renee,
Last week, or maybe the week before, I read Foucault's *Madness and
Civilization* in which he takes up various themes you mentioned. He
counterposed an earlier age in which the "mad" were confined and on Saturday
or Sunday the general public paid to see the show. He points out that as
humiliating this all seems, unlike with the gaze, the subject or a dialougue
still existed. With the gaze, the "mad" are just an object or what he calls
the monolougue because the dialougue ceases to exist.
On 248, Foucault mentions in reference to the gaze,
"In classical confinement, the madman was also vulnerable to the
observation, but such observation did not, basically, involve him; it
involved only his monstrous surface, his visable animality; and it included
at least one form of reciprocity, since the sane man could read in the
madman, as in a mirror, the imminent movement of his downfall. The
observation Tuke now insituted as one of the great elements of asylum
existance was both deeper and less reciprocal. It pursued in the madman the
least perceptible signs of madness, in the place where madness becomes
secretely distinct from reason, begins to detach itself from it; and the
madman cannot return this observation in any form, since he is merely
observed; he is a kind of new arrival, a late comer in the world of reason".
Nate
-----Original Message-----
From: renee hayes [mailto:emujobs@hotmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 12, 2000 8:53 AM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: RE: illness and moral culpability
Thanks to Nate for the excerpt from Foucault´s interview, giving me meaning
for the term "Fouclaultian gaze." I can only imagine that he (Fouclault,
that is) was thinking that this type of control can be similarly economical
and efficient in the institurionalized control practices of schools,
especially given the quote "to put an overseer in the tower and place in
each of the cells a lunatic, a patient, a convict, or a schoolboy."
I am still processing the connection between Foucaultian gaze and ADHD
medical discourse...is the argument then that the way ADHD is diagnosed,
kind of exposed and imbued with a sense of reality as it is constructed as a
medical reality, results in a type of relatively simple and economical
control, analgous to the institutional architecture designed to ensure that
everyone (well, at least the ones that don´t fit) is exposed, observed?
And maybe this can be applied to other mental health-type diagnoses (those
that employ, as described by Virginia, the DSM-IV manual.) I have always
been fascinated by the diagnosis of mental illness by the DSM manuals (I
remember when it was just III). I used to work in a group home with
adolescents with "behavior disorders." To some extent, they went through
some of the things described in Virginia´s paper...relief at being
diagnosed, issues of moral culpability (I used to be a delinquient but now I
have borderline personality disorder). And for their family and teachers,
maybe some mixture of relief and guilt at the justification the label
offered for removing them from the home and school entirely.
Anotehr side effect of diagnosis in this case was that their rights of
privacy and confidentiality were removed in kind of a striking way. All the
counselors and case workers were required to write daily, weekly, and
monthly "progress notes." These were recorded in a big red book and read by
all the staff, but interestingly hidden from the client (that was the term
we used, to make ourselves feel better I think that we were not saying
"patient" like the mental hopsitals did.) And I remember that when one of
our clients was particularly upset about this idea, that his records were
open to all staff yet closed to him, the staff considered him to be
untrusting and resistant. But I think this relates to the gaze, because the
staff seem to say to the client "we can all see you, we are all watching you
and sharing notes, and you can not even know what we see of you." Wierd, I
think.
By the way, thanks, John, for pointing out the difference between glaze and
gaze. I must have been fantasizing about doughnuts again...
Renée
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