The TLS
August 21, 1998
The myth lingers on
Lachlan Mackinnon
THE SOCIAL MISCONSTRUCTION OF REALITY.
Validity and verification in the scholarly community. By
Richard F. Hamilton. 289pp. Yale University Press.
Pounds 22.50 - 0 300 06345 8.
Wellington never said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on
the playing-fields of Eton; Mozart was not buried in a
pauper's grave. Richard F. Hamilton's ragged, wide-ranging
book, concerned with how error is perpetuated within the
scholarly community, begins with these two relatively minor
instances. The account of Mozart's last years, showing that he
was both much better off and more highly regarded than is
generally supposed, is the fuller of the two discussions, and
the way in which his first major and romantically inclined
biographer Otto Jahn told the story is shown to have set an
entirely misleading precedent. What Professor Hamilton
learns from the Mozart affair is that "intellectuals can produce
and maintain discourse . . . independently of political or
economic elites" and that "generations of intellectuals (and
their immediate audience, the well educated) have proved
curiously accepting". The Mozart myth has, he argues, the
"underlying theme . . . that artists, the talented, the creative
minds, or intellectuals, are not paid enough".
There follows a long, patient and careful demolition of Max
Weber's thesis on the relationship between Protestantism and
early capitalism. Not all of the discussion is new, and in many
ways the Weber thesis already seemed ropey enough not to
need this further critique, but Hamilton shows by a statistical
examination of textbooks how widely it is still held in fields
other than the one to which it directly applies; economic
historians may have quietly shelved it, but sociologists and
others continue to treat it as gospel. I was sorry that he did not
say more about the ideological motivation of Weber's work,
the determination to show the inadequacy of Marxism. If
Protestantism could be proven to have caused economic
transformation, by implication essentially superstructural
elements like religion were as important as the direct
economic causality on which Marx relied.
Hamilton then grinds his particular axe, the nature of those
who voted for Hitler. With an impressive array of statistics, he
resumes an argument begun elsewhere, that Hitler's support
can at the very least not be shown to have come from the
lower middle class. The argument that it did, he feels, both
derives from and plays a part in confirming a snobbish and
reductive view of the lower middle class. He sees a "double
standard" having been applied, "a direct parallel to one seen
with respect to the Weber thesis. A weak standard is allowed
for the original claim; a stringent one is set for the challenge."
Hamilton's third major target is Michel Foucault. He
concentrates on Foucault's early work on penology, showing,
for instance, that the panopticon was hardly ever realized in
bricks and mortar. Again, there is a faint feeling of familiarity
here, but Hamilton's demolition of Foucault's claims to
scholarship is highly entertaining. He is also concerned by
how Foucault's work, despite the problems seen by a number
of reviewers, somehow passed academic muster.
Part of the problem, he thinks, was the "shortage of
knowledgeable reviewers", part the relative inaccessibility of
some of Foucault's sources. However, there were simpler
failures. Noting the widely known progressive failure of
English juries to convict on capital charges through the
eighteenth century, Hamilton writes that "Power," clearly,
was being thwarted by "the people." This experience again
challenges a basic truth of Foucauldian science. For Foucault,
the solution is simple: he does not report the actual practice.
But the difficulty was also missed by the critics.
Despite the "approved stance" academics take, one of a
"proudly announced critical propensity", he fears that too
many were simply participants in, or victims of, "conformity".
Because he focuses on the early work, Hamilton is unable to
engage with Foucault's later theory of a freely circulating
"power" by which social issues were determined, a theory
which is perhaps seductive partly because it resembles the
ethics of the bathhouse writ large, and is almost entirely
insusceptible of empirical testing. Equally, he does not need
to reiterate the common complaint that Foucault was entirely
unable to account for the epistemic transformation he insisted
had taken place, whereas Thomas Kuhn's paradigm-shifts, to
take a cognate example, could at least be traced to the work of
particular individuals. Most importantly, he does not have to
deal with the evasive slippage by which Foucault is now more
commonly referred to as a philosopher rather than as a
historian, as though idleness, misrepresentation and sloppy
thinking were only to be expected of philosophy.
Hamilton comes to some rather banal conclusions: scholars
should avoid "groupthink" and check their colleagues'
sources. This is no doubt true, but it falls flat at the end of a
study which raises much larger questions. The major targets
of Hamilton's inquiry, Weber, the lower middle class and
Foucault, are all instances of idealtyping in different forms.
Weber wanted to produce an early capitalist in whom
religious belief and economic practice were at one, a type
against whom deviations could be measured. Hamilton makes
us feel, uneasily, that in this case the distance between Max
Weber and Peter York, who gave the Sloane Ranger her
being, may be less than we would want to think. The lower
middle class, anathematized as a type, has learnt its lesson all
too well; Poujadisme and Thatcherism are the results.
Foucault wanted to create alternative worlds, by which our
own might be relativized, and he might be better thought of as
a science-fiction writer than as a historian or even a
philosopher.
Without saying so, Hamilton shifts his argument from the
simpler matter of citation-chains which perpetuate mistakes to
a broader theoretical field, one he leaves untilled. I was left
wondering what would have happened if Louis Althusser,
who is not mentioned in this book, had not killed his wife.
The faults of Althusser's work (the jargon, the scholasticism,
the dependence of his model of the State Ideological
Apparatus solely on the educational settlement of the Third
Republic, for instance) are glaring. None the less, he might
offer historical sociology a way between abstract types and
atomized local investigations in his emphasis on the relative
autonomy of the superstructure and of elements within it. His
insistence that the final instance, the economic, is the one
which never comes - that it is a kind of theoretical vanishingpoint - saves him from too rigorous a determinism. As
Althusser's biographer, Yann Moulier Boutang, has written, it
was an extraordinary intellectual "abdication", particularly in
an age which swore by Foucault's theories of madness, that
Althusser's judicial status should have been allowed simply to
erase his thought. Richard Hamilton's study of academic
conformity and carelessness is admirably level-headed, but
his recommendations do not have the theoretical range they
would need to have a significant effect.
Lachlan Mackinnon
The TLS
February 23, 2001
All quiet on the postmodern
front
Arthur Marwick
The "return to events" in historical study
In a recent issue of the TLS (September 29, 2000), John Ellis,
the distinguished Germanist, published an unflinchingly
hostile review of David Macey's Dictionary of Critical
Theory: the neo-Marxist postmodernism being expounded
was, he said, nothing more than an absurd belief system. To
Professor Ellis's chagrin, not a dog of a reader (to adapt an old
saying) lifted his leg in protest. Had all the fire departed from
postmodernist bellies, was the postmodernist tide now
definitively ebbing?
The Great War (also referred to as "the culture wars", "the
history wars", or "the science wars"), which had its origins
deep in the 1960s, was, in the 80s, marked by phenomenal
victories on the part of the postmodernists. They overran
much of Eng Lit and established the puppet state of Cultural
Studies. They walked, without even token resistance, into
History and Philosophy of Science, being embraced by
weeping Sociologists; flamboyant hopes of conquering the
high peaks and cantons of the Natural Sciences were,
however, exposed as ill-conceived. Parts of the marcher lands
of History fell easily, though it was here that some of the
nastiest fighting took place.
John McGowan, in Postmodernism and Its Critics (1991),
thought that postmodernism, as a philosophy or intellectual
discourse, had four variants: post-structuralism (Derrida and
Foucault); the new Marxism (Jameson, Eagleton, Said); neopragmatism (Lyotard, Rorty); and feminism (which -man of
discretion! -he did not discuss). But any deduction therefrom
that postmodernism is, at most, one-quarter Marxist must be
tempered by an appreciation that all the great intellectual
debates of the 1960s were within the Marxist tradition
(Foucault calling Sartre "the last Marxist", and meaning it as
an insult, yet comparing Marx to Newton and Darwin). A
useful label is "Marxisant" for those, contemptuous of vulgar
Marxism and, of course, all official Communist parties, who
still accepted Marxist periodization, Marxist condemnations
of the bad "bourgeois" society and Marxist perceptions of
what ought to be the role of the "proletariat".
Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard and the luminaries of
the Left Bank were all Marxisant. Thus postmodernism
inherited a strong radical Marxist constituency, which greatly
increased as traditional Marxism suffered blow after blow;
only the rigorously scholarly and materialist, like E. P.
Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, held out.
But postmodernist philosophy could claim an organic
connection with postmodernism in the arts, postmodernism as
a style. The argument that modernism had come to a stop,
with nowhere to go, was a persuasive one, particularly with
respect to architecture. Whether postmodernist art, literature
and music really represent a total reaction against modernism,
rather than an extension and extreme exaggeration of it, is
probably best met with the response that it is both, with, often,
the state-of-the-art frisson of incorporation of the latest
technology, as in video installations or digital art.
Since the upheavals of the 1960s, there had been no such
thing as the shock of the new; that had been replaced by the
simple allure of the ever-more shocking.
With the power and the bathos of e-mail, the Internet and
cellular telephones, the excesses and contradictions of
consumerism, and the Thatcherite and Reaganite revolutions,
it was difficult not to feel "the contemporary" as palpable, and
the explanation that this was "the condition of postmodernity"
as plausible. The aphorisms of Lyotard and Jameson were
deeply satisfying: who did not feel what Jameson referred to
as "a sense of unlimited change co-existing with unparalleled
standardisation"? Despite its deep Marxisant substructure,
much of postmodernism appealed profoundly to those who
were by no means politically radical. They might not be
sympathetic to the formulaic linking of the condition of
postmodernity to an alleged crisis in late capitalism, but they
were aware of all the disruptions and uncertainties implicit in
globalization. Many aspects of postmodernist theory had a
liberating feel about them: the insistence on plurality and
difference; the abandonment of "grand narratives", of which,
of course, traditional Marxism was the grandest; the
recognition of the insecurities of language and the lack of a
direct correspondence between language and reality, if not the
whole-hog position of everything being constructed within
language.
One of the biggest academic growth areas in the last quartercentury has been Popular Culture. Since the rise and rise of
television, pop music and fashion, commercialized mass
sport, and the commodification of almost everything are very
much associated with the assumed condition of
postmodernity, it was natural that postmodernist theory
should be at the heart of the study of Popular Culture,
insisting, for instance, that theories of narrative and
emplotment were essential in, say, analysing television
programmes.
Postmodernism drew prestige too from the early association
between structuralism and the most celebrated of all
historians, Fernand Braudel.
Levi-Strauss sought to snub Sartre by declaring, "Whatever
meaning and movement history displays is imparted and
endorsed, not by historical actors, but by the totality of rule
systems within which they are located and enmeshed"; but
this was close to what the Annales historians, with their
rejection of histoire evenementielle, believed. Further bottom
was given to the cause by praying in aid the anthropologist
everyone wished to be seen quoting, Clifford Geertz, and his
"webs of meaning".
However, there can be no doubt that political radicalism was
the most powerful impetus behind postmodernism, of which
Geraldine Finn wrote that it seemed to open up spaces in
culture and consciousness where we can speak, hear and
recognize other and heretofore subordinated histories,
realities, reasons, subjectivities, knowledges and values which
have been silenced and suppressed and certainly excluded
from the formulations and determinations of the old modernist
project.
New departments created, and new appointments made, to
further women's studies, black studies and post-colonial
literature created bases from which the whole postmodernist
project could be expanded. The euphoric, totalizing (though,
formally, postmodernism is supposed to be the opposite)
enthusiasm of that blissful dawn when post-structuralism,
radicalism and feminism were just beginning to come
together, is well captured by the note on which the other John
Ellis, and his partner, Rosalind Coward, opened their 1977
book, Language and Materialism: Developments in semiology
and the theory of the subject:
"Perhaps the most significant feature of twentieth-century
intellectual development has been the way in which the study
of language has opened the route to an understanding of
mankind, social history and the laws of how society
functions."
It was, of course, the overtly political agenda of the
postmodernists, and their attacks on conventional studies, the
sciences and history, in particular, which provoked punitive
counter- attacks. Alan D. Sokal, a Professor of Physics at
New York University, is a dedicated Old Left figure whose
commitment had extended to going out to teach mathematics
for the Sandinista government. The publication in the
spring/summer 1996 issue of Social Text, an American
postmodernist journal of cultural studies, of his hoax article,
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a transformative
hermeneutics of quantum gravity", was a brilliant stroke
against postmodernist claims that there was a relativist and
indeterminate postmodernist science which in itself supported
feminist and radical causes.
But to achieve a fuller answer as to why the postmodernist
front has fallen silent, we should consider the original German
title of Erich Maria Remarque's classic: what was transpiring
Im Westen was nichts Neues. Since the thunderous assaults of
the 1980s and early 90s, there has simply been nothing new.
On the grounds that in an age which, being postmodern, was,
by definition, post-hot war, and post-cold war, any kind of
war was impossible, Baudrillard wrote an article in Liberation
of January 4, 1991, entitled "The Gulf War will not take
place", leading inexorably to further articles, "Is the Gulf War
really taking place?" and "The Gulf War has not taken place"
(Liberation, March 29, 1991), insisting that the War was
actually that characteristically postmodern phenomenon, a
massive media campaign. For the cause of postmodernism,
this burbling nonsense amounted to devastating friendly fire.
As John Searle comments in Mind, Language and Society
(1999): "It is a sad fact about my profession, wonderful
though it is, that the most famous and admired philosophers
are often the ones with the most preposterous theories."
At no time did postmodernism carry all before it. Just when
the speculative ideas associated with it were emerging,
perfectly formed, a new reflexiveness, carefully examining
methods and principles, was beginning to develop in the
humanities, particularly in history. Thatcherism, with its
insistence on value for money from education, strengthened
this process. There has been much groaning in academia over
the new regime in which intended "outcomes" have to be
specified and "benchmarked", welcomed, however, by those
of us who have always been explicit and disciplined in our
teaching. The new regime, certainly, is inimical to the
fantasies and unfounded authoritarianism of postmodernist
cultural theory; those who have lived by indeterminacy and
the discursive shall perish by benchmarking and Learning
Outcomes.
In the 1980s, young postgraduates, going, as apprentice
academics, into any of the humanities, felt bound, unless
exceptionally gifted or independent-minded, to give their
work a distinctive postmodernist ring. Today, I find Open
University students objecting to postmodernism and feminism
being thrust down their throats, and some tutors objecting to
being parties to the thrusting.
Even in America, the forces of external accountability are
strong. John Ellis (the Germanist) has remarked that
postmodernist posturing "brings power and prestige on
campus but lacks any validity in the wider world".
Large tracts of Eng Lit, particularly in America, remain in the
condition of pre-1989 Albania, but elsewhere "nothing new"
is synonymous with "out of fashion", and we all know the
desolation of being out of fashion. Ludmilla Jordanova has
been a loyal and aggressive Foucaldian; but now, in her recent
History in Practice, she recognizes that postmodernism was
merely a fad of its day: "in the late 1990s the enthusiasm is
beginning to subside."
Former devotee John Tosh has also, in the latest edition of his
book The Pursuit of History, lapsed, lapsing also into one of
today's ghastliest cliches: postmodernist appeal was simply
explained "by its resonance with some of the defining
tendencies (sic) in contemporary thought". Most portentously,
Willie Thompson, the former Marxist from Glasgow
Caledonian has, in his What Happened To History?, just
published a brilliant explication of history as a domain of
knowledge analogous to the natural sciences, based on
evidence and eschewing second-hand postmodernist tropes,
such as nations as "imagined communities" or "memory" as a
collective phenomenon inextricably bound up with popular
radicalism.
In fact, at this very time, historians are turning back to events,
deserting structures and "webs of meaning" in shoals. In
France, the lifting of the interdict on histoire evenementielle
was symbolized when, in 1994, Annales changed its subtitle
from Economies, Societes, Civilisations to Histoire, Sciences
Sociales. A culminating point came in the March/April issue
of 1999 which had a section on that most evenementielle of
events, the Fronde.
Robert Descimon wrote that "the return to events", seen as
incompatible with "Fernand Braudel's total history", is
opening new "explanatory perspectives", particularly in
relationship to willed human action. Throughout the
postmodernist efflorescence, event-based history was the
prerogative of the Sorbonne and the Ecole des Chartes, led by
Yves-Marie Berce, whose magnificent doctorat d'etat,
Histoire des croquants: Etudes des soulevements populaires
au XVIIe siecle dans le Sud-Ouest de la France had appeared
in two volumes in
1974. "Croquants" is the condescending term for "peasants"
met with in La Fontaine's Fables: in Berce's account, they are
highly resourceful in ensuring that their risings were events of
considerable historical significance. Berce's Fete et Revolte
(1994) is full of willed action. One event he deals with is the
Carnaval of Romans, subject of a grossly oversold, vestigially
postmodernist, book by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Deftly,
Berce lodges a note of dissent: "Sans la suivre (my italics), j'ai
fait mon profit de l'interpretation brillante donnee par E. Le
Roy Ladurie." In 1992, having been affected, as we all have,
by the dramatic events of 1989-91, Berce published (notez
bien le titre) La Naissance dramatique de l'absolutisme, 15981661. Fainthearts at Macmillan cut the obviously deeply felt
"dramatic", a tug at the tail of Braudel's la longue duree,
coming up with an unremarkable (but decisively nonpostmodernist) The Birth of Absolutism: A history of France
1598-1661 (1996).
What historians are studying is the way events are
experienced, the outcomes of those experiences, and the place
of events in complex chains of causation.
Obvious examples are Mark Mazower's Inside Hitler's
Greece: The experience of Occupation, 1941-1944 (1993) and
The People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution,
1891-1924 by Orlando Figes (1996).
Historians, furthermore, are now, after having talked about it
for years, developing genuine transnational comparative
approaches to their analyses of events. (Postmodernist
historians write about la patrie or, in the case of local hero
Patrick Joyce, Britain's own uncompromisingly
incomprehensible postmodernist historian,Lancashire.) A
most impressive example is Steven J.
Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, Volume One, The
Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age (1994). In
The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic memory and
national recovery in Western Europe, 1945-1965, the Belgian
Pieter Lagrou sharply disposes of postmodernist abuse of
language: "The universality of the fashionable terminology of
'national memory' might cause its users to forget the
metaphorical and probably even inappropriate use of the word
'memory' in this context. Few human characteristics are more
inalienably individual than memory."
Postmodernist/Marxist junk about nationalism being
"invented" has been seen off in work by Anthony Smith,
Adrian Hastings, and the classic, and event-filled, States,
Nation and Nationalism (Munich 1994, London 1996) by
Hagen Schulze, Director of the German Historical Institute in
Bloomsbury: "A whole series of disasters began in 1309 with
the exile of the popes in Avignon and assumed even more
dramatic features with the beginning of the Hundred Years
War in 1337.
Increasing famines and plagues reached a climax with the
Black Death . . . .
There followed the Jacquerie . . . ."
I conclude my case by citing the two volumes just published
of The Short Oxford History of Europe. By organizing his
contributors into teams, Open University-fashion, the editor,
Tim Blanning, has coaxed out an integrated narrative which
demonstrates the effects of events on society, economy and
culture, and vice versa, from the era of "International Rivalry
and Warfare" and of "Orders and Classes: Eighteenth-century
society under pressure" to the moment of release of the
"destructive force of the First World War" and "its horrific
long-term consequences", with nary a cheep about gender,
memory, identity, or imagined communities.
For some time, I have been running a check on how often the
names Foucault and Marx appear in the indexes of serious
books in my general field. Their disappearance has been quite
staggering. In Albrecht Folsing's Albert Einstein:
A biography (1997), I did find the two names -Foucault (JeanBernard) and Marx (Wilhelm): both real scientists. Readers
should as quickly as possible get hold of the February 1999
issue of the historical journal Past and Present. With exquisite
judgment, the editors simply printed, unaltered, Patrick
Joyce's "The Return of History: Postmodernism and the
politics of academic history in Britain", this return to planet
Joyce being an incomprehensible mix of jargon, cliche,
gibberish and unfocused rage. Postmodernism had produced
its very own "longest suicide note in history".
The TLS
March 23, 2007
Scholarship of fools
Andrew Scull
The frail foundations of Foucault's monument
HISTORY OF MADNESS. Translated by Jonathan Murphy
and Jean Khalfa. By Michel Foucault. 725pp. Routledge.
Pounds 35. - 978 0 415 27701 3.
History of Madness is the book that launched Michel
Foucault's career as one of the most prominent intellectuals of
the second half of the twentieth century.
It was not his first book; that was a much briefer volume,
Maladie mentale et personnalite, that had appeared seven
years earlier, in 1954, in the aftermath of a bout of depression
and a suicide attempt.
(A translation of the second edition of that treatise would
appear in English in 1976, in spite of Foucault's vociferous
objections.) But History of Madness was the first of his works
to attract major attention, first in France, and a few years
afterwards in the English-speaking world. Still later would
come his swarm of books devoted to the "archaeology" of the
human sciences, the place of punishment in the modern
world, the new medical "gaze" of Paris hospital medicine, the
history of sex -the whole vast oeuvre that constituted his
deconstruction of the Enlightenment and its values, and that
served to launch the Foucault industry, influencing and
sometimes capturing whole realms of philosophical, literary
and sociological inquiry.
But in the beginning was Madness -a book introduced to the
anglophone world by a figure who then had an iconic status of
his own, the renegade Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing. It was
Laing, fascinated by existentialism and other things French,
who recommended the project to the Tavistock Press,
pronouncing it "an exceptional book . . . brilliantly written,
intellectually rigorous, and with a thesis that thoroughly
shakes the assumptions of traditional psychiatry". In those
days, his imprimatur counted for much.
In its English guise, at least, Foucault's history of madness
had one great merit for a book introducing a difficult and then
unknown author -someone working in an intellectual tradition
that was not just foreign to the idioms of most Englishspeaking people, but also remote from their interest or
sympathy.
That merit was brevity, a delightful quality, little valued by
most academics.
Short yet sweeping, spanning the whole of the Western
encounter with unreason from the high Middle Ages to the
advent of psychoanalysis, the book in its first English
incarnation also possessed a wonderful title. Madness and
Civilization advertised its wares far more effectively than its
plodding French counterpart: Folie et deraison: Histoire de la
folie a l'age classique. Quite where the new label came from from Foucault himself, from Laing, from the publisher, from
the first translator, Richard Howard -remains obscure; but it
was a remarkable piece of packaging, arresting and
provocative, and calculated to pique the interest of almost
anyone who came across it.
Madness and Civilization was not just short: it was
unhampered by any of the apparatus of modern scholarship.
What appeared in 1965 was a truncated text, stripped of
several chapters, but also of the thousand and more footnotes
that decorated the first French edition. Foucault himself had
abbreviated the lengthy volume that constituted his doctoral
thesis to produce a small French pocket edition, and it was
this version (which contented itself with a small handful of
references and a few extra pages from the original text) that
appeared in translation. This could be read in a few hours, and
if extraordinarily large claims rested on a shaky empirical
foundation, this was perhaps not immediately evident. The
pleasures of a radical reinterpretation of the place of
psychiatry in the modern world (and, by implication, of the
whole Enlightenment project to glorify reason) could be
absorbed in very little time.
Any doubts that might surface about the book's claims could
always be dismissed by gestures towards a French edition far
weightier and more solemn -a massive tome that monoglot
English readers were highly unlikely, indeed unable, to
consult for themselves, even supposing that they could have
laid their hands on a copy.
None of this seems to have rendered the book's claims
implausible, at least to a complaisant audience. Here, indeed,
is a world turned upside down. Foucault rejects psychiatry's
vaunted connections with progress; he rejects the received
wisdom about madness and the modern world. Generation
after generation had sung paeans to the twin movement that
took mad people from our midst and consigned them to the
new world of the asylum, capturing madness itself for the
science of medical men; Foucault advanced the reverse
interpretation. The "liberation" of the insane from the
shackles of superstition and neglect was, he proclaimed,
something quite other -"a gigantic moral imprisonment". The
phrase still echoes. If the highly sceptical, not to say hostile,
stance it encapsulates came to dominate four decades of
revisionist historiography of psychiatry, there is a natural
temptation to attribute the changed intellectual climate,
whatever one thinks of it, to the influence of the charismatic
Frenchman. But is it so? There were, after all, myriad
indigenous sources of scepticism in the 1960s, all quite
separately weakening the vision of psychiatry as an
unambiguously liberating scientific enterprise.
It is not as though such a perspective had ever gone
unchallenged, after all.
Psychiatrists' pretensions have seldom been given a free pass.
Their medical brethren have always been tempted to view
them as witch doctors and pseudo-scientists, seldom
demonstrating much respect for their abilities, or much
willingness to admit them to fully fledged membership in the
profession.
And the public at large has likewise displayed few illusions
about their performance and competence, dismissing them as
mad-doctors, shrinks, bughouse doctors and worse. The crisis
of psychiatric legitimacy, as Charles Rosenberg once
shrewdly remarked, has been endemic throughout the
profession's history.
But the years when Foucault came to prominence were a
particularly troubling time for defenders of the psychiatric
enterprise. There was the work of Erving Goffman, the
brilliant if idiosyncratic American sociologist whose loosely
linked essays on asylums lent academic lustre to the
previously polemical equation of the mental hospital and the
concentration camp. Goffman dismissed psychiatry as a
"tinkering trade" whose object was the collection of
unfortunates who were the victims of nothing more than
"contingencies". Then there was the renegade New York
psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, who declared that the very
existence of mental illness was a myth, and savaged his
fellow professionals as oppressors of those they purported to
"help", self-serving creatures who were nothing more than
prison guards in disguise. And there was Ronnie Laing
himself, now dismissed in most quarters as yesterday's man,
but welcomed, in the feverish atmosphere of the 1960s, as the
guru who had shown the adolescent mental patient to be the
fall girl, the designated victim of the double bind of family
life; and who had, yet more daringly, launched the notion of
schizophrenia as a form of super- sanity. More prosaically, a
new generation of historians, abandoning their discipline's
traditional focus on diplomacy and high politics, were in these
years embracing social history and "history from below", and
doing so in an intellectual climate of hostility to anything that
smacked of Whig history and its emphasis on progress. The
birth of the revisionist historiography of psychiatry was thus
attended by many midwives.
Still, Foucault's growing stature both in serious intellectual
circles and among the luminaries of cafe society was not
without significance. He undoubtedly helped to establish the
centrality of his subject, and to rescue the history of
psychiatry from the clutches of a combination of drearily dull
administrative historians and psychiatrists in their dotage. It is
curious, particularly in the light of Foucault's prominence in
the Anglo-American as well as the francophone world, that it
has taken almost half a century for the full text of the French
original to appear in translation. Certainly, the move does not
reflect any increase in the ranks of French-speaking scholars
in Britain and the United States. To the contrary, linguistic
incompetence and insularity even among humanists seems to
have grown in these years. So one must welcome the decision
of Routledge (the heirs of Tavistock) to issue a complete
translation. The publishers have even included the prefaces to
both the first and second full French editions (Foucault had
suppressed the former on the book's republication in 1972).
And they have added Foucault's side of an exchange with
Jacques Derrida over the book's thesis, a lecture given at the
College Philosophique in March 1963. But the warmth of the
welcome one accords to the belated appearance of History of
Madness depends upon a variety of factors: the nature of the
new material now made available to anglophone readers; the
quality of the new translation; the facts that the complete text
reveals about the foundations of Foucault's scholarship on the
subject of madness; and -an issue I shall flag, but not expand
on here -one's stance vis-a-vis his whole anti-Enlightenment
project.
As to the first of these, the "new" version is more than twice
as long as the text that originally appeared in English, and
contains almost ten times as many footnotes, not to mention
an extended list of Foucault's sources. The major additions are
whole chapters that were omitted from the first English
edition: a chapter examining "the correctional world . . . on
the threshold of modern times" and its associated "economy
of evil" -a survey that claims to uncover the abrupt creation of
"grids of exclusion" all over Europe, and of "a common
denominator of unreason among experiences that had long
remained separate from each other"; a chapter discussing
"how polymorphous and varied the experience of madness
was in the classical age"; a series of chapters that make up
much of the early sections of Part Two of Foucault's original
discussion, including a lengthy introduction, and a chapterand-a-half of his examination of how eighteenth-century
physicians and savants interrogated and came to understand
the phenomenon of madness; the greater part of a long chapter
on "the proper uses of liberty", which examines the fusion of
what Foucault insists were the previously separate worlds of
medical thought and of confinement. In place of the few
pages on Goya, Sade and Nietzsche that were labelled
"Conclusion" in the Richard Howard translation, there is a
much longer set of musings on the nineteenth century that
begins with an adjuration that "There is no question here of
concluding", not least because "the work of (Philippe) Pinel
and (William) Tuke" -with which the substantive portion of
Foucault's analysis concludes -"is not a destination". To these
formerly untranslated chapters, one must add the restoration
in other portions of the text of a number of individual
paragraphs and sometimes whole sections of Foucault's
argument that were simply eliminated from the abridged
version of his book: elaborations, for example, of portions of
his famous opening chapter on "the ship of fools"; a long
concluding section previously omitted from his chapter on the
insane; and passages originally left out of his discussion of
"doctors and patients".
Even confining ourselves to this brief and cursory summary
of what is now translated for the first time, the potential
interest and importance of Madness is clear. How many
people will actually plough through the extended text is less
clear, and the new translation by Jonathan Murphy and Jean
Khalfa is not much help in that regard. Often dreary and
dispirited, it is also unreliable and prone to inaccurate
paraphrase. Howard's version, however incomplete the text
from which he worked, sparkles by comparison. Compare, for
example, their respective renditions of the book's famous
opening lines: Foucault's text reads:
A la fin du Moyen Age, la lepre disparait du monde
occidental. Dans les marges de la communaute, aux portes des
villes, s'ouvrent comme des grandes plages que le mal a cesse
de hanter, mais qu'il a laissees steriles et pour longtemps
inhabitables.
Des siecles durant, ces etendues appartiendront a l'inhumain.
Du XIVe au XVIIe siecle, elles vont attendre et solliciter par
d'etranges incantations une nouvelle incarnation du mal, une
autre grimace de la peur, des magies renouvelees de
purification et d'exclusion.
Murphy and Khalfa give us:
At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the
Western world. At the edges of the community, at town gates,
large, barren, uninhabitable areas appeared, where disease no
longer reigned but its ghost still hovered. For centuries, these
spaces would belong to the domain of the inhuman. From the
fourteenth to the seventeenth century, by means of strange
incantations, they conjured up a new incarnation of evil,
another grinning mask of fear, home to the constantly
renewed magic of purification and exclusion.
Howard's version runs as follows:
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.
But what even a weak translation does not disguise is the kind
of evidence upon which Foucault erected his theory. Those
thousand and more untranslated footnotes now stand revealed,
and the evidence appears for what it is. It is not, for the most
part, a pretty sight.
Foucault's research for Madness was largely completed while
he was in intellectual exile in Sweden, at Uppsala. Perhaps
that explains the superficiality and the dated quality of much
of his information. He had access to a wide range of medical
texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -English,
Dutch, French and German -as well as the writings of major
philosophers like Descartes and Spinoza. A number of the
chapters that now appear for the first time in English make
use of these primary sources to analyse older ideas about
madness. One may object to or accept Foucault's
reconstructions, but these portions of his argument at least rest
on readings of relevant source material. By contrast, much of
his account of the internal workings and logic of the
institutions of confinement, an account on which he lavishes
attention, is drawn from their printed rules and regulations.
But it would be deeply naive to assume that such documents
bear close relationship to the realities of life in these places, or
provide a reliable guide to their quotidian logic. There are,
admittedly, references to a handful of archival sources, all of
them French, which might have provided some check on these
published documents, but such material is never
systematically or even sensibly employed so as to examine
possible differences between the ideal and the real.
Nor are we given any sense of why these particular archives
were chosen for examination, what criteria were employed to
mine them for facts, how representative the examples
Foucault provides might be. Of course, by the very ambitions
they have set for themselves, comparative historians are often
forced to rely to a substantial extent on the work of others, so
perhaps this use of highly selective French material to
represent the entire Western world should not be judged too
harshly. But the secondary sources on which Foucault
repeatedly relies for the most well-known portions of his text
are so self-evidently dated and inadequate to the task, and his
own reading of them so often singularly careless and
inventive, that he must be taken to task.
Foucault alleges, for example, that the 1815-16 House of
Commons inquiry into the state of England's madhouses
revealed that Bedlam (Bethlem) placed its inmates on public
display every Sunday, and charged a penny a time for the
privilege of viewing them to some 96,000 sightseers a year.
In reality, the reports of the inquiry contain no such claims.
This is not surprising: public visitation (which had not been
confined to Sundays in any event) had been banned by
Bethlem Royal Hospital's governors in 1770, and even before
then the tales of a fixed admission fee turn out to be
apocryphal.
Foucault is bedevilled by Bethlem's history. He makes the
remarkable claim that "From the day when Bethlem, the
hospital for curative lunatics, was opened to hopeless cases in
1733, there was no longer any notable difference between the
London hospital and the French Hopital General, or any other
house of correction". And he speaks of Bethlem's
"refurbishment" in 1676. In reality, it had moved in that year
from its previous location in an old monastery in Bishopsgate
to a grandiose new building in Moorfields designed by Robert
Hooke.
Monasteries surface elsewhere in his account. We are told
with a straight face that "it was in buildings that had
previously been both convents and monasteries that the
majority of the great asylums of England . . . were set up".
This is a bizarre notion. First, there were no "great asylums"
set up in England in the classical age. Vast museums of
madness did not emerge until the nineteenth century (when
they were purpose-built using taxpayers' funds). And second,
only Bethlem, of all the asylums and madhouses that existed
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was ever housed
in a former convent or monastery, and when it was, its peak
patient population amounted to fewer than fifty inmates,
hardly the vast throng conjured up by Foucault's image of
"grands asiles". It is odd, to put it mildly, to rely exclusively
on nineteenth-and early twentieth- century scholarship to
examine the place of leprosy in the medieval world. It is
peculiar to base one's discussion of English and Irish poor law
policy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries on, in
essence, only three sources -the dated and long superseded
work of Sir George Nicholls (1781-1865), E. M. Leonard's
1900 textbook, and an eighteenth-century treatise by Sir
Frederick Morton Eden. For someone purporting to write a
history of the Western encounter with madness, it is
downright astonishing to rely on a tiny handful of long-dead
authors as a reliable guide to English developments: Jacques
Tenon's eighteenth- century account of his visit to English
hospitals, supplemented by Samuel Tuke's Description of the
Retreat (1813) and Hack Tuke's Chapters in the History of the
Insane (1882).
But then, Foucault's sources for his accounts of developments
in Germany, in Austria, even in France, are equally outdated
and unsatisfactory. The whole of Part One of Madness has a
total of twenty-eight footnotes (out of 399) that cite twentiethcentury scholars, and the relevant list of sources in the
bibliography mentions only twenty-five pieces of scholarship
written from 1900 onwards, only one of which was published
after the Second World War. Things do not improve as the
book proceeds. Foucault's bibliography for Part Two lists a
single twentieth-century work, Gregory Zilboorg's The
Medical Man and the Witch During the Renaissance (1935) scarcely a source on that subject calculated to inspire
confidence among present-day historians (and one that
Foucault himself criticizes). For Part Three, he lists a grand
total of eleven books and articles written in his own century.
Narrowness of this kind is not confined to footnotes.
Foucault's isolation from the world of facts and scholarship is
evident throughout History of Madness. It is as though nearly
a century of scholarly work had produced nothing of interest
or value for Foucault's project. What interested him, or
shielded him, was selectively mined nineteenth-century
sources of dubious provenance.
Inevitably, this means that elaborate intellectual constructions
are built on the shakiest of empirical foundations, and, not
surprisingly, many turn out to be wrong.
Take his central claim that the Age of Reason was the age of a
Great Confinement.
Foucault tells us that "a social sensibility, common to
European culture . .
.
suddenly began to manifest itself in the second half of the
seventeenth century; it was this sensibility that suddenly
isolated the category destined to populate the places of
confinement . . . the signs of (confinement) are to be found
massively across Europe throughout the seventeenth century".
"Confinement", moreover, "had the same meaning throughout
Europe, in these early years at least."
And its English manifestations, the new workhouses,
apparently appeared in such "heavily industrialised" places as
seventeenth-century Worcester and Norwich.
But the notion of a Europe-wide Great Confinement in these
years is purely mythical.
Such massive incarceration simply never occurred in England
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whether one
focuses one's attention on the mad, who were still mostly left
at large, or on the broader category of the poor, the idle and
the morally disreputable. And as Gladys Swain and Marcel
Gauchet argue in Madness and Democracy (reviewed in the
TLS, October 29, 1999), even for France, Foucault's claims
about the confinement of the mad in the classical age are
grossly exaggerated, if not fanciful -for fewer than 5,000 were
locked up even at the end of the eighteenth century, a "tiny
minority of the mad who were still scattered throughout the
interior of society". Foucault's account of the medieval period
fares no better in the light of modern scholarship. Its central
image is of "the ship of fools", laden with its cargo of mad
souls in search of their reason, floating down the liminal
spaces of feudal Europe. It is through the Narrenschiff that
Foucault seeks to capture the essence of the medieval
response to madness, and the practical and symbolic
significance of these vessels loom large in his account. "Le
Narrenschiff . . . a eu une existence reelle", he insists. "Ils ont
existe, ces bateaux qui d'une ville a l'autre menaient leur
cargaison insensee." (The ship of fools was real. They existed,
these boats that carried their crazed cargo from one town to
another.) But it wasn't; and they didn't.
The back cover of History of Madness contains a series of
hyperbolic hymns of praise to its virtues. Paul Rabinow calls
the book "one of the major works of the twentieth century";
Ronnie Laing hails it as "intellectually rigorous"; and Nikolas
Rose rejoices that "Now, at last, English-speaking readers can
have access to the depth of scholarship that underpins
Foucault's analysis". Indeed they can, and one hopes that they
will read the text attentively and intelligently, and will learn
some salutary lessons. One of those lessons might be
amusing, if it had no effect on people's lives: the ease with
which history can be distorted, facts ignored, the claims of
human reason disparaged and dismissed, by someone
sufficiently cynical and shameless, and willing to trust in the
ignorance and the credulity of his customers.
The TLS
March 14, 2008
Grades of boys
Catharine Edwards
THE GREEKS AND GREEK LOVE. By James Davidson.
634pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Pounds 30 (US $59.65) - 978 0 297 81997 4.
In the middle of the gymnasium, the exercise ground
frequented by the citizen male youth of Athens, two beautiful,
naked young men are locked in an erotic embrace, while their
peers look on approvingly. This scene, from a vase of the late
sixth century bc, offers, on James Davidson's reading, an
image of Greek Love (the use of capitals plays a significant
role in his book) which is a world away from the criminalized
sodomy, the pathologized homosexual - or even the illicit
fumblings of schoolboys after lights out - of more recent
centuries. To mark their graduation to citizen status, their
coming out, as it were, the new cohort of eighteen-year-olds
would run a nude torch race the night before the Panathenaea,
the great summer festival of Athena, from the altar of love in
the gymnasium outside the city walls to an altar inside the
city. Older men looked on as they ran, admiring their
beautiful young flesh in action, perhaps singling out a wellmade individual for future courtship. The love such young
men might inspire was closely integrated into a range of
religious cults and rituals both in Athens and elsewhere in the
Greek world.
Although there is a lot of semen in evidence - sometimes in
unexpected places - The Greeks and Greek Love is
emphatically about love rather than sex. Greek Love is the
passionate devotion of one man (or in some communities
woman, on Davidson's model) to another, a devotion which
meets with general approval (and need not necessarily involve
sex); in the words Plato puts in the mouth of Pausanias in the
Symposium, "we do not merely tolerate, we even praise the
most extraordinary behaviour in a lover in pursuit of his
beloved, behaviour which would meet with the severest
condemnation if it were practised for any other end".
Among the heroes particular to Athenian democracy were
Harmodius and Aristogiton. These two met their deaths for
daring to assassinate the tyrant (or rather the tyrant's brother)
Hipparchus on the morning of the great Panathenaea in 514
bc, a key moment in the establishment of the democratic
regime. Whether or not Hipparchus had sought to seduce
Harmodius, the assassins' bravery was seen as motivated by
their altruistic devotion to one another. Statues of the two of
them, the younger beardless Harmodius, the older bearded
Aristogiton, stood as emblems of democracy in the Athenian
agora, still celebrated centuries later.
All the same, the distinction between eros, one-sided
devotion, often publicly demonstrated, and philia, a
relationship which involved reciprocity, is a significant one. It
is eros, that devoted pursuit of what evades one's grasp, which
plays the crucial role in Platonic philosophy, for instance. The
seeker after wisdom yearns for, but can never attain, the
beauty of sublime truth.
This is more than an analogy, for the fleeting incarnation of
beauty in a young man may well serve as the initial stimulus
to this supremely noble philosophical endeavour. At the same
time, Davidson argues that many actual erotic pursuits would
have the end result of philia, ongoing mutual affection.
The relationship between Pausanias and the poet Agathon
referred to in the Symposium (and elsewhere) seems to have
endured decades. Might this not count as marriage, by some
criteria at least? Indeed, for Davidson, evidence for rituals of
homosexual troth-plighting is to be found in numerous images
and texts from Athens and elsewhere.
Davidson argues convincingly for a move away from what he
terms "sodomania" - the preoccupation with the politics of
penetration, the idea that what really mattered was who
penetrated whom. This was the view of, especially, Kenneth
Dover, whose Greek Homosexuality (first published in 1978)
remains highly influential, not least through its impact on
Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality. In Davidson's
account, being penetrated was not (as they had argued)
intrinsically humiliating; rather, a beloved youth might under
certain circumstances quite properly grant his lover all kinds
of favours. At the same time references to looks, smiles and
conversations are not necessarily to be taken as euphemistic
cloaks for more intimate contact.
Certainly, Greek texts evince concern about granting favours
for the wrong reasons (most significantly financial gain) and
about uncontrolled desire for sex, but not (despite the claims
made by Dover and Foucault) about exactly which sexual acts
take place. Greek writers also talk - and worry - about underage sex. For some modern historians, what look like
references to the sexual exploitation of the young constitute a
hideous blot on the beauty of classical Athenian culture.
Shouldn't we be concerned at poems dwelling on the charms
of boys when the down first appears on their cheeks or vases
showing an older bearded man apparently pinning down an
unwilling boy? Davidson adduces persuasive parallels from
other pre-industrial cultures to suggest that the age of first
beard was likely to have been significantly later in antiquity
than it is in the modern West, perhaps around eighteen.
Importantly, the very term "boy" turns out to be an ambiguous
one in classical Athens. In general Greek usage, pais (when
not referring to a male slave of any age) signified a male
under twenty, but in Athens it was often used more
specifically to refer to a male under eighteen (brilliant
detective work has gone into Davidson's delineation of the
Athenian age-class system). Thus in some contexts "boys" are
strictly off limits - as under-eighteens they can be admired but
only from afar (and, in wealthy families, are strictly
chaperoned). But those aged eighteen or nineteen, whom
Davidson distinguishes as striplings or youths, were expected
to inspire love among, and be proper objects of pursuit for,
the young men aged twenty and over. An age difference was
expected between a lover and his beloved, but it will often
have been only a couple of years (far less than the gap which
separated many Athenian husbands from their wives).
Greek Love was by no means an exclusively Athenian
phenomenon. Davidson traces its multiple varieties, including
relationships between women, which were characteristic not
only of Lesbos (the home of Sappho) but also of Sparta, he
argues. Different "love-ways" between males seem to have
been practised particularly in Sparta (where sex between the
under-eighteens was said to be common, but mitigated by a
cloak separating flesh from flesh), in Crete (where formalized
relationships between an older and a younger man were
framed by complex rituals) and in Elis (whose brusque
practices were spoken of with disapproval by other Greeks).
Davidson's book is at its most persuasive in exploring the
work done by these Greek Love relationships in their
particular social contexts. Hipparchus' pursuit of Harmodius,
and other similar courtships, functioned on one level as a
mechanism to win over new adherents to the supporters of
tyranny in Athens.
Greek Love served to reinforce bonds in military units, most
famously in the Theban "sacred band"; no one wants to
appear a coward in front of his beloved.
In Sparta, the bond between a lover and his beloved worked to
mediate potentially acrimonious rivalries between age-classes.
Davidson also offers a persuasive picture of the politics of
love in the court of Alexander the Great.
What might matter most about Alexander's passionate
devotion to Hephaestion, he contends, is not whether they
actually had sex, but rather that his role as beloved allowed
the talented Hephaestion to take on a leading part in
government from which his low social status would otherwise
have excluded him.
Myths, in all their rich complexity, play a key role here in
articulating the cultural centrality of Greek Love. Achilles and
Patroclus, as they appear in Homer and in later literature, are
its patron saints. In this respect also Davidson's ancient
Greece is far from homogeneous. Local variants of the stories
of Zeus and Ganymede, Apollo and Hyacinthus, or Heracles
and Iolaus are tied suggestively into the details of particular
cults, into Greek topography and astronomy (though
sometimes the mythological connections Davidson articulates
are dazzling rather than persuasive).
By turns lyrical, analytic and militant, this is a magnificently
personal and self-reflexive book; Davidson vividly evokes his
own adolescent engagement with Dover's commentary on
Aristophanes' Clouds, for instance, or his experience of
gazing at the stars on a clear night in Spain, or how his views
on the way a particular word should be translated have
changed over the years. The ancient Greek language, in all its
subtlety and strangeness, painstakingly elucidated for the
Greekless reader, is at the heart of this book. Davidson offers
thought-provoking and original readings of Homer, Plato,
Sappho and a host of other Greek (and later) texts. His
discussions of images exploit their detail and bring out their
beauty with tremendous subtlety - though on occasion
credulity is strained (and it's a pity the images themselves with the exception of the seductive jacket and endpapers - are
less than clearly reproduced).
Less successfully integrated, perhaps, is Davidson's analysis
of the politics of modern scholarship. In addressing the
question of why classicists are obsessed with anal sex,
Davidson charts at length formative moments in Dover's
intellectual and emotional development and the (for
Davidson) baleful influence on Foucault of his colleague at
the College de France, the Roman historian Paul Veyne (who
certainly argued that the Romans were obsessed with who
penetrated whom - a more plausible argument in their case
than for the Greeks, one might contend). Perhaps it is the case
that Foucault's unwillingness to identify himself as gay was
on some level motivated by his experience, as a child in
Vichy France, of seeing Jewish boys "disappear" from his
school. Yet Davidson's insistence on the complex interrelationship between twentieth- century intellectual
justifications and critiques of racism and of homophobia
entangles him in an extended and problematic discussion of
theories of culture which fits awkwardly into the book as a
whole. If the reaction against Nazi racism, which informed
developments in sociolinguistics and anthropology, has
generated the view of homosexuality as culturally
constructed, this all too easily, he contends, slips into the
perception of homosexuality as a socially formed perversion.
For Davidson, a constructionist understanding of
homosexuality (that is to say the view that sexual orientation
is not firmly rooted in nature) is a hostage to fortune, enabling
the conception of a world in which homosexuals do not exist on one level a step towards Auschwitz. Yet his own picture of
the workings of love in classical Athens, where young men,
particularly upper class young men, are expected to fall in
love with youths a little younger than themselves, scarcely fits
with the essentialist position he appears to advocate. Certain
cultures suit and encourage certain dispositions, harnessing
particular inclinations and enabling them to flourish, he
plausibly suggests.
But we can never escape culture. There will never be a
situation in which those who are naturally disposed to be
homosexual or heterosexual can be securely distinguished
from those who have been disposed by a whole host of
cultural influences to love those of their own - or the opposite
- sex.
The book ends with speculation about the origins of Greek
homosexuality, as Davidson finds traces of same-sex love
among the proto-Aeolians of the second millennium bc.
Should we look to the Aryans for its source, he asks? There is
a curious implication here that Aryan origins might give
added legitimacy to Greek Love. Yet the origins of Greek
Love are likely to prove as elusive as the dividing line
between nature and culture. The great achievement of this
book is its rich, suggestive and powerful portrait of a
historically attested society, or cluster of societies, whose
practices can still command significant symbolic capital in the
modern West. Even if it does not always convince, The
Greeks and Greek Love will certainly transform debates about
Greek homosexuality. And the publicly celebrated love of
boys - the Greeks' most idiosyncratic custom and one
absolutely at the centre of their culture - functions as a
brilliant way in to a fuller understanding of the Greek world.