Arenas of sequestration

The orientation of modernity towards control, in the context of internally referential systems, has well-known connotations on the level of culture and philosophy. Positivistic thought, in one guise or another, became a central guiding thread in modernity's reflexivity. Positivism seeks to expunge moral judgements and aesthetic criteria from the transformative processes it helps set into motion and of which it also provides interpretation and analysis. Rather than concentrating on features of discourse,

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however, I want to direct attention to their institutional correlate, which is the accumulation of processes that effectively make extrinsic influences of limited patience. Processes of institutional sequestration appear in various areas. In each case they have the effect of removing basic aspects of life experience, including especially moral crises, from the regularities of day-to-day life established by the abstract systems of modernity. The term `sequestration of experience' refers here to connected processes of concealment which set apart the routines of ordinary life from the following phenomena: madness; criminality; sickness and death; sexuality; and nature. In some cases such sequestration is directly organisational: this is true of the mental asylum, the prison and the medical hospital. In other instances, sequestration depends more on more general characteristics of the internally referential systems of modernity. Broadly speaking, my argument will be that the ontological security which modernity has purchased, on the level of day-to-day routines, depends on an institutional exclusion of social life from fundamental existential issues which raise central moral dilemmas for human beings. In order to trace out and develop this theme, a certain amount of historical material is necessary. If we look back, briefly, to the origins of the various arenas of sequestration, we can identify some of the processes underlying the replacement of external by internal criteria in the constitution of modernity's social systems.

Rothman's work, rather than that of Foucault, is most relevant for discussion of the asylum. ¹³ Although Rothman's research concentrates on the emergence of mental hospitals in the United States, the analysis has very general application. Foucault's discussion of the asylum and of imprisonment relates incarceration to the drive to establish the dominance of bourgeois reason. ¹⁴ Those who would seek to contest the sovereign claims of reason are henceforth to be excluded from direct participation in the social order. Suggestive and important as it is, this position has major weaknesses. Without going into these in detail, one can say that it was not so much `reason' which was at issue as the development of reflexive transformation. What would later be regarded as `insanity', `crime' and `poverty' were treated, prior to the modern period, as extrinsic features of human existence. Madness, crime and poverty were not yet thought of as `social problems'. Even as late as the eighteenth century, the presence of these characteristics in individuals who would subsequently find

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themselves placed into one or other of these categories was not regarded as an indicator of either personal or communal failure.

Attitudes towards poverty are revealing here. Use of the term `poor' in the early eighteenth century encompassed a variety of social conditions. Discussions and legislation about the poor included widows, orphans, the sick, the aged, the disabled and the insane without clear differentiations being observed between them. Morally defined need, rather than the special circumstances which produced it, was the identifying characteristic. A Massachusetts law, which became a model for other states in the US, held that poverty occurs `when and so often as it shall happen that any person be naturally wanting of understanding, so as to be incapable to provide for him or herself'. ¹⁵ This attitude was already a change from preceding eras in Europe. For poverty had by this stage come to be thought of as something needing communal attention, rather than being wholly an extrinsic feature of the circumstances of social life.

How closely these attitudes still remained tied to extrinsic considerations, however, is demonstrated by the treatment of criminality -- or more accurately, vagabondage -- in eighteenth-century America. Vagabondage, like poverty more broadly, was regarded as largely endemic. It was surrounded by, and connected to, an indefinite set of moral transgressions.

The colonists judged a wide range of behaviour to be deviant, finding the gravest implications in even minor offences. Their extended definition was primarily religious in origin, equating sin with crime. The criminal codes punished religious offences, such as idolatry, blasphemy, and witchcraft, and clergymen declared infractions against persons or property to be offences against God. Freely mixing the two categories, the colonists proscribed an incredibly long list of activities. The identification of disorder with sin made it difficult for legislators and ministers to distinguish carefully between major and minor infractions. Both were testimony to the natural depravity of man and the power of the devil -- sure signs that the offender was destined to be a public menace and a damned sinner. ¹⁶

The idea of secular correction emerged only gradually and should be understood as part of broader processes whereby the social and natural worlds came to be seen as transformable rather than

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merely given. `Social control', therefore, was not primarily a means of controlling pre-existing forms of `deviant' behaviour. `Deviance' was in fact largely created by the imperatives brought about by the transmutation of naturally given conditions into manageable ones. The sequestration of the mad and the criminal accelerated when these categories became separate from poverty in general, and when it came to be believed that all were intrinsically capable of alteration. Constructing a special setting for deviants provided a means of integrating remedial treatment with the maintenance of regularised control over the settings of day-to-day life on the outside.

The idea that human beings can be subject to correction was necessarily bound up with the notion that social life itself is open to radical change. The early prison reformers -- like many professional sociologists later -- sought to show that the conditions leading to criminal behaviour derived from the dismal lives people in less fortunate communities were forced to lead. Changing these conditions could at the same time help to alter the behaviour of those who challenged the dominant proprieties. `The vices of social life', as one official observed of a prisoner in Pennsylvania in the 1840s, `have heralded the ruin of his fortunes and his hopes.' ¹⁷ The existence of crime pointed, not to intractable elements of human nature, but to the inability of the community to live up to its task of creating a responsible citizenry. A properly organised society would both shield potential offenders from temptation and at the same time diminish the circumstances leading to criminal activity.

The impetus which led to the establishment of prisons was originally fuelled by moral considerations. The discipline and regimentation of prison life were to be a form of moral education which, by removing the criminal from the depravity of his or her surroundings, would have rehabilitating effects. The penitentiary was to become a laboratory for social improvement. The routines of prison life, however, in exaggerated form mimicked those established in the social environments of modernity as a whole. The prison henceforth became a laboratory in much the same sense as all the other contexts of modernity are: an environment in which social organisation and change are reflexively engineered, both as a backdrop to individual life and as a medium for the reconstitution of individual identity.

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Date: 2016-04-22; view: 564