Erving Goffman’s Asylums Fifty Years On

Beyond These Walls:

The ‘Total Institution’ of Homelessness

John Adlam and Christopher Scanlon

ALEXANDER: Dost thou not know that I am able to give thee a kingdom?
DIOGENES: I know thou art able, if I had one, to take it from me; and I shall never place
any value on that which such as thou art can deprive me of.
[Henry Fielding, A Dialogue between Alexander the Great, and Diogenes the Cynic , 1743]

When Goffman wrote about ‘total institutions’, he had in mind those intra-mural spaces
in which people are separated from wider society either through the nature of their
work (barracks and monasteries) or because of incapacity, disadvantage or
dangerousnesss (orphanages, mental hospitals and prisons). The total institution was
identifiable by the impermeability of its inherent “barrier to social intercourse with the
outside and to departure” (Goffman, 1961: 15). Processes and rituals of admission to
the institution across its separating boundary were accompanied by varying degrees of
humiliation and often catastrophic losses of role and identity. The ‘key fact’ of a total
institution was related not to the primary task of the institution itself but to the
bureaucratic management of those subject to its authority, “whether or not this is a
necessary or effective means of social organization” (Goffman, 1961: 18). He held that
“every institution has encompassing tendencies” (Goffman, 1961: 15) and noted that
staff employed in such institutions were set up, like so many miniature Alexanders, with
immense arbitrary power over those in their charge.

We would like to pay homage to Goffman’s ideas by wondering if the concept of the
‘total’ nature of an institution can also apply extra-murally to the bureaucratic
management of incapacitated or disadvantaged persons outside the perimeter wall. We
have previously noted how, in response to a fear and loathing of the ‘violence and
madness in, and of, the community’, the ‘housed’ increasingly lock themselves in to
alarmed houses in gated communities or behind high walls, because there is nothing so
frightening as having ‘them’ in our backyards (Foster and Roberts, 1998) and nothing so
reassuring as the ‘beggar at the gate’ (Scanlon and Adlam, 2008). The Italian
philosopher Giorgio Agamben (2005) analyses ‘states of exception’, whereby
sovereignty is paradoxically asserted over sections of a population by virtue of their
being excluded from the rights and legal frameworks of citizenship that sovereignty
exists to uphold and within which an experience of social inclusion is defined. Hannah
Arendt, reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), showed how the
totalitarian nature of the Nazi state and the fascist state of mind was defined by its
capacity to place Jews and other constructed ‘sub-species’ outside the frame of
citizenship and the rule of law. The junta in Argentina in the early 1970s first created a
quasi-legal category of ‘non-Argentinians’ before causing the ‘disappearance’ of
thousands of their number (Bell, 2010). Processes of ‘extraordinary rendition’ and the
extra-legal status of Guantanamo Bay are contemporary examples of how ‘others’ are
rendered persona non grata.

Fielding’s imaginary dialogue between Alexander and Diogenes, cited above, epitomises
this issue of the ‘total’ nature of sovereignty and how one is never in greater peril than
when apparently placed outside sovereignty’s bounds. Diogenes sees that the risk of
accepting Alexander’s gift of a kingdom (or a house) is that, in so doing, he does not
become less vulnerable but more so. At the time of writing the UK government
continues to refuse voting rights to prisoners: the Prime Minister David Cameron has
said that “it makes me physically ill even to contemplate having to give the vote to
anyone who is in prison. Frankly, when people commit a crime and go to prison, they
should lose their rights, including the right to vote” (Hansard, 2010). In the USA,
Gilligan (1996) has powerfully shown how male rape is a systematic instrument of terror
deployed by the State against those who are, in effect, placed outside the State’s
protection by being incarcerated. We suggest that these victims of intra-mural
institutional violence are a priori subjected to the extra-mural violence of the wider
societal total institution that has excluded them. We might also note Declerk’s (2006)
critique of the urban west’s hostility to the homeless. The bureaucratic control of the
homeless and the stateless; the humiliations attendant upon their transition to those
‘outside’, excepted states; the speed with which individuals become deskilled when
administratively stripped of that which previously oriented them to the world; the
disorienting jargon and vernacular of the inside or outside; all of these exclusions on the
‘outside’ echo the routines and rituals of passage that Goffman describes in relation to
the forced inclusions on the ‘inside’ of his total institutions (see also Brown and Walker,
2010; Brown et al., 2011).

Bion’s theory of basic assumption states of mind in groups and society (1961; see also
Hopper, 2003; 2011) may perhaps shed some light on how these ‘disturbances of
groupishness’ extend the traumatising dynamics of the total institution to excluding
(dis)organisations (Scanlon and Adlam, 2011a) and indeed to whole populations.
Goffman’s total institution is located in an age dominated by what Bion called a
‘dependent basic assumption’, where what was expressed was a desperate wish for a
benevolent leader who would administer and control the deviance and violence of the
fascist state of mind. It was a time when it was still possible to speak positively about
communalism (Rapaport, 1960) as a benign, developmental opportunity and about
socialism as a democratic means through which it might be achieved; when the promise
of houses for heroes had yet to lose its lustre. The tension lay between this wish for a
more benign and re-assuring dependency and a manic hope – which Bion might have
understood as a ‘pairing basic assumption’ – invested in an aspirational modernity
within which there would be meaningful ‘care in the community’: a hope rooted in a
mad idea that the community is willing to care about those who find themselves living
at its edge.
We have elsewhere borrowed Levi-Strauss’ concepts of anthropophagic (abolishing
difference by incorporating) and anthropoemic (abolishing difference by evacuating)
responses to that which is experienced as ‘other’ and sought to apply them to an
analysis of traumatised social systems (Levi-Strauss, 1955; Scanlon and Adlam, 2008;
2011a). In these terms, the old asylums and criminal justice systems were
predominantly anthropophagic in nature, forcibly incorporating, in order to neutralise,
the threatening difference of the mad, bad, sad and indigent (Foucault, 1961; Adlam
and Scanlon, 2010; Scanlon and Adlam, 2011b). However, as we are describing here,
the landscape of social care and control was, and is, also characterised by anthropoemic
responses that result in a denying of asylum, such as punishment by transportation of
offender, the deportation of asylum seekers and the denial of other ‘intra-mural’
services for other excluded and worth-less groups such as the homeless, the chronically
sick, the elderly and disabled (Dartington, 2010) and the unemployed (Scanlon and
Adlam, 2010; Adlam, Pelletier and Scanlon, 2010).

Now, in our liquidly modern world (Bauman, 2000), some of the old-style would-be
helping total institutions have fallen out of fashion and favour so that those who might
have been helped are now anthropoemically vomited out into the sick-bucket of
incohesive, ‘metropolitan’ social systems (Hopper, 2003, 2011). The world of benign
dependency has failed and in its failing the needs of the vulnerable are denied –
perhaps because, literally and metaphorically, we cannot ‘afford’ to think about them
(Hopper, 2003; Cooper and Lousada, 2005; Dartington, 2010). Most of us live beyond
the fortress walls in an aggregated, individualistic world where we experience the
potentially lethal consequences of quick fixes, instant gratification and envious
competition for scarce and dwindling natural and social resources ( see eg Wilkinson and
Pickett, 2009; Dorling, 2010).

The liquidly modern ‘total institution’, in contrast to the manifest social terror of the
walled asylums, can then be understood as the apparently ‘invisible’ background of
objective violence out of which ‘individual acts of terror’ emanate (Žižek, 2008).
Diogenes’ protest against the excluding/excepting nature of Metropolitan ancient Greece
was to identify himself as a Cosmopolitan citizen of the world, thus rejecting the tyranny
of inside and outside that is established by ‘limit concepts’ (Agamben, 1998) such as city
walls and state boundaries. In the post-war period and up until the fairly recent past, a
nostalgic longing for totally reliable and benevolent (and dependent) metropolitan social
institutions was juxtaposed against and oscillated with the manic hope that in a caring
community the included and the excluded could really ‘get it together’ (Bion, 1961). In
the aggregated, liquidly modern and incohesive world that we are evoking, to survive is
perhaps to accept that homelessness as a bodily state, or ‘unhousedness’ as a state of
mind, is the norm of the modern ‘total institution’. The challenge is how best to position
oneself in order to find meaningful relationships with others in a world where there is an
ever-present danger: where, to borrow from Flann O’Brien (1939), ‘a pint of plain is
your only man’ and Diogenes’ barrel is the only refuge.
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