Taking my punishment like an American: A true story

Brad may or may not have been planning to call the police when he first threatened to do so, but after he finished thrashing me he started walking back and forth angrily yelling at me that he was calling the police.   I was not afraid to talk to the police; I did not suspect they would simply take his word for what had happened.  When he walked out the door, I followed shortly after.

The police always arrive in large numbers; there must have been half a dozen officers, both male and female.  Police in New York are often friendly; this time they merely lied to me, as would a number of people at the hospital.  The officers did not ask me what happened or for my side of the story.  I did tell them I was hurting from the blows to which Brad had subjected me, and this gave them a convenient excuse.  I gathered that Brad had in fact recorded some or all of our fight, though it would have been hard for him to capture an image of my punching him, in part because he cannot have known that I would do so, and because he was not holding up his phone to videograph me but had it lying on a table adjacent to where he was setting.  However, for whatever reason they believed his story and did not even ask for mine, and they obviously inferred that his beating of me was retaliatory and therefore justified.  Or perhaps even in self-defense.  By and by they told me that they were taking me to the hospital for an x-ray, to see if I had kidney damage.  They made it clear that I had no choice.  As I remarked with regard to Brad’s threat to take me to the hospital for being clumsy and symbolically injuring myself just as I had symbolically violated his territory with the piece of foil, your body is not your property but that of the state and your health is its concern, and its agents have the right to protect you against yourself and will use violent force if necessary to do so.  It seems to me our national security state needs to promulgate the idea that everyone’s safety, health, and innocence are threatened, ultimately by everyone else as well as by themselves.  Indeed, shortly after I left the hospital, I went to Washington to visit my father and at the train station I noticed a video, running in a continuous loop, designed to warn travelers about terrorism.  It advised all passengers to be on the lookout for “anyone who looks unusual.”  I later found out from a mutual friend that the police had asked Brad whether he wanted me to go to jail or to the hospital, and he said, the hospital.   The police, seconded by the psychiatrist at the hospital, who as we will see did not actually make a decision about this but only pretended to do so, the decision having been made by the police, obviously judged that I was guilty of the crime of a criminal potentiality, and that justifies psychiatric incarceration on the grounds that the person is a danger either to himself or to someone else or both.   It seems to me the logic of the national security state is that ultimately everyone will be a potential criminal, perhaps on the model of original sin, and therefore dangerous, and therefore mentally ill.  Because, make no mistake about: of course they said I was mentally ill, but that is only because they were looking for an ex post facto justification.  In fact, they did not believe I was dangerous because mentally ill, but rather that I had to be mentally ill because judged dangerous.

An ambulance came.  I rode to the hospital, two blocks away, in the ambulance where I was accompanied by a young fireman.  Somehow we got onto the subject of studying in France.  He had spent a semester abroad.  He wrote a research paper on the May ’68 protests.  We had an interesting brief discussion.  He was very amicable.

At the hospital they first took care of their pretext.  I waited briefly for a male nurse who was to take my blood pressure.  I momentarily entertained the fantasy that these other Americans would surely treat me fairly, thinking of a situation in a French film in which Maggie Cheung finds herself in a hospital, and I thought, well, I’m in America so I suppose they will not hurt me.  Or will they?  I wondered.  I knew from experience that health care in a public facility in France is about health care and even if like me you are not a French citizen, French society is republican enough that there is a respect for people who are subject to the power of public institutions.  It occurred to me that that might be much less true of a public hospital in America, and it seems to me I would soon learn that that is indeed the case.  The man who was to take my blood pressure arrived.  He asked me if “this man” was my “husband.”  I said no, I might like to have a wife, but I don’t want a husband.  He obviously was told that I had gotten into a fight, and presumably that I was responsible for it.  Maybe he wondered whether I had a familial relationship with this man, not because that would exculpate me, for then it would be domestic violence, but because that would enable him to understand me, and it would be understandable because people are supposed to have families and love and war within them.  Or maybe he was tasked with getting information from me that could be used against me; in that that would really be the only likely reason for his asking that, because he was there to take my blood pressure, and not to initiate a conversation for the disinterested purpose of being helpful.  I suspect that the police and justice system on the one hand and the hospital system on the other work together, with the difference that with psychiatry you are incriminated in such a way that you cannot exonerate yourself because it is said to be a matter of health and not justice, and your health is something doctors and nurses can busy    themselves with you needing to be involved in any active way.  If the therapeutic society with its Protestant spirituality promises responsibility without guilt, it actually delivers guilt without responsibility.  I should have concluded that everyone in the emergency room, which I assumed was where I was, had been informed that I was there because I was a criminal.  In fact, he was of course searching for incriminating information.  It would have gone on my medical record instead of a police record, but of course the DA would have access to my medical record if I were charged.  I was given an x-ray and then given a cup and told to give a urine sample.  I went to the bathroom and tried to piss.  Nothing.  I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since the previous evening.  I came back and reported to the male nurse at the counter that I could not give the urine sample right then, and suggested I might need to drink some water.  He said, “If you don’t give a urine sample, we’ll stick a catheter in you to get it.”  Once again, my body is the property of the state and its benevolent police officers, or perhaps in this case prison guards, pretending to be nurses.  My stay in the hospital would confirm my view of nurses and their brutality.  I had once come to this same hospital about a bladder problem, and the doctor wanted to insert a catheter in order to take a picture of the inside of my bladder.  When the catheter was inserted I felt unspeakable pain and screamed.  The doctor returned and said, “I’m not going to do this procedure because it might injure you.”  Now I was faced with a threat of bodily harm, indeed possibly permanent injury to my reproductive organ, as well as horrible pain, as punishment.  All because my bladder was being disobedient.  The nurse had given me an order and I could not comply.  I gather that it is the tendency of Americans, or at least the more ignorant among them, to assume that where there is a problem it is the sinfulness of the person having the problem that is its cause.  And of course in America—as it is essentially Protestant, even in New York with all its Catholics and Jews who together outnumber protestants, the culture is protestant, our political culture, our television programs, etc. —in protestant America sin is disobedience and disobedience is crime.  Besides, I had been labeled a criminal and the nurses all seem to have known this.  I don’t think I told the nurse about my previous experience with catheters, but in any case it was perfectly clear that he was making a threat.  This was an assault involving a threat of medical violence: the abuse of medical instruments or procedures to cause bodily harm, usually in order to punish someone for disobeying or bothering a medical functionary in some way.   At least he obviously knew that catheters are unpleasant.  Did he not believe me when I said my bladder was empty?  I suppose not; otherwise he would not have made the threat.   How it could escape him that someone unable to give a urine sample might just need to drink some water is beyond me.  But again, I think nurses are often very ignorant people, in part because they are Americans, and in part because it is a profession that does not require a great deal of education and it is also one that enjoys a shortage of personnel, so no doubt corners are cut in recruiting.  One of the striking things about his reaction to my putative disobedience is how quickly and superficially the attribution of disobedience is made.

Next another man came up beside me and asked in a friendly way if I wanted to see a psychiatrist.  Although my accession was motivated by naivete, since I unthinkingly assumed I was being asked if I wanted to see a psychiatrist on an outpatient basis, and I had in fact been planning to come to the hospital to see a psychiatrist to get medication, and of course I also assumed he was being truthful in posing this as a question.  Of course he was lying, just as the police had lied: it had already been decided that I would be incarcerated.  The purpose of keeping up the pretense was obviously to secure my willing cooperation so that they would not have to use force against me.  This man had been told to accompany me to the psychiatric admitting unit, and he has probably been trained in patient management procedures and communication skills, which no doubt include a principle that you should first ask the patient nicely.  Pretty please.  You don’t have a choice but we’ll be nice like good Christians.  I would encounter this later and be subjected to violence in part because I refused to pretend to see through the pretense. 

I followed this man until we reached a door, which he told me to enter.  I did so.  On the other side of the door was a large room which opened onto a suite of offices.  Next to the door was a large black man, a security guard.  When the police had come, they had asked me if I needed anything from Brad’s apartment, and I had chosen to ask them to bring my laptop.  I assumed that I would be at the hospital for a couple of hours while I got an x-ray, since that is what they told me.  So all this time I had my laptop with me.  The security guard told me I had to give him my laptop and that he would put it in a locker and it would be returned to me when I left.  I said, since I am just going to talk to a doctor, I don’t see why I can’t keep it with me.  Of course this security guard knew, like everyone else, that I was going to be incarcerated; I was the only person in the dark about this, and it was obviously part of the idea to keep me in the dark as long as possible.  Though the security guard may have assumed that I knew.  He reiterated that I had to give him my laptop.  He seemed hostile.  He did not inform me that I was being admitted as an in-patient and that that was why I had to give up my laptop. I said I believe I have the right to keep it, and he said, no, you don’t.  I then clasped it to my chest.  Immediately and with great swiftness he grabbed it from me, and I was then immediately thrust to the ground by four or five hospital personnel who had apparently emerged out of the woodwork for this purpose.  They proceeded to hit and poke me all over my body and to remove my wallet and cell phone from my pockets.  I said, “I’m not resisting arrest!”  While they had me on the ground I was conscious of being in essentially the same situation as so many protesters and so many people abused by the police.  These are my people.  What is happening to me has a meaning.  When I get out, I will publicize these events and this meaning; I will not allow them to succeed in naming what happened the necessary punishment for my disobedience of hospital rules.  (Again, I was informed of no hospital rule, nor of the fact that it had already been decided that I would be incarcerated).  They then stood me up and twisted my arms around my back.  Did they imagine I was trying to get away?  I in fact made no effort to resist or free myself, although I am sure they thought otherwise. I asked for the police; there was no response.  Imagining that they might appreciate that they are hurting me if I manifested that I was in pain, I then said, “Ouch! Ouch!” and continued to say this while they continued to grapple with me.  I then said to myself, silent, the Shema, the Jewish prayer of affirmation of God that is said at the moment of one’s death and that has been uttered by many martyrs.  Of course I knew what would happen if I said this aloud.  In Israel it would be understood as a protest and a bitter statement of indictment of the authorities for their barbarism.  Here, if anyone did recognize the prayer they would just have furnished me with a rabbi, whose offer of religious consolation in the face of an injustice he could have little real appreciation of would serve the hospital to legitimate their behavior, while also making it clear that they recognize Jewishness as a private and therefore meaningless religion to which patients are naturally entitled.  It might even help them with their mental health, which is endangered by their disobedience. Indeed, I later encountered a rabbi on the ward, and he legitimated the violence that had recently been done to me by some of the nurses.  This is one of a few encounters that I regret I must say have not endeared me to rabbis; I like some of them very much but no longer give them the benefit of the doubt.  I have often had the impression that Protestantism is an ideology that among refuses all humanity.  If a person is suffering, not only is it his own fault, but his suffering itself and his expressions of it are just a form of disobedience.  The totalitarianism of this kind of bureaucracy is such that the slightest hesitation in the face of a demand for obedience or an exercise of force is interpreted as disobedience and is a sign for the initiation of ruthless violence.  Why were they twisting my arms in the first place?  God only knows.  Perhaps so as to exercise force against me in such a way as to artificially produce, if they could not evoke, the resistance that would appear to them and perhaps to any third party within their own hierarchy to justify their use of force.  Because by twisting my arms in a show of wrestling with me, they might be able to make it seem like I was trying to get away, as absurd as that would have been, so that they could justify twisting my arms.  Institutional violence generally needs to either evoke violent resistance or attribute it.  They have to justify themselves.  A later incident reveals the absurdities to which this can be taken as well as the theatrical and ritual character of certain demonstrations of power, designed to intimidate and terrify even more than to punish, and perfectly capable of coding as violence behavior that can only be so-called within a bureaucracy that has become a policing apparatus that will be directed against those subject to it not only whenever they refuse to comply but also anytime they violate a tacit norm that figures in the institution’s ideological legitimation as something other than an apparatus of coercion. 

My saying “Ouch!” was a genuine expression of what I was feeling, because they were hurting me, but it was also the result of a decision.  I thought this the thing I could say that would most likely to have an effect, although of course I realized that anything I said would probably only just be used as further evidence of my disobedience or illness or both.  The concept of mental illness is a very convenient way of blaming the person who is suffering; it is based on an idea of what suffering is that is depoliticizing, that refers the person’s suffering back onto his own deficient or maladapted ego which is inadequately internalized the social norms that can only be either taught him or enforced; it goes without saying that they cannot be questioned.  Arguably, the minimal criterion of a liberal democracy is a society whose norms are not simply taken for granted but can be questioned, doubted, and criticized.  You must be able to criticize not only particular individuals, who of course institutions are happy to blame so that the blame is deflected from them, but also institutions, practices, folkways, the way things are.  And you must be able to criticize the way things are not in support of some new policy that some well-intentioned person might advocate, but in support of spreading dissatisfaction through your audience with indeterminate results.  Obviously, the people most likely to do so are people who are disaffected in some way, and it is impossible to be disaffected without feeling some quantity of emotional distress.  The prevailing assumption since Aristotle has been that emotional distress is a malady and it should be alleviated.  Before psychiatry, the most important practice that served this purpose was the Catholic confession.  Hegel thought that in the modern world religion became replaced by art.  Of course this is true: European culture has not been very religious for centuries, in France since Montaigne and Rabelais in the sixteenth century.  It has simply taken popular culture a long time to catch up, and it has been much slower to do so in America both because of the profound importance of religion in American life, something that has no parallel in Europe or anywhere else in the industrialized world today, except maybe Iran, and because Americans are much less educated.  Hegel was more right than he believed: art and the artist in the modern world, at least and particularly since the French Revolution and romanticism, have often had a political character that was lacking in Shakespeare and in Racine and Molière.  Shakespearean tragedy and comedy and the comedy of Molière facilitate criticism of individuals.  But in a liberal democracy, a certain kind of artist becomes possible and with him a certain kind of art; what becomes possible is the artist who is alienated from his society and who therefore is very prone to criticize it.  The idea of revolution is itself in part an outcome of an idea of social criticism, and so far a sensibility of this sort has enjoyed phenomenal success in the arts and mostly abject failure in politics, unless one counts the Bolshevik Revolution a success, and of course it appears as if it was in one way and not in another.  The reputations of Brecht, Mayakovsky, and Eisenstein are intact even without the political movements they supported, but Lenin’s star has fallen.  It is not only that it is easier to create an artwork that breaks radically with the given, the aesthetic ancien régime, than it is to create an ideal society, or a much better one, or one that truly breaks with the ancien régime, or with everything rancid in it; there is also every reason to believe that changing or interrogating our form of life is very much bound up with and consequent upon work on our sensibility, our understanding of our form of life, or our form of life as it is subjectively lived or experienced and not only the material practices that are organized in an economy in the hope that our collective household might be better managed.  It is so much bound up with this that artists, commentators, and philosophers have a very important role to play that depends on their having more or less absolute freedom.  You are not free to commit a murder, even an assassination, but you must be free to portray one.  And as soon as the state declares that it represents the state or movement of the people and that it and therefore they are threatened, by terrorists, by counter-revolutionaries, whatever, then the people in losing their poets will lose their prophets.  To the charge of elitism, since I obviously wish to belong to this elite or to think of myself as such, and I will be the first to admit this is in any substantial sense but an aspiration of mine, I would reply that one of the urgent tasks of any government wanting to be revolutionary or progressive or anything of the sort, either in Jacobin terms or in the more polite ones of Jefferson and Paine, is to give to everyone who wants it the resources they need to create works of art.  The emergence of a do-it-yourself culture of amateurism that was first prefigured by punk rock and rap music and later taken up by bloggers and filmmakers using cheap DV cameras, this is the basis for a culture, and not just a society, that is participatory rather than representative.  Sartre said at the end of his autobiography that he was « a whole man, made of all men, worth all of them, and any one of them worth him. »  That is my response to those who think I am claiming a privilege and thereby committing an anti-republican sin.

In saying “Ouch!” wasn’t I assuming that people understand that I use language to say something and not merely as a manifestation of a behavioral tendency they can address their professional responsibility to controlling or treating?  Could I claim this privilege only as a writer?  Am I, when confronted with the arrogance, stupidity, and violence of power, best counseled to understand that I am not free, that my speech will not be taken seriously, meaning that it will be understood to be only expressive of my state of mind, which of course will be regarded as problematic, and not as referential?  For in a curious way for the psychological ideology the world does not exist for the patient; he is forced to become a solipsist, or at any rate is relentlessly treated as one.  If I make a statement about the room I am in and the things in it, or, less trivially, about one or more of the other persons present and something that they have said or done, it is understood that this statement is not really about the thing or person or event I think I am talking about it.  It is only about me.  This is a consequence in part of the fact that psychology is divorced from sociology, though not of course from biology; it is individualizing; the therapeutic patient can very well talk about his relationships with other people, and may even be encouraged to do so, but it is only because his experiences of the social world are relevant to understanding not that world but only his experience.  The presupposition of all psychiatry and most psychotherapy including psychoanalysis is the absolute and authoritative character of “society,” to which the individual must be assisted to adjust, society being that mythical entity which in the end is merely a fiction that the state invokes as being that which it represents and which is the fictional ground of its legitimacy.  Although in fact legitimation is usually only by reference to an idea of necessity or to professional competence.  For instance, if the psychiatrist says you are mentally ill, the statement will be understood, including by a judge, to be true, and what makes it true is that it was uttered by a person possessed of an acknowledged professional competence to pronounce this judgment.  And so he does not have to justify it with a reason, although there is of course a body of scientific knowledge that is theoretically the basis of the psychiatrist’s judgments, the provides him with a sense that is doing good, and that can always be invoked in their defense.  The marshaling of data or evidence in support of a claim has to be taken with a grain of salt, and is always suspect when the makers of the claim cannot even really make clear what they mean by it.  Sophists and sophistical lawyers do this: they start with the position they want to defend, and then they go out in search of evidence to defend it, which they invariably find.  We have all had arguments with people who, because they are really not interested in inquiry but only in winning, do this sort of thing, and of course it is obnoxious.  To see that having evidence to support your claim is not enough to justify it, it suffices to observe that people are always influenced by their moods in terms of what they see.  If you are in a very bad mood, you may be inclined to notice numerous claims about how bad the world is in this or that respect.  And of course you can find enough such things that can be proven.  The threat of nuclear war, global warming, the impoverishment of so many of the world’s people.  Now put the same person in a time and place where things are going well, and he may be spontaneously inclined to notice all sorts of happy things, and they really do exist also; the evidence will show that the unhappy man correctly infers his right to unhappiness from the great quantity of misery and evil; but the happy man is right also, just not about the same things.  When a psychiatrist has you in front of him, particularly in a public hospital which caters to the poor, who are presumed to have something wrong with them, and indeed probably liable a commit a crime, he assumes before he has even looked at you that you are mentally ill.  The only thing he does not know is how.  Now I know I have only described the intellectual dishonesty of finding evidence to confirm a belief one has already formed, and I admit the psychiatrist may be intellectually honest and may observe your behavior and/or speech for a few moments before jumping to a conclusion.  Though I have found all too often it is only for a few moments.  Funny, I have struggled to understand myself better, imbued at times with a consciousness of the Delphic oracle, at times with a certain idea of writing, and even on occasion with a vague sense of the theoretical usefulness of psychoanalysis; how is it that what has taken me a very long time takes a man with a medical degree a few seconds?  Admittedly, he is only conferring upon me a diagnostic category.  But that suffices to indicate for himself and his colleagues who or what kind of person I am so that he is able to decide what medication to give me, since of course it is assumed not only that anyone with a complex mind and personality is mentally ill but also but that all personal problems, any difficulty I might have in formulating and living by both an ethics and a politics, must be solvable through drugs.  If I wrote a book as my “therapy” (although I would never think of it as only that, and anyone who does is not a writer because he is not writing for publication; while ordinary people address their prayers to God, our addressee is an audience of readers), it would not be profitable for any of the business enterprises with which the psychiatrist is connected, including the organization which pays his salary.  The psychiatrist’s ideology of scientism treats its objects, including persons in this case, as observational specimens to be understood empirically.  There is a vast literature on empiricist and post-empiricist philosophy of science, and for and against the legitimacy of the former, and in social science, which includes psychology though not psychiatry, which is essentially a biological science although in theory it is and has to be a hybrid discipline, there has long been a debate about the validity of empirical and quantitative methods versus those involving interpretation based on interviews, and participant-observation ethnographic fieldwork.  One of the problems with empiricism in social science is that in itself it is unable to interrogate or clarify the meaning of its observations or categories, which it tends to define operationally.  This has practical consequences.  One of them is that encounters tend to be undialectical, and by that I mean that there is someone interrogating you and/or informing you about what he thinks you need to know, and this person does not reflect on what he is doing and cannot, or in any case, will not, do so.  If he asks you a question and you think it a strange question, he will very likely not be very receptive to your turning the tables by asking him why he asks this question.  Sartre’s once published a fictional dialogue in his journal Les Temps Modernes in which a psychoanalytic patient tried to do this; it was called “The Man with a Tape Recorder,” and its publication produced a scandal.   There are certainly good reasons why a psychoanalyst should insist on rigid adherence to the division of roles, although a psychoanalyst is not exactly an empiricist, if only because he is an interpreter; and in Lacanian psychoanalysis, for instance, the analyst does not give interpretations, refusing absolutely to be what Lacan called “the subject who is supposed to know,” but evokes them in the patient himself, who is not only allowed but expected to develop his own interpretations.   As to adjustment to “society,” I have heard several of the therapists whom I have seen over the years preach to me with a straight face about what “people” are like, and yes, about what “society” is like, but more frequently about the “world.”  It seems almost every therapist is eager to preach to you his or her metaphysics.  One told me that I need to accept that the universe is indifferent; another that you always get what you deserve (I gathered that this quite liberal and genial man was not a scholar of the Holocaust); yet another told me about “people” and offered (this was a college counselor) to enroll me in a mini-course on “social skills.”  This course was based on Transaction Analysis, which reduces all interactions to roles that are called “parent,” “adult,” and “child.”  Wonderful, I thought, this course will teach me how to communicate successfully with people in order to get what I want and avoid unpleasantness by showing me how to be an adult and how to manage my inner child.  (I once knew a young woman who believed in this ideology, and she said to me one day, “You know that you have a child.”  Funny thing for a young woman to tell a man, although as it happened we had not been lovers.)  This course would have taught me how to communicate with other people in a successful manner according to the norms of American Protestant society. That additional detail was not mentioned because American ideologues almost all believe that their ideology is a representation of the way things are in the world, or, as Beckett put it in the title of one of his novels, of “How it Is.”  I have often heard Americans tell me how it is.  This is always said in justification of what they are doing and what they want me to do.  It’s similar to referring to the bottom line.  You have to pay your debts, your taxes, etc. because that is how it is.  What could be simpler?  It’s common sense, to use another American ideologeme.  The advantage of statements like this is that their ideological character is so transparent you know that the claim they are using it to legitimate is false.  Perhaps this can be accepted as impatient shorthand for something like the law.  But Americans in their Protestantism typically do not believe in any concept of justice.  This is Christian, and it reflects Christianity’s constitutive ambivalence towards the idea of justice, thought to be in principle incompatible with love, mercy, and forgiveness.  This counselor was obviously a Protestant and he articulated what I later would learn is something of a mantra among American psychotherapists: you should not think that there is something you should do.  The reason is you might resist and procrastinate, because it is assumed that duty is in conflict with desire.  So the party of desire has won out: from now on, everyone will be encouraged to talk about how to do what they want to do, how to realize their desires, how to get what they want.  How to be successful: the American religion.  My counselor had a big poster of a football player on his wall.  What are sports about and why is college or hometown identification with the local team conservative?  It is about generic success.  This is how sports differ from music: a musician is like an athlete in having to work very hard to be successful, and the two are equally corporate and bureaucratic, unlike poetry and painting, for instance.  I suppose the fact that I am impatient, rebellious, and easily frustrated is the reason why I did not become a pianist as a child, though I had been given the opportunity.  But music is art and sports are not. Corporations love sports. Because it is meaningless excellence, or, to be more charitable, its valuation is simply in cultivation of the body and the enjoyment of its exercise.  It is autotelic in a certain way.  I do not have a problem with the idea of sportsmanship; of course it is good to cultivate physical skills; it is good for one’s health; and many people find it enjoyable and we have achieved sufficient liberty at this point in the history of capitalism that no one has to justify their doing something enjoyable if it doesn’t contravene any private or public law.  Maybe someday people will be able to do what they most love with most of their time; I can think of no better credo for a revolution, and if there is anything good in the legacy of bourgeois Protestantism it is surely this.  It is only sad that so often this desideratum can only be realized parodically.  In my work as an editor I often read admissions essays for art school.  Of course, many people go to college in order to get a good job, and I knew people who were studying business or accounting because their parents wanted them to be financially secure even though they wished that, like me, they could study literature.  But it is a given that anyone who goes to art school wants to become an artist of some type or other in order to realize not just ambition but his desire.  Your ambition must be based on your desire.  This assumption is so widespread that I occasionally have encountered people pursuing the most mundane of careers while declaring without any graphemic blush or oracular shiftiness that this is their heart’s desire.  A dystopia could be described in which everyone who wants any job of any kind, including immigrant doctors who have, like so many of them, to work as janitors, is expected to declare that it is their desire, otherwise they will not have a chance of getting the job.  And in fact I think to some extent this is true.  If, out of desperation, I look for a job as a file clerk, I very well might be asked, “Why do you want to be a file clerk?”  Nonstarters would include not only “I don’t,” but also “In order to pay the rent so I can devote my free time to writing.”  Everyone must sing a Hatikvah of their professional romanticism, declaring that where they have chosen to be, or are trying to get to, is not just what they want for some ordinary utilitarian reason but is their heart’s inner longing that they have been pursuing since the detachment of their umbilicum and that is the ultimate and most perfect expression of who they are in the deepest “spiritual” sense. (Though I am convinced that most stockbrokers, for instance, would say that what they most love about their work is the money, perhaps papering it over by describing making money as if that were in itself a creative endeavor or at least a potentially meaningful task and not a consequence, though of course it is true that they make money in one sense and get paid for it another.)  I have always sensed that something like this is implicit in the way that, as everyone says, you have to “sell yourself” in a job interview, which has always been distasteful to me because I am a writer and an introvert, not a salesman.  I have been told it is a world of extraverts, a world of salesmen perhaps.  Maybe in the future if everyone becomes a contractor and thus a free agent and not an employee, responsible for sinking or swimming in the marketplace where many must sink, then we all be selling ourselves and buying other people all the time, and since most people are liars, we will become a society of con artists.  No one welcomes the stranger like the con artist. 

In the grip of these people prolonging their arrest of me by, apparently, trying to manufacture a resistance on my part that would legitimate their efforts, I thought of saying the shema, before settling on the evocatively simply “Ouch!”  The shema is the affirmation of the existence and oneness of God that Jews say (out loud) at the point of death.  True, I was not quite being tortured and they weren’t killing me, but I considered what they were doing a form of violence and it seemed to me this might be appropriate.  But it would not have worked.  If they recognized that I was speaking Hebrew and correctly inferred that the statement was religious in nature, they would simply have taken this, like anything else I might have said, as a statement about myself and not them, and I would have been referred to a rabbi for the consolations of faith as a private matter that the hospital is happy to allow (indeed, there was a rabbi on the ward; I will describe him later) but that have no public significance.  Indeed, this is the role of religion in America: it is everywhere in public life, but of course it is only understood as a private morality, an ethics and not a politics, and psychiatric prisoners as well as those in jails and prisons proper are assumed to have something wrong with them psychically or morally.  Psychotherapy and psychiatry as disciplines are of course based on the separation of the psychic from the moral, which is done with recourse to the concept of health.  The idea of mental health is a very modern one.  I have already commented on the exclusion of the idea of justice.  This is far reaching; it of course means also that mental health workers in general have no concept of injustice.  They are incapable of doing anything wrong, but only of failing to follow the rules that govern the efficient performance of their jobs and perhaps those that are implicated in their own professional formation.  Doctors and nurses believe not in justice but in health; and why shouldn’t they?  They are health care workers, not lawyers.  Professionalism means that each person concerns himself only and essentially with doing his job well in accordance with the techniques and procedures and perhaps knowledge that he has learned.  The knowledge is not examined critically, but just assumed to be authoritative, we might say that it is assumed in an authoritative and authoritarian manner to be authoritative.  In a hospital environment what this means is, first, that if you are a patient you are guilty of a sin for which you can never be absolved, including by understanding it through the development of insight (notably there was no pretense of offering psychotherapeutic counseling on the ward; there were groups, but they could not honestly be called group therapy; I will get to these groups and what I think was their purpose). You cannot be absolved of it in part because it is now attributed to a deficiency in your brain.  And, conveniently for subjecting much of the populace to lifelong psychiatric surveillance as well as for generating profits for the pharamaceutical companies to the disposition of which American psychiatry has now placed itself almost completely, your psychic malady, even if it has a moral or “spiritual” dimension such as might indicate the utility of some kind of literary or humanistic learning, once considered very important in psychiatry, is not only a consequence of your biology but one that cannot allow for any cure.   People are presumably born crazy just as it is thought that those who are less intelligent are born that way and not made so by deficient upbringing and education; the implications of the latter notion, which is contested, for America’s race relations and approaches to crime are obvious.  Is it not also obvious that the mentally ill person is a kind of pseudo-criminal?  The inextricability of the “spiritual,” the psychic, the intellectual, and the moral should make this obvious enough.  The person who is hospitalized, as I was, because of a judgment that he poses a danger to himself or someone else, this person presents an interesting problem: he is punished (or treated) not for a crime but for a criminal disposition.  And he is not suspected of a crime; he is suspected of a disposition.  That means you could commit a crime.  Since this is true of everyone, everyone must be suspected, and that is indeed the major principle of the national security state.  And then he is judged as having one not by a judge but by a psychiatrist.  Who, as mentioned, only has to affix the imprimatur of professional licensure to transform suspicion into conviction and condemnation.  I later was told by a psychiatrist at this hospital that people are suspected of mental illness if they seem in any way abnormal.

After the arm-twisting ritual was over, I then found myself speaking to a young female psychiatrist, whom I gathered was Russian, and who was behind a partition.  I don’t recall if I asked to speak to her or was told to do so.  Angered by what had just happened, I asked to be able to use a phone (my cell phone having been taken away from me) so that I could call a lawyer.  I asked this both of the other personnel, whom I suppose were either nurses or clerks, and of her.  She seemed to be displeased that I had something to say and did not want to listen to her.  I spoke with her very briefly two or three times.  My request to use a phone was not even acknowledged, let alone responded to. 

I then was ushered into a room with a male psychiatrist. 

1. He thought I was speaking with an accent – and I did not respond to his enthusiastic entreaty, said as he opened wide his arms - to “be American” since he “welcomed” me to do so.  

2.  He said I was feeling anxiety – he did not ask, he stated – I made the mistake of not obeying his thinking because I said I recognize the feeling of anxiety but was not feeling it at this time – so he obviously concluded I am psychotic because he thinks I have a “false self” and denied the feelings he believed I knew I had.

3.     He looked at a piece of paper and said “I see you have a history of mental illness.”  I should have pointed out that I had seen psychiatrists for mild cases of anxiety.  Was I going to be punished for this.  Mental illness is not a mental illness, but he has made it one.  He is after not trying to decide about treatment to provide me, but whether or not to lock me up.

4.     When I asked at the end if he was incarcerating me, he said, “Yes, so you will be safe.”  Safe from what?  The only thing I was threatened by was hospital personnel, and he was not removing from their grasp but placing me within in.  Can people be so hypocritical – is that the right word? Do people believe the lies they tell?  (I think generally so; this is the question of ideology.  Anyone outside the situation and possessed of a decent capacity to reason and evaluate evidence would not say or do the kinds of things this “doctor” and various nurses did.  I must conclude that they do not think and that their professional training has made them functionally stupid).

 Of course, authorities may often promise people they are subjecting to their authority that they are loving fathers and mothers who in their great professional wisdom and in accordance with their professional “ethics” are protecting people; the police often protect the people they beat up or kill.  Maybe that is because they don’t know any other way.  If you are smart, and you have the capacity to do this, you will throw at the moralizing-punitive-carceral machine the live body of someone whom you can portray as a threat to you and others and, of course, himself.  The police need perpetrators, and they make them the object of war (although policing is not supposed to be war, which is why we have courts).  Perhaps psychiatrists are similar.

Do I have an "unconscious intention" of speaking like an Englishman?   I rather think the tonality or whatever it is that constitutes an accent is something of an accidental by-product, for my intention has really just been to speak more responsibly, consciously, perhaps even (ideally) a bit poetically.   I have met other artistic people who similarly want to fashion themselves and the way they appear and speak. 

This might well include a shade of the famous English "wit" that Americans generally refuse since it is incompatible with the communitarian intimacy they insist upon that makes an internal distancing not impossible but unacceptable to manifest.   And that of course means that the Other is compelled to agree with what you are saying, since otherwise you do not feel properly supported and validated, and someone who refuses this will be suspected -- perhaps, of being mad.   As the psychiatrist made clear by implication, this conscious and therefore conscientious stance could only be tolerated, if at all, if I really were a foreigner and thus entitled to my difference, though probably in that case I would be required to confess and thus hand over my foreignness, with the kind assistance of a translator making clear what I am required to understand were I speaking a foreign language and not merely perversely possessed of a tendency to speak my native language and his with what  he recognized, perhaps correctly, as an accent, but which was more than that: it is the very writerly desire to speak a major language in a minor voice.   If one wants to use Kantian terms that properly endow the speaker with responsibility, it was the insistence of a certain autonomy, giving myself the law at least in terms of my manner of speaking.   Kant also said that artists create their own norms, in their works.  Perhaps then my desire was just to be a writer, and my fateful error was, as my sister suggested, to mistake the norms of writing for those of speech.   Here I was being called, held to account, being interpellated, told what the feelings I was supposed to be having that I had to answer for, perhaps by dutifully offering up a commentary that did not question the presupposition on which it was supposed to be motivated, just as Talmudic discussants offer a commentary on the meaning of the Law but never question it since they are driven by the desire to come to terms with an originary set of pronouncements held to be authoritative.  (Though of course my own only possible motivation could have been self-defense, in order to avoid the incarceration that had already been decided, although a charade was necessary in order to provide it with a justification, which apparently is not a difficult matter given the flimsiness and absurdity of the psychiatrist's pretexts),    

The admitting psychiatrist told me he knew that I was feeling anxiety.   He knew what I was feeling, and the feeling that he imputed to me was a sort of crime or an illness, obviously in his mind an illness since a therapeutic psychology with its concepts of health and illness is distinct from a moral psychology with its concepts or sin or crime or injustice, and obviously a moral psychology might also be a politics, driven as both are by notions of social justice and injustice.  The concept of health is linked to happiness (happiness is well-being (eudaimonia) that is subjectively experienced and appropriated: the happy person experiences the enjoyment of the good and judges that his experience of his situation is good.  It is because our society is still essentially Christian and Protestant that people believe in the pursuit of happiness much more than the pursuit of justice (people who have this orientation will have problems; they may be regarded as fanatics, subject to antisemitism if it is recognized or imagined that they are Jews, or as angry and therefore "violent", …) that health has replaced sin; in fact, the concept of health does not distinguish the human from the animal and indeed from all individual living beings, animal and plant, whereas the concept of justice is only possible among human beings because it depends upon a certain kind of thinking. --   He also was a judge whose judgment and its reasons, to the extent that he had any, which I doubt, did not have to be shared with me and in any case was not open to a procedure or process of critical examination in which I could be allowed to participate, which of course is what I necessarily desire in cases such as this though obviously it is impossible to obtain.   I do think I was in fact anxious in one way: the object of my anxiety was the fear that I would be incarcerated as a result of his judgment, which I would know to be unjust insofar as it would probably be irrational and also insofar as I knew that I had no tendency or disposition whatsoever to harm either myself or another person, which under American law, which obviously is not always observed by psychiatrists and doctors and psychiatric, medical, and psychotherapeutic institutions and practitioners in America - under American law it is only these two criteria (unfortunately as determined solely and sufficiently by a licensed psychotherapist or doctor or other mental health professional on the sole basis of his professional knowledge, which of course is either scientific or pseudo-scientific (in the basis of psychiatrists, almost always a mixture of both, with a fair measure of common social prejudices thrown in) but not really thoughtful, meaning not philosophical), which can legitimate a person's involuntary incarceration in an institution that treats deviants with medical and psychological treatments.

He can make a declaration and it is « true »  because he has a license to pronounce such judgments.  That is the principal sense in which I had « a history of mental illness. »

I think that for this psychiatrist, my having an emotion, anxiety, that being the state he incorrectly imputed to me, is an index of an emergency, all the more compelling in its urgency if I fail to recognize it.   For what do we say about a person who is in imminent danger, of a kind of spiritual damnation perhaps, and who fails to recognize this danger, but that he must be in great danger indeed?  (Of course, this idea of danger was the content of his anxiety, which he was projecting onto me in order to make me responsible for it so that my incarceration could be blamed on me).   Furthermore, given this presumption that being affected and moved (affect, emotion) constitutes a disposition to act and not a disposition to think, it can be supposed that the affectively moved person is being moved implicitly to some form of crime, some transgressive or unforeseen action, lying outside the bounds of the normal and the proper, since in effect this attitude cannot but treat deviance and transgression as crime and crime as violation not of legality but normality?   Of course, the danger imputed to me did not in fact get so imputed as a consequence of what the psychiatrist observed or his interpretation of my speech.   It was already inscribed in the book of my deeds understood as manifesting my criminal disposition or the pseudo-criminality of my malaise as a consequence of my having hit Brad.   He was only looking for an excuse, for something to write down, since obviously it had already been decided that I would be incarcerated, which was why the Black guard had my computer confiscated.    

It may be pointed out that if these doctors were so sure I wanted to hurt someone, myself or someone else, (1) how is it that in fact this was not the case? (2) how is it that they concluded this on the basis of evidence that is obviously irrelevant to drawing that conclusion?  

--- 

On the ward: One day I went to ask one of the nurses at the nurse’s station for more paper or sharpened pencils, I forget which.  I had to do this every few hours since they would ration what they gave me so as to make me dependent on them; they did this my money also, which I could only use to make phone calls, but they wanted to make me dependent on them for the ability to do so.  This nurse appeared hesitant in some slight way.  She did not say no but neither did she say yes.  Obviously she was communicating with body language.  This meant I was supposed to know what she was saying through her non-saying.  I responded in some way that I gather she interpreted as slightly persistent.  I infer that that annoyed her, because instantly another nurse was handing me a pill and saying, “You have to take more medication now.”  It was not time for my medication, and the psychiatrist had not prescribed it, not being present.  So the nurse had made this decision.  In her mind I was acting crazy.  Because the other nurse was slightly annoyed and because my minute perceived as agresssive, and in America today and certainly among hospital nurses, aggressiveness or the tiniest hint thereof is violence.  Or craziness.  And it requires punishment thinly disguised as treatment.

Soon a team of about half a dozen nurses followed me down the hallway.  One of them held out a paper cup in her hand.  They said I had to take this medication.  Of course they did not say why.  Maybe I should have asked, but in institutions like this no one is rational; even the educated psychiatrists were not rational.  And certainly patients are not allowed to question or contest anything.  Well, I did: I said, I believe I have the right to refuse medication.  I knew I did. Hospital policy acknowledges this legal right of patients.  One of the nurses said, “Yes, you do have the right to refuse medication.  But you have to take it now.”  Wordlessly, I thrust my hand forward in a very rapid gesture and grabbed the cup, which I crumpled and let drop to the floor.   One of them, or several of them, I don’t remember, said that I had been violent because I spilled water on the nurse’s trousers.  They obviously were unsure of what they were saying, since it is a transparent lie unless they are defining language they are using in medicalese in a manner different from the use of terms in ordinary speech in English. 

One of the nurses was a six foot tall black man.  He apparently was the enforcer.  I imagined him smiling as he did this.  Every prejudice that I have ever entertained or that anyone might about black men as thuggish brutes, perhaps (read on) as hate-filled ones was confirmed by this man.   He grasped my neck in a hand-lock with thumb on one side and fingers on the other and threw me to the ground. 

When they told me they would now give me the medication by force, I pleaded, saying, I will take the medication if you are going to be that way about it.  Of course they refused.  This – none of it, including the initial demand that I take the extra medication – was about medication.  It was about power. 

So I was taken into what I will call the punishment room.   What followed was a ritual.  The ostensible purpose was to give me an injection in the ass of either the medication that I had just agreed to take or of some other that was now substituted for it.  I found it that it was 5 mg. of Haldol, a major tranquilizer, and it was obviously given to subdue me and make me more obedient, or as social worker like to say, compliant.  This is of course routinely done in hospitals and these drugs are used not for their medical value but as forms of pacification.  I said something about how I knew this was about punishment and I had to be punished.  Did they say nothing confirmatory or disconfirmatory because they had knew I had spoken the truth?  I wanted them to admit it.  The black thug said, with a very hostile and angry look on his face, that I had better shut up.  I wonder what he or they would have done if I had continued to say things that were challenging.  A challenge to their power is violence in their minds, and clearly, that is all they understand by violence.  It is a transgressive statement or action, real or (as in the case of the nurse being annoyed at me earlier) imagined, that is or is perceived as transgressive in such a way that it may be thought to challenge the authority of the people in authority.  And that is the definition of a prison-like environment and of institutions that, as has long been known to be the case with mental hospitals, have that character.  What if I had something angry or hostile back to this man?  People in authority who are barbarians have a monopoly on the expression of angry and hostility, and that is part of how they understand their civilizing project, and this has probably been the case at least the outset of colonialism.  If I had challenged him, would he have come up and put my head in a vise and used physical force to somehow prevent me from speaking?  He clearly was threatening me, and with more bodily violence,  and the fact that the content of the threat was unspoken made it all the more powerful, in part because I am then left to my imagination, and if you really want to dominate people the ideal way may be to make them fear you.  When we really do have a police state, ideology will be finished.  Everyone will hate the government and the police but they won’t care.  It will be enough for them to make it clear that they may kill you if you do not obey, so you will obey not only out of fear but with hatred.  But that’s alright.  Every society like ours rests on this possibility in its depths, and at its upper surface are an upper class who both are free of it and who insist that it does not happen, a denial that is in fact part of the meaning of their elaborate codes and rules of civility and politeness.  Because of course “white” society is based on such elaborate codes.  To it applies what the filmmaker Vera Chitylova says at the end of her film “Daisies”: “Dedicated to all those whose sole source of indignation is a messed up trifle.”  Doctors and judges condemn people to punishments that they must be largely unaware of.  This is especially true in the case of judges, since of course they sentence people to punishments that on paper, in terms of the law, or if you like in terms of the Bible make perfect sense.  Language is applied to the body to effectuate the punishment and perhaps all power, but for the judge the body is an idea of something that is subjected to time, which is also an idea.  I wonder if a mathematical theory would not be ideal for judges.  The men and women they sentence are then taken to places where they most likely will be either serially raped or put in dark cells of “solitary confinement” where the brain and thus the mind are in short order irreparably damaged, where one experiences what the UN calls torture and what I think is in its effects similar to the Nazi concentration camp in producing a human being whose soul has been destroyed.  Violent men or men and women wielding systems of an almost medieval cruelty do this because they have made themselves unaware of the effects of their actions and because they live in a country club world where those kinds of things are not part of the language they speak.  And to the extent that they do acknowledge it, they blame it on the people who either were victims to start with or who soon will be. 

The shot was nothing.  Again, that was not the real content of the ritual; rituals are rituals of the demonstration and effectuation of power and they are their own content.  What they are said to be about is almost always a pretext.  About the shot, I will say: I have a strong will, and they would surely have pitted their wills against mine even more violently, for perhaps that is what violence is, it is an attempt to destroy a person’s will by attacking their body.  That is what is rape is. If I had expressed myself more forcefully, in words or gesture, they would have countered my will.  Instead, they just subjected me to their theater of punishment and hatred, and gave me the shot.  The shot did not destroy my lucidity.  They would have to have tried harder to destroy me.  I am sure if they had the chance they would have.  

To get out of one of these places you obviously have to show or pretend that you are docile and contented.  It is the same in the workplace.  You have to accept authority but pretend you recognize them as part of your happy world or that yours is part of theirs.  They would  never stop punishing me if they knew how I felt and what I thought about them.  That is to say: I am being subjected to a kind of rape.  And then the rapist says, I love you, don’t you love me?  I gave you something.  (For of course in rape something is given; it just isn’t wanted).  And to be let out and allowed to resume your life you have to smile and treat the rapist like he is your friend. 

The other black nurse on the staff was a woman.  She too had an expression of anger and hostility.  When the routine was over, she ordered me to run back to my room.  I took it that this was like when the police in some Latin American countries would tell someone to run so that they could shoot him.  Perhaps they would run after me and punish me again if I did not run fast enough, but if I ran too fast they would accuse me of an imaginary crime and punish me for that.  She said, “I don’t know what I might do.”  So she is not responsible for her actions, which, obviously, might be violent; rather, I am.  I will be held responsible for her violence.  But this is not news, as I already have seen.  

There is something to be said about the fact that black people in American tend to have authoritarian personalities.  I would say this: The hospital is racist and that black man is racist, prejudiced against himself, unless he thinks thuggery is good.  Maybe the boss and the gospels alike in his world justify it.  I suspect so.

I have experienced violence in my life but I consider to be the worst.  And the threat it poses is the worst.  Because it is official, state violence.

When I got out of the hospital I told a lawyer friend what had happened in the hospital, starting with being tackled after I refused to relinquish my computer.  He said, Since they did not break any bones, you probably cannot sue them.  I said to myself, “I hate America.”

Of course this expression of momentary despair is not my concerted opinion.  Still,
it would seem that it would later be used against me, when they tried again.  (To be continued).