Today a documentary, which I realised with Anne Schiltz, will have its première in Luxembourg. It’s about a ward called Orangerie 1 inside the Centre Hospitalier Neuro-Psychiatrique, the biggest psychiatric hospital in Luxembourg. The first mail I found about the project is from September 2007 when we met for the first time people working in the hospital we wanted to make a film about. In 2009, we got an aide financière sélective à l’écriture, two years later the Luxembourg Filmfund gave us an aide financière sélective à la production. In 2011, we shot a first time in January and then a second time in the summer. From the beginning on, we decided that we would not use a sound engineer and cameramen, but that we would try to make the photography and sound ourselves in order to be the less “intrusive” possible. Guy Maezelle and Yann-Elie Gorans from chocolat noisette taught us the basics of their jobs.
When people ask me if I want to make another documentary, I always answer “Never again”. The experience has completely changed my way of writing the history of psychiatry. I became more and more convinced that the history of psychiatry is too often reduced to the history of psychiatrists. I changed the structure of my book that I was writing, in parallel, on the history of psychiatry in the 20th century. But – and I know that I am just stating an evidence – making a film is a full-time job. Being a director and an academic seems just not feasible.
The trailer reads:
The Orangerie: a unit in Luxembourg’s neuropsychiatric hospital, its nursing staff, doctors and patients. A place where daily life is divided between trying to manage illness and learning to live with other people, a place that many have turned to for refuge yet can’t wait to leave. We meet unique and desperate people, resourceful and powerless, talkative and silent, carers and cared-for, and are granted an insight into the unit’s clinical approach. Mental illness has changed, along with its treatment and perception.
From November the 13th on, it will be projected at Utopia in Luxembourg. We hope that some festivals will be interested in Orangerie so that we will be able to show the documentary in different European countries.
Last problem: my university seems to be heading to a very bibliometric approach of evaluation. Our publications server, orbilu, does not take into account films as scientific production, so I chose the most prestigious category – at least for historians – i.e. the category “book”. The orbi-notice is here.
Since January 2011, I am working as an historian at the University of Luxembourg. I have written my PhD on the occupation of Belgium during World War One and World Two. In 2013 I published a social history of psychiatry in the 20th century from below. I am also co-editor of h-madness.
Issu d’un colloque qui s’est tenu il y a deux ans et demi au Le Mans, l’article s’interroge sur la manière qu’ont les patients de parler de la folie. L’idée est d’élargir ce qu’on comprend sous “savoir psychiatrique” souvent limité à celui des psychiatres. Or, pour la période étudiée, on voit clairement que beaucoup de patients arrivent dans l’asile avec leur propre savoir psychiatrique aussi bien en ce qui concerne le diagnostic que les thérapies ‘adaptées’. Cet autre savoir psychiatrique jusqu’ici peu pris en compte par les historiens se nourrit de sources très divers: séjours répétés en psychiatrie, “psychiatrisation/psychologisation” du discours quotidien… Ce savoir est utilisé pour contester le diagnostic médical, pour exiger des thérapies différentes, pour justifier un comportement jugé inadapté… Apparaît dès lors une toute autre histoire de la psychiatrie où le patient n’est pas un simplement objet du regard médical, mais un acteur de sa propre histoire dans l’institution asilaire.
Since January 2011, I am working as an historian at the University of Luxembourg. I have written my PhD on the occupation of Belgium during World War One and World Two. In 2013 I published a social history of psychiatry in the 20th century from below. I am also co-editor of h-madness.
Brian Beaton (University of Pittsburgh) gave a stimulating talk on “Unrooting the Rules: The Social Life of Plants in Libraries and Archives”
Ten days ago, I organised with Elissa Mailänder a two-day workshop on material culture in closed spaces. As “kick-off”, I presented the following text.
Intro
In the notion of confinement, the idea of the object that “contains” is often implicit. Several verbs, which we use to describe this confinement contain the object: to barricade, to wall, to cloister, in French encelluler, in German einkerkern, einbunkern, einlochen… Thinking about confinement seems to lead automatically to the object that encloses. But until now historians have remained fairly distant from the material question. This is not only true for the history of confinement but also for the general historical writing.
Oblivion/Illustration
When historians are interested in the materiality of objects, they often use an approach similar to that which characterises their uses of images. The objects serves to illustrate a thesis, it is integrated into the narrative at times when it suits the argument. The watchtower illustrates the concentration camp, the uniform the standardization of society, the desk the disciplinarisation in the school. Sometimes the iconic character of these objects are taken into account but the materiality is rarely worth any notice.
Fetishism
Opposite to this position, one sometimes encounters a cult of of the object, particularly observable in museums. Three weeks ago this became very evident for me: for the first time I participated at a conference, Hidden Stories, organised by people working in museums. Museums live around their objects: it is around them that they organise exhibitions, it is on objects that the different crafts work: a new museum is often created around a collection1 ; certainly recently some museums dared to “appear” without developing their very own collections. But their expositions continue to be built by placing objects in a room, the narratives continue to be organised around these objects, despite the growing number of opportunities one has to tell the story other than through the (original) object.
A paradox characterises this obsession of the object. On the one side, the “original” object confers a strong legitimacy, but at the same time an experience of its materiality is most of the time forbidden.
Veto of the object
Parallel to this cult of the object in the museum, one can observe a certain revival of interest in material culture. In a world profoundly touched by the linguistic turn, in a world were even processes and practices are nothing more than discourses, the materiality seems to be a solution, seems to produce a “veto of the object”2, bringing back a certain reality.
If I have to choose between the two extremes, the second seems to me now the least bad choice because it helps to break out of the “illustrative prison” in which the object is still often confined. This choice forces us to build the story from the object, an object that is given a certain autonomy. Based on the object, at least a triple life unfolds before us:
Biography of the object
the imagined object. At the beginning is the idea of an object. To stay in the area we are interested in – the closed spaces – there is a doctor, a teacher, a soldier, an architect who, confronted with a problem, think of an object. In considering the question, in being inspired by other models, he or she imagines several “possibles”;
the produced object. The imagined object is in a second step transformed into a manufactured object. The craftsman – be it an artisan, an industrial engineer, an architect – brings its own expertise. These broadens the range of possibilities – it brings new solutions, offers other practices – but at the same time reduces the possibilities by the process inherent to the production be it on a technical or economic level.
the used object. Finally, the object arrives in a particular context . This new context will define a space of possibilities that is often beyond the imagined and produced object. The multiplicity of actors, intended or not, acting with the object, the interaction with other objects which is rarely imagined, the heterogeneous contexts of use open unimagined worlds.3
Materiality through print?
Even the historian who takes the object seriously, limits himself often to the third part of the “biography of the object”4. Most of the time there still is a great distance between him and the object: in fact most of us have access to the object only through printed sources: the materiality of the object stays inaccessible to us, remains foreign. Claiming that historians working on confinement have to be imprisoned so that they know what the bars feel like, how to manipulate a lock or how to move a bed makes you laugh but nevertheless raises the question how the material is accessible to us through writing or images.
The toilet door of an asylum
For me, everything started three years ago with an imagined toilet, a door imagined for an asylum, which I “met” in the archive. Starting with this object and adding the bed and the bath, I tried to construct a narrative parallel to the more classic one that I was writing about psychiatry in the 20th century. Focusing on the object helped me at three levels.
Condensation of my argument. The object seems particularly adapted to focus the argumentation. I have the feeling that an object can sometimes replace several pages of text as if its materiality shortened the discussion
Slow science. At the same time, and this may seem paradoxical, the subject requires me to slow down. As a historian of contemporary history, I am confronted with an enormous quantity of archives and so I finally spent not so much time at analysing the documents. The object, which I am unable to “read” immediately – false impression that I have before written document – forces me to slow down, to spend time with this object. Instead of writing my story with 1000 documents which I flipped through, I wrote it with three things that I have studied in detail
Scale of everyday life. Finally, for the history of psychiatry that I am interested in – which pays attention to the daily interaction between patients, caregivers and medical personnel – the object allows me to “ground” my narrative, to give it a thickness which is suitable to the scale.
The Musée de la Grande Guerre in Meaux who opened in 2011 has been build around the collection of Jean-Pierre Verney. The future musée de la photograpie in Brussels has been launched after the death of Astrid Ullens. [↩]
König Gudrun M., « Das Veto der Dinge. Zur Analyse materieller Kultur », Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 58, août 2012, p. 14-31. [↩]
Majerus Benoît, « La baignoire, le lit et la porte. La vie sociale des objets de la psychiatrie », Genèses, 82-1, 2011, p. 95-119. To get the text, click here. [↩]
Igor Kopytoff, « The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process », in Arjun Appadurai (éd.), In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge, CUP, 1986, p. 64-91. [↩]
Since January 2011, I am working as an historian at the University of Luxembourg. I have written my PhD on the occupation of Belgium during World War One and World Two. In 2013 I published a social history of psychiatry in the 20th century from below. I am also co-editor of h-madness.
Le vieillissement est une des problématiques médico-sociles les plus discutées au 20e siècle. L’affiche ci-dessus vient d’une campagne de l’ONG britatnnique Age Concern.
3e mardi du mois de 9 h à 12 h (salle des artistes, 96 bd Raspail 75006 Paris), du 16 octobre 2012 au 21 mai 2013
Les interventions médico-sociales ont été développées au XXe siècle pour répondre aux besoins de populations présentant une intrication de problèmes médicaux et de difficultés sociales et elles se sont imposées dès lors comme un enjeu important des politiques publiques. Historiquement, cependant, le périmètre de ces interventions a considérablement varié, incluant des questions allant selon les époques de la tuberculose au vieillissement pathologique et au handicap en passant par la maladie mentale. Ce séminaire de recherche vise à explorer les dynamiques de constitution de ce champ et ses transformations jusqu’à aujourd’hui. L’une des hypothèses que nous explorerons est que les contours du médico-social reflètent non seulement les problématisations des questions concernées mais également de façon plus générale les modes de régulations des politiques sociales et leur articulation à la médecine. Nous chercherons particulièrement à comprendre quelles sont les raisons des difficultés de l’institutionnalisation de ces interventions dans les systèmes de santé.
Pour aborder ces questions ce séminaire associera sociologie, histoire et science politique. Nous chercherons à comprendre quels ont été les acteurs de ce champ, analyser comment les savoirs médicaux ont été travaillé en même temps qu’ils ont travaillé ces interventions, à mettre en évidence la mobilisation des expertises dans l’espace public. Nous prêterons une attention particulière au rôle de la prévision dans la mise en forme de ces problèmes – assurances, planification, projection. Enfin ce séminaire développera une réflexion comparée sur les façons dont ces questions ont été abordées dans différents pays d’Europe.
Dans un premier temps plusieurs séances seront consacrées à une série de thèmes transversaux – « problème public », « expertise », « projection »… – avant de proposer dans un second temps des analyses portant sur des domaines spécifiques – vieillissement, psychiatrie…
Nicolas Henckes (chargé de recherche au CNRS, CERMES3, henckes@vjf.cnrs.fr) et Benoît Majerus (maître de conférences à l’Université du Luxembourg, benoit.majerus@uni.lu)
Programme
1ère séance – 16 octobre 2012
Nicolas Henckes. Les métamorphoses du secteur médico-social en France. Un cadre d’analyse
2e séance – 20 novembre 2012
Benoît Majerus. La construction des problèmes publics.
3e séance – 18 décembre 2012
Nicolas Henckes. Mesurer, standardiser et intervenir. Les nouvelles médicalisations du social
4e séance – 15 janvier 2013
Adrien Minard. (Sciences Po) Maladies vénériennes. La fin du péril vénérien ? Déclin et reconfigurations de la lutte contre la syphilis en France (1945-années 1960)
5e séance – 19 février 2013
Nicolas Henckes. Maladies mentales. Retour sur La gestion des risques
6e séance – 19 mars 2013
Benoît Majerus. Vieillissement (1). Saisir l’âge par les études longitudinales
7e séance – 16 avril 2013
Séance commune avec le séminaire « Handicap et sciences sociales » organisé par J.F. Ravaud, I. Ville et M. Winance. Handicap. Quelle place dans les politiques médico-sociales.
8e séance – 21 mai 2013
Tiago Moreira. (Durham University) Vieillissement (2). Ageing in technological democracies
Since January 2011, I am working as an historian at the University of Luxembourg. I have written my PhD on the occupation of Belgium during World War One and World Two. In 2013 I published a social history of psychiatry in the 20th century from below. I am also co-editor of h-madness.
Intérieur de l'Ecole d'enseignement mutuel, située rue du Port-Mahon, au moment de l'exercice de l'écriture. Lithographie de H. Lecomte, 1818.
Six months ago, I launched with Elissa Mailänder a call for paper on the material culture in closed spaces. The workshop will take place on 11-12 October in Luxembourg and we are quite happy with the people we succeeded bringing together.
OCTOBER 11
14h-15h Kick-off, Elissa Mailänder (Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po Paris) and Benoît Majerus (University of Luxembourg)
15h-16h Unrooting the Rules: The Social Life of Plants in Libraries and Archives, Brian Beaton (University of Toronto)
16h30-17h30 Entrance Permitted?! The Exclusionary Character of Public Administrations: Studies on Materiality and Sociality in Swiss Municipalities, Michaela Schmidt (ETH Zurich)
5h30-6h30 Totalizing Materiality and Subaltern Practices in the Context of Education in the Swiss Penal System: Reflections on the Porosity of the Total Institution (Ueli Hostetter, Marina Richter (University of Fribourg)
6h30-7h30 ‘A New Leaf’: Paper!and the Reform of the Institution and Inmate, 1793-1860, Rebecca Wynter (University of Birmingham)
OCTOBER 12
9h-10h The Material Culture of Gymnasiums in Early 19th Century Paris, Sun-Young Park (Harvard University)
10h-11h Inside the barrack room: material culture, discipline and promiscuity in French republican garrisons (1872-1914), Mathieu Marly (Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po, Paris)
11h30–12h30 Communist Women’s Prison, Albania (1977-1985): Political prisoners and their everyday life of forced labour for survival, Shannon Woodcock (University of Sydney)
1h30-2h30 ‘Ditch the old handcuffs, dig the new i-pods’: Prison legacies and the allure of ‘forgetting’ among Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala, Ayetree Sen (University of Manchester)
2h30-3h30 Final whistle, Elissa Mailänder (Centre d’histoire Sciences Po Paris) and Benoît Majerus (University of Luxembourg)
Since January 2011, I am working as an historian at the University of Luxembourg. I have written my PhD on the occupation of Belgium during World War One and World Two. In 2013 I published a social history of psychiatry in the 20th century from below. I am also co-editor of h-madness.
Two weeks ago Loïc Wacquant was invited to the doctoral seminar of Humanities at the University of Luxembourg. Comment mettre Bourdieu au travail: principes et illustrations sur le cas de la ville et la justice was the title of his presentation and he mainly presented the research he has realised during the last 15 years. For two hours, he quite brilliantly defended his arguments: he was moving at least as much as if he would still be in the ring1. From the beginning on, when Wacquant defined his research topic as being “the body, the ghetto and the penal state“, I wondered if the should rather present Foucault than Bourdieu. At least “the body” and “the penal state” are themes that I would rather relate to Foucault than to Bourdieu2. And this first impression was confirmed later on when he presented one of his major thesis i.e., that the reality of neoliberalism is not “less state” but the replacement of the welfare state by the punitive state. While listening to his very convincing argumentation, I thought that Loïc Wacquant finally proposes a story for the 21th century that is very close to the one Foucault presented for the 18th century, a narrative of the “great confinement“. I’m quite curious what historians will do with this sociological master narrative in the future3.
.
Wacquant Loïc J. D, Body & soul : notebooks of an apprentice boxer, Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press, 2004. [↩]
From Surveiller et punir to the later work on biopolitics. [↩]
Graf Rüdiger et Priemel Kim C., « Zeitgeschichte in der Welt der Sozialwissenschaften. Legitimität und Originalität einer Disziplin », Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 59-4, 2011, p. 479–508. [↩]
Since January 2011, I am working as an historian at the University of Luxembourg. I have written my PhD on the occupation of Belgium during World War One and World Two. In 2013 I published a social history of psychiatry in the 20th century from below. I am also co-editor of h-madness.
Today a documentary, which I realised with Anne Schiltz, will have its première in Luxembourg. It’s about a ward called Orangerie 1 inside the Centre Hospitalier Neuro-Psychiatrique, the biggest psychiatric hospital in Luxembourg. The first mail I found about the project is from September 2007 when we met for the first time people working in the hospital we wanted to make a film about. In 2009, we got an aide financière sélective à l’écriture, two years later the Luxembourg Filmfund gave us an aide financière sélective à la production. In 2011, we shot a first time in January and then a second time in the summer. From the beginning on, we decided that we would not use a sound engineer and cameramen, but that we would try to make the photography and sound ourselves in order to be the less “intrusive” possible. Guy Maezelle and Yann-Elie Gorans from chocolat noisette taught us the basics of their jobs.
