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CRITICAL DIMENSIONS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY:
ASYLUMS
Some Macro-Analytic Considerations of Total Institutions
Lecture 62
A lecture prepared for the Graduate Students at Texas Woman's University
Asylums, by Erving Goffman, 1961, Double-Day Anchor Books
There are several macro-analytic points which a critical theorist would add to the work of Goffman on Asylums and Total Institutions which give it an emancipatory and transforming edge not well developed in this otherwise most astute work on the nature and activities in Total Institutions.
A. First, all total institutions are part of a pre-social population base in which the 'inmates' do not have, as yet, full social status. The ordinary total institutions of which we see so often in societies around the world, function to socialize, sanctify or otherwise prepare young people for a future role in society. Schools, convents, seminaries, monasteries, apprenticeships and other such establishments transmit values, norms and bestow social status-roles on those who are processed through them.
Some total institutions, as Goffman notes, are oriented to take care of people who are fairly harmless yet need, so we think, the more closed routines of hospitals, asylums, leper colonies and retreats for alcoholics, over-weight persons, stressed out persons and others who, somehow, are thought to benefit from both isolation and routine.
B. Goffman does not note that some total institutions are designed to degrade and re-cycle people thought to be unfit or dangerous to society. He does note that they may be a danger but the notion of re-socialization is not well presented in this otherwise most helpful analysis of total institutions.
Prisons, concentration camps as well as hospitals for the 'criminally insane' have this character; they take in persons who, at one time, were treated as competent social actors, degrade them and confine them until they have met some standard of behavior thought to mark 'good' citizens.
C. There is a larger political economy in which to locate the rise and rigor of Total Institutions totally lacking in Goffman. It is only in advance capitalist societies with it great structures of domination and inequality that one finds the vast retinue of prisons, asylums, hospitals and other re-cycling structures.
Capitalism, as a political economy, discards people to their own devices failing the ability of some employer to find a way to extract surplus value from the labor power of people in a given population. Those thus made surplus to the labor needs of capital find themselves dealing in drugs, engaged in theft, wandering homeless on the streets and generally failing to find a niche in this most hostile economic environment. Total institutions, especially prisons, emerged in the last 400 years to house that part of the surplus population not domesticated to welfare or marginal jobs.
D. Then too, there is a sociology of desire which lurks behind so many decisions to confine people; especially young people. Those who act on their sexuality in ways not conformable to the production of the next generation of the workforce are defined as mentally, emotionally or physiologically deviant...and thus channeled to a total institution.
At the same time, desire is colonized by advertizing companies dedicated to creating demand for unsold goods and services. This is done by identification of the deep and forbidden desires of people, linking those desires to products and then saturating the media with such ads. Among the desires forbidden or inaccessible are those for polymorphous sexuality, an archaic masculinity, an impossible femininity, a most difficult sanctification and the great lift obtained from certain forbidden psychogens; cocaine, alcohol, marijuana, hashish and opium.
Teenage pregnancy, so long a desired affair has been with the advent of industrial production, and in the context of repressed sexuality, carries great onus...so great that such women are said to be in need of special welfare staff to guide their lives and special placement for the child born 'out of wedlock.'
D. The norms of sexual repression, in turn arise out of a prior political economy, that of settled agriculture and claims of property rights to land, buildings and herds which emerged some 4000 years ago...especially with the advent of irrigated farming. Concern for title to the land creates all sorts of sexual repressions for women...both pre- and after marriage. Virginity, chastity, fidelity and continence all work to guarantee that the first male child shall be the issue of the legitimate spouse...and in the case of the eldest male, the heir to the land. Counter claims to that eldest male by other families greatly becloud the transfer of land, estate and as it turns out in feudalism, claims to throne and hereditary office.
E. All this is lacking in Goffman's Asylums. One cannot complain that a fine piece of scholarship does not do everything under the sun...but one can claim that there is a larger historical, Political, and Economic context in which Goffman's most engaging work can be and should be placed.
The de-politicized and conservative critique of Goffman when first his work made its way into academia was not that it lacked a political economy but that it was not good social psychology nor good institutional analysis. I disagree. I think Goffman's work fits nicely into a massified, marginalized population and should be honored as a fine expansion of Mead, Cooley, Blumer and others who seek to locate social psychology in the safe, middle class social life worlds from which they came.