the history of the university - part three

In part one of this series of reflections, I recounted my childhood education and its embeddedness within colonial, racist structures and systems. In part two I shared some of the lessons that I received at undergraduate and postgraduate level at universities in the US and UK. Now I'll turn to the matter of mad knowledge, which I encountered firsthand over a decade ago and which revealed to me how deeply entrenched is the notion – still – between 'us' and 'the other;' between 'civilised' and 'savage;' between sanctioned and illicit knowledges.

The centuries-long project of industrial capitalism entailed the erosion of the commons, and the plundering of global wealth by Europe and (by extension) North America. In order to justify this undertaking, a great 'othering' took place which placed a boundary between the perpetrators of the plunder and the victims of its violence. By dehumanising the 'other' through the mechanisms of racism, sexism and classism, the project of White Male European Empire turned people (and the flora and fauna of the natural world too) into objects and resources for wealth-creation, and absolved itself of the immorality and violence therein.

Entwined with this 'othering' was the Age of Enlightenment, which elevated rationalism as the lens through which to judge all else. Rationalism fueled the ascendance of science and medicine, and the idealisation of civilisation, which diminished and demolished folk wisdom and intuitive practices (through witch trials, for example.) Professionalism sequestered knowledge and turned it into a possession of the elite, restricted primarily to the White Male European. I go back to the observation made by Prof Bren LeFrancois, that “the history of the university is the history of whiteness.”

Because rationalism served as the gatekeeper to power and wealth, madness became the ultimate realm of the 'other.' Mad knowledge was pathologised and served with the ultimate dismissal, for to be charged as 'the ravings of a lunatic' was to be denied meaning, agency, worth and even liberty. Asylums served as prisons, where those whose words, actions or behaviour deviated from Rationalism/Imperialism could be isolated and disempowered. (Incidentally, I'll just return briefly here to the 'madwoman in the attic' trope which was used so effectively in Jane Eyre. There is a whole aspect of mad history whereby outspoken or inconvenient women were institutionalised as a method of removal from general society.)

Othering still functions as a tool of empire. Racism, sexism, classism are joined by sanism – a discriminatory process which elevates rationalism and denigrates madness. Diana Rose, in her book Mad Knowledges and User-led Research, points out that

… the groups and collectives doing this work [eg research by psychiatric survivors] had one thing in common: they recognised, even actively promulgated, that theirs was a political struggle, a social justice struggle; that they were fighting action or inaction on the part of those who had an enormous degree of control over their lives and extremely negative representation of them as Other.

And here's where I must be explicit: yes, mad knowledge has value. The suffering of mental distress results from and reflects the oppressions of our society; the downright madness of psychosis offers visions and ravings that speak truth to power. Like the Court Fool, whose role was to surrepticiously offer an amusing, palatable critique of the King, the madfolk speak to the insanity of the social constructions by which we abide.

The professionalisation of knowledge is the thin end of a wedge which seeks to disempower a person's faith in their own senses, their own experience and their own judgment. Madness is the ultimate act of bearing witness to discord and chaos, and mad knowledge is a gift to society of what those journeys have reaped. Mad knowledge cites the evidence of lived experience, of self-discovery and indeed, of human potential. We all have the capacity to go mad. Our minds and our psyches are none of them impervious to the surrender of control, and the dismantling of rationalism.

I'll finish here with a simple observation: chaos theory and spiritual wisdom both tell us that there is order within disorder. A system must dissolve and breakdown into chaos in order to make the leap into another paradigm. Madness is indicative of this process. Mad knowledge is profoundly valuable knowledge, if we would only listen to it.