Foucault-The Great Confinement PDF

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Foucault: The Great Confinement 

In seventeenth century, houses of confinement are established for “the poor, the unemployed, prisoners, and the insane” (124/39). Penal and nineteenth century psychiatry does its work in these houses of confinement; madness becomes linked to confinement which becomes designated as its natural abode. o 1656: Hospital General founded by royal edict (124); also Salpetriere, Bicetre, etc. These are “not medical establishments” (125), but semi judicial structures meant to control social space and to clean public spaces of “problem” people (125); administrative entities; “an instance of order” (125) or the monarchical and bourgeois order being organized in France at that time.

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What’s the unity that lies at the heart of confining such a disparate group of people (the poor, the mad, criminals)? A social sensibility forms (126), a clearly articulated perception that centers on the ethic of work and the dream city (126). o Confinement was a police matter (128); the imperative of labor structures confinement, not medical concerns (128); condemnation of idleness.

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Who are the poor? o Peasants, beggars, disbanded soldiers, impoverished students, the sick (129); economic changes, wars; the negative measure of exclusion was transformed into the positive measure of confinement (130) o the confined person was not kicked out, but rather was put to work in a system of obligation and moral constraint (130). o Confinement was the answer to various economic and social problems in the 17 century across Europe (130); “it was feared the people would overrun the country” (131).

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o Outside the periods of crisis, confinement acquired a different meaning: its repressive function was combined with a new use—those confined were put to work (132); “reabsorption of the idle and social protection against agitation and uprising” (132). “Work was not only an occupation; it must be productive” (51). Houses has different specialties.... (132‐134).

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Fixing economic problems of society (132) o the poor were still poor, not in public and as a social threat. They disappeared at th

the beginning of the 19 century; however, they did serve as an important experiment in how labor was to be regarded in society (133): a “certain ethical consciousness of labor” was formulated and established; labor’s effectiveness was supported by Judeo‐Christian belief in “the fall of man” (134)man was forced to work not by a law of nature, but by the effect of a curse (139); Calvin.... “the sin of idleness is the supreme pride of man once he has fallen” (141). Sloth leads the round of vices (135). o “It was in a certain experience of labor that the indissociably economic and moral demand for confinement was formulated” (135). 

Society invents a space derived from an ethical transcendence from the law of work into which the insane were slotted o Madmen were included in the prescription of idleness (135, bottom); they would be subjected to the rules of forced labor; kinship established between the insane and the poor in terms of notions of labor (136) 

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madness was linked with an imaginary transcendence; in the classical age madness is perceived for the first time through the condemnation of idleness; this notion acquires the power of segregation and gains the meaning it still has in our own culture (136)

Madness crosses the limits of bourgeois order as a moral perception. o Houses of confinement are thus “correctional” institutions, moral institutions, penance (138) o Obligation to work as ethical exercise and moral guarantee (138) o Institutions carry that moral imperative: “this is the underside of the bourgeoisie’s great dream and great preoccupation in the classical age: the laws of the State and the laws of the heart are at last identical (139).

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Myth of social happiness, also for the Church (139); confinement “conceals both a metaphysics of government and a politics of religion.... Tyrannical synthesis... “(139);

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Central to Foucault’s interpretation of the successive construal’s and exclusions of madness is the idea of a “Great Confinement”: a great internment, activated from the midseventeenth century, in context of political absolutism and enlightenment rationality (61) o Those whose lives affronted bourgeois rationality (beggars, petty criminals, prostitutes) became liable to sequestration grouped with the sick, the old, the lame and the lunatic.

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o Such problem people though different from normal citizens were identical amongst themselves. o The common denominator was idleness. The mad did not work and those who did not work were the essence of unreason. o Claims that the mad were confined without distinction alongside all other “offensive people” all were unreason (83) o Madness at this stage was not defined by specialist psychiatric criteria being rather a negative projection of reason. Summary 

Organized around key shifts in the status of madness within society.

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Confinement involves a series of measures—building houses of confinement and prisons, the creation of a new kind of social space, and the realignment of madness within this space. o The Hospital General represents the beginning of confinement and the only place of confinement that Foucault analyzes.

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Foucault sees confinement as a series of social and economic measures that surround certain people and tendencies. o sees society as creating a kind of safe place where it put those who it saw as abnormal: criminals, those who do not work and the mad. o Unreason, or the irrational included all these people. They were not confined because they need medical attention, or out of humanitarian concern, but because the power of the state needs to control them.

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In the classical period madness became part of a wider class of social deviancy, which was defined by its relationship to work. o

Criminals and the idle were inseparable from madmen.

o express a desire to control, and to define people. 

Foucault emphasizes the importance of economics and morality in explaining the development of confinement. o those who were confined had a negative relationship with labor and the economy o An age that tried to define "normality" in terms of economic productivity attempted to isolate and exclude those who could not or would not produce. o Economic development was supported by an ethical theory that argued that work was morally good. o madness in the classical period was silenced and isolated. It was not allowed to speak, and was seen as a moral and economic evil

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