This post contained an draft version of a dissertation section. A more recent version is now available on the works page.
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This post contained an draft version of a dissertation section. A more recent version is now available on the works page.
Anarchist Without Content 
i wanted to say I’m enjoying this series of posts on affect and emotion, the passions and their logics. I especially love your style and tone. I’m not sure if I can follow you all the way- for tactical reasons more than anything else; but also because, with your psychiatric example, I can list from experience plenty of “madmen” who are confined because they will harm themselves, I’ve seen a few succeed. At any rate, its a passionate prose you got going on. I need to stop by here much more frequently!
thanks! i really appreciate the kind words. and perhaps my hyperbole got the best of me: i believe mental illness exists, is often experienced as painful or self-destructive, and is best treated with a combination of therapy and medicine. that said, i believe that while bodies are prone to certain illnesses, it is a “sick” society that triggers them. and because of that, no amount of society as will know it will ever bring true relief.
also – it looks like the thatcher demos were fun. i wish more anarchists were enjoying themselves that much.
On Thatcher! Yes! I ummed and ahhed a lot, not having been present at the original parties, and having an immediate sense of what socialists like Owen Jones were writing- that there was nothing to celebrate, that Thatcherism lived on in the neoliberal policies of the Blair and Cameron governments and across the world.
A friend who attended a party in Brixton and the Trafalgar Sq. party told me he got a sense of an awareness of that, of a kind of feeling that in the absence of anything to celebrate let’s celebrate!
On mental illness, I think the relations between body, mind, and the social field are more complex than we could do justice to in blog posts or comments boxes; but to add anyway, I’d want to say that its more complex than a society producing experiences of distress…which is certainly not to say that society doesn’t produce illnesses at all. The question has to be asked of each psychopathology- how much of this is organic, genetic, neurological, organological at any rate…and how much of it is down to malignant “social” forces, and what are those forces exactly. Its a problem that can only be gestured at really, through the production of singular maps or (as dmf from the ANTHEM blog writes) “proto-types” that trace these singular relations as best as we can.
At any rate, I’ll be reading more regularly and commenting more (time permitting).
BTW, you probably already follow/read Ian Bone’s blog…but in case you don’t this is a pretty amusing post on the SWP (Trotskite party) and the recent wave of celebration:
http://ianbone.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/why-the-trots-were-not-at-trafalgar-square/