VARIETY
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man's behavior but as a forming process that has created a new image
of the mad. As such,
Histcire de la Folie
might serve as a model for those
histories in which documents have to serve as the reflections of a state
that is itself without a coherent language.
The practice of confinement as established by the edict of 1657
is
not, in Foucault's analysis, an isolated phenomenon but part of the total
structure of society. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the mad,
inasmuch as they were one of the images of man's misery on earth, were
occasion for charity and thus stimulated a Christian virtue. As a constant
reminder of the imperfections of this world, they provided a link to the
next. When, in the seventeenth century, the state and not the individual
assumed responsibility for them, the mad were treated not as spiritually
beneficial but as possible sources of contagion from which the body
politic should be isolated. Thus a treatment of madness was invented that
denied any connection between folly and the human condition, and
glorified the animal nature of the insane. Madness was transformed into
a spectacle, and the madhouse into a theater. When the visitors to the
houses of correction (whether they were prisons, hospitals, or private
institutions) witnessed the antics of the insensate, the sight was both a
reaffirmation of their own sanity and a warning of the abyss into which
a fall from the state of reason would precipitate them. By this means
society reaffirmed its values, but in so doing suppressed one of the
interlocutors in the interplay between reason and unreason that had
characterized the life of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
In his attempt to relate the patterns of internment to larger struc–
tures, Foucault refers also to economic data, for the fluctuations in the
number incarcerated can be correlated with periodic economic crises.
In Paris alone the edict of 1657 resulted within four years in the imprison–
ment of 6000 people--one percent of the inhabitants of the capital- who
were thereby withdrawn from the labor force. Foucault does not suggest
that society's treatment of the mad is determined by this or any other
single cause, but rather that it results from a conjuncture of interests,
much as in psychoanalytic theory an act may be over-determined. Here
we could cite the very contradictions of internment as proof: the same
treatment is considered at one moment as punishment, at another as
social welfare or even therapy. Society's need to exclude is so compelling
that the illogicalities are not apparent.
But to stop here would be
to
miss the main thrust of Foucault's
argument. Confinement of the mad, as a public policy, is not simply a
reflection of a culture; it is a preparation for a new manner of under-
