‘A great space of murmurings’

Abstract

Prompted by the 50th anniversary of the first publication of Foucault’s famous book commonly known in English as Madness and Civilization, this essay explores how the book has changed between versions, in the process losing what can be cast as both its phenomenological undertones and a ‘romanticism’ about the truths supposedly revealed by madness. Reasons for Foucault’s own disavowal of these elements are considered, and taken together – conjoining a critical biography of the book with attention to Foucault’s reactions to it – this essay fashions a mirror to hold up to certain currents within contemporary human geography. It is argued that the ‘romantic fantasy’ which permeates the original book, if not overwhelming it, has significant echoes in the ‘romantic gesture’ displayed by some present-day geographers. The older Foucault’s distancing from his earlier romanticism is hence instructive for scholars critiquing the recent history of human geography, but there may also be grounds for claiming that it would be mistaken to lose this romanticism, together with its phenomenological correlates, entirely.

Keywords

Foucault history human geography madness phenomenology romanticism

I Scene-setting

This essay is prompted by 2011 being 50 years since the first appearance of the book by Michel Foucault known in French as Histoire de la Folie (Foucault, 1961: henceforth HF) and in English as Madness and Civilization (Foucault, 1965: henceforth MC). My immediate focus will be ‘the book’, as I will call it, particularly differences between the initial, heavily abridged English translation (MC) and a later, unabridged English translation simply entitled History of Madness (Foucault, 2006a: henceforth HM). My goal is to advance an argument about what I will configure as the lost phenomenological and even ‘romantic’ undertones of the original French version, once more on show in the unabridged English version. I will explore Foucault’s own erasure of these undertones, notably through the suppression of the original preface, but also in how he subsequently reworked the book’s subject-matter for later writings. The geographies in different incarnations of the book will be excavated, but my broader ambition is to create a mirror to hold up to certain trajectories within contemporary human geography. This mirror will be gradually polished over what follows, rather than fully revealed at the outset, and as such my essay will have an incremental character cautiously preparing the ground for grander claims to come. It might be contended that I do not need a sustained engagement with MC/HF to arrive at the grander reflections from this mirror, but my sense is that recounting the detail of the book’s conflicted ‘romanticism’ affords a peculiarly intense appreciation of what is at stake in embracing, rejecting or seeking accommodation with what might be termed a ‘romantic gesture’ abroad in contemporary human geography.

In any of its guises, Foucault’s book is a work of ‘psychiatric history’, the catch-all term for a diversity of inquiries into the histories of ‘madness’ (mental illness), ‘madhouses’ (mental hospitals), ‘mad-doctoring’ (psychiatry) and ‘mad-people’ (mental patients).² That said, it challenges ‘progressivist’ accounts, where everything is getting better, as commonly retold in psychiatric histories written both before and after 1961. In bygone times, according to such accounts, mad people were treated badly, chained in cellars or burned at the stake, but their lot gradually improved with the dawning realization that their madness was really an illness requiring specialist medical intervention in dedicated institutional settings. For Foucault, the narrative is inverted; and so he talks about things deteriorating for mad people over time, as they are increasingly regarded as both carriers of an individual pathology needing cure and a collective social problem needing mastery. More elliptically, he narrates an ongoing silencing of the mad, charting an increasing loss of attention to what they actually say, do and want as they are captured in nets of medical, psychiatric and even psychoanalytic control; as their words are increasingly ignored or translated into the ‘languages’ of not-madness; as they are beset by vocabularies that are not their own; as they become trapped in a new machinery (Foucault will later call it a ‘technology’) alienating them from themselves, even as it abandons the physical horrors of whips, bars and chains.

The book also offers what might be termed a social critique of ‘enlightenment’, exposing the sociological correlates of an establishment obsession with ‘reason’: with qualities of being ‘reasonable’ and capacities for ‘reasoning’. Such correlates, Foucault insists, were embodied in a ragbag of humanity, the mad included but hardly alone, identified with the despised domain of ‘unreason’ or ‘irrationality’ specified by the European Enlightenment (Foucault’s ‘Classical Age’ or ‘Age of Reason’) commencing in the mid-1600s. Thus, the book insists on a thoroughly relational perspective, proposing that e/Enlightenment, as both period (the long-18th century) and process (reaching back to Ancient times) unavoidably called into being unreason as the inverse of reason – in deconstructionist terms, the ‘constitutive outside’ – and then populated it with a polar-world of troubled and troubling human types. Imaginatively, but also to an extent actually, this population was expelled from the mainstream of everyday life, conscripted to spaces of negative otherness at once ‘ideal’ and material. More philosophically, the book is an inquiry into the setting of limits – of boundaries to thought-and-action – that demarcate reason from unreason, exploring the excesses of human being and enticing readers into the nether reaches of madness, sexuality, ecstasy and death. Even before contemplating different versions/editions of the book, it is already several books in one, a multiplicity in a singularity.

The book is taken by friend and foe alike as an imposing outcrop of 20th-century intellectual endeavour, as well as a provocation to rethink ideas about and practices towards the mentally vulnerable (in which respect it swiftly became allied with the ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement arising in the 1960s). Colin Gordon (2007a) describes it as ‘a work of masterful accomplishment and prodigious and prodigal energy, grasp and daring’, declaring that ‘[n]o richer, more multidimensional work of cultural and intellectual history has been written – including by Foucault himself’. Noted French intellectuals praised the book for its contribution to both social history and philosophy, and appreciative if more cautious reviews appeared in Anglo-American circles (Beaulieu and Fillion, 2008: 74–75). A backlash then ensued:

Foucault … provides us with a dark vision of modern society which accords with only some historical facts. Abstract and metaphoric in expression, unconcerned with historical detail of time and place, or with rigorous documentation … Foucault’s work has had an enormous and disturbing influence upon traditional views of Western history. (Stone, 1987: 274)

Psychiatric historians denounced Foucault’s allegedly over-drawn speculations from insecure scholarly foundations, while others objected that he was condemning people with mental health problems ‘to the streets’ or simply recoiled from the ‘darkness’ of how he portrayed European/western history. To have elicited such forceful responses is probably a measure of the book’s significance, but what might be added is that some of these responses were based solely on the abridged English translation.

II Charred roots

I will now detour from the book to the first epigraph of James Miller’s controversial philosophical biography of Foucault:

Certain beings have a meaning that eludes us. Who are they? Their secret resides in the depths of the very secret of life. They approach it. Life kills them. But the future which they have awakened with a murmur, divines them, creates them. Oh labyrinth of extreme love! (In Miller, 1993: 11)

The ‘certain being’ is presumably meant to be Foucault; his meaning eludes us, but Miller seeks to unearth Foucault’s secrets in the conduct, ethics and politics of his life and death, attending to ‘a murmur’ that can be barely discerned, possibly relating to ‘extreme love’ (and Miller pursues Foucault into the gay baths and S&M cellars of San Francisco). The epigraph is a quote from the French poet René Char (1907–1988); and, for reasons to become clear, let us pause to consider Char, who was evidently possessed of a vivid ‘geographical imagination’.³ One critic (Caws, 1976) organizes her commentary on Char around spatial-geographical themes such as ‘path’, ‘crossing/distance’, ‘mountain’ and ‘range’, ‘contour’ and ‘relief’, ‘natural cycles’, and ‘archipelago and constellation’; while another (Lawler, 1978: 52) proposes Char's ‘imaginative scheme’ to pirouette between ‘[o]n the one hand, Vaucluse closed by the mountain face; on the other, a large plain swept by the winds of Provence over its crops, its herbs and streams of sun-drawn creatures’.

Char was initially identified as a surrealist, coming under the influence of the surrealist André Breton, but he was to depart from surrealism, a break prompted by his wartime experience as what one critic (Greilsamer, n.d.) calls ‘a poet in arms’. Char went underground with the Resistance, and by the early 1940s was commanding a resistance brigade, gaining responsibility for running the Durance parachute drop. Responding to what he later called ‘the moment of monsters’, the impending and then actual German invasion, Char became a man of action. His battle-front was the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence in southeast France, specifically the village of Céreste, a wild part of the country which he had visited previously: ‘a poor secretive village’; a place, as he said, ‘of forest, flints and white frost’; his ‘republic in the mountains’ (phrases in Greilsamer, n.d.). He knew violent conflict and was no stranger to enforcing villagers’ loyalty, possibly even disposing of traitors; he was hardened, made cruel. Whereas Theodor Adorno (cf. Adorno, 1973: 361–368) once declared that that ‘there can be no poetry after Auschwitz’, for Char the war became his muse; engaging a sensibility of violence as a path to beauty and truth, intimating too why he breaks from Breton’s surrealism.

Char began to write in a ‘mixed-poetico mythological register’, a phrase from the literary critic Van Kelly (2003: 110) who explores resonances between Char and Foucault. Char produced two wartime works that were later published: in 1945, Seuls demeurent (‘Alone remaining’), an anthology of poetry concluding with a series of aphorisms named Partage formel (‘Formal division’); and, in 1946, Feuillets d’Hypnos (‘Leaves of Hypnos’). Hypnos, a Greek semi-god who slept with his eyes open, was a reference to Char’s own wartime practice, and Feuillets is effectively a wartime notebook. In the hills of the 1940s, Char joined what one historian (Kedward, 1995) of the rural French resistance calls an ‘outlaw’ or ‘alternative culture’, a marginal shadow army of resistors, also known as the marquisards,⁴ especially young men and women. Char himself called them his compagnons pathétiques, ‘companions in pathos’, while Kelly (2003: 117–118) casts them as ‘shadow children’ or even ‘this companionable group of children who inhabit the shadows’. Also present is a sense of these resistors ‘murmuring’ behind the contrivances of domineering power; these shadow people in the hills whispering behind the backs of the German invaders and the Vichy regime. In Partage formel, Char resurrected Breton’s surrealist sense of murmure or ‘murmur’ as the inner voice (or ‘inward country’: Kelly, 2003: 122) only recoverable in surrealist automatic writing or dream-work, setting it instead into the social flows of history. It now became the murmurings, audible to the attentive listener, of those who are oppressed, who resist in their words, bodies and acts, but which are all too prone to being silenced by history’s bellicose progress. It is precisely this poetic sensibility to murmurings from the margins that apparently inspires Foucault when drafting HF.

One pre-war poem, included in the Seuls collection, has the subtitle of L’emmuré, ‘the one enclosed by walls’, referencing a painting by Georges de La Tour (see Figure 1) sometimes known as Le Prisonnier:⁵

In a dark place, which has been explained as a prison cell, a man sits on a squared block of wood or stone: his body is emaciated and his hair and beard unkempt, he is naked except for a loin-cloth and a loose cap. His hands are clasped, and he looks up, with mouth open as if to speak, to a tall woman who stands over him …; stooping she speaks to him. (Furness, 1949: 52)

Figure 1.

Le Prisonnier, painting attributed to Georges de La Tour, c. 1600s.

Kelly (2003) continues:

Char kept a reproduction of this painting on the wall of his command post in … Céreste, as a symbol of the freedom and grace for which he was fighting (Feuillets d’Hypnos, aphorism 178, where Char says that de La Tour ‘mastered the Hitlerian shadows by demonstrating a dialogue for human beings’). (Kelly, 2003: 113)

The image of this troubled man, confined behind walls, suggests a further connection to Foucault’s book, where incarceration in the prison, or more specifically the asylum, is paramount. The darkness of the enclosed space, a hint at claustrophobic captivity, anticipates an imagery that runs both explicitly and more subliminally throughout HF/MC, what might be termed a phenomenology of dark space without which, arguably, the book loses much of its force. Also pertinent is the wish to dispel ‘the Hitlerian shadows’, to oppose all those who (will to) confine the afflicted and the mad, just possibly through the device of ‘dialogue’; of speaking, gently reaching out in words and gestures, attending to the murmurings from the shadows.

III A spatial history of madness and unreason

Char will return shortly, but another sidestep is required to clarify why the book might matter to geographers; or, rather, to underline that there is warrant for casting it as a thorough-going work of ‘spatial history’, a term also deployed by Stuart Elden (2001: especially 120–133) with respect to both this book and Foucault’s wider corpus. Michel Serres (1962) tellingly detected here a stark géométrie de la folie, a notion easily understood from reading the following passage:

Between labor and idleness in the classical world ran a line of demarcation that replaced the exclusion of leprosy. The asylum was substituted for the lazar house, in the geography of haunted places as in the landscape of the moral universe. The old rites of excommunication were revived, but in the world of production and commerce. It was in these places of doomed and despised idleness … that madness would appear and soon expand until it had annexed them. A day was to come when it could possess these sterile reaches of idleness by a sort of very old and very dim right of inheritance. The nineteenth century would consent, would even insist that to the mad and to them alone be transferred these lands on which, a hundred and fifty years before, men had sought to pen the poor, the vagabond, the unemployed. (Serres, 1962)

In highly condensed fashion, this passage encapsulates the spatialized narrative running the length of the book. On the one hand, there is the city, the centre of human settlement, the civilized polis; and on the other, closer to the natural world, there is the countryside with its fields, forests and wildernesses. In Foucault’s first chapter, attention is immediately drawn to leper houses sited beyond the walls of Medieval settlements, maybe just outside the town gates or perhaps further into the dense woodlands shrouding much of Europe at this time. It was the leper, not the mad person, who comprised the sin-ridden figure excluded par excellence in the Medieval period, pushed to the margins through diverse ‘rites of excommunication’, while the mad, insofar that they were recognized as anything out-of-the-ordinary, endured nothing like the same systematic ostracism (and, indeed, in certain respects were tolerated and even treated kindly). In subsequent chapters, Foucault talks about the will of elites to open general houses of confinement – a roll-call of poorhouses, workhouses, houses of correction and other carceral establishments – that did appear on the Early Modern landscape, in larger numbers than critics often allow, occupying figuratively and sometimes actually ex-urban locations akin to those of the older leper-houses. Reflecting both a political-economic solution to European under-productivity and a manifestation of growing antipathy towards all unreasonable denizens of a self-regarding Age of Reason, these institutions, distanced from everyday scenes of social life, became receptacles for all manner of dubious characters under the umbrella designations of ‘the poor, the vagabond, the unemployed’.

While they should have been nurseries of industriousness, in practice these institutions were often peopled by misfits who could or would not work, and who, more broadly, consistently rebelled against the strict routines which the carceral regimes necessitated. Foucault suggests that it was the mad who surfaced as the most problematic of inmates, resistant to work, disruptive to good time-space order and even embodying, with their noisy animality, an unjust extra penalty for their fellow detainees. In a hyperbolic flourish, he identifies the mad as effectively ‘annexing’ the spaces concerned, but the crucial point is that here, in these ‘lands’ beyond clusters of population, the mad finally received their inheritance from earlier centuries in the shape of the lunatic asylum (as modernity’s leper-house). In the final period tackled by the book – from the late 1700s to the late 1800s – Foucault explains how specialist confinement was demanded for this mad cohort, which was henceforth to be ushered into the asylum as a set-apart space charged with ‘persuading’ the insane back into sanity. Foucault is alert to a tangle of medico-moral therapeutics that sanctioned the siting of asylums in the ‘purity’ of the countryside, albeit less the brutal nature of wilderness and more its domesticated cousin in agricultural milieux, allegedly brimful with curative potential. He duly conjoins a critical sense of mad people being banished from the urban, a crude ‘out of sight, out of mind’ logic, with a more mannered inquiry into how lunacy experts of the 1700s–1800s enlisted a ‘retreat’ to the rural within their project of securing mastery over the mad.

The grand sweep of Foucault’s spatial history of madness is threaded unevenly though a maze of materials, none of which are without interpretational and evidential difficulties. I would nonetheless contend that this spatial history is no incidental by-product of his (as some might say) more foundational arguments, but rather is written into the heart of everything that comprises his epic tragedy of madness silenced. I also insist that there is empirical justification for agreeing with the bolder outlines of the spatialized narrative traced above, even accepting that it requires finessing in detail. On a personal note, I have long researched the historical geography of the ‘mad-business’ (after Macalpine and Hunter, 1969), from an undergraduate dissertation (Philo, 1983) through a doctoral thesis (Philo, 1992) into a monograph (Philo, 2004). Throughout, I have sought in sustained fashion – not beyond criticism, but certainly sustained – to engage Foucault’s spatial history with the English and Welsh historical-archival record from the Dark Ages to the 1860s, using obvious primary sources (such as Lunacy Commission reports) but also less obvious ones (examples being vitae of Medieval saints, stalled parliamentary bills and surveys of imprisoned debtors). Contra psychiatric historians of different stripes (e.g. Goldstein, 1992; Porter, 1990) who disparage Foucault’s relevance to the English and Welsh experience, I find that the architecture of his account, notably what he deduces about shifting spatial relations from leper-house to poorhouse to asylum, fares remarkably well in the face of multiple empirical ‘testing’. My efforts cannot be the last word in judging Foucault’s spatial history of madness, to be sure, but they bolster the case for defending it on substantive as well as more conceptual or ethico-political grounds.

IV A book undergoing changes

The full French title in 1961 was Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à L’Âge Classique,⁶ but subsequently the work has tended to be known simply as HF. The latter was the title selected for the French edition of 1972, which was unaltered save for the original preface being replaced by a shorter ‘anti’-preface⁷ and the addition of two appendices, both to be mentioned later, which were dropped for an 1976 edition. An abridged French ‘budget paperback’ version appeared in 1964 and the English translation of 1965, MC, was based on this French abridgement, complete with a similarly shortened preface. Like its French equivalent, the English version also lost the bulk of its scholarly armature through the excision of most endnote references to both secondary literature and, crucially, primary archival sources. Anglophone scholars have tended to work with the 1965 version, and for them the original is, as Gordon (1992; also Still and Velody, 1992) calls it, ‘an unknown work’. The full unabridged English translation of 2006, HM, saw everything reinstalled and a few extras besides. As one index of the difference between the two English versions, it is instructive to compare the length of MC (289 pages of main text, 4 of preface, 9 of endnotes) with that of HM (538 pages of main text, 10 of [original] preface, 54 of endnotes). The latter is a brick in comparison, although the contrast is exaggerated because the former possesses a small typeface with text tightly packed on each page. The book has carried numerous covers, and I reproduce (see Figure 2) covers from editions of both MC and HM in my own library: the former, with an Escher hand cradling a Goya madman is emblematic of the primary relationship under scrutiny (reason capturing unreason); and the latter, part of a Goya painting called ‘Yard with Madmen’, intimates that phenomenology of dark space mentioned earlier.

Figure 2.

Covers of (on the right) History of Madness and (on the left) Madness and Civilization, respectively the unabridged and the abridged English translations of Michel Foucault’s 1961 book Histoire de la Folie. Covers reproduced here with permission.

Encountering HM, complete with its endnotes, ought to be a salutary experience for those empiricist (psychiatric, medical and social) historians cleaving to the received wisdom that the book is empirically light, archivally shoddy and indeed fanciful; but no quarter has been given to Foucault’s assertion, in the full preface now available in English, that ‘the most important part of this work is the space I have left to the texts of the archives themselves’ (HM: xxxv). Arguably, HM should also have clarified how Foucault was authoring a fundamentally different species of history: restlessly shifting between archival record, philosophical disquisition and social critique; happily juxtaposing political-economic analysis, historical-sociological survey and deconstruction of cultural forms; and being as much concerned to excavate a societal-epochal ‘will’ to do things as to document their actual doing (perhaps the simplest but most misunderstood of the book’s rationales). In the main, critics such as Andrew Scull (2007), most savagely, and Peter Barham (2007), more circumspectly, have persisted with the same objections as raised to MC. Indeed, Barham (2007: 35) remarks on how ‘the notion that much of the carping about the work was a product of a flawed and abridged translation is false’, adding that HM only magnifies the ‘historical shortcomings’ identified previously. Unsurprisingly, my sympathies lie with Gordon’s (2007b) systematic rebuttal of the Scull-type position; and, for me, questions about the book should be directed less at some (uncommitted) crime of archival inattention, and more at instabilities in how Foucault deploys what might be cast as, respectively, phenomenological and structural(ist) framings. In this respect, if not others, the publication of HM arguably does throw this problem, if problem it be, into much sharper relief.

1 Two books

Ian Hacking (2006), in a preface to HM, writes of Foucault’s book really being two:

One of these books is governed by an idea of déraison, by which you might say unreasonable derangement, in which there lurks a dream of madness in the wild, as something pre-discursive, inaccessible, pure. The other book is what the first became: stripped of romantic illusion. (Hacking, 2006: xii)

The first book is HF, now available in the full translation as HM, while the second is MC and other abridged editions.⁸ In the former, the mad themselves do make more of an appearance: they intrude, they erupt, and, even if the vast majority of the unabridged book still trades in the words and actions of the ‘not-mad’ – meaning physicians and government officials, as well as a wider society and its epochal representations of the mad – the pressing problematic of the mad, of what they ‘say’ if not to ‘us’ but when mumbling and gesturing to each other, is now centralized. Their embodied presence, their gestures – fist-shakes, head-banging, sad looks, body curl-ups – and occasionally their own speech, writing and artworks, all acquire a heightened significance that does become more apparent from HM than from MC.⁹ That said, Hacking’s claim is overstated, since even the abridged versions still contain traces of this dream of madness as wild, pure and somehow original, but he touches a nerve, even so, identifying a problematic for the remainder of this essay, especially the notion of ‘romantic illusion’, to be revisited as a window on contemporary human geography.

Table 1 shows the contents of MC, with its nine chapters plus a conclusion, set alongside that of HM, with its tripartite structure and 14 chapters (plus two ‘part’ introductions). I show how the chapters of HM map back to MC, with two wholly missing from the latter, one almost wholly missing, three being only partially present, and all of the others being present but minus between circa two and 27 pages of text. The absent Chapter 1.III, on ‘The correctional world’, provides more insight into the regimes installed by the general houses of confinement, including the problems inherent with the mad in such ordered institutions; while the absent Chapter 2.I, on ‘The madman in the garden of species’, explores Early Modern categories of human types (and diseases), clarifying the increasingly ‘eccentric’ place inhabited by madness in these spaces of concept and imagination. Many crucial passages are absent from MC, including some of the Descartes materials (HM: 44–47 [see below]), passages about madness emerging from the matrix of unreason in general confinement (HM: 381–394), and greater elaboration of the iconic stories about Pinel and Tuke ‘striking the chains off the lunatic’ (HM: 464–481). Among the missing passages are also ones with an explicit geographical flavour: including Foucault’s discussions of milieu (HM: 372–380) and also more on ‘the fantastical geometry of … confinement’ in Revolutionary France (HM: 429–431).

Table 1.

Chapter (and appendix) contents listings of Madness and Civilization (MC) and History of Madness (HM).

Madness and Civilization (MC) (Foucault, 1965)	History of Madness (HM) (Foucault, 2006)	Mapping back of chapters from HM to MC
I Stultifera Navis	Part 1 (pp. 1–160)	HM1.I – MCI
II The great confinement	I Stultifera Navis	HM1.II – MCII
III The insane	II The great confinement	HM1.III – absent
IV Passion and delirium	III The correctional world	HM1.IV – some in MCIII
V Aspects of madness	IV Experiences of madness	HM1.V – MCIII
VI Doctors and patients	V The insane	HM2.I – absent
VII The great fear	Part 2 (pp. 161–340)	HM2.II – MCIV
VIII The new division	Introduction	HM2.III – MCV
IX The birth of the asylum	I The madman in the garden of species	HM2.IV – MCVI
Conclusion	II The transcendence of delirium	HM3.I – MCVII
	III Figures of madness	HM3.II – MCVIII
	IV Doctors and patients	HM3.III – some in MCVIII
	Part 3 (pp. 341–538)	HM3.IV – MCIX
	Introduction	HM3.V – some in MC Conc.
	I The great fear
	II The new division
	III The proper use of liberty
	IV Birth of the asylum
	V The anthropological circle
	Appendices (pp. 539–590)
	I Madness, the absence of an oeuvre
	II My body, this paper, this fire
	III Reply to Derrida

2 Two prefaces

It is worth considering the full original preface, the one shortened for MC before being suppressed for the 1972 French edition and then reinstated in HM. The original opens by envisaging ‘this degree zero of the history of madness, when it was an undifferentiated experience, the still undivided experience of division itself’ (HM: xxvii). This phrasing – which is still there at the outset of the MC preface – implies that scholars must return to the moment in history when ‘the human’ arguably still comprised a unity of madness and reason, before the latter had in effect detected something, madness, to be named, detached, expelled. Here, then, we would be trembling on the threshold of this great division being made, after which madness and reason – and Foucault sometimes capitalizes the first letters, Madness and Reason, immediately injecting a sense of them as trans-historical forces – ‘fall away like things henceforth foreign to each other, deaf to any exchange, almost dead to each other’ (HM: xxvii). This ‘falling away’ is the splitting asunder of madness and reason, prior to them marching down the ages in lock-step silent antagonism, enacting – as Foucault explicitly states in a phrase expunged from the watered-down preface – an epic tragedy told under ‘the sun of the great Nietzschean quest’ (HM: xxx). At once, readers appreciate a characterization of madness and reason as ‘things’, entities with their own internal dynamics, even as they are indelibly shaped by their reciprocal encounters with one another: as great, tragic actors propelling the course of history. Much of the difficulty of the book lies here, in any version, since this elemental division appears simultaneously as: an historical ‘event’, traceable to the European Middle Ages; a structural formation, a divide with a timeless logic waiting patiently outside history to be materialized in real human-historical happenings; and a phenomenological intuition, a sense of embodied differences between those who truly lapse into a mad state-of-being (the standard-bearers of madness) and those who do not (the police-officers of reason).

I wish to pursue the phenomenological undertones, particularly as manifested in the uncut preface. Foucault wonders about the potentials for writing ‘[a] history not of psychiatry, but of madness itself, in all its vivacity, before it is captured by knowledge’ (HM: xxxii, my emphasis); and, taken at face value, such a claim does accord madness a distinct being-in-the-world apart from and prior to its capture by reason. Such a construction is variously repeated, most obviously when referencing ‘a madness whose wild state can never be reconstituted … [an] inaccessible primitive purity’ (HM: xxxiii), fuelling Hacking’s allusions to madness as an originary, pure, lively, vital wildness. Foucault himself immediately acknowledges that this realm is ultimately inaccessible, impossible to reconstitute, precisely because the very tools with which he is compelled to work – the languages and practices of historical scholarship – cannot but sit squarely on the reasoning side of the great divide.¹⁰ The point, however, is that for Foucault of the original preface this realm is seemingly still there; arguably more than an elaborate thought-experiment, but rather as a shadow-reality with its own ways of communicating its own truths, but forever in a manner obscure to the not-mad (who constantly demand a translation into the words and signs of not-madness). Foucault duly understands his own project not as a phenomenology of madness, but rather as what he calls ‘a structural study of the historical ensemble – notions, institutions, judicial and police measures, scientific concepts – which hold captive … madness’ (HM: xxxiii). This deceptively simple formulation precisely states the book’s major accomplishments, as well as a broader sense of this ‘structure of refusal’, of reason refusing madness as madness, that energizes history: ‘a motionless figure …: the simple division into daylight and obscurity, shadow and light, dream and waking, the truth of the sun and the power of midnight’ (HM: xxxiv).

3 Two oeuvres

As the descriptions in this last passage imply, however, Foucault’s structuralism – his recomposing of the elements that combine to instantiate exclusions of the mad – is built atop a poetic sensibility concerning what essences are cast to one side or the other of the great divide. Moreover, the original preface entertains statements about the oeuvre, meaning the ‘work’ (the writings and then doings) of human history, as set against the ravings and ramblings of madness. On the one hand, ‘the few first decisive words that wove the becoming of Western reason’ and their descendants; and, on the other, ‘these dossiers of delirium’ comprised by the mumblings of the mad, only occasionally transcribed and ‘juxtaposed by chance to the words of reason in prison and libraries’ (HM: xxxi).¹¹ Foucault hence discusses ‘[t]he great oeuvre of the history of the world’ as ‘indelibly accompanied by the absence of an oeuvre’ (HM: xxxi), thereby supposing that mad people do not represent themselves in or through an oeuvre or ‘work’ recognizable to the normal codes of (western) intellectual life. ‘Where there is an oeuvre, there is no madness’ (HM: 537, italics in original), claims Foucault, and HM even includes an appendix entitled ‘Madness, the absence of an oeuvre’, originally penned in 1964.¹² This appendix elaborates on the residues of madness that are so hard to apprehend, buried as they are beneath the ‘technical substratum’ of how psychiatry renders madness as ‘mental illness’, but also as obscured by Freud’s further translation of madness into an ‘esoteric language’ folded in on itself, a psychoanalytic ‘double language’ that ultimately speaks only of itself (HM: 542–543).¹³ Foucault reflects here on the division installed between reason and madness, detecting an irony in how the former isolates the latter, accepting that here lies ‘the naked truth’ of humanity, but then refuses to accept that ‘the words of the excluded’ amount to a credible oeuvre (HM: 541–542).

This sensibility clearly vibrates with that phenomenology of madness mentioned earlier. Indeed, for all that madness appears here as this oeuvre-that-never-can-be, Foucault’s broader argument still situates madness as an oeuvre of sorts, a counter-oeuvre perhaps, ‘whose seat is at the margins’ (HM: xxxii), ‘run[ning] unaltered in its inevitable void the length of history and from before history … and after it again as it will triumph in the last word uttered by history’ (HM: xxxi). Once again, such claims come close to implying a transcendental being-ness of madness somehow beyond time, or at least outside human history’s fleeting passage through universal time. More than this, for Foucault casts madness as the pre-existent soil out of which history proceeds; comprising the chaos of formless raving and rambling (noises, gestures, marks) out of which shared language – and hence an oeuvre and the potential for human events – necessarily emerges and back into which it will eventually collapse. Thus, in two remarkable passages:

History is only possible against the backdrop of the absence of history in the midst of a great space of murmurings … An obscure, equivocal region: pure origin, as it is from there that the language of history [the oeuvre] would be born, slowly conquering so much confusion with the forms of its syntax and the consistency of its vocabulary. (HM: xxxi)

The plenitude of history is only possible in the space, both empty and peopled at the same time, of all the words without language that appear to anyone who lends an ear, as a dull sound from beneath history, the obstinate murmur of a language talking to itself – without any speaking subject and without an interlocutor, wrapped up in itself, with a lump in the throat, collapsing before it ever reaches any formulation and returning without a fuss to the silence that it never shook off. The charred root of meaning. (HM: xxxi–xxxii)

Almost against his own injunctions about the impossibility of a mad oeuvre, Foucault now urges us to ‘lend an ear’ to these mumblings from below: ‘We need to strain our ears, and bend down towards this murmuring of the world, and try to perceive so many images that have never been poetry, so many fantasies that have never attained the colours of day’ (HM: xxxii). We are implored to listen to the poems and tales that never quite become an oeuvre, but which he still divines as the deep-buried well-springs of meaning delivering what does become the oeuvre (the language and then history) of reason and its products.

4 Dark space, Charred space

Similarly, Foucault writes about ‘the time of history’ commencing with the ‘lightning flash decision’ installing the great divide ‘which separates the murmur of dark insects from the language of reason’ (HM: xxxiii). The frequent appeal, as here, to ‘the murmur’ is significant, but first let me consider the impressions conjured by the passages just quoted. Roughly equivalent ones appear throughout any version of the book, but there is something particularly unsettling about madness being embodied as ‘insects’ mumuring away in the darkness. Moreover, my suggestion is that, as becomes plainer to Anglophone scholars reading HM, Foucault’s book evokes a phenomenological geography of madness – a spatialized grounding of madness as this other to reason – luring the reader into the prisons or ‘fortresses’¹⁴ where mad people have often been incarcerated. For me, doubtless influenced by covers chosen for the book, an imagery redolent of Goya’s ‘madhouse’ scenes, expressly discussed by Foucault (HM: 530–532), is never distant. Such a scene localizes his ‘great space of murmurings’, a dark space populated by writhing mad people muttering, crying, screaming and gesticulating their unheeded counter-oeuvre. It conveys that confused pandemonium out of which the asylum-doctors and other ‘psy’-experts seek to carve a semblance of order and hence rationality, but also too, if more metaphorically, the undifferentiated morass out of which language (and hence qualities of reason, self, events, change, history) will eventually arise. It suggests the materiality of real spaces for the mad, whether workhouse cellar, asylum ward or hospital clinic, even if their older darkness has now been replaced with strip-lights (as ‘the rooms of the restless’ [in the asylums of old] mutate into the ‘great tepid aquariums’ [of modern mental health facilities]; HM: 549). It also suggests a realm that is much older, a terrifying void or Nietzschean ‘chaosmos’ alien to all forms and words, from which the fragile accomplishments of human ‘civilization’ are hard-won and to which they are so easily lost.

The poetic sensibility of René Char enters this dark space as well, such that even the allusion to ‘the charred root of meaning’, ending one of the quotes above, could be taken as an echo of Char. More substantially, the repeated references to ‘murmur(ing)s’ infer the presence of Char,¹⁵ as too does the emphasis on ‘division’ or partagé, a key notion for Char, itself spawned by the latter’s familiarity with Le Partagé de les Eaux, the parting of the waters, a real place in France where a river separates.¹⁶ Char’s influence becomes explicit, moreover, because Foucault ends his original preface with these (originally unattributed) words from Char:¹⁷

Companions in pathos, who barely murmur, go with your lamp spent and return the jewels. A new mystery to be deciphered, sings in your bones. Cultivate your legitimate strangeness. (HM: xxxviii)

Char’s ‘companions in pathos’ hence become Foucault’s mad people holding a secret if different truth:

Foucault’s companions are obviously not Char’s marquisards; instead, their resistance is passive and resides in the persistent, irreducible murmur of their difference … [But h]is preface does build in crescendo toward the concluding exaltation that these persecuted companions develop their inner murmur into a strange legitimacy and culture’. (Kelly, 2003: 123; also Miller, 1993: 107–108)

Mad people are thereby granted, even if momentarily, a resistant spirit not usually detected in Foucault’s book, nor elsewhere in his writings, emulating Char’s rural combatants in setting their faces, words and sometimes deeds, purposefully or otherwise, against their oppressors. In tandem with the marquisards, Foucault’s mad people acquire a guise, an agency even, belying both the structuralist leanings of his study and its more ethereal phenomenology; and, indeed, there is here a Char-ian ‘call to arms’ from attending to the lamps, jewels and bones of this ‘great space of murmurings’ where mad people bear witness to their lives.

V Losing it

To begin folding matters together and more explicitly linking to contemporary human geography, let me quite boldly inspect two facets of Foucault’s original work – present in HF, re-presented in HM – that arguably ‘get lost’ over the years, but do so for good reasons that I must also consider. The first I call Foucault’s lost phenomenology; for, all qualifications or even evasions aside, such a phenomenology is indelibly present in HF/HM. The second I call Foucault’s lost romanticism, for running alongside this phenomenology is a clear stream of romantic attraction to the possibility that we might, just conceivably, catch sight of genuinely other ways of being-and-reflecting in the world that can evade the constricting straitjackets of western reason (of intellectual business-as-usual).

1 Lost phenomenology

As explained, madness is here intimated as a unitary thing, cast as an embodied primal reality and set to work as the (unreliable) dialectical partner of reason in the flow of history. It is also this counter-oeuvre resistant to reason, expressly sited in the spaces of mad people raging, sighing, crying, laughing, dancing, scratching, fighting. That said, it must be repeated that the line (fairly) consistently taken by Foucault’s book is that, by the logic of his narrative, it can only be subsequent to the great divide (instituted between madness and reason) that ‘madness’ becomes identified as something warranting special interest and response. He knows full well that the sane scholar cannot reconstitute the ‘concrete pain’ and ‘insane words’ of madness itself:

because that pain and those words only exist, and are apparent to themselves and to others, in the act of division that already denounces and masters them. It is only in the act of separation, and from it, that we can think of them as dust that has not yet been separated. Any perception that aims to apprehend them in their wild state necessarily belongs to a world that has captured them already. The liberty of madness can only be heard from the heights of the fortresses in which it is imprisoned. (HM: xxxii, my emphasis)

Crucially, therefore, whenever Foucault speaks about ‘the experience of madness’ (e.g. HM: xxxii, xxxiv), what he means is not a phenomenological immersion into what madness itself experiences, but rather a structural inquiry into what societies/epochs experience of, and then conceptualize and represent about, madness. As such, the overall architecture of the book is indeed a phenomenology supplanted by a ‘structural study’, a lost phenomenology perhaps, although my own preference is to frame the former as still a necessary foundation for the latter. Without madness as something, however ultimately unknowable, the structural account of how it gets progressively (re)named, (mis)treated, excluded and silenced makes little sense.

Jean Khalfa (2006: xx) writes in his introduction to HM how a ‘dimension of the book is that it marks the passage between two philosophical perspectives’, by which he means phenomenology and structuralism, before also remarking that ‘[t]he vocabulary of the phenomenological approach is still common here, in particular in the first preface’. During the 1950s Foucault had been attracted to phenomenology: hence his lengthy introduction to a translated text by the existential-phenomenological psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger; and also a short book published in 1954 entitled Maladie Mentale et Personalité (Foucault, 1954), a substantially revised version of which, seemingly against the author’s wishes, appeared in 1962 as Maladie Mentale et Psychologie (Foucault, 1962; translation 1976a). The former engages with the everyday existence of the mentally distressed individual, situating them in the settings of everyday life in a manner not wholly distant from, for instance, R.D. Laing’s ‘worlding’ of psychoanalysis (McGeachan, 2010). Revealingly, the latter contains a potted version of HF, with Marxian-materialist elements foregrounded and phenomenological strains now muted, implying that the abridgements to the 1963 French paperback of HF, as carried through into MC, were not solely for commercial purposes but also reflected shifts in Foucault’s own thinking.

That Foucault’s thinking does shift is evident from how he suppressed or subsequently disputed what might be deemed the overtly phenomenological undertones of the original book. By contrasting MC and HM, I have tugged out the phenomenology lost between these two versions, and undoubtedly, by truncating the original preface (before cutting it altogether) and removing other passages, the effect was to reposition the book as more structural, less phenomenological. For Anglophone readers of MC, the severely cut original final chapter, ‘The anthropological circle’, now just called ‘Conclusion’, hence seems oddly disjointed from the preceding pages. It appears as an isolated disquisition on madness in artworks, positioning the likes of Artaud, Nietzsche and Van Gogh as ‘explosive’ irruptions of madness into modern consciousness (MC: 286; HM: 536); while key translational differences also arise, with MC writing, confusingly perhaps, that ‘[m]adness is the absolute break with the work of art’ (MC: 287), whereas HM writes that ‘[m]adness is an absolute rupture of the oeuvre’ (HM: 536). Both abridgement and translation serve to disconnect MC from the phenomenology of how madness as not-quite-oeuvre harbours unpalatable truths of the human, and along the way we also lose Foucault’s speculation on ‘[t]he exact geography of this path’ (HM: 526) from ‘man’ to ‘true man’ via ‘the madman’. Such major themes are developed at length in the disappeared first half of ‘The anthropological circle’, the very title of which would be all but inexplicable had it been used for MC’s ‘Conclusion’.

A crucial intervention – one often revisited (e.g. Boyne, 1990; Harrison, 2007) – was the critique that Jacques Derrida offered of HF, initially in a lecture of 1963 and then in a 1964 publication, translated as Derrida (1981), to which Foucault eventually replied in both an appendix to the 1972 French edition, translated as Foucault (1974), and a lecture delivered in the same year (both appended to HM). The tardiness of Foucault’s response suggests that he was shaken by Derrida’s critique, and there is evidence, notwithstanding his spirited reply, that he actually agreed with aspects of what Derrida had attacked, notably the latent phenomenology of HF. While some (e.g. Saldanha, 2008) read Derrida as critiquing Foucault’s structuralism, his chief complaint is that Foucault smuggles in a ‘metaphysics of presence’, thereby supposing a trans-mythico-historical reality of madness (or Madness) as a fundamentally ‘exterior’ challenge to the overall discursive field of western philosophy. For Derrida, madness cannot be accorded this special status, but rather must be seen as merely another ‘interior’ complication, ongoing since the days of Ancient Greece, and in no way arising from an eventful divide of Madness and Reason decisively pinning the former beyond the intellectual conversations of the West. Much then hinges on those few lines of HF where Foucault tackles how Descartes interpreted madness and other unusual mental states, notably dreams, since Derrida reckons to find here the foundational error underlying the ‘folly’ of Foucault’s overall project. Thus, whereas Foucault supposes that Descartes took madness (but not dreams) as where the rational Cartesian rational ego finds its limits, comprising an unfathomable other side of reason, Derrida supposes Descartes to regard both madness and dreams as problems set within the orbit of reason, conundrums to be sure but ultimately caught within its logos. In response, Foucault is at pains to reject Derrida’s reading of Descartes, before admitting that he probably should have avoided Descartes in the first place, while also objecting that Derrida might have paid more attention to the other 600-plus (Descartes-free) pages of HF.

In other words, Foucault now senses that he need not have addressed the rarefied skies of western philosophy at all, but rather should have stuck to what he now saw as ‘the most essential part of the work’: namely, ‘the analysis of these events, these bodies of knowledge, and those systematic forms that link discourses, institutions and practices … all things about which Derrida has not a word to say’ (HM: 578). With such a statement, however, the inference must be that 1970s-vintage Foucault is now distancing himself from both the broader philosophical ambitions of HF – its exploratory forays around the limits of western reason – and the more phenomenological claims about madness as something, however unknowable. In The Order of Things, originally published in 1966, Foucault (1970: xxiv) elucidates what a given culture conceives as ‘The Same’ (its core intellectual statements [its oeuvre]) in contradistinction to ‘The Other’ (its unreason or madness [maybe its counter-oeuvre]); but by The Archaeology of Knowledge, originally published in 1969, any sense of there being a coherent other discourse or even presence-to-itself called ‘madness’ is now abandoned. He confesses here that he ‘had been too close to admitting an anonymous and general subject of history’, adding that he should not have been ‘trying to reconstitute what madness might be in the form which it first presented itself to some primitive, fundamental, obscure, scarcely articulated experience’ (Foucault, 1972: 16, 47). Whether or not Derrida haunts this self-critique, it is clear that, insofar as a phenomenology of madness did infiltrate his 1961 text, it had now been lost from Foucault’s own self-evaluation of that text’s merits.

Throughout the Collège de France Lectures given annually from 1970 to 1984, gradually being published in French and then English, Foucault continually revisits and reformulates his prior work on madness. He worries away at this theme, as if anxious to find the definitive formula for finally putting the record straight on what he had really meant to do, or indeed had really done if only readers would notice, when authoring his first great opus. Most obviously, the Psychiatric Power lectures (1973–1974: Foucault, 2006b) deliberately return to the subject-matter of HF, consulting a wealth of new archival and library research, but the conceptual lens now becomes that of the book which he had then all but finished, Discipline et Punish (Foucault, 1976b). These lectures are a very different beast to HF: transparently shorn of the latter’s big-picture historical sweep, and with nothing like its philosophical-phenomenological undertow, they offer instead a claustrophobic ‘scenography’ (Philo, 2007a) of countless tiny scenes, enacted in asylums across 19th-century Europe, wherein alienists were striving to exert power over their mad inmates. The practices deployed in these scenes, including a ‘Panopticon’-like diffusion of the ‘body’ of the asylum’s medical superintendent into every corner of asylum space, fuelled a mushrooming technology of control that doubled as a pseudo-knowledge (the embryonic ‘psy’-disciplines) of mental and, increasingly, nervous diseases. In the opening shots of his next year’s Abnormal lectures (1974–1975: Foucault, 2003), Foucault critically reassesses the stark binary of inclusion-exclusion central to HF, expressly qualifying its bipolar spatial history with a contextually inflected investigation of relations between ‘the normal’ and ‘the pathological’ (or ‘the abnormal’: after Canguilhem, 1973; see also Philo, 2007b). In later lecture series, Foucault then situates madness within ‘games of truth’, as an object fabricated to suit diverse economic, biopolitical and even spiritual prerogatives, and in The Birth of Biopolitics lectures (1978–1979) he admits ‘let’s suppose that madness does not exist. Only something that is supposed to be madness’ (Foucault, 2008: 3). Again, all circumlocutions aside, such a claim sits uneasily alongside those mad people urged at the close of HF’s original preface ‘to cultivate their legitimate strangeness’.

2 Lost romanticism

When discussing Foucault’s second loss, a case can readily be made for viewing HF/HM in the longue durée of conflict between Enlightenment and Romanticism, about which more presently. If Enlightenment lends priority to ‘the Same’, notably the cool calculus of philosophical-scientific rationality shining light into the obscure corners of superstition and ignorance, then Romanticism insists that the effect is a foreclosing on ‘the Other’, meaning quite other ways of knowing the world, ones more engaged, passionate, even enraptured and delirious. Madness is often seen as a repository of such other veracities, and in a still-longer European tradition, familiar to the likes of Erasmus and Shakespeare, the figure is that of ‘folly’ speaking wisdom and truth back to the realms of the supposedly knowledgeable and powerful. Here is the lens through which Hacking spies the ‘romantic illusion’ of Foucault’s original book: ‘A romantic fantasy lurks here, the purity of the possessed, those who not only speak the truth in paradox, like the fools in Shakespeare, but who are also themselves the truth’ (Hacking, 2006: xi). Foucault’s cast of characters, notably the Marquis de Sade, whose excessive personage roams the dark spaces of HF’s margins, immediately allies him with a romantic wish to return the vibrancy of human passions, unchecked, to the fold of the western oeuvre. The references to Nietzsche, de Sade, Van Gogh and other ‘mad geniuses’ imply fractured instances when the claims of madness do become palpable, when the murmurs from below become tract or canvas released to the world, ostensibly narrowing the great divide between ‘madness and civilization’. Beyond these specific eruptions of maddened creativity, however, ‘Foucault discovers an untamed power of ‘total contestation’, a mad form of being that calls into question the very roots of modern culture’ (Miller, 1993: 112). Attending to mad otherness, Foucault detects a point at which all contestation becomes possible, from which it might be possible to derive meanings, lessons and even hopes for the realization of (better, more inclusive, more creatively charged) alternative realities. Such is the poetics and politics of the original book.

A further claim is that aesthetics and madness constantly pirouette around each another in the tragedy that Foucault knowingly narrates of madness, this tragically silenced truth of humanity’s dual origin and demise, suffused by the romance (maybe recalling Char) of extreme loves and violent hatreds. His book is not some arid structural analysis, nor some dry empiricist fact-grubbing, but rather is written with a pen dipped in blood, gripping the emotions and challenging the beliefs; hailing life, death, pain, sorrows, dark deeds and grand words. The romance and aesthetics of madness fold into one another, indexing a dizzying interplay of madness and artistic, but especially literary, creativity. During the 1960s, Foucault was fascinated by avant-garde writing (see also Johnson, 2008), notably when dreaming of an ‘outside’ alongside Maurice Blanchot (Foucault, 1998a), while in an unusually un-nuanced lecture from 1970 he symmetrically positions madness and literature together on the inverse side of reason (Foucault, 1998b). In his ‘absence of an oeuvre’ appendix, he also reflects on how, through the lyricism of romantic poetry but also in modern literary experimentation, an intimation may be gleaned of quite other truths about the world; notably in the surrealist twists of Artaud, Mallarmé and Roussel, since both madness and their experiments diagram a kind of originary ‘empty form’ where the phrases ‘I write’ and ‘I am delirious’ approach each other (but can never finally meet; HM: 549). Foucault arguably intended HF/HM to be nourished by the same experimental promise; indeed, ‘[t]he peculiar and highly literary style of the work was … its singular most disquieting feature’, and arguably ‘he was creating a ‘work’ of madness, as well as about madness’ (Miller, 1993: 104, 109, his emphases).

Subsequently, though, Foucault becomes increasingly suspicious of such romantic impulses. At the same time as he begins to revise his understanding of (the) Enlightenment, chiefly through a sequence of engagements with Kant (compiled in Lotringer, 1997) where Enlightenment is reconfigured from all-conquering monolith to resource for strategic re-appropriation, he loses, and effectively renounces, the romanticism of HF/HM. Nowhere is this more evident than in The Birth of Biopolitics lectures from 1978:

Undertaking the history of regimes of veridiction … obviously means abandoning … the well-known critique of European rationality and its excesses, which has been constantly taken up in various forms since the beginning of the nineteenth century. From romanticism to the Frankfurt School, what has been called into question and challenged has been rationality with the weight of power supposedly peculiar to it. Now the critique of knowledge that I would now propose does not … consist of denouncing what is continually oppressive … under reason, for after all, believe me, insanity (déraison) is just as oppressive. (Foucault, 2008: 36)

Madness is here far from celebrated, for it carries its own ‘oppressions’, terrors and despairs; no romantic sense permeates of its privileged access to truth, nor of how it ‘heroically’ stands against the unremittingly unaccommodating apparatuses of reason. Moreover, Foucault expressly de-couples his project from Romanticism’s polarized dispute with Enlightenment rationality, and instead outlines a concern for (historically and geographically variable) ‘regimes of veridiction’, or truth-telling, wherein a biopolitics of life and death is contextually (non-teleologically) outworked. The upshot is a plainer form of study: less the epic tragedy, grandly told with multiple allusions, and more an anthology of ‘small stories’, simply told with steady focus; less the dramatic account of major agencies brutally colliding, with all-or-nothing winners and losers, and more a patient documenting of local combats, strategic engagements and tactical advances/retreats across a diversity of discursive, institutional and practical ‘fields’. These later inquiries continue to hold ‘vital implications’ (Philo, 2012a), sometimes pertaining to madness and asylums, but the bold phenomenological and romantic strokes of HF are now but a distant – and, for Foucault it appears, slightly embarrassing – echo.

Unsurprisingly, the moves just described have been paralleled by significant changes in Foucault’s own style of writing and presenting: indeed, away from experimentation – the literary reaching for otherness, for other truths, as displayed in HF – to the just-mentioned plainness, to saying things without embellishment. Char’s break with surrealism led him to a fresh poetics, responsive to the violence of the world; and, similarly, Foucault splits from avant-gardism, but in effect too from a Char-esque poetics, arguably as his own response to the mundane combats of the world wherein he wished to detect interventions that were, and could be, effective. His quest hence mutated from an historical geography of the romantic gesture to a political geography of little words said differently, often in subversion of, not squarely opposed to, the discourses of (enlightened) reason (also Cadman, 2010). This revisioning of the subject-matter for his studies rebounded into the manner of his own delivery, written or verbal, which loses its literary-experimental quality, to be replaced by a fierce commitment to speaking directly, unvarnished. As Miller (1993) dramatizes the final interview given by Foucault on his deathbed in June 1984:

The first question had been carefully prepared in advance: ‘What strikes us upon reading your latest books is a clear, pure and smooth writing, very different from the style we were used to …’. (Miller, 1993: 372)

‘I admit it!’ Foucault exclaimed. ‘The philosophical study I performed in The Order of Things, Madness and Civilization and even in Discipline and Punish was essentially based on a certain use of a philosophical vocabulary game … to which I was completely devoted.’ But now, the dying sage confides, ‘I am trying to detach myself’ from this rhetorically evasive ‘form of philosophy’, in order ‘precisely to use it as a field of experience to be studied, mapped out and organized’. (Miller, 1993: 372)

VI Beyond the romantic gesture in contemporary human geography?

In closing, I wish to hold up my mirror to contemporary human geography. I will keep my remarks here brief: they are speculative, and have a gestural quality quite different from the relative precision of the preceding pages. I propose that infusing the condition of our contemporary discipline is a ‘romantic gesture’, often allied with a phenomenological imperative, which resonates profoundly with the original and uncut versions of Foucault’s big book of madness. To risk a somewhat hyperbolic claim, I suspect that a credible history of (human) geography as a disciplinary endeavour could be crafted in terms of the previously mentioned longue durée of dispute between Enlightenment and Romanticism.¹⁸ The lineaments of the former can be found in geographical texts, rehearsed (in praise or revulsion) when depicting, among other matters, the rationalism of science, the logocentricism of philosophy and the universalizing of ethics (e.g. Gould, 1994; Gregory, 1994: Chapter 2). Less familiar to geographers perhaps, those of the latter can be drawn as follows:

Romanticism was [is?] a European cultural movement, or set of kindred movements, which found in a symbolic and internalized romantic plot a vehicle for exploring one’s self and its relationship to others and to nature, which privileged the imagination as a faculty higher and more inclusive than reason, which sought solace in or reconciliation with the natural world, which ‘de-transcendentalized’ religion by taking God or the divine as inherent in nature or in the soul and replaced theological doctrine with metaphor and feeling, which honoured poetry and all the arts as the highest human creations. (Ferber, 2010: 10)

Set against what Doughty (1922: 5) long ago caricatured as ‘a plain, a very plain Reason’ hostile to the poetic passions of ‘lyric’, and reacting to a world ‘stripped of its mystery, value and surprise’ (Black, 2009: 2), Romanticism emerged within the sensibility of artists and poets supposedly able ‘to [r]omanticize the world by giving the commonplace a lofty meaning, to the ordinary an occult aspect, to the well-known the dignity of the unknown’ (Peer, 2009: 3). It took the world as vitally animated, as in William Wordsworth’s 1798 Tintern Abbey poem, where he wrote that ‘We see into the life of things’, intimating ‘an immanent, ‘horizontal’ orientation’ (Feber, 2010: 67) between the lively things of the earth, ‘a kind of animism: the belief that all elements in the universe are mystically connected and alive’ (Black, 2009: 28). In this ‘organic universe’, the locus of plentiful ‘romantic vitalism’ (Thorslev, 1984: Chapters 3 and 4), ‘the world greeted [viewers] in terms that exceeded their rational need for order’, prompting ‘the romantics to … seek knowledge through the non-rational, including as their subject-matter such intangibles as the imagination, spirituality and play’ (Black, 2009: 24, 28). Here, ‘truth’ was thought to reside ‘outside of language in the indeterminate noumenal realm of the ‘not-yet-said’; where it might be revealed (though not captured) in aesthetic terms’ (Black, 2009: 24). Tellingly, such a philosophy (and, by implication, spirituality) also reached back – explicitly on occasion – to the 17th-century ‘pantheism’ of Spinoza, for whom a ‘vertical’ relationship between earth and heaven (humanity and God) was replaced by the construct of ‘Deus sive Natura, “God or Nature”’ (Ferber, 2010: 87), where ‘God is in effect the totality of the mathematico-logical relationships expressed in things as they are’ (Thorslev, 1984: 118). Accordingly, Spinoza gets cast as both ‘one of the great figures of continental European rationalism’ and ‘a thoroughgoing irrationalist’, for whom creation becomes a matter of the ‘affects’ released in myriad ‘encounters’ between ‘bodies and things’, all as constantly (re)worked in that ‘positive (human and even trans-human) mental capacity’ known as ‘imagination’ (Thrift, 2003: 110–113).

Characterizing Romanticism as such partially recalls Foucault’s phenomenological-aesthetic, even vitalist, leanings in HF/HM, notably the appeals to the non-rational and a realm of the ‘not-yet-said’ open to an aesthetic quarrying for ‘truth’ – hence solidifying my claims about his lost romanticism. Moreover, once Romanticism is so characterized, it is relatively easy to map across into the recent genealogy of human geography¹⁹ – Ruskin (with a dash of Wordsworth) to Denis Cosgrove (1979), for instance, or Spinoza (via Deleuze) to Nigel Thrift (2003)²⁰ – and to show that in all cases, if differently slanted and with varying conceptual-terminological baggage, these ‘romantic geographies’²¹ have all been impelled by distaste at the continuing effects of the discipline’s Enlightenment heritage (however manifested). Moreover, they have arguably also been impelled, from humanistic geography in the 1970s through to the three registers discussed presently, by a deep-seated disquiet about the current (dis)orders of the world beyond the academy, thereby questing for quite ‘other’ ways of being – of doing politics and ethics; of respecting both humanity and ‘nature’; of making new geographies – in the face of the numberless visceral abuses, terrors and inequities produced by a degraded ‘Enlightenment’ (to adapt the analysis of, say, Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979).²² In their compelling recent contribution, Hilary Geoghegan and Tara Woodyer (2012) come close to the kind of retold disciplinary history that I am envisaging when they trace human geography’s post-Second World War outplaying of the ‘enchantment-disenchantment couplet’, although I hesitate to embrace fully their associated call for more ‘enchanted’ forms of critique.²³ That said, rather more could be done to elaborate how trends of more-or-less recent vintage in the discipline do amount to a new romanticism in human geography. In sketchiest outline, we might even talk about a ‘romantic geographical imagination’ operative across at least three interrelated registers:

Social-cultural geographies of otherness, outsiderness, alterity, subalternity, marginality, vulnerability and precarity. Inquiries into geographies of otherness are legion, spreading throughout the discipline, so much so that it is futile even starting to give references, and including work on the geographies of people with mental health problems (e.g. Parr, 2008). Present within such work is often a notion, more-or-less explicit, of wishing ‘not to answer our deepest questions’ – as in ‘us’, academics, offering our own definitive verdicts on the truths of creation – ‘but [instead] to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what [humanity] has said’ (Geertz, 1973: 30). Structural accounts of the forces producing (sometimes harsh) conditions of life for these ‘others’ hence rub shoulders with Clifford Geertz’s more romantic sense of what might indeed be changed, within ‘our’ thoughts-and-practices, through a sustained encounter with otherness.²⁴

Theoretically inflected, other-facing geographies, by which I mean inquiries, proceeding from a bewildering variety of theoretical starting-points, which grasp for a sense of something ‘other’ about what comprises the human – perhaps what comprises all life-forms – in the hope of approaching the multiple other truths of being, becoming, existing, acting, responding, desiring, living and dying in a defiantly more-than-human world. Post-phenomenological, non-representationalist, vitalist, biophilosophical, psychoanalytical, queer geographies, and more besides, again far too many to reference: in all kinds of ways, all of these ‘isms’ and ‘ologies’ are indeed reaching for something else, entertaining an intuition that there is something other to know, something other to write about, something other to apprehend that is deeply significant. As Nigel Thrift (2000: 214) states in one of his non-representationalist manifestos, we must attend to ‘what Phelan (1993) calls the “unmarked”, that is … attempt to find, value and retain what is not marked as “here”, yet palpably still reverberates; invisible dust still singing, still dancing’. Or, as Mick Smith et al. (2009: 1) reflect when opening their edited volume on emotional geographies, ‘Suddenly the whole world appears differently’.

Literary-experimental geographies, closely allied with elements of (2) above, where stylistic and literary experimentation is uppermost, in that the form of the work, how it is written or otherwise communicated, becomes itself tightly braided with the quest for otherness, other truths, other experiences. The paradigmatic case in academic geography is Gunnar Olsson, the spatial scientist who becomes the poet-jester writing self-consciously in a high-modernist, surrealist style, wilfully kicking against the normal western intellectual strictures (the boundaries, the prison-walls) constraining what can be thought-and-done. Indeed, it is instructive to compare his most recent major text Abysmal (Olsson, 2007) with Foucault’s HF/MC: both are forensic deconstructions of western reason, exposing and pressing against its limits, boundaries and ‘prison-houses’, and for Olsson (here as elsewhere: Philo, 2012b) the figure of madness stands for transgressions where what ‘we’ cannot (and should not) know or say do become, if obscurely, known and said. The thrill of literary experimentation in Olsson’s work is echoed throughout contemporary human geography: Thrift’s (2000) ‘Afterwords’ paper talks at length about ‘the push’ to ‘new styles’ of thinking, performance and writing, perhaps an inevitable corollary of striving to represent the non-representable; but there are other current geographical projects, such as a recent conference on ‘Storying Journeys’ (Lorimer and Parr, 2012), where a parallel wish to witness the world differently (and, indeed, to narrate different worlds) is warmly embraced.

The attraction of these diverse romantic geographies cannot be denied: indeed, I have been seduced by them all, and genuinely believe that the landscape of contemporary human geography would be much the poorer without their impress. There are nonetheless reservations to be voiced, possibly borrowing from wider assaults directed at Romanticism in its many guises. While using the term sparingly, and evidently seeing Romanticism as forged from the same early-bourgeois crucible as Enlightenment, Terry Eagleton’s much-reprinted The Ideology of Aesthetic (Eagleton, 2000: especially Chapters 2–5) offers a Marxist critique of Romanticism and its more recent incarnations, decrying its pervasive ‘ideological’ utility for ruling-class interests when divorcing aesthetics from the workings of power and wrongly granting it autonomous ‘revolutionary’ agency. Notably, one commentator twins Eagleton’s critique with, in effect if not name, David Harvey, ‘Marxist geographer and theorist’, and equates the seductions of the romantic with Nietzschean nihilism (Black, 2009: 33).²⁵ There is a feminist critique, which in human geography can be indexed by Gillian Rose’s (1993: Chapter 3, especially pp. 60–61) spirited exposure of an ‘aesthetic masculinity’ to be found as much in the writings of humanistic geographers, in which camp she numbers Olsson, as those of locational analysts with their aggressive scientistic pretensions; there is a post-colonial critique, especially in contributions to ‘critical writing on Romantic travel’, wherein authors ‘explore issues of cultural power using the insights of feminist and post-colonial theories that are reshaping the map of Romanticism’ (Gilroy, 2000b: 3); and queer, anti-ableist and more broad-brush anti-elitist objections, likely alongside other possibilities, could additionally be identified both within and beyond the discipline. Such critical stances, richly justified, emerge from a position largely exterior to the romantic geographies under scrutiny here, but self-critical reflections also arise from scholars who have long been interior to romanticism, empathetic with its spirit and purpose.

Indeed, the present essay should be conceived as just such an interior critique since, if the three geographical registers just outlined can be discerned at work in Foucault’s big book of madness, particularly its longer incarnations, then criticizing the ‘romantic fantasy’ of the latter will also double as an embryonic critique of romanticism within contemporary human geography. Reading across from the book to 50 years of human geography is hence highly illuminating, particularly if paying heed to both its romanticism and the reasons why Foucault himself ultimately stills this undercurrent. It is salutary to see how the older Foucault cautions the romanticist in his younger self, acknowledging that there may be horrors to be encountered when opening up to madness, to unreason, to otherness, to overstepping limits, to crossing the ‘event horizon’ from which nothing can come back, especially not words. The snares of new tyrannies and oppressions arguably lie in wait, unchecked by the hard-won tools of reasoning against superstition, ignorance, prejudice and injustice: tools made available, if in no way guaranteed, by e/Enlightenment (as both period and process). Moreover, critiquing the ‘philosophy vocabulary game’ of his earlier writings, the older Foucault worries about the dangerous alchemy of language, with its insane rhetorical evasions, and wonders what is forsaken in the experimental pursuit of an ultimate other-worldliness at the expense of a less dramatic, more mundane and this-worldly engagement. I realize that more might be explained about the older Foucault who features in his final essays, interviews and Collège de France lecture series (see Philo, 2012a), so as better to secure my overall line of argument, but its basic thrust should now be clear. Foucault of HF/HM was in effect a romantic geographer with phenomenological leanings; but his older self substantially, if not entirely, lost such trappings, and why he did so is a provocation for looking again at latent romanticisms without our current disciplinary moment.

Finally, though, let me twist one more time. Thrift (2007: 53) decries Foucault’s ‘anti-humanism’ which is ‘the result of Foucault’s growing antipathy to phenomenology after the publication of … Madness and Civilization’. Guardedly, I agree that there are losses attendant upon this retreat from the phenomenology of HF, which was already under way in the first English translation (MC), in that – despite recognizing dangers arising from the romanticism of its shadowy phenomenology – there does remain a sense that the book is less coherent, even in its structural dimensions, without the intimation of madness’s essential if ultimately unfathomable otherness. For me, therefore, an intimation of otherness, of quite other possibilities as yet not disclosed to the world, should be allowed to remain in the wings of Foucault’s work on madness, not chased away, as a ‘legitimate strangeness’ that impels the project even if it cannot crystallize as the prime focus. Similarly, I would not want to expunge entirely that phenomenology of dark space which lingers in the original book, since it bleeds through into the more structurally framed critical spatialities of exclusion, incarceration and silencing which form the centrepiece of Foucault’s psychiatric history. Neither would I wish to abandon that fleeting sensation, after Char, of bending to listen to these mad companions in their ‘great space of murmurings’, potentially animating ‘spirits of resistance’ (Routledge and Simons, 1995) to reason’s steely embrace of the mentally different and vulnerable. Here, then, is the exceptionally precarious stance that I am cultivating in my own geography, not just when researching madness and asylums, but in principle when confronting any subject-matter. I may remain at heart an incurably romantic geographer, but I am determinedly not one about to jump ecstatically into other-worldliness, and prefer instead to treat intimations of otherness as an inspirational source (for analytics, empirics, ethics and politics) within studies of this-worldly social spaces.²⁶

In his last lectures in 1984, when discussing the Cynics as a quite specific grouping of ancient philosophers, Foucault partially retrieves his will to glimpse otherness. In particular, he talks about Diogenes of Sinope (e.g. Foucault, 2011: 253–265; 275–278), who dwelt in poverty, begged, slept in a tub, lived as a dog and masturbated in the city square. In many respects, Diogenes was ‘mad’, and was widely regarded as such, but he also wished – and was seemingly allowed, or at least was mythically imagined as being allowed – to speak to the powerful of the time: not as a muttering mad person in the shadows, but as an ‘other’ kind of person speaking through his otherness, and apparently being heard, in a trenchant critique of both established niceties and domineering power. In the final written note for his last ever lecture, which he likely never uttered, Foucault concluded: ‘There is no establishment of the truth without an essential position of otherness; the truth is never the same; there can be truth only in the form of the other world and the other life’ (Foucault, 2008: 340). Maybe here, at the last, he did arc back to the romanticism of HF, but the context suggests not a hopelessly romantic gesture aching for transcendence, but rather a hopeful advocacy of (other) truth-telling for pragmatic purposes in the immediate here-and-now.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I must thank the editors of Progress in Human Geography for the honour of presenting one of the journal’s annual lectures. I must also thank all those who attended, and particularly those whose questions and comments, at the time and subsequently, have influenced the written version. Specifically, I must thank Stuart Elden and Colin Gordon for their thoughts and constructive criticisms, as well as Noel Castree for his generous editorial guidance. Additionally, big thanks to Fran Cresser for transcribing the audio-record of my spoken lecture, thus providing me with a scripted version to rework into the present essay.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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