Foucault and the secret about mental illness

Capitalism produces schizophrenia, Part 1

[Mixed media by

April Burke

]

In their 1972 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari understand mental illnesses in the light of capitalist production:

“[W]e do not merely mean to say that modern life drives people mad. It is not a question of a way of life, but of a process of production.”[i]

Indeed, they propose examining schizophrenia through an analysis of capitalist production:

the relationship of schizophrenia to capitalism [goes] far beyond problems of modes of living, environment, ideology, etc., […] it should be examined at the deepest level of one and the same economy, one and the same production process. Our society produces schizos the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars, the only difference being that the schizos are not salable.[ii]

According to Deleuze and Guattari, as products of social production in capitalist society, schizos are only distinguishable from commodities in that they are not saleable—they don’t bear commodifiable labor power, capacities fit for competing on the labor market or maintaining a job.

Deleuze and Guattari describe schizophrenia as “our very own ‘malady,’ modern man’s sickness,” which they seek to understand from both psychoanalytic and political economic perspectives.

1. Through a return to the analysis of madness, as found in the contemporary philosopher Michel Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari understand the individual schizo, “the schizophrenic entity,” as a product of capitalism, as a pathological form made possible by socio-economic constraints and contradictions.

2. Through a return to the critique of capitalism, as found in the contemporary philosopher Étienne Balibar, Deleuze and Guattari understand schizophrenia as process, a broader social category of rupture between productive forces and relations of production, which includes all of capitalism’s socially revolutionary dynamics: through expropriations of land; through displacements of workers via new machinery; through colonization and proletarianization of foreign workers. In this broad category of rupture, schizophrenia as a process also includes all the forms of resistance and subversion which capitalism subsequently induces: through art, science, and organizing, all kinds of breaks from the suppressed, neurotic drives that keep the system going; all forms disinvestments from the capitalist system; all modes of escaping the dominance of capital. There’s also a paranoiac reaction against all of these dynamics, a fear of the Other.

For Deleuze and Guattari, schizophrenia is both “the exterior limit of capitalism itself” and “the conclusion of its deepest tendency.”[iii]

Here, to provide as insightful background for understanding Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the schizo as a product of capitalism, I’ll introduce Foucault’s 1954 book Mental Illness and Psychology, wherein Foucault provides a critical history and analysis of madness, drawing a direct connection between the pathological form of schizophrenia and the conditions of work in capitalist production: “the world of the machine and the disappearance of affective relations between men.”[iv]

Part 2 of this essay will focus on the influence of Balibar in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of schizophrenia as a general process of rupture in capitalism.

The secret about mental illness

In his 1954 Mental Illness and Psychology, Foucault reveals a “secret” about mental illness: “The illness is not an essence contra natura, it is nature itself, but in an inverted process.” In other words, mental illnesses are not unnatural; quite the contrary.

In Foucault’s view, pathological forms emerge as avenues of escape from real world socio-economic constraints and contradictions. The various forms of neurosis and psychosis are differentiated on the basis of their varying defenses against anxiety, defenses which are interruptions from the past, from complexes formed in responses to past anxiety, induced now in response to present ones.[v]

Mental pathology demonstrates both “positive” and “negative” elements, in terms of productivity and counterproductivity of consciousness, for with the disappearance of spatio-temporal coherence and the complex coordinations of consciousness, mental pathology “rediscovers forms of behavior that have normally been surpassed.”[vi]

These illnesses present as the dissolution or suppression of various social capacities and replacement with archaic ones:[vii] neuroses, paranoia, dream states, manic and melancholic states, confusional and schizophrenic states, and dementia—the most extreme degree, where “this pathological dissolution closes.”[viii]

Foucault explains that this secret was held by psychology because it exposes the unsavory origins of psychology itself: that it was the productivities of the mad held in confinement that enabled psychology, enabled the study of the unconscious.[ix]

Madness was allowed free rein

The visibility and inclusivity of the mad has varied across societies and over time, often contributing significantly to culture and attaining a status of prestige, as is evident in the late Renaissance works of Shakespeare or Cervantes. Generally, throughout the Renaissance madness was an integral part of society:

Generally speaking, madness was allowed free rein; it circulated throughout society, it formed part of the background and language of everyday life, it was for everyone an everyday experience that one sought neither to exalt nor to control.[x]

Despite being an integral and unproblematic part of society, madness’s “free rein” came to an end rather abruptly in the middle of the 17^th Century.

The exclusion of the mad from society in Europe first arose as part of a project of confinement of those unable to contribute productively to society: “the poor and disabled, the elderly poor, beggars, the work-shy, those with veneral diseases, libertines of all kinds.”[xi] Through this broad association, madness acquired the connotations of criminality and immorality. The internment itself was thus not about treating illness: “[it] concerns not the relations between madness and mental illness, but the relations between society and itself, between society and what it recognized and did not recognize in the behavior of individuals.”[xii]

Following the French Revolution, society confined the mad on the rationale of safety for the families. It is in the context of confinement that the mental pathological descriptions which formed the basis of psychology emerged and developed.

A breaking up of the flow of thought and a breakdown of affective contact

Dementia praecox is a classical pathological description composed of several particular descriptions – chronic hallucinatory psychosis, hebephrenia, catatonia. Through a combination of the latter and certain descriptions of paranoia came the concept of schizophrenia:

an illness generally characterized by a disorder in the normal coherence of the associations—as in a breaking up (Spaltung) of the flow of thought—and, on the other hand, by a breakdown of affective contact with the environment, by an inability to enter into spontaneous communication with the affective life of others.[xiii]

In the case of schizophrenia, “the deterioration takes the form of a deficifit in capacity,” a diminishing in the basic social capacities for dialogue and “mastery over the symbolic world” such that a “world of persecution arises on every side.”[xiv] Having lost capacities for perceiving affect, the schizophrenic has lost the “criterion of truth in his solidarity with others:”

the world in which the other’s gaze has been extinguished becomes porous to hallucination and delusion. Thus, in these pathological phenomena, the patient is sent back to archaic forms of belief, to a state in which primitive man had not yet found the criterion of truth in his solidarity with others, in which he projected his desires and fears in phantasmagorias that weave into reality the indissociable threads of dream, apparition, and myth.[xv]

Having lost the capacities for affective social relations, the schizophrenic transitions in and out of an alternate world, between awareness of the illness on the one hand and on the other being fully enwrapped in delusions and hallucinations of a morbid world.

The pathological experience is marked by “‘flight of ideas;’” “delusions of ‘limits;’” “frontiers […] walls […] anything that encloses and protects […] a function of the absence of internal unity in the arrangement of things;” others becoming Strangers, or worse “the major Other,” whose persecuting gaze is shown through invariable faces, masks; the body becoming “a corpse or […] an inert machine, all of whose impulses emanate from a mysterious exteriority,” or in some cases, “the full consciousness of the body” becoming “an incorporeal life and a delusional belief in an immortal existence.”[xvi]

The world of the machine and the disappearance of affective relations

Foucault argues that the pathological world of mental illness is caused by a culture’s inability to resolve the contradictions of its own socio-economic relations—“[t]he social relations that determine a culture, in the form of competition, exploitation, group rivalry, or class struggle.”[xvii] This includes the recognition of “a fatherland” in the universality of socio-economic relations, one which “may denounce him as a foreigner” through even the hostile gaze of others.[xviii]

But contemporary madness is also related to “the world of the machine and the disappearance of affective relations between men.” For Foucault, we should not be surprised “the morbid world” of contemporary madness appears mechanistic and devoid of affective life because it is often one of the few options available in a world that segments affective social relations of production with machines in an exploitative mode:

this is the only way open to him of escaping from the constraints of his real world. In fact, when man remains alienated from what takes place in his language, when he cannot recognize any human, living signification in the productions of his activity, when economic and social determinations place constraints upon him and he is unable to feel at home in this world, he lives in a culture that makes a pathological form like schizophrenia possible. […] Only the real conflict of the conditions of existence may serve as a structural model for the paradoxes of the schizophrenic world.[xix]

Thus, Foucault arrives at an understanding of schizophrenia as a pathology formed in and contingent upon a particular arrangement of social production, highlighting the various forms of alienation which define work and life under capitalism.[xx]

I’ve written elsewhere about how Marx locates the cause of industrial pathologies in “the suppression of a whole world of productive drives and inclinations” which occurs in the divisions of labor of capitalist manufacture and factory production—divisions of labor that enrich the productive power of capital “through the impoverishment of the individual worker in productive power.”[xxi]

It’s through these kinds of connections between pathology and economy, schizophrenia and capitalism, that Deleuze and Guattari understand schizophrenia as “the conclusion of [capitalism’s] deepest tendency.”

However, Marx is also essential for understanding what Deleuze and Guattari mean by schizophrenia being “the exterior limit of capitalism itself;” in their view, schizophrenia ought to be analyzed—not at the level of the individual, but rather—in the light of broad socioeconomic dynamics Marx described as counteracting factors against the tendency for the rate of profit to fall under capitalism; dynamics which serve to displace limits to capitalist growth, by radically transforming, intensifying, and expanding the composition of the labor-capital relation.

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Notes

[i]. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2009a [1977]) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, (London:

Penguin), 34.

[ii]. Ibid, 245.

[iii]. Ibid, 246.

[iv]. Michel Foucault, (2011 [1976]) Madness: The Invention of An Idea [previously published under the title Mental Illness and Personality], trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: HarperCollins), 138.

[v]. Ibid, 60-7.

[vi]. Ibid, 29, 31.

[vii]. Ibid, 39.

[viii]. Ibid, 44-7.

[ix]. Ibid, 122-4.

[x]. Ibid, 112.

[xi]. Ibid, 113.

[xii]. Ibid.

[xiii]. Ibid, 8-10.

[xiv]. Ibid, 39-40.

[xv]. Ibid, 41.

[xvi]. Ibid, 85-91.

[xvii]. Ibid, 135.

[xviii]. Ibid, 136.

[xix]. Ibid, 138-9.

[xx]. In The Marxist Theory of Alienation, Ernest Mandel defines several categories: alienation from the means of production and the means of subsistence; alienation from the land; alienation of labour and from the products of labour; alienation of capacity to perform creative work; alienation of the consumer in the provocation of “continued artificial dissatisfaction in human beings” [i.e., alienation via the creation of lack through marketing]; alienation from human activity in general by overspecialization, to which corresponds a reification of social relations; and alienation of capacity to communicate. Ernest Mandel, The Marxist Theory of Alienation (Pathfinder Press, 1970) 15-34.

[xxi]. Marx, Capital: Vol. One (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 481, 483.