[Foucault-L] Diagrams and Care in the Community

Hi

Someone recently asked about diagrams, I've been reading Deleuze's Foucault and Deleuze mentions two things. Could anyone enlighten me?

Firstly, he mentions that "there is no similarity between the way in which the general hospital or the asylum locked up madmen in the seventeenth century and the way prison locked up delinquents in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The imprisonment of madmen was imposed like an 'exile' and took the leper as its model, while the confinement of delinquents was carried out by 'partitioning' and took its model from plague victims."

Earlier he states: "when Foucault invokes the notion of diagram it is in connection with our modern disciplinarian societies, where power controls the whole field: if there is a model it is that of the 'plague', which cordons off the stricken town and regulates the smallest detail. But if we consider the ancient sovereign societies we can see that they also possess a diagram, even if it relates to different matters and functions: here too a force is exercised on other forces, but it is used to deduct rather than to combine and compose to divide rather than to isolate the detail; to exile rather than to seal off (it's model is that of leprosy')"

I'm looking at care in the community as a new diagram, but, erroneously it seems, had assumed the asylum was disiplinarian, therefore the new diagram was one of control, but am not sure now it seems to be one of exile. There is still a discursive form of confinement, I have ideas of what the non-discursive form is.

Anyone any ideas? comments?

Best regards

Alastair Kemp






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  • Re: [Foucault-L] Diagrams and Care in the Community
    • From: Glen Fuller
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