A Media Theory Approach to Representations of ‘Nervous Illness’ in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The investigation conducted here focuses on two very remarkable asylum memoirs – one published in 1838, the other in 1840 – by John Perceval, a self-proclaimed ‘insane and nervous patient’. It makes use of recent developments in the study of media – in particular, the theory of ‘cultural techniques’ – to explore the fascination Perceval evinced in his memoirs for some of the more mundane architectural features of the various institutions in which he found himself: a glass door, iron veranda blinds. Equally troubling to him was the human mechanism consti-tuted by the asylum attendants. Other theoretical contexts are supplied by Friedrich Kittler’s analysis of Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness , Theodo Adorno’s rumination on refrigerators, and Gregory Bateson’s application of information and cybernetic theory to the study of psychosis and alcoholism as pathologies of communication (in 1961, Bateson produced the only modern edition of Perceval’s writings). Perceval’s books are books of com-plaint. They are repetitive, snobbish, and embittered. But they include remarkable passages of commentary and description which make it clear that for him insanity was a process, not a condition: a process which could be reversed. His account of the crucial stages in that process coincides with an enhanced attention to infrastructure as medium or cultural technique. Insanity was the mediated life gone horribly wrong.