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.