Well, I am still trying to hammer this one out, I think there may still be some hope here

"Ruse and new triumph of madness: the world that thought to measure and justify madness through psychology must justify itself before madness, since in its struggles and agonies it measures itself by the excess of works like those of Nietzche, of Van Gogh, of Artaud." Foucault Madness and Civilization p289

"Nietzche's last cry, proclaiming himself both Christ and Dionysos, is not on the border of reason and unreason, in the perspective of the work of art...it is the very annihlation of the work of art, the point where it becomes impossible and where it must fall silent; the hammer has just fallen from the philosopher's hands." Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p.287

"To write is to communicate, express, witness, impose, instruct, redeem, or save- at any rate to send out an unambiguous message...Obscurity is an imposition on the reader. True, but beware when you cross railroad tracks for one train may hide another train...To write "clearly," one must incessantly prune, eliminate, forbid, purge, purify..."(Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Woman Native Other, pp16-17)


Who, then, communicates what we don't have words for? The artists, of course...

I am interested in Foucault's connection between art and madness and then madness and civiliztion

often a binary is drawn to include wilderness along with the feminine and civilization with the masculine but I believe this to be a misuse of that binary...

for a civilization to work it must be constanly drawing new knowledge from the unknown and getting rid of ideas that are no longer useful

and perhaps there is no such thing as wilderness really, because even the forest and the jungle have a very clear order

but for a population to be controlled, the means of available communication must be "pruned, eliminated, forbidden, purged, purified,"

what is Foucault's connection between madness and disease, anyway...at the beginning he talks about how in the middle ages insanity came to replace leprosy in the minds of Europeans

a powerful way to control people is by fear of disease...if insanity is seen as a disease...

but I am still sort of spinning in binaries...fear of the unknown leading to fear of disease

this is where I found the existence of groups like Pivot (try googling PivotLegal) in terms of all the groups covered under its umbrella

is there an "other" really or are all these people just unified by a common enemy?