PLEASURE AND PROVOCATION: REACTION‐SHOTS TO MICHEL FOUCAULT'S HISTORY OF MADNESS
2007; Wiley; Volume: 38; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1467-9191.2007.00269.x
ISSN1467-9191
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes
ResumoThe domain of culture begins when one HAS “forgotten-what-book”. Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke. Abstracting from a certain quaintness of language, this could be Eliot Sptitzer, the Governor of New York State, announcing and promoting the new laws on “civil confinement” and “sexually motivated felony.” It is in fact from a treatise by a certain N. de La Mar, Traité de police, published in four volumes in Paris in 1738 and quoted by Michel Foucault in History of Madness, published in 1961 under the title Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique and reissued by Routlege in a new, and newly complete, translation in 2006: a reminder that la plus ça change la plus c’est la même chose and, more pointedly, that Foucault's big and complex book remains both relevant and appealing.1 Of course “appealing,” unlike “true” and probably unlike “relevant,” is audience-relative: What works for some does not work for all. My guess would be that, in thinking about our fellow citizens, we can differentiate those who would red-flag the phrase “such people,” and similar phrases (“such people” arepeople who have nothing to do with “us” and “our” well-conducted lives) and those who find such phrases suspect or at least a little lacking in sympathy and their casual users dead, imaginatively, to the possibility of being in uncomfortable shoes, tight spots, or civil trouble. The book under discussion and other works of Foucault, especially Surveiller et punir and the three volumes of the Histoire de la sexualité will appeal to the latter, the actually or potentially restive, more than to the former, those who cannot understand why anyone, with nothing to hide, could be troubled by government reading of email or who can ask, with full sincerity, as I have heard more than once during jury selection: “Why would a policeman lie?” I am invoking here the figure—quasi-caricatural, quasi-real—of the bien-pensant: not the postal worker who is cognitively harmless, but the occupant of a tiny executive position at American Express or Morgan Stanley. Hated by every French thinker from Sartre to Barthes, there is perhaps no exactly equivalent American term of abuse. The person described as bien-pensant has opinions certainly, but they partake of what Barthes calls doxa: “c’est l’Opinion publique, l’Esprit majoritaire, le Consensus petit-bourgeois, la Voix du Naturel, la Violence du Préjugé.”2 I want to say something about how Foucault's book works off, and against, this French cultural formation. First of all, Foucault wants to persuade the bien-pensant that much of what they take to be obviously true is, not only not obviously true, but not true at all. I think this exercise is bound to fail, even if a minor amount of mental disturbance can be generated: doxa, by its nature, is immune to straightforward attack, more or less cognitively impenetrable. There is nevertheless something to be said for provocation. It annoys—in a gadfly-like way—but it also finds its audience. The reference to Socratic practice is deliberate. If you read the Euthyphro, you will see that Socrates does not persuade Euthyphro he doesn't know what he is talking about. Euthyphro, like most adults, has a case-hardened or effectively moated ego. It cannot be touched (or anyway roughed up) by mere rational persuasion, however clever. You will also recall the crowd of young people who liked to witness Socrates in action. They cannot, I think it is safe to assume, enjoy the Socratic provocation (what is in fact a dialectical belittlement), unless they are able to distinguish themselves from its target (or victim). The thought must be: We are not like Euthyphro. The obvious idea is that we who take, who can take, pleasure in reading History of Madness are like the young bystanders in the Socratic story. This is just how it works. It does not follow that we have fewer prejudices than the man on the Clapham omnibus, though in the instant case it can be factually true that we are not doctors or psychiatrists or judges: Our judgments, we suppose, have never put anyone behind the bars of either a prison or a madhouse. In making these remarks, I am treating History of Madness as a work of literature. I mean that Foucault is an author belonging to the same history as Montaigne or Voltaire or Rousseau. In two important reviews, in London Review of Books (LRB) and Times Literary Supplement (TLS), there is no sense of this and the writers of those reviews (which I will say more about hereinafter) are entitled to dismiss my placement of Foucault as an extravagant, and perhaps even silly, value judgment. How do you support value judgments in the area of aesthetics? You take people into the room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art which contains a bunch of Clyfford Stills and you hope something happens. It might not. If the paintings are not themselves persuasive, you cannot be. So read the book. Read it in French if you can, but as is common with great works, enough, even if not everything, comes across in translation. Here's the sort of passage that makes me think History of Madness is literature: L’anéantissement de la mort n’est plus rien puisqu’il était déjà tout, pisque la vie n’était elle-même que fatuité, paroles vaines, fracas de grelots et de marottes. La tête est déjà vide, qui deviendra crâne. La folie, c’est le déjà-là de la mort.3 As translated by Richard Howard in the first English version, this becomes: Death's annihilation is no longer anything because it was already everything, because life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells. The head that will become a skull is already empty. Madness is the dèjà-là of death.4 This reads in the new translation by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa: Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a jester's cap and bells. The death's head showed itself to be a vessel already empty, for madness was the being-already-there of death.5 I suppose the first thing to say to any translator is “Thank you,” but after that, even with a just appreciation of that thankless task, one may be inclined to grumble. The best comment on translation I know is by Susan Sontag in an essay entitled “The World as India”: Is the first task of the translator to efface the foreignness of a text, and to recast it according to the norms of the new language? There is no serious translator who does not fret about such problems: like classical ballet, literary translation is an activity with unrealistic standards, that is, standards so exacting that they are bound to generate dissatisfaction, a sense of being rarely up to the mark, among ambitious practitioners.6 Andrew Scull, writing in TLS, having conceded—and “conceded,” given, the tenor of his review, does seem the right word—that History of Madness is of “potential interest and importance,” makes the following comment: “How many people will actually plough through the extended text is less clear, and the new translation by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa is not much help in that regard. Often dreary and dispirited, it is also unreliable and prone to inaccurate paraphrase. Howard's version, however incomplete the text from which he worked sparkles in comparison.”7 This is generally speaking a fair comment on the translations. My quoted passages partly, but only partly, bear this out. Although the Murphy/Khalfa version reads better in English, it really is a paraphrase. There is nothing in the French that supports the use of the word “meaning.” On the other hand, Howard (himself a poet of some note), though often excellent, here produces something that is pretentious and macaronic, perhaps pretentious qua macaronic. Incidentally, the number of readers of History of Madness, translation problems aside, is not likely to be increased by a review appearing, unforgivably and unfairly, under the title, whether Scull's or the TLS editors’, “Scholarship of Fools.” How bad is Foucault's historical scholarship? Probably worse than the scholarship of many historians of medicine, sober specialists, who remain dismally unfamous while the slapdash Foucault got widely, and internationally, noticed. Scull speaks of Foucault's growing stature with “the luminaries of café society,” but this is likely to be the fantasy of an academic who does not spend much time away from the library. In any case what counts is that Foucault got to be more famous than academics like Scull. How did this happen? Well, says Scull, Foucault's audience was “complaisant.” I think it is worthwhile to quote at length Scull's final summing up: The back cover of History of Madness contains a series of hyperbolic hymns of praise to its virtues. Paul Rabinow calls the book “one of the major works of the twentieth century”; Ronnie [sic] Laing hails it as “intellectually rigorous” and Nikolas Rose rejoices that “Now, at last, English speaking readers can have access to the depth of scholarship that underpins Foucault's analysis.” Indeed they can, and one hopes they will read the text attentively and intelligently, and will learn some salutary lessons. One of these lessons might be amusing, if it had no effect on people's lives: the ease with which history can be distorted, facts ignored, the claims of human reason disparaged and dismissed, by someone sufficiently cynical and shameless, and willing to trust in the ignorance and credulity of his customers.8 “Customers” suggests a commercial interest there is no evidence Foucault possessed; and I am told that even writers such as Danielle Steele and John Grisham are more idealistic, and literary-aspirational, than their very market-ready output would indicate. Doubtless some of the praise is hyperbolic and I am glad I can agree with something Scull says. Major works of the 20th century might include Ulysses, Principia Mathematica, Quer pasticciacco bruto de via Merulana, or even Les Mots et les choses, but not History of Madness. History of Madness is nevertheless a serious work. It is a work of scholarship even if there are many mistakes. A more reasonable negative judgment than Scull's is that of Peter Barham in LRB: “Its historical shortcomings are patent, but it should not be forgotten that when Foucault set out in the 1950s the history of psychiatry was almost entirely terra incognita [. . .].”9 But let me return to Scull whose remarks have a kind of creepy clinical interest. The way Scull puts it implies conscious distortion, something Foucault thought he could get away with because he could depend on his readers being credulous. I think it wildly unlikely that Foucault had any such thoughts as he labored in the archives at Uppsala, producing a work with around 220 citations, 220 negating “easy” seemingly, but showing to Scull, I suppose, the lengths to which Foucault was prepared to go to fool the public. Some people are cynical; some people are not. Is Scull in a position to place Foucault? How does Scull know that Foucault was incapable of, or at least did not feel, shame? Even if Scull is right about the scholarship, he is guessing, in what strikes me as a radically unscholarly way, about Foucault the man. (There are, by the way, biographies of Foucault that might be consulted, but, of course if they don't confirm one's rash judgment—to mention that old-fashioned Catholic sin—they can be dismissed as hagiography.) Because Scull's dismissal of Foucault in the quoted paragraph is so brutal and snide, I am tempted to argue ad verecundiam and to that end will mention Robert Castel, Directeur d’études à l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales who describes History of Madness (this in 1986) as a work “hiératique et belle, flamboyante par son style et sophistiquée par l’érudition qu’elle déploie [. . .].”10 Interesting that praise, “flamboyante” for example, transmutes to denigration by mere translation into English. I wonder in passing why it “might be amusing” to learn any of the lessons a careful, critical reading of History of Madness might provide. I suppose the idea must be that we, from our position of scholarly superiority, might derive some amusement (of a highly uncharitable kind) from the spectacle of our intellectual inferiors taken in by bad work. But even more puzzling is the qualification: “if it had no effect on people's lives.” It is perhaps unfair to scrutinize a book review (whose author might regard it as mere jobbery or throwaway work), but one cannot help notice that grammar makes the “it” in the qualification refer to one of the salutary lessons, saddling Scull with an unusually odd thought. Interpretive charity suggests that it is a thought Scull did not think. The actual thought must be that it is Foucault who is having the effect, presumably deplorable, on people's lives. Foucault was known, in his own person, to be variously “engaged”—in the French movement of prison reform, for example—and this is something that can, depending on political and other judgments, be deplored or celebrated. Of course these things have nothing to do with the worthwhileness, or the opposite, of History of Madness. There is also the matter of Foucault's relation to the “anti-psychiatry” movement. Whether he should be counted a member, he certainly aided and abetted, having underscored, in Barham's words “the arbitrariness and fragility of the whole psychiatric enterprise.”11 If these are properties the enterprise has, my brand of enlightenment says it is a good thing to say so, however discomforting to the routine practitioners of ordinary practice. Thomas Szasz, a leading anti-psychiatrist, wrote of the “myth of mental illness,” the title of a 1960 article in the American Psychologist and later a book. Taking seriously the work of Foucault's teacher, Georges Canguilhem, one might be tempted to speak, more radically, of the “myth of illness.” I will say more about this below. Here, I simply note the line of magisterial descent—Bachelard teacher of Canguilhem, Canguilhem teacher of Foucault—which is obscured in common truncated appropriation, but, if noticed, helpfully locates Foucault in the robust French history-and-philosophy-of-science tradition. A few words more about the phrase “effect on people's lives.” It is often thought by those it would be accurate to characterize as bien-pensant that any fundamental doubt raised about standard medical practice, including psychiatric practice, will always function, and can only function, as interference with or distraction from the “healing arts” and the dedicated “care providers” curing the sick. From this point of view, Foucault is the enemy of those trying to help. But the real enemies are elsewhere. Here's something that happened about the time Foucault was researching History of Madness in Uppsala. In 1952 Alan Turing was accused of having sexual relations with a 19-year-old man, something that, perhaps very foolishly, he made no attempt to deny. He was convicted of gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1895. Given the choice of prison or “treatment,” Turing allowed himself to be injected with oestrogen, then thought to reduce libido. Whether the course of treatments reduced sexual drive, it produced breasts and other unpleasant side effects. On June 8, 1954, Turing's body was found by his cleaning woman, an apparent suicide. This story is known because Turing was himself well-known, for reasons that are well-known. It took place, not in Nazi Germany, but in “civilized” England. One can assume that the legislators involved in this story sincerely believed that what they were criminalizing was really wrong and they had in any case the backing of the right-thinking. What Turing did was seen (and felt) to be grossly indecent, not only by judges, but by members of the medical profession. (The sexual practices—of others—that we find unenticing will often strike us as disgusting and it takes an apparently uncommon degree of enlightenment to realize that our own “gut reactions” are morally irrelevant.) What happened to Turing was made possible by a view of homosexuality as both mental illness (to be cured) and moral failing (to be punished). One way of looking at History of Madness (though not the only) is as a sustained reaction formation to stories like Turing's. One theme of History of Madness is the curious blending—variously compounded—of sickness and sin: “It is true [Foucault writes in a typical passage] that people were often confined so that they might escape judgment, but they were confined to a world where all was a matter of evil and punishment, libertinage and immorality, penitence and correction.”12 Foucault explains in a 1971 interview that the pairs “normal”/“pathological” and “innocent”/“guilty” are mutually reinforcing: “When a judgment can no longer be expressed in terms of good and evil, it is expressed in terms of normal and abnormal. And when this last distinction must be justified, one has recourse to considerations of what is good [bon] or bad [nocif] for the individual.”13 Commenting in the same interview on the “war on drugs [lutte antidrogue],” it is, Foucault claims, not only a pretext for social repression, “mais aussi exaltation de l’homme normal, rationnel, conscient et adapté.”14 Even in disagreement about the war on drugs, one can still appreciate Foucault's general point that tribes aim to produce in successive generations tribes people rather than perfect human beings, just as parents in the main attempt to reproduce versions (even if cosmetically altered versions) of themselves. Philosophically, perhaps the most important issue is whether there is any place in the work of Foucault, in History of Madness or anywhere else, where “the claims of human reason [are] disparaged and dismissed.” To make a simple analytic point, claims are always claims that and we need to know just what Scull thinks human reason (itself perhaps a not entirely innocent personification) is claiming that Foucault is denying. Elsewhere in the review, Scull speaks of Foucault's “whole anti-Enlightenment project.”15 Whether Foucault has such a project will depend on the construal of Enlightenment. If the doctors injecting Turing with oestrogen were enlightened and were operating within an enlightened medical practice, then of course Foucault is anti-Enlightenment as I am and I hope you are too. That's an easy enough point to make looking back to past practice, but more difficult in application to our own contemporary practice—if only because we cannot view as false our own unabandoned beliefs. But if Enlightenment has anything to do with Kant's famous answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?”: “Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmündikeit,” I do not think anyone will suspect that Foucault is against our exiting a state of “self-incurred tutelage” wherein we are unable to use our understanding without direction [Leitung] from someone else.16 Every sentence that Foucault ever wrote (and this seems the least surprising thing) was designed to help the reader make up her own mind about the matters discussed. We may worry that this amounts a systematic undervaluation of the role experts should play in our intellectual lives, but expertise may be allowed, even according to Foucault, as long as it examined and not faith-based, and in any case our understanding, since no one can understand anything for us, either functions autonomously or not at all. But I am afraid none of this is getting at what is worrying—indeed aggravating—Scull. To get at that, we have to consider “the claims of human reason disparaged and dismissed.” To decide whether Foucault did anything like this, we should, as already noted, need to know what these claims are. Absent instruction from Scull, I offer a few ideas. Human reason counsels distinguishing Modus Ponens from the Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent, Modus Tollens from the Fallacy of Denying the Antecedent, and in general distinguishing valid from invalid forms of argumentation and placing our cognitive trust accordingly. A person aware of all this and generally good at following these counsels may nevertheless occasionally make a mistake in reasoning. Should we then say on that ground alone that he has either disparaged or dismissed human reason? Again, human reason counsels examination of our processes of belief formation and tells us that defective processes of belief formation will almost never (despite the fact that they can) lead to a true belief. A person who is aware of all this and is generally successful in avoiding substandard processes of belief formation may nevertheless occasionally form a belief on insufficient evidence or otherwise defectively. Should we then say on that ground alone that he has either disparaged or dismissed human reason? These are, I assume, recognized to be rhetorical questions. Unlike various kinds of fanatics, Foucault turns out to be cognitively normal and the only thing surprising is that anyone should find this surprising. Here is one of Foucault's own comments (in Le Monde) on the upshot of History of Madness: “Madness is never found raw [à l’état sauvage]. Madness exists only within a society and never outside forms of sensibility that isolate it and forms of repulsion that exclude or apprehend it.”17 This is not to deny that madness exists, or to claim that madness and sanity are the same, though Foucault does find it an irony in this interview, and elsewhere, that it is sane psychiatrists “qui ont permis l’internement d’Artaud.” Even agnostic about the case of Artaud, we can support the general case that Foucault is making. Neither psychological nor psychiatric concepts track the realities they aim to describe the way that, at least many, concepts deployed in the physical sciences track their target realities. For one thing, to paraphrase Ian Hacking, electrons do not care (and in all seriousness do not know) what is said about them and cannot react, but schizophrenics and autistic children do. Hacking calls the kinds that typically occur in psychological classification interactive kinds: “kinds that can interact with what is classified.” And he comments: “And because kinds can interact with what is classified, the classification itself may be modified.” He continues: “The classification hyperactive did not interact with children simply because the individual children heard the word and changed accordingly. It interacted with those who were so described in institutions and practices that were predicated upon classifying children as hyperactive.”18 Hacking's antonym to interactive is indifferent: “The classification ‘quark’[Hacking writes] is indifferent in the sense that calling a quark a quark makes no difference to the quark.”19 My example is the concept electron only because I know more about electrons than quarks. The concept electron was constructed or developed or progressively refined by high-energy physicists as more of the properties of electrons were precisely measured. The realist story about electrons is probably the best one: Electrons existed before humans knew anything about them and indeed before there were any humans to know anything about anything. Electrons were discovered and more and more of their properties were discovered. High-energy physics, its theories and concepts, as well as the equipment it uses (like the large hadron collider at CERN), are human inventions, but electrons are not. We know, and—more importantly—it is the sort of thing we can have knowledge about, that an electron has a mass that is 1/1836th that of a proton and has both intrinsic angular momentum and intrinsic magnetic moment along its spin axis. Here is a vividly contrastive story. In December 1973 (that recently!) the board of directors of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) decided to remove homosexuality from the list of mental disorders in DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). The membership of the Association asked for a referendum on this change and 58% of those voting upheld homosexuality's change of status. It was nice they did though the numbers were not exactly reassuring either. Philosophically speaking, that is neither here nor there. What counts is that this story does not lend itself to a realist interpretation. No one discovered that homosexuality is not a mental disorder. Nor would it be correct to say that we now know that homosexuality is not a mental disorder just as, before 1973 it was not only not known that homosexuality was a mental disorder, but could not have been known. What happened in 1973 was a change of attitude. This is not to suggest some inexplicable brute fact, even worse than a Kuhnian revolution. Many things known about homosexuals supported the change: for example, that at least those not running off to psychiatrists or analysts could be as happy as anybody else. Those who are impatient with the general drift of History of Madness because they think psychiatry treats of real diseases with—sometimes known, sometimes conjectured, always likely—organic foundations would do well to consider the APA/DSM story. The moral of the story is not that homosexuality is unreal or that it lacks an organic, and possibly even a genetic, basis. At the metaphysical level, what is true of sexuality is bound to be true of its varieties. The cleanest way of putting the moral might be simply to say that the story serves to remind us that disorder is always relative, a distortion of or deviation from some order. Once upon a time homosexual acts were commonly called “unnatural,” but the laws of nature seemed to allow them, so “unnatural” could only mean (in addition to its having strong negative connotations) contrary to some code, illicit, unrecommended, or unhelpful relative to some assumed or favored purpose like procreation. Somewhere along the line, what Foucault said happened in the 18th century must have happened: “The whole era bears witness to the great confiscation of sexual ethics by family morality, although the process of confiscation did not come about without debate or reservation.”20 We feel Foucault is right to speak of “the triumph of bourgeois morality”21 because (in the useful phrase of Donna Leon's Commissario Guido Brunetti) we can still feel “the contemporary truth of this.” A lot of tragedy, and indeed comedy, is still being produced by the distance between what sexuality is supposed to be like by the bien-pensant (and a whole army of low-level right-thinking mental health counselors in their employ) and what sexuality actually seems to be up to in its anarchic and slovenly nature. In truth and from a Foucauldian point of view, we should not speak of “the nature of sexuality.” There is nature, “an anatomo-physiological infrastructure” which supports, but does not by itself determine, a range of family-resemblant sexualities. This can be said another way. There is, on one side, all that which obeys the laws of nature and is impenetrable by human imagination, and which we can do nothing about; and, on the other, that which is shaped by human culture and contrivance and where what we think makes some difference, and which, in planned and unplanned ways and at very various speeds, can change for the better or the worse. Allow me, before moving on, to quote the passage from which I extracted the phrase “anatomo-physiological infrastructure.” It is a comment of Michel Tournier's on Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World: “Human love is not solely the product of a biological fatality. It supposes, certainly, an anatomo-physiological infrastructure, but, on this base, society, or rather societies, construct a code, a mythology, an edifice of dreams and sentiments which depend only on cultural factors.”22 As usual, an answer to the question “What is it made out of?” does not answer the question “What does it do?” *** Scull's review of History of Madness has generated considerable scholarly controversy in the letters columns of TLS. One defensive respondent Scull describes as a “devout Foucaldian.”23 I am not a devout Foucauldian. I do not really care if Foucault is wrong about everything as “everything” is construed by Scull. Attentive readers of Foucault will recall that L’usage de plaisirs in its day (1984) outraged many classical scholars. Scholars are almost always right; that is, after all, their métier. One way of defending Foucault is to say that the scholars are quibbling about little details. Returning to History of Madness: suppose there were no Narrenschiffen. This is not a little detail. Foucault says “[. . .] they really did exist, these boats that drifted from one town to another with their senseless cargo [cargaison insensée].”24 He also says “The Narrenschiff was clearly a literary invention, and was probably borrowed from the ancient cycle of the Argonauts that had recently been given a new lease on life among mythological themes [. . .].”25 According to Scull, Narrenschiffen did not exist. What is the ordinary reader to do? Or, more interestingly, what is the ordinary—let us say, philosophically aware, but nonscholarly—reader doing?He is not just a dupe as Scull suggests, but he finds these texts stimulating even if he does not decide, because he is in no position to decide, every question for himself. “Stimulating” may be thought faint praise rather like “thought-provoking,” but phrases like these must be taken as mere placeholders for a more detailed account of what happens when a mind absorbs a book sentence-by-sentence. Reflecting on History of Madness many years later (1978), Foucault makes a comment worth quoting at length. This book has continued to function in the public mind as an attack directed against contemporary psychiatry. Why? Because this book has, for me and for those who have read and used it, co
Referência(s)