"Modernism meant the whole modern show—including the Enlightenment, empirical science, and rational thought—and postmodernism, which was sometimes called post- structuralism, was its refutation and replacement.
If the old dispensation was the age of reason, the new one was the age of unreason. That would explain why Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization was one of the touchstone texts always lurking in the background. It didn’t matter that its author rejected the postmodern label, because postmodernists like Foucault rejected all fixed meanings. That was the whole point.
There was no truth in this new world, only “truth”—sometimes called “knowledge”—which lived inside quotation marks whether you noticed them or not. Truth wasn’t established with empirical evidence but talked into existence with a kind of rhetorical magic called “discourse” that made something so because of how you expressed it.
Truth was the “product” of discourse, not the other way around. It was manufactured like a salami in a metaphorical meaning factory operated by unseen systems of authority whose interests it ultimately served and whose only purpose was maintaining power. Accordingly, the madness in Madness and Civilization wasn’t a medical diagnosis but a “social construct,” devised in the seventeenth century to enforce the rule of reason by demonizing anyone who strayed beyond the boundaries of convention. “Madness” turned nonconformists into “the other” so they could be locked away. Like madness, invented to serve as reason’s defining opposite, the asylum was the indispensable foil of freedom, making forced confinement not just the dark side of the Enlightenment but its raison d’être.
Foucault’s true theme was power, the only thing that was really real. There was something seductive about seeing everything in terms of its secret relationship to power, and the critic as someone trained to unmask it. It made the intellectual a kind of superhero, freeing people from the structures of oppression embedded inside institutions, social systems, and works of art. The suffering of people imprisoned by a poem might not be great, but the person exposing it was a liberator. And wasn’t I trying to liberate myself, at least a little, from false
constructions, so I could live inside the story of my own unfolding? The beauty of postmodernism was that it erased the world with one hand while rewriting it with the other, allowing you to inherit the authority you discredited like a spoil of war. But there was something arbitrary about it, too, that left me feeling falsified in ways I lacked the clarity to put my finger on. Foucault’s obsession with hidden power engendered a low-level paranoia that took the place of thought while making you feel smart.
The hyperrational aspects of the Enlightenment did have a dark underside, and those with power were constantly drawing arbitrary lines they pushed the powerless across, but did the Enlightenment really destroy an age of freedom and use reason only to suppress its enemies? Having banished medical causes, all that remained to explain madness in Madness and Civilization was a social construct creating a supply of demonized “others” leading to a demand for asylums that in turn increased the supply of madmen in a widening spiral of expanding categories and segregating spaces culminating in “the great confinement.”
Foucault even considered AIDS a social construct, waving away the warning he received from the writer Edmund White in the early 1980s when he was teaching at Berkeley. “You American puritans, you’re always inventing diseases,” Foucault told White, though people were already dying of AIDS, most conspicuously gay men like Foucault himself, who had plunged into San Francisco’s bathhouse scene in the orgiastic seventies and remained passionately devoted to anonymous drug-fueled sadomasochistic sex. Still, he preferred to see the disease, which killed him the year before I got to graduate school, as an imaginary disorder, “and one that singles out blacks, drug users and gays—how perfect!”"
--- The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions / Jonathan Rosen
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