Recognizing and Transforming Madness,Citizenship,and Social Justice

Introduction

In their respective ways, Professors Brown 2013 and Ward 2013 offer thoughtful and forward-looking responses to the philosophical and clinical notions presented in the main article that I authored (Arrigo, 2013). Brown asks for clarification on the conditions of transformation needed, if the “human, the humane,” [is to] materialize in contexts that are fundamentally dehumanizing” (p. 700). Ward posits that relational ethics can meaningfully hurdle the inevitable problem of “moral pluralism and its practice challenges” (p. 704) in offender recovery and similar rehabilitation settings, especially when moral acquaintanceship and its “values of engagement, respect, and embodiment” (p. 707) structure (and transform) the interaction among different system participants. The observations provided by both commentators are important to the human social critique that I developed. Brown questions how the overcoming of systemic captivity (e.g., the Amy Johnson [2013]) story and case study) can be made possible “at all levels of [our] self and society” (p. 700) existences, corporeally and materially. Ward proposes how “difference” and the risk that it constitutes can be managed as clinical prescription, ethically and professionally.

To respond to these comments—even if only provisional—it is instructive to consider the philosophical and cultural footing of Psychological Jurisprudence (PJ; for example, Arrigo, 2010, 2011a, 2011b, 2012), especially because its theory, method, and praxis represent a proposed antidote to “the society of captive’s” thesis and to the “harm of social dis-ease” (Arrigo, 2013, p. 672). However, before addressing these prescient concerns, some preliminary background on PJ as delineated by Arrigo, Bersot, and Sellers (2011) is warranted. The background material further clarifies or amplifies a number of conceptual and treatment issues that were underdeveloped in the Arrigo (2013) main article.

PJ: An Emerging Philosophical Perspective and Cultural Critique

PJ is a philosophy about the self in society, the social person. PJ emphasizes the cultivation of human social capital or dynamic potential in being and transformative possibility in becoming for, by, and about one and all. As cultural criticism, PJ argues that these potentialities and possibilities await and long for recognition in human consciousness and in all facets of social relating. As such, PJ is a critical philosophy of ontology (a radical reading of who we could be/become as social beings) and ethics (a radical morality regarding the process of more fully realizing individual human flourishing and of actualizing latent mutually generative excellence). Thus, the ontology of PJ answers the question of will; its ethics, responds to the question of way.

Moreover, PJ’s epistemology represents a critique of discourse (i.e., an “interrogation” of the constructed narratives that define the social person) and the discursive, performative, and therefore situated properties that govern the texts of being in-and-of-society. Stated differently, PJ’s epistemology draws attention to the politics of discourse and the contested meaning-making terrain through which intention, choice, and action reside. This landscape, always and already politicized, tells the story of ontology (i.e., what it means to be a social being). Currently, this landscape is populated by stories of the self in society that are increasingly and alarmingly partialized and fragmented, fictionalized and false, virtualized and sensationalized. Among others, these include the de-realizing narratives of violence and victimization, crime and punishment, treatment and recovery, health and wellness, and human agency and social reality.

The fact that PJ seeks to unleash human potential and possibility that await recognition or awareness in consciousness indicates that a constrained aesthetic (harm-generating images) about the social person presently (and far too routinely) maintains dominion over the topography of the (collective) psyche. This jurisprudence of the mind (e.g., Arrigo, 2004; Biagi-Chai, 2012; Caudill, 1997; Goodrich, 1995) both binds and checks human social capital. These constraints include the reductive/repressive conditions of bad faith (Sartre, 1956) and false consciousness (Marx, 1964) that repetitively caricaturize, trivialize, or sanitize the more dynamic and transformative properties of ontology. Overcoming both of these conditions (i.e., the self-deception and “escape” from freedom that bad faith nurtures; the hegemony of otherizing and the fetishism of abstraction that false consciousness reproduces) requires a departure in how risk is presently managed within its various captivity-maintaining communal contexts and/or institutional settings. Risk refers to the regulation of “difference,” to self in society capital that could be otherwise if each of us lived more dynamically (as beings moving toward unleashed potential), and that could become otherwise than being if each of us lived more transformatively (as beings dwelling within harnessed possibility). Thus, PJ’s epistemology explains how the social reality of difference (e.g., the being/becoming of mental illness, drug dependency, and criminality) is currently reasoned and problematically scripted; its aesthetics makes evident how these present-day renderings, when embraced and deployed as normal and healthy “best practices,” often discipline and domesticate dynamic and transformative human social capital.

How does PJ argue that the above-outlined recognitions and transformations can take place? In part, the answers are based on PJ’s rediagnosis of madness, its deconstruction of citizenship, and its reconstitution of social justice praxis. Each of these issues is very briefly recounted below and, where appropriate and useful, tentatively fitted to the central concerns and curiosities raised, respectively, by Professors Brown and Ward.

Rediagnosing Madness, Deconstructing Citizenship, and Reconstituting Social Justice

Embracing the critical philosophy of PJ—inhabiting the type of radical mindfulness that it promotes—requires a “revolutionary” attitude concerning the madness, citizenship, and social justice relationship. Appropriating this attitude is necessary because the “madness” of captivity (i.e., the society of captives) is sourced in its all-encompassing and mind-numbing ubiquity. Indeed, this madness extends not only to the kept (those who are confined and constrained) but to those who keep them (those who monitor, treat, and correct the kept), regulate them (those who administrate to, educate about, or legislate over the kept), and watch them (those who passively and complacently accept captivity’s normalizing strictures). The harm of this captivity is existential, corporeal, and material in its cultural composition and effects, and it includes harms of reduction (limits on being, forestalling one’s humanity, otherizing) and harms of repression (denials of becoming, foreclosing one’s possibilities, territorializing). These harms thwart human social capital. When the madness that the society of captives represents is reified, then a social pathology, a systemic dis-ease and a condition termed totalizing confinement is fetishized. Stated differently, when harms of reduction and repression are normalized, then the society of captives phenomenon gives way to society’s total captivity. This is the point at which dynamic and transformative human social capital is vanquished for, by, and about one and all. This is the point at which citizenship and social justice appear within consciousness (i.e., the jurisprudence of the mind) as mere shadows of what they could be/become, humanistically, productively, and interdependently.

The principal cultural undertaking of PJ and its philosophy of aesthetics is to conceive of and generate human social capital as freedom, as a more completely liberated jurisprudence of the mind. Retrieving, replicating, and circulating these images holds the nearest promise of overcoming captivity’s madness, and of revolutionizing individual and collective consciousness. These portraits of the social person are much more dynamic in their composition of being and they include representations of the subject as “in-process,” as moving toward unleashed potential. In addition, these images of the self in society are much more transformative in their composition of becoming and they consist of visions of the subject as “situated,” as dwelling within harnessed possibility.

How are these in-process and situated conditions summoned in consciousness, especially in the midst of devastating captivity (Johnson, 2013), that effectively binds and checks “at all levels of self and society” (Brown, 2013, p. 700) existence? For PJ, the answer entails calling upon and assembling ontological will. This is the will-to-power of which Nietzsche (1968) wrote. It emerges much like a fleeting epiphany or a flash of light. It is a sudden instance of clarity made manifest because of (not despite) one’s difference, one’s humanness. It is the moment when living outside of mental illness (Davidson, 2003) or of making good on recovery (Maruna, 2001) means that one reclaims their status (e.g., as patient, as addict, as convict) but does so productively (Saks, 2008), dynamically (Lyng, 2004), and transformatively (Arrigo & Milovanovic, 2009). Indeed, this notion of will-to-power is what makes Johnson’s (2013) story so profound. The recounting and recording of her story, of “I Should Be Dead,” is an existential, corporeal, and material instance of ontological will. By reclaiming the labels assigned to her (even while resisting them), her difference becomes productive (her story is published and disseminated to others), dynamic (the story’s message paints an alternative picture about mental illness, crime, victimization, drug abuse, etc., than is typically portrayed), and transformative (both the story and its message deepen and expand consciousness). When will-to-power is reproduced like this, then habitus (i.e., the horizon of perception, thought, and action; Bourdieu, 1977) is simultaneously shattered and increased.

Reclamation of the sort described above unleashes latent potential in being (as in personal growth) and marshals untapped possibility in becoming (as in collective change). This is the human social project as movement toward experimentation, innovation, and creativity; and as a body (self, institutional, communal) without stasis, categories, or other captivity-generating limits or denials. This is the social person, always and already, as revolutionary (Deleuze, 1983); as being human and doing humanness differently (i.e., another way). When difference is envisioned as such, then the social person (i.e., as being and becoming revolutionary) requires a replacement method of risk management.

As method, PJ considers the question of managing risk by relying on the notion of citizenship. Stated otherwise, the possibility of restoring and the potential of revolutionizing difference occur when PJ’s Aristotelian-derived (1976) normative theory guides the assessment. This theory holds that the embodied practice of excellence (or of living virtuously) is dynamic; it evolves. Cultivating human potential and dwelling within harnessed possibility, then, is about journeying toward and taking up residence within changing habits of character (e.g., living ever more courageously, mercifully, and benevolently). These evolving habits of character when exercised (i.e., conjured and consumed, spoken and inscribed, personified and deployed) hold the nearest power to ignite human social capital, to release us from captivity, and to rediagnose the madness that presently renders one and all no more than the shadows of being and becoming. To be clear, advancing this version of citizenship is a lifelong quest. It is an ongoing pursuit in the service of living ever more humanely, productively, and interdependently as a mutating self-in-society for and about being excellent. This pursuit entails a careful reading (a genealogical deconstruction and de-territorialization; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Foucault, 1998) of the concealed values, obscured interests, and hidden assumptions lodged within the texts that define and regulate the social person’s ontology. For example, legal documents, psychiatric records, release and discharge plans, treatment manuals, and professional codes of conduct are all texts (i.e., systems of thought). The content of these narratives mostly endorses a circumscribed and finite picture about what it means to be in and of society as an ex-offender, a recovering addict, a consumer of psychiatric services, or even as a provider of treatment and corrective services. These portraits often finalize being (Bakhtin, 1982) and foreclose becoming (Deleuze, 1983). This is how the social person is captured (bound and checked) as shadow in consciousness.

There are many questions to ponder in this genealogy of human consciousness (Lacan, 1977, 1981) and its landscape, its jurisprudence, of the mind. In part, Professor Ward anticipates the heterodox methodology that makes the management of risk (the multiplicity of human values, norms, and beliefs) possible in institutional contexts and/or community-based settings. He suggests that a minimalist morality based on relational ethics should structure the clinical treatment and should inform the therapeutic exchange. To this notion, a provisional (temporal, conditional) and positional (circumstantial, intersectional) ethic is recommended. To be in-process and to be situated is to acknowledge how history and culture are constitutive of and interconnected to human social capital. In addition, PJ examines how and for whom notions of citizenship—of moving toward and dwelling within excellence or inhabitable virtues—are communicated through the narratives that classify and correct the social person. This is a reference to PJ’s radical morality and the process by which its philosophy of ethics first unpacks and then diagnoses the quality and extent of captivity that presently limits potential and presently denies possibility in the texts that discipline and domesticate the social person. The purpose of this excursion is to make more explicit how intention, choice, and action could be rendered more fully affirming of mutually generative potential and possibility. Thus, PJ’s philosophy of ethics seeks to reveal how the presence of bad faith and false consciousness are located within the systems of thought that codify and regulate humanness (i.e., difference).

As praxis, PJ’s therapeutic corrective about and treatment prescription for being and becoming excellent dynamically and transformatively—of living ever more differently, productively, and interdependently—extends to and from the kept as well as their keepers, regulators, and watchers. Growing human social capital is an inexorably shared, although unfamiliar, undertaking. It is an uncharted venture into the latent potentialities and untapped possibilities of being and becoming. This strange departure affirms the interactive link between thinking about (imagining the in-and-of society self as more or other) and doing (making a difference because of one’s difference) humanness. This is the crucible in which social justice awaits emergence as transpraxis (Nietzsche, 1968), as the overcoming that could more completely reconstitute and revolutionize social justice for a people yet to come, for a people yet to be (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The possibility of instantiating this change (e.g., of growing individual well-being, communal good, and collective accord dynamically and transformatively) begins as an exercise in critique (i.e., PJ’s methodological solution).

On the question of captivity, risk management, and harm, the critique considers how the in-process and situated social person intends, chooses, and acts justly. This is thinking about and doing humanness as otherwise than what is—as continually moving toward and settling within signification that dignifies and affirms difference virtuously, treats and heals the harms of captivity dynamically, and restores and transforms one and all innovatively. This praxis strategy is about overcoming the conditions of captivity (i.e., bad faith and false consciousness) that engender harm (reductive limits on being, repressive denials of becoming). For PJ, transcending these conditions entails an evaluation of how and for whom justice is symbolized (What are the images that dominate consciousness on matters of mental health and correctional system treatment and programming?), narrated (Which texts inform the story of difference, of risk, within institutional settings and/or community-based contexts?), practiced (Whose version of responsibility, dangerousness, treatment-resistant, incompetent, etc., prevails intrapsychically, interpersonally, and collectively?), and reproduced (How does the dissemination of these symbolizations, narrations, and practices emancipate ontology for one and all?). This is the journey of thinking about and doing social justice as transpraxis, as an unfinished and ever-freeing expedition, and as human social capital unleashed and harnessed ever more humanely, productively, and interdependently. Commencing this journey anticipates all those within the society of captives who make meaning, discern choice, reach judgment, and undertake action as imprisoned social beings.