Melina Salvador
To inhabit the full meaning and texture of LRA life-worlds, one must move beyond conventional notions of reason.
Against Humanity, 145
After Sam’s disappearance, I wanted to spend some time with him, so I picked up his book. It had not occurred to me to think with Against Humanity for my work, mostly because my fieldwork in US outpatient psychiatry clinics felt so far from his. But reading from this new space, one where I was desperately trying to finish my dissertation and Sam was so suddenly gone, the distance between our fieldwork felt less expansive. Ever conscientious of the vastly different geographic, political and historical settings of our fieldwork, I spent some time thinking through what I observed in early psychosis clinics in the US with Sam’s critique of the concept of humanity. My approach, more grief than method, is an experiment in academic companionship premised on friendship rather than field.
Acting more fine
I am in a university-based psychiatric clinic in the United States observing an early psychosis intake assessment for a teenage woman I will call Alice. The clinician, Nancy, is an expert in the identification and treatment of early psychosis. Alice smiles warmly as we are introduced. Many of Alice’s presenting concerns are culturally congruent to her social environment. She feels judged for being fat, for having acne. She worries about the possibility of being shot at school, of being raped.
At one-point Alice and Nancy begin talking about Alice’s sense that her life is a TV show. Nancy asks how sure she is of this sense. Alice responds, “seventy percent.”
Nancy: Anything you do to alter your behavior?
Alice: Act more fine
Alice compares it to how she is acting during the psychiatric interview itself. She tells us that she is taking care to not have us see her chew her nails or fidget. She is resisting the urge to check to make sure her phone is not recording her. These actions would make her seem not fine.
She tells us she “acts more fine” when she is experiencing psychosis. Nancy acknowledges in a joking tone, “note to self, if Alice is acting fine, she is likely not doing great.” Alice laughs just long enough to let us know she got the joke, but not long enough to suggest that the summary was untrue.
Nancy then asks Alice about her fear of being sexually assaulted. Alice describes it as “just a womanly kind of fear.” Nancy later follows up, “do you feel like we are going to rape you?”
Alice: Kinda
My stomach sinks as I am implicated as a perpetrator. I would never. I want her to feel safe. I want to tell her she is safe. And yet the impossibility of me as rapist leaves no other option but for Alice’s perception to be unreasonable. Such an outright refusal is problematic because as truth, it renders her experience false, and in the context of early psychosis, potentially paranoid. Alice could just be wrong. But that does nothing to acknowledge the fear she feels. From this position, for her to be sane, I must be, at least potentially, a monster—it’s her humanity or mine, and mine was never going to be in question in the same way.
From a space of mournful reading, Sam inspires me to start somewhere else, to try to disrupt the traps of humanity. What would it mean to take up the incongruity he describes, to look for social connection forged through violence, not in refusal of it? Could I act more fine beside Alice, be fine and not fine—get beyond diagnosis in hope of understanding? As I re-read Against Humanity, I had a sense of the possibility for multiple inchoate and ambivalent selves, not only for Alice but also for me.
Against Humanity pushes beyond the limits of humanity, including those imposed by the human’s definition as animal rationale. Sam’s analysis of the contradictory logics of members of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) finds both relativism and anti-relativism lacking. This lack, he explains, is based on what they share, being founded on the “grounds of reason.” This foundation, no matter how it is applied, implies a sameness through humanity casting particular logics as either acceptable as versions of the multiple ways of being human or as terms for refusing humanity.
Sam instead places LRA logics outside the sameness of (anti)relativism, as something other than a version or refusal of humanity. Sam shows how LRA life-worlds cannot be understood through the un/reason binary. He argues that by holding rational-scientific and irrational-magical logics together (e.g., modern and prophetic time), the LRA transcend them both. Such holding renders diagnosis of their humanity ill-conceived by destabilizing the very foundation on which the concept is upheld. To understand, one must move beyond conventional notions of reason.
From beyond, maybe Alice’s “more fine” can be seen as a reaction to, in Sam’s words, the demands of the world itself–the world where it is not at all unimaginable that Alice will be sexually assaulted or shot at school. Acting more fine does not hide Alice’s madness, nor does it become a reasonable response to a mad world. Instead, it helps challenge normative notions of human subjectivity by giving us a way to incongruently inhabit this world while maintaining a rebellious hope that it might someday be different.
Works Cited:
Dubal, Sam. 2018. Against Humanity: Lessons from the Lord’s Resistance Army. Oakland: University of California Press.