killer professors from outer space

Music: Sade: Soldier for Love (2010)

It's been such a dizzingly busy weekend that I only learned recently about Prof. Amy Bishop's shooting rampage last week at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. For the three of you like me who didn't hear the details, this apparently brilliant but "socially awkward" biology professor shot and killed numerous colleagues who voted against her bid for tenure (ok, is it just me, or does she seem a bit old or late in the game to be up for tenure just now?). Having just went through the process, I can understand how anxiety about promotion and security can lead one to fantasize---but for the life of me I cannot understand how one can turn life into a video game. Apparently after Bishop killed a number of her colleagues she spoke on the phone with her husband and confirmed "date night" was still a go.

WTF? Clearly these colleagues were not people to Bishop. I can understand getting really crazy about one person who upset you---even though I could never understand wanting to kill someone. But she shot multiple people---it's paranoia on a stick.

Since I'm knee-deep in reading Lacan's thoughts about object relations theory for our graduate seminar on "The Object," it's tough not to think about Bishop's killing spree in relation to psychosis. Lacan actually came to psychoanalysis because he was obsessed with understanding psychosis---what it is, how it happens, how to explain it. Lacan eventually defined psychosis structurally as a foreclosure of the paternal metaphor. I won't go into all of that---there's a lot in the blog archives about it---except to say there are both a biological and a cultural explanations. There's no question Bishop has a problem, and she has a long, documented history of having problems that reek of psychosis. What I'm interested in, however, is the kind of cultural psychosis that does to Bishop what she has done to her victims: turn them into objects to love or destroy for satisfaction.

That is to say, there's something to say about the type of system that is productive of psychosis. Bracketing for the moment this person was definitely off, the context nevertheless evoked a certain violent response. Lately we've been hearing a great deal about violence in the academy---psychotic violence. Is there something about the scholastic setting that is productive of psychosis? The reward system of the academy (versus, say, the corporate sector)?

Bracketing Lacan for the moment, we can all agree---at least semantically---that psychosis means a loss of contact or relation with "reality." I think the general definition is something like this: a psychotic person is someone who is so emotionally and psychologically warped that he or she loses touch with "reality," when reality is something like that most people have consensus about as being "real." For the psychotic, other people are akin to objects that are not real. It's like a childhood fantasy in which the child imagines its parents and others are robots programmed to "test" him or her. I'm thinking of The Truman Show and films such as this, when other people are reduced to characters in one's "show." I cannot confess to ever being psychotic (well, there was some LSD experimentation in my teen years . . . ), but I think I can smell it when it's around. Clinically Bishop may or may not be psychotic, but it certainly seems like she embodies all the characteristics of the basic definition.

I was reading the second seminar of Lacan today, and in the lecture in which he advances the conception of "the Big Other," his opening provocation is a question: why are subjects not planets? The answer is that plants do not have mouths. This is to say many things, however, one of them is the predictability of a planets orbit---they are not dynamic bodies that move and change in complex and sometimes unpredictable ways, much like human speech. While it's only implied, Lacan's suggestion seems to be that psychosis reduces the Other to so many orbiting planets. The psychotic reduces others to mere bodies occupying space.

What I'm thinking about is how various institutional contexts reduce folks to objects orbiting in space, as if they did not have the capacity to speak. Of course, this is Marx's critique of the capitalist; this also is Heidegger's worry about the "standing stock" produced by "technology." The ultimate symbol of evil from my childhood was Darth Vader and the Death Star, a planet that didn't have a mouth, but rather a laser that destroyed other planets. Psychosis papers over the mouth of the other, forcing it into a false predictability.

Just thinking aloud here, and I really don't have a point or argument (per usual). Still, as I contemplate the horror of this troubled professor's actions---and what "tenure" apparently meant to her---I'm also caused to think about the ways in which the academy can encourage psychosis: yes, she was not right "in the head," but still, were there scenic triggers? There's something about the way in which the academy advances a family metaphor in order to mask an increasingly corporate mentality that leads people to unhealthy decisions.

I really don't know what to think, and I debated whether or not to post my confusion/indecision. I just know that by reducing this person's acting-out to her individual psychosis, we may be overlooking a larger, systemic psychosis of which this acting-out is an expression. I'll keep thinking . . . .