REFERENCES
When the other gets tangled
The figure of 'information' transfer is 'joint action' and
its ground is in the vagueness due to the 'others'. This
transferral will make sense at the 'boundary', therefore, by way
of the 'joint action'. It "is at that uncertain moment, when a
first person has finished speaking and a second must respond in
accord with the set of possibilities made available to them by
the first, that people between them make sense of their exchange.
It is in the tense or tension filled boundaries between different
people, where they cannot not respond to each other's actions and
people must cope with novel 'circumstances' as they occur, that
new and unique meanings are made" (Shotter, 1994: 57). Clearly
the quality of the communication relates to the commonalties and
clashes of the 'others'. If dialogue breaks down and this
transferral won't make sense, therefore, it is by way of
confusion related to those 'others'.
Suppose now that the 'other' of a sapient being is
generically incomprehensible. Such would likely be the case in
the alien experiment, since their 'calculus of beings' would have
an illusory quality due to the experimental manipulation and not
reflect the bizarre originary circumstances of the 'first
nation'. The crossing of boundaries becomes perilous indeed if
there is a major likelihood of destructive confusion. We need to
understand helping as it's limited by the comprehensibility of
the 'other' to discuss 'psychotherapy'. If the helping person
can't figure things out, if the possibilities are spaced out or
beyond any good assessment, and generically deal with things
complex and volatile, then help becomes problematical and risky.
'Therapy' as a social institution today relies on things not
being generically 'too bad'. For if they were, everybody would
be like a fool and every conversational entry like a piece of
disconnected foolishness.
We need to address the case where the context of
interaction goes from rationalizing individual behavior to
rendering coherent the uncoordinated foolishness of people whose
'joint action' is of modest proportions and whose information
'disconnect' is relatively large. Where we have in effect
'providential contexts for dialogue' rather than merely
'providential dialogues'. We find madness inasmuch as 'mind' is
an attribute of 'situation' (Natanson, 1956: 17-19) and here the
situation is maddening! And this being said, we will then
consider what is this phenomenon of dis-ease that provokes
helping.
REFERENCES
The fools' play
Here I shall go back to a popular French dramatic form from
the 15th and 16th centuries, the sottie or fools' play.
This form will serve as metaphor for the kind of social situation
encountered when the 'generalized other' is inchoate and out-of-hand
and the sphere of 'joint action' or information exchange is
very limited. In this form, the norms of dialogue are inane if
indeed not wholly illogical. The actors are not a fortiori mad
or representing madness, but they are understood as fools by the
audience.
Some readers may object here that the end of the medieval
era in France was in effect a period of (the onset of) 'barbarism'
in the sense of Vico. Therefore, it may be claimed,
this metaphor can't very well refer to the alien artifice that
I'm positing, but is a natural illustration of the usual Vichian
order. However, I submit that the significance of a sottie kind
of form, given the posited manipulation, could yet be the
similar. The irrational aspect might well be stronger or more
usual, as there could arise additional uncanny or 'mad' elements
due to the experiment. The sottie itself should be viewed as
minimally representing the dialogic of such a social reality. The
point is, there needs to be more room for dialogue to be (or
appear) nonsensical.
Nothing much happens in a fools' play. A "sottie does not
have 'characters' as we conceive them, neither does it have a
'plot' in the modern sense. .. The only possible source of
suspense was the question: Who else might appear" (Arden, 1980:
43-44)? In other words, there is interaction, then another fool
comes on stage and the interaction shifts in some way in response
to his presence. The "preoccupation with the appearance on stage
of a character will prove to be symptomatic of a concern .. with
what a character appears to be, and what he turns out to be in
reality" (Arden, 1981: 45). If real life has this experiential
content, how are we then to discern what things are in reality?
As it were, the fool stumbles in mumbling something about
chocolates, and we must engage.
If we now wish to understand mental 'dis-ease', and how
philosophy and 'psychotherapy' relate on the boundaries, the
model of the sottie evinces a kind of free social interaction in
the conditions where things tend to be awry or out of sorts. In
the sottie, the audience 'chases the other' as it seeks for
amusement and comprehension. In life, the challenge of helping
arises largely in relation to questions of managing and/or
inhibiting such free social interaction - we need to control
uncanny phenomena. Especially in the unsettling condition of the
alien experiment, the disturbance of social awareness will be
accurately reflected in fools' interactions and interfered with
by more controlling ones. For the fools' play challenges the
ground of the 'out of sorts', highlighting the irrationality of
the 'other' (Sampson, 1993). The fool's kind of statement about
phenomena renders actual the 'ease' (of 'dis-ease') to the extent
it is possible.
There is abundant irrationality in a sottie type
environment, loose undirected mental energy; there, the helping
situation is highly impacted psychologically. As to help, the
word itself betrays the issue. We call the helping person the-
rapist, and that is an appropriate trope. For the helping
relationship is governed by a control process, a social
manipulation which is violent in its very nature to the client.
And it is highly libidinally invested as that is the energy
medium of our psychiatric dialogue (Masson, 1994; Schaef, 1992).
In this sottie of a life, to the extent that that is a good
metaphor, the helping person who intrudes on such inchoate
affairs must perforce exhibit (in the service of managing) a
seemingly unwarranted rationality. The rationality of the helping
situation is at the price of distance and control, of masking the
involvement process. There follows a natural logic leading to
what Wittgenstein (1980) calls 'wrong descriptions' that do not
"accord with the practice of the person giving the description."
This sort of statement is described by the client 'Bill' in
Shotter's example as 'conditional' language.
1
What is the kind of way we talk about helping and
controlling? Wittgenstein says, "we must remind ourselves .. of
the kind of statement that we make about phenomena .. our
investigation is therefore a grammatical one. Such
investigations shed light on our problem by clearing
misunderstandings away" (1953: #90). Here the 'conditional' of
the therapist checks the condition of the client by asking stupid
factual questions, creating a grammatical tangle. Bill, above,
complains that the therapist was not talking with 'him', that is,
the person he intended to be. In an hermeneutical and
phenomenological study of the mentality of madness, Sass (1994)
compares Wittgenstein's critique of solipsism with the mind
problems encountered by the mad person. He finds a strong
reflection of the philosophical issues related to rationality in
the typical ideation of the 'schizophrenic' client. As with Bill,
the mindset of the mad person is hard to access to the point of
occultness and the rational approaches to it present process
conundrums of their own.
We need to look at a helping process that collaborates with
the foolishness and psychologically impacted character of our
situations. We need something that is superior to a control
process management that interferes with Being. In the controlled
setting of psychotherapy, 'free association' (or any analogous or
derivative process) breaks down the awareness of the client in a
'primal' direction, closer to the mentality of Vico's 'first
people', more open to social conditioning. But note! Remaining
within this line of thinking, we seem to get a bit 'stuck'.
Past the clinical paradigm