Cultures of Madness. Liminal Phenomena of the Urban Modern Era (1870–1930)

The transformation of traditional narratives and the formation of new modes of representation in the literature of classic modernity attests to the decisive role assumed by madness and the metropolis. Literature on life in the metropolis is stamped by a knowledge of madness that pervades scholarly treatises, essays, and literary texts in equal measure, a phenomenon that the distinction between literary and scientific culture fails to entirely apprehend and describe. This project examines an ensemble of rhetorical strategies along with narrative forms and procedures in the effort to comprehend madness and link the distinctive qualities of the mad individual to the generality of disease. At the same time, it analyzes the ways in which a knowledge base that approaches madness as an incomprehensible reality is overlaid with literary depictions of the city as itself incoherent and incomprehensible: What psychiatric texts define as pathological behavior emerges in literary texts as a basic experience of urban modernity. By integrating the hermeneutical perspective of psychiatry and then superimposing other forms of knowledge onto the analysis of narratives of madness, the project seeks to develop conceptions of the psychopathic personality and psychopathic characters. It thereby highlights the new modes of narration that emerge in the literature on madness that, in turn, prove foundational to representations of urban modernity.

This dissertation pursues many objectives. One is the examination of medical police controls on prostitution in the early-20th century that drew attention to and enforced sexual differences through venereological inspections. The interest lies in the contact between the inspector and the inspected, the moment when the disciplinary knowledge systems of gynaecology and criminology interlock with modern urban planning. The figure of the prostitute brings a specific type of narrative into focus that is then examined in terms of its distribution and circulation within a historical set of ideas about knowledge. The central question, therefore, becomes: How does the sexual self orient itself in regards to venereal disease? Or more generally, how are people made into subjects in our culture?
In addition to concerns based on questions of content, the study also thematizes the question of form, namely of the form of knowledge that the project itself participates in. The project explicitly asks about the possibilities of writing an academic work that does not just aim to reconstruct a discourse and its various formations, but also invariably reflects on research writing as a process of generating knowledge. In so doing, the project strives to apprehend the modes of representation that contribute to the construction of disciplinary claims to truth. The principle objective is to configure a textual collage that encourages a step beyond the confinements of disparate disciplines. In this manner, the project endeavors to engage with texts as material that is open for dialogue and further reflection and research.

Using ego-documents in addition to literary and psychiatric texts that were written between 1870 and 1930, this project examines how Fabulation and Querulation were established, differentiated, criticized, and finally rejected once again as two categories of madness.
The first step of the project is to show that Fabulation and Querulation follow discrete rules, laws, and principles, whose own logic can be attributed to medial requirements, the process of writing itself, and cultural factors.
The second step involves reconstructing the transformations literature and psychiatry experienced in their engagement with Fabulation and Querulation, which includes both the genesis and practice of a fabulative writing style in literature as well as changes traced through the discourse and the practices of psychiatry.
The third step demonstrates the relevance of this theme as part of a theory of modernity. With Fabulation and Querulation psychiatry explored phenomena that it also in fact created, which demanded second-order observations and a conceptualization of systemic processes.
While psychiatry’s dealings with Fabulation and Querulation presented a problem that it was unable to solve, new developments in literature and the sciences were initiated by Fabulation: on the one hand, literature cultivated a specific modern narrative through Fabulation, which weakened the schematic distinction between fiction and reality; and on the other hand, psychology gained a new understanding of the relationship between reality and language in its study of Fabulation.

Autism was coined in 1910 by psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler to describe a symptom of schizophrenia. Then, in the 1940s it became the term used for an entire syndrome that afflicted children. It took some time before it gradually became disassociated from madness. Now, autism is understood in a new light as a complex »developmental disorder«. Not only is it the subject of intense research in psychiatry, but also in biology and the neurosciences, among other disciplines. Furthermore, autism has gained the attention of the public sphere in many countries around the globe. It  frequently makes headlines in the daily papers and is discussed in online forums. In fact, today people with autism are considered ideal candidates for employment in the IT sector, and it is not uncommon to find autistic protagonists in films and novels.

This project will culminate in a history of knowledge that sheds light on a range of historical conceptions of autism with the aid of scientific, literary, and popular sources. It also posits the question of which epistemic effects various methods of representation (in texts, films, and images) have on specific concepts of autism and how interactions between different discourses impact them as well.

These concepts will be regarded in their cultural-historical context as driving forces behind and expressions of significant cultural debates in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Conceptions of autism always already involve negotiating models of subjectivity, communication, or empathy, and of childhood and family. Representations of autism, which often portray it as an interpersonal disorder per se, elucidate historically variable understandings of the ›social‹. It is precisely through its constitutive intangibility that the figure of the autistic often makes visible that which it is not – and thus often occupies a position in the vacuous center of social self-descriptions.