3 Body / power

pg 55, the great fantasy: universality of wills

      Is there a fantasy body corresponding to different types of institution?

  I believe the great fantasy is the idea of a social body constituted by the universality
  of wills. Now the phenomenon of the social body is the effect not of a consensus but of
  the materiality if power operating on the very bodies of individuals.

pg 59/60, functions of power and the state apparatuses

  I would also distinguish myself from para-Marxists like Marcuse who the notion of
  repression an exaggerated role - because power would be a fragile thing if its only
  function were to repress, if it worked only through the mode od censorship, exclusion,
  blockage and repression, in the manner of a great Superego, exercising itself only in
  a negative way.If, on the contrary, power is strong this is because, as we are beginning
  to realise, it produces effects at the level of desire - and also at the level of
  knowledge.[...]

      Your study is concentrated on all those micro-powers that are exercised at the level
      of daily life. Aren't you neglecting the State apparatus here?

  [...] In order to be able to fight a State which is more then just a government, the 
  revolutionary movement must posses equivalent politico-military forces and hence must
  constitute itself as a party, organised internally in the same way as a State apparatus
  with the same mechanisms of hierarchies and organisation of power. [...] I don't claim
  at all that the State apparatus is unimportant, but it seems to me that among all the
  conditions for avoiding a repetition of the Soviet experience and preventing the
  revolutionary process from running into the ground, one of the first things that has to
  be understood is that power isn't localised in the State apparatus and that nothing in
  society will be changed if the mechanisms of power that function outside, below and
  alongside the State apparatuses, on a much more minute and everyday level, are not also
  changed.

pg 60/61, case for psychoanalysis

      Could we now turn then to human sciences, and psychoanalysis in particular?

  The case of psychoanalysis is indeed an interesting one. [...] If one can suceed in
  modifying these relationships of power into which psychoanalysis enters, and rendering
  unacceptable the effects of power they propagate, this will render the functioning of 
  the State apparatuses much more difficult. Another advantage of conducting a critique
  of relations existing at minute level would be to render impossible the reproduction
  of the form of the State apparatus within revolutionary movements.

pg 61/61, role of intellectual

      How do you see the intellectual's role in millitant practice?

  The intellectual no longer has to play the role of an advisor. The project, tactics and
  goals to be adopted are a matter for those who do the fighting. What the intellectual can
  do is to provide instruments of analysis, and at present this is the historian's essential
  role. What's effectively needed is a ramified, penetrative perception of the present, one
  that makes it possible to locate lines of weakness, strong points, positions where the
  instances of power have secured and implanted themselves by a system of organisation dating
  back over 150 years. In other words, a topological and geological survey of battlefield -
  that is the intellectual's role. But as for saying, 'Here is what you must do!', certainly
  not.

pg 62, from philanthropy to 'social workers'

  During certain periods there appear agents of liaison. Take the example of philanthropy in
  the early nineteenth century: people appear who make it their business to involve themselves
  in other people's lives, healthy, nutrition, housing; then, out of this confused sed of 
  functions there emerge certain personages, institutions, forms of knowledge: public hygiene,
  inspectors, social workers, psychologists. And we are now seeing a whole proliferation of
  different categories of social work. Naturaly it's medicine which played the basic role as
  the common denominator. Its discourse circulated from one instance to the next. It was in
  the name of medicine both that people came to inspect the layout of houses and, equally, that
  they classified individuals as insane, criminal, or sick.