Interpretations of a Couple of Rock Songs

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The Limits of Discourse, or The Truth About Cats and Dogs

I am currently reading an essay by David Ingram that explores the debate between the philosophers Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas on the subject of conversation or dialogue, a debate about the nature of debate itself. The subject is fascinating and so I have decided to explore it myself in this post. What is permissible for a person to say and what not? As usual, I will approach this philosophical issue via anecdotes about my own screwed-up life, because, in a way, these anecdotes support the claims that I wish to make.

What is a conversation? Dialogue is sometimes concerned with the sharing of practical information, sometimes with the issuing of verbal instructions or imperatives, sometimes with gossip about acquaintances who are not present. The main role of phatic communication though is that it allows individuals to disclose or manifest their selves,  their lives, their situations, to others. It is concerned with mutual recognition. Yet when we speak to others we are always picking and choosing what aspect of ourselves we wish to reveal - dialogue is always selective. Moreover any conversation has rules about what is appropriate or inappropriate to discuss, rules that depend on the situation or context in which the conversation takes place. For instance, when we make small talk at a party with a stranger, it is usually considered bad manners to 'bring up' sex or religion or politics. Some topics are almost always off-limits. In any conversation, an individual always holds something of himself back.

One topic that is almost always inappropriate in any situation to broach is that of sexuality. It tends to make people uncomfortable. Yet this is strange because sexuality is central to how we experience the world. It is at once the most important thing in life and the least talked about - although in the modern era sexuality has 'come out of closet' in a way unthinkable for much of history. It is precisely the way in which we talk about, or fail to talk about, sexuality that this essay concerns.

As I have discussed in earlier posts, in 2007 I experienced a severe psychotic episode. During this episode I formed the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals and, at my first visit to the Mental Health Clinic at which I would be treated more or less for the next nine years, I told my first contacts there that I wanted "to come out as straight". I think that what I wanted to achieve by this was to correct certain misperceptions that may have started to circulate about me – I wanted to be recognized as heterosexual by others in the world. This may seem quite bizarre but I was forced into this terrible position by circumstances quite beyond my control. At my first formal appointment with the psychiatrist who would treat me until early 2012, I told him truthfully that I lived at a vegetarian flat of twenty people. He asked if I was a vegetarian. I said no, that I was "a carnivore". By saying that I was "a carnivore" I was trying, in code admittedly, to say not only that I was straight but that I had a sex-drive. He smirked. Because he did not ask me my sexuality directly, I could not tell him. Even though I wanted to. I knew immediately that I had been, perhaps deliberately, misinterpreted and that there was no way to correct it and this was to cause me significant distress in the years to come. (I was in fact never asked how I identified myself until Easter 2013.)

What was apparent to me from this first consultation onwards was that I was in a situation, a milieux, in which no-one used the words "straight" and "gay" and in which a person's sexuality was never enquired about. This may seem counterintuitive to you, my reader. Naively, we would assume that many people who find themselves patients of a country's Mental Health System are sexually muddled, or have been the victims of rape, or of sexual abuse, and need to talk about it. But, in my experience, the topic of sexuality is off-limits among mental health practitioners. The Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders contains many categories of Mental Illness, such as Avoidant Personality Disorder, Bi-Polar Disorder or Schizophrenia, but, after lobbying by the gay community, homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973. Ever since, psychiatrists have been in a problematic relationship to this 'condition'. Should they still be trying to cure it? Should they rather be subtly encouraging those deemed 'repressed homosexuals' to come out? No formal policy exists. The culture of the New Zealand Mental Health Service during my time as a patient of it, it seems to me, is similar to the culture that obtained in the United States military until 2010 - an unofficial "Don't ask; don't tell" policy operates (although this unofficial policy does not prevent the spread of gossip, false records and false rumors). Even in society at large a kind of unofficial "Don't ask; don't tell" rule often obtain - I have often noticed how difficult it is for other straight people to say that they are straight even when directly asked.

I was in a situation in which it was inappropriate for me to either talk directly about the 'homosexual conspiracy' or to say that I was straight. Even when I did, indirectly, I felt I was not believed. In fact, during this first episode, I formed the delusion that there was a microphone in my glasses and that if I said the wrong thing I might be punished in some way, a delusion that did not go away entirely until the very beginning of 2010. Either subject, I sensed, was inappropriate. This delusion was a manifestation of the dialogical setting in which I found myself. So I talked about both topics indirectly, cryptically. I doubt that those I spoke to about these topics understood me at all. They lacked the rosetta stone that would translate what I said into plain English.

Contemporaneously with my first contact with the Mental Health System, I formed the belief that the world could be divided into 'cat people' and 'dog people' - or, to be more accurate, that others divided up the world this way. It came to me first because it seemed to me that my father was calling me a 'cat'; a little later I would often see Asian men walking dogs.  I decided that the cat/dog distinction constituted some kind of esoteric code. In a world where no one came out as gay or straight,  people instead identified as 'cats' and 'dogs'. But what did this mean? Were the cats gay and the dogs straight? Were the cats closet homosexuals and the dogs openly gay? I didn't know. Yet I felt that I was being asked by the world to identify myself as one or the other. I refused to do so. It couldn't be an informed decision, I knew, if I didn't know what these terms meant. I didn't speak that language and perhaps only the Illuminati knew what these terms signified. This problem stuck with me for years. In fact, in 2012, during a period in which I was discharged from the service, I wrote a film called The Hounds of Heaven in which the young female protagonist identified herself early on as a 'fraidy cat'. (This screenplay is on the Internet if you google it.)

Although the idea of a code language concerning 'cat people' and 'dog people' seemed to arrive in my mind out of nowhere, I know now that this hermetic code does have a history in our culture. The 1937 screwball comedy The Awful Truth subtly alludes to it, as does Martin Amis in the 2012 novel Lionel Asbo, and presumably the 1996 film The Truth About Cats and Dogs as well (although I should admit that haven't seen this film). Iggy Pop penned a song in 1969 called I Wanna Be Your Dog and The Cure released a song in 1983 called The Love Cats. The earliest reference I know to this cipher is Kafka's The Trial. At the conclusion of this novel, just before the protagonist Joseph K. is executed, he exclaims, "Like a dog!"

Animal metaphors also seem to circulate through the popular culture. I remember at family birthday party in 2008 I think, my sisters suggest we play a game in which we each picked our totem animal. My mum picked a horse, I chose a dolphin, my brother a whale and my father an octopus. In 2011, at a coffee group for people who had experienced psychosis, one of the Occupational Therapists suggested we play a similar parlor game in which each of us identified the animal we would like as a pet. The chap on my left cautiously chose a monkey (a sagacious decision because monkeys are almost human), I said when I was a kid I had a pet dog and the girl on my right said, "I hate dogs".All of us there obviously felt that we were being asked to commit ourselves to some mystery we didn't understand – a cruel game, incidentally, to ask people susceptible to paranoia to play.

The animal code is just a modern way to try to speak the unspeakable. The need for a code or cipher when speaking about sexuality arose in a time when homosexuality was illegal; it enabled people to 'come out' as gay with reduced risk of being incarcerated within a prison or mental asylum. The word 'gay' now pretty much unambiguously means 'homosexual' but, in the 'fifties, a 'gay bachelor' could mean a homosexual or it could simply refer to a carefree, freewheeling single man not yet ready to settle down. Now, in 2016, decades after homosexuality was legalized, we should have a discourse, be able to have a conversation, that is transparent rather than riddled with opacities - and yet we have an animal discourse that conceals more than it reveals. If an animal code exists, it is vestigial, anachronistic.  Better to talk of 'gay' and 'straight' rather than of 'cats' and 'dogs'. It is more honest. In the fifties, by the way, it was often assumed that all married persons were straight and all single people gay. In the present era, when single people seem practically to outnumber married people, it seems cruel to assume that a person is single because he or she wants to be.

Because the truth about cats and dogs is that there is no truth. The terms mean different things to different people. Perhaps I can take this opportunity to define what these terms mean to me, now. A 'cat' is someone who doesn't talk about sex and a 'dog' is one who does. Cats don't talk about sex because, for them, love and sex are sacred and shouldn't be sullied by speaking of them with others. Dogs, though, do talk about sex, often perhaps because they feel the need to prove something. For most of my life, I have, by this definition, been a 'cat', although I was forced by circumstance to become a dog briefly. By natural inclination I am however a cat. A girl I was very fond of once described me as a 'lion' and this is a memory I treasure.

I thought I would finish this post by returning to the beginning. Michel Foucault is one of my favorite philosophers – I believe his works The History of Madness and The History of Sexuality should be required reading for anyone studying psychiatry. Foucault was gay, of course (he died of AIDS in 1984), but this does not diminish my admiration for him. In late 2009, when I was hearing voices more or less continuously, Foucault's ghost spoke to me and the girl with whom I was telepathically connected, advising us to write a book called "The History of Sexuality – the Other Side". Perhaps I will one day.

An Unusual State of Consciousness

The philosopher Heidigger has argued that an individual's engagement with the world is tinctured, shaped, constituted by the mood in which an individual finds himself or herself. The moods that particularly interested Heidigger were anxiety and boredom. In today's post I want to describe another state of consciousness, a state which is, I believe, quite unusual, but which is very interesting. Technically it is known as 'derealization'. I hope by talking about it, I can excavate some deeper facts about the human condition. Just as Heidigger was able to gain metaphysical and ontological insights from the phenomenological study of his own consciousness when in a mood, I think it may be possible to express important 'truths' about an individual's situation in the world by describing and analyzing this peculiar state of consciousness.

'Derealization' is considered both a symptom of other neurological disorders and a disorder in itself. It is generally characterized as a feeling that the world has become somehow unreal. I have experienced it several times in my life.  For instance, I remember it manifesting itself in mid 2007 when my mother and I travelled south from Auckland to Wanganui. At this time I had endured a psychotic episode that had persisted for several months. During this trip south, I developed the delusion that I was the star of a film directed by Peter Jackson. All of the people I saw on the road and in the cafes we visited were extras in this film – I was the only genuine person left in the world. If you know the film The Truman Show, dear reader, you may have some idea how I felt. I felt not only that I was under constant observation or monitoring but that everyone I saw was, in some way or another, dependent on me for their existence. It was a peculiar state of mind of course and I wonder if some recreational drugs can induce the same effect.

This was not an isolated occurrence of derealization. Around August 2009, for instance, I visited a beach in Point Chevalier with a social worker and again I experienced this peculiar state of mind. The beach didn't so much seem unreal as too real - all off my senses were elevated to a higher pitch and I was intensely aware of my own perceptions of this environment. I had never visited this beach before despite living in Auckland all my life and, consequently, I briefly entertained the delusion that the beach had not existed before I visited it, that it had been created only the day before. It was a beautiful beach - how could I never have known of it previously unless it had just been created? Once again I had the feeling that the external world was manifesting itself only for my benefit. Derealization, as you see, can easily segue into a type of solipsism. When in this state of mind, a person becomes overwhelmed by his own consciousness of the world; the idea that the world might exist independent of one, that it might carry on by itself, in some strange way recedes. It is a state of mind that can also easily arise during moments of extreme paranoia when the whole world, one feels, is involved in a conspiracy against one and, for this reason, I would characterize paranoia as a type of totalitarianism. Derealization, I would also argue, is the purest form of psychosis.

Derealization, like psychosis generally, is an organic response to severe psychological stress. I had a friend who spent eight months in a mental health ward in 2012. During this time she developed the delusion that there was a video camera in her eyeball and that her mental health team were watching the world through her eyes. She had even considered cutting out the offending eyeball to escape the feeling. This girl had obviously experienced a continuous feeling of derealization for a number of months while in hospital. I could sympathize with this friend because I had myself entertained the belief, in earlier episodes of my life, that my spectacles had a video camera in them. She had become hyper-aware of her own perceptions of the world and the video-camera delusion was something she had invented as an explanation for this heightened state of consciousness. To speak plainly, I believe that the occasions of derealization that my friend and I experienced were a response to the stress caused by psychiatric misdiagnosis. When it seems that the whole world believes bullshit about a person, it can cause the person to doubt the foundations of reality itself.

How to describe what depersonalization is like? In one's ordinary experience of the world, we take it for granted. We tacitly and automatically assume the world's independent existence, we assume that others have their own lives that have nothing to do with us, we assume that people and places and things are constituted by a dense, complex web of interrelationships, interrelationships in which we may not be involved and to which we do not usually give even a cursory thought. When derealization occurs, all of these assumptions fly out the window. The world presents itself instead now as pure phenomena. The world, we feel, has become conditional on our consciousness. My feeling in 2009 that the beach was just something 'made up' may have arisen from a need to feel some sense of control over my own situation and environment. The idea that the beach had previously existed but I had not known about it before was in a way threatening. It imperiled my sense of self. I preferred to believe instead that it had never existed before, rather than accept that I had simply been ignorant of its existence.

Strange as it may seem, derealization, although it may seem pathological, is a very philosophical mood to find oneself in. Consider the hoary old philosophical problem, "If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?" Bishop Berekely would say, "No". Berkeley did not believe in the existence of an external world; rather he thought all our perceptions were ideas in the mind of God. Earlier Descartes, having proven to his own satisfaction that he himself existed ("Cogito ergo sum"), provided an ontological argument for the existence of God and, only on the basis that God is omni-benevolent rather than omni-malevolent, was able to assert the idea that an external world exists, a thesis that would be otherwise problematic. Immanuel Kant argued that we have no perceptual access to "things-in-themselves" and Husserl's phenomenological method is founded on the operation known as "epoche" - a suspension of belief in the reality of perceived objects. Derealization, a state of mind that comes naturally to someone in the grips of psychosis, is deliberately cultivated by phenomenologists. Perhaps all these philosophers I mention have had some glancing acquaintance with madness, an acquaintance they themselves did not recognize as such? It is not impossible.

So what can one learn from this peculiar state of consciousness? I tend toward the idea that there is no single, objective reality – but I am no solipsist. I believe in the existence of other minds. Multiple worlds coexist side by side. Every individual inhabits, is the centre, of their own universe. But these different worlds overlap and it is within this overlap that discourse, conversation, occurs. It is in this space, the space that we all contest, that one should seek to make one's home.