POWER / KNOWLEDGE

1 On popular justice: discussion with Maoists

  In the following discussion MichaelFoucault and some Maoists militants attempt to identify the
  basic issues in a debate which had been initiated in response to the project of June 1971, to
  set up a people's court to judge the police. 

pg 15, imposition, penal legislation, certain allegedly universal moral categories

  For the burgeoisie it is a matter of imposing on the proletariat, by means of penal legislation,
  of prisons, but also of newspapers, of 'literature', certain allegedly universal moral
  categories which function as an ideological barrier between them and the non-proletarianised   
  people. All the literary, journalistic, medical, sociological and anthropological rhetoric about
  criminals (and we are all familiar with examples of all these in the second half of the
  nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century) play this role.

pg 16, the revolution and radical eliminitaion of the judicial apparatus

  This is why the revolution can only take place via the radical elimination of the judicial 
  apparatus, and anything which could reintroduce the penal apparatus, and anything which
  could reintroduce its ideology and enable this ideology to surreptitiously creep back into
  popular practices, must be banished.

pg 20, imposition of values disguised as ...

  Among the methods employed some were of enormous consequence (as, for example, the morality
  taught in primary school, that is, the fradual imposition of a whole system of values 
  disguised as the teaching of literacy, reading and writing covering up the imposition of vaules)
  and some were rather smaller inovations, tiny and horrible machiavelianisms.

pg 22, on creators of penal law

  Penal law was not created by the common people, nor by the peasantry, nor by the proletariat,
  but entirely by the burgeoisie as an important tactical weapon in this system of divisions
  which they wished to introduce. That this tactical weapon was not based on true assessment
  of what the actual possibilities of revolution were in fact, and a fortunate one at that.

pg 23, proletarian ideology

  This judicial apparatus has had specific ideological effects on each of the dominated classes,
  and there is in particular a proletarian ideology into which certain burgeois ideas about
  what is just and what unjust, about theft, property, crime and criminals have infiltrated

pg 26/27, burgeois apparatus vs new forms of organisation

  Moreover, you say that there must be a revolutionary state apparatus in order to regulate
  unity between the proletariat and the marginalised people. Agreed, but you will also grant
  me that the forms of state apparatus which we inherit from the burgeois apparatus cannot
  in any way serve as model for the new forms of organisation.

pg 30, model for the people's court

  I would even say - though perhaps the analogy is a bit strained - that the court sets up
  again a kind of divisions of labour. There are those who judge - or who pretend to judge -
  with total tranquility, without being in any way involved. This re-inforces the idea that
  for judicial proceedings to be just they must be conducted by someone who can remain quite
  detached, by an intellectual, an expert in the realm of ideas. When, into the bargain,
  the people's court is organised or presided over by intellectuals, who come along to hear
  what on the one hand the workers and on the other hand the bosses have go to say, and to 
  pronounce: "This one is innocent, that one guilty", then the whole thing is infused with
  idealism. When it comes to proposing this as a general model of what popular justice 
  should be like, I'm afraid that the worst possible model has been picked.

pg 36, moral ideology

  And moral ideology - for what are our moral values but those which are over and over again
  associated and re-confirmed by the decisions of the courts - this moral ideology, just
  like the forms of justice operated by the burgeois apparatus, must be submited to the
  scrutiny of the most rigorous criticism.

2 Prison talk

pg 38/39, surveillance, regime of power within the social body

      You determine one moment being central in the history of repression:the transition
      from the inflicting of penalties to the imposition of surveillance.

  That's correct - the moment where it became understood that it was more efficient and 
  profitable in terms of the economy of power to place people under surveillance than
  to subject them to some exemplary penalty. [...] But in thinking of the mechanisms
  I'm thinking rather of its capillary form of existence, the point where power reaches
  into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their
  actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives. The
  eighteenth century invented, so to speak, a synaptic regime of power, a regime of its
  exercise within the social body, rather from above it.

pg 39/40, prisons as instruments, handy deliquents, useful mafia

  People tend to suppose that the prison was kind of refuse-dump for criminals, a dump
  whose disadvantages became apparent during use, giving rise to the convinction that
  the prison must be reformed and made into means of transforming individuals. But this is
  not true [...] The prison was ment to be an instrument, comparable with - and no less
  perfect than - the school, the barracks, or the hospital, acting with precision upon its
  individual subjects. [...] Prisons manufactured deliquents, but deliquents turned out to
  be useful, in the economic domain as much as the political. Criminals come in handy. [...]

      So the Americans in the twentieth century weren't the first to use the Mafia for this
      sort of job?

  Absolutely not.

pg 47, no crime means no police

  At the end of the eighteenth century, people dreamed of a society without crime. And then
  the dream evaporated. Crime to was too useful to them to dream of anything as crazy - or
  ultimately as dangerous - as a society without crime. No crime means no police, What makes
  the presence and the control of the police tolerable for the population, if not fear of
  the criminal? This institution of the police, which is so recent and so opressive, is only
  justified by that fear. 

pg 51, mechanisms of power has never been studied

  Mechanisms of power in general have never been much studied by history. History has studied
  those who held power [...] Again, distinct from this, we have had histories of institutions
  [...] But power in its strategies, at once general and detailed, and its mechanisms, has
  never been studied.

pg 52, scientific research and capitalism + on quoting marx

  Knowledge and power are integrated with one another, and there i sno point in dreaming
  of a time when knowledge will cease to depend on power; this is just a way of reviving
  humanism in a utopian guise. It is not possible for power to be exercised without
  knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power. 'Liberate scientific
  research from the demands of monopoly capitalism': maybe it's a good slogan, but it will
  never be more than a slogan.

      You seem to have kept your distance from Marx and Marxism; this was a reproach that
      was being addressed to you already about The Archaeology of Knowledge.

  No doubt. But there is also a sort of game that i play with this. I often quote concepts,
  texts and phrases from Marx, but without feeling obliged to add the authenticating label
  of a footnote with a laudatory phrase to accompany the quotation. As long as one does
  that, one is regarded as someone who knows and reverses Marx [...] But i quote Marx
  without saying so, without quotation marks, and because people are incapable of
  recognising Marx's texts I am thought to be someone who doesn't quote Marx.

pg 53,54 on Nietzche and power

  Nietzche is the philosopher of power, a philosopher who managed to think of power
  without having to confine himself within a political theory in order to do so. [...]
  The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzche's is precisely to use it, to make it
  groan and protest. 

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.

4 Questions On Geography

pg 65, Marxism and philosophy as a university institution

  [...] Marxism, one which consists in saying, 'Marxism, as the science of sciences, can 
  provide the theory of science and draw the boundary between science and ideology'. Not this
  role of refree, judge and universal witness is one which I absolutely refuse to adopt,
  because it seems to me to be tied up with philosophy as a university institution.

pg 66, the question of Truth

  If someone wanted to be a philosopher but didn't ask himself the question, 'What is
  knowledge?', or, 'What is truth?', in what sense could one say he was a philosopher? And
  for all that I may like to say I'm not a philosopher, nonetheless if my concern is with
  truth then I'm still a philosopher. Since Nietzche this question of truth has been
  transformed. It is no longer, 'What is surest path to Truth?', but 'What is the hazardous
  career that Truth has followed?' That was Nietzche's question, Husserl's as well, in 'The
  Crisis of the European Sciences'. Science, the constraint to truth, the obligation of 
  truth and ritualised procedures for its production have traversed absolutely the whole of
  Western society for millenia and are now so universalised as to become the general law for
  all civilisations. What is the hostory of this 'will to truth'? What are its effects? How
  is all this interwoven with relations of power?

 

 
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