Madness and Classification
A thesis on discourse and identity
Francisco Goya - El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The sleep of reason produces monsters)
Bachelor thesis Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology Student: Tim Rijk (10166823)
Email: tim_rijk@hotmail.com
Supervisor: Dr. V.A. De Rooij Second Reviewer: Dr. M. Veenis
Date: 9 December 2014 Word Count: 11.093
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Abstract
In this essay I analyze the modern psychiatric discourse on madness. My approach to this discourse is based on the work of Michel Foucault on systems of discursive formations. By analyzing the effects of psychiatric discourse on the personal and social identity of the madman, I attempt to reintroduce the subject in Foucault’s work, as well as to give a critical discussion of this discourse. The main argument is that the psychiatric discourse is detrimental to the
development of a healthy identity. I analyze personal identity through the philosophical debate on recognition, and I analyze social identity through the anthropological theories on grammar and anti-grammar. In search of an alternative to this repressive discourse, I will explore the idea of art as a counter-discourse.
Keywords: anti-grammar, discourse, identity, madness, recognition.
Introduction
On 22 July 2011, Anders Behring Breivik killed a total of seventy-seven people in the Norwegian capital of Oslo and on the island of Utøya. Breivik started his killing spree with the detonation of a car bomb in the center of Oslo, targeted at government buildings of the Labor Party
government. Eight people were killed and another 209 were left injured when the bomb, made of 950kg of fertilizer, exploded. Breivik then took a ferry to the nearby island of Utøya, where the youth organization of the Labor Party had organized their annual summer camp. There he continued his killing spree, shooting and killing sixty-nine people and leaving another thirty-three injured. At around 18:30 local time Breivik surrendered himself to the police. By this time, he had killed seventy-seven people, leaving another 242 injured.i
As this was one of the most extreme cases of violence to ever shock Norwegian society, great care was placed in making sure that justice would be served in his trial. Before Breivik was taken to trial, he was inspected by psychiatrists commissioned by the Norwegian court. They concluded that Breivik was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and that he could not be held responsible for his actions. The prosecution therefore demanded that Breivik be transferred to compulsory psychiatric care. Breivik tried to fight the charge of insanity and attempted to justify his actions, by claiming that the bloodbath was necessary to stop the ‘Islamization’ of Norway.ii An objection to the psychiatric report was that Breivik’s extreme view of the world is shared by a minority of right-wing individuals in Norwegian society. Another group of psychiatrists was appointed by the court and they concluded that Breivik suffered from signs of narcissistic and
2 antisocial personality disorders, but that he was criminally responsible. On 24 August 2012, the judge decided to follow the second report and Breivik was found sane and sentenced to twenty-one years in jail.iii
It was this case that first got me thinking about the subject of madness. What I see in the trial of Anders Breivik is an individual who is trying to claim full responsibility for his gruesome actions and who is very much aware of the implications of an insanity verdict. To Breivik, the insanity-verdict means the misrecognition of his actions, and thus a failed attempt to spread his world-view. If he is found sane his actions would leave a more urgent mark in the world, as they would respond to the fear that a sane man could do such a terrible thing based on his
convictions alone. In this essay I will discuss the ‘insanity verdict’ in a slightly different context, by focusing on the classification of madmen in psychiatric discourse. I want to argue that modern psychiatry presents to us as a society a strictly limited vocabulary for dealing with madness, as it delivers a monologue that excludes any insight in the lived experience of
madness. I want to analyze this vocabulary by discussing its historical conditions of possibility, and I want to discuss the consequences of losing all meaningful modes of expression. What does it mean when you can no longer express your most personal feelings in actions and words, as everything you think or do is classified as a symptom of your mental sickness? Is it even possible for psychiatry to be wrong? Can you maintain a healthy relation to yourself and to your
surroundings under such a repressive discourse?
By asking these questions, I am engaging in one of the main debates in anthropology: the debate on classification. From the ideas of George Herbert Mead on the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’ (1967 [1934]) to the work of Marcel Mauss on the notions of person and self (1985 [1938]), from the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss on bricolage and the ‘savage mind’ (1966 [1962]) to the work of Mary Douglas on the group-grid pattern (1970), anthropology has had a rich history of dealing with classification in a wide variety of contexts and systems. In this essay I want to focus on classification in the context of linguistic structure, in order to give a critical analysis of the psychiatric discourse. Ever since the 1950s, when the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was
posthumously reproduced and popularized (1956), there has been a growing interest in anthropology in this subject of linguistic classification. For this essay, I want to engage with socio-linguistic theories that explicitly connect discourse and identity, and supplement this debate with theories from social philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. By using an
interdisciplinary approach, I hope to enrich the debate on classification in anthropology, as well as to give a more complete insight in the effects of psychiatric discourse.
Yet perhaps the most central figure in this essay is the philosopher Michel Foucault, whose own approach can rightly be called interdisciplinary as well. Through his ‘archaeological’ work on the modern psychiatric discourse, I hope to introduce the set of problems that is of
3 interest in this essay: a discourse that silences the other. Yet I believe that Foucault’s discourse-analysis has a somewhat unique relation to both socio-linguistic theory and to the
anthropological debate on classification.iv I will therefore start my essay with a theoretical discussion on these different notions of discourse and the relation between discourse and identity, in order to give an understanding of the debate I’m engaging in and what I will be doing differently.
After discussing Foucault’s analysis of psychiatric discourse, I want to carry on where Foucault stops, by analyzing the effects that psychiatric discourse has in contemporary society. My focus will be on the repressive effects of psychiatric discourse in the development of a healthy identity. As Foucault’s form of discourse-analysis and research is not that commonplace in socio-linguistic research, I feel justified in using sources to attempt to bridge the gap between Foucault’s discourse-analysis and socio-linguistic theory. For this end, I will discuss the debate in social philosophy on identity and recognition, to show how the psychiatric discourse is disruptive in forming healthy relations to self, in developing personal identity. After that I will discuss structuralist theories of grammar and anti-grammar, as they are represented by the anthropologists Gerd Baumann and Jojada Verrips. Through these theories I want to discuss the social identity of madmen, their relation to society, by arguing for the function of a ‘dangerous’ other in society. After having argued that the psychiatric discourse is repressive, I feel the need to ask one last question: how is resistance possible? In an attempt to answer this question, I will therefore end my essay with an exploration of Foucault’s ideas on art as a counter-discourse.
Discourse and identity
In order to situate Foucault’s work and method of discourse analysis in the debate in socio-linguistics, I feel it is best to discuss one of its most influential articles, the 1977 article The
Economics of Linguistic Exchanges, by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In this article Bourdieu
criticizes the theoretical presuppositions of formal linguistics, as he tries to provide an analysis of language in praxis. What he attempts to do is to reintroduce the social world into the science of language (Bourdieu 1977: 650). This is accomplished by a threefold (sociological)
displacement in the concepts of linguistics:
In place of grammaticalness it puts the notion of acceptability, or, to put it another way, in place of ‘the’ language (langue), the notion of the legitimate language. In place of relations
of communication (or symbolic interaction) it puts relations of symbolic power, and so
replaces the question of the meaning of speech with the question of the value and power of speech. Lastly, in place of specifically linguistic competence, it puts symbolic capital, which is inseparable from the speaker’s position in the social structure (ibid. 646).
4 What Bourdieu introduces to the science of language are whole new sets of questions: How does one speak appropriately and who determines what the appropriate language is? How do the objective power relations between speakers influence linguistic production? Through questions about power-relations we get a renewed understanding of what discourse really is, that is:
…a compromise formation emerging from the negotiation between the expressive interest and the censorship inherent in particular linguistic production relations (the structure of linguistic interaction or a specialized field of production and circulation) which is imposed on a speaker equipped with a determinate competence, i.e. a greater or lesser symbolic power over those production relations (ibid. 651).v
A real science of discourse must therefore seek the truth of discourse not only within but also outside discourse, in the social conditions of production and reproduction and in the
relationship between producer and receiver (ibid. 650).
But instead of giving an in depth discussion of Bourdieu’s views in abstract, I feel that his method can here best be described as it is applied to the subject of madness. It is in the work of anthropologist Jim Wilce that we best see Bourdieu’s ideas on language linked to the case of madness. In his 2004 article Madness, Fear, and Control in Bangladesh, Wilce explores the tension between the traditional Bangladeshi perspectives on madness and the newer
medicalized perspectives. For this end, Wilce describes how Bangladeshi patients, their families and psychiatrists try to deal with madness through discourse, and argues that their conflicting abilities to cope are the result of a tension between bodies of power and knowledge (Wilce 2004: 358).
The theme that best illustrates the point Wilce tries to make is the subject of fear. As madness raises a lot of unanswerable questions for patients and their families, it provokes a wide range of fears. Rural Bangladeshi’s, the vast majority of the country’s citizens, do talk about fear as a problem, but only as part of a discourse on magic and spirits and not as the
individualized psychologized object that is emotion (ibid. 360). Especially in young children, fear is often characterized as dar, signaling a danger to weak souls. Young souls are believed to be the most vulnerable to being frightened away and fear in young children is therefore seen as an important problem in itself. Therefore, when psychiatrists signal a pervasive fear as a symptom of a disease, families tend to interpret the fear of their young children as magical fright or dar (ibid. 361). What we have here then are two different discourses with different ways of dealing with human emotions that presents a real mismatch. But the mismatch isn’t problematic in itself. What makes it problematic is the shame of Bangladeshi traditional beliefs and medicine that is present in psychiatric circles. As psychiatrists ‘take on the task of enlightening rural people with a missionary zeal’ (ibid.), they scandalize the use of traditional discourse and thus make a
5 pragmatic form of understanding impossible. What psychiatrists in Bangladesh try to do is establish their discourse as the accepted form of knowledge, by taking away the power of traditional discourse. This clash of discourses is fought by clashing social classes, as it is in part through the unequal access to education that this clash becomes possible. Here we see clearly what Bourdieu intended with his ideas on discourse: it is through a relation of power (the relation doctor – patient) that the legitimate language is established in a certain context and that the value of different speech acts is determined. And with unequal access to cultural capital, unequal access to forms of discourse becomes possible.
While Foucault does pay attention to relations of power that make a discourse possible, his focus on structures and his aversion of the subject in his early work arguably form a contrast with Bourdieu’s ideas on discourse-analysis. Foucault published a book on his method of
discourse-analysis and archaeology, called The Archaeology of Knowledge (2010 [1969]). I feel that in this book, Foucault gives a somewhat idealized version of what his archaeological project entails, as he tries to distance himself from accusations of being a structuralist. Yet what he says about discourse seems to a better reflection of his early work.vi In its most elementary form, discourse is a group of statements that belong to a single discursive formation (Foucault 2010 [1969]: 121). A discursive formation is a system for the dispersion of statements, facilitated by the rules of formation, which provide the conditions of existence of a discourse. Foucault’s work in the Archaeology of Knowledge is both vague and dense as he deliberately tries to employ new concepts, in order to distance himself from ‘words that are already overladen with conditions and consequences’ (ibid. 41), like ‘science’ and ‘ideology’. To clarify what a discursive formation is for Foucault, I believe it is useful to have a look at his discourse-analysis in practice. And to understand Foucault’s practice of discourse-analysis, it is necessary to clarify another of his concepts: the archaeological project.
In the preface to The Order of Things (2002 [1966]), Foucault defines the goal and method of an archaeological project:vii
I am not concerned, therefore, to describe the progress of knowledge towards an objectivity in which today’s science can finally be recognized; What I am attempting to bring to light is the epistemological field, the episteme in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or to its objective forms, grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility; in this account, what should appear are those configurations within the space of knowledge which have given rise to the diverse forms of empirical science. Such an enterprise is not so much a history, in the traditional meaning of that word, as an ‘archaeology’ (Foucault 2002 [1966]: xxiii-xxiv).
6 What Foucault is trying to uncover with his archaeological project is the implicit structure underneath events that make a system of thought, an episteme, possible. It is the episteme that provides the boundaries of what can be thought in a certain historical period. A change in episteme is only explained by a ‘discontinuity’, as Foucault distances himself from a progressive explanation of history (ibid. xxiv). In The Order of Things Foucault attempts to do an
archaeological analysis of the episteme of the humanities. It is through the modern notion of ‘man’ as the locus of meaning, that the episteme of the humanities becomes possible. This episteme in turn creates the conditions of possibility for the modern systems of discursive formation: psychology, sociology and philology (ibid. 392). These systems each produce their own discourse, yet they all share in the same episteme as they share ‘man’ as their subject. Each discourse is therefore limited by the implicit rules of the episteme of the humanities, while still being different from other discourses.
It is also through an archaeological project that Foucault tries to analyze the discourse on madness. He researches the historical events that made a particular mode of thinking (the episteme) about a subject possible. Different groups of statements about this object become possible, as different systems of discursive formation create different discourses. A discourse-analysis for Foucault is thus focused on linguistic structures and on conditions of possibility, as it uses a ‘historical’ method that excludes any form of specific linguistic interaction. What I want to do in this essay is to reintroduce the subject in the work of Foucault, by analyzing the effects of linguistic structures on the individuals who are classified by these structures. Yet before I will begin with my discussion of Foucault, I feel that it is necessary to discuss how socio-linguistics deals with issues of classification, to show how my approach is inspired by and differs from this debate.
As I have discussed in my introduction, there is a whole range of theories in anthropology on classification. But how can classification be related to discourse? To answer this question I will be discussing the article Identity and Interaction (2005) by Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, in which they propose a framework for analyzing identity as situated in linguistic interaction. Their view on identity can best be summarized as follows:
We argue for the analytic value of approaching identity as a relational and socio-cultural phenomenon that emerges and circulates in local discourse contexts of interaction rather than as a stable structure located primarily in the individual psyche or in fixed social categories (Bucholtz & Hall 2005: 585).
For Bucholtz and Hall, identity is the social positioning of self and other through linguistic interaction. Their focus is on interaction, as they argue that in interaction we see identity emerge
7 at multiple analytic levels (ibid. 586). Through an interdisciplinary approach they can pay
attention to both the details of language and the workings of society in order to give a description of identity.
…………..As their work is mainly a methodological piece, Bucholtz and Hall give five principles that constitute their framework. These principles situate identity in language and help to criticize traditional notions on identity. The first principle is the principle of emergence. Bucholtz and Hall criticize the notion that language just offers a reflection of an identity primarily housed within the individual mind. According to them, it is only through a form of discourse that identity enters the social word. Their claim is therefore that ‘identity is best viewed as the emergent product rather than the pre-existing source of linguistic and other semiotic practices...’ (ibid. 588). This identity is fundamentally a social and cultural
phenomenon. They claim that identity is best recognizable as an emergent product when the language use does not confirm with the social category to which people are normatively
assigned (ibid.). Their second principle criticizes the notion that identity is simply a collection of broad social categories like age or gender. Instead Bucholtz and Hall offer the more nuanced principle of positionality, that states that:
Identities encompass (a) macro-level demographic categories; (b) local ethnographically specific cultural positions; and (c) temporary and interactionally specific stances and participant roles (ibid. 592).
The third principle offers some conceptual tools to find identity in linguistic interaction. The principle of indexicality states that relations of identity emerge in interaction through indexical processes, like overtly mentioning identity categories or through displaying one’s epistemic orientations to ongoing talk. The principle of relationality states that identities are
intersubjectively constructed through several complementary and often overlapping relations. The aim of this principle is very much in line with the work of Bourdieu: to emphasize that identities aren’t autonomous, but that they acquire social meaning through their relation to other available identities. And finally, the principle of partialness states that identity is always partial, as it is contextually situated and always relational. This principle is a critique on all social theory that tries to represent social life as internally coherent. Identity is always shifting as interaction unfolds and can take different meanings across discourse contexts (ibid. 606).
What I have hoped to show by now is how discourse is treated as an object of research in social science and what the possibilities of a science of discourse are. Both Bourdieu and
Bucholtz & Hall analyze linguistic practices and either show how the truth of discourse is determined by social factors (Bourdieu) or show how discourse can produce and refer to social categories (Bucholtz & Hall). By discussing the work of Foucault, I am now going to make the
8 shift from linguistic interaction and the individual subject to structures and society at large. By discussing the effects that a linguistic structure has on the personal and social identity of mad individuals, I will attempt to bridge the gap between the work of Foucault and sociolinguists. But first, I will now discuss what Foucault himself has to say about madness.
An archaeology of silence
In Madness and Civilization (2001 [1964]) Foucault provides an archaeological analysis of the episteme of reason and insanity. According to Foucault, the madman has been condemned to silence in modern psychiatric discourse. He therefore calls Madness and Civilization an
archaeology of silence, as he tries to analyze the implicit structure underneath events that made this silence and this discourse possible (Foucault 2001 [1964]: xii). viii In the modern episteme, madness is seen as the uncomfortable other to our Reason, and therefore Foucault also searches for ‘the caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason’. Foucault
discusses three epistemes in which the silencing of madness finds its possibilities or its conclusion. These epistemes can be linked to the following historical periods: the renaissance (until +- 1650), the classical period (+- 1650-1800) and the modern period (1800-present). Foucault characterizes each episteme through a historical figure that is illustrative for that episteme and the changes within that episteme. The changes between epistemes aren’t
explained through one definitive cause, but through a growing uneasiness that eventually leads to a discontinuity between epistemes. These discontinuities are illustrated by Foucault through events that introduce the characterizing historical figure of the next episteme.
The first event that introduces a new historical figure is the disappearance of leprosy at the end of the Middle Ages. This is a significant event, as madness inherits the spaces of exile left behind by leprosy (ibid. 5). A new historical figure emerges in renaissance literature: the
stultifera navis or Ship of Fools, which carries madmen as cargo from town to town, because they
were excluded from the towns. This new structure of exclusion is linked to a changing perception of madness, where the madman becomes a dangerous figure for the first time: excluded to the outskirts of the city, the madman finds himself only symbolically enclosed in society through his exile (ibid. 9). The changing perception of madness becomes apparent in religion and literature, where there is a real fascination with madness, as illustrated by the Ship of Fools. Madness becomes problematic and fascinating as it replaces death as the main subject of religion, as madness becomes linked to the end of the world:
It is no longer the end of time and of the world which will show retrospectively that men were mad not to have been prepared for them; it is the tide of madness, its secret
9 invasion, that shows that the world is near its final catastrophe; it is man’s insanity that invokes and makes necessary the worlds end (ibid. 14).
In literature, madness assumes a new role in the hierarchy of vices; it becomes the main theme of literature as it ‘leads the joyous throng of all human weaknesses’ (ibid. 21). Madness loses its relation to the world and insinuates itself within man; it becomes a ‘subtle rapport that man maintains with himself’ (ibid. 23). The most essential characteristic of this period is that we see a great fascination with madness in all forms of cultural expression, while the madman himself is completely excluded from society.
With the creation of the first Hôpital Général in 1656, we enter the classical episteme. The Hôpital Général is not a hospital in the medical sense that we know it today; it was rather ‘a sort of semijudicial structure, an administrative entity’ (ibid. 37). Its main purpose was to be an institution of order, to provide in the correction of deviant citizens. The Hôpital Général is illustrative of a more general tendency throughout Europe: the great confinement of the poor and unemployed. The creation of the Hôpital Général and the confinement of the poor are significant for the classification of madness, as it is the first time that madness starts to rank as a problem of the city (ibid. 59). Madness is no longer associated with the end of the world, nor is it represented as the chief vice. It is now simply one of the forms of deviancy and it is through the ideas on confinement and work that we learn more about madness in the classical episteme. In the eighteenth century, confinement was the solution to problems of unemployment: all the unemployed were confined in an effort to rid the city of beggars and idle citizens. Through mandatory labor and correctional policies in these places of confinement, the ideas of social usefulness and contributing to a society arise. Unemployment thus became not only a problem of economy but also of morality, as idleness is seen as the source of all disorders (ibid. 43). Each prisoner who could and who would work was once again released in society, as he has once again ‘subscribed to the great ethical pact of human existence’, conforming to the demands of society and its laws of reason (ibid. 55). It is in this context that madness is silenced for the first time: the mad are confined and isolated from society, because they have a negative relation to labor and thus cannot conform to the demands of classical society. They are part of a larger group of deviants and are in that role classified as the dangerous unreason, which threatens the ideal of a perfect society ordered by reason (ibid. 60).
The start of the modern episteme is illustrated by the liberation of the insane at the hospital of Bicêtre, in 1794. At Bicêtre, all patients were released from their chains after a period of growing condemnation of confinement (ibid. 211). The condemnation of confinement and the liberation of the insane are significant for the classification of madness, as it is the starting point for a growing need to separate madness from other forms of social deviation. The events at Bicêtre can best be related to a changing perception of responsibility concerning madness, which
10 is best illustrated by the ideas on hysteria and hypochondria at the end of the classical period. Hysteria and hypochondria were seen as forms of madness caused by irritated nerve fibers. One could prevent the irritation of nerve fibers by avoiding forms of sensory stimulation, by staying inside and changing one’s lifestyle and passions. It is in this context that the modern conception of madness becomes possible: the madman acquires a form of guilt and madness becomes seen as a punishment for an immoral life (ibid. 149). The modern episteme on madness and the historical figure of the modern episteme, the clinic, now become possible through a combination of morality and illness. Modern psychiatry becomes the sole system of discursive formation, as it judges what are acceptable passions and lifestyles and as it pathologizes forms of behavior (ibid. 150).
Through this long and complex structure of possibilities, the psychiatric discourse on madness came into being. There is in this discourse a total silence of madness, as madness is seen as a threat to society or as a punishment for immoral behavior. In less than 400 years’ time, we have gone from a fascination of madness to a complete silence: ix it is now only under the control of the psychiatric institution that we obtain a way of speaking about madness (ibid. xii). Psychiatry fully determines what can be said about the mad and how they can be classified. What I want to do in the rest of this essay is discuss the implications of this discourse for the person being classified: the madman. I want to analyze how the psychiatric discourse on
madness influences identity in practice, to understand what it means to be the ‘eternal other’. To this end, I will discuss the influence silence has on both personal and social identity.
Personal identity and misrecognition
The first debate on identity that I want to discuss is related to the idea of personal identity. By personal identity I mean the image someone has of himself and how he values his own thoughts and actions. To analyze the effects of psychiatric discourse on personal identity, I want to discuss the debate in political philosophy on recognition. Charles Taylor argues, in his 1994 article The
Politics of Recognition, that due recognition is a vital human need because of the supposed link
between recognition and identity. His thesis is that:
…identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves (Taylor 1994: 25).
According to Taylor, the fundamental connection between identity and recognition is a product of modern society. He seeks to understand how recognition came to be so important, by giving a history of identity.x Taylor recognizes two changes that made the connection between identity
11 and recognition possible. These changes each created a politics of recognition and both politics of recognition are active in modern society (ibid. 26). The first change Taylor describes is the collapse of social hierarchies and the disappearance of honor as a norm for interaction. In pre-democratic societies, relations of inequality provided clear modes of interaction: you were to treat your superiors with respect and it was at all times clear who your superior was. Yet to have democratic societies it is necessary to replace social hierarchies with a universal basis for equal interaction, through the notion of universal dignity. The notion of universal dignity is based on the idea that all human beings have an inherent potential (because of their rationality, cf. Kant) and should therefore be treated with dignity. Dignity needs a politics of recognition, as dignity doesn’t provide clear modes of interaction. As such it is possible to act in ways that misrecognize the dignity of others. Therefore a politics of equal dignity came into being, the political project that seeks to ensure that the equality of all citizens is recognized by treating everyone in the same way (ibid. 27).
The second change that made the connection between identity and recognition possible is the eighteenth century idea that human beings have a moral sense, an intuitive feeling for right and wrong. It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who clearly articulated this idea, when he spoke of morality as ‘following a voice of nature within us’ (ibid. 29). We can lose contact with our voice of nature through passions that result from our dependence on others, and it is only through restoring the contact with our authentic self that we can fully enjoy our existence. This voice of nature and the idea of living authentically become problematic when they are combined with the idea of ‘measure’, the idea, best articulated by Johann Gottlob Herder, that each human being has an original way of being human (ibid. 30). The ideas of authenticity and originality have both become so paradigmatic, that living authentically has almost become the same as living up to your originality. As human identity is fundamentally formed in dialogue with others, it is necessary to express your originality in linguistic exchange and to have your originality recognized (ibid. 33). This made a new politics of recognition necessary: the politics of difference, which seeks to ensure that you treat people differently based on their unique persona.
What is problematic to identity in the modern age is thus not the need for recognition, but the conditions in which the attempt to be recognized can fail (ibid. 35). The conflicting politics of equal dignity and originality are a result of this possibility. To really understand the threat misrecognition poses to personal identity, it is useful to include the work of Joel Anderson and Axel Honneth in this discussion. In the 2005 article ‘Autonomy, Vulnerability, Recognition, and Justice’, Anderson and Honneth discuss diverse threats to autonomy that become possible by the misrecognition of identity. Their moral framework can best be summarized with the following quote:
12 The key initial insight of social or relational accounts of autonomy is that full autonomy – the real and effective capacity to develop and pursue one’s own conception of a
worthwhile life – is achievable only under socially supportive conditions (Anderson and Honneth 2005: 130).
The main point that they try to make is that autonomy is vulnerable to disruptions in one’s relations to others. Autonomy is dependent on the ability to sustain certain attitudes to one-self. Anderson and Honneth recognize three relations to self and discuss how these conceptions of self are in turn dependent on the recognition by others. Their claim is not that misrecognition makes autonomy fully impossible, but that a structure of misrecognition is an extra burden in developing a healthy self-image. The question of justice is thus ‘whether the burden is fair’ (ibid 131).
The first relation to self that Anderson and Honneth recognize is self-respect. Self-respect is defined as ‘the affectively laden self-conception that underwrites a view of oneself as the legitimate source of reasons for acting’ (ibid. 132). It is a view of oneself as someone with adequate reason which makes one a legitimate (co)author of one’s decisions. Self-respect can be diminished through structures of subordination, marginalization, and exclusion. Through these structures one is denied the social standing of legitimate co-authorship of one’s decisions. Society can protect self-respect through the politics of equal dignity, by guaranteeing individual rights to all (ibid. 132-133). I believe that the discourse on madness is a burden for developing self-respect. What is most troubling in this discourse is its relation to unreason. The politics of equal dignity is based on the idea that everyone should have equal rights because everyone has the inherent capacity to reason. By being classified as mad, one is denied to have this capacity to reason through association with unreason. We see the effects of this misrecognition in the case of an insanity defense, where people are denied to be the legitimate source of their own actions.
The second relation to self recognized by Anderson and Honneth is self-trust or basic self-confidence. Self-trust is the capacity to have an open and trusting relationship with your own emotions and desires (ibid. 133). Self-trust is a vital component of autonomy because of the complexity of our access to feelings and fears. When you lose self-trust, you lose the basis for leading your life according to your most basic convictions, as you can no longer trust these basic convictions to be authentically your own. Self-trust can develop through genuine openness in intimate relationships, and it is through ‘intimate violations’ like rape and torture that self-trust can become deeply disturbed (ibid. 134-135). I believe that the concept of ‘danger’ in the discourse on madness presents a real threat to self-trust as well. This is best illustrated by Jim Wilce’s discussion on fear that was already mentioned. Madness forms a danger to self and society and raises a lot of questions, which result in a climate of fear surrounding madness. It is through this context that people need to learn to deal with madness, as it is mostly approach
13 with fear and suspicion. While this isn’t a violation of intimacy like rape or torture is, I do believe that this climate of fear is a real obstacle for genuine openness in intimate relationships.
And finally, the third relation to self is self-esteem or self-worth. Self-esteem is the capacity to feel that your actions are valuable and important. If you want to be autonomous and act out your will, it is necessary for you to feel that your actions matter. Self-esteem can develop through a positive symbolic-semantic field of language. By having words with a positive
connotation available to describe your feelings and actions, you can easier develop self-esteem. It is thus through a linguistic structure that is hostile to what one does that self-esteem is diminished (ibid. 136-137). I would argue that the discourse on madness negatively influences self-esteem as well, as it empties the words and actions of madmen from any (positive) meaning. James M. Wilce gives a good illustration of my point in his 1998 article The Pragmatics of
“Madness”. In this article Wilce analyzes the performativity of wept speech by persons classified
as mad and discusses how this lament is received by family and academics. The key problem he discusses is exactly the diminishing of self-trust: the fact that the performance of wept speech loses its footing or meaning because the person who is speaking is labeled ‘mad’ by her kin (Wilce 1998: 1). By being labeled as ‘mad’, one isn’t seen as a legitimate author of their own decisions. The author of your decisions is your madness, as this label pathologizes all your behavior. The discourse of madness thus forms a threat to self-trust as it cannot recognize the actions of madman as important and meaningful.
What I have tried to show here is that the discourse on madness is a threat to personal identity, as it forms a burden on the development of healthy relations to self. This discourse fails to recognize relations of self-respect, self-trust and self-esteem, and thus makes it a real threat to developing a positive self-image. I am here not making an argument against the effectiveness of psychiatry or even the necessity of classification in psychiatric method. But what I do hope to have shown by now is how a discourse can negatively influence self-image, and that this can affect how people experience their mental problems and how they can recover. In the next section, I want to discuss the influence of psychiatric discourse on social identity, and show what happens when a discourse on identity is taken to its limits and beyond.
Social identity and anti-grammar
The second debate on identity that I want to discuss is related to the idea of social identity. By social identity I mean how people see themselves situated and integrated in society. I want to analyze the effects of psychiatric discourse on social identity, by discussing the debate in
structuralist anthropology on grammars of identity and anti-grammar. Gerd Baumann discusses the theory of grammar and anti-grammar in his 2004 article ‘Grammars of Identity/Alterity’. Baumann recognizes three grammars, three modes of classification that form a notion of self
14 through the notion of other. He analyzes the potential of these grammars through two
challenges: the ternary challenge and the question of falsification. The ternary challenge is concerned with proving that the grammars do not form binary oppositions that leave open a whole range of possibilities between two extremes, but that these grammars are tertiary instead. The question of falsification is related to the ideas of Karl Popper that a theory is only
meaningful if its conditions for falsification are known. Baumann thus searches for the conditions that make a grammar fail, that make a self-other relation impossible. It is his
falsification of grammar or anti-grammar that is essential to my argument. But before we get to anti-grammar, I will first discuss the three grammars that Baumann recognizes.
The first grammar that Baumann discusses is the grammar of Orientalization. This is a form of identity formation first theorized by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978). In this work Said tries to understand the classification of the ‘Orient’ by the ‘Occident’. What makes Said’s analysis of classification stand out for Baumann is that it is more than a binary opposition between ‘us good’ and ‘them bad’. The grammar of Orientalization is a binary opposition that is subject to reversal (Baumann 2004: 20). Through classifying the Orient, the West does not only form a positive self-image through what is bad in the East, but it also implicates self-critique through recognizing what is good in them that we lack. The grammar of Orientalization thus offers ‘… a double-edged, potentially subtle, and at times even dialectical way of selfing one’s own and othering the alien’ (ibid. 21).
The second grammar discussed by Baumann is the grammar of segmentation. It was Edward Evans-Pritchard who first theorized segmentation as a form of classification in The Nuer (1940), his book on the political institutions of the Nuer people. Evans-Pritchard theorized how the Nuer use a hierarchical ‘pyramid of identifications’ that determines identity according to context. Baumann describes this theory as follows:
While in the context of a lineage-level blood feud a Nuer must ‘other’ an implicated neighbor to the point of threatening a revenge killing, the same neighbor is an ally in the context of a clan-level conflict or, as in Evans-Pritchard’s days, a threat to colonial conquest. This is why Evans-Pritchard coined the paradoxical term ‘ordered anarchy’ (Baumann 2004: 21).
The grammar of segmentation is probably best illustrated by the example of football
competitions. When the neighborhood team plays against a team from the other side of the city, people associate with their team based on their local context. When one of the city’s teams plays a big match against a team from another city, people associate with their city’s identity, leaving local differences aside. And when the national team plays against a team from another country, people support this team by associating with their national identity, leaving aside national
15 diversity to best support their nation’s team. What makes this theory of identity formation stand out for Baumann is its contextual awareness and flexibility: we associate with different segments or levels of our identity according to context (ibid. 24).
And finally, the third grammar that is discussed by Baumann is the grammar of encompassment. Encompassment was first theorized by Louis Dumont in the 1980 Homo
Economicus, in which Dumont gives an analysis of the Indian caste system. He describes how the
higher caste, in defining the caste system and its hierarchy, needs the members of the lower caste. What makes this theory of identity interesting for Baumann is how the ‘other’ is here subsumed in the encompassing theory of the one who is defining, in an identity that
encompasses both self and other. ‘Encompassment means an act of selfing by appropriating ... selected kinds of otherness’ (Baumann 2004: 25). Yet instead of recognizing difference on multiple levels, like in the hierarchical theory of segmentation, encompassment only works on two levels: the lower level of difference and the higher level of universality that subsumes that which is different (ibid.). The example of ‘Hindu’ as classification might be enlightening. In defining what a Hindu is, the Hindu recognizes the Sikh as other, concerning the conflicts in India for example. But through a sub-inclusion they can also claim that they both share in the same universal: a Sikh is really just ignorant, and in essence a believer in Brahma and the Hindu faith. As such, the lower level of classification that is based on conflict is subsumed to make the universal category of ‘Hindu’ possible (ibid. 26).
After discussing the three grammars and their unique contributions, Baumann can analyze the conditions of possibility for these theories of identity. He first attempts to show that all three grammars are tertiary instead of binary (self-other as mutually exclusive poles) modes of classification. The problem with binary opposition is that it presents a really black-or-white picture of reality: you are either ‘selfing’ or ‘being othered’ (ibid. 35). The ternary challenge implies that there is always something external to the classification between self and other. Baumann shows how this is the case for all three grammars. For the grammars of segmentation and encompassment, it is easy to explain how they are tertiary. Segmentation implies associating with identity on a hierarchical level based on context. As such, everything outside this context cannot associate to this hierarchy and is thus outside classification, external to self and other. The groups not relevant in the context of a specific identity formation thus make this grammar tertiary. Encompassment implies subsuming that which is different in that which is universal to both. In the example of classifying Hindus, this means that Hindus define Sikhs as part of Hindu community. What this leaves out are other groups that aren’t included in the universal ‘Hindu’, like Muslims or atheists. It is thus the group that doesn’t share in the universal between self and other that makes this grammar tertiary (ibid. 38). For the grammar of Orientalization, it is more difficult to prove that it is tertiary. Baumann gives the example of classifications of migrant
16 groups in the Netherlands. What makes this a tertiary classification is that we can distinguish between settled and newly arrived immigrants. What is good in settled immigrants, how well they have adapted, their mastery of language, is what is lacking in newly arrived immigrants, and this is how new immigrants come to be defined. This creates a tertiary model of national identity: there is an unquestionable ‘us’, the category of ‘the tolerable immigrants’ with whom we are prepared to talk, and the ‘bad immigrants’ who are mere problem objects and are thus excluded (ibid. 39).
The last challenge that Baumann poses is the question of self-falsification. Baumann shows a great variety of contexts in which the grammars of identity seem to work. But to know the conditions of truth of a theory, the question must be posed: under what conditions do the grammars of identity fail? This situation when grammars of identity fail is what Baumann calls the ‘return to anti-grammar’. According to Baumann, all grammars of identity are based upon a certain measure of violence, to make it possible for the privileged people to define the ‘people below them’ as ‘others’. Yet under conditions of extreme violence, like in situations of genocide, all three grammars of identity seem to fail. What arises is anti-grammar: the simple binary notion of ‘we are good, so they are bad’ and the genocidal conclusion that ‘we must live, so they must die’. In this anti-grammar the other becomes dehumanized until the category of other no longer seems possible. What rests is total annihilation (ibid. 42)
Baumann tries to explain his theory of grammar by discussing the rise of anti-Semitic discourse in Nazi-Germany. He shows how new words to classify Jews replace the old discourse, by discussing the diary of Victor Klemperer. Klemperer was a Jewish philologist who made notes about the perversion of language in his diary. First Klemperer signalled the use of terms like ‘punitive expedition’, a mode of correcting the behaviour of Jews and other social deviants in German society. For Klemperer, these words signalled a colonial mode of classifying Jews, as second-rate citizens (ibid. 44). Yet in this mode of classification Jews were still seen as citizens of the German nation, and it was believed that they only need correction. The perversion of language was completed when Jews could only be classified as ‘alien’ to society, when words like ‘international Jewry’ and ‘the World Jews’ became part of mainstream discourse. In this discourse the Jew could only be thought outside German society, as a threat to the nation that needed to be exterminated (ibid. 45). This is the anti-grammar of ‘we are good, so they are bad’, where the constitution of a self as pure ‘sameness’, the ideal of the Third Reich, implies the destruction of the other.
What I would like to argue is that the discourse on madness is a form of anti-grammar. It is an extreme commitment to rationality that causes the madmen to be fully excluded from dialogue. Yet the discourse on madness doesn’t cause any form of extreme physical violence. To understand how this anti-grammar functions, I believe that a discussion of Jojada Verrips’ work
17 is useful. In Dehumanization as a Double-Edged Sword (2004), Verrips discusses the role that dehumanizing language plays in army boot camps. The main question that he seeks to answer is why people start developing an anti-grammar. Central to his theory is the Lacanian concept of ‘fantasy’, as it is used by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. According to Žižek, we construct fantasies to deal with the ‘Real’, “a ‘something’ that pushes people forward but is too big for words and therefore horrible” (Verrips 2004: 144). Žižek claims that notions like race and nation are just ‘things’ to which we can only relate through fantasies, as we are unable to truly understand what these concepts mean for us. We relate to these notions by fantasising the ‘Other’ as a threat to our way of life. We imagine that the ‘Other’ wants to steal our pleasures by ruining our way of life, to somehow relate to an abstract idea of nation. According to Verrips, it is through these fantasies that anti-grammar can develop (ibid. 145). Through a radical exclusion of the ‘other’, we achieve a radical inclusion of the ‘self’, as anti-grammar can offer us a collective sense of ‘self’ through extermination of the other.
The argument that I want to make is that we fantasise the ‘mad other’ as a danger to our way of life. We see this element of danger in Foucaults archaeology, where he shows how madness has time and again been associated with trouble and danger. The association of madness with fear, in the work of Jim Wilce, is also a good reflection of the point that I’m trying to make. Madness and unreason form a threat to the ideal image of a democracy, and its Kantian assumption that all men deserve equal rights because of their equal capacity to reason. Through the dangerous mad ‘Other’ we try to deal with the ‘Real’ that is this idealized capacity for reason. And because of this fantasy, the anti-grammar that is the complete silencing of madness
becomes possible. Through this silence, it is possible to commit to the idea that our actions can be motivated solely by reason, and thus commit to our democratic identity.
What I have discussed so far is how identity is influenced by the psychiatric discourse. I have argued that the discourse on madness has a negative influence on self-identity. A discourse that excludes the madman from dialogue proves unable to provide adequate recognition, and is thus detrimental for the development of self-respect, self-trust and self-esteem. I have also argued that the discourse on madness influences social identity, as the madman proves a haunting reminder of unreason. Through the psychiatric discourse we can exclude madness from society, and keep faith in our ideal image of democracy. Yet now that this discourse has proved to be so harmful, the question arises: is it possible to break the silence, to restore a dialogue outside psychiatric discourse, in order to return meaning to the world of madmen? I want to dedicate the last section of my essay to this question, inspired by a somewhat enigmatic passage by Foucault.
18 Breaking the silence: art as a counter-discourse
After a whole book devoted to the conditions of possibility of the modern episteme on madness, Foucault suddenly begins his conclusion to Madness and Civilization by discussing the painting
The Madhouse by the Spanish romantic painter Francisco Goya. While making references to art
Figure 1: Francisco Goya - Casa de Locos (The Madhouse)
has often been a part of Foucault’s work and of French philosophy in general, some of the claims that Foucault makes in his conclusion are extraordinary. His initial discussion of Goya’s work is used in a style that we returns in his later worksxi: he argues that the changing perception of madness can be seen in the change in paintings in Goya’s oeuvre (Foucault 2001 [1964]: 265-267).
Yet after a complicated discussion on the relation between art, madness and truth, Foucault makes another claim about art in general. The claim that he makes is based on an argument that is dense and closely related to his discussion of unreason.xii For my purposes I believe that the following quotes best introduce the theme that I want to discuss:
Henceforth, and through the mediation of madness, it is the world that becomes culpable (for the first time in the Western world) in relation to the work of art; its language, compelled by it to a task of recognition, of reparation, to the task of restoring reason
from that unreason and to that unreason (ibid. 274).
The moment when, together, the work of art and madness are born and fulfilled is the beginning of the time when the world finds itself arraigned by that work of art and responsible before it for what it is (ibid.).
19 What Foucault seems to suggest in these quotes is that art has the potential to provide a counter-discourse. It is through art that we can break the silence and learn how the ‘eternal other’ lives. Art confronts us with the task to recognize the voice of madness and to appreciate it for what it has to say. And perhaps through art, we can restore the madman to some (symbolic) place within society, like in the renaissance. In this last part of my essay, I want to discuss art as a way to break the silence, to restore some meaning to the feelings of madmen and to help understand their world. But first, I will briefly elaborate on the historical relation between madness and art, to understand the historical context of this debate.
The Germanic linguist Derek Hillard discusses the historical relation between creativity and madness, in his 2002 article ‘The Rhetoric of Originality’. Through an analysis of the German poems of Paul Celan, Hillard tries to re-examine the relation between genius and madness ‘in the wake of 20th-century totalitarian politics’ (Hillard 2002: 394). By doing so, he gives these poems a place in the discursive history of madness and genius. It is mainly this discursive history of madness and genius that is of interest for my discussion. Hillard argues that ‘the writings of genius and madness have traditionally appeared as articulations of a basically original and irreproducible nature’ (ibid.). That is to say: art roots itself in originality, and through originality art acquires an irrational aura. Both genius and madness partake in this irrationality of
originality. In the 18th century, it was Johann Georg Hamann who first clearly asserted the link between madness and genius. He claimed that a sort of prophetic enthusiasm of geniuses could often manifest itself as madness. But at the same time, some genius poets could be denounced as mentally ill. Madness in art is here both a prophetic higher truth and an abnormal condition. In the 20th century too, the madness of genius was both a gift and a punishment. The artist derived his originality from a divine intervention, which gifted him his enthusiasm to express his singularity. Yet this madness was also seen as a punishment for daring to transgress human limitations (ibid. 395).
While Hillard still has a lot more to say about madness and art, I think that for my present purposes this discussion has been sufficient. What I have hoped to make clear is how madness and art are historically connected, through the figure of genius and originality. I believe nobody represents this link between madness and art better than the Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí. The following quote, often attributed to the painter, clearly illustrates my point: ‘There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad’. Yet Dalí claimed to be more than just a madman, as he claimed that he had developed a method to exploit his madness. This paranoiac-critical method, as it was called, was used to systematize the interpretation of delirium, in order to fully discredit the world of reason and reality and to give an insight in the irrational subconscious. Dalí claimed to apply the method for his own work, and even convinced the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud of the potential of this
20 method, after giving a critical analysis of the representation of the subconscious in his painting
The Metamorphosis of Narcissus (Figure 2). xiii
Figure 2: Salvador Dalí – The Metamorphosis of Narcissus
While it arguably doesn’t diminish the fascinating qualities of Dalí’s work, the possibility of performativity in Dali’s madness is somewhat troubling for the questions that I want to ask. To finish this essay, I want to have a closer look at art by people who are actually classified as mad by psychiatrists, by discussing the research of the anthropologist and artist Alexandra Schüssler. In Insanity as Looking Glass (2002), Schüssler gives an analysis of how the imagery created by mental health patients is received. In particular, she researches the art created by the Artists from Gugging. These are mental health patients who live in the Artist’s House, a special department of the psychiatric hospital in Maria Gugging, Austria. All patients who display a talent for art brut, a term used to describe creative individuals outside the artistic sphere, can become an Artist from Gugging (Schüssler 2002: 136). The art that these patients produce is displayed in expositions all over the world and sold to private collectors, often for a hefty fee. The founder of the Gugging art project, the psychiatrist Leo Navratil, originally tried to frame his project within psychiatric practices. Yet under his successor, Johann Feilacher, there have been successful attempts to promote them exclusively as contemporary artists, distancing them from psychiatric discourse (ibid. 137).
Schüssler researches how this art is received by visitors to the Artist’s House and to the galleries. The ideas of Roland Barthes on the impact of photographic images are essential to her
21 argument. Barthes distinguished two ways that images can have an impact on the viewer: the
studium and the punctum. The studium is a culturally coded way of reacting to imagery, which
determines what we ‘like’ about a picture (ibid. 146). An example might be the ways in which art connoisseurs try to say something meaningful about the presented images. The punctum, in contrast, is something that jumps out of its context and pierces the viewer. It instills a sense of being exposed, as if the viewer is turning in an ‘other’. The punctum touches us deeply and leaves
Figure 3: Arnold Schmidt – Drei Figuren (Three Figures)
us unable to name what produces this feeling. Our attempts to capture the punctum only result in self-exposure (ibid. 147).
What Schüssler argues, is that the visitors of the Artist’s house experience a punctum. The descriptions people give of the paintings are a form of self-exposure rather than a
description of the artist or his work. When asked about the painting by Arnold Schmidt (Figure 3), one of the visitors, believing it to represent a family story, replied:
…Well, it seems like the artist has painted it in a rather neutral mood. Probably he understands that ‘okay, something went wrong in my family and I am the one to suffer from it’. I think the red-eyed figure is the painter himself. The artist perceives himself, but he does not express pain or anything else, it is purely symbolic. No pain, no
mourning, no gayness - not in these colours ... the painting looks like it was made in an outburst of anger. The aggression is not destructive, but it had to be released on paper. You can see that in the signature - he could cover the whole surface with his scribbling (ibid. 143).xiv
According to Schüssler, there is a very specific form of self-exposure at work here. This is related to Jacques Lacan’s ideas of the mirror image. According to Lacan, young infants form a notion of
22 ‘I’ through the mirror image of their body in the mirror. As the mirror image reflects the illusory unity of the body, an ideal image of the ‘I’ as complete unity arises. This idealized unity forms the base for our desire for order and control and our fear of fragmentation and chaos. Because the ‘real’ can never correspond to the desire for complete unity, we construct a projection, a fictive model in our imagination, to push back the fear of chaos. The self becomes dependent on an outside object, starting with the mirror image (ibid. 148). If the unity of the ideal ‘I’ feels threatened by incoherence, we can confront this fear of incoherence through projection, by using an outside object as a ‘screen’ (ibid. 149). For infants, the body image serves as a ‘screen’ for projection, as it is through the idealized unity of the body image that we affirm our own coherence. According to Augustus Ruhs, we replace the body image as ‘screen’ for projection with transitional subjects as we mature. A transitional subject can be a living creature or a manmade object. When it is a living creature, full human subjectivity is denied to it in terms of rationality and intellect (ibid. 148).
Schüssler claims that the mental patient is a transitional subject for us, a bridge between the ‘I’ and the ‘real’. What makes the art of Gugging stand out is the fact that it is made by a transitional subject. This art offers us a punctum, a way of exposing our fear of incoherence, by projecting our fears on the transitional subject through his art. Whenever our unity of self feels threatened by the fear of incoherence or insanity, we can confront these fears through the art of the madman, to affirm ourselves of our own rationality (ibid. 150). According to Schüssler, this is what we see happening in the descriptions that people give of the art of Gugging.
The insane have been locked away in mental institutes and silenced by psychiatric discourse, but through art we can still confront madness. When our ideal of coherence and sanity feels threatened, we can confront the fear of insanity by projecting these fears on madmen through their art. It is thus through art that we attempt to learn about the experience of
madness, not to restore a voice of madness, but to help silence some of our deepest fears. As such, art seems to hold no potential for breaking the silence: we approach art not with an interest in meaningful dialogue and understanding, but only with the interest of finding reassurance in our ‘eternal other’.
Conclusion
My interest in the classification of madness started with the trial of Anders Breivik, and the subject of an insanity verdict. When a man is so insistent on being held responsible for such gruesome actions, the questions arises: what does it mean to not be held responsible for your own actions? What happens when you are classified insane, when you are accused of losing the authorship of your feelings and actions to madness? By using the work of Foucault in this essay, I effectively set out a complementary goal for myself: to situate and integrate the work of Foucault
23 in the field of socio-linguistics. By discussing the effects of psychiatric discourse on identity, I tried to return the subject to the discourse-analysis of Foucault, in order to show how its place in the field of socio-linguistics.
I have discussed what it means to only be talked about, and I argued that the modern psychiatric discourse is disruptive of personal identity as well as social identity. Psychiatric discourse cannot recognize the actions of madmen as meaningful. As recognition is essential to developing a healthy personal identity, the psychiatric discourse forms a real obstacle for the development of a healthy relation to self. Through fantasizing the madman as a danger to society, the psychiatric discourse disturbs the relation between madman and society as well. What I have argued is that there is a necessity for this disturbed social identity. When we construct the madman as the ‘unreasonable other’ to our reason, we can relate to the abstract notion of complete rationality, which is essential for the ideal of democratic society.
At the end of this essay, one question remains both urgent and unanswered: How can we truly restore the dialogue between madman and society? Both Lacan and Foucault were
contributors to the anti-psychiatry movement: the movement that finds psychiatry to be more harmful than beneficial. I too believe in anti-psychiatry to some extent, as the discourse employed by psychiatry is detrimental to the development of a healthy identity. Without any way to meaningfully express yourself as a healthy individual, how is recovery supposed to be possible? What alternative can we provide to psychiatric discourse, to break the silence and to restore meaning to the world of madness?
24 Notes
i Source: BBC News Europe - Timeline: How Norway’s terror attacks unfolded.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-14260297, visited on 6 October 2014 ii Source: BBC News Europe - Prosecutors in Norway call for Breivik insanity verdict.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-18530670, visited on 7 October 2014 iii Source: BBC News Europe - Anders Behring Breivik: Norway court finds him sane.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-19365616, visited on 7 October 2014
iv Throughout this essay I will be referring to Foucault’s early archaeological works. His later work on power and sexuality, often called genealogical, has a more prominent and less troublesome position in anthropology.
v Bourdieu is here quoting an earlier work of himself. The original French quote, in L’ontologie
politique de Martin Heidegger (1975), reads:
le produit d'un compromis entre un intérêt expressif et une censure constituée par la structure même du chams dans lequel se produit et circule le discours. Plus ou moins "réussie" selon la compétence spécifique du producteur, cette "formation de
compromis", pour parler comme Freud, est le produit de stratégies d'euphémisation, consistant inséparablement à mettre en forme et à mettre des formes : ces stratégies tendent à assurer la satisfaction de l'intérêt expressif, pulsion biologique ou intérêt politique (au sens large du terme), dans les limites de la structure des chances de profit matériel ou symbolique que les différentes formes de discours peuvent procurer aux différents producteurs en fonction de la position qu'ils occupent dans le champ, c'est-à-dire dans la structure de la distribution du capital spécifique en jeu dans ce champ. (Bourdieu 1975: 109)
vi It should be noted that Foucault is notorious for using concepts in multiple and sometimes conflicting ways. I believe this is caused by his wish to distance himself from established modes of thinking, which results in his creation of new concepts, which are at times both vague and ambiguous.
vii I am here deliberately not referring to The Archaeology of Knowledge, because of the objections that I stated earlier.
viii For the problems with Foucault’s project of madness, and with his method of giving a voice to silence, see: Jacques Derrida – Cogito and the History of Madness (2001 [1963]).
ix For anthropological work concerning the subject of silence, see: Michael Jackson – The Prose of
Suffering and the Practice of Silence (2004)
x It could therefore be argued that his method superficially resembles the method of Foucault’s archaeological projects.
xi See for example his discussion in The Order of Things of the 1656 painting Las Meninas, by Diego Velázquez
xii N.B.: Foucault introduces this theme on the very last page of Madness and Civilization, and as such one would assume that this matter was of some importance to him. Yet to my knowledge he has never directly worked on this topic again.
xiii Source: Terry Riggs: Salvador Dalí – Metamorphosis of Narcissus. Text summary for Tate museum website. http://tinyurl.com/opa5nd2, visited on 4 December 2014
xiv While there is a reference to a ‘red-eyed figure’ in the article, the image in the article is actually in black and white. I believe that it is the figure on the right that is referred to.
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