'One Must Eliminate the Effects of... Diffuse Circulation [and] their Unstable and Dangerous Coagulation': Foucault and Beyond the Stopping of Mobilities

Chris Philo

Mobilities, 2014, vol. 9, issue 4, 493-511

Abstract: Foucault spent time investigating the stopping of mobilities, notably when studying carceral spaces such as asylums and prisons which effectively immobilise their inmates at a societal scale. In Discipline and Punish , he speculates on how such spaces are designed to put a stop to casual 'nomadisms'. The purpose here is to inspect this aspect of Foucault's thinking, particularly to recover what he also said about the regulation and cultivation of mobilities within the depths of immobility. Attention is also drawn to an engagement with mobility-immobility appearing in Foucault's little-discussed Psychiatric Power lectures, prompted by the ideas and practices of Edouard Seguin, an educator of 'idiot' children, whose own words provide additional 'empirical' weight to an emerging argument. Reading the unabridged English translation of Madness and Civilization , a final claim is that Foucault's phenomenology of 'madness' depends upon unruly mobilities within the asylum, the very stuff of 'unstable and dangerous coagulation'. The overall ambition is to furnish an alternative account of Foucault and mobilities, concentrating on those Foucauldian texts initially seeming the least promising for scholars of mobilities.

Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2014.961261

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