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he writes about the history of prisons and discipline.
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And he argues that institutions like the asylum and the prison form
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modern subjectivities, form how it is that we think we can
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be people, and know things.
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So, the argument goes something like:
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you can't be a modern madman without the asylum.
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It's not like madness existed, and then asylums got built to take care of it.
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He sees the rise of the asylum and the rise of clinical insanity as
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requiring one another; you can't have one without the other.
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So, it's the rise of the defining institution that maps directly onto
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the rise of any condition like that: similarly sexuality,
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laws that govern deviants, norms of behavior that stabilize gender.