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Madness, Work, and Rebellion/Kirsten Anderberg
Madness, Work, and Rebellion
By Kirsten Anderberg (www.kirstenanderberg.com)
Written Nov. 27, 2008
During the Renaissance (the 14th -17th centuries), insanity possessed an air of divine intervention, of romanticism and wonder, such as that reflected in works such as Shakespeare's King Lear, Cervantes' Don Quixote, or the Fool card of the Tarot. Yet during this same period we also see the development of the "Ship of Fools." "Madmen" and "madwomen" were rounded up in towns throughout Europe during the Renaissance and sent to sea in these "Ships of Fools," to either be dumped overboard, or left on the streets of a foreign city. In the classical period (1750 - 1820), the "insane" were treated as though possessed by either demon or animal, reportedly due to moral weakness and/or idleness, and were rounded up, confined in institutions, and forced to work. The institution's owners and the industrialists split the profits from the insane population's labors. But "The Mad" would not work properly for "The Man." Church and State proclaimed idleness caused insanity at one point, and thought work to be insanity's cure. But they tried to force the "insane" to work and that became highly problematic. Thus people began to think that perhaps it was not idleness that made people "crazy," but rather "insanity" made people unable to work. This idleness, either way, was rubbing against industrialists' demands for society's "useless" segments (the insane, beggars, the homeless, abandoned children, the sick and elderly, etc.) to become their workforce, and thus the madman's idleness was deemed pride and rebellion, as an affront to God and the bourgeois order, and was even outlawed in many places over many centuries.
Authorities have oft labeled the mad as Rebellion Personified. Michel Foucault, in his classic book, "Madness and Civilization," (1961), writes "This is why idleness is rebellion - the worst form of all, in a sense: it waits for nature to be generous as in the innocence of Eden, and seeks to constrain a Goodness to which man cannot lay claim since Adam. Pride was the sin of man before the Fall; but the sin of idleness is the supreme pride of man once he has fallen, the absurd pride of poverty."[1] Foucault also writes, "the question Voltaire would soon formulate, Colbert's contemporaries had already asked: "Since you have established yourselves as a people, have you not yet discovered the secret of forcing all the rich to make all the poor work? Are you still ignorant of the first principles of the police?"[2]
Foucault goes on to say that it was not due to a "social uselessness" that the insane were segregated and confined away from society in institutions, but rather it was due to their immoral idleness. "In this classical age, for the first time, madness was perceived through a condemnation of idleness and in a social immanence guaranteed by the community of labor. This community acquired an ethical power of segregation, which permitted it to eject, as into another world, all forms of social uselessness. It was in this other world, encircled by the sacred powers of labor, that madness would assume the status we now attribute to it. If there is, in classical madness, something which refers elsewhere, and to other things, it is no longer because the madman comes from the world of the irrational and bears its stigma; rather, it is because he crosses the frontiers of bourgeois order of his own accord, and alienates himself outside the sacred limits of its ethic."[3]
Foucault explains that although we would like to imagine these institutions as having existed for the good of the insane patients, it was more about what was good for industry. "…Confinement was required by something quite different from any concern with curing the sick. What made it necessary was an imperative of labor. Our philanthropy prefers to recognize the signs of a benevolence toward sickness where there is only a condemnation of idleness."[4] And Foucault connects the dots between these segregated confinement islands of "the insane," and the earlier "Ship of Fools." He says, "The old rites of excommunication were revived, but in the world of production and commerce."[5]
Foucault gives a chronology of events: "In 1532, the Parlement (sic) of Paris decided to arrest beggars and force them to work in the sewers of the city, chained in pairs…"[6] "For the first time, purely negative measures of exclusion were replaced by a measure of confinement; the unemployed person was no longer driven away or punished; he was taken in charge, at the expense of the nation but at the cost of his individual liberty. Between him and society, an implicit system of obligation was established: he had the right to be fed, but he must accept the physical and moral constraints of confinement."[7] ""The archers of the Hopital (sic)," began to hunt down beggars and herd them into the different buildings of the Hopital."[8]
To give you some idea of the numbers involved here, Foucault writes, "a few years after its foundation, the Hopital General of Paris alone contained 6,000 persons, or around one percent of the population"[9] "One tenth of all the arrests made in Paris for the Hopital General concern "the insane," "demented" men, individuals of "wandering mind," and "persons who have become completely mad." Between these and the others, no sign of a differentiation. Judging from the registries, the same sensibility appears to collect them, the same gestures to set them apart."[10]
Foucault then begins to speak in terms that are frighteningly similar to things we hear on the news today in the U.S. in 2008. "Despite all the measures taken to avoid unemployment and the reduction of wages, poverty continued to spread in the nation."[11] Foucault says that the role of these madhouse/poorhouse/workhouses were evolving due to high unemployment and poverty levels, and that they no longer just served as a segregation to save families and religion from disgrace and blasphemy, but began to function as caches of cheap manpower during high employment periods, but he also says they served as protection from social unrest in times of economic crisis. Foucault writes, "It was no longer merely a question of confining those out of work, but of giving work to those who had been confined and thus making them contribute to the prosperity of all. The alternation is clear: cheap manpower in the periods of full employment and high salaries; and in periods of unemployment, reabsorption of the idle and social protection against agitation and uprisings. Let us not forget that the first houses of confinement appear in England in the most industrialized parts of the country…"[12]
Institutionalized labor camps for the insane were praised by the industries privy to this cheap labor force, albeit one troubled with continued noncompliance that religious zealots and work ethic proponents worked ceaselessly to right, and this arrangement was also praised by the owners of these madhouses/labor camps as they split the profits from the inmates' labor with the industrialists. The idea was sold not only on curing the insane and giving them useful employment, but also on the concept that this slave workforce would drive prices down for consumers. But the powers that be had not taken into account the issue of bitter fights over business competition due to this. Even today this dichotomy exists. Today, the business community complains about taxes for taking care of the idle poor, yet when the poor are given state funded job training in their fields, they scream foul play, which is why business and state funded job training is predominantly only in the areas of low wage, low status service labor or for jobs no one is fighting for. Even today the state is not training the poor to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, business owners, or college professors, but instead funnels them into 2 year trade/vocation schools to learn service industry, and helper/assistance roles to benefit industry and professionals.
Foucault writes about industrial concerns of competition from hospitals for the insane: "It was suggested that the workhouses might enter the local industries and markets, on the principle perhaps that cheap production would have a regulatory effect on the sale price. But the manufactories protested. Daniel Defoe noticed that by effect of the too easy competition of the workhouses, poverty was created in one area on the pretext of suppressing it in another; "it is giving to one what you take away from another; putting a vagabond in an honest man's employment, and putting diligence on the tenters to find out some other work to maintain his family." Faced with this danger of competition, the authorities let the work gradually disappear."[13]
In speaking about these "prisons of poverty," Foucault again touches on a topic that is too similar to our current credit/housing crisis in America: "In the first phase of the industrial world, labor did not seem linked to the problems it was to provoke; it was regarded, on the contrary, as a general solution, an infallible panacea, a remedy to all forms of poverty. Labor and poverty were located in a simple opposition, in inverse proportion to each other. As for that power, its special characteristic, of abolishing poverty, labor - according to the classical interpretation - possessed it not so much by its productive capacity as by a certain force of moral enchantment."[14]
I fear we may be about to relearn these lessons as a society in America. This concept that work is the antithesis of poverty is not correct if there is not enough gainful employment for all. Foucault not only noticed that industry got angry when competition from the poor or slave labor took the form of state subsidized competition in its field, and he also noticed that poverty was not merely linked to "scarcity of commodities nor unemployment." Foucault comments about this period, "…it was made quite clear that the origin was neither scarcity of commodities nor unemployment, but "the weakening of discipline and the full relaxation of morals.""[15]
With this philosophy, unemployment and access to commodities was not the origin of poverty, per se, but rather immoral and unethical, undisciplined, pagan or atheist weaklings were the problem. At this point, there was still a large controversy over the causes of insanity as well. Some felt it was the animal or beast side overtaking the human side, some felt it was merely a demon that needed to be exorcized, some felt it was karmic retribution for behaviors that were not pious, some felt it was "vapors" in the blood, etc.
The Hopital General in Paris was one of the first confinement institutions for the insane, but these institutions were all over Europe during the classical period, and there was no medical credential or license required to run these institutions turned workhouses or "general hospitals." Thus we see people rounded up against their will from public streets, then taken to these institutions and forced to work as much as possible, and the only way for them to escape is not by working, per se, but by either pretending to, or actually, holding the newly found principles of the work ethic that would deliver him from insanity and thus cured, back to society. Foucault writes, "…the Hopital does not have the appearance of a mere refuge for those whom age, infirmity, or sickness keep from working; it will have not only the aspect of a forced labor camp, but also that of a moral institution responsible for punishing…"[16] Thus these institutions did serve as a safety valve of "social protection against agitation and uprisings." They punished people who did not go along with the status quo, with enslaved labor until they swore to the religion of the confinement officers and the ethical mythology of their captors.
Foucault writes, "The prisoner who could and who would work would be released, not so much because he was again useful to society, but because he had again subscribed to the great ethical pact of human existence."[17] He further expounds that "…the very requirement of labor was instituted as an exercise in moral reform and constraint, which reveals, if not the ultimate meaning, at least the essential justification of confinement. An important phenomenon, this invention of a site of constraint, where morality castigates by means of administrative enforcement. For the first time, institutions of morality are established in which an astonishing synthesis of moral obligation and civil law is effected."[18] Foucault observes that in this way, "morality permitted itself to be administered like trade or economy."[19]
In this way, we see an intersect of madness (or mental illness in current terms), morality, labor, and societal control. Or in plainer terms, there is an historical interconnectedness between poverty institutions, mental illness, industrialization, social unrest, and economics. "…in the history of unreason, it marked a decisive event: the moment when madness was perceived on the social horizon of poverty, of incapacity for work, of inability to integrate with the group; the moment when madness began to rank among the problems of the city. The new meanings assigned to poverty, the importance given to the obligation to work, and all the ethical values that are linked to labor, ultimately determined the experience of madness and inflected its course,"[20] writes Foucault.
Footnotes:
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Kirsten Anderberg. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint/publish, please contact Kirsten at kirstena@resist.ca.