Hi Michel! We were supposed to speak about
“Madness” today, but you told me that
you would prefer “Milieu.”
“Milieu” seems to be the more relevant
concept theses days. It refers to the issue
of security and hence also to epidemics, quarantine,
etc.
But let’s wait and see, “Madness” may also play a role here…
OK. Where do you want to start?
Perhaps we start with the security apparatus.
In the late 1970s, in my lectures at the Collège de France,
this was the actual context in
which I talked a lot about the milieu.
Why was that?
Well, the concept simply belonged together
with the concept of population. It is something
like its counterpart. If you want to talk
about bio-politics, you also need to speak
about populations and their milieus.
But population seems to be a rather abstract,
if not statistical notion.
Precisely! If you want to do statistics, you
need to define your object or rather field.
You have to circumscribe the territory you
want to look at, for example
a region or a city.
In your lectures you talk a lot about town
planning and the design of urban spaces…
Back then, that was a hot topic. Henri Lefevre
would talk about it, Fernand Braudel did quite
some research on the history of cities. Even with Deleuze and Guattari, I had some very interesting discussions
about urbanism – but that’s a different
story.
So back to populations and milieus!
Discipline structures space. Remember Bentham
and the panopticon? Discipline „addresses
the essential problem of a hierarchical and functional distribution of elements“ (Security, Territory, Population, p. 20).
Security operates
in rather different ways. It tries „to plan
a milieu in terms of events or series of events
or possible elements, of series that will
have to be regulated within a multivalent
and transformable framework“ (ibid.).
In other words, the security apparatus does not
focus on designing single architectures.
Instead, it aims at reflecting and modifying urban
space (see ibid., p. 21).
Is a milieu, then, something like an environment?
In a certain sense, yes. A milieu is something
in which circulations are carried out, circulations
of people, but also of things and words. It
is a hybrid form: “The milieu is a set of
natural givens—rivers, marshes, hills—and
a set of artificial givens—an agglomeration
of individuals, of houses, etc.“ (ibid.).
I guess I need more clarification. In the
"Order of Things", you describe Cuvier as the
inventor of the ‘environment’ in the biological
sense of the term. Following this account,
Cuvier appears as the first biologist establishing
a crucial link between the living being and
its conditions of existence: the air it breathes, the water it drinks, the food it absorbs (The Order of Things, p. 298).
However, in History
of Madness, the milieu appears as everything
artificial that was created by man – religion,
literature, art. Up to the point where you
say: „The milieu began where nature began to die in man.“ (History of Madness, p.372).
I admit it is contradictory; this is precisely
the reason why I wanted to talk about the
concept. Eventually, it stands for an axiomatic
topic, the relation between the organism and
its environment, or Umwelt. This was crucial already in Canguilhem, but it was already of key importance
in Kurt Goldstein, Henri Wallon and many others. At the same time, this relation is not simply
an exterior one. As early as in the 19th century,
physiologist Claude Bernard established that
every organism has an interior milieu.
And the puppets? They also seem to have an
interior milieu. At least here it is the human
hand that, from the inside, provides them
with life.
Well… More interesting and probably more
important is their exterior milieu. It usually
corresponds to the world of children, theater, entertainment, and so on. When puppets appear
in intellectual milieus, this is often seen
as inappropriate.
Yes. When you combine thinking and puppets,
you quickly come close to madness.
Without madness, however, there would be no thinking. – Bye, bye!
Bye.
