ABSTRACT
The ‘placing’ of lives and the ‘lived-ness’ of place, the threads connecting the trajectories of mad lives with the grammar of the city and its implied mapping of the administratively/existentially generated self, has anchored lives in place more decisively, more firmly, than intended. What appears to be placed is about the moment in time – arresting lives – at which the sociological reading was made. The purpose of this chapter is to disrupt what has been placed. Lives are not static, fixed in place, but in the process of many journeys from one place to another. Biographies – which are not the living of a life but its telling – are also, like the lives they seek to represent, journeys. In this the mad, like the tourists and refugees whose lives have been conceptualized as emblematic of globalized post-modern city life, are no different from others. What marks their difference is the nature of their journeys, the scenes on which they are set, and the character of the processes and relationships connecting them with the social.1 Their lifestyles resemble those of refugees, except that they are expatriated by different political processes and realignments: of welfare regimes and moral agendas, which differentially value lives and construe forms of entitlement, rather than shifts in the meaning of community and ethnicity in the broader schemes of history, which traditionally displace refugees. To present mad lives as stationary would involve airbrushing-out their mobility, anchoring them to the spaces they use and move through, rather than inhabit, and this would seriously distort their situation. These are, in fact, lives in various forms of interconnected transit – global, national and urban, as this chapter will show – and they should not be understood in place but in transit between places connected by the mad in the varied living of their lives and the diverse movement of their bodies in space. Those who live in shelters, in rooming houses, and on the street and who graze from food banks, soup kitchens and day centres generate (a version of) the city – not as overlapping zones of occupation – but as a series of nodal points (identified in the proceeding two chapters) connected by the movement of people between them.2 Lives are not lived in place but in the threading together of places as sequential scenes in their trajectories. It is in the activities of lives and bodies connecting places that the grammar of space is written, configured through the agency of lives. All of those featured in this chapter, with the exception of Terrance who claims to have delusions but not schizophrenia, carry a
diagnosis of schizophrenia. It is worth reminding the reader of this, a point, which might otherwise get lost in the analysis of space.
