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

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 to up on a on both the of the or S as as his diagnosis as the of his this is to that he is, of not defined by (or reduced his diagnosis, but also that the manic S, the one who at an and begin to be as and who to be by a of to its also one who lives in this world and has been by who is by this world and in it. 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