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The Dawn of Idiocy: Nineteenth Century Tropes and Topologies of Intelligence
David Roof (University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign)
The scientific paradigm of ‘intelligence’ as a human/mental teleology rests on a historical notion of “discovery” or scientific advancement illuminating the nature of intellectual ability. My paper, however, traces the shift in the epistemological orientation of ‘intelligence’ through the human sciences re/production of intellectual abnormality discourse throughout the nineteenth century. Specifically, I look at ‘idiocy’ as it became a formal scientific classification creating a binary between intellectual-abnormality and intelligence par excellence. My paper is divided into three sections. In the first section, I examine the work of Itard and the case of ‘Sauvage de l’Aveyron’, known later as ‘Victor’ he was regarded as a child who had been raised in the wild, completely out of contact with ‘civilization’. This event has been made famous in the history of psychology, and can be regarded as a conceptual marker for the birth of scientific intelligence. Here I examine the tropes of ‘wildness’ and ‘savagery’ as culturally self-authenticating devices, and the shift to psychologically formed tropes such as idiocy, feeble-mindedness, and imbecility. In the second section I investigate the rhetorical use of ‘intellectual abnormality’ discourse in newspaper articles, scientific journals, and congressional documents of the nineteenth century. This rhetoric formed notions of a crisis in society, and deviation among individuals. I also sketch-out the use of intellectual abnormality in the mental measurement movement as seen in the work of Goddard, Galton, and Binet. These three scientists are regarded as the fathers of eugenics, genetics, and the intelligence quotient. Here I am looking at idiocy, as based not simply on a corpus of information or understanding, but rather, a ‘body’ through which power/knowledge functions, -a body in which knowledge is invested, and in turn re/produces that knowledge. My evidence suggests that this ‘body of knowledge’ which allows ‘scientific intelligence’ to function, did not simply emerge as a unified body, but was it put together in piecemeal fashion from a variety of discursive conceptions. The third section explores the social/spatial formations through which the theoretical components of intellectual abnormality were manifested. Here the focus is on discourse used to divide, classify, and arrange socially and spatially individuals in realms of perceived intellectual function. For example, the spatial arrangements of asylums, and the separate ‘ungraded classrooms’ for ‘backward children’ that accompanied the common school movement. Here I draw on asylum reports, manuals for school architecture, and academic journals.
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