W
where
Guest
how about some Foucault?
the SCOURIES thread receives its 10,000th post - did you make one???
how about some Foucault?
Peregrinator
Hooded On A Hill
- Joined
- May 27, 2004
- Posts
- 89,482
post some more philosophy and I'll see what I can do
F's work on mental illness in the 1950s
Strictly speaking, this is not F's first work. Two major works of the 50s preceded it: a book entitled Mental Illness and
Personality (1st ed, 1954) or Mental Illness and Psychology (2nd ed, 1962) and a long Introduction to the French
translation of Binswanger's work of existential analysis, Traum und Existenz (1954). Both works betray Foucault's
existential phenomenological outlook in the 50s, as they explicate mental illness or dreams as phenomena explicable only
in terms of personal existence, of the meaning of the world constituted by individual subjects. The key factor is
imagination, the creation of a world other than the present one: for mental illness, the lived world is dominated by terrifying
images that lock the ill person in sick situations; in healthy people, the imaginary world can be realized artistically, and
hence becomes an expression of the existence of the person. The key that produces mental illness is the blocking of
expression by a warped social system that prevents some people from acting on their projects (blocks their desiringproduction, in D/G terms). Therapy must consist in helping the person move their social situation to one that allows
expression. In other words, F has an essentially Marxist account of mental illness at this point.
There is a major shift between the first and second editions of Mental Illness ...: in the first, existential analysis is included
(along with Freudian psychoanalysis and individualizing medical history) as "mythical explanations" that need to be
replaced by Marxist categories. In the second edition (after MC), however, the Marxism is toned down, and the way is
cleared for a historical analysis of the "experience of madness" of past ages: the project of MC. Thus F rewrote his early
book to accommodate the first big breakthrough.
Madness and Civilization
MC itself, while F's first big book, remains slightly different from the others, maintaining a bit of a strange "historico-socio
phenomenology" (thus nuancing what I said last week in "Situating Foucault") in seeking to articulate the "experience" of
madness in the Classical Age. This method is supplemented however by an early type of archaeology.
Renaissance
To do so, F distinguishes it from the Medieval experience of integration (barely mentioned) and the Renaissance
experience, to which he devotes a good bit of space. In the Renaissance, madness was an "experience of nothingness"
(as opposed to death, which was the Medieval figure of nothingness). There are two major poles to the Renaissance
experience of madness: 1) as a portal to the terrifying natural powers of the night (Ren painting: Bruegel and Durer); 2) as
the ironic counterpart to reason (humanist writers like Erasmus: In Praise of Folly. The first experience is cosmic, a secret
knowledge; the second is critical, a commentary on human weakness. Only the second survives until the early 17th
century, as a tamed madness, a madness in dialogue with reason, as figured in the court jester (e.g., Lear and the Fool).
The first, the autonomous "truth" of madness, its "own voice," disappears from the West according to F, appearing again
only in the "lightning flashes" of mad art (Holderlin, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Artaud). (This strand of MC prompted Derrida to
write "Cogito and the History of Madness" in 1963, to which F replies 7 years later. Various biographers posit explanations
for the delay and the bitterness of F's reply. The two only reconciled 11 years later when F helped Derrida on the occasion
of the latter's trumped-up arrest on drug charges in Prague in 1981). In any event, the symbolic figure of the Renaissance
experience of madness is the Ship of Fools: an exile, a marginalization, but not a strict exclusion, as the mad were
sometimes put ashore in a different town.
Classical Age
The symbolic beginning of the Classical experience was the "Great Confinement," an event in 1656 that confined over 1
percent of the population of Paris. These were all idlers: the mad, but also the poor, the sick, the promiscuous,
blasphemers, rebellious children, irresponsible parents, and so on: a motley crew. The proximate cause of the
confinement was an economic crisis; it was maintained afterwards for economic reasons as well: in crisis, confinement
prevented violence from unemployed; in prosperity, they were cheap labor. But besides economics, the confinement
expressed and produced (NB the mutual presupposition of material practice and experience) a new experience of
madness, the specifically Classical one. F starts with the moral evaluation of madness, which he reads from practices and institutions (or more precisely, the
records, plans, and manuals or such). He first shows four key characteristics of Classical madness: 1) it is included in the
general category of "unreason"; 2) it is conceptually excluded from the life of reason (Descartes reading; note parallel of
physical confinement and conceptual exclusion); 3) it is morally condemned as a "originary choice" of unreason over
reason (idleness violates fundamental bourgeois commandment to work); 4) it is an object requiring administrative control
(the unreasonable must be dealt with, not just ignored).
The specific difference that distinguished the mad from the other unreasonables was their "animality." This is not some
dark inverse of reason as in Romantics (e.g., not a Mr. Hyde), but wholly outside reason, the "zero degree" of humanity.
These 5 factors make up the "critical" cness of madness: the moral disapprobation of madness.
Next comes the "practical" cness of madness: how they were dealt with on the basis of this moral evaluation. The
experience of madness as animality, as human antinature, is reflected in relative lack of original Classical medical
treatments (the ones that existed were medieval or renaissance holdovers, F maintains); if the mad weren't human, they
couldn't be worked on by human medicine or persuaded by human morals: they could only be disciplined: physically
forced to obey. The animality of the mad explains their periodic exhibition: they reminded man of how low he could sink
(mad as religious symbols).
Next F deals with the cognitive relation (recognition and knowledge) to madness (not a theory / practice split, as both
evaluation and cognition are intertwined [as will be made clear in F's 70s notion of "power/knowledge"]). He shifts here to
reading philosophers and scientists, rather than practice manuals. The Classical recognition of madness is that it 1)
deviates from the norms of reason; and 2) is an object available to reason, to science. The two are intertwined: there is no
positive scientific knowledge, only the knowledge that madness is simply unreason, the abstract negative of reason.
Classical knowledge of madness attempted to classify madness as a type of illness and to identify its sub-types in tables
and charts. But here a tension appears that frustrated Classical attempts at knowledge: illness was a positive
phenomenon in the Classical age (diseases were things with essences, not collections of symptoms indicating deviation
from a norm of health, as in the Modern age), but madness was recognized as essentially negative, as a deviation from
reason, as unreason. This conflict of recognition (reconnaissance) and knowledge (connaissance) was never remedied in
the Classical Age.
Now despite this gap between evaluation and cognition (confinement made no appeals to scientific accounts of madness)
F maintains they have a common underlying structure (which he insists on calling an "experience" but which he will later
use a non-subjective term like episteme: what we could call the move from a quasi-phenomenology to a quasistructuralism). This excavation of a common underlying structure is F's first archaeology (again, he later drops the
"experience" bit to focus on the conditions of existence of linguistice acts). The key is the way the mad (specifically, the
delirious) use logical structures that are based on delusions, on self-deception. The mad are dazzled by the light of
reason; they focus on the light, and not on the reality revealed by the light. The light / dark talk is grounded in the
"cosmology" of the Classical Age: night and day follow one another in strict alternation, with no reconciliation. Madness is
precisely a transgression of the division of day and night, light and dark: it builds a rational order of falsehoods. It thus
negates the definition of Classical reason and thus must be excluded from it. Thus the Great Confinement is not just a
politico-economic expedience, but an expression of the reaction to the transgression of the basic structure of Classical
thought.
Modernity
In some ways, MC is oriented to undermining our belief that the modern recogntion of madness as mental illness is: 1) the
recognition of a reality that had previously been obscured by false conceptions; 2) that modern psychology provides the
objective grounds for effective treatment of the mentally ill, as opposed to the cruelties of the past. In the most basic way,
F refuses to take modern psychology's self-portrait to be the final word.
The first signs of a shift from the Classical experience comes in the "Great Fear" in mid 18th C, a panic that contagion
was spread from houses of confinement. Paradoxically, by becoming an object of fear, the mad were at least now part of
the human world, rather than an animal outside it. Madness was becoming a moral fault, for which the mad were to be
made to feel guilt. On the practical side, people began to feel it was wrong to house the mad with criminals and debtors;
also, the poor were becoming recognized as 1) victims of vast economic forces, and 2) an essential part of the economy
(as F puts it: "they labor [yet] consume little). This new awareness of the utility of the (healthy) poor created the need for a
new institution for the mad, i.e., the asylum.
The asylum is a key component of Modern madness: in fact, F will claim that the structure of asylum life (more precisely,
the moral and social authority of the doctor within the institution, the little society, of the asylum) is the key to modern psychology and psychiatry. F will argue that the medical gaze of the doctor is a covert moral judgment (the mad violate
bourgeois morality: they are useless, filthy, violent, etc.) and that treatment is a bringing the mad back under bourgeois
values (making them useful, clean, pacific). F makes this case through examination of Tuke's Quaker farm retreat and
Pinel's new asylum. Despite superficial differences, both are mechanisms for internalizing of fear and guilt: Tuke's farm
via work and observation; Pinel's asylum via silence, mirroring, and perpetual judgment. Here we see elements of a
subjectifying practice, as we will later see in the Panopticon.
In the asylum, the doctor rules not by virtue of scientific knowledge, but by virtue of moral authority. Tuke and Pinel had no
trouble admitting this. 19th C medicine thought itself objective and non-moralistic though, so that they had to assume that
any effective treatment of the mentally ill came from advancing scientific knowledge. But for F, "what we call psychiatric
practice is a certain moral tactic contemporary with the end of the 18th C, preserved in the rites of asylum life, and
overlaid with the myths of positivism" (MC 276). Freud's "discovery" of transference, from this perspective, is only the
resurrection of the moral authority of the doctor in a non-asylum setting (cf. the rituals of the couch and armchair as
creating the little world of the analyst's office in which the doctor can be loved).
But we should be clear that MC ends with Tuke and Pinel; it offers no anti-psychiatric critique of contemporary practice.
That it was taken up by the anti-psychiatry movement came later, an example of capture and appropriation. In sum,
Gutting says MC is not a knockout punch delivered to contemporary psych, but a useful start on such a project.
MC as history
MC has come under a lot of attack by historians for its details. For one thing, it seems German and English 18th C
treatment of mad was substantially different than the French, on which F concentrated. Secondly, F's generalizations have
lots of exceptions. The response here from F's supporters is that he is not generalizing from specific cases (he is not
doing historiography from induction), but that he is trying to articulate the fundamental experience of an age. But in turn,
isn't that the real problem, the assumption of an underlying "experience"? This seems suspiciously Hegelian, the
crystallization of a single figure out of the welter of multiple, overlapping and conflictual practices and thoughts, all moving
at different speeds and with different lineages.
MC as germ of F's later work.
First of all, madness is a great limit-experience, an other or outside, so MC sets the stage for F's other investigations of
limit-experiences of sickness, crime, and sex (here, again, we see Bataille and transgression). Secondly, in terms of
history, when confinement broke down, separate institutions were created for the mad, the sick, and the criminals. MC
studies the asylum, BC the clinic, DP the prison. OT can be seen as a generalization of the study of the Classical age
undertaken in MC. Third, MC studies objectifying human sciences, as do BC and DP, and also studies a type of
subjectifying practice in the asylum, as does HS.
W
where
Guest
I'm about to start wrapping my brain around madness and civilization.
Peregrinator
Hooded On A Hill
- Joined
- May 27, 2004
- Posts
- 89,482
I have a survey-course familiarity with Foucault, I'm afraid. Just read a few excerpts and descriptions.
W
where
Guest
this is quite interesting as well...
“Preface”
The “merciless language of non‐madness” (ix) confines “madness” because it uses “sovereign reason”
and excludes that other language that does not fit reason.
F. is trying to return to a time when the language of psychiatry was not yet established to see whether
he can hear madness speak. This “is undoubtedly an uncomfortable region” (ix), and we must not let
ourselves be guided by what we NOW know about madness from the language of psychiatry. What
action divides madness before it is explained by science? In other words, first there is a division, and
then science comes in to explain that division in retrospect (ix).
“Hence we must speak of that initial dispute without assuming a victory, or the right to a victory” (x).
Only then can we see how madness and non‐madness are NOT two distinct phenomena, but rather are
in dialogue, “are inextricably involved” (x).
“In the severe world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman” (x). The
physician speaks to the madman only by way of seeing the person as having a disease; the dialogue with
madness is broken. “The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has
been established only on the basis of such a silence” (x‐xi). F. does not write a history of that language of
medicine; he tries to write “and archeology of that silence” (xi).
The reason/madness nexus constitutes for Western culture “one of its dimensions of originality” (xi).
So, how does one go about listening to a language of madness that does not follow the predicates of
reason? This realm points to the “limits” of a culture, not it’s identity, or what’s already possible (xi).
During the classical period one can trace the exchange between madness and reason, and how its
language changes (xii):
1657 the creation of the Hôpital Général, and the “great confinement” of the poor
1794 the “liberation” of the insane, and “moral therapy” approach by Pinel
Middle Ages through Renaissance: dramatic debate between madness and non‐madness
In our era: the experience of madness remains silent under a knowledge that “forgets” it. Mute
commentary, “a great motionless structure” (xii).
Chapter 1: “Stultifera Navis”
Madness Notes 2
During the middle ages, leprosy occupied a place in the margins of communities.
From the 14th to the 17th century, the spaces occupied by leprosy were left vacant, awaiting “another
grimace of terror, renewed rights of purification and exclusion.” (3)
Although leprosy withdrew, the values and images attached to the figure of the leper remained. (6) –
The meaning of exclusion remained and fear remained.
In time, the poor criminals and the insane would occupy the structural positions of the leper. (7)
Characteristic of this form; “a rigorous division, which is social exclusion, but spiritual reintegration.”
A new conception in the renaissance: The Ship of Fools (originally a literary creation)
These ships really existed. (8+)
Mad people were housed and provided for by various cities, yet they occupied “a liminal position,”
meaning that they both allowed to live in cities, but also confined through various rituals. (11)
Pg 13 – Foucault asks why the ship of fools motif became so popular in the 15th century. Answer:
Because “it symbolized a great disquiet suddenly dawning on the horizon at the end of the middle ages.”
(13) A whole literature of tales and moral fables begins to circulate, including a large number of images
in woodcuts and engravings. The general anxiety has to do with questions people are beginning to ask
at this time? (Renaissance, etc) However, there is a difference (the great line of cleavage in the western
experience of madness) in how madness is represented in images versus writing. (18)
Images: A proliferation of meaning, “dreams, madness, and the unreasonable can also slip into this
excess of meaning. The power of images is not to teach, but to fascinate. What is this fascination? 1.
Animality 2. Knowledge ‐ for the madman seems to perceive “the density of an invisible knowledge”
(22) 3.The lure of curiosity – The forbidden diabolical power. On all sides, madness fascinates man.
Images communicate with the great tragic powers of this world.
During the same period, “the literary, phi losophical, and moral themes of madness are in an
altogether different vein.” (24) Madness does not fascinate anymore, “it rules all that is easy, joyous,
and frivolous in the world.” (25)
“In a general way, madness is not linked to the world and its subterranean forms, but rather to man, to
his weaknesses, dreams, and illusions.” (26) Erasmus: Madness is located within the individual. The
Self‐attachment, self‐perception: This understanding gives access to a moral universe. “Evil is not
punishment or the end of time, but only fault and flaw.” (27) Erasmus observes madness from a
distance, out of danger.
Madness Notes 3
Summary: “A new enterprise was being undertaken that would abolish the tragic experience of
madness in a critical consciousness.” (28) WITH SOME EXCEPTIONS, to be found in Don Quixote and
King Lear, others.
(29+)The 4 forms of its expression in these exceptions: 1. Madness by romantic identification – “the
confused communication between fantastic invention and the fascinations of delirium, all the forms of
the human imagination.” 2. The madness of vain presumption – “the imaginary relation we maintain
with ourselves.” 3. Madness of just punishment – lady Macbeth’s delirium is her proof of guilt 4.
Madness of desperate passion – “love disappointed in its excess ... has no alternative but to be mad.”
Summary: These literary examples “testify” “more to a tragic experience of madness appearing in the
15th century, than to a critical and moral experience of unreason developing in their own epoch.
Outside of time, they establish a link with a meaning, about to be lost, whose continuity will no longer
survive except in darkness. “
Outside of time, these literary works establish a link with a tradition of representing madness that is
eclipsed by reason; it remains, though, in darkness (31); the madness in Cervantes and S. cannot be
restored to either truth or reason;
Soon, madness is deprived of its tragic seriousness (32); “the classical experience of madness is born”
(35); not even a century after Bosch, mad people are confined in “madhouses”; “Here, each form of
madness finds its proper place, its distinguishing mark” (35); madness is tamed (36).
Chapter 2: “The Great Confinement”
In seventeenth century, houses of confinement are established for “the poor, the unemployed,
prisoners, and the insane” (39). Pinel and nineteenth century psychiatry does its work in these houses of
confinement; madness becomes linked to confinement which becomes designated as its natural abode.
1656: Hospital General founded by royal edict (39); also Salpetriere, Bicetre, etc. These are “not medical
establishments” (40), but semijudicial structures meant to control social space and to clean public
spaces of “problem” people (41); administrative entities; “an instance of order” (41) or the monarchical
and bourgeois order being organized in France at that time.
The Church was also involved in this movement; it reformed its own hospital institutions (42).
This phenomenon happens across Europe (43‐44).
What’s the unity that lies at the heart of confining such a disparate group of people (the poor, the mad,
criminals)? A social sensibility forms (45), a clearly articulated perception that centers on the ethic of
work and the dream city (46).
Madness Notes 4
Confinement was a police matter (46); the imperative of labor structures confinement, not medical
concerns (46); condemnation of idleness.
Who are the poor? Peasants, beggars, disbanded soldiers, impoverished students, the sick (47);
economic changes, wars; the negative measure of exclusion was transformed into the positive measure
of confinement (48): the confined person was not kicked out, but rather was put to work in a system of
obligation and moral constraint (48). Confinement was the answer to various economic and social
problems in the 17th century across Europe (49); “it was feared the people would overrun the country”
(50).
Outside the periods of crisis, confinement acquired a different meaning: its repressive function was
combined with a new use—those confined were put to work (51); “reabsorption of the idle and social
protection against agitation and uprising” (51). “Work was not only an occupation; it must be
productive” (51). Houses has different specialties…. (51‐53).
However, houses of confinement failed as fixing the economic problems of society (54); the poor were
still poor, not in public and as a social threat. They disappeared at the beginning of the 19th century;
however, they did serve as an important experiment in how labor was to be regarded in society (55): a
“certain ethical consciousness of labor” was formulated and established; labor’s effectiveness was
supported by Judeo‐Christian belief in “the fall of man” (55) man was forced to work not by a law of
nature, but by the effect of a curse (55); Calvin…. “the sin of idleness is the supreme pride of man once
he has fallen” (56). Sloth leads the round of vices (57).
“It was in a certain experience of labor that the indissociably economic and moral demand for
confinement was formulated” (57). Society invents a space derived from an ethical transcendence from
the law of work into which the insane were slotted (since putting the poor in this space had failed).
Madmen were included in the prescription of idleness (57, bottom); they would be subjected to the
rules of forced labor; kinship established between the insane and the poor in terms of notions of labor
(58). Until the Renaissance, madness was linked with an imaginary transcendence; in the classical age
madness is perceived for the first time through the condemnation of idleness; this notion acquires the
power of segregation and gains the meaning it still has in our own culture (58). Madness crosses the
limits of bourgeois order as a moral perception.
Houses of confinement are thus “correctional” institutions, moral institutions, penance (59). Obligation
to work as ethical exercise and moral guarantee (59). Amazing shift: “morality permitted itself to be
administered like trade or economy” (61). Institutions carry that moral imperative: “this is the underside
of the bourgeoisie’s great dream and great preoccupation in the classical age: the laws of the State and
the laws of the heart are at last identical (61).
Myth of social happiness, also for the Church (63); confinement “conceals both a metaphysics of
government and a politics of religion…. Tyrannical synthesis… “ (63);
Summary: p. 64.
“Preface”
The “merciless language of non‐madness” (ix) confines “madness” because it uses “sovereign reason”
and excludes that other language that does not fit reason.
F. is trying to return to a time when the language of psychiatry was not yet established to see whether
he can hear madness speak. This “is undoubtedly an uncomfortable region” (ix), and we must not let
ourselves be guided by what we NOW know about madness from the language of psychiatry. What
action divides madness before it is explained by science? In other words, first there is a division, and
then science comes in to explain that division in retrospect (ix).
“Hence we must speak of that initial dispute without assuming a victory, or the right to a victory” (x).
Only then can we see how madness and non‐madness are NOT two distinct phenomena, but rather are
in dialogue, “are inextricably involved” (x).
“In the severe world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman” (x). The
physician speaks to the madman only by way of seeing the person as having a disease; the dialogue with
madness is broken. “The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has
been established only on the basis of such a silence” (x‐xi). F. does not write a history of that language of
medicine; he tries to write “and archeology of that silence” (xi).
The reason/madness nexus constitutes for Western culture “one of its dimensions of originality” (xi).
So, how does one go about listening to a language of madness that does not follow the predicates of
reason? This realm points to the “limits” of a culture, not it’s identity, or what’s already possible (xi).
During the classical period one can trace the exchange between madness and reason, and how its
language changes (xii):
1657 the creation of the Hôpital Général, and the “great confinement” of the poor
1794 the “liberation” of the insane, and “moral therapy” approach by Pinel
Middle Ages through Renaissance: dramatic debate between madness and non‐madness
In our era: the experience of madness remains silent under a knowledge that “forgets” it. Mute
commentary, “a great motionless structure” (xii).
Chapter 1: “Stultifera Navis”
Madness Notes 2
During the middle ages, leprosy occupied a place in the margins of communities.
From the 14th to the 17th century, the spaces occupied by leprosy were left vacant, awaiting “another
grimace of terror, renewed rights of purification and exclusion.” (3)
Although leprosy withdrew, the values and images attached to the figure of the leper remained. (6) –
The meaning of exclusion remained and fear remained.
In time, the poor criminals and the insane would occupy the structural positions of the leper. (7)
Characteristic of this form; “a rigorous division, which is social exclusion, but spiritual reintegration.”
A new conception in the renaissance: The Ship of Fools (originally a literary creation)
These ships really existed. (8+)
Mad people were housed and provided for by various cities, yet they occupied “a liminal position,”
meaning that they both allowed to live in cities, but also confined through various rituals. (11)
Pg 13 – Foucault asks why the ship of fools motif became so popular in the 15th century. Answer:
Because “it symbolized a great disquiet suddenly dawning on the horizon at the end of the middle ages.”
(13) A whole literature of tales and moral fables begins to circulate, including a large number of images
in woodcuts and engravings. The general anxiety has to do with questions people are beginning to ask
at this time? (Renaissance, etc) However, there is a difference (the great line of cleavage in the western
experience of madness) in how madness is represented in images versus writing. (18)
Images: A proliferation of meaning, “dreams, madness, and the unreasonable can also slip into this
excess of meaning. The power of images is not to teach, but to fascinate. What is this fascination? 1.
Animality 2. Knowledge ‐ for the madman seems to perceive “the density of an invisible knowledge”
(22) 3.The lure of curiosity – The forbidden diabolical power. On all sides, madness fascinates man.
Images communicate with the great tragic powers of this world.
During the same period, “the literary, phi losophical, and moral themes of madness are in an
altogether different vein.” (24) Madness does not fascinate anymore, “it rules all that is easy, joyous,
and frivolous in the world.” (25)
“In a general way, madness is not linked to the world and its subterranean forms, but rather to man, to
his weaknesses, dreams, and illusions.” (26) Erasmus: Madness is located within the individual. The
Self‐attachment, self‐perception: This understanding gives access to a moral universe. “Evil is not
punishment or the end of time, but only fault and flaw.” (27) Erasmus observes madness from a
distance, out of danger.
Madness Notes 3
Summary: “A new enterprise was being undertaken that would abolish the tragic experience of
madness in a critical consciousness.” (28) WITH SOME EXCEPTIONS, to be found in Don Quixote and
King Lear, others.
(29+)The 4 forms of its expression in these exceptions: 1. Madness by romantic identification – “the
confused communication between fantastic invention and the fascinations of delirium, all the forms of
the human imagination.” 2. The madness of vain presumption – “the imaginary relation we maintain
with ourselves.” 3. Madness of just punishment – lady Macbeth’s delirium is her proof of guilt 4.
Madness of desperate passion – “love disappointed in its excess ... has no alternative but to be mad.”
Summary: These literary examples “testify” “more to a tragic experience of madness appearing in the
15th century, than to a critical and moral experience of unreason developing in their own epoch.
Outside of time, they establish a link with a meaning, about to be lost, whose continuity will no longer
survive except in darkness. “
Outside of time, these literary works establish a link with a tradition of representing madness that is
eclipsed by reason; it remains, though, in darkness (31); the madness in Cervantes and S. cannot be
restored to either truth or reason;
Soon, madness is deprived of its tragic seriousness (32); “the classical experience of madness is born”
(35); not even a century after Bosch, mad people are confined in “madhouses”; “Here, each form of
madness finds its proper place, its distinguishing mark” (35); madness is tamed (36).
Chapter 2: “The Great Confinement”
In seventeenth century, houses of confinement are established for “the poor, the unemployed,
prisoners, and the insane” (39). Pinel and nineteenth century psychiatry does its work in these houses of
confinement; madness becomes linked to confinement which becomes designated as its natural abode.
1656: Hospital General founded by royal edict (39); also Salpetriere, Bicetre, etc. These are “not medical
establishments” (40), but semijudicial structures meant to control social space and to clean public
spaces of “problem” people (41); administrative entities; “an instance of order” (41) or the monarchical
and bourgeois order being organized in France at that time.
The Church was also involved in this movement; it reformed its own hospital institutions (42).
This phenomenon happens across Europe (43‐44).
What’s the unity that lies at the heart of confining such a disparate group of people (the poor, the mad,
criminals)? A social sensibility forms (45), a clearly articulated perception that centers on the ethic of
work and the dream city (46).
Madness Notes 4
Confinement was a police matter (46); the imperative of labor structures confinement, not medical
concerns (46); condemnation of idleness.
Who are the poor? Peasants, beggars, disbanded soldiers, impoverished students, the sick (47);
economic changes, wars; the negative measure of exclusion was transformed into the positive measure
of confinement (48): the confined person was not kicked out, but rather was put to work in a system of
obligation and moral constraint (48). Confinement was the answer to various economic and social
problems in the 17th century across Europe (49); “it was feared the people would overrun the country”
(50).
Outside the periods of crisis, confinement acquired a different meaning: its repressive function was
combined with a new use—those confined were put to work (51); “reabsorption of the idle and social
protection against agitation and uprising” (51). “Work was not only an occupation; it must be
productive” (51). Houses has different specialties…. (51‐53).
However, houses of confinement failed as fixing the economic problems of society (54); the poor were
still poor, not in public and as a social threat. They disappeared at the beginning of the 19th century;
however, they did serve as an important experiment in how labor was to be regarded in society (55): a
“certain ethical consciousness of labor” was formulated and established; labor’s effectiveness was
supported by Judeo‐Christian belief in “the fall of man” (55) man was forced to work not by a law of
nature, but by the effect of a curse (55); Calvin…. “the sin of idleness is the supreme pride of man once
he has fallen” (56). Sloth leads the round of vices (57).
“It was in a certain experience of labor that the indissociably economic and moral demand for
confinement was formulated” (57). Society invents a space derived from an ethical transcendence from
the law of work into which the insane were slotted (since putting the poor in this space had failed).
Madmen were included in the prescription of idleness (57, bottom); they would be subjected to the
rules of forced labor; kinship established between the insane and the poor in terms of notions of labor
(58). Until the Renaissance, madness was linked with an imaginary transcendence; in the classical age
madness is perceived for the first time through the condemnation of idleness; this notion acquires the
power of segregation and gains the meaning it still has in our own culture (58). Madness crosses the
limits of bourgeois order as a moral perception.
Houses of confinement are thus “correctional” institutions, moral institutions, penance (59). Obligation
to work as ethical exercise and moral guarantee (59). Amazing shift: “morality permitted itself to be
administered like trade or economy” (61). Institutions carry that moral imperative: “this is the underside
of the bourgeoisie’s great dream and great preoccupation in the classical age: the laws of the State and
the laws of the heart are at last identical (61).
Myth of social happiness, also for the Church (63); confinement “conceals both a metaphysics of
government and a politics of religion…. Tyrannical synthesis… “ (63);
Summary: p. 64.
G
Guest
Guest
Dear Authors,
Thank you,
[size=+2]Gabrielle L.[/size]
President, A.I.R.
Secretery of the MOST COMMENTED on
and the MOST VOTED on story clubs
and 2011 Survivor Contest Director
Miami Beach, Florida
I’ve been inundated with “SCOURIES thread posting guideline” requests so further to my post # 10050 which stated:
Of course the SCOURIES thread tries to raise just that much higher. While any reader is welcome to post here we believe that only A.I.R. award winning authors, MANU Award Winners or certain other highly acclaimed authors should post from the “authors” group. We ask that all LITEROTICA authors check their status with me before posting ... Thanks for understanding! – ScouriesWorld management.]
Please be advised that, besides A.I.R. winners and MANU winners, any author who falls into any of the following categories is free to post here without checking with me:
*1000+ VOTE Club members
*100+ COMMENT Club members
*One of the Top 50 “Most Favorited” Authors
*Any author who’s penned one of the 50 MOST VIEWED stories on the site
*Any author who’s penned one of the 50 MOST FAVORITED stories on the site.
Of course the SCOURIES thread tries to raise just that much higher. While any reader is welcome to post here we believe that only A.I.R. award winning authors, MANU Award Winners or certain other highly acclaimed authors should post from the “authors” group. We ask that all LITEROTICA authors check their status with me before posting ... Thanks for understanding! – ScouriesWorld management.]
Please be advised that, besides A.I.R. winners and MANU winners, any author who falls into any of the following categories is free to post here without checking with me:
*1000+ VOTE Club members
*100+ COMMENT Club members
*One of the Top 50 “Most Favorited” Authors
*Any author who’s penned one of the 50 MOST VIEWED stories on the site
*Any author who’s penned one of the 50 MOST FAVORITED stories on the site.
Thank you,
[size=+2]Gabrielle L.[/size]
President, A.I.R.
Secretery of the MOST COMMENTED on
and the MOST VOTED on story clubs
and 2011 Survivor Contest Director
Miami Beach, Florida
mark197205
Sgt Cervix Basher
- Joined
- Mar 16, 2004
- Posts
- 227,437
Dear Authors,
I’ve been inundated with “SCOURIES thread posting guideline” requests so further to my post # 10050 which stated:
Of course the SCOURIES thread tries to raise just that much higher. While any reader is welcome to post here we believe that only A.I.R. award winning authors, MANU Award Winners or certain other highly acclaimed authors should post from the “authors” group. We ask that all LITEROTICA authors check their status with me before posting ... Thanks for understanding! – ScouriesWorld management.]
Please be advised that, besides A.I.R. winners and MANU winners, any author who falls into any of the following categories is free to post here without checking with me:
*1000+ VOTE Club members
*100+ COMMENT Club members
*One of the Top 50 “Most Favorited” Authors
*Any author who’s penned one of the 50 MOST VIEWED stories on the site
*Any author who’s penned one of the 50 MOST FAVORITED stories on the site.
Thank you,
[size=+2]Gabrielle L.[/size]
President, A.I.R.
Secretery of the MOST COMMENTED on
and the MOST VOTED on story clubs
and 2011 Survivor Contest Director
Miami Beach, Florida
Go fuck yourself.
