II
In search of a general anchor, I’m going to begin with what transpersonal psychologist (and acid guru) Stanislav Grof calls ‘non-ordinary states of consciousness’ (NOSC). In an ordinary state of consciousness most of us are capable of making sense through language. There is a way to speak. A way to write as well. In ordinary states the sensibility of language is all pervasive, reflecting the fact that to be human is generally to be with language; society entering the individual as the individual enters the world of symbolic speech, “It is the world of words that creates the world of things.”4 However in a NOSC such as psychosis formal symbolic structures tend to fracture and crumble away. Language and meaning are pushed to their very limits by the psychotic (and sometimes well beyond…). In as much as the psychotic becomes detached from a normative sense of self and world, so her language also opens out to new aleatory significations.
Now psychosis is just one example of a NOSC. We can cite numerous other situations of language breaking NOSC, including psychedelic experience, dream states, religious ecstasies (with their glossolaliac potential), ascetic practices, meditation, hypnosis and various states of brain damage, to name just a few. For sake of ease though – ever conscious of my cluster-fuck capacity – I’m going to stick just with psychosis here, leaving extended comparison open for the afore mentioned future texts in this vein.
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