Print

---

Here here,

I long for the time when true relativism holds sway and that no one sytem is
valued more than another for reasons more akin to social dynamics than real
analysis and indivdual consideration.

I hold with the philosophical viewpoint of George Fox, who would doff his
hat to no-one, being the ultimate arbiter of his own experience.

The reality is that in any discourse the very use of language itself is
suspect in that it cannot convey the true subtleties of thought and
ideation, between one person and another let alone one culture/sub culture
and another.

It is unfortunately indefinable mathematically or symbolically, therefore of
its nature imprecise and subjective.

Foucault is as much a product of his time and culture, and our perceptions
and projections of him mediated through the myriad of social and societal
experience governed even by our own pyscological perspectives, so I think
your virus analogy is apt.

Larry contra mundum comme d'habitute

> -----Original Message-----
> From: The Disability-Research Discussion List
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of m. miles
> Sent: 26 January 2001 14:01
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Fou Cult virus in Disability-Research Histories
>
>
> Fou Cult Virus in Disability-Research Histories
>
> Disability Students who omit to mention the works of the dead, white,
> able-bodied, european, male-elitist professor Michel Foucault may
> be divided
> into three  groups:  those who omit Foucault because they have
> read none of
> his works; and those who omit Foucault because they have read some of his
> works.  Those in the first group should not reject out of hand
> the extensive
> oeuvre of this influential philosopher, propagandist, entertainer or
> charlatan; but some choices have to be made when faced with the
> mountains of
> material potentially relevant to disability studies. Is Foucault worth the
> effort?  A few notes are gathered below on the value of Foucault
> to anything
> historical, such as the development of ideas about disability and social
> responses to disability.
>
> (The third group?  Yes, they have both read Foucault and not read
> Foucault.
> This is the exciting new position offered by cultural studies to the
> disability world).
>
> A dip into Foucault quickly gives an impression that he (or
> perhaps she, as
> the third group may wish to argue) is long on theory and short on
> the basic
> data with which serious historians have conventionally worked, such as
> dates, people with names, and primary sources. 'So much the worse for
> convention', the Foucaultians reply, 'since on closer examination these
> "basic data" turn out to be merely one among many possible selections; one
> made by (male) bourgeois [= city-dwelling?] historians to maintain their
> power and privilege, while they systematically suppress other data that
> would expose the hidden biases in their oppressive discourse.'
> (Et cetera).
> Where this is an argument for scepticism, it is useful; but in so
> far as it
> legitimises a blanket dismissal of other historians' work merely by
> labelling it 'bourgeois', and it privileges an alternative
> selection of work
> by historians who are Right-Thinking, or Politically Correct, or Marxian,
> Flat-Earthist, village-dwelling, paranoid, Foucaultian,
> Foucauldian, or any
> other flavour of the month, it is clearly the opposite of scepticism.
>
> Further, Foucault seldom troubled to explain himself clearly, whether in
> French or in authorised translations; where he did seem to write clearly,
> and produced either banalities or assertions contrary to
> carefully research
> and well-documented 'facts', he might deny later that his meaning has been
> understood. The question continues to arises whether investing time in
> Foucault would benefit disability studies. Two sample tests are
> given below.
>
> A.  Foucault's  "Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique" is the work that
> might seem to have some direct application to historical
> disability studies.
> It was his doctoral thesis, so probably had the partial aim (at
> least in the
> second country where he tried it) of communicating intelligibly with the
> bourgeois professors whom Foucault anticipated would examine it and who
> could block or unblock the road to the wonderful land of tenure. His
> (revised) preface to the 1977 reprint of the Gallimard edition recognises
> that the work has already developed multiple forms: people have
> read it (or,
> more simply, have not read it), and have constructed their own text and
> meanings. Foucault realises that a Preface merely attempts to
> establish the
> tyranny of author over reader, and prepares himself for the certainty of
> being misunderstood. He has already made it certain by the deliberate (or
> perhaps the careless) ambiguity of his writing style.
>
> To make misunderstanding more sure,  "Histoire de la folie" begins, under
> the chapter heading "Stultifera navis", with a sweeping assertion,
> characteristic of Foucault: "A la fin du Moyen Age, la lèpre disparaît du
> monde occidental."  This appears to assume that there was such a thing as
> the Middle Age(s), that it had an identifiable end, that
> 'leprosy' was also
> something, perhaps a social phenomenon, that could be identified and could
> disappear, that the western world was a known and meaningful place or
> quantity in which leprosy could exist or disappear; but Foucault or his
> devotees could of course deny that any of these assumptions were made or
> were implicit.
>
> Perhaps 'la lèpre' is merely a kind of abstract concept of
> leprosy, evoking
> in bourgeois authorities all the repressive, controlling attitudes that
> Foucault believes resurfaced later in the face of other threats (and of
> which he himself gave vigorous examples when anyone gave a tug at
> the rug on
> which he was standing). Foucault gives little evidence for his bold
> assertion, another common feature of his writing; for what
> 'evidence' could
> exist for so broad an assertion, short of a lifetime's study of textual
> sources across a large but unspecified land mass and an
> indefinite period of
> time and in languages in which many words have changed their
> meanings across
> centuries?  (Such a lifetime's study was in fact made by the medical
> historian  E. Jeanselme (1931) Comment l'Europe, au Moyen Age, se protégea
> contre la Lèpre, Bull. Soc. Française Hist. Méd. 25 (1 & 2): 3-155.  No.
> Nobody's ever heard of him).
>
> In subsequent assertions about the emptying of leprosariums, their
> alternative use for people with venereal diseases, and the curious fact
> that, two or three centuries later, in the same places, the same games of
> exclusion were supposedly replayed in the 'great incarceration' of mad
> people, Foucault does cite a small number of secondary sources,
> mostly from
> several centuries after the events.  One of them suggests that
> the citizens
> of Reims celebrated the disappearance of leprosy in 1635 - a rather late
> ending for the `Moyen Age'.  At the hospital of Ripon, by contrast, lepers
> had `disappeared' as early as 1342. (Nevertheless, new hospitals
> were still
> being founded in England in the sixteenth century, according to Peter
> Richards (1977) The Medieval Leper, Cambridge: Brewer, p. 83.)
>
> One may deduce that the duration of Foucault's Moyen Age, like
> the moyen age
> of a late 20th century middle-aged westerner, depends entirely on how he
> feels about it at any time. Foucault's grand theories tend to lean heavily
> on French evidence. Had he searched further north than Ripon, e.g. during
> his years as a lecturer in Sweden, he might have learnt that leprosy
> declined in Norway (often counted as part of 'the western world') in the
> 15th and 16th centuries, then steadily increased, until a survey in 1856
> reported 2,858 lepers. Around Bergen, more than 2% of the population had
> leprosy. (Th.M. Vogelsang (1965) Leprosy in Norway, Medical History 9:
> 29-35.)  Foucault's dramatic opening statement, when scrutinised
> carefully,
> dies the death of a thousand qualifications. (Too bad for careful
> scrutiny).
>
> B.  Foucault introduces the Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools) with the
> unexceptionable remark that it is clearly a literary device or figure by
> means of which various authors commented on the state of the world.
> (Histoire de la folie, pp. 18-19.)  However, "de tous ces vaisseaux
> romanesques ou satiriques, le Narrenschiff est le seul qui ait eu une
> existence réelle, car ils ont existé, ces bateaux qui d'une ville
> à l'autre
> menaient leur cargaison insensée."  (Ibid. p. 19.)  Allan Megill,
> celebrating Foucault's artistic talent for ambiguity, permits himself the
> wonderfully inclusive belief that "The passage both denies and
> asserts that
> ships of fools had a real existence" (p.90) - one can imagine
> some prominent
> barristers licking their lips over the prospect of
> cross-questionining such
> an expert witness in a court of law - but Megill at least seems to agree
> that "the Narrenschiff did exist". (A. Megill (1992) Foucault,
> ambiguity and
> the rhetoric of historiography, in: A. Still & I. Velody (eds)
> Rewriting the
> History of Madness, 86-118, London: Routledge.)
>
> Foucault admits to some puzzlement about Narrenschiffen (pp. 19-22), but
> rises to the occasion with a disquisition on the symbolism of
> water and some
> analysis of what may have been in people's minds (pp. 22-24.) Late Middle
> Age Occidental Man was worried by madness and madmen. To his own
> satisfaction, Foucault demonstrates for another 30 pages  [no misprint: he
> goes on for thirty pages...]  what these worries were, and how
> and why they
> issued in the separation of Madmen from the rest of men, and the
> subsequent
> locking up of the former by the latter. Some of this ramble is
> superficially
> plausible; but much of it is in terms for which it would be difficult to
> show what evidence could possibly exist.
>
> For the Narrenschiffen themselves, the real existence of which Foucault
> asserted and then used for a magisterial reconstruction of what was
> obviously going on men's minds several hundred years ago  (No,
> madam, women
> did not have minds in those days), the evidence was even harder to find.
> When two American psychologists studied the question and found none, and
> finally wrote to Foucault asking for his evidence, he admitted that it was
> not easy for him to provide it because, in effect, the dog had eaten his
> homework. He referred them to the University of Uppsala library; but that
> library, and many others on further enquiry, could provide only
> allegorical
> boats. (W.B. Maher & B. Maher (1982) The Ship of Fools.
> Stultifera Navis or
> Ignis Fatuus? American Psychologist 37: 756-761.)  Maher & Maher give an
> entertaining account of many other writers, some still holding academic
> posts, who took Foucault's assertion as true without bothering to
> check any
> primary sources, and who then embroidered wonderfully upon it, strolling
> confidently through the tortuous alleyways of medieval mentality.
> Apparently
> the same dog got around and ate their homework too.
>
> ***
>
> From these brief samples of Michel Foucault - at a period when he
> was busily
> trying to scramble up the ladder towards a position of
> unassailable academic
> privilege and emolument, and still felt some slight, residual need to
> provide scraps of evidence for his historical pronouncements -  it appears
> that however wonderfully one may seem to spin and reconstruct the
> epochs and
> hidden movements in the thoughts of people long ago and to expose their
> sinister motivations and nasty tendencies, the credibility of the whole
> exercise can still be undermined by a ridiculous intrusion of bourgeois
> questions about dates and documents, or by one's inability to satisfy the
> tiny, factist minds of enquirers after such trivia.
>
> More detailed and trenchant critiques by historians of mental illness and
> treatment appear in Still & Velody, Rewriting (see above), and in Peter
> Burke (ed.) (1992) Critical Essays on Michel Foucault, Aldershot: Scolar
> Press, which also interestingly shows some of Foucault's ineffectual
> attempts to cover up the flaws in his historical work. See also  H.C. Erik
> Midelfort (1999) A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century
> Germany, Stanford
> UP, 7-9, 229-230.  Midelfort, who has spent 25 years in detailed and
> laborious study of ground and background over which Foucault skimmed with
> effortless speed, has indeed noticed occasions when the latter's instant
> insights happen to have coincided with his own plodding conclusions.
> Charitably he avoids drawing an analogy with the stopped clock
> that is right
> twice a day.
>
> The issues, tissues or misuse of the Ships of Fools have been extensively
> cited as examples of Foucault's historiographical unreliability and such
> citations have of course been dismissed as trivial by the great prophet's
> devotees, who simply know in their hearts that he must have been right.
> Problems with the 'disappearance' of leprosy have not roused much
> interest,
> perhaps because leprosy was hardly a live issue in late 20th
> century Europe.
> This discussion is by no means the final word on Foucault's
> contribution to
> the history of mental illness, or that of the Foucaultians to histories of
> the medical, educational or 'disabling' professions. In his
> Introduction to
> The Archaeology of Knowledge, transl. A.M. Sheridan Smith, 1972, New York:
> Pantheon, pp. 3-17, Foucault left himself plenty of room for changing his
> mind and popping up in different places to deny that he ever
> meant anything
> of the sort.
>
> The major issue of course is not merely that Foucault made mistakes - a
> moderate number could be pardoned, if there were real gains in models of
> human thought across centuries. It is his resolute denials, his
> inability to
> acknowledge that he had ever been wrong and to admit that his lengthy
> reconstruction of medieval mentality also crashes over his mistakes, that
> remove Foucault from the world of serious scholarship. It might indeed be
> possible to excavate some sort of history of the meanings of disability by
> methods similar to those of M. Foucault; yet for all his aperçus and
> scintillations, the game hardly seems worth the doubtful,
> flickering candle
> of illumination to be anticipated from the exercise. Only the Fou
> Cult virus
> continues to thrive and multiply...
> ___
>
> m99m
> _________________________________________________________________________
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