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April 16, 2007
I've always wondered how modernist cultural conservatives would engage with Foucault's texts rather dismiss them. In Australia we usually we get something along the lines of a defence of the [positivist] Enlightenment by attacking the moral relativism and nihilism of "po mo", with little recognition of a history of the Enlightenment in the plural---as a series of multiple, conflicted enlightenments. Little more than that is offered. I would presume that, as empiricists who start from facts, the cultural conservatives would have an animus against rationalism, discourses and knowledge power. They hold that theories are build up from, and checked by facts. You do not start with a discourse. But this epistemology is rarely argued for. So, more often than not we have the cultural conservative dismissal of poststructuralism as a nasty foreign body that will infect the common sense of empiricism.
Well, here is an engagement, of sorts. A review by Andrew Scull of Foucault's History of Madness in The Times Online. This early text, which had been published in an abridged form as Madness and Civilisation in 1965 examines the ideas, practices, institutions, art and literature relating to madness in Western history. Foucault argues that in the modern period unreason is pushed further beneath the surface of society, and is understandable only through certain artists; madness on the other hand, becomes mental illness, and is treated and controlled by medical and psychiatric practices.Various cultural, intellectual and economic structures determine how madness is known and experienced within a given society. In this way, society constructs its experience of madness.
Thus madness in the Renaissance was an experience that was integrated into the rest of the world, whereas by the nineteenth century it had become known as a moral and mental disease. In a sense, they are two very different types of madness. Ultimately, Foucault sees madness as being located in a certain cultural "space" within society; the shape of this space, and its effects on the madman, depend on society itself. The' history of madness is the counterpart of the history of reason'. Hence the linkage between the self-affirmation of early modern philosophical reason and the social repression of unreason as identified in the form of disordered conduct.
Sculls' review is entitled The fictions of Foucault's scholarship. Scull says that the early abridged text:
. .. could be read in a few hours, and if extraordinarily large claims rested on a shaky empirical foundation, this was perhaps not immediately evident. The pleasures of a radical reinterpretation of the place of "psychiatry in the modern world (and, by implication, of the whole Enlightenment project to glorify reason) could be absorbed in very little time...Here... is a world turned upside down. Foucault rejects psychiatry’s vaunted connections with progress; he rejects the received wisdom about madness and the modern world. Generation after generation had sung paeans to the twin movement that took mad people from our midst and consigned them to the new world of the asylum, capturing madness itself for the science of medical men; Foucault advanced the reverse interpretation. The “liberation” of the insane from the shackles of superstition and neglect was, he proclaimed, something quite other – “a gigantic moral imprisonment”. The phrase still echoes. If the highly sceptical, not to say hostile, stance it encapsulates came to dominate four decades of revisionist historiography of psychiatry...
Well, Foucault was analysing the cultural, intellectual and economic structures that dictate how madness is constructed. He is concerned with changing patterns or structures of knowledge, sets of relations, and broad themes. His central argument is that modern medicine and psychiatry fail to listen to the voice of the mad, or to unreason. According to Foucault, neither medicine nor psychoanalysis offers a chance of understanding unreason.
Scull is reviewing the new Routledge translation of Foucault's History of Madness. In Scull's terms Foucault was questioning psychiatry's legitimacy, which he reads in terms of Foucault's "anti-Enlightenment project." His objection is that:
Foucault’s isolation from the world of facts and scholarship is evident throughout History of Madness. It is as though nearly a century of scholarly work had produced nothing of interest or value for Foucault’s project. What interested him, or shielded him, was selectively mined nineteenth-century sources of dubious provenance. Inevitably, this means that elaborate intellectual constructions are built on the shakiest of empirical foundations, and, not surprisingly, many turn out to be wrong.
He says that Foucault argues that the Age of Reason was the age of a Great Confinement:
Foucault tells us that “a social sensibility, common to European culture . . . 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 . . . the signs of [confinement] are to be found massively across Europe throughout the seventeenth century”. “Confinement”, moreover, “had the same meaning throughout Europe, in these early years at least.” ....But the notion of a Europe-wide Great Confinement in these years is purely mythical. Such massive incarceration simply never occurred in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whether one focuses one’s attention on the mad, who were still mostly left at large, or on the broader category of the poor, the idle and the morally disreputable.
Scull is concerned with historical facts, Foucault with a historical sensibility or discourse without the category of power. More accurately, as Michael Gordon points out in his review, Foucault's account of the Great Internment' under the ancient regime, administered by the King's lieutenant de police, can be interpreted in the light of Foucault's later analysis of 'police' as a governmental rationality for the regulation of conduct.
Update: 18 April
Over at Catallaxy Rafe Champion has a short piece that says the triumph of pomo was an effect (not a cause) of an earlier triumph of politicisation and trivialisation of the social sciences and humanities:
And so POMO infected an organism that was already debilitated by other factors. The process of debilitation occurred in the period between 1965 and 1973, massively stimulated by events of 1968. Certainly by 1973 the lunatics were pretty well in charge of the asylum in soft faculties like Sociology. The timetable of publication of works by the major pomos indicates that they could not be indicted for events pre 1973.
Champion gives a list, which he says indicates the dates of publication of English translations of the early works of the authors (not a complete list) that lead to pomo as sympton of intellectual decline in the 1980s:
Foucault: Madness and Civilisation 1965, The Archeology of Knowledge 1972, The Birth of the Clinic 1973, The Order of Things 1973.
Derrida: “Speech and Phenomena” and Other Essays, 1973, Of Grammatology, 1976, Writing and Difference 1978, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, 1979.
Lacan: The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, 1977.
Gadamer: Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, 1976, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 1976.
de Man: Allegories of Reading 1979, Blindness and Insight, 1983.
Lyotard: The Postmodern Condition 1979.
Its an odd list---eg.,Gadamer: Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, 1976, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 1976--but it includes Foucault's Madness and Civilisation
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Well, you're a day late and a dollar short on this one, Gary. (Er, not that you don't have a perfect right to be, being busy with other matters). There was an intersting comment by an actual historian at "The Value" blog 1st post on this controversy, comment #24, which is worth considering. For the rest, I was used to wipe the floor on this one at "Long Sunday" as a spouter of pomo gibberish, who is so shallow as to question the indubitable authority of empirical criticism.