The madness that is the world:young activists' emotional reasoning and their participation in a local Occupy movement

The focus of this paper is young people’s participation in the Occupy protest movement that emerged in the early autumn of 2011. Its concern is with the emotional dimensions of this and in particular the significance of emotions to the reasoning of young people who came to commit significant time and energy to the movement. Its starting point is the critique of emotions as narrowly subjective, whereby the passions that events like Occupy arouse are treated as beyond the scope of human reason. The rightful rejection of this reductionist argument has given rise to an interest in under- standings of the emotional content of social and political protest as normatively con- stituted, but this paper seeks a different perspective by arguing that the emotions of Occupy activists can be regarded as a reasonable force. It does so by discussing find- ings from long-term qualitative research with a Local Occupy movement somewhere in England and Wales. Using the arguments of social realists, the paper explores this data to examine why things matter sufficiently for young people to care about them and how the emotional force that this involves constitutes an indispensable source of reason in young activists’ decisions to become involved in Local Occupy.

'Listen to my madness':understanding the experiences of people with serious mental illness

This article explores the salience of disability theory for understanding the experiences of people with serious mental illness. Drawing on data from a focus group study, we suggest that users experience both impairment (as embodied irrationality) which can, in itself, be oppressive, and also have to manage their lives within a largely disabling society. We outline some of the strategies adopted by users to manage their situation and ensure they access and receive health services, and illustrate how these are a result of the complex relationship between disability and impairment. We suggest that using a framework of the social model of disability provides a useful way of understanding and making sense of the experience of users with serious mental illness. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd/Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness 2005.

Die Sprache des Wahnsinns. Harald Kaas und sein Erzählband ‘Uhren und Meere’:Harald Kaas and his short story collection 'watches and seas'

This essay examines the only book published by the late Harald Kaas. His collection of short stories Uhren und Meere (1979), dealing with depictions of psycho-pathological states of mind, gained Kaas a short-lived notoriety as he himself was a certified schizophrenic possessing first-hand experience of psychiatric treatment. This essay sets out to investigate whether or to what extent the stories in Uhren und Meere can be understood as a document of the language of madness. It concludes that despite the biographical dimension of his schizophrenic experience, Kaas’s texts fail to voice an as it were unadulterated language of madness. However, when read in conjunction with his quasi-poetological interview statements, it is possible to determine the very nature of madness as a collapse of a logical system of language. Meaning that language cannot actively be used to express madness, while at the same time madness can express itself in a language that we necessarily fail to understand. The language of madness manifests itself as the madness of language.