Foucault and Specific Discourses

What I love about Foucault is how contextual he is. In The Order of Discourse, he shows this in his discussion of reason and madness. He talks about how people who are the outcasts (like the insane or the criminals) are not heard (Bizzell & Herzberg, p. 1155). Foucault links this into his past work in asylums and prisons. I have to say that I can really get lost in Foucault’s work…and I mean that in a good way. One semester I got completely involved in reading three of his books during the course of that semester. Other things suffered such as work, home, etc. but my mind was enthralled. With Foucault, I find that I don’t leave feeling satisfied so much with answers as much as new threads to ponder and examples to look for as society and conversation unfolds around me and within me. I suppose, that’s one of the “beginnings” that Foucault discussed (Bizzell & Herzberg, p. 1154).

For this blog, I will discuss the how treatment had moved from an intermingling of criminals, madmen, and the poor during the 18th century to the separation of these peoples to deal more directly with their issues (Bizzell & Herzberg, p. 1156). Being classified with one of these undesirable groups had previously paralleled guilt and unreason, catching the insane in a confinement of all three. By the 19th century, insanity was considered a social failure, but society did not have a system of recourse other than the confinement solution it had used with each of these three groups. And so the process of locking up the insane began to take shape as institutions figured out how to handle and treat such persons (Foucault, 1988, pp. 259-260). As the insane were now being confined separately, three intertwined solutions were being tested: communication, observation, and judgment.

Communication
Communication has seen an interesting pattern between silencing and listening to the insane (Bizzell & Herzberg, p. 1155). During the period of torture for madness, chains and dungeons were employed to silence the madman. During this time and for centuries afterward, the mad were often a spectacle put on show as they clanked in their chains and babbled incessantly (Herrick, p. 251). The paradox here is that the public and the workers were essentially encouraging the insane to make more noise and to talk more while effectively silencing (ignoring) any actual words that came out of their mouths. Those with mental illness were not listened to but rather made as a show in the circus (Herrick, p. 249). Eventually when the treatment of the insane removed the shackles, they were less of a spectacle but more of a sense of observation that encouraged guilt and shame for the “transgression” of being insane (Foucault, 1988, p. 261).

Foucault connects communication and this sense of transgression to the birth of psychoanalysis:

“Language was engaged in things rather than really suppressed. Confinement, prisons, dungeons, even tortures, engaged in a mute dialogue between reason and unreason --- the dialogue of struggle. This dialogue itself was now disengaged; silence was absolute; there was no longer any common language between madness and reason; the language of delirium can be answered only by an absence of language, for delirium is not a fragment of dialogue with reason, it is not language at all; it refers, in an ultimately silent awareness, only to transgression. And it is only at this point that a common language becomes possible again, insofar as it will be one of acknowledged guilt. “Finally, after long hesitations, they saw him come of his own accord to join the society of the other patients…” The absence of language, as a fundamental structure of the asylum, has its correlative in the exposure of confession. When Freud, in psychoanalysis, cautiously reinstitutes exchange, or rather begins once again to listen to this language, henceforth eroded into monologue, should we be astonished that the formulations he hears are always those of transgression? And this inveterate silence, transgression has taken over at the very sources of speech” (1988, p. 262).

There is a process by which language and communication vacillate and eventually come to a dialogue interwoven with religious guilt, another rhetoric (or discourse, as Foucault would put it) we have studied this semester.

Observation
Observation was being used less as a form of spectacle and more as a form of assessment. But it was not assessment as we know it today. It was more as a tactic of external eyes and internal acknowledgment (Herrick, pp. 249-50). By this, the workers at asylums were the observers who encouraged the insane to take a look at themselves. Foucault calls this a recognition by the mirror. By being grouped with other madmen, the insane got a sense of their own character, and sometimes, this encouraged them to want to be more normal (meaning more like the outside world of accepted behavior and less like the insane around them). The idea was if you show the madman others who act like him, he judges for himself that such behavior is madness and chooses to change his language and his actions. Foucault states, “The madman recognizes himself as in a mirror in this madness whose absurd pretensions he has denounced...He is now pitilessly observed by himself. And in the silence of those who represent reason, and who have done nothing but hold up the perilous mirror, he recognizes himself as objectively mad” (1988, p. 264).

So the 18th century was mainly the madman being observed by others; as the 19th century began, institutions were accepting such systems where madmen were observing each other. Foucault explains that madness became a spectacle of itself where mirrors of other madmen created an awareness (linked to shame) that promoted acknowledgment and self-restraint (1988, pp. 264-265). Just imagine if we had spent this entire semester studying the history of the rhetoric of the insane. And wha-laa, read some Foucault. There you have it.

Judgment
This sense of reflection and the mirror incited self-assessment and judgment, as in Foucault’s view many discourses do. Foucault explains how such continual self-observation is rooted in fear and justice leading to self-condemnation as a part of the treatment of insanity (1988, p. 265). The asylum had its own judicial system that “judged immediately, and without appeal” (Foucault, 1988, p. 266). If we follow the progression from dungeons to poor houses to hospitals to asylums, we can see the development of punishment --- both internal and external --- as a therapeutic tool. But this is another topic for another post (just something I am interested in). Basically, the older forms of confinement already had a disconnect from the judicial system of the society. Eventually asylums also created their own judicial languages for punishing untoward behavior. Just one example: A researcher named Pinel took 18th century therapeutic methods and used them as forms of punishment (Foucault, 1988, p. 266). One example that Foucault offers is that of the cold shower as a means of “medicine” for the nervous system. “The happy consequences of the cold shower, the psychological effect of the unpleasant surprise which interrupted the course of ideas and change the nature of sentiments” was used as a means to keep the insane in line both verbally and otherwise physically (1988, pp. 266-267).

Hence, such systems were employed to ensure that the insane man felt the observation and judgment of those around him (Herrick, p. 251). The link between transgression of accepted behavioral norms and the punishment that the person came to accept as just was glaringly evident (Bizzell & Herzberg, p. 1157). One can see how it is difficult to decide whether to call this person in the asylum a patient or an inmate. Madness was subject to the rules of the asylum system and became “a kind of endless trial” where the individual had committed a social crime and had come to a “perpetual recommencement in the internalized form of [silent] remorse” (Foucault, 1988, p. 269; Bizzell & Herzberg, p. 1155; Herrick, p. 250).

While the asylum had not yet reached the status of a medical space where patients were watched for diagnosing and treating, it had developed into “a judicial space where one [was] accused, judged, and condemned, and from which one [was] never released except by the version of this trial in psychological depth --- that is, by remorse” (Foucault, 1988, p. 269). The insane were no longer viewed by society as guilty of a criminal activity, yet they were still punished and disciplined for their abnormal language, mutterings, and behavior. In this context, there is so much to investigate in terms of Foucault’s call for (1) will to truth, (2) discourse, and (3) signifier power (Bizzell & Herzberg, pp. 1157 & 1164).

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Additional reference:

Foucault, Michel. (1988). Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage-Random House.