Madness and Automation: On Institutionalization
Postmodern Culture(1995)
摘要
The week was bizarre, inexplicable, intense. The week had a story, the story of a breakdown, a story whose breakdown delineates the workings of the psychiatric machine. This machine, operating on a streaming in/out flow of people, is not only institutional but institutionalizing; its inputs become institutionalized. It works where it breaks down; "The social machine's limit is not attrition, but rather its misfirings; it can operate only by fits and starts, by grinding and breaking down, in spasms of minor explosions" (Anti-Oedipus 151). The breakdown of its patients is reflected onto the ward; in its case, however, breaking down is productive and creates the institutional moment. Understanding that experience of institutionalization, making it explainable, means reading that story and following its lines of flight. What results is a patchwork narrative, neither coherent nor choosy about its sources. The aim is not purity of form, but an answer to "What happened?" that respects the complexity of the institutional moment and a diversity of viewpoints on that moment. Nevertheless, from this patchwork emerges an effective understanding of social machines in general and the possibilities for agency even at the moment of subjugation; the narrative of this singularity leads to a general strategy for escape from totalization based on the postulates of machinic analysis.
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