Indian Madness

Abstract

Schizophrenia in contemporary American culture is linked by Leslie Fiedler to the archetype of Indian and White, a drama staged at the interface of geographical and psychological frontiers. The “madness” of the frontiersman, both as archetype and resistance-paradigm to The Institution, seemed to represent an escape from history; but his sanity, within history, has been described by Richard Slotkin as a mythopoesis which produced a hero precariously balanced between European and Indian: myth becomes ideology, directly transferred into imperialist power structures ranging from economic exploitation to genocide.

The fictional character of the cogito now clear, we can begin to reread the “renegade’s” resistance to the cogito’s disciplinary process of institutional adjustment. As the open space of madness yet subject to the shrinkage of rationalizing enclosure, the frontier mirrors in a wild park Michel Foucault’s histories of prisons and insane asylums.

Gesturing dada and frontier life-styles, the sixties’ counter-culture sought to flood Western ego-consciousness with madness. Jürgen Peper is pessimistic; the technocratic mind will always co-opt the renegade. Recourse in the shamanism of Carlos Castaneda? Beyond analytic reductionism, the shaman, don Juan, provides us with metaphors of movement in fictional space-time, strategies of survival and resistance to institutional coercion.

But resistance as the evasions of meaning, Derrida’s or don Juan’s play/experience, has its dangers. The critic as cultural frontiersman sketches Denkmodelle — mere intellectual lean-tos soon abandoned and tending to clutter up the woods. One day maybe he’ll rejoin the folks back home where they’ll put him in charge of an institution.

Co-option provides as much ground for humor as despair; nor does the fact of fiction wish away mechanisms of power.