Foucault on the Arts and Letters

Perspectives for the 21st Century

Catherine M. Soussloff

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783485758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

As one of the most important philosophers of the 20 th century, Michel Foucault’s reputation today rests on his political philosophy in relation to the contemporary subject in a neo-liberal and globalized society. This book offers insight into the role of the arts in Foucault’s thought as a means to better understanding his contribution to larger debates concerning contemporary existence. Visual culture, literary, film and performance studies have all engaged with Foucauldian theories, but a full examination of Foucault’s significance for aesthetic discourse has been lacking until now. This book argues that Foucault’s particular approach to philosophy as a way of thinking the self through the work of art provides significant grounds for rethinking his impact today. The volume moves across as many disciplinary boundaries as Foucault himself did, demonstrating the value of Foucault’s approach to aesthetic discourse for our understanding of how the arts and humanities reflect upon contemporary existence in a globalized society.

Part I

Visual Articulations

Chapter 1

Unreason and the Ambiguities of Silence

Dana Arnold

William Hogarth’s picture cycle A Rake’s Progress (1732–1733) tells the story of Tom Rakewell, a wastrel heir who inherits his miserly father’s fortune. Originally a series of eight paintings that was later translated into popular prints, the scenes narrate Tom’s moral and financial decline. We see how money and manners make Tom socially acceptable and the lengths he is prepared to go to in order to maintain his newly found status and wealth. His actions and ambitions are parodied in the final scene, where we see his descent into madness and incarceration in the London lunatic asylum known as Bedlam. Rakewell’s rejection by the society he sought to please has resonance with Foucault’s exploration of why the mad have been confined, isolated, and excluded throughout modern history in his seminal work Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961).

My concern here is with visual manifestations of madness and the spaces in which they take place. First I consider the complexities of the publishing history and the reception of Foucault’s text in both the Anglophone and Francophone worlds. This underpins my discussion of the spaces of madness in eighteenth-century Britain as evident in the architecture of Bedlam and Hogarth’s depiction of this as part of his visual narrative of the “progress” of Tom Rakewell.

The History of the Book

In Folie et déraison, Foucault argues that madness exists only in society and comes into being only when societal forces seek to repress it. The essence of madness is that it cannot be verbalized, as language is the tool of reason. Instead, he suggests we can write the story of madness by writing about what makes madness such a linguistically impenetrable zone. According to Foucault, this would be an “archaeology of silence” that in turn would help us to understand other forms of exclusion.1

In Folie et déraison, Foucault charts the journey of the mad from liberty and discourse to confinement and silence, and explores how this transition is achieved through the exercise of power. He starts in the sixteenth century, when madness was an “undifferentiated experience,”2 a time when the mad roamed the countryside in “an easy wandering existence.”3 Foucault presents madness as an active force in Renaissance society that was part of daily life. Madness was not controlled or encountered in specific situations nor was it observed in particular conditions; it was simply part of everyday social experience. In Renaissance society madness was public and present everywhere, not exhibited behind bars. An important distinction is drawn between the different experience of madness during the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, when the mad were separated from the rest of society. Foucault identified a shift in attitudes toward the insane that resulted in their confinement or incarceration. This confinement hid away unreason but drew attention to madness in order to organize and exhibit it.

Foucault shows the historical and cultural developments that lead to “that other form of madness, by which men, in an act of sovereign reason, confine their neighbours.”4 Foucault examines the “great incarceration” of the insane into asylums during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France and England. This was both a physical and a moral incarceration, a stigmatization of madness to replace the old stigma of leprosy. The madhouse isolated unreason, substituting “for the free terror of madness the stifling anguish of responsibility.”5 We learn how the mad came first to be identified and confined; how moral and economic factors determined those who ought to be confined; how they were perceived as dangerous as a result of being confined, partly through association with the lepers who they had replaced as outcasts. Madness became the antithesis of reason, and the dialogue of reason and unreason – such as Shakespeare had portrayed between the fool and King Lear – was ended. Reason had triumphed at the expense of the unusual, the nonconformist, and, ultimately, the individual human being. And this signals Foucault’s broader concern with the notion of existence and the social systems that work to contain and control it. Madness is germane to this train of thought.

Foucault and Archaeology

The concept of archaeology is no stranger to Foucault’s writing. Indeed, The Archaeology of Knowledge is arguably one of Foucault’s best-known works,6 albeit that it stands distinct from his other writings. Here, Foucault reflects on the mode of analysis he employed in his previous works Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things. Foucault presents a historiographic review of his methodological processes in these earlier works. To this end he uses “archaeology” or the “archaeological method” as a means of critiquing the established narrative structures of both history and philosophy. Foucault sees the need for continuity and progression in constructing narratives of the past as processes of exclusion where we project our own consciousness on to the past. Instead, Foucault argues that systems of knowledge define the boundaries of thought and language used in a given period. These epistemes, or discursive formations, function outside the consciousness of the individual subjects.

There is no doubt that Foucault’s thoughts about the “archaeology of knowledge” are perhaps better known than his thinking about an “archaeology of silence.”7 That said, I would like to begin with an “archaeological” exploration of the book itself as this text, perhaps more than any other of Foucault’s writings, has been through several transformations, not least due to the author’s own editorial interventions.

My method here resembles, in some ways, a more traditional archaeological digging through the layers of the text to establish its publishing history. But at the same time, I also explore the anachronisms, deviations, and indeed ambiguities in the history of the text and its reception by the Anglophone and Francophone scholarly communities. I contest that here Foucault’s own archaeological method of exploring knowledge and historical circumstance comes into play.

It is important to explore the publication and translation history as it differs greatly between the French and Anglo-American contexts. Moreover, the unevenness between the two linguistic realms impacted on the critical reception of Foucault’s early work. Subsequent developments in Foucault’s own thinking and his oftentimes unsystematic editorial interventions mean there is the lack of fixity in the text. Added to this are the vagaries of the translations into English. The problematic relationship between different versions and different languages has caused some disquiet among scholars, especially the resolutely Anglophone. But to my mind the protean nature of this text makes it all the more interesting.

The Publishing History of the Book

Folie et déraison was first published by Plon in 1961. It was an enormous volume based on Foucault’s doctoral thesis. An abridged version appeared only three years later as Histoire de la folie published by Union générale d’éditions (UGE). This version, which had been shortened by Foucault himself, was translated into English by Richard Howard and published in 1965 as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Pantheon). The same translation was published in Britain by Tavistock in 1967 in a series edited by R. D. Laing, a leading light in the anti-psychiatry movement (see below).8 This version had a preface by David Cooper, who was also part of the anti-psychiatry movement, and included some of the material from the original 1961 text. Foucault returned to the abridged version in 1972, making minor amendments to the text and adding a new preface that replaced the original one and two new appendices. This was published by Gallimard as Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. The two appendices that were added in 1972, “La folie, l’absence d’oeuvre” and “Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu,” were subsequently withdrawn from a further edition also published by Gallimard in 1976. This work is commonly known as Histoire de la folie. An English version of the original full-length 1961 text appeared forty-five years after the first French edition. It was published in 2006 by Routledge under the title History of Madness, with a new translation by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. An additional “archaeological” layer was added to this new version as R. D. Laing’s review of the text for the 1967 version is included in the front matter.9

Debates about the scholarly worth and historical accuracy of Folie et déraison have straddled the Francophone and Anglophone worlds since its first appearance in 1961. It is not my concern here either to rehearse these arguments in depth or to add to the many gallons (or liters) of academic ink that have been spilled in their furtherance.10 What follows is, if you will, a shallow archaeology of the critique and reception of the work in its various manifestations. This gives context to my Foucauldian reading of two discrete but related articul...