A presentation for MA

Even after the eradication of leprosy the structures of social exclusion remained. Leprosy’s place was taken by mental illness. Madmen were denied the use of churches, although ecclesiastical law did not deny them the use of sacraments. Madmen were put on a ship called the ship of fools. In Elizabethan England the task of the madman is to tell the truth. Folly leads each man into blindness where he is lost, the madman reminds each man of his truth. The formidable knowledge which a scholar or a mystic has, the “Fool in his innocent wisdom already possesses. While the man of reason and wisdom perceives only fragmentary and all the more unnerving images of it, the Fool bears it intact as an unbroken sphere. That crystal ball which for all others is empty is in his eyes filled with the density of an invisible knowledge.” Madness fascinates man. The fantastic images it generates are not fleeting appearances that quickly disappear from the surface of things. In Shakespeare madness is allied to death and murder. In Shakespeare and Cervantes, madness still occupies an extreme place, in that it is beyond appeal. Nothing ever restores it either to truth or reason. It leads only to laceration and thence to death. The knight’s madness in Don Quixote has grown conscious of itself. Houses for confining were created in the seventeenth century. The Hospital General in France is not just a medical establishment, it is rather a sort of semi-juridical structure, an administrative entity “which along with the already constituted powers and outside of the courts, decides, judges and executes. The directors having for these purposes stakes, irons, prisons and dungeons in the said Hospital General.” The institution was tasked with stopping mendicancy and idleness. In the 17th century “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. Between him and society, an implicit system of obligation was established, he had the right to be fed, but he must accept the physical and moral constraint of confinement.” Throughout Europe, confinement had the same meaning. For a long time, the house of correction or the premises of the Hospital general would serve to contain the unemployed, the idle and the vagabonds. Outside the periods of crisis, confinement acquired another meaning. Its repressive function was combined with a new use. “It was no longer merely a question of confining those out of work but of giving work to those that that had been confined and thus making them contribute to the prosperity of all. Cheap manpower in the periods of full employment and high salaries, and in periods of unemployment, absorption of the idle, and social protection against agitations and uprisings.” Since, the Fall, man had accepted labour as a penance and for its power to work redemption. It was not a law of nature  which forced man to work, but the effect of a curse. A belief with those making policy that virtue can be of the people can be regulated by laws of the state. A decisive moment came “when madness was perceived on the social horizon of poverty, of incapacity for work, of inability to integrate with the group. The moment when madness began to rank among the problems of the city.” Madness which earlier had imaginary freedom in the works of Shakespeare and Cervantes became confined and bound to reason and morality. Confinement is explained or at least justified, by the desire to avoid scandal. It seems that the honour of a family requires the disappearance from society of the individual who by vile and abject habits shames his relatives. It was doubtless a very old custom of the medieval age to display the insane. Confinement hid away unreason but it explicitly drew attention to madness. If in the case of unreason, the chief intention was to avoid scandal, in the case of madness that intention was to organize it. Foucault’s earliest research interests and publications focused on the institutionalization of medicine, particularly psychiatry in the nineteenth century, Foucault saw the potential of madness as an artistic and political force. Foucault wished to write a revisionist history of mental illness that would critique the commonplace received view regarding the liberalization of the treatment of the mad with the birth of modern psychiatry. Foucault’s writings must have stemmed from his experience of working in the role of mental health professional. His critique of the history of madness will be written to articulate the historically silenced voice of the mad, rather than from the point of view of the psychiatric professional. The central organizing principle of Foucault’s argument is that madness and reason have been progressively separated and estranged from each other throughout history and particularly in modern times with the result that madness appears as a “truth” to be diagnosed and cured by the scientific disciplines. The specific term Foucault uses for madness, the French word “folie”, which can encompass more easily than the English translation – “madness” both the wise idiocy of the Shakespearian fool and the concept of insanity in the modern clinical sense. The shades of meaning of both are thus allowed to co-exist and remain in play throughout Foucault’s consideration. Foucault critiques the discourse that silences the voice of the “mad”, privileging instead the voice of the “expert”. The silence of the “mad” would require an archaeology to bring it to light, a historical method that uncovers what has been forgotten, or what lies in the gaps between the points that are remembered. The History of Madness posits that madness has been understood according to four distinct belief systems in the west. In the Middle ages, it was considered a holy mystery, a part of the vast collection of human experience. In the renaissance it was seen as an ironic form of special reason, which laid bare the nonsense of the world. Madmen were at once tragic and comic. Madness and madmen became major figures, in their ambiguity, in their menace and mockery, the dizzying unreason of the world and the feeble ridicule of men. This set of ideas is crystallized in the image of the Ship of Fools: a group of madmen set adrift from society, not only as outcasts but also as pilgrims in search of their reason and by extension the reason of the world. In these early periods madness had a relationship with sanity. Pre-modernity posited them as alternative ways of relating to the underlying absurdity of the world, rather than opposing them within a binary system, as healthy and correct on the one hand or aberrant and sick on the other, as today. According to Foucault, the major shift in the conceptualization of madness dates from the middle of the seventeenth century. At this historical moment, madmen ceased to be a figure of tragic-comic wisdom, in confrontation with the cosmos, and instead became hospital patients, inmates of confinement houses. Foucault argues that madhouses in the 17th and 18th centuries were not medical asylums but semi-judicial institutions. In addition to the mad, the poor, the sick, and the unemployed of both sexes found themselves segregated from mainstream society by this structure. A second fundamental change noted is that of the dehumanization of the mad during the period of the great confinement. Where once madness had been intrinsic to the perceived nature of the human condition, suddenly madness became comprehensible as the trace of animality in the human being. The madman gives in to his passions, rather than being governed by reason. This gives rise to the earliest form of psychiatry, to the invention for the first time of taxonomies of madness, the labeling of forms that the exercise of the passions could take. Mania, melancholia, hysteria and hypochondria. With the dawning of modernity, madness became properly the object of the science of psychiatry. Where once, Foucault argues, unreason was understood as a special form of reason, modern psychiatry establishes instead a discourse about madness, which articulates itself at the price of unreason’s silence.