This is Part II preceded by Part I
In chapter two Foucault proceeds to develop exclusion via confinement. Consistent with the exclusionary mode of embarkation, confinement exists as its counterpart:
The madman’s voyage is at once a rigorous division and an absolute Passage. In one sense, it simply develops, across a half-real, half-imaginary geography, the madman’s liminal position on the horizon of medieval concern—a position symbolized and made real at the same time by the madman’s privilege of being confined within the city gates: his exclusion must enclose him; if he cannot and must not have another prison than the threshold itself, he is kept at the point of passage. He is put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely. (11, Foucault’s emphasis)
When aboard the ship of fools—excluded by embarkation—the madman is confined in the exterior (the interior of the exterior). Meanwhile, when detained within the city walls—excluded by confinement—the madman exists within the interior but remains secluded (the exterior of the interior). The crucial requirement is that the madman made abnormal and excluded from the normal population. The two approaches differ with respect to whether the madman is to be returned to his liminal position—performing physically and spatially his symbolic meaning of existing in between states of grounded reason, i.e. perpetually adrift—or whether he can be enclosed within a carefully controlled quarters.
Like their predecessors the leprosariums, Foucault asserts that “from the very start, one thing is clear: the Hoptial General is not a medical establishment” (40). The institutions set out to confine the mad were “semijuridical structures” (40). Replete with “stakes, irons, prisons and dungeons,” these institutions of intervention were clearly unconcerned with taking care of the ill and decidedly committed to the correction of disobedience. Existing outside the bounds of state authority, the directors of these institutions enjoyed absolute sovereignty over their complex. These institutions of public welfare were charged with the establishment of religion and public order.. Those confined included “those condemned by common law, young men who disturbed their families’ peace or who squandered their goods, people without profession, and the insane” (45).
In accounting for the development that “almost overnight” (45) confined over 1 percent of the population (in the case of Paris) Foucault continues his pattern of denying the real. By the “real,” I mean the empirical, real-world problems of state and society and their resolutions by pragmatist, realist decision makers. In his discussion of leprosy Foucault dismisses rationales of medical quarantine and epidemiology in the imprisoning of lepers. Again, in explaining the embarkation of madmen he dismisses superficial concerns of banishing nuisances and social burdens as the rationale for exiling the mad. Once again, the problem that needs to be solved, the requirements that need to be met, are not those of real, material existence, but those pertaining to the psyche. As the Great Confinement is coextensive with the burgeoning bourgeoisie, it would seem obvious (obvious at least since Marx) that confinement resulted from a necessity to discipline labor during this period of great social transformation. As a counterpart to the enclosure movement that transformed peasants into proletarians, structures of confinement are clearly needed to absorb the population in excess of the needs of capital.
While dutifully acknowledging the needs of controlling the surplus population, Foucault takes as his organizing principle not the requirements of political economy, but rather the development of a new “sensibility” within the Western conscience.
There must have formed, silently and doubtless over the course of many years, a social sensibility, common to European culture, that suddenly began to manifest itself in the second half of the seventeenth century; it was this sensibility that suddenly isolated the category destined to populate the places of confinement…But what is for us merely an undifferentiated sensibility must have been, for those living in the classical age, a clearly articulated perception. (45)
For Marx, the classical era is indisputably characterized by the change in the mode of production, however for Foucault, the determining force is the mode of perception.1 The Enlightenment—which exists as superstructure for Marx, an ideological apparatus justifying the capitalist mode of production—serves as Foucault’s principal impetus, necessitating a segregated homeland for the mad to enable the sublime purification of Reason.
Further complicating the problem, Foucault does not deny the causative importance played by the needs of capitalist development. Rather, Foucault affirms that confinement resulted in reaction to economic crisis.2 Foucault make reference to the Church’s action to interfere with the labor’s collective organizing, accusing the workers’ secret gathering as that of sorcery (48). Notwithstanding the role of political economy in terms of efficient causation, Foucault’s history privileges the discourse deployed by Church and state aiming to discipline labor. While the discourse deployed by the Church and state could be regarded as epiphenomena at the time, Foucault privileges this discursive formation to offer a revaluation of history situated within his own temporal and political perspective. The immature structures of knowledge and power born under these economic conditions will come to play a hegemonic role in the ordering of social life under modernity.
This new perception take the reproduction of material life as its subject. The sensitivity to poverty is revealed by the royal edict establishing the Hopital General which charged it the task of preventing “mendicancy and idleness as the source of all disorders” (47). An ethos of work becomes the paramount virtue of the era. Not work with respect to a particular aim or concrete goal, but work for the sake of work. It is idleness that is the enemy of the Church, state and the Enlightenment. The classical age marks the first time madness is linked to idleness. The threat posed by the madman is no longer his adrift state of groundless, his lack of obedience to reason. The madman now challenges bourgeois transcendence in his self-alienation outside the confines of the bourgeois ethic, in short, his refusal to observe transcendence as labor (58).3
The marriage between church and state during the Classical era cannot be overstated. It was a fusion of the two that encapsulated the protestant-bourgeois ideal: “the dream of a city where moral obligation was jointed to civil law” (46). There is little doubt that if Foucault was to place Anglo-Saxon at the center of his history, rather than his native French, he would have quickly made mention of Separatist, Puritan leader John Winthrop’s “City Upon A Hill”. In the self-embarkation of the Puritan separatists they shared the vision of a juridical-religious complex based on a covenant with God. Winthrop chose the metaphor of a “city upon a hill” to symbolize the city’s absolute legibility in bearing witness to God. The madmen in their confinement were subjected to this protestant-bourgeois normative project: “a moral city for those who sought, from the start, to avoid it…a sort of sovereignty of good, in which intimidation alone prevails and the only recompense of virtue…is to escape punishment” (61).
The imperative to labor brought about crucial new techniques in the governing of populations. In answer to the requirements posed by poverty, the state first ushered a modern notion of police, i.e. “the totality of measures which make work possible and necessary for all those who could not live without it” (46). Purely negative measures of exclusion now are outmoded with the development of confinement. A new relationship between then the state and the life of its subjects emerges: “The unemployed person was no longer driven away or punished, he was taken in charge, at the expense of the nation but at the cost of his individual liberty” (48). An implicit social contract is made between the state and its subject. Guaranteed the right to food and shelter—in short, life—the subject trades his individual liberty and submits to physical and moral subjection. Biopolitics is born.
1“But what is for us merely an undifferentiated sensibility must have been, for those living in the classical age, a clearly articulated perception. It is this mode of perception which must investigate in order to discover the form of sensibility to madness in an epoch we are accustomed to define by the privileges of Reason” (45).
2“Throughout Europe, confinement had the same meaning, at least if we consider its origin. It constituted one of the answers the seventeenth century gave to an economic crisis that affected the entire Western world…”
3“…it is no longer because the madman comes from the world of the irrational and bears its stigmata; rather, it is because he crosses the frontiers of bourgeois order of his own accord, and alienates himself outside the sacred limits of its ethic.” (58)
“Mad and Civ,” A Commentary, Part III (Ch. 3)
May 20, 2009 at 7:04 am (Philosophy)
Tags: Foucault, Madness, Philosophical Commentary, Philosophy
Cosmology of MadnessThis is the third section of the commentary, preceded by Part I and Part II
The need for confinement was driven by another force—the desire to avoid scandal. The Renaissance treated unreason and all matters social order with absolute transparency. The prevailing idea was that of openness, knowing that only sunlight could purge the dark recesses of evil. To this end, matters of justice privileged public confession no matter how heinous the crime. For Good to triumph, one’s offenses must be made manifest though a public catharsis.1
The Classical age reversed the publicity of the Renaissance in accordance with a new consensus that “there are aspects of evil that have such a power of contagion, such a force of scandal that any publicity multiplies them infinitely” (67). Due to the threat to social order some crimes must avoid confession at all costs and “must absolutely be thrust into oblivion” (Pontchartrain quoted on 67). This is most certainly the case among members of the clergy or other distinguished members of society whose example must persist as the paragon of well-tempered reason.
The imperative to avoid scandal was not the unequivocal stance of the Classical era. Starting in the 17th and 18th centuries the experience of unreason became disaggregated for the first time. In juxtaposition to the mindless priest hidden from public view existed a second class of madmen who were not only visible, but exalted to the level of spectacle. As recent as 1815 the hospital of Bethleham charged onlookers a penny to attend the weekly exhibition of its lunatics every Sunday (68). Unlike the immoral characters of unreason tucked away in the dark recesses of the asylum, this second class existed as monsters—“etymologically, beings or things to be shown” (70). Though made visible, these madmen were not free to roam the countryside as in the pre-confinement days of the Renaissance. With madness safely confined behind bars, reason no longer feared madness, as it no longer felt any relation to it (70). The complete subjugation of madness resignified its publicity. No longer iconoclastic, the organized exhibition of madness confirmed its status as wholly other.
The crucial distinction between the monsters manifesting madness in its purest form and the still dangerous class of unreasonables secluded in darkness is on the level of species. Unreason still constituted a grave threat to reason because its immoral subjects were still human. The freaks so fascinating to onlookers were completely unadulterated by human substance. No longer a beast within the psyche, madness now existed completely alien to its subject as pure animality. In short, confinement entailed two discrete operations: the avoidance of scandal by secluding immoral as unreasonable, and the glorification of madness-as-animality in the performance of spectacle.
In this regression of history’s rational, forward development, madness existed as a pre-human phenomenon reminiscent of Rousseau’s natural man. Unconditioned by human sensibilities, these brutes were comfortable on a “straw pallet” and “could not enjoy sleep without being soaked by the water that trickled from the mass of stone” (71). Asylums were complete with chains, locks and all manner of constraining devices, but the function of these objects was not of a punitive or corrective nature, but used to restrain the furious force of madman’s raging frenzy. In one hospital,
The sheer ferocity of these inhuman creatures made them immune to any attempt at correction; only through disciplining and brutalizing could the beasts be effectively tamed and made docile.
Crucial to bear in mind was that the entirety of the measures used to exclude, constrain and exhibit madness lacked any medical purpose. To the contrary, the lunatic’s animality protected him from sickness as his beastly nature inured him to hunger, cold, and all variety of discomforts no human could expect to withstand. One doctor remarked in an admiration of “the constancy and the ease with which certain of the insane of both sexes bear the most rigorous and prolonged cold” such that “on certain days when the thermometer indicated 10, 11, and as many as 16 degrees below freezing, a madman in the hospital of Bicetre could not endure his wool blanket, and remained sitting on the icy floor of his cell…” (Pinel quoted on 74-75).
Humanity has struggled in its contradiction as “rational animal.” Curiously, the Western imagination considers animals separate from the wisdom of nature. The wild, unruly violence of animality exists in an anti-nature in opposition to nature’s sublime, rational order. So as with nature—the phenomenal realization of God’s thought—as is with God. Indeed, Christianity underwent a curious transformation from the time when madmen were permitted to roam freely and their subsequent confinement. As the new sensibility of the Classical age took increasing hold in the seventeenth century, gone went the Christian mysticism of Janeism and Pascal. Embrace of God no longer required sacrifice; good Christians no longer suspended their reason in a leap of faith. In a world where reason had finally matured (reaching its apotheosis in the thought of Hegel2) God revealed himself to be Truth and Reason in essence.
God-in-man’s-image often carried the appearance of madness, but behind God’s phenomenal expression lay eternal Truth. Notwithstanding the now developed opposition of God-as-Being and madness-as-non-being, madness still carried an important function. God chose to have his incarnation consort with the destitute and insane, and indeed Jesus appeared as a lunatic himself. Through his life and crucifixion, Jesus sanctified madness and death, revering nonbeing as holy. Indeed,“to respect madness is not to interpret its as the involuntary and inevitable accident of disease, but to recognize this lower limit of human truth, a limit not accidental but essential” (81). Just as the life of God’s son provides a paragon of Christian existence, the example of death and madness testify to the ultimate limit point of the Fall. Beyond the negative techniques of confinement, the captivity of madness fulfilled its positive role in the cultivation of new subjectivities. While the danger of immorality must be prevented from scandal, monsters serve an instructive demonstration, as they “showed men how close to animality their Fall could bring them; and at the same time how far divine mercy could extend when it consented to save man” (81).
Mode of Exclusion
Object
(Target)
Madman as
animal
Free Prisoner,
(Passenger par excellence)
1 “Until the seventeenth century, evil in all its most violent and most inhuman forms could not be dealt with and punished unless it was brought into the open. The light in which confession was made and punishment executed could alone balance the darkness from which evil issued. In order to pass through all the stages of its fulfillment, evil must necessarily incur public avowal and manifestation before reaching the conclusion which suppresses it.” (67)
2“But the fact that the world has become Christian, and that the order of God is revealed through the meanderings of history and the madness of men, now suffices to show that “Christ has become the highest point of our wisdom” (79).
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