Resisting Rational Transformation: Mannix Narrating Psychiatry Narrating Mannix
This paper will focus on the work of the Australian Outsider writer and artist Anthony Mannix. It will look particularly at his experience of schizophrenia and the manner in which psychiatry seeks to silence such marginal voices through a process of re/narration.
The “schizophrenic cosmology” Mannix articulates in his oeuvre, can be read as a narrative that counters the narrative created about him by the medical profession over a twenty-five year period. Here is brought into stark relief the resistance of Mannix, and schizophrenia itself, to the sense-making categorisation of psychiatry. Language is shown to be the central staging ground for power relations between doctor and patient (sanity and madness), wherein the patient is posited as an unreliable narrator of his or her own psychotic experience.
Mannix redresses the power imbalance between madness and sanity by countering psychiatry’s narrative of psychosis with a nomadic, “speculative narrative” of radical confluence and association. Such writing becomes an implicit political challenge to the interpretive authority of the medical establishment. It is within an account of this nature that Mannix is able to reliably narrate the chaotic experience of psychosis and thus come to voice his own experience, speaking, rather than being spoken for.
One of the central challenges when approaching Mannix’s work from an academic viewpoint is to preserve the integrity of his psychotic expressions whilst simultaneously making them an object of study. The rational transformation of such expressions, that a process of study necessarily entails, must be resisted. This paper will close by describing ‘The Atomic Book’ digital archive (which contains images of all Mannix’s original texts), and the role it plays within the study to ensure that Mannix’s words retain the capacity to speak themselves, even as they are drawn into a narrative of literary reason.
Theorist, poet and digital media artist: Gareth teaches experimental writing practices at the University of Technology, Sydney. He holds a Masters degree in psychology and his PhD focused on avant-garde literature and art-makers that have experienced schizophrenia. He has published critical and creative material in Australia and internationally.