Free Bipolar Expeditions by Emily Martin

inside the person where it “assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject’s self identity.” 10 The circle closes if a subject’s enactment of a norm consolidates the norm’s apparently unchangeable reality. The circle opens if the subject feels at odds with the norm and takes action to subvert it. “Subjectivity” involves both whatever places a person occupies in the system of categories the culture provides, and whatever senses of identity the person has about those places.
    The case that concerns me, the designation of rationality or irrationality, is not necessarily raised for every person the way gender is. One does not announce at birth, “It’s a rational human being!” But when one’s rationality does become an issue, through one’s own experience or the observations of others, the disciplines of psychiatry and biomedicine offer a set of categories of health and illness in terms of which a person can be described, for example, as “manic depressive.” When this term was applied to me, I came to identify myself as “a manicdepressive person,” thus incorporating the tenets of this knowledge inside myself. But the circularity between norms and subject formation that Butler and Foucault stress leads to an uneasy conclusion in the case of mental illness. Since the category manic depression denotes an irrational condition, I appear to be trapped in a circular process that robs me of the ability to be a subject at all: once I occupy the subject position of the irrational, my actions will always be interpreted as irrational, no matter how much I protest.
    To understand such a trap ethnographically, we need accounts of social life that refer not only to language but also to actions, ideas, dreams, institutions, roles, objects, exchanges, memories, expressions, gestures, and a multitude of other socially inflected practices. 11 If we broaden and deepen the social contexts in which we explore subjectivity, we will discover gaps, slips, and sidelines similar to those Freud found in the psyche, famously calling their emanations “the psychopathology of everyday life.” Being able to see such gaps is important because they contain places where subjection fails to hold. Butler acknowledges that because a person’s enactment of a norm such as femininity never completely instantiates the norm itself, institutions and authorities must make repeated efforts to shore up the norm and strengthen its hold. Just as the gender norms are, in Butler’s phrase, “haunted by their own inefficacy,” 12 I would argue that the rational norm is haunted by signs of incompleteness, inconsistency, and conflict.
    We can describe social practices in such a way that these kinds of gaps and slippages take social rather than psychic form. Discursive psychology, an approach to the analysis of language in its social context, conceptualizes mental traits and dispositions as accomplishments that we achieve through social interaction. The argument is that we can understand psychological phenomena as brought about through social, linguistic activity instead of through private, inner processes within the individual. Accordingly, discursive psychologists argue that psychology should be based on the study of this outward activity rather than on hypothetical, and essentially unobservable, inner states. 13 The sociologist Avery Gordon has pointed to the important role of repressed, mysterious forces that have no obvious cause yet have great impact on social life. These forces could be seen not as inborn urges beyond or outside language but instead as a constitutive resource of language, the social facts we do not want to recognize pushing into awareness. 14 This would mean that dark, repressed forces in human life need not be hidden only in the psyche: they may be hidden within public social processes including language. Concealment could take place socially, through social