The Mapmakers of Hell

In my exegesis for Madness and Civilization I discuss at length the “sacred circle” which the medieval church placed around leprosy, an elaborate matrix maintained not to eliminate leprosy (though it certainly contributed to the near eradication of the disease on the peninsula, in conjunction with reduced trade with eastern sources of the disease following the end of the crusades) but to keep it at a sacred distance. This matrix, Foucault argues, materially informed the development of the categories of madness, insanity, and unreason more broadly as well as/by way of the systems of managing those deemed mad. Leper houses were converted to hospitals in Britain and France, though the term is somewhat misleading to a modern audience; these were not places of therapy (which occurred outside of the hospital, for example at the patient’s home) but rather places of imprisonment-production. here the bodies of the unreasonable (spendthrifts, runaways, debtors, absentee fathers, etc) were made to work. as much as one percent of parisians were under compulsory labor at the hospital general. the mad proper were sometimes exempt from this if they were too difficult (the catatonic?) to manipulate, but this was no sure thing. the hospital, like the witch hunts and the Atlantic slave trade, was a necessary escape clause to the point of a tuautology of proto-liberal capitalist ideology, or that which was making conditions ripe for capitalism. the worker was a reasonable being who understood the need to part with their labor to maintain the day to day operations of their life, unless of course their reason proved itself unmanifest, in which case an intense aparatus of coercion and direct force, in the form of the cells and chains, the violence of the guards, the patholigization of the quasi juridical-medical hospital authority, compelled such labor. the hospital itself rented the labor of its inmates to employers, effectively subsidizing their ventures through the establishment of a minimum floor of cheap and immobile. an archivist might be able to produce an estimate of the value thereby extracted from the pathologized/objectified bodies of the patient-prisoners, i myself have not been able to locate such a quantification. however, it strikes me that this extraction, if not scale, at least in quality resembles the primitive accumulation of colonization, slavery, witch hunts, and prison labor. that is, in such instances the state takes proactive steps to create an artificial labor market, ripped from the human context (see David Graber’s Debt: 5,000) into a commodified, abstracted exchange. liberal theorists accounts for this at times either as a necessary exception to an exceptional circumstance. normally the doubly free labor-as-commodity can be bought and sold simply against the backdrop of destitution and poverty which the reserve army of labor exemplifies, but for particular exceptions, where the machinery of logic cannot reliably make itself manifest by the inward operations of the brain, then self governance at both the individual and collective level can be be dispensed with, their preconditions absent, their very formulation impossible. this is the case for John Stuart Mill on the matter of self-governance of Britain’s colonial subjects in India, for children not yet capable of rationality, and for the mad. Likewise, Milton Friedman distinguishes the condition of freedom (not in the collective sense, which for him is more or less a contradiction of terms, but in the sense of self directed action) to be impossible for “children and madmen”. there is something almost transubstantial, certainly tautological, in this logic, that we are entirely and exclusively free to make a preordained choice, or narrow range of choices, dictated by our position within the market. to fail to make those choices is not one of several alternate outcomes of freedom in the sense of something open-ended, but as a breakdown in an predetermined operation. freedom thereby leaves the domain of the ethical, of choices and reasons, and becomes something ontological, a precondition of being in a capitalist context. that is to say that one cannot be denied one’s freedom within the market but only ever be recognized as not the sort of thing which could be said to be free or unfree in a meaningful sense, any more than a rock in open air is free to plumet towards the earth.

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Was Satan free? did Satan make some choice which was then responded to by casting him out? did his choice itself, or its effects, alter his nature such that spiritual gravity took hold of him? did he know what he was doing, or like the crowds before the cross were his charges downgraded from guilt to ignorance? or was his position in heaven not physical at all, but rather a categorical change, a necessary and logically entailed alteration, that is to say, a change in political category, a change in subject, not (only) on a cartography of the cosmos but of language?

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i find the sacred circle very interesting, not least because of the way it deputizes/incorporates the exceptional category, that which is held at a distance, in the case of leprosy not without a certain reverence. the circle is a relationship which goes both ways, that is to say, those held at the edge, while their agency may be suppressed to the point of objectification, by their presence inform the development of the overall system, which further is to say that the forces which keep the sacrosanct at bay are still caught up in responding to this contingent. we might say that societies make their own sacraments, but they do not make them as they please. the biopolitics of all dead generations way like a neurosis on the brains of the living, which far from being warrened off and controlled, confined to old houses of sublime ailment, influence with a necessary and innate gravity the categories, codes, organs of regulation, production, isolation, and metabolization. it is in such a dynamic that the bleeding text denotes its author, creates by rites of internal resistance and ambivalence a space and a relation and common sense whereby its meaning makes itself in the world of bodies and signs.

I do not think self-harm just happens. even when it just happens, we can point to the larger strangeness, sublime quality of absence of personality and reason as motions execute themselves. i don’t agree. but that is itself an extreme case. in my expirence, the bleeding text must be read to be written, it announces itself by means of deliberation and impulse, weighing the utter despair of an inverse frozen mixed state, collapse of the soul, against a proactive implosion of violence which demarcate within the previous void of anger and despair a body which is being cut and a body which is cutting. that it is the same body seems like a short circuit, but the roles here do not collapse into each other so much as emerge out of this practice, this ritual, this exercise, this political demonstration against the frozen despair of unself into a rocking dynamic, both split and antagonistic but also parallels systems delivering and volleys of signs which otherwise might be only angry static. even when the cut occurs against angry static, it introduces a discursive element not otherwise there, for when I wake up and see that i have cut myself, i will be able to reassure myself that the horror of that angry static was real, real enough at least as a phenomena to mark it’s presence by an appropately intense categorization. there’s something deeply antinhilistic, something of resistance even in the form of self destruction, which changes both the angry static and the one who bears it.

it is hard to explain.

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!Compare this phenomena to the political grammar of Schmitt’s friend-enemy system.