Architectonic

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.