Madness and Civilisation II

The great theme of the book is that Reason is constituted dialectically, it is not something in and of itself. The Madman is as integral to Modernity as the Scientist. But for this dialectic to hold up the Mad had to be separated from the Reasonable. They were erected the houses of confinement. He rejoins the story at the dawn of the Classical Age (C17 and C18). The Renaissance had already decentered the Mad. Not they were cast out altogether. Whichever ruins the Mad psyche in the Reasonable did not want to see.

In 1656 the ‘Hôpital Général’ was founded. Seemingly as an administrative reform, and one which was for the benefit of the poor and downtrodden. However, this organisation was extrajudicial. - between the king and the courts but one which outside of the law could delegate judges and execute. It is one of the first bourgeois inspiring institutions. It was an example of how Reason requires an abstracted ‘humanity’, a ‘society’, to work its improving schemes on, in order to justify domination over specific humans. This was not just a French phenomenon; in Germany we have seen the founding of the Zuchtthäuser and in England the workhouses connection. In England at least, the purpose of the Workhouse was clear, they excluded the invalid who were still housed in hospitals - and so as places of correction and control. After the response was made refugees from madness which were supposed to be insane outside the juridical fiction of the Government - and hence democratise control. The government essentially erected its schools of vice inside (who was viable? Those condemned by common law; young men who disturbed their families peace or who squandered their goods; people without profession and the insane).

Thus Confinement organised society. Mixing the insane with the role power could create an ethic in wider society. One based on relief to the poor, but which joined aid law and moral obligation. Even in the Classical Age, the State assumed the Church. There were agents of reform through economic control. ‘Police… the totality of measures which make men possible and necessary for all those who could not live without it.’ Magdal General and the Workhouses are just examples of an institution central to the dialectic; the space where rules are suspended.

“for the first time… constrictions of confinement.”

The meaning of confinement becomes clear - it is an answer to an economic crisis in Europe. It is to provide work for those without them, the idle and unemployed became the new lepers. The old metaphor had been revived, but taken on a new form, in production and commerce. This was a cosmology of frugality, and through a calculating and thrifty value ethic which metamorphosed into Reason.

Until the Renaissance… sacred limits of its ether.

The ‘Hôpital’ becomes a negative city, not only for control but also for moral reeducation, but also to house the decrees of the age - when the laws of the State and the laws of the heart are identical - and so was born The Insane.

Through Confinement the Age Cleansed Age sketched its primitive ancestors. It hopes disappeared from Europe a new force would have to replace them through the forms of that exclusion; would remain the same. For an us to be saved a ‘them’ must be damned. Through exclusion we can define who we are!

The excluded are central to our social self-conception. And so was born The Insane.

By casting out Madness from Man, and making the evil of unreason visible, Reason can assume a dominion over what it has rejected. Confinement redolent of shame was not enough. Only oblivion could suppress evil; the Classical Age could not let all forms of unreason hide, in the light - Evil could no longer be dealt with and punished when it was brought into the open. Madness represented the total symptoms of Man Reasonable. Men into unreasoning animals. Only a visible separation - bars - and confinement would do. Only then could Madness be controlled; no longer a monster visible only by but part of an idea and uniting world. Reason assumed dominion over the natural world through this separation; reason and reason alone, could tame the ‘evil’ of Nature.

Confining the Mad to oblivion suggests that shame. Becoming a bourgeois subject required a considerable amount of repression. This repression constitutes the Classical subject.

In this age Reason took on a meaning which is at once positive - textual punitive terminal thoughts - and normative - adhering to bourgeois norms. Reason the process of improvement constituted Reason. It was the delinquent, spendthrift, debauched, drunkards who were confused and labelled ‘unreasonable’. The ideal modern subject was formed and engaged in the project of Civilisation. Yet this Civilisation - made being constituted through Madness. It is always a project which could fall apart or excel. To be rid of Madness would be to be rid of Civilisation.

What is excluded is paradoxically central. We start with the Mad so that we can question Reason. So we have made Madness something which is not distinct from what we say about it. Since the Mad do not speak, We can only understand them ironically, they’d utter the Reasonable say about Madness.

Modernity made Madness comprehensible and safe, confined first in the Madhouse and then the Clinic.