councils of patients who help manage the unit, if not decide hospital policy, like a little company union, tolerated and encouraged by management because they are on the same page, compliant, recognizing that there are different stakeholders and their opinions are valued too?  And would it mean anything if they did?  Of course not.  They sometimes had patient groups on “political” topics.  These were always newspaper politics or issues in the city or nation, not anything directly affecting those of us there and then.  Of course not.  At the conclusion of one of them, a male nurse said, “It really is just the Trilateral Commission; they rule the world, you see.”  I was only surprised he didn’t say it was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  But after making this declaration he said, Ok, we’re done.  The world is run by bad people, it’s all rigged, and what do we care, we just do what we have to do.  Things are the way they are, that’s all there is to it. Another way of saying, Get back to your work, you bastards.

In another group, the nurse leading it asked everyone to say what they will remember to do if they are later living on the outside and start to have symptoms.  She wasn’t asking us what we should do but telling us.  If you feel uncomfortable, call your doctor to say that you are afraid the mental illness in you is threatening to act up and damage your peace of mind.  They’ll send someone out to rescue you from you.  From the dangerous tendencies in you that are threats to security, including yours, which is why when you have these thoughts you may feel unsafe. That’s what your mental health is about, it means that something bad is in you, it comes from you, though it is organic, in your brain, it isn’t your fault, it’s ok, we’re all losers, something in you is threatening you in this way and we have to manage this, that’s what we are here for. If you feel something, say something; alert a police officer or mental health employee. As in all such groups, the staff member who leads it is totally in control of the discussion, and when anyone says anything, they repeat it, ostensibly so that it is understood, but actually so that people see that opinions of patients have to be validated by a person in authority to be understood.  Thus, I said nothing.    

But do what, plan what?  The answer to this question is one of those things that is obvious, but it was hinted at all the same by an attitude of a taboo-like fetishizing of the corridor, about a dozen feet in length, that led to the one door of the unit opening onto the rest of the hospital and the free world.  Nurses would act greatly alarmed if any patient strayed anywhere close to this magic zone.  The social worker acted similarly when I asked if I could use her computer not just to download a text from the Bibliothèque nationale de France but also to check my email.  These extreme reactions remind you that you are a prisoner. 

And plan and do what?  It is obvious what is the only thing that patients thinking and working together could meaningfully organize themselves to do in a place like this: escape.  

“This is the fast I desire: … to untie the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, to break off every yoke.”  It would have been enough.