An otherwise classroom and a diagnosis, or, the preciousness of a pause

Abstract

It was late September last year. I was a few weeks into a graduate seminar that had quickly turned into one of my favorites. Anthropology of the Otherwise taught by Dr Naisargi Dave at the University of Toronto over the Fall of 2022. Drawing on the concept of “otherwise worlds” by Elizabeth Povinelli (2012), the seminar explored what is not there yet, and what might be1, the world as it is and it is becoming, and what political and ethical alternatives exist in worlds that are determined to deplete and exhaust. Some thinkers, some teachers, some books, and some classmates make it possible to truly inhabit and practice the creative pulse of thought; they take us to places we did not know exist—they create places. The otherwise seminar was one of those experiences, taking me to a different place each week. But in some ways, also the same—from another route, another angle, another field of view and possibility, all in wonderful company. Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return one week. Political manifestos, another. Freud and psychoanalysis in the middle. Around the same time, another kind of world-making was underway in my life. A loved one who had been a cherished presence for many years and lived in another continent (let's call him Sunflower—or just S, oh the fear of not being taken seriously!) was starting to act in ways that I could not comprehend. I had known and loved S for many years. More importantly, I liked him very much. But I had begun to find it straining to like him. I would find out 3 months later that these were the beginnings of what would be diagnosed as S's “first manic episode”. I would make an emergency visit to India and make possible his “forced sedation” and hospitalization at a psychiatric facility. In what follows, I write about the coming in contact of these two moments—the otherwise classroom and S's diagnosis, and how this serendipitous contact aided what can sometimes appear to be the most difficult thing to do—just getting by, possibly as an otherwise practice and an ethic of alongside-ness. Here, I think about that (ongoing) moment and some questions it raises about ethical and political ways of “becoming” in the world alongside one another. In doing so, I think about what it means to take care of each another and what is there to do, if anything at all, when we are exhausted—by diagnosis, by caregiving, by the limits that an oppressive world forces upon us, and, perhaps by the limits of politics and ethics themselves? Can an otherwise world emerge amid such exhaustion and what might it look like? For better or for worse, I have often seen the world through my classroom notes (what a privilege to have inhabited classrooms that make that possible!). In the face of a diagnosis that felt totalizing and all-engulfing, the body (re)turned, almost intuitively, to the otherwise classroom experience where, as if, presciently enough, the question at stake was: How to register context and history without letting them ingest us? How to get by and make room for otherwise narratives and contexts to emerge when a deterministic context (in this case, the context of the diagnosis) seeks to do the opposite: to limit the possibility of emergence, to fix (Dave, 2023). In entering into a retrospective conversation with the otherwise classroom and an ongoing experience of living alongside S as he lives “under the description of manic depression” (Martin 2009), I think somewhat obliquely, with two related questions raised by Elizabeth Povinelli in her 2012 essay “The Will to be Otherwise/ The Effort of Endurance”—Where does an otherwise world (what Foucault calls autrement) emerge from? And significantly, what “political and theoretical weight” can be given to the “exhausting conditions” of the spaces in and against which the otherwise emerges? These questions are the edifice of my reflection on politics and ethics of diagnosis and caregiving, the effort they call for, and what textures of the otherwise might emerge amidst such effort. Ex·​haus·​tion: the act or process of exhausting; the state of being exhausted; neurosis following overstrain or overexertion (as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary). Thirteen days of Sunflower's hospitalization had passed. We were allowed no meetings or communication with him. Every two days, a nurse would call with a general update— “He is sleeping a lot”. “He is asking for you”. “He wants his phone and laptop”. “He asked for a notebook—we have given him one”. “You can't meet him yet”. “He is cutting out newspaper clippings and collecting them in a bag”. “He did not eat lunch today”. “He is asking for you”. How did we get here? Did it all begin when S left from India on a student exchange program to Germany? It had felt like an escape to him, even if a short-lived one. He was so happy. He, in fact, had been the first one to notice that his happiness felt “a bit excessive”. Before leaving for Germany, S had been pursuing his master's in cinematography at a “highly reputed” university in India. Like many other public institutions that have been systematically dismantled by the ruling Hindu fascist dispensation, this institute too had witnessed multiple attacks on its autonomy, leadership, curriculum etc.2 There were also various complex issues endemic to the institute and the larger structure it inhabited, which preceded and exceeded the Hindu nationalist attacks. Students had been organizing multiple strikes and protests over the years since 2015—against the hijacking of the institute by the Hindu nationalist government, the lack of important resources including equipment and technical staff, unsafe working conditions for students resulting in tragic accidents, improper and arbitrary course plans, exclusionary admission and hiring policies, indefinitely delayed timelines. S, like many others, had started feeling consumed and trapped with no view of an exit. His master's degree that was supposed to have ended in 2020 was still ongoing in late 2022. And, two of his friends had died by suicide on the residential campus, within a span of a few months—all shortly before his exchange program. Some version of this essay can be written as an ethnography of exhaustion. Perhaps, S's mania was an expression of his exhaustion. Perhaps, it was his body's rebellion against this very exhaustion—its own language of pausing. But this, I wonder in hindsight. While Sunflower was at the hospital, I was afraid of another kind of exhaustion—one that can stem from diagnosis and treatment. Separated from S and left to frantically peruse overwhelming amount of literature, I wondered what it means to be labeled and reduced by diagnosis. On especially bad days, I let the dark corners of the internet sink me into debilitating anxieties of the side-effects of Lithium and Risperdal. I may also have been haunted by the guilt of acting on “behalf of” S. Didn't S keep saying how happy he was? Was it right for me to get him hospitalized against his will? Can I get “will” and “consent” to mean something else here? There seemed to be a cruelty, as necessary as the doctors said it was, in “treating” precisely that which felt like happiness to Sunflower—something he was just beginning to feel after a long, long time. That guilt had become an ever-present knot in the chest. Then, there were days of anger, frustration, and resentment. Am I tied by the determinism, burden, and finality of S's diagnosis too? When will I go back to my life? What will happen to all my new beginnings and my recently-started PhD? Perhaps, I was afraid. Of my own exhaustion. As time has passed, some of these questions have morphed into a different texture. In the following sections, I jump between the otherwise classroom and the context of Sunflower's manic depression to pose three related questions about an exhausting and yet, an emerging otherwise world. These are questions about living as political and ethical subjects—about the role of closure and conversation as ethico-political precondition, and the preciousness of a pause in a world that demands that we be knowing, speaking subjects. In The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), Fred Moten and Stefano Harney ask what lies beyond, beneath, despite and amidst broken institutions—the university, the prison, the settlement (let us add here, the hospital). Their answer—the “undercommons” is conceived as a “thought of an outside, a nonplace […]—the nonplace that must be thought outside to be sensed inside” (39). Always in hiding and eluding knowability or governability, the undercommons is inhabited by the marginal and the otherwise. I want to dwell here on just one aspect of the undercommons: its committed resistance to two related, dearly-held entities: politics and critique. Moten and Harney argue that with an already-defined “subject” and “principle of decision” (2013,18), “politics” encloses and regulates that which must flourish. Following a similar cartography of determinism, “critique endangers the sociality it is supposed to defend” (19)—it pins down and fixes that which is moving. The potential of the undercommons lies in its refusal to be pinned down. “Every time it tries to represent our will, we're unwilling. Every time it tries to take root, we're gone (because we're already here, moving)” (ibid,19). The Undercommons, thus, is “wary of critique” and a determinate “politics” (ibid, 38). A reading of Undercommons in the otherwise classroom had prompted reflection on dominant idioms of doing politics. A question that emerged for me throughout the seminar, then, had to do with the limits of imagining conversation as the precondition for or a necessary part of doing politics—What is lost in imagining conversation (talking to, talking across/despite difference, speaking up and other such metaphors for political speech) as the infrastructure on which politics is built? What would it mean to think of an otherwise world that is neither swallowed by the fantasy and the fatigue of tireless conversation nor diminished by its erasure or impossibility? Naisargi Dave (2023) would perhaps respond with “Indifference to difference”—that is, an ethic of living with the other that does not cannibalize its otherness and does not anchor itself in the anthropological desire for difference. Indifference to difference, she writes, is “an indifference to the thatness of others: not acquiring, not desiring, not appalled, not in thrall, not celebrating, not hankering, not assimilating, not repairing, not normalizing, not consuming, not anthropologizing, not staring” (2023: 1). Neither Moten and Harney's critique of “politics and critique” nor Dave's ethic of “indifference to difference” are a call for political insularity—far from it. They are both considerations of and protests against the normalizing impulse of politics. For Moten and Harney, it is a kind of “anti-politics”; for Dave, it is what she calls the “depolitical”: “an ongoing refusal to be determined, decided for, enclosed, made useful, or made sensible through and for lines of force” (2023, 84). When confronted with caregiving (or simply living alongside), in the context of manic depression, I find myself thinking with Moten and Harney's critique of the political and Dave's ethic of “indifference to the thatness of the other”—both, I think, would invite a questioning of the centrality of conversation in the imagination of a political and ethical otherwise. In the early days of navigating the experience, I saw some version of this “indifference” in one of my companions in this experience—S's mother. On many days, between arranging for the hospital bills and future course of action, we talked about illness, parenting, caregiving, substance abuse, and other things that one or both of us had been confronted with, without warning. The contrast in our approaches made apparent the difference in our languages: mine was a response of words (too many words—aimed at understanding, resolving, trying to undo professional and financial damages, to iron out creases; later, aimed at eliciting words from S too) and hers was a language of silence. On days when I yelled and fought her wisdom with my “I know better” attitude, she would grow quieter. Not as a mark of anger or some vengeful passive aggressiveness but as a language of care, to protect herself and even me, from the wound of words. I envied her a little. Silence didn't always come easily to me. The S who was permitted to leave the hospital after 15 days was said to have “significantly improved with still poor insight”. In a world that seemed to have been taken over by mood charts and mood-monitoring apps, second and third and fourth consultations with psychiatrists, therapy for S and his caregivers, support groups, medication, more medication to mitigate side effects of earlier medication, conversation really failed S and I. Conversation failed, or at least proved deeply inadequate, not in the least because it became impossible to have a “reasonable conversation” but precisely because conversation as ethical and political precondition, presumes a certain notion of “reason” and “rational”. And the determinative kernel of conversation is what the “manic S” exposed. Often, conversation aims to resolve, it seeks closure and determinacy via language. Like diagnosis? Can conversation inhabit the folds of uncertainty between posing or identifying a problem (diagnosis) and solving it away (treatment)? Far from fully rejecting conversation as a cherished way of doing, I want to think here with ethics and politics that inhabit what Povinelli calls the pause or interval, what Deleuze and Parnet (2007) think of as “stuttering in one's own language” and what King, Navarro, and Smith call speaking with “amateur-ness” King et al.. (2020). For my part, in practice, this has begun to translate into leaving S alone. Out of respect for his solitude. This also means slowly learning to give up on a stubborn insistence on both the idea of the “pre-mania” or “pre- bipolar” S as well as his diagnosis as the legitimate metric of his personhood. To learn this is to learn that he is, of course, not defined by (or reduced to) his diagnosis, but also that the manic S, the one who writes at an urgent pace, whose hurt and joy begin to be articulated as music and film scripts, who seems to be driven by a feverish angst of productivity only to then collapse under its burden—is also Sunflower, one who lives in this world and has been produced by it, who is exhausted in/ by this world and strives in it. He is not a crisis to be resolved in the here and now by the weight of conversation. S is learning to live in a world that asks him to turn his mood and mind into a number or emoticon on an app and monitors the shifts in medication. He is constantly haunted by well-wishers’ “how are you feeling?”. This is a world of management of feeling, which seeks to bring some measure of predictability into a not-fully knowable process. Through this process, both Sunflower and I have wondered about another kind of exhaustion—one that I have briefly alluded to earlier –the exhaustion from repair. That which is meant to repair—the psychiatric ward, the medicine, the monitoring apps—perhaps also cause their own scars? In the world of capital, relief can not only be capitalized to cause more injury but injury itself can be made to look like respite. In Bipolar Expeditions, anthropologist Emily Martin (2009) discusses the perverse fascination that American society has with manic behavior and how individuals with mania are harnessed to “stoke the economy”. In certain settings in the US, specialty firms teach people how to be manic in order to be more productive (2009, 53). In his talk titled “More than a Manifesto: A Poet's Essay” (part of the otherwise syllabus) Fred Moten (2018)3, says that critique can sometimes do what chemotherapy (and I add, diagnosis) does—burning that which is meant to be repaired. Is it cancer or chemo? Is it bipolar or lithium? Is it the fatigue of oppression or the weight of political struggle? How is the otherwise to be imagined in such a world? The question of the place of exhaustion and rest owes its formulation, in part, to Povinelli's discussion of “the relationship between willful curiosity and risk, potentiality and exhaustion” (2012, 454). Perhaps, one could invert the same question to ask, and that might be truer to the spirit of Povinelli's inquiry—will we be exhausted in/ by the otherwise world? In sitting with Foucault's “stubborn questions” (ibid, 471) about the sources of an otherwise world, Povinelli argues that the otherwise demands an endurance of risk of subjectification and worldliness. Drawing upon American pragmatists like William James and Charles Sanders Peirce who foreground this endurance, she underlines thought as the “effort of attention”. It is this thought that forms the precondition of ethical action. Thought is effort as life-work, directed as ethical action towards transformation of the self and what Povinelli describes as breaking the “clerical hold of thought and refashioning it as experiment on the self in the world” (ibid, 472). The pragmatists, especially James, thinks of this self-experimentation as an ethic of constantly “trying out” and as Povinelli notes, this “trying” shares a “curious symmetry” with Foucault's ascesis (ibid). I want to think briefly with this politics of thought that Povinelli sketches out for us via Foucault, James and Peirce (also, Agamben). To cultivate a politics of thought, of ethical action directed first and foremost towards the self, of the effort of trying things, is also to note that the possibilities of an otherwise world emerge from within the exhausting conditions of the world. This is perhaps what Dave calls “a relation of unfolding immanence” (Dave, 2023, 7). My sense is, and I have hinted above, that this immanent action which is crucial to Moten and Harney's “undercommons”, Dave's “indifference to difference” and the pragmatists’ “thought as effort” is constantly confronted with (even, exhausted by) the limits and injuries of conversation as ethical and political action; the potential of its freedom emerges from the precious pause. Sunflower's mania has been created by this world—its fascist, capital-driven, productivist logics. But as he continues to show in his everyday living, it is by quietly residing within the folds of this very world that multiple other worlds emerge. At several points through the course of the initial months when very little seemed to be making sense, I found asking myself: Do I really know Sunflower? Where does S end and the episode begin? Where does maleness and caste end, and manic depression begin? Or does the self exist precisely to make the episode consistent?4 Perhaps, all my conversations with him and with friends were an attempt to align his diagnosis with my existing knowledge of him. Now, however, I am trying to think through another kind of ethical endeavor: one that does not trace its route and cartography based on the lines of already-existing knowledge of another and is open to creating its own new knowledges, contexts, and conversations. What does living alongside Sunflower look like, if the stuff of our relation is constituted not by knowledge of one another but what psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (2012) calls “not knowing” and the possibility of a “something else” it generates. This “something else” resonates again with Dave's ethic of “indifference to difference” which does not owe fidelity to any one context or any one frame of knowledge. She points out that contexts (which we think of as indispensable, already-existing preconditions for knowledges) fix and determine, and thus, in telling us what matters, they tell us that certain other things don't matter at all (Dave, 2019). Calls for context also become calls for ethical and political consistency—“to normalize, to exhaust, and to restore otherwise gestures to existing, familiar, lines of force” (Dave, 2023, 75). In her critique of context and thus, consistency, thus lies another vision of politics. If the otherwise can move across contexts, refusing to be tamed by the demands for consistency, what is its tense? Very early on, with the curve of Sunflower's manic depression, it emerged that our lives might straddle between what emerges from the here and now (we act a certain way in a certain moment because what else is there to do?—my emergency travel to India on a 28-h flight, my decision to get him hospitalized despite his strong protest) and is open to deferral to an unknown future. Deferral, not necessarily as an investment in a better future but a willingness to not demand everything instantly, from the (context of the) present. The temporality of an otherwise world or a will for an otherwise life mimics the temporality of uncertainty—or of Phillip's “not knowing” and Dave's “depolitical”. It is akin to what James calls the “unfinished world” which “has a future and is yet uncompleted”. What Dave described in the otherwise classroom as the “double emptiness” of “what is not there yet and what might be”5. What Ben Lerner (2016) calls (in a different context—of poetic failure) as learning to live in the space between what one is moved to do and what one can do. After spending a few months in India, I returned to my other life in North America. Sunflower joined me about 3 months later. To very different degrees and in different ways, we are both (learning to) recalibrate our lives and ecosystems. While attending to the pragmatics of building a life in a new country—learning its ways, finding work etc., Sunflower walks a lot, watches dogs play, practices tennis, cooks, and always pauses to look at the shiny, black squirrels on his way to anywhere. He talks about missing parts of his manic self and how it gave him something that life seemed to have stolen from him. He does the needful, as instructed by his doctor, to prevent/manage another episode. They have labeled him a “very stable patient”. With some time having passed, we both try to see the episode through each other's eyes. “Trying out”, getting by, living alongside, dwelling in the interval. I try to be what Winnicott et al. (1986) call the “good enough” caregiver—not perfect, not consistent, hopefully not ingested, just “good enough”. Depending on the emphasis and the chosen frames of writing and reading, this piece can be read as a caregiver's account. Or perhaps, an ethnography of broken institutions. Perhaps, a rumination on what forms of relationality become possible when we think of the alongside-ness of joy and grief, annihilation and proliferation, crisis and the ordinary. Importantly, an ode to an otherwise classroom. With shifts in rhythms, it can be an account of the unholy union of fascism and capitalism and what they do to personhoods. Far from being conclusive, this piece wants to dwell in an unfinished, unfolding world that refuses to be contained by the certainty and determinacy of conversation, knowledge, context, politics, ethics—above all, their diagnostic and curative impulse. Refusing exhaustion neither by the weight of the present nor tethered to the hopes of a better future, it wants to dwell in an in-between non-place, a pause, or a stutter, that doesn't feel obligated to finality, closure, or certainty. This silent dwelling seems necessary to the politics of thought and ethical self-transformation. After all, it is the humility of the pause that vitalizes the effort and creates what Winnicott may call a “happy enough” life. This piece owes its existence to the discussions and readings in the Otherwise seminar. It's very first draft was written as a paper for the seminar. Thank you, Professor Naisargi Dave, for the inspiring seminar and feedback. I am grateful to all my otherwise classmates, especially Muntasir Chowdhury, Noha Fikry, Diana Richani, Jehuda Tjahjadi, Samuel Huard and Louis Plottel. Thank you to the reviewers and editors whose incredible feedback helped me sharpen this piece, particularly around exhaustion.