The
essential
thing is the importance of the principle; the intransitivity of literature.
Foucault-Live
104 Film and Popular Memory
? which have an important role. In A Whole Life, for instance, they play a very big part. Or again, in the films of Marcel Ophuls, or of Harris and Sedouy, it's very moving to watch the reality to Duclos in action in 1936 or 1939. And on the other hand, there are fictional characters who, at a given mo- ment of history, condense within themselves the greatest pos- sible number of social relations, of links with history. This is why Lacombe Lucien is so successful. Lacombe is a French- man under occupation, an ordinary Joe with concrete connec- tions to Nazism, to the countryside, to local power, etc. And we shouldn't ignore this way of personifying history, of incar- nating it in a character or a collection of characters who em- body, at a given moment, a privileged relation to power.
? There are lots of figures in the history of the workers' movement that aren't known; there are plenty of heroes in the history of the working class who've been completely driven out of memory. And I think there's a real issue to be fought here. There's no need for Marxism to keep on making films about Lenin, we've got plenty already.
? MF: What you say is important. It's a trait of many Marxists nowadays--^ignorance of history. All these people, who spend their time talking about the misrepresentation of history, are only capable of producing commentaries on texts. What did Marx say? Did Marx really say that? Look, what is Marxism but a different way of analyzing history itself? In my opinion, the left in France has no real grasp of history. It used to have. At one time in the 19th century, Michelet might have been said to represent the left. There was Jaure`s, too, and after them there grew up a kind of tradition of left-wing, social democratic historians (Mathiez, etc. ). Nowadays it's dwindled to a trickle; whereas it could be a formidable wave, carrying along writers, film-makers. True, there has been Aragon and Les Cloches de Bale--& very great historical novel. But there
? Film and Popular Memory 105
? are relatively few things, compared to what it could be like in a society where, after all, one can say that the intellectuals are more or less impregnated with Marxism.
Q: In this respect, the cinema offers something new: history captured "Live. " How do people in America relate to history, seeing the Vietnam war on television every evening while they're eating.
MF: As soon as you start seeing pictures of war every evening, war becomes totally acceptable. That's to say, thor- oughly tedious, you'd really love to see something else. But when it becomes boring, you put up with it. You don't even watch it. So how is this particular reality on film to be reacti- vated as an existing, historically important reality?
Q: Have you seen The Camisards?
MF: Yes, I liked it very much. Historically, it's im- peccable. It's well made, intelligent and it makes a lot of things clear.
? Q: I think that's the direction we have to take in mak- ing films. To come back to the films we were talking about at the beginning--^we must raise the question of the extreme left's confusion in the face of certain aspects of Lacombe Lu- cien and Night Porter, particularly the sexual one; and how this confusion can be of benefit to the right. . .
? MF: As for what you call the extreme left, I find my- self in considerable difficulty. I'm not at all sure that it still exists. Nonetheless, there really needs to be a thorough sum- ming-up of what the extreme left has done since 1968, both negatively and positively. It's true that this extreme left has
? 106 Film and Popular Memory
? been the means of spreading a whole number of important ideas; on sexuality, women, homosexuality, psychiatry, hous- ing, medicine. It's also been the means of spreading methods of action, where it continues to be of importance. The extreme left has played as important a role in the forms of acticity as in its themes. But there's also a negative summing-up to be made, concerning certain Stalinist and terrorist organizational practices. And a misunderstanding, too, of certain broad and deeply-rooted processes which recently resulted in 13 million people backing Mitterrand, and which have always been disre- garded, on the pretext that this was the politics of the politi- cians, that this was the business of the parties. A whole heap of things have been ignored; notably, that the desire to defeat the right has been a very important political factor within the masses for a number of months and even years. The extreme left hasn't sensed this desire, thanks to a false definition of the masses, a wrong appreciation of what this will to win really is. Faced with the risks a co-opted victory would involve, it pre- fers not to take the risk of winning. Defeat, at least, can't be co-opted. Personally, I'm not so sure. A
? Translated by Martin Jordin Notes
' Lacombe Lucien, a film by Louis Malle, is the story of a French collaborator during the German occupation. Night Porter, a film by Liliana Cavani, is a sado-masochistic love story involving a former Nazi camp worker and prisoner.
^ LIP, a cause ce? le`bre in France, involved the take-over by workers of a factory. Cf. A. Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States (New York: Autonomedia, 1988).
' P. Modiano, La Place de l'Etoile (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).
? 9
Sorcery and Madness
? ? Q: For twenty years Thomas S. Szasz has developed the theme that there are fundamental analogies between the persecution of heretics and witches in former times and the persecution of the mad and mentally ill today. It's the prin- ciple subject of his book The Manufacture of Madness, which shows that the therapeutic state has been substituted for the theological state. ' Psychiatrists and more generally workers in the field of mental health have succeeded in bringing back the Inquisition and in setting it up as a new scientific panacea. Does the parallel between the Inquisition and psychiatry ap- pear to you to be historically justified?
MF: When will we be delivered from these witches and misunderstood madnesses that a society without psychia- trists unfortunately condemned to the stake? When will we be rid of this commonplace that so many books are still recount- ing today?
? What's strong and important in Szasz's work is to have shown that the historical continuity doesn't go from witches to madness, but from the institution of witches to the one of psychiatrists. It's not the witch, with her tawdry chime- ras and power over the shades, who has finally been recog- nized as the alienated one by a tardy but beneficent science.
? 108 Sorcery and Madness
? Szasz shows that a certain kind of power is exercized through the surveillances, interrogations and decrees of the Inquisition; and that through successive transformations it interrogates us still, questions our desires and our dreams, disturbs our nights, hunts down secrets and traces boundaries, designates what's abnormal, undertakes purifications and assures the functioning of order.
? Szasz, I hope, has definitively displaced the old question--^were witches the mad ones? --and reformulated it in these terms: What, in the psychiatric set-up, is still recog- nizable as the effect of a power linked to the prying work of the Inquisitors, with their long muzzles and sharp teeth? The Manufacture of Madness, I think, is an important book in the history of the related techniques of power and knowledge.
? Q: In The Manufacture of Madness Szasz describes the insatiable curiosity of the Inquisitors concerning the sexual fantasies and activities of their victims, the witches, and com- pares it to that of psychiatrists. Do you think this comparison is justified?
? MF: We're really going to have to rid ourselves of the "Marcuseries" and "Reichianisms" which encumber us and which would have us believe that of all things sexuality is the most obstinately "repressed" and "overrepressed" by our "bourgeois," "capitalist," "hypocritical" and "Victorian" soci- ety. ^ Since the Renaissance there is nothing that has been more studied, questioned, extorted, brought to light and into dis- course, forced into confession, required to express itself and praised, finally, when it found the words. No civilization has chattered so much about sexuahty as ours. And many people still believe that they are subverting it when they are only obeying this injunction to confess, this secular requisition that subjects us--^we other men of the West--to say all about our
? Sorcery and Madness 109
? desire. Since the Inquistion, through penitence, the examina- tion of conscience, spiritual guidance, education, medicine, hygiene, psychoanalysis and psychiatry, sexuality has always been suspected of holding over us a decisive and profound truth. Tell us what your pleasure is, don't hide anything of what happens between your heart and your sex, and we will know what you are and what you are worth.
? Szasz has seen very clearly I think how the "ques- tioning" of sexuality was not simply the morbid interest of Inquisitors crazed by their own desire, but that what was tak- ing shape there was a modem kind of power and control over individuals. Szasz is not an historian and perhaps one can quarrel with him, but at a time when the discourse on sexuality fascinates so many historians, it was good that a psychoanalyst retraced in historical terms the interrogation of sexuality. And many of Szasz's intuitions confirm what Le Roy Ladurie re- veals in his remarkable book Montaillou.
Q: What do you think of Szasz's idea that in order to understand the psychiatric institution--and all mental health movements--^it's advisable to study the psychiatrists them- selves and not the so-called sick? '
? MF: If it's a question of studying the psychiatric in- stitution, he's obviously right. But I think Szasz goes much further. Everyone dreams of writing a history of the mad, of going over to the other side and tracing the great evasions or the subtle retreats into delirium fi'om the beginning. Yet, under the pretext of tuning in and letting the mad themselves speak, one already accepts the division between the two as a fact. It's necessarily better to put oneself at the point where the machin- ery that makes these qualifications and disqualifications is ac- tually functioning, and putting the mad and the non-mad on two sides facing each other. Madness is no less an effect of
? ? 110 Sorcery and Madness
power than non-madness; it doesn't dart through the world like a furtive beast until its course is halted and it's put in the cage of an asylum. It's a tactical response, in the form of an infinite spiral, to the tactics that invest it. In another of Szasz's books. The Myth of Mental Illness, there's a chapter that I think is exemplary on this subject, where hysteria is shown to be a product of psychiatric power, but also as the reply that opposes it and the trap into which it falls.
? Q: If the therapeutic state has replaced the theological state, and if medicine and psychiatry have today become equally the most restrictive and underhanded means of social control isn't it necessary from the point of view of an indi- vidualist and libertarian like Szasz to fight for the separation of medicine and the State?
MF; On this point I have some difficulty. I wonder if Szasz is not identifying, in a way that's too forced, power with the State.
Perhaps this identification is explained by Szasz's double experience: the European experience, in a totalitarian Hungary where all forms and mechanisms of power were jeal- ously controlled by the State, and an experience of an America penetrated with this conviction that liberty begins where the centralized intervention of the State ceases.
? In fact, I don't believe that power is only the State, or that the non-State is therefore liberty. It's true (here Szasz is right) that the circuits of psychiatricalizing and psycholo- gizing, even if they pass through the parents, the peer group and the immediate surroundings, are finally supported by a vast medico-administrative complex. But the "free" medicine of the "liberal" doctor, the private psychiatrist or home psy- chologist are not an alternative to institutional medicine. They are part of the network, even in the case where they are poles
? ? ? Sorcery and Madness 111
? apart from the institution. Between the therapeutic state Szasz talks about and "liberated" medicine there is a whole play of support and complex cross-reference.
? The analyst listening silently in his chair is not so foreign to the insistent questioning and the close surveillance in the asylum. I don't think one can apply the world "libertar- ian"--Does Szasz himself do it? I don't remember--to a doc- tor who is "liberal," that is, linked to an individual profit that the State protects all the more since it profits from it too. Szasz cites very effectively the anti-State interventions of these lib- eral doctors, and they have had salutory effects. But it seems to me that there you have the combative utilization--against "general abuses"--of a medicine whose destination rather is to assure, conjointly with the State and with its support, the well functioning of a normalizing society. Rather than the therapeu- tic State, it's the normalizing society, with its institutional and private wheels, that it is necessary to study and criticize. Robert Castel's book Le Psychanalysme* seems to me to have cast a very accurate light on this great continuous web which reaches from the sad dormitory to the profit-making couch. A
? Translated by John Johnston Notes
' Thomas Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
? ^ Foucault's History of Sexuality, which takes this anti-Reic- hian stand, came out at the time of this interview.
' Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).
*Robert Castel, Le Psychanalysme (Paris: Maspero, 1973).
? 10
On Literature
? ? Q: What is the place or status of literary texts in your research?
MF: In Madness and Civilization and in The Order of Things, I only mention literary texts, or point to them in passing, as a kind of dawdler who says, "Now, there you see, one cannot fail to speak of Rameau's Nephew. " But these allusions play no role in the economy of the process.
For me, literature was on each occasion the object of a report, not part of an analysis nor a reduction nor an integra- tion into the domain of analysis. It was a point of rest, a halt, a blazon, a flag.
? Q: You didn't want these texts to play the role of expressing or reflecting historical processes?
MF: No. . . The question would have to be broached on another level.
There has never really been an analysis of how, given the mass of things that are spoken, given the set of discourses actually held, a certain number of these discourses (literary
discourse, philosophical discourse) are sacralized and given a particular function.
? I
? 114 On Literature
? It seems that traditionally literary or philosophical discourse has been made to function as a substitute or as a general envelope for all other discourses. Literature had to assume the value for all the rest. People have written histories of what was said in the 18 th century by passing through Fon- tenelle, Voltaire, Diderot or The New Heloise, etc. Or else they have thought of these texts as the expression of something that in the end failed to be formulated on a more quotidien level.
? In regard to this attitude, I passed from a state of uncertainty--citing literature where it was, without indicating its relationship with the rest--to a frankly negative position, by trying to make all the non-literary or para-literary dis- courses that were actually constituted in a given period re- appear positively, and by excluding literature. In Discipline and Punish it's a matter only of bad literature.
Q: How does one distinguish good from bad?
? MF: Exactly. That's just what will have to be consid- ered one day. We will have to ask ourselves just what is this activity that consists of circulating fictions, poems, and narra- tives in a society. We also ought to analyze a second opera- tion: among all these narratives (re? cits), what is it that sacral- izes a certain number and makes them begin to function as "literature"? They are quickly taken up in the interior of an institution that at its origin was very different: the institution of the university. Now it begins to be identified with the liter- ary institution.
? This is a very visible line of decline in our culture. In the 19th century the university was the medium at the center of which a literature said to be classic was constituted. This literature was by definition not a contemporary literature, and was valorized simultaneously as both the only base for con- temporary literature and as its critique. Hence a very curious
? On Literature 115
? play in the 19th century between literature and the university, between the writer and the academic.
? And then, little by little, the two institutions, which underneath their petty squabbles were in fact profoundly akin, tended to become completely indistinguishable. We know per- fectly well that today the literature said to be avant-garde is only ever read by academics; that a writer over thirty has students around him who are doing their theses on his work; and that writers live for the most part by giving courses and by being academics. Thus the truth about something is already evident there, in the fact that literature functions thanks to a play of selection, sacralization, and institutional valorization of which the university is at once both the operator and the receiver.
? Q: Are there intrinsic criteria for [evaluating] texts, or is it only a matter of sacralization by the university as institution?
MF; I know nothing about it. I would simply say this; in order to break with a certain number of myths, like the one of literature's expressive character, it has been very im- portant to establish the great principle that literature is con- cemed only with itself If it has anything to do with its author, it's according to a mode of death, silence, and the very disap- pearance of the one who writes.
? The reference here to Blanchot or Barthes matters little.
The essential thing is the importance of the principle; the intransitivity of literature. It was indeed the first stage thanks to which one could get rid of the idea that literature was the place of all transits, or the point where all transits ended up, the expression of totalities.
? But it seems to me that this was still only a stage. Yet, to maintain the analysis at this level is to risk not disman-
? 116 On Literature
? tling the set of sacralizations by which literature has been affected. On the contrary, one risks sacralizing it even worse. And that's actually what has happened, even up to 1970. We have seen a certain number of the themes of Blanchot and Barthes used for a kind of exaltation, at once ultra-lyrical and ultra-rationalizing, of literature as a structure of language sus- ceptible to analysis only in itself and in its own terms.
? The pohtical implications were not absent from this exaltation. Thanks to it, one succeeded in saying that literature in itself was at this point freed from all determinations, that the fact of writing was in itself subversive, that the writer possesses, in the very gesture of writing, an imprescribable right to subversion! Consequently, the writer was a revolution- ary, and the more the writing was Writing (l'e? criture e? tait e? criture), the more it plunged into intransitivity, the more it produced in doing so the revolution! You know that these
things were unfortunately said. . .
? In fact, Blanchot's and Barthes' trajectory tended to- ward a desacralization of literature by breaking the connec- tions that put it in a position of absolute expression. This rup- ture implied that the next movement would be to desacralize it absolutely, and to try to see how, in the general mass of what was said, at a given moment and in a certain mode, this par- ticular area of language could be constituted, an area that must not be asked to bear the decisions of a culture, but rather how it can be that a culture has decided to give it this position so singular and so strange.
? . Q: Why strange?
? MF; Our culture accords to hterature a part which is in one sense extraordinarily limited: how many people read lit- erature? What place does it actually have in the general expan- sion of discourse?
? On Literature 117
? But this same cuhure imposes on all its children, as a touting towi^ffds culture, this passage through a whole ideol- ogy, a whole theology of literature, during their studies. There is a kind of paradox there.
? And it's not unrelated to the affirmation that writing is subversive. That someone affirms it, in such and such a periodical, has no importance and no effect. But if at the same moment all instructors firom high school teachers to university professors tell you, explicitly or not, that the great decisions of a culture, the points where it changes. . . these must be found in Diderot, Sade, Hegel or Rabelais, you see very well that it's finally a matter of the same thing. Both make literature func- tion in the same way. At this level, the effects of reinforce- ment are reciprocal. The so-called avant-garde groups and the gross mass at the university are in agreement. That leads to a very heavy political blockage.
? Q; How have you escaped this blockage?
? MF: My manner of taking up the problem was on the one hand the book on Raymond Roussel and then above all the book on Pierre Rivie`re. Between the two there is the same investigation; what is this threshhold starting from which a discourse (whether that of a sick person, a criminal, etc. ) be- gins to functiion in a field described as literature?
? In order to know what is literature, I would not want to study internal structures. I would rather grasp the move- ment, the small process through which a non-literary type of discourse, neglected, forgotten as soon as it is spoken, enters the literary domain. What happens there? What is released? How is this discourse modified in its efforts by the fact that it is recognized as literary?
? 118 On Literature
? Q: You have however devoted texts to literary works about which this question is not posed. I am thinking notably of your essays in Critique on Blanchot, Klossowski and Bataille. If they were collected in a single volume, perhaps they would give your transversal an unexpected image. . .
? MF; Yes, but. . . . It would be rather difficult to speak of them. At bottom, Blanchot, Klossowski and Bataille, who were finally the three who interested me in the 1960s, were for me much more than literary works or discourses interior litera- ture. They were discourses exterior to philosophy.
? Q; That is to say. . .
MF; Let's take Nietzsche, if you like. Nietzsche rep- resents, in relation to academic philosophical discourse, which ceaselessly refers to him, the outside edge. Of course a whole channel of Western philosophy can be found in Nietzsche's works. Plato, Spinoza, the philosophers of the 18th century, Hegel. . . all that passes through Nietzsche. And yet, in relation to philosophy, there is in Nietzsche's work a roughness, a rustic simplicity, an outsideness, a kind of mountain peasant- ness that allows him, with a shrug of the shoulder and without appearing in any way ridiculous, to say with unavoidable force: "What non-sense all that is! "
To rid oneself of philosophy necessarily implies such an offhandedness. It's not by remaining in philosophy, it's not by refining it to the maximum, it's not by turning it against itself that one exits from it. No. It's by opposing it with a kind of astonished and joyful stupidity, a sort of incomprehensible burst of laughter that in the end understands, or in any case, breaks. Yes. . . it breaks more than it understands.
? To the extent that I was nevertheless an academic, a professor of philosophy, what remained of traditional philo-
? On Literature 119
? sophic discourse hampered me in the work I had done on madness. There was an Hegelianism there that dragged. To make objects appear that were as derisory as relations with the police, measures of internment and the cries of the mad, that did not suffice inevitably to exit from philosophy. For me, Nietzsche, Bataille, Blanchot and Klossowski were ways of exiting fi'om philosophy.
? In the violence of Bataille, in the sort of insidious and disturbing sofmess of Blanchot, in Klossowski's spirals, there was something that began with philosophy, put it into play and into question, then left it and came back. . . Something like the theory of breathing in Klossowski is connected by I don't know how many lines to all of Western philosophy. And then, through the staging (mis en sce`ne), the formulation, the way in which all that functions in Le Baphomet, philosophy leaves it entirely.
? These comings and goings around the position of phi- losophy finally rendered permeable--and thus finally deri sory--the frontier between philosophy and non-philosophy. A
? Translated by John Johnston
? 11
The Politics of Soviet Crime
? ? Q: Guard towers, barded-wire fences, police dogs, prionsers transported in trucks like so many animals. . . When the first filmed reports of life in a Soviet detention camp to reach the West were shown on French television, these were some of the scenes witnessed by viewers--scenes all too char- acteristic of our century. Soviet spokesmen at first denied the film's authenticity. Later admitting the existence of the camp in question, they added, by way of justification, that only non- political prisoners were interned there. The response of the French public was on the whole one of relief: "Oh well, since they're only common criminals. . . . " What were your reactions to the film and to the responses it elicited?
? MF: One early statement on the part of the Soviet authorities impressed me enormously. They claimed that the very existence of the camp in plain view in the middle of a city proved that there was nothing shocking about it. As though the fact that a concentration camp could exist undis- guised in the middle of Riga constituted an excuse. (The Ger- mans, after all, sometimes felt the need to hide their camps. ) As though the shamelessness of not hiding from the people of Riga what they do in that city entided the Soviet authorities to demand silence everywhere else and to enforce their demand.
? 122 Politics of Soviet Crime
? It's the logic of Cyrano de Bergerac, cynicism as censorship; "You're not allowed to mention my nose because it's right in the middle of my face. " As though it were possible not to see the Riga camp for what it is, a symbol of shamelessly exer- cised power, just as we see our own city halls, courts, and prisons as emblems on the escutcheon of power.
Setting aside for a moment the question of whether its inmates are political or non-political prisoners, the camp's high visibility and the fear inherent in that visibility are in themselves political. Barbed wire, searchlight beams, and the echoing footsteps of prison guards--that is political. And that is policy.
I was also struck by the Soviet rationalization you quoted; "These are not political prisoners; they are common criminals. " Now, as a matter of fact, the Soviet vice-minister of Justice has said that the notion of political imprisonment does not even exist in his country. The only ones who may be prosecuted are those who seek to weaken the social order and the state by means of high treason, espionage, terrorism, vili- fying propaganda, or the dissemination of misinformation. In short, he defines as non-pohtical precisely those acts which the rest of the world considers political.
? The Soviet definition is at once logical and bizarre. The obliteration of the distinction between political and non- political offenses in the Soviet Union would be a logical de- velopment. But at that point, it seems to me, all offenses be- come political. In a socialist state, any breach of law--rob- bery, the most petty of thefts--^is not a crime against private property, but against the property of the people, against soci- ety itself, socialist production, and the body politic. I would understand if the Soviet authorities had said that there were no longer any non-political prisoners because all crime is by defi- nition political. As it is, we must not only accuse the vice minister of lying (because he knows there are political prison-
? Politics of Soviet Crime 123
? ers in the Soviet Union), but also ask him how after sixty years of socialism they still have a criminal code for non-political crimes.
? However, if we define criminality in purely political terms, we necessarily forego the traditional contempt for "common" criminals that is an essential element of the penal system itself And if we consider all crime to be political, then our response to it must be equally pohtical. But in fact, the guard towers, the police dogs, and the endless gray barracks are only "political" in so far as they are sinister evocations of Hitler and Stalin, who used them to dispose of their enemies. The penal methods themselves--incarceration, deprivation, forced labor, brutality, humiliation--^are not far removed from those invented by eighteenth-century Europe. Those v,'ho break the laws of the Soviet Union are subject to bourgeois penal techniques some two hundred years old. And far from changing these techniques, the Soviets have made them more atrocious and carried them to their logical extreme. What so moved those who saw the Riga documentary was not only the specter of Dachau, but beyond it, the endless procession of human beings condemned to penal servitude--a two-hundred- year spectacle used by those in power for the purpose of in- stilling fear.
? Q: I think the explanation of these paradoxes lies in the fact that the Soviet Union claims to be a sociaUst state but is in reality not at all socialist. The hypocrisy of Soviet leaders and the incoherence of their official statements follows logi- cally from this fact. It has been evident for some time now that if the Soviet Union has been unable to evolve along lines that the Twentieth Congress seemed to suggest, it is because the weaknesses of the Soviet society are structural and lie in the mode of production, and not simply in a more-or-less bureau- cratized leadership.
? 124 Politics of Soviet Crime
? MF: It is undoubtedly true that although the Soviets indeed changed the distribution of property and the role of the state in the control of production, they merely adopted certain power and management techniques perfected by nineteenth- century European capitalism. The particular morality, esthetic forms, and disciplinary methods that already functioned effec- tively by 1850 in European bourgeois society--^its forms of social control--^were adopted wholesale by the Soviets. I think the system of imprisonment was invented as a generalized penal system during the eighteenth century and consolidated in the nineteenth century in connection with the development of capitalist societies and states. Moreover, the prison system was only one of the techniques of power necessary to the development and control of the forces of production. The dis- ciplined life--disciphne in school, at work, in the army-- is also a technical innovation of that period. And techniques are easily transplanted. Just as the Soviets adopted the principles of scientific management and other related management tech- niques developed in the West, they also adopted our discipli- nary techniques, adding one new weapon--^party discipline-- to the arsenal we had perfected.
? Q: It seems to me that Soviet citizens have even more difficulty than Europeans in understanding the political significance of these mechanisms. I see proof of this in the unfortunate prejudice of Soviet dissidents against non-political prisoners. Solzhenitsyn's descriptions of the latter are abso- lutely chilling. His "ordinary" criminals are subhuman crea- tures incapable of expressing themselves in any known lan- guage. The least we can say about his attitude is that he shows them no compassion.
? MF: The hostility shown toward "ordinary" crimi- nals by those who consider themselves political prisoners can
? Politics of Soviet Crime 125
? seem shocking to those of us who think that poverty, rebellion, and the rejection of exploitation and humiliation are at the root of delinquency. But we must try to look at things in terms of their tactical relevance. We must take into account the fact that in the Soviet Union, just as in France or elsewhere, the crimi- nal element is controlled, infiltrated, and manipulated by those in power. Among criminals as among non-criminals, rebels are a minority and conformists a majority. Do you think that a system of punishment that provides recidivism could have been maintained if criminal behavior did not serve some fiinc- tion? Early in the nineteenth century it became obvious that in most cases imprisonment tumed the condemned into lifetime offenders. Other methods of punishment would certainly have been invented, were it not for the fact that the professionaliza- tion of crime created a kind of reserve army useful to those in power for providing services such as prostitution, for example, and for providing informers, strike-breakers, lackeys, agents- provocateurs, and even bodyguards for electoral, and even presidential candidates. In short, there is a historical conflict between political and non-political offenders--^in so far as those in power have always sought to implicate both groups in the same base, selfish, and savage criminality.
? I do not mean to imply that non-political criminals are the faithful handmaidens of the Soviet regime. But given the extreme difficulty of the dissidents' struggle, I wonder whether it is not necessary for them to distinguish themselves from the others, to show that their cause is not that of the "thieves and murderers" with which the regime tries to iden- tify them. This may be only a tactical maneuver on the part of the dissidents. In any case, I find it difficult to condemn the attitude of the Soviet dissenters who are careful not to be confused with the "ordinary" criminals. I believe there were many members of the French resistance who when arrested refused--for political reasons--^to be taken for black-market-
? 126 Politics of Soviet Crime
? eers, even though the latter could expect a far less cruel fate.
? However, if you were to ask me about a country like France, my answer would be different. Here must point out the existence of a broad spectrum of illegalities that extends from the sometimes honored, always tolerated wheelings and deal- ings of politicians and the merchant princes of drugs and mu- nitions (who all use the law), to the prosecuted and punished offenses of the small-time thief who rebels against the law, is ignorant of it, or even baited by it. And we must also point out the unequal treatment handed out by our penal system. The important distinction here is not between political and non- political offenders, but between the profitable illegalities per- petrated with impunity by those who use the law, and the simple illegalities that the penal system uses to create a stand- ing army of criminals.
? Q: But it is also true that in the Soviet Union, just as in France, there is a profound rupture between the ordinary people and those found guilty of petty crimes. I recently saw a program on Italian television that ended with scenes of a prison cemetery where those who died while serving their sen- tences are buried in tombs hardly worthy of the name. The prisoners' families almost never claim their dead--undoubt- edly because transportation is too expensive, but also because they are ashamed.
? which have an important role. In A Whole Life, for instance, they play a very big part. Or again, in the films of Marcel Ophuls, or of Harris and Sedouy, it's very moving to watch the reality to Duclos in action in 1936 or 1939. And on the other hand, there are fictional characters who, at a given mo- ment of history, condense within themselves the greatest pos- sible number of social relations, of links with history. This is why Lacombe Lucien is so successful. Lacombe is a French- man under occupation, an ordinary Joe with concrete connec- tions to Nazism, to the countryside, to local power, etc. And we shouldn't ignore this way of personifying history, of incar- nating it in a character or a collection of characters who em- body, at a given moment, a privileged relation to power.
? There are lots of figures in the history of the workers' movement that aren't known; there are plenty of heroes in the history of the working class who've been completely driven out of memory. And I think there's a real issue to be fought here. There's no need for Marxism to keep on making films about Lenin, we've got plenty already.
? MF: What you say is important. It's a trait of many Marxists nowadays--^ignorance of history. All these people, who spend their time talking about the misrepresentation of history, are only capable of producing commentaries on texts. What did Marx say? Did Marx really say that? Look, what is Marxism but a different way of analyzing history itself? In my opinion, the left in France has no real grasp of history. It used to have. At one time in the 19th century, Michelet might have been said to represent the left. There was Jaure`s, too, and after them there grew up a kind of tradition of left-wing, social democratic historians (Mathiez, etc. ). Nowadays it's dwindled to a trickle; whereas it could be a formidable wave, carrying along writers, film-makers. True, there has been Aragon and Les Cloches de Bale--& very great historical novel. But there
? Film and Popular Memory 105
? are relatively few things, compared to what it could be like in a society where, after all, one can say that the intellectuals are more or less impregnated with Marxism.
Q: In this respect, the cinema offers something new: history captured "Live. " How do people in America relate to history, seeing the Vietnam war on television every evening while they're eating.
MF: As soon as you start seeing pictures of war every evening, war becomes totally acceptable. That's to say, thor- oughly tedious, you'd really love to see something else. But when it becomes boring, you put up with it. You don't even watch it. So how is this particular reality on film to be reacti- vated as an existing, historically important reality?
Q: Have you seen The Camisards?
MF: Yes, I liked it very much. Historically, it's im- peccable. It's well made, intelligent and it makes a lot of things clear.
? Q: I think that's the direction we have to take in mak- ing films. To come back to the films we were talking about at the beginning--^we must raise the question of the extreme left's confusion in the face of certain aspects of Lacombe Lu- cien and Night Porter, particularly the sexual one; and how this confusion can be of benefit to the right. . .
? MF: As for what you call the extreme left, I find my- self in considerable difficulty. I'm not at all sure that it still exists. Nonetheless, there really needs to be a thorough sum- ming-up of what the extreme left has done since 1968, both negatively and positively. It's true that this extreme left has
? 106 Film and Popular Memory
? been the means of spreading a whole number of important ideas; on sexuality, women, homosexuality, psychiatry, hous- ing, medicine. It's also been the means of spreading methods of action, where it continues to be of importance. The extreme left has played as important a role in the forms of acticity as in its themes. But there's also a negative summing-up to be made, concerning certain Stalinist and terrorist organizational practices. And a misunderstanding, too, of certain broad and deeply-rooted processes which recently resulted in 13 million people backing Mitterrand, and which have always been disre- garded, on the pretext that this was the politics of the politi- cians, that this was the business of the parties. A whole heap of things have been ignored; notably, that the desire to defeat the right has been a very important political factor within the masses for a number of months and even years. The extreme left hasn't sensed this desire, thanks to a false definition of the masses, a wrong appreciation of what this will to win really is. Faced with the risks a co-opted victory would involve, it pre- fers not to take the risk of winning. Defeat, at least, can't be co-opted. Personally, I'm not so sure. A
? Translated by Martin Jordin Notes
' Lacombe Lucien, a film by Louis Malle, is the story of a French collaborator during the German occupation. Night Porter, a film by Liliana Cavani, is a sado-masochistic love story involving a former Nazi camp worker and prisoner.
^ LIP, a cause ce? le`bre in France, involved the take-over by workers of a factory. Cf. A. Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States (New York: Autonomedia, 1988).
' P. Modiano, La Place de l'Etoile (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).
? 9
Sorcery and Madness
? ? Q: For twenty years Thomas S. Szasz has developed the theme that there are fundamental analogies between the persecution of heretics and witches in former times and the persecution of the mad and mentally ill today. It's the prin- ciple subject of his book The Manufacture of Madness, which shows that the therapeutic state has been substituted for the theological state. ' Psychiatrists and more generally workers in the field of mental health have succeeded in bringing back the Inquisition and in setting it up as a new scientific panacea. Does the parallel between the Inquisition and psychiatry ap- pear to you to be historically justified?
MF: When will we be delivered from these witches and misunderstood madnesses that a society without psychia- trists unfortunately condemned to the stake? When will we be rid of this commonplace that so many books are still recount- ing today?
? What's strong and important in Szasz's work is to have shown that the historical continuity doesn't go from witches to madness, but from the institution of witches to the one of psychiatrists. It's not the witch, with her tawdry chime- ras and power over the shades, who has finally been recog- nized as the alienated one by a tardy but beneficent science.
? 108 Sorcery and Madness
? Szasz shows that a certain kind of power is exercized through the surveillances, interrogations and decrees of the Inquisition; and that through successive transformations it interrogates us still, questions our desires and our dreams, disturbs our nights, hunts down secrets and traces boundaries, designates what's abnormal, undertakes purifications and assures the functioning of order.
? Szasz, I hope, has definitively displaced the old question--^were witches the mad ones? --and reformulated it in these terms: What, in the psychiatric set-up, is still recog- nizable as the effect of a power linked to the prying work of the Inquisitors, with their long muzzles and sharp teeth? The Manufacture of Madness, I think, is an important book in the history of the related techniques of power and knowledge.
? Q: In The Manufacture of Madness Szasz describes the insatiable curiosity of the Inquisitors concerning the sexual fantasies and activities of their victims, the witches, and com- pares it to that of psychiatrists. Do you think this comparison is justified?
? MF: We're really going to have to rid ourselves of the "Marcuseries" and "Reichianisms" which encumber us and which would have us believe that of all things sexuality is the most obstinately "repressed" and "overrepressed" by our "bourgeois," "capitalist," "hypocritical" and "Victorian" soci- ety. ^ Since the Renaissance there is nothing that has been more studied, questioned, extorted, brought to light and into dis- course, forced into confession, required to express itself and praised, finally, when it found the words. No civilization has chattered so much about sexuahty as ours. And many people still believe that they are subverting it when they are only obeying this injunction to confess, this secular requisition that subjects us--^we other men of the West--to say all about our
? Sorcery and Madness 109
? desire. Since the Inquistion, through penitence, the examina- tion of conscience, spiritual guidance, education, medicine, hygiene, psychoanalysis and psychiatry, sexuality has always been suspected of holding over us a decisive and profound truth. Tell us what your pleasure is, don't hide anything of what happens between your heart and your sex, and we will know what you are and what you are worth.
? Szasz has seen very clearly I think how the "ques- tioning" of sexuality was not simply the morbid interest of Inquisitors crazed by their own desire, but that what was tak- ing shape there was a modem kind of power and control over individuals. Szasz is not an historian and perhaps one can quarrel with him, but at a time when the discourse on sexuality fascinates so many historians, it was good that a psychoanalyst retraced in historical terms the interrogation of sexuality. And many of Szasz's intuitions confirm what Le Roy Ladurie re- veals in his remarkable book Montaillou.
Q: What do you think of Szasz's idea that in order to understand the psychiatric institution--and all mental health movements--^it's advisable to study the psychiatrists them- selves and not the so-called sick? '
? MF: If it's a question of studying the psychiatric in- stitution, he's obviously right. But I think Szasz goes much further. Everyone dreams of writing a history of the mad, of going over to the other side and tracing the great evasions or the subtle retreats into delirium fi'om the beginning. Yet, under the pretext of tuning in and letting the mad themselves speak, one already accepts the division between the two as a fact. It's necessarily better to put oneself at the point where the machin- ery that makes these qualifications and disqualifications is ac- tually functioning, and putting the mad and the non-mad on two sides facing each other. Madness is no less an effect of
? ? 110 Sorcery and Madness
power than non-madness; it doesn't dart through the world like a furtive beast until its course is halted and it's put in the cage of an asylum. It's a tactical response, in the form of an infinite spiral, to the tactics that invest it. In another of Szasz's books. The Myth of Mental Illness, there's a chapter that I think is exemplary on this subject, where hysteria is shown to be a product of psychiatric power, but also as the reply that opposes it and the trap into which it falls.
? Q: If the therapeutic state has replaced the theological state, and if medicine and psychiatry have today become equally the most restrictive and underhanded means of social control isn't it necessary from the point of view of an indi- vidualist and libertarian like Szasz to fight for the separation of medicine and the State?
MF; On this point I have some difficulty. I wonder if Szasz is not identifying, in a way that's too forced, power with the State.
Perhaps this identification is explained by Szasz's double experience: the European experience, in a totalitarian Hungary where all forms and mechanisms of power were jeal- ously controlled by the State, and an experience of an America penetrated with this conviction that liberty begins where the centralized intervention of the State ceases.
? In fact, I don't believe that power is only the State, or that the non-State is therefore liberty. It's true (here Szasz is right) that the circuits of psychiatricalizing and psycholo- gizing, even if they pass through the parents, the peer group and the immediate surroundings, are finally supported by a vast medico-administrative complex. But the "free" medicine of the "liberal" doctor, the private psychiatrist or home psy- chologist are not an alternative to institutional medicine. They are part of the network, even in the case where they are poles
? ? ? Sorcery and Madness 111
? apart from the institution. Between the therapeutic state Szasz talks about and "liberated" medicine there is a whole play of support and complex cross-reference.
? The analyst listening silently in his chair is not so foreign to the insistent questioning and the close surveillance in the asylum. I don't think one can apply the world "libertar- ian"--Does Szasz himself do it? I don't remember--to a doc- tor who is "liberal," that is, linked to an individual profit that the State protects all the more since it profits from it too. Szasz cites very effectively the anti-State interventions of these lib- eral doctors, and they have had salutory effects. But it seems to me that there you have the combative utilization--against "general abuses"--of a medicine whose destination rather is to assure, conjointly with the State and with its support, the well functioning of a normalizing society. Rather than the therapeu- tic State, it's the normalizing society, with its institutional and private wheels, that it is necessary to study and criticize. Robert Castel's book Le Psychanalysme* seems to me to have cast a very accurate light on this great continuous web which reaches from the sad dormitory to the profit-making couch. A
? Translated by John Johnston Notes
' Thomas Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
? ^ Foucault's History of Sexuality, which takes this anti-Reic- hian stand, came out at the time of this interview.
' Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).
*Robert Castel, Le Psychanalysme (Paris: Maspero, 1973).
? 10
On Literature
? ? Q: What is the place or status of literary texts in your research?
MF: In Madness and Civilization and in The Order of Things, I only mention literary texts, or point to them in passing, as a kind of dawdler who says, "Now, there you see, one cannot fail to speak of Rameau's Nephew. " But these allusions play no role in the economy of the process.
For me, literature was on each occasion the object of a report, not part of an analysis nor a reduction nor an integra- tion into the domain of analysis. It was a point of rest, a halt, a blazon, a flag.
? Q: You didn't want these texts to play the role of expressing or reflecting historical processes?
MF: No. . . The question would have to be broached on another level.
There has never really been an analysis of how, given the mass of things that are spoken, given the set of discourses actually held, a certain number of these discourses (literary
discourse, philosophical discourse) are sacralized and given a particular function.
? I
? 114 On Literature
? It seems that traditionally literary or philosophical discourse has been made to function as a substitute or as a general envelope for all other discourses. Literature had to assume the value for all the rest. People have written histories of what was said in the 18 th century by passing through Fon- tenelle, Voltaire, Diderot or The New Heloise, etc. Or else they have thought of these texts as the expression of something that in the end failed to be formulated on a more quotidien level.
? In regard to this attitude, I passed from a state of uncertainty--citing literature where it was, without indicating its relationship with the rest--to a frankly negative position, by trying to make all the non-literary or para-literary dis- courses that were actually constituted in a given period re- appear positively, and by excluding literature. In Discipline and Punish it's a matter only of bad literature.
Q: How does one distinguish good from bad?
? MF: Exactly. That's just what will have to be consid- ered one day. We will have to ask ourselves just what is this activity that consists of circulating fictions, poems, and narra- tives in a society. We also ought to analyze a second opera- tion: among all these narratives (re? cits), what is it that sacral- izes a certain number and makes them begin to function as "literature"? They are quickly taken up in the interior of an institution that at its origin was very different: the institution of the university. Now it begins to be identified with the liter- ary institution.
? This is a very visible line of decline in our culture. In the 19th century the university was the medium at the center of which a literature said to be classic was constituted. This literature was by definition not a contemporary literature, and was valorized simultaneously as both the only base for con- temporary literature and as its critique. Hence a very curious
? On Literature 115
? play in the 19th century between literature and the university, between the writer and the academic.
? And then, little by little, the two institutions, which underneath their petty squabbles were in fact profoundly akin, tended to become completely indistinguishable. We know per- fectly well that today the literature said to be avant-garde is only ever read by academics; that a writer over thirty has students around him who are doing their theses on his work; and that writers live for the most part by giving courses and by being academics. Thus the truth about something is already evident there, in the fact that literature functions thanks to a play of selection, sacralization, and institutional valorization of which the university is at once both the operator and the receiver.
? Q: Are there intrinsic criteria for [evaluating] texts, or is it only a matter of sacralization by the university as institution?
MF; I know nothing about it. I would simply say this; in order to break with a certain number of myths, like the one of literature's expressive character, it has been very im- portant to establish the great principle that literature is con- cemed only with itself If it has anything to do with its author, it's according to a mode of death, silence, and the very disap- pearance of the one who writes.
? The reference here to Blanchot or Barthes matters little.
The essential thing is the importance of the principle; the intransitivity of literature. It was indeed the first stage thanks to which one could get rid of the idea that literature was the place of all transits, or the point where all transits ended up, the expression of totalities.
? But it seems to me that this was still only a stage. Yet, to maintain the analysis at this level is to risk not disman-
? 116 On Literature
? tling the set of sacralizations by which literature has been affected. On the contrary, one risks sacralizing it even worse. And that's actually what has happened, even up to 1970. We have seen a certain number of the themes of Blanchot and Barthes used for a kind of exaltation, at once ultra-lyrical and ultra-rationalizing, of literature as a structure of language sus- ceptible to analysis only in itself and in its own terms.
? The pohtical implications were not absent from this exaltation. Thanks to it, one succeeded in saying that literature in itself was at this point freed from all determinations, that the fact of writing was in itself subversive, that the writer possesses, in the very gesture of writing, an imprescribable right to subversion! Consequently, the writer was a revolution- ary, and the more the writing was Writing (l'e? criture e? tait e? criture), the more it plunged into intransitivity, the more it produced in doing so the revolution! You know that these
things were unfortunately said. . .
? In fact, Blanchot's and Barthes' trajectory tended to- ward a desacralization of literature by breaking the connec- tions that put it in a position of absolute expression. This rup- ture implied that the next movement would be to desacralize it absolutely, and to try to see how, in the general mass of what was said, at a given moment and in a certain mode, this par- ticular area of language could be constituted, an area that must not be asked to bear the decisions of a culture, but rather how it can be that a culture has decided to give it this position so singular and so strange.
? . Q: Why strange?
? MF; Our culture accords to hterature a part which is in one sense extraordinarily limited: how many people read lit- erature? What place does it actually have in the general expan- sion of discourse?
? On Literature 117
? But this same cuhure imposes on all its children, as a touting towi^ffds culture, this passage through a whole ideol- ogy, a whole theology of literature, during their studies. There is a kind of paradox there.
? And it's not unrelated to the affirmation that writing is subversive. That someone affirms it, in such and such a periodical, has no importance and no effect. But if at the same moment all instructors firom high school teachers to university professors tell you, explicitly or not, that the great decisions of a culture, the points where it changes. . . these must be found in Diderot, Sade, Hegel or Rabelais, you see very well that it's finally a matter of the same thing. Both make literature func- tion in the same way. At this level, the effects of reinforce- ment are reciprocal. The so-called avant-garde groups and the gross mass at the university are in agreement. That leads to a very heavy political blockage.
? Q; How have you escaped this blockage?
? MF: My manner of taking up the problem was on the one hand the book on Raymond Roussel and then above all the book on Pierre Rivie`re. Between the two there is the same investigation; what is this threshhold starting from which a discourse (whether that of a sick person, a criminal, etc. ) be- gins to functiion in a field described as literature?
? In order to know what is literature, I would not want to study internal structures. I would rather grasp the move- ment, the small process through which a non-literary type of discourse, neglected, forgotten as soon as it is spoken, enters the literary domain. What happens there? What is released? How is this discourse modified in its efforts by the fact that it is recognized as literary?
? 118 On Literature
? Q: You have however devoted texts to literary works about which this question is not posed. I am thinking notably of your essays in Critique on Blanchot, Klossowski and Bataille. If they were collected in a single volume, perhaps they would give your transversal an unexpected image. . .
? MF; Yes, but. . . . It would be rather difficult to speak of them. At bottom, Blanchot, Klossowski and Bataille, who were finally the three who interested me in the 1960s, were for me much more than literary works or discourses interior litera- ture. They were discourses exterior to philosophy.
? Q; That is to say. . .
MF; Let's take Nietzsche, if you like. Nietzsche rep- resents, in relation to academic philosophical discourse, which ceaselessly refers to him, the outside edge. Of course a whole channel of Western philosophy can be found in Nietzsche's works. Plato, Spinoza, the philosophers of the 18th century, Hegel. . . all that passes through Nietzsche. And yet, in relation to philosophy, there is in Nietzsche's work a roughness, a rustic simplicity, an outsideness, a kind of mountain peasant- ness that allows him, with a shrug of the shoulder and without appearing in any way ridiculous, to say with unavoidable force: "What non-sense all that is! "
To rid oneself of philosophy necessarily implies such an offhandedness. It's not by remaining in philosophy, it's not by refining it to the maximum, it's not by turning it against itself that one exits from it. No. It's by opposing it with a kind of astonished and joyful stupidity, a sort of incomprehensible burst of laughter that in the end understands, or in any case, breaks. Yes. . . it breaks more than it understands.
? To the extent that I was nevertheless an academic, a professor of philosophy, what remained of traditional philo-
? On Literature 119
? sophic discourse hampered me in the work I had done on madness. There was an Hegelianism there that dragged. To make objects appear that were as derisory as relations with the police, measures of internment and the cries of the mad, that did not suffice inevitably to exit from philosophy. For me, Nietzsche, Bataille, Blanchot and Klossowski were ways of exiting fi'om philosophy.
? In the violence of Bataille, in the sort of insidious and disturbing sofmess of Blanchot, in Klossowski's spirals, there was something that began with philosophy, put it into play and into question, then left it and came back. . . Something like the theory of breathing in Klossowski is connected by I don't know how many lines to all of Western philosophy. And then, through the staging (mis en sce`ne), the formulation, the way in which all that functions in Le Baphomet, philosophy leaves it entirely.
? These comings and goings around the position of phi- losophy finally rendered permeable--and thus finally deri sory--the frontier between philosophy and non-philosophy. A
? Translated by John Johnston
? 11
The Politics of Soviet Crime
? ? Q: Guard towers, barded-wire fences, police dogs, prionsers transported in trucks like so many animals. . . When the first filmed reports of life in a Soviet detention camp to reach the West were shown on French television, these were some of the scenes witnessed by viewers--scenes all too char- acteristic of our century. Soviet spokesmen at first denied the film's authenticity. Later admitting the existence of the camp in question, they added, by way of justification, that only non- political prisoners were interned there. The response of the French public was on the whole one of relief: "Oh well, since they're only common criminals. . . . " What were your reactions to the film and to the responses it elicited?
? MF: One early statement on the part of the Soviet authorities impressed me enormously. They claimed that the very existence of the camp in plain view in the middle of a city proved that there was nothing shocking about it. As though the fact that a concentration camp could exist undis- guised in the middle of Riga constituted an excuse. (The Ger- mans, after all, sometimes felt the need to hide their camps. ) As though the shamelessness of not hiding from the people of Riga what they do in that city entided the Soviet authorities to demand silence everywhere else and to enforce their demand.
? 122 Politics of Soviet Crime
? It's the logic of Cyrano de Bergerac, cynicism as censorship; "You're not allowed to mention my nose because it's right in the middle of my face. " As though it were possible not to see the Riga camp for what it is, a symbol of shamelessly exer- cised power, just as we see our own city halls, courts, and prisons as emblems on the escutcheon of power.
Setting aside for a moment the question of whether its inmates are political or non-political prisoners, the camp's high visibility and the fear inherent in that visibility are in themselves political. Barbed wire, searchlight beams, and the echoing footsteps of prison guards--that is political. And that is policy.
I was also struck by the Soviet rationalization you quoted; "These are not political prisoners; they are common criminals. " Now, as a matter of fact, the Soviet vice-minister of Justice has said that the notion of political imprisonment does not even exist in his country. The only ones who may be prosecuted are those who seek to weaken the social order and the state by means of high treason, espionage, terrorism, vili- fying propaganda, or the dissemination of misinformation. In short, he defines as non-pohtical precisely those acts which the rest of the world considers political.
? The Soviet definition is at once logical and bizarre. The obliteration of the distinction between political and non- political offenses in the Soviet Union would be a logical de- velopment. But at that point, it seems to me, all offenses be- come political. In a socialist state, any breach of law--rob- bery, the most petty of thefts--^is not a crime against private property, but against the property of the people, against soci- ety itself, socialist production, and the body politic. I would understand if the Soviet authorities had said that there were no longer any non-political prisoners because all crime is by defi- nition political. As it is, we must not only accuse the vice minister of lying (because he knows there are political prison-
? Politics of Soviet Crime 123
? ers in the Soviet Union), but also ask him how after sixty years of socialism they still have a criminal code for non-political crimes.
? However, if we define criminality in purely political terms, we necessarily forego the traditional contempt for "common" criminals that is an essential element of the penal system itself And if we consider all crime to be political, then our response to it must be equally pohtical. But in fact, the guard towers, the police dogs, and the endless gray barracks are only "political" in so far as they are sinister evocations of Hitler and Stalin, who used them to dispose of their enemies. The penal methods themselves--incarceration, deprivation, forced labor, brutality, humiliation--^are not far removed from those invented by eighteenth-century Europe. Those v,'ho break the laws of the Soviet Union are subject to bourgeois penal techniques some two hundred years old. And far from changing these techniques, the Soviets have made them more atrocious and carried them to their logical extreme. What so moved those who saw the Riga documentary was not only the specter of Dachau, but beyond it, the endless procession of human beings condemned to penal servitude--a two-hundred- year spectacle used by those in power for the purpose of in- stilling fear.
? Q: I think the explanation of these paradoxes lies in the fact that the Soviet Union claims to be a sociaUst state but is in reality not at all socialist. The hypocrisy of Soviet leaders and the incoherence of their official statements follows logi- cally from this fact. It has been evident for some time now that if the Soviet Union has been unable to evolve along lines that the Twentieth Congress seemed to suggest, it is because the weaknesses of the Soviet society are structural and lie in the mode of production, and not simply in a more-or-less bureau- cratized leadership.
? 124 Politics of Soviet Crime
? MF: It is undoubtedly true that although the Soviets indeed changed the distribution of property and the role of the state in the control of production, they merely adopted certain power and management techniques perfected by nineteenth- century European capitalism. The particular morality, esthetic forms, and disciplinary methods that already functioned effec- tively by 1850 in European bourgeois society--^its forms of social control--^were adopted wholesale by the Soviets. I think the system of imprisonment was invented as a generalized penal system during the eighteenth century and consolidated in the nineteenth century in connection with the development of capitalist societies and states. Moreover, the prison system was only one of the techniques of power necessary to the development and control of the forces of production. The dis- ciplined life--disciphne in school, at work, in the army-- is also a technical innovation of that period. And techniques are easily transplanted. Just as the Soviets adopted the principles of scientific management and other related management tech- niques developed in the West, they also adopted our discipli- nary techniques, adding one new weapon--^party discipline-- to the arsenal we had perfected.
? Q: It seems to me that Soviet citizens have even more difficulty than Europeans in understanding the political significance of these mechanisms. I see proof of this in the unfortunate prejudice of Soviet dissidents against non-political prisoners. Solzhenitsyn's descriptions of the latter are abso- lutely chilling. His "ordinary" criminals are subhuman crea- tures incapable of expressing themselves in any known lan- guage. The least we can say about his attitude is that he shows them no compassion.
? MF: The hostility shown toward "ordinary" crimi- nals by those who consider themselves political prisoners can
? Politics of Soviet Crime 125
? seem shocking to those of us who think that poverty, rebellion, and the rejection of exploitation and humiliation are at the root of delinquency. But we must try to look at things in terms of their tactical relevance. We must take into account the fact that in the Soviet Union, just as in France or elsewhere, the crimi- nal element is controlled, infiltrated, and manipulated by those in power. Among criminals as among non-criminals, rebels are a minority and conformists a majority. Do you think that a system of punishment that provides recidivism could have been maintained if criminal behavior did not serve some fiinc- tion? Early in the nineteenth century it became obvious that in most cases imprisonment tumed the condemned into lifetime offenders. Other methods of punishment would certainly have been invented, were it not for the fact that the professionaliza- tion of crime created a kind of reserve army useful to those in power for providing services such as prostitution, for example, and for providing informers, strike-breakers, lackeys, agents- provocateurs, and even bodyguards for electoral, and even presidential candidates. In short, there is a historical conflict between political and non-political offenders--^in so far as those in power have always sought to implicate both groups in the same base, selfish, and savage criminality.
? I do not mean to imply that non-political criminals are the faithful handmaidens of the Soviet regime. But given the extreme difficulty of the dissidents' struggle, I wonder whether it is not necessary for them to distinguish themselves from the others, to show that their cause is not that of the "thieves and murderers" with which the regime tries to iden- tify them. This may be only a tactical maneuver on the part of the dissidents. In any case, I find it difficult to condemn the attitude of the Soviet dissenters who are careful not to be confused with the "ordinary" criminals. I believe there were many members of the French resistance who when arrested refused--for political reasons--^to be taken for black-market-
? 126 Politics of Soviet Crime
? eers, even though the latter could expect a far less cruel fate.
? However, if you were to ask me about a country like France, my answer would be different. Here must point out the existence of a broad spectrum of illegalities that extends from the sometimes honored, always tolerated wheelings and deal- ings of politicians and the merchant princes of drugs and mu- nitions (who all use the law), to the prosecuted and punished offenses of the small-time thief who rebels against the law, is ignorant of it, or even baited by it. And we must also point out the unequal treatment handed out by our penal system. The important distinction here is not between political and non- political offenders, but between the profitable illegalities per- petrated with impunity by those who use the law, and the simple illegalities that the penal system uses to create a stand- ing army of criminals.
? Q: But it is also true that in the Soviet Union, just as in France, there is a profound rupture between the ordinary people and those found guilty of petty crimes. I recently saw a program on Italian television that ended with scenes of a prison cemetery where those who died while serving their sen- tences are buried in tombs hardly worthy of the name. The prisoners' families almost never claim their dead--undoubt- edly because transportation is too expensive, but also because they are ashamed.
