‘One must eliminate the effects of … diffuse circulation [and] their unstable and dangerous coagulation’: Foucault and beyond the stopping of mobilities

Foucault spent time investigating the stopping of mobilities, notably when studying carceral spaces such as asylums and prisons which effectively immobilise their inmates at a societal scale. In Discipline and Punish, he speculates on how such spaces are designed to put a stop to casual ‘nomadisms’. The purpose here is to inspect this aspect of Foucault’s thinking, particularly to recover what he also said about the regulation and cultivation of mobilities within the depths of immobility. Attention is also drawn to an engagement with mobility-immobility appearing in Foucault’s little-discussed Psychiatric Power lectures, prompted by the ideas and practices of Edouard Seguin, an educator of ‘idiot’ children, whose own words provide additional ‘empirical’ weight to an emerging argument. Reading the unabridged English translation of Madness and Civilization, a final claim is that Foucault’s phenomenology of ‘madness’ depends upon unruly mobilities within the asylum, the very stuff of ‘unstable and dangerous coagulation’. The overall ambition is to furnish an alternative account of Foucault and mobilities, concentrating on those Foucauldian texts initially seeming the least promising for scholars of mobilities

Squeezing, bleaching, and the victims’ fate: wounds, geography, poetry, micrology

This article opens a dialogue between geohumanities and poetry—or, more broadly, creative writing—around the subject matters of violence and wounding. It considers what kinds of “poetry” might be usefully enrolled by the geoliterary critic, or even authored by the geographer-poet, in response to such subject matters. Difficult questions abound about what it means to author, hear, and read poetry that is engaged and enraged by instances of violence, trauma, and victimhood. One horizon for these questions is Adorno’s ([1966] 1973) claim that “there can be no more poetry after Auschwitz,” and more particularly his elaboration and partial retreat from this claim in Negative Dialectics. Here, wary of attempts “at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate” (Adorno [1966] 1973, 361), he nonetheless concluded that “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man to scream; hence it may be wrong to say that after Auschwitz you can no longer write poems” (363). This article explores Adorno’s position, chiefly pursuing his arguments about the need for poetry—and indeed philosophy—that strives not for “purity” but precisely to be “soiled” and “spoiled,” never comforting, always disconcerting, never idealistically “transcendent,” always materialistically “micrological.” Including reference to a short story by Borges and critique of poetry by the geographer Wreford Watson, the argument is further advanced by attending to Adorno’s claims about another poet, Heine, sometimes regarded as a particularly “geographical” poet. The article concludes with final notes on possible implications for recasting work on wounded geographies as a species of applied micrology

James Frame's The Philisophy of Insanity (1860)

Our aim in presenting this Classic Text is to foster wider analytical attention to a fascinating commentary on insanity by a former inmate of Glasgow Royal Asylum, Gartnavel, James Frame. Despite limited coverage in existing literature, his text (and other writings) have been surprisingly neglected in modern scholarship. Frame’s Philosophy presents a vivid, affecting, often destigmatising account of the insane and their institutional provision in Scotland. Derived from extensive first-hand experience, Frame’s chronicle eloquently and graphically delineates his own illness and the roles and perspectives of many other actors, from clinicians and managers to patients and relations. It is also valuable as a subjective, but heavily mediated, kaleidoscopic view of old and new theories concerning mental afflictions, offering many insights about the medico-moral ethos and milieu of the mid-Victorian Scottish asylum. Alternating as consolatory and admonitory illness biography, insanity treatise, mental health self-help guide, and asylum reform and promotion manual, it demands scrutiny for both its more progressive views and its more compromised and prejudicial attitudes

Words

No abstract available

Remoteness, Rurality and Mental Health Problems (Findings paper no. 5)

Findings papers associated with ESRC-funded research project, 'Social Geographies of Rural Mental Health' (R000 23 8453)

Visibility, Gossip and Intimate Neighbourly Knowledges (Findings paper no. 7)

Findings papers associated with ESRC-funded research project, 'Social Geographies of Rural Mental Health' (R000 23 8453)

When Teddy met Teddie

No abstract available

'Looking into the countryside from where he had come: placing the 'idiot, the 'idiot school and different models of educating the uneducable

The article begins with the story of ‘the savage of Aveyron’, a wild boy of the woods who some early 19th-century experts identified as an ‘idiot’ (a version of what is now widely termed ‘learning disability’). In seeking to tame, civilise and educate this boy, the French physician Itard learned to avoid wild nature, the remoter reaches of the rural, but still sought to enlist, as part of a thoroughly embodied training regime, encounters with patches of cultivated nature in Paris. A contrast is thereby suggested between different models and geographies of how the apparently ‘uneducable’ might be educated, one dwelling within the remote rural as a source of sensory enchantment and other enlisting domesticated ‘natural’ settings within a broader programme of disciplining the mind-body. This contrast is illustrated through the later 19th-century extremes of, first, Guggenbühl’s ‘idiot school’ on a remote Swiss mountain and, second, Séguin’s blueprint for a North American ‘idiot school’ with carefully regulated buildings, gardens and outdoor gymnasiums not too ‘isolated’ from urban areas. This contrast loosely maps on to disputes between Romanticism and Enlightenment, as well as on to shifts in forms of power enacted in educational establishments, and it informed specific controversies over where exactly to locate ‘idiot schools’ on the ground. The article concludes with brief reflections on such wider matters beyond the empirical materials to hand

Highlands, Economy, Culture and Mental Health Problems (Findings paper no. 4)

Findings papers associated with ESRC-funded research project, 'Social Geographies of Rural Mental Health' (R000 23 8453)