Contenu du sommaire : Folies ?

In Western modernity, madness constitutes a universe of otherness and alteration that opens up the exploration and experimentation of the forms of the human being. It challenges scientific epistemologies as much as it gives access to a singular representation of reality and contributes to the construction of our common world. The contributions in this issue explore these themes on three intimately intertwined levels: experiences, experimentations, and the materialities of madness.

Although quantification has marked psychiatric practice since the rise of experimental psychology, the past two decades have seen an intensified use of data, implemented in tandem with a general move toward big data and “scored societies” across the biosciences. Today, a new, hyper-quantified psychiatry is aiming to map the neurological substrates of affective disorder through extracting neural data from brain implants. The classic story that is often rendered by many critical scholarly accounts about this new form of hyper-quantified psychiatry is that in their drive to render psychiatry profitable to new forms of data capitalism, such technologies evaporate language and the subjective into a cascade of numbers. This paper examines a case study of a subject enrolled in an experimentation in psychiatry for the first brain implant system coupled to an artificial intelligence in order to trouble such easy narratives about quantification. How would our account of quantification change if we saw language not as an extraneous surplus to the experimental production of numbers, but at the heart of how these new technologies of quantification are being developed?

The qualitative, undifferentiated time of disaster affords propitious moments, requiring quick action by those in its midst. During Katrina, the rapidly transforming watery world of New Orleans created new resistances and lines of flow. In the absence of government-organized disaster assistance during Katrina, some New Orleanians already long afflicted with chronic mental illnesses were left to navigate the flooded city on their own, as this essay captures from oral histories gathered and observations made over four years. For some long disabled by severe mental illness, surviving the disaster resembled their life pattern of circuitous movement, the survivors appearing caught up in a circular pattern of water, floating along with no external force to push against or momentum to be retrieved. Their particular mode evokes pre-steam engine era sailors stuck in the Doldrums, the Equatorial belt where atmospheric conditions deprive the sea of wind-force and momentum. Yet others deviated from the usual everyday scripts in which they were ensconced, be they those of patient-clinician routines or of stigmatizing encounters in public places. Rather than stagnating, these survivors moved along, improvising at every turn, divinely realized or sheer happenstance. They interacted with the disaster's undercurrents, crafting temporary solutions through chance encounters and found resources. Such wayfarers place-mark a world wide open, even for those whose lives are usually confined to a circuit of institutions and marginal spaces that stymie agency and narrow relational possibilities. Mark Bradford's Katrina-inspired art resonates with such varieties of experience, from exclusion to the possibility of community and rebirth, however momentary.

Why is it that when we see images of major new urban developments today – whether housing units, office blocks, or shopping malls – those developments are as likely as not to be covered in a thin canopy of trees? In this paper, I approach this question by thinking about the long history of the idea that cities are somehow bad for human beings, and especially that they are bad for our mental health. From Shanghai to Paris, from Biophilia to “cheap nature”, from Donna Haraway to Thomas Heatherwick, I examine the growing entanglement between the psychologically restorative city and the green city. I ask: what does it mean, for historical cultures of both madness and the city, that we now ask our urban spaces, recast as centres of nature and biological life, to have even a reparative relationship to mental health?

In colonial Vietnam, mental asylums were designed as large agricultural colonies, where patients would work the land on the path to healing and eventual liberation. This article discusses the role of labor as a kind of therapy for asylum patients, and how French psychiatric experts were constantly drawn into broader networks of care and economy, thereby shifting attention from the asylum itself to the world beyond its walls.