Crisis and the critical cartographies of solitary confinement

• In Event: Back to the Future: The Construction of Time and Prisoner Reentry

Abstract

This paper is based on empirical research conducted in a Canadian forensic psychiatric setting. The project studies the phenomenology of seclusion for mentally ill inmates, and explores the ethics of seclusion with attention to the ways the lived-body experiences and interacts with seclusive space. The paper brings together the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty with the anti-psychiatry writings of Michel Foucault. It develops an argument around the medical meaning of “crisis,” which disappears from medicine in the late eighteenth century. Paradoxically, however, as Foucault argues psychiatry continues to rely on medical “crisis” and provokes and produces crisis as a rhetorical justification for psychiatric science and truth. Crisis is needed because “neither the disciplinary regime … nor pathological anatomy, enabled psychiatric knowledge to be founded as truth” (Foucault 2006: 250). The seclusion room is a privileged place to study the “truth” of psychiatric power because the lived-body is not simply an object among other objects; it is subject, it inhabits a place, takes place, and lives in and through that place. This paper suggests that crisis is produced and provoked as the phenomenological place of the lived-body is displaced by the cartographic, Cartesian space of the seclusion room.

Author

• Stuart Murray, Carleton University