JONATHAN RUBIN wrote:
> Oh come on Mr Science Man, nothing is easier than to demonstrate that X
> is not the casue of Y, simply show that X happened after Y - which is
> exactly what Doug was doing.
> Incidently the (British) Mental Health Act that is most significant in
> this respect was passed in 1959 - several years before Foucault wrote
> Madness and Civ, and many more before it was translated. Likewise in
> Britain the whole anti-psychiatry movement of Laing and Cooper et al was
> a sixties phenomena that was pushing on a door already opened by the
> 1959 Act.
> De-instiutionalisation in Britain, and concern about how patients were
> simply being dumped was occuring before Foucault had even been heard of
> in Britain.
So what? I'm not saying that antipsychiatry was the one and only, the
singular and unique cause in these cases. You yourself said that it "was
pushing on a door" which is all that I am claiming: that it was one cause,
among others, not the first, not the last, just one. For a bunch of
poststructualists, you guys are remarkably obsessed with origins, to the
obliteration of all else.
I am actually not against M.F., but your fanatical support of his theses -
your will to make them absolutely true in all cases, absolutely correct,
even if it means violating his text or the matter in question so that the
two fit seamlessly - provokes in me to protest.
> Oh come on Mr Science Man, nothing is easier than to demonstrate that X
> is not the casue of Y, simply show that X happened after Y - which is
> exactly what Doug was doing.
> Incidently the (British) Mental Health Act that is most significant in
> this respect was passed in 1959 - several years before Foucault wrote
> Madness and Civ, and many more before it was translated. Likewise in
> Britain the whole anti-psychiatry movement of Laing and Cooper et al was
> a sixties phenomena that was pushing on a door already opened by the
> 1959 Act.
> De-instiutionalisation in Britain, and concern about how patients were
> simply being dumped was occuring before Foucault had even been heard of
> in Britain.
So what? I'm not saying that antipsychiatry was the one and only, the
singular and unique cause in these cases. You yourself said that it "was
pushing on a door" which is all that I am claiming: that it was one cause,
among others, not the first, not the last, just one. For a bunch of
poststructualists, you guys are remarkably obsessed with origins, to the
obliteration of all else.
I am actually not against M.F., but your fanatical support of his theses -
your will to make them absolutely true in all cases, absolutely correct,
even if it means violating his text or the matter in question so that the
two fit seamlessly - provokes in me to protest.