Imagery of Unused Confinement
Foucault begins Madness and Civilization by discussing the persistence of leper colonies despite the disappearance of leprosy:
At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. In the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable. For centuries, these reaches would belong to the non-human. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, they would wait, soliciting with strange incantations a new incarnation of disease, another grimace of terror, renewed rites of purification and exclusion. (3)
This imagery of spaces meant to confine people but empty of people to confine is, as Foucault calls it, “haunting.” It suggests society had to create new categories of people in order to fill the structural role of confinement and exclusion. Societies need to confine an excluded “other” in order to be organized, and the mad will soon come to fill this role.
Imagery of Madness as a Spectacle
Foucault argues that madness got swept up in the Great Confinement along with poverty and criminality, but that it also had its own special relation to the public. Madness was more a public spectacle to be witnessed than a private secret to be hidden:
Yet there is one exception in this consignment to secrecy: that which is made for madmen. It was doubtless a very old custom of the Middle Ages to display the insane. In certain of the Narrtürmer in Germany, barred windows had been installed which permitted those outside to observe the madmen chained within. They thus constituted a spectacle at the city gates. The strange fact is that this custom did not disappear once the doors of the asylums closed, but that on the contrary it then developed, assuming in Paris and London almost an institutional character. (68)
Here, we can visualize the spectacle of madness as well as the ways in which things like architectural design facilitated it. Viewing the mad like animals in a zoo, behind closed bars, contributed to the public fascination with madness. This is why madness was central to how society understood itself, rather than simply being shunned and forgotten.
Imagery of Judgment
In this quote, Foucault gives us an image of Pinel’s asylum, where one principle was the “perpetual judgment” of patients:
We profit from the circumstance of the bath, remind him of the transgression, or of the omission of an important duty, and with the aid of a faucet suddenly release a shower of cold water on his head, which often disconcerts the madman or drives out a predominant idea by a strong and unexpected impression; if the idea persists, the shower is repeated, but care is taken to avoid the hard tone and the shocking terms that would cause rebellion; on the contrary, the madman is made to understand that it is for his sake and reluctantly that we resort to such violent measures; sometimes we add a joke, taking care not to go too far with it. (267)
From this imagery, we get a sense of how the patient in Pinel’s asylum was supposed to feel constantly judged, from all sides. This was meant to reform the patient by forcing him to confront his own moral failures and redress them.
