Bipolar Expeditions (14 page)

How might we understand this? Given that everyone in the room had been diagnosed with a major psychiatric illness, and was thus categorized as irrational, this event might be understood as a commentary
about
putatively irrational conditions themselves. Since self-awareness is a central ingredient of rationality in the Western tradition, if people can give an impromptu performance
about
the definition of rationality, the question of their “irrationality” becomes more complex. To the extent they are aware of the irrational conditions attributed to them, they possess a key attribute of rationality.
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Additionally, we might say the support group reaction to the film was a critical commentary on the current understanding of manic depression: a carnivalesque reversal of the established order. By reversing the usual decorum of the support group, in which each person sits quietly in a chair, speaking only when invited by the moderator, the group reversed the can-do theme of the video. In contrast to the video's message, most group members were not working regularly and subsisted on disability payments. They frequently experienced employment or other discrimination when their status as “mentally ill” was known, and they learned from these experiences that revealing the diagnosis of manic depression was risky. Their comments provided an opposing narrative to the overly optimistic estimate of the drug's effectiveness the video portrayed.

Yet another description of the event would be that the group displayed the view of manic depression in the video a second time.
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The Abbott-sponsored story of mania in the video is the “first voice.” The first voice becomes a passive tool in the hands of the group when they sound a “second voice” in their own story of mania. The Abbott Laboratories story is thus shown to be a specific world produced in particular circumstances: one in which Abbott's Depakote manages moods perfectly and everyone has a job. The Abbott video depicts a world in which the condition of manic depression means the person cannot monitor his own behavior, cannot reflect consciously on his own behavior, without the aid of a drug. In being at least somewhat self-conscious and purposeful, the behavior of the support group members runs against the grain of the lack of self-awareness manic depressives are supposed to have. The enactment at the meeting shows that manicdepressive persons, with or without drugs, and certainly without increasing their medication just then, are people with enough self-awareness to deliberately enact mania. Their enactment, fit to the specifics of the time and place, is a well-tailored communication
about
mania, instead of an instance of out-and-out mania. Seeing this self-awareness, even in the midst of an event any casual observer would describe as manic, returns us to the issue with which I opened this chapter: if there can be self-awareness (and therefore “rationality”), even in the midst of strange experiences of multiplicity, the sharp line between the “rational” and the “irrational” begins to waver.

Other moments in which people sounded a “second voice” occurred frequently in my fieldwork. At the yearly August picnic for all the support groups in Orange County, signs were posted at many places around the public park, directing visitors to the DMDA (Depression and Manic Depression Association) picnic. The acronym was never spelled out, but several people commented that they were self-conscious about being publicly identifiable. At one point, the small cluster of people I was standing with discussed the possibility that the stigma against manic depression came from confusing manic depressives with schizophrenics. One person thought many people did not realize that manic depression, unlike schizophrenia, has medications that can keep it under control. At this moment, an “eye flash” occurred, initiating an impromptu enactment of mania in which everyone spoke loudly and extremely fast, jumped from one topic to another, gestured dramatically, glanced around vivaciously, laughing all the while. One woman made us all dissolve into shrieks of laughter when she interjected, “Yeah, and we drool, too,” as she somehow contrived to let strings of saliva drip from the corner of her mouth.
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This was not the same cast of characters who enacted mania in the support group meeting, but they also had a lightning fast response to the claim that manic depressives can only act normally with the help of medication. By deliberately enacting manic behavior, the group showed the limits of the medication they were all most likely taking to control manic behavior. The small drama ended when the woman who drooled commented, “Actually, my
medicine
does make me drool, but only a little,” thus breaking the simple formula of manic-depressive person plus medication equals normal behavior. In her display, manicdepressive person plus medication equals the abnormal behavior of drooling.

Angela Vickers enacted a small performance of mania as a speaker at the national meetings of the DMDA, attended by patients, doctors, researchers, and advocates. She told the audience that although she had professional credentials in law, she had also received the diagnosis of manic depression. She began to study law because her manic depression had cost her custody of her children: “On the one side the court saw a wealthy businessman, and on the other a psychotic wife.” Studying law in order to bring about reforms so that this kind of discrimination would not happen to others, she remembered encountering discrimination in the classroom. One law professor remarked, “Watch out for those manic depressives, they
look
so normal.” Her own doctor warned her, “Keep your condition quiet; you will never be seen as the same again.” But this was a level of complicity with discrimination she told us she could not accept. To make her point, she said, “I am a Vivien Leigh variety of manic depressive,” and launched into a tiny drama with some similarities to the support group's disorderly meeting. While enacting many features of manic behavior—eyes burning, head tossing, arms waving, hands gesturing—she called out, “I am not crazy, I am not crazy, I am not crazy!” The audience nodded and laughed along with her, understanding her message: like Vivien Leigh, my style is dramatic, and in the right context, such as this conference or the courtroom, it can be effective.

But still more can be gleaned from this material. Events fit the definition of verbal performance in Richard Bauman's definition, when they involve a performer who assumes responsibility “to an audience for the way in which communication is carried out, above and beyond its referential content…. [T]hus conceived, performance is a mode of language use, a way of speaking.”
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By this definition, it might appear that I have mistakenly described the events from my fieldwork as “performances.” There is not usually an audience separate from the performers, and there is certainly no formal way in which the “performances,” if such they are, could be evaluated in Bauman's terms. I want to evoke a more modest notion of performance, with the help of anthropologist Donald Brenneis's description of the Indian
pancayat
in Fiji. The goal of a dramatic performance among Indians in Fiji is not to act out the feeling or mood itself, but to act out the “conditions that excite that mood and the responses that follow from it.”
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In contrast to usual Western notions, in which the locus of emotion (or moods) is in the individual, a theory from classical Hindu poetics called
rasa-bhava
locates nonindividualized moods in events. “Moods” or, as they are also called, “flavors” are seen as “impersonal, universal sentiments.” In addition, feelings seem not to be viewed as internal states; instead, the local Hindu word for emotion is the “same as that for gesture or display.” Rasa-bhava theory also values the nonindividualized mood—rasa—more highly than whatever personal feelings are associated with it. Hence performers strive to produce a shared emotional experience for the audience rather than to express themselves.
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Brenneis's description enlarges the capacities we can see in the ephemeral enactments of mania I described. Each of them starts with an “eye flash” of recognition that races around the group, an eye-to-eye signal of knowing anticipation, a gestural equivalent to a film director's call, “Action!” The following enactment places “mania” squarely in a social setting, in the intersubjective space among group members who, in a passing moment, seize their chance to comment on the state of their moods. That they do so socially moves the focus away from the inside, where Western common sense places the psyche. For those living under the description of manic depression, the inside site of emotion is where what is wrong with them is said to be, and for which they have trouble finding a legitimating form of description, apart from medical discourse. The force of these performances is that they enact a nonindividualized mood—as Fijians depict rasa—and give this enactment legitimacy in the social space of their meetings.

With this modest concept of performance in hand, let us return briefly to the incidents I discussed earlier in this chapter. In the support group meeting and at the picnic, people deeply marginalized by being classified as “irrational” were by definition not expected to be capable of producing commentary
about
the classifications that marginalized them. Their commentaries occurred in out-of-the-way places, they were fleeting and one-off in form, and they arose spontaneously out of the materials and experiences immediately at hand. They could be called social experiences “in solution” rather than “precipitated.” They were forms of action critical of the dominant understanding of mental illness, even though they were not expressed in the dominant language about mental illness.
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Such experiences blur the sharp division be tween the rational and irrational by revealing how much of social life and imagination lies somewhere in between. If the groups' reactions had been “precipitated,” they might have consisted of a clear, formal statement like, “Manic depressive people are rational enough to manage themselves.” Remaining “in solution,” their impromptu dramatic sketches nonetheless created ripostes to the idea that people living under the description of manic depression cannot control themselves. Once we see their actions as performances, as artifice, then we do not have to see them as involuntary signs of madness caused by natural or biological forces that people are helpless to control. At the least, we can see their actions lying somewhere in between these poles. To the extent that we can see these events as performances, we gain a way of seeing mania as a state people can actively produce under the right conditions, rather than as a state that overpowers a person entirely. If acts, however spontaneous, have a certain deliberate quality, why should we not think of them as rational?

Equally important, seen as performances, such events also open spaces where questions about the collective and social aspects of any display of mania might be asked. Were the support groups feeling their way toward a view of manic depression from their own perspective? Their actions had a performative cast, where the cast was toward the “meta,” toward actions whose import was to comment on the whole class of phenomena they were displaying. In a sense the groups were displaying a message to themselves—they were both acting and observing—and in a sense the audience, albeit not literally present, was made up of those who espouse the conventional understanding of manic depression. Thinking about events through the concept of performance helps us see how the lines between the rational and the irrational quake and shift.

Style and Manic Performances

The concept of performance becomes more powerful when it is combined with the concept of “style.” With “style,” individual variation and unconscious thought enter the picture. To capture the double mean ings at the core of the ways “style” has been used in art criticism, Carlo Ginzburg explicates a pun made by a theologian, Paolo Sarpi, in 1607. Sarpi was excommunicated by the church for his heretical views and then, some months later, five men armed with daggers assaulted him. He whispered to the physician brought to his aid that his wounds had been made “stylo Romanae curiae.” The pun lay in the word “stylo” or “style,” which meant both “‘by the knife of the Roman Curia' and ‘by the legal procedure [literally the pen] of the Roman Curia.'”
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Ginzburg takes this pun as his starting point to show that “‘style often has been used as a cutting device, as a weapon, and as a self-defining category.”
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As a category in the arts, style could refer to both the persisting, distinguishing qualities of a school or tradition of art and the particular, individually variable quality of a specific artist's work.
³⁵
Early in the nineteenth century, John Flaxman described how ubiquitous individually conferred style was: he thought even a “savage” could “superadd to the elegance of form an additional decoration in relief on the surface of the instrument, a wave line, a zig-zag, or the tie of a band, imitating such simple objects as his wants and occupations render familiar to his observation.”
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The other side of the meaning of “style”—uniformity over time—came to have dark associations with race and national character, culminating in its use by National Socialists to distinguish “pure” German culture from Jewish or other “impure” forms.
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Running throughout scholarly debate about both senses of style is the question whether style is produced consciously or unconsciously. Art historians have clearly recognized that style can be consciously deployed, as when the Assyrian state built statues with massive arms and torsos to depict their massive power.
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But, in a contemporary example, cultural critics have recognized unconscious factors in styles that consumers develop by means of commercial goods. Consumers may be only partially conscious of the larger cultural values that affect how they attach complex affective experiences to commodities.
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