| Echoing Robert Frost's critique of the mental health metaphor in his essay "Education by Poetry," "The Subject of Schizophrenia: Anamnesis of a Metaphor" designates just how far a metaphor can travel before it "breaks down somewhere." This thesis was designed to catalogue the uses and abuses of metaphors of schizophrenia. It focuses on such practices in popular culture and media as well as on those of modernist and postmodernist aesthetics. Excerpts from transcripts of interviews with people with schizophrenia are woven into the body of the thesis in order include people with schizophrenia---albeit anonymously---in the discussion. Analysing the etiology of the term "schizophrenia," this dissertation scrutinizes the rhetoric of modern clinical research as regards to its own history of reliance on the use of technological metaphors for the "mind." Tracing the paradoxical path(s) of the alternately demonized and romanticized "Outsider" artist, nontraditional agency and authorship is examined as it appears in contemporary media, medical rhetoric, critical theory, experimental modernism (Breton, Yeats, Artaud), and exhibitions of art brut.;The argument is made in "The Subject of Schizophrenia" that several critics of late capitalism such as Deleuze and Guattari have borrowed from the Romantic legacy that tends to conflate notions of creativity, madness, genius, and freedom. In the realm of popular culture, our century has been diagnosed as suffering a kind of "schizophrenia," which is used to explain all sorts of disparate contemporary phenomena from duplicitous advertising techniques to a sense of radical fragmentation and prosthetic augmentation by technology and computers. In short, when "schizophrenia" is metaphorically invoked, what one actually confronts is often a generalized and unresolved sense of modern malaise. However, this disease also has come to represent the unassimilable, uncontrollable mind---the mind that cannot be appropriated for commercial use. The metaphorical deployment of schizophrenia, as that of any disease, often constitutes an act of catachresis. Furthermore, when used as a metaphor, schizophrenia will tend to accentuate the state of aporia and ambiguity with which the twentieth-century subject is often confronted. |
