Therefore
I don't see how one can say that the forms of rationality, which have governed these three realms, break apart and disperse.
Foucault-Live
not to let myself be led astray when the Frankfurt School had already opened the ways.
There is a remarkable problem of non-penetration of two forms of thought, which are akin to each other.
Perhaps h is this proximity which explains the non-penetration.
Nothing obscures a common problem more than two related ways of approaching it.
? Q: It is interesting that you say you would have avoided certain things if you had been familiar with the Frank- furt School and Critical Theory, especially since Habermas and Negt have applauded your efforts. In a conversation with Habermas, hepraised to me your idea of la bifurcation de la raison--that in every moment reason is supposed to be di- vided in two. Despite that I asked myself if you would agree with the bifurcation of reason as Critical Theory conceives of it. That is, with the dialectic of reason according to which reason is perverted by the effect of its own power, is trans- formed and reduced to a type of thought which is technical thought. The ruhng thought in Critical Theory is that of a dialectical continuity of reason, with a perversion, which changes it completely suddenly and which serves to correct it, which should be the beginning of the battle for emancipation. The will to knowledge has made in its own way a lot of trust in history ambiguous (bifurquer). The word bifurquer is per- haps not the right word. Reason has divided knowledge many times.
? MF: Yes, one has often tried to blackmail all criti- cism of reason and every critical test of the history of rational- ity so that one either recognizes reason or casts it into irration- alism--as if it were not possible to write a rational criticism of rationahty, a rational history of all ambiguity and biftircations, a contingent history of rationality. Since Max Weber in the Frankfurt School and in every case with many historians of
? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 243
? science like Canguilhem it was a matter of determining the form of rationalism, which is presented as the ruling one and to which one gives the status of reason, in order to let it appear as one of the possible forms of rational work. In this history of French science, which is considerably significant, Gaston Bachelard also plays a central role.
? Q: Despite that the hymns of praise are a bit poi- soned. According to Habermas you described the moment of the bifurcation of reason splendidly. This bifurcation is sup- posed to be a one-time occurrence, you had determined, as reason took a turn, which led to technical rationalism, to a self-diminution, to a self-limiting. If this bifurcation is also a split, then it could only have happened a single time in history, in order to divide two realms as one has called them since Kant. This analysis of bifurcation is Kantian. There is knowl- edge of understanding, the knowledge of reason, technical rea- son and moral reason. In order to judge this bifiircation one accepts the position of moral-practical reason. Therefore, a one-time bifurcation, a division between technical and practi- cal which governs all of the history of thought in Germany. You just said that this tradition stems from the question "What is Enlightenment? " This praise seems to diminish your assess- ment of the history of ideas.
? MF: In fact, I do not speak of a bifurcation of reason. Rather I speak of multiple bifurcations. I speak of an endless prohfic division. I am not speaking of the moment when rea- son became technical. At the present, in order to give an ex- ample I am researching the problem of technology of self in Greco-Roman antiquity. How men, life, self were objects of a certain number of technai, which can be compared completely in thek compelling rationality of a production technology.
? 244 How Much Does It Cost. .
? Q: But without including the entire society.
MF: Without including the entire society. What a technai or technology of self brings to development is a his- torical phenomenon, which is completely analyzable and de- terminable and is not the bifurcation of reason. In the prolific division, breaks, caesuras, this was an occurrence, a signifi- cant epoch, which had noteworthy consequences, but is not a one-time phenomenon.
Q: If one then assumes that the phenomenon of the self-perversion of reason is not a one-time occurrence, didn't occur just once in history where reason lost something essen- tial, something substantial--as Weber would say--does your work aim to rehabihtate fruitful reason? Is there another kind of conception of reason in your work, another concept of ra- tionality as that which is accepted by us today.
? MF: Yes. But here I would like to free myself from phenomenology which was my starting point. I don't believe that there is here a kind of founding act through which reason in its essence discovers or would be engaged and afterwards could be broken off from any occurrence. I believe that there is a self-creation of reason and therefore I am trying to analyze the forms of rationality: various proofs, various formulations, various modifications by which rationalities educe each other, contradict one another, chase each other away, without one therefore being able to designate a moment in which reason vypuld have lost its basic design or changed from rationalism to irrationahsm. Very schematically, I wanted in the 1960s to give up the phenomenological thesis as well as the Marxist thesis (Luka? cs). There was a rationality which was the exem- plary form of reason itself which had been led into a crisis by a number of social necessities (capitahsm or even more the
? . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 245
? transition of one form of capitalism to another). That is, into a forgetting of reason and a descent into irrationalism. That is the second great model, schematically correct and unjust, from which I tried to free myself.
? Q: According to this model there was a one-time bi- furcation, be it after a forgetting, be it after an expropriation by a class. Therefore the emancipation movement in history did not just consist of a retaking of what had been expropri- ated in order to re-expropriate it, but rather on the contrary in that reason was given back its entire truth, given back its status of absolute universal science. It is clear that you have no proposal of a new science or an expanded science.
? MF; Absolutely not.
Q; But you show that every time a form of rational- ity asserts itself, it occurs through division, that is, through closure or alienation, through the demarcation of a boundary between itself and another. Does your proposal include a wish to rehabilitate this other one? For example, when you embrace the silence of a madman, do you consider it a language which expresses itself comprehensively on the necessities of the creation of works?
? MF; Yes. What interested me in this general frame- work were the forms of rationality, which the human subject applied to himself. While the historian of science in France busied himself primarily with the problem of the constitution of scientific objects, I asked myself another question. How does it happen that the human subject makes himself into an object of possible knowledge, through which forms of ration- ality, through which historical necessities, and at what price? My question is this; How much does it cost the subject to be
? ? 246 How Much Does It Cost.
? able to tell the truth about itself? How much does it cost the subject as madman to be able to tell the truth about itself? About the cost of constituting the madman as the absolute other and in that it not only pays this theoretical price, but also an institutional and even economic price as the organization of psychiatry allows it to be determined. A complex and multi- layered totality with an institutionalized game, class relation- ships, class conflicts, modalities of knowledge and finally a whole history, subjects and reason are involved in it. That is what I tried to reconstitute. That is perhaps a completely crazy, very complex project, of which I could only observe a few moments, a few special points, hke the problem of the insane subject. How can one tell the truth about an insane subject? Those were my first two books. The Order of Things asked, what is the cost of problematizing and analyzing the speaking, working, living subject. That's why I transferred the same kinds of questions to criminals and penal institutions. How can one tell the truth about oneself as a criminal. And I want to continue that in respect to sexuality. How can the subject tell the truth about itself as a subject of sexual gratifi-
cation, and at what cost?
Q: It is in no way a matter of exhuming using ar- chaeology something archaic which existed before history.
MF: No. Absolutely not. When I use the word ar- chaeology, which I don't do anymore, then I use it to say that the type of analysis which I conduct was displaced, not in time blit by the level at which it is determined. My probleni is not to study the evolution of the history of ideas, but rather much more to observe the ideas, how this or that object could appear as a possible object of perception. Why for example insanity became at one time an object of perception, which corre- sponded to a type of recognition. This displacement between
? ? ? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 247
? the ideas about insanity and the constitution of insanity as object I wanted to delineate through the use of the word ar- chaeology as opposed to history.
Q: I asked this question because there are now ten- dencies, under the guise that the New German Right is influ- enced by Nietzsche, to assume that French Nietzscheanism comes from the same vein. One mixes everything together in order to renew basically the fronts of a new theoretical class war, which is very difficult to find these days.
? MF: There is not just one Nietzscheanism. One can- not say there is a true Nietzsceanism and that this one is truer than the other. But those who found Nietzsche a tool more than 25 years ago, to change their position in regard to the body of philosophical thought ruled by one of phenomenology or Marxism, have nothing to do with those who use Nietzsche today. GUles Deleuze wrote a powerful book about Nietzsche and Nietzsche is present in his work in general, but without noisy reference and without the desire to flaunt Nietzsche's banner for a rhetorical or political effect. It is impressive that someone like Deleuze simply turned to Nietzsche and took him seriously. I also wanted to do that: what serious use can one make of Nietzsche? I gave a lecture about Nietzsche and have written a little about him. ' The only honor I accorded him, weakly, was naming the first part of The History of Sexu- ality "The Will to Knowledge. "
? Q; Motivated by this will to knowledge there was al- ways a rapport or relationship. I suspect you avoid both these words because they are colored by Hegelianism. Perhaps we should speak about evaluation, as Nietzsche did; a way to evaluate truth and the power to give it structure to create it; a power which does not exist as archaically as reason or source.
? 248 How Much Does It Cost. .
? but rather a relationship of powers--perhaps already a rela- tionship of power in the act of constituting all knowledge.
MF: No, I wouldn't say that. That is too comph- cated. My problem is the relationship of self to self and that of saying the truth. What I thank Nietzsche for, I owe more to his texts of around 1880 in which the question of truth, of the truth of history and the will to truth were central for him. The first text which Sartre wrote as a young student was a Nietzschean text. "The History of Truth," a tiny text which appeared for the first time around 1925 in a gymnasium jour- nal. His departure point was from the same problem. And it is very noteworthy that his way led from the history of truth to phenomenology while the way of the subsequent generation to which we belong, arose particularly to severe itself from phe- nomenology in order to retum to the question of the history of truth.
Q: You admit to an affinity to Deleuze, to a certain extent. Does this include Deleuze's concept of desire?
MF: No.
Q: It seems to me that desire by Deleuze is a produc- tive desire and gives the species its form-giving reason for genesis.
? MF: I don't want to take a position or say what Deleuze meant. People say what they want to or what they can. When a system of thought is created it always becomes fixed and identified in the heart of a cultural tradition. It is perfectly normal that this cultural tradition takes it up and re- stricts it, does what it wants with it, has it express what it didn't say, but with the allusion that it is only another form of
? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 249
? what one intended to say. That belongs to the play of culture. But that cannot be my relationship to Deleuze. I will not say what he wanted to say. His problem was the problem of desire. Probably we will find in the theory of desh-e the effect of a re- lationship to Nietzsche. While my problem always was truth. Wahr-Sagen and the relationship between it and the forms of reflexivity, the reflexivity of self above self.
Q: Yes, I think Nietzsche did not differentiate thor- oughly enough the will to knowledge fi^om the will to power.
? MF; There's a noticeable shifting in Nietzsche's text between those who are governed by the question about the will to knowledge and the will to power. But I didn't want to debate this for a simple reason. I haven't read Nietzsche for a good many years.
Q: The elaboration seemed to be important for me because of the truly confused reception of Nietzsche abroad, as characterized by the way also in France.
MF: My relationship to Nietzsche is not a historical relationship. I am not so interested in Nietzsche's history of thought as in this quality of the challenge, which I felt--rather long ago--as I read Nietzsche for the first time. If one reads
"Fro? hliche Wissenschaft" or "Morgenrote" while one is being formed by the great and old university tradition of Des- cartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, then one stumbles on these witty, strange, and impudent texts and says to oneself, good, I won't do it the way my fiiends, colleagues, and professors do it, peering in arrogance from on high. What is the epitome of philosophical intensity and what are the actual philosophical effects, which we can find in these texts. That for me is the challenge of Nietzsche.
? 250 How Much Does It Cost. .
? Q: In the actual reception there is a second confu- sion, that is post-modernism, to which not insignificant people refer and which played a certain role in Germany, since Habermas took up this expression and criticized it. Do you see a tendency in it ? Can you ascertain a place for yourself in it?
? MF: I must say, I find that difficult to answer. First, because I never really understood how modernism is defined in France. It's clear by Baudelaire, but after that it seems to lose meaning for me. I don't know in what sense Germans speak of modernism. I know that Americans are planning a kind of seminar with Habermas and me and Habermas pro- posed modernism as the topic. I'm at a loss; I don't know what that means nor what the problematic is. As much as I recog- nize behind the expression Structuralism, the problem of the subject and its transformation, as little do I see the common problematic between post-modernism or post-structuralism,
? Q: Accepting modernism or rejecting it is not only ambiguous, it truncates modernism. Also it has at least three definitions: the definition of the historian, Weber's definition, and Adorno's which alludes to Benjamin's Baudelaire. Haber- mas seems to prefer here against Adorno the tradition of rea- son, that is, Weber's definition of modernism. Therefore he perceives in post-modernism the decline of reason, so that reason basically becomes a form of the will to knowledge, among other things.
MF: That isn't my problem. I don't at all identify reason with the totality of the forms of rationality. The latter could until recently dominate in the types of knowledge, the forms of technology and the modalities of governance. The application of rationality occurs primarily in these areas. I don't deal with the problem of art, it is too complicated. For
? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 251
? me no given form of rationality is reason.
Therefore I don't see how one can say that the forms of rationality, which have governed these three realms, break apart and disperse. I simply see multiple transformations--^but why should one call that the demise of reason? Endlessly other forms of rationality are born. Therefore I claim that reason is a long narrative, which ends today and makes room for another, and makes no sense.
? Q: The field is open for many forms of narratives.
? MF: We hit upon here one of the most destructive habits of contemporary thought. Perhaps even one of the most destructive of modem thought--in any case, of post-Hegelian thought. That is that the moment of the present is considered in history as the break, the chmax, the fulfillment, the retum of youth, etc. The solemnity with which everyone who has a philosophical discourse reflects his own time seems a stigma to me. I say this particularly because it happens to me and one finds it constantly in Nietzsche. One must probably find the humility to admit that the time of one's own life is not the one- time, basic, revolutionary moment of history, from which eve- rything begins and is completed. At the same time humility is needed to say without solemnity that the present time is rather exciting and demands an analysis. We must ask ourselves the question, what is today? In relation to the Kantian question, What is Enlightenment? One can say that it is the task of philosophy to explain what today is and what we are today, but without breast-beating drama and theatricality and main- taining that this moment is the greatest damnation or daybreak of the rising sun. No, it is a day like every other, or much more, a day which is never like another.
? Q: That brings up a lot of questions which you have posed yourself. What is today? Can one characterize this ep-
? 252 How Much Does It Cost. .
? och despite everything as a great fragmentation in regard to others, through deterritorialization and schizophrenia?
MF: I want to say about the task of a diagnosis of today that it does not consist only of a description of who we are, rather a hne of fragility of today to follow and understand, if and how what is, can no longer be what it is. In this sense, the description must be formulated in a kind of virtual break, which opens room, understood as a room of concrete freedom, that is possible transformation.
Q: Does the practical work of the intellectual focus on this place of the crack?
? MF: I believe so. The work of the intellect is to show that what is, does not have to be, what it is. Therefore this des- ignation and description of reality never has the value of a pre- scription according to the form "because this is, that is. " Therefore the retum to history makes sense in the respect that history shows that that which is was not always so. It unites casual movements into threads of a fragile and uncertain his- tory. Thus things were formed which give the impression of the greatest self-evidence. What reason considers its necessity or much more what various forms of rationality claim to be their necessity existence, has a history which we can deter- mine completely and recover from the tapestry of contingency. But this doesn't mean that these forms of rationality are irra- tional. They rest upon a foundation of human practices and human faces, because they are made they can be unmade--of course, assuming we know how they were made.
? Q: This work on the breaks is both descriptive and practical, is work on a particular place.
? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 253
? MF: Perhaps a place and perhaps work which must retum as a result of the questions asked there so far back into historical analysis.
Q: Is the work on the place of the break that which you call microphysics of power or analysis of power?
MF: A little. These forms of rationality in the proc- ess of dominance must be analyzed for themselves. These forms of rationality are alien to other forms of power like recognition or technology. On the contrary, there is an ex- change, transfer, interference. But it is impossible however to designate these three realms as the only and constant form of rationality. We find the same types again displaced, dense manifold circuits, but still no isomorphism.
Q: Sometimes or always?
MF: There are no universal rules which estabhsh the types of relationship between rationality and the processes of govemance.
? Q: I asked this question because a number of critics express the same criticism--like Jean Baudrillard*--which claims the beginning of microphysics reflects a situation in which power has been rendered irreparable through dissemina- tion. That you speak up at a point in time when capitalism has decomposed the subject so much that it is possible to realize that the subject was never anything but a multiphcity of posi- tions.
? MF: I'll talk about that soon but I started with some- thing else. First, when I examine the rationality of govemance, I seek to estabhsh circuits which are not isomorphisms. Sec-
? 254 How Much Does It Cost. .
? ond, when I speak about the relationships of power and the forms of rationality, which regulate and govern these, then I'm not speaking about the power, which governs all of society and superimposes its rationality on it. Relationships of power are manifold. They have various forms which can be executed within the family, inside an institution, an administration, be- tween a ruhng and subservient class in specific and common forms of rationality. It is a matter of a field of analysis and not a reference to a unique instance. Third, when I examine rela- tionships of power, I create no theory of power. It is how relationships of power interact, are determining elements in every relationship which I want to examine; between the re- flexivity of the subject and the discourse of truth when my question is: How can the subject tell the truth about itself? That is obvious for my examination of insanity. The subject was able to tell the truth about his insanity, because the struc- tures of the Other allowed him to. That was possible as a result of a specific kind of dominance, which some persons exerted over others.
? I am no theoretician of power. The question of power in itself doesn't interest me. When I did speak often about this question fo power, I did so because the given political analysis of the phenomenon of power could not be properly given jus- tice from the fine and small appearances which I wanted to recall, when I asked the question of the "dire-vrai" about oneself. If I "tell the truth" about myself, I constitute myself as subject by a certain number of relationships of power, which weigh upon me and which I lay upon others. I am not creating a theory of power or an analysis of contemporary power. I am working on the way the reflexivity of self to self has been estabhshed and which discourse of truth is tied to it. When I speak about the institutions of confinement in the 18th cen- tury, then I am speaking about the point in time of existing relationships of power. I take contemporary psychiatry for ex-
? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 255
? amination. A number of problems arise in the interdepend- ences of function of the institution. They point to a relatively
ancient history, which encompasses several centuries. I write the history or archaeology of the kind and way one tried in the 17th or 18th century to tell the truth about insanity. I want to show it as it existed at that time. If for example I described the criminal and system of punishment in the 18th century I have researched how the forms and practices of power in a small number of 18th century institutions, which can serve as a model, existed. Therefore, I do not find it correct at all to say
power is no longer the same. A
Translated by Mia Foret and Marion Martius.
Notes
? 1 Dominique Desanti, A Woman in Revolt: A Biography of Flora Tristan, trans, Elizabeth Zewin (New York: Crown, 1976); Les Staliniens, 1944-1956: une expe? rience politique
(Paris: Fayard, 1975).
? 2 Mikel Dufresne, The Sciences of Art (Westport, Conn,: Greenwood, 1963); Jean-Franc? ois Lyotard, Driftworks (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1984).
3 Paul Ricoeur wrote extensively on hermeneutics. See, for example. The Conflict of Interpretations (Chicago: North- western University Press, 1974), and Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Texas Christian Univ. Press, 1976).
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). See also On the Line, trans. John Johnston (New York:
? 4
? 25(5 How Much Does It Cost. . .
Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1983), and Nomadol- ogy: The War Machine, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1987).
5 Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Geneaology, History," Semiotext(e) (Vol III, No. 1,1978).
6 Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1987). See also Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, and Paul Patton (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1983); Simulations, trans. Philip Beitchman, Paul Foss, Paul Patton (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1985); and The Ecstasy of Communications, trans. Bernard Schutze and Caroline Schutze(New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1988).
? 20
An Ethics of Pleasure
? ? Q; In your interview with geographers at Herodote, you said that architecture beocomes political at the end of the eighteenth century. Obviously, it was political in earlier peri- ods, too, such as during the Roman Empire. What is particular about the eighteenth century?
? MF: My statement was awkward in that form. Of course I did not mean to say that architecture was not political before, becoming so only at that time. I only meant to say that in the eighteenth century one sees the development of reflec- tion upon architecture as a function of the aims and techniques of the government of societies. One begins to see a form of political lietarature that addresses what the order of a society should be, what a city should be, given the requirements of the maintenance of order; given that one should avoid epidemics, avoid revolts, permit a decent and moral family life, and so on. In terms of these objectives, how is one to conceive of both
? 21
What Calls For Punishment?
? ? Q: Your book Discipline and Punish, published in 1974, fell Uke a meteor onto the domain of criminology and penal studies. Proposing an analysis of the penal system in the perspective of political tactics and the technology of power, this work collided with traditional conceptions of delinquency
and the social function of punishment. It has troubled repres- sive judges, at least those who examine the meaning of their work; it has shaken up a number of criminologists who hardly enjoyed having their discourse described as idle chatter. In- creasingly rare today are books on criminology that don't refer to Discipline and Punish as an incontrovertible work. How- ever, the penal system doesn't change and the "idle chatter" of criminologists continues invariably, as if one rendered homage to the theoretician of juridico-penal epistemology without being able to learn from his teachings, as if a totally airtight barrier existed between theory and practice. No doubt your intention was not to be a reformer, but can one imagine a politics of criminology that would take support from your analysis and try to draw from it certain lessons?
? 280 What Calls for Punishment?
? MF: Perhaps I first ought to explain precisely what I intended to do in this book. I didn't want to write a directly critical work, if one means by "critical" the denunciation of the drawbacks of today's penal system. Nor did I want to write an historical work about the institution, in the sense that I did not want to recount how the penal and carceral institution functioned in the course of the 19th century. I tried to pose another problem: to discover the system of thought, the form of rationality, which since the end of the 18th century has underlain the idea that the prison is in sum the best means, one of the most efficient and most rational, to punish in fi'actions in a society. It is clear that in doing this I had certain preoccu- pations concerning what one could do now. Indeed, it often appeared to me that in opposing as one did in the traditional way through reformism and revolution, one did not give one- self the means to think what could yield to a real, profound and radical transformation. It seems to me that very often in the reforms of the penal system one accepted implicitly and sometimes even explicitly the system of rationality that had been defined and put into place a long time ago, and that one tried simply to know what the institutions and the practices would be that would permit realization of the project and at- tanment of its ends. By isolating the system of rationality underlying punitive practices, I wanted to indicate what postu- lates of thought it was necessary to reexamine if one wanted to transform the penal system.
? I do not say that one had necessarily to free oneself from them; but I believe that it is very important when one wants to do a work of transformation to know not only what are the institutions and their real effects, but equally what is the type of thought that sustains them: what can one still ac- cept of this system of rationality? What part, on the contrary, deserves to be set aside, transformed, or abandoned? I had tried to do the same thing in regard to the history of psychiat-
? What Calls for Punishment? 281
? lie institutions. And it's true that I have been somewhat sur- prised and fairly disappointed to see that all that did not derive firom any enterprise of reflection and thought that might have been able to re-unite, around the same problem, very different people: judges, theoreticians of penal law, employees of peni- tentiary institutions, lawyers, social workers, and people with prison experience. It's true, on that side, no doubt for social and cultural reasons, that the 1970s have been extremely dis- appointing. Many criticisms have been launched in every di- rection; often these ideas have had certain influence, but there rarely has been a crystallization of questions posed as a collec- tive enterprise, to determine in any case what are the transfor- mations to be made. In any case, for my part and despite my desire, I have never had the possibility of a working contact with any professor of penal law, any judge, or any political party--that's obvious. Thus the Socialist Party, founded in
1972, which for nine years was able to prepare its assumption to power and which to a certain point echoed in its discourse several themes developed in the course of the 1960s and 1970s, never made a serious attempt to define in advance what its real practice would be when it came to power. It seems institutions, groups and political parties that might have been able to promote this work of reflection did nothing. . .
? Q: One has the impression that the conceptual sys- tem hasn't evolved at all. Although jurists and psychiatrists recognize the pertinence and the novelty of your analyses, they collide, it would seem, with the impossibility of translat- ing them into practice and into research on what is ambigu- ously called "a politics of criminality. "
? MF: You are posing a problem that is indeed very important and difficult. You know that I belong to a genera- tion of people that has seen most of the utopias framed in the
? 252 What Calls for Punishment?
? 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century collapse one after another, and that has also seen the perverse and sometimes disasterous effects that could follow from projects which were the most generous in their intentions. I have al- ways insisted on not playing the role of the prophet intellec- tual who tells people in advance what they must do and pre- scribes to them the frameworks of thought, the objectives and the means--all drawn from his own brain while working in an office among his books. It has seemed to me that the work of an intellectual, what I call a "specific intellectual," is to try to isolate, in their power of constraint but also in the contingency of their historical formation, the systems of thought that have now become familiar to us, that appear evident to us, and that have become part of our perceptions, attitudes and behavior. Next, it is necessary to work in common with practitioners, not only to modify institutions and practices but to elaborate forms of thought.
Q: What you have called the "idle chatter of crimi- nologists" and which no doubt has been poorly understood, is it precisely the fact that this system of thought in which all these analyses have been carried out for a century and a half has not been put into question?
? MF: Yes, that's it. Perhaps that phrase was a httle too off-hand. Let's take it back then. But I have the impression that the difficulties and contradictions that penal practice has encountered over the last two centuries have never been deeply re-examined. And now, one hundred and fifty years later, the same notions, the same themes, the same reproaches, the came criticisms, the same demands are being repeated, as if nothing had changed, and in a sense, indeed nothing has. From the moment when an institution presents so many draw- backs, arouses so much criticism, and can only give rise to the
? What Calls for Punishment? 283
? indefinite repetition of the same discourse, "idle chatter" is a serious symptom.
? Q: In Discipline and Punish, you analyze this "strat- egy" which consists in transforming certain illegalisms into delinquency, making a success out of this apparent failure of the prison. Everything happens as if a certain "group" more or less consciously used this means to arrive at certain effects which would not be announced. One has the impression, per- haps false, that that's a ruse of power that subverts the projects and undermines the discourse of humanist reformers. From this point of view, there would be some similarity between your analysis and the model of Marxist interpretation of his- tory (I am thinking of the paper in which you show that a certain type of illegalism is singled out for repression whereas others are tolerated). But one does not see clearly, in contrast with Marxism, what "group" or what "class" or what interests are at work in this strategy.
? MF; In the analysis of an institution different things must be distinguished.
? Q: It is interesting that you say you would have avoided certain things if you had been familiar with the Frank- furt School and Critical Theory, especially since Habermas and Negt have applauded your efforts. In a conversation with Habermas, hepraised to me your idea of la bifurcation de la raison--that in every moment reason is supposed to be di- vided in two. Despite that I asked myself if you would agree with the bifurcation of reason as Critical Theory conceives of it. That is, with the dialectic of reason according to which reason is perverted by the effect of its own power, is trans- formed and reduced to a type of thought which is technical thought. The ruhng thought in Critical Theory is that of a dialectical continuity of reason, with a perversion, which changes it completely suddenly and which serves to correct it, which should be the beginning of the battle for emancipation. The will to knowledge has made in its own way a lot of trust in history ambiguous (bifurquer). The word bifurquer is per- haps not the right word. Reason has divided knowledge many times.
? MF: Yes, one has often tried to blackmail all criti- cism of reason and every critical test of the history of rational- ity so that one either recognizes reason or casts it into irration- alism--as if it were not possible to write a rational criticism of rationahty, a rational history of all ambiguity and biftircations, a contingent history of rationality. Since Max Weber in the Frankfurt School and in every case with many historians of
? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 243
? science like Canguilhem it was a matter of determining the form of rationalism, which is presented as the ruling one and to which one gives the status of reason, in order to let it appear as one of the possible forms of rational work. In this history of French science, which is considerably significant, Gaston Bachelard also plays a central role.
? Q: Despite that the hymns of praise are a bit poi- soned. According to Habermas you described the moment of the bifurcation of reason splendidly. This bifurcation is sup- posed to be a one-time occurrence, you had determined, as reason took a turn, which led to technical rationalism, to a self-diminution, to a self-limiting. If this bifurcation is also a split, then it could only have happened a single time in history, in order to divide two realms as one has called them since Kant. This analysis of bifurcation is Kantian. There is knowl- edge of understanding, the knowledge of reason, technical rea- son and moral reason. In order to judge this bifiircation one accepts the position of moral-practical reason. Therefore, a one-time bifurcation, a division between technical and practi- cal which governs all of the history of thought in Germany. You just said that this tradition stems from the question "What is Enlightenment? " This praise seems to diminish your assess- ment of the history of ideas.
? MF: In fact, I do not speak of a bifurcation of reason. Rather I speak of multiple bifurcations. I speak of an endless prohfic division. I am not speaking of the moment when rea- son became technical. At the present, in order to give an ex- ample I am researching the problem of technology of self in Greco-Roman antiquity. How men, life, self were objects of a certain number of technai, which can be compared completely in thek compelling rationality of a production technology.
? 244 How Much Does It Cost. .
? Q: But without including the entire society.
MF: Without including the entire society. What a technai or technology of self brings to development is a his- torical phenomenon, which is completely analyzable and de- terminable and is not the bifurcation of reason. In the prolific division, breaks, caesuras, this was an occurrence, a signifi- cant epoch, which had noteworthy consequences, but is not a one-time phenomenon.
Q: If one then assumes that the phenomenon of the self-perversion of reason is not a one-time occurrence, didn't occur just once in history where reason lost something essen- tial, something substantial--as Weber would say--does your work aim to rehabihtate fruitful reason? Is there another kind of conception of reason in your work, another concept of ra- tionality as that which is accepted by us today.
? MF: Yes. But here I would like to free myself from phenomenology which was my starting point. I don't believe that there is here a kind of founding act through which reason in its essence discovers or would be engaged and afterwards could be broken off from any occurrence. I believe that there is a self-creation of reason and therefore I am trying to analyze the forms of rationality: various proofs, various formulations, various modifications by which rationalities educe each other, contradict one another, chase each other away, without one therefore being able to designate a moment in which reason vypuld have lost its basic design or changed from rationalism to irrationahsm. Very schematically, I wanted in the 1960s to give up the phenomenological thesis as well as the Marxist thesis (Luka? cs). There was a rationality which was the exem- plary form of reason itself which had been led into a crisis by a number of social necessities (capitahsm or even more the
? . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 245
? transition of one form of capitalism to another). That is, into a forgetting of reason and a descent into irrationalism. That is the second great model, schematically correct and unjust, from which I tried to free myself.
? Q: According to this model there was a one-time bi- furcation, be it after a forgetting, be it after an expropriation by a class. Therefore the emancipation movement in history did not just consist of a retaking of what had been expropri- ated in order to re-expropriate it, but rather on the contrary in that reason was given back its entire truth, given back its status of absolute universal science. It is clear that you have no proposal of a new science or an expanded science.
? MF; Absolutely not.
Q; But you show that every time a form of rational- ity asserts itself, it occurs through division, that is, through closure or alienation, through the demarcation of a boundary between itself and another. Does your proposal include a wish to rehabilitate this other one? For example, when you embrace the silence of a madman, do you consider it a language which expresses itself comprehensively on the necessities of the creation of works?
? MF; Yes. What interested me in this general frame- work were the forms of rationality, which the human subject applied to himself. While the historian of science in France busied himself primarily with the problem of the constitution of scientific objects, I asked myself another question. How does it happen that the human subject makes himself into an object of possible knowledge, through which forms of ration- ality, through which historical necessities, and at what price? My question is this; How much does it cost the subject to be
? ? 246 How Much Does It Cost.
? able to tell the truth about itself? How much does it cost the subject as madman to be able to tell the truth about itself? About the cost of constituting the madman as the absolute other and in that it not only pays this theoretical price, but also an institutional and even economic price as the organization of psychiatry allows it to be determined. A complex and multi- layered totality with an institutionalized game, class relation- ships, class conflicts, modalities of knowledge and finally a whole history, subjects and reason are involved in it. That is what I tried to reconstitute. That is perhaps a completely crazy, very complex project, of which I could only observe a few moments, a few special points, hke the problem of the insane subject. How can one tell the truth about an insane subject? Those were my first two books. The Order of Things asked, what is the cost of problematizing and analyzing the speaking, working, living subject. That's why I transferred the same kinds of questions to criminals and penal institutions. How can one tell the truth about oneself as a criminal. And I want to continue that in respect to sexuality. How can the subject tell the truth about itself as a subject of sexual gratifi-
cation, and at what cost?
Q: It is in no way a matter of exhuming using ar- chaeology something archaic which existed before history.
MF: No. Absolutely not. When I use the word ar- chaeology, which I don't do anymore, then I use it to say that the type of analysis which I conduct was displaced, not in time blit by the level at which it is determined. My probleni is not to study the evolution of the history of ideas, but rather much more to observe the ideas, how this or that object could appear as a possible object of perception. Why for example insanity became at one time an object of perception, which corre- sponded to a type of recognition. This displacement between
? ? ? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 247
? the ideas about insanity and the constitution of insanity as object I wanted to delineate through the use of the word ar- chaeology as opposed to history.
Q: I asked this question because there are now ten- dencies, under the guise that the New German Right is influ- enced by Nietzsche, to assume that French Nietzscheanism comes from the same vein. One mixes everything together in order to renew basically the fronts of a new theoretical class war, which is very difficult to find these days.
? MF: There is not just one Nietzscheanism. One can- not say there is a true Nietzsceanism and that this one is truer than the other. But those who found Nietzsche a tool more than 25 years ago, to change their position in regard to the body of philosophical thought ruled by one of phenomenology or Marxism, have nothing to do with those who use Nietzsche today. GUles Deleuze wrote a powerful book about Nietzsche and Nietzsche is present in his work in general, but without noisy reference and without the desire to flaunt Nietzsche's banner for a rhetorical or political effect. It is impressive that someone like Deleuze simply turned to Nietzsche and took him seriously. I also wanted to do that: what serious use can one make of Nietzsche? I gave a lecture about Nietzsche and have written a little about him. ' The only honor I accorded him, weakly, was naming the first part of The History of Sexu- ality "The Will to Knowledge. "
? Q; Motivated by this will to knowledge there was al- ways a rapport or relationship. I suspect you avoid both these words because they are colored by Hegelianism. Perhaps we should speak about evaluation, as Nietzsche did; a way to evaluate truth and the power to give it structure to create it; a power which does not exist as archaically as reason or source.
? 248 How Much Does It Cost. .
? but rather a relationship of powers--perhaps already a rela- tionship of power in the act of constituting all knowledge.
MF: No, I wouldn't say that. That is too comph- cated. My problem is the relationship of self to self and that of saying the truth. What I thank Nietzsche for, I owe more to his texts of around 1880 in which the question of truth, of the truth of history and the will to truth were central for him. The first text which Sartre wrote as a young student was a Nietzschean text. "The History of Truth," a tiny text which appeared for the first time around 1925 in a gymnasium jour- nal. His departure point was from the same problem. And it is very noteworthy that his way led from the history of truth to phenomenology while the way of the subsequent generation to which we belong, arose particularly to severe itself from phe- nomenology in order to retum to the question of the history of truth.
Q: You admit to an affinity to Deleuze, to a certain extent. Does this include Deleuze's concept of desire?
MF: No.
Q: It seems to me that desire by Deleuze is a produc- tive desire and gives the species its form-giving reason for genesis.
? MF: I don't want to take a position or say what Deleuze meant. People say what they want to or what they can. When a system of thought is created it always becomes fixed and identified in the heart of a cultural tradition. It is perfectly normal that this cultural tradition takes it up and re- stricts it, does what it wants with it, has it express what it didn't say, but with the allusion that it is only another form of
? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 249
? what one intended to say. That belongs to the play of culture. But that cannot be my relationship to Deleuze. I will not say what he wanted to say. His problem was the problem of desire. Probably we will find in the theory of desh-e the effect of a re- lationship to Nietzsche. While my problem always was truth. Wahr-Sagen and the relationship between it and the forms of reflexivity, the reflexivity of self above self.
Q: Yes, I think Nietzsche did not differentiate thor- oughly enough the will to knowledge fi^om the will to power.
? MF; There's a noticeable shifting in Nietzsche's text between those who are governed by the question about the will to knowledge and the will to power. But I didn't want to debate this for a simple reason. I haven't read Nietzsche for a good many years.
Q: The elaboration seemed to be important for me because of the truly confused reception of Nietzsche abroad, as characterized by the way also in France.
MF: My relationship to Nietzsche is not a historical relationship. I am not so interested in Nietzsche's history of thought as in this quality of the challenge, which I felt--rather long ago--as I read Nietzsche for the first time. If one reads
"Fro? hliche Wissenschaft" or "Morgenrote" while one is being formed by the great and old university tradition of Des- cartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, then one stumbles on these witty, strange, and impudent texts and says to oneself, good, I won't do it the way my fiiends, colleagues, and professors do it, peering in arrogance from on high. What is the epitome of philosophical intensity and what are the actual philosophical effects, which we can find in these texts. That for me is the challenge of Nietzsche.
? 250 How Much Does It Cost. .
? Q: In the actual reception there is a second confu- sion, that is post-modernism, to which not insignificant people refer and which played a certain role in Germany, since Habermas took up this expression and criticized it. Do you see a tendency in it ? Can you ascertain a place for yourself in it?
? MF: I must say, I find that difficult to answer. First, because I never really understood how modernism is defined in France. It's clear by Baudelaire, but after that it seems to lose meaning for me. I don't know in what sense Germans speak of modernism. I know that Americans are planning a kind of seminar with Habermas and me and Habermas pro- posed modernism as the topic. I'm at a loss; I don't know what that means nor what the problematic is. As much as I recog- nize behind the expression Structuralism, the problem of the subject and its transformation, as little do I see the common problematic between post-modernism or post-structuralism,
? Q: Accepting modernism or rejecting it is not only ambiguous, it truncates modernism. Also it has at least three definitions: the definition of the historian, Weber's definition, and Adorno's which alludes to Benjamin's Baudelaire. Haber- mas seems to prefer here against Adorno the tradition of rea- son, that is, Weber's definition of modernism. Therefore he perceives in post-modernism the decline of reason, so that reason basically becomes a form of the will to knowledge, among other things.
MF: That isn't my problem. I don't at all identify reason with the totality of the forms of rationality. The latter could until recently dominate in the types of knowledge, the forms of technology and the modalities of governance. The application of rationality occurs primarily in these areas. I don't deal with the problem of art, it is too complicated. For
? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 251
? me no given form of rationality is reason.
Therefore I don't see how one can say that the forms of rationality, which have governed these three realms, break apart and disperse. I simply see multiple transformations--^but why should one call that the demise of reason? Endlessly other forms of rationality are born. Therefore I claim that reason is a long narrative, which ends today and makes room for another, and makes no sense.
? Q: The field is open for many forms of narratives.
? MF: We hit upon here one of the most destructive habits of contemporary thought. Perhaps even one of the most destructive of modem thought--in any case, of post-Hegelian thought. That is that the moment of the present is considered in history as the break, the chmax, the fulfillment, the retum of youth, etc. The solemnity with which everyone who has a philosophical discourse reflects his own time seems a stigma to me. I say this particularly because it happens to me and one finds it constantly in Nietzsche. One must probably find the humility to admit that the time of one's own life is not the one- time, basic, revolutionary moment of history, from which eve- rything begins and is completed. At the same time humility is needed to say without solemnity that the present time is rather exciting and demands an analysis. We must ask ourselves the question, what is today? In relation to the Kantian question, What is Enlightenment? One can say that it is the task of philosophy to explain what today is and what we are today, but without breast-beating drama and theatricality and main- taining that this moment is the greatest damnation or daybreak of the rising sun. No, it is a day like every other, or much more, a day which is never like another.
? Q: That brings up a lot of questions which you have posed yourself. What is today? Can one characterize this ep-
? 252 How Much Does It Cost. .
? och despite everything as a great fragmentation in regard to others, through deterritorialization and schizophrenia?
MF: I want to say about the task of a diagnosis of today that it does not consist only of a description of who we are, rather a hne of fragility of today to follow and understand, if and how what is, can no longer be what it is. In this sense, the description must be formulated in a kind of virtual break, which opens room, understood as a room of concrete freedom, that is possible transformation.
Q: Does the practical work of the intellectual focus on this place of the crack?
? MF: I believe so. The work of the intellect is to show that what is, does not have to be, what it is. Therefore this des- ignation and description of reality never has the value of a pre- scription according to the form "because this is, that is. " Therefore the retum to history makes sense in the respect that history shows that that which is was not always so. It unites casual movements into threads of a fragile and uncertain his- tory. Thus things were formed which give the impression of the greatest self-evidence. What reason considers its necessity or much more what various forms of rationality claim to be their necessity existence, has a history which we can deter- mine completely and recover from the tapestry of contingency. But this doesn't mean that these forms of rationality are irra- tional. They rest upon a foundation of human practices and human faces, because they are made they can be unmade--of course, assuming we know how they were made.
? Q: This work on the breaks is both descriptive and practical, is work on a particular place.
? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 253
? MF: Perhaps a place and perhaps work which must retum as a result of the questions asked there so far back into historical analysis.
Q: Is the work on the place of the break that which you call microphysics of power or analysis of power?
MF: A little. These forms of rationality in the proc- ess of dominance must be analyzed for themselves. These forms of rationality are alien to other forms of power like recognition or technology. On the contrary, there is an ex- change, transfer, interference. But it is impossible however to designate these three realms as the only and constant form of rationality. We find the same types again displaced, dense manifold circuits, but still no isomorphism.
Q: Sometimes or always?
MF: There are no universal rules which estabhsh the types of relationship between rationality and the processes of govemance.
? Q: I asked this question because a number of critics express the same criticism--like Jean Baudrillard*--which claims the beginning of microphysics reflects a situation in which power has been rendered irreparable through dissemina- tion. That you speak up at a point in time when capitalism has decomposed the subject so much that it is possible to realize that the subject was never anything but a multiphcity of posi- tions.
? MF: I'll talk about that soon but I started with some- thing else. First, when I examine the rationality of govemance, I seek to estabhsh circuits which are not isomorphisms. Sec-
? 254 How Much Does It Cost. .
? ond, when I speak about the relationships of power and the forms of rationality, which regulate and govern these, then I'm not speaking about the power, which governs all of society and superimposes its rationality on it. Relationships of power are manifold. They have various forms which can be executed within the family, inside an institution, an administration, be- tween a ruhng and subservient class in specific and common forms of rationality. It is a matter of a field of analysis and not a reference to a unique instance. Third, when I examine rela- tionships of power, I create no theory of power. It is how relationships of power interact, are determining elements in every relationship which I want to examine; between the re- flexivity of the subject and the discourse of truth when my question is: How can the subject tell the truth about itself? That is obvious for my examination of insanity. The subject was able to tell the truth about his insanity, because the struc- tures of the Other allowed him to. That was possible as a result of a specific kind of dominance, which some persons exerted over others.
? I am no theoretician of power. The question of power in itself doesn't interest me. When I did speak often about this question fo power, I did so because the given political analysis of the phenomenon of power could not be properly given jus- tice from the fine and small appearances which I wanted to recall, when I asked the question of the "dire-vrai" about oneself. If I "tell the truth" about myself, I constitute myself as subject by a certain number of relationships of power, which weigh upon me and which I lay upon others. I am not creating a theory of power or an analysis of contemporary power. I am working on the way the reflexivity of self to self has been estabhshed and which discourse of truth is tied to it. When I speak about the institutions of confinement in the 18th cen- tury, then I am speaking about the point in time of existing relationships of power. I take contemporary psychiatry for ex-
? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 255
? amination. A number of problems arise in the interdepend- ences of function of the institution. They point to a relatively
ancient history, which encompasses several centuries. I write the history or archaeology of the kind and way one tried in the 17th or 18th century to tell the truth about insanity. I want to show it as it existed at that time. If for example I described the criminal and system of punishment in the 18th century I have researched how the forms and practices of power in a small number of 18th century institutions, which can serve as a model, existed. Therefore, I do not find it correct at all to say
power is no longer the same. A
Translated by Mia Foret and Marion Martius.
Notes
? 1 Dominique Desanti, A Woman in Revolt: A Biography of Flora Tristan, trans, Elizabeth Zewin (New York: Crown, 1976); Les Staliniens, 1944-1956: une expe? rience politique
(Paris: Fayard, 1975).
? 2 Mikel Dufresne, The Sciences of Art (Westport, Conn,: Greenwood, 1963); Jean-Franc? ois Lyotard, Driftworks (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1984).
3 Paul Ricoeur wrote extensively on hermeneutics. See, for example. The Conflict of Interpretations (Chicago: North- western University Press, 1974), and Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Texas Christian Univ. Press, 1976).
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). See also On the Line, trans. John Johnston (New York:
? 4
? 25(5 How Much Does It Cost. . .
Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1983), and Nomadol- ogy: The War Machine, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1987).
5 Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Geneaology, History," Semiotext(e) (Vol III, No. 1,1978).
6 Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1987). See also Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, and Paul Patton (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1983); Simulations, trans. Philip Beitchman, Paul Foss, Paul Patton (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1985); and The Ecstasy of Communications, trans. Bernard Schutze and Caroline Schutze(New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1988).
? 20
An Ethics of Pleasure
? ? Q; In your interview with geographers at Herodote, you said that architecture beocomes political at the end of the eighteenth century. Obviously, it was political in earlier peri- ods, too, such as during the Roman Empire. What is particular about the eighteenth century?
? MF: My statement was awkward in that form. Of course I did not mean to say that architecture was not political before, becoming so only at that time. I only meant to say that in the eighteenth century one sees the development of reflec- tion upon architecture as a function of the aims and techniques of the government of societies. One begins to see a form of political lietarature that addresses what the order of a society should be, what a city should be, given the requirements of the maintenance of order; given that one should avoid epidemics, avoid revolts, permit a decent and moral family life, and so on. In terms of these objectives, how is one to conceive of both
? 21
What Calls For Punishment?
? ? Q: Your book Discipline and Punish, published in 1974, fell Uke a meteor onto the domain of criminology and penal studies. Proposing an analysis of the penal system in the perspective of political tactics and the technology of power, this work collided with traditional conceptions of delinquency
and the social function of punishment. It has troubled repres- sive judges, at least those who examine the meaning of their work; it has shaken up a number of criminologists who hardly enjoyed having their discourse described as idle chatter. In- creasingly rare today are books on criminology that don't refer to Discipline and Punish as an incontrovertible work. How- ever, the penal system doesn't change and the "idle chatter" of criminologists continues invariably, as if one rendered homage to the theoretician of juridico-penal epistemology without being able to learn from his teachings, as if a totally airtight barrier existed between theory and practice. No doubt your intention was not to be a reformer, but can one imagine a politics of criminology that would take support from your analysis and try to draw from it certain lessons?
? 280 What Calls for Punishment?
? MF: Perhaps I first ought to explain precisely what I intended to do in this book. I didn't want to write a directly critical work, if one means by "critical" the denunciation of the drawbacks of today's penal system. Nor did I want to write an historical work about the institution, in the sense that I did not want to recount how the penal and carceral institution functioned in the course of the 19th century. I tried to pose another problem: to discover the system of thought, the form of rationality, which since the end of the 18th century has underlain the idea that the prison is in sum the best means, one of the most efficient and most rational, to punish in fi'actions in a society. It is clear that in doing this I had certain preoccu- pations concerning what one could do now. Indeed, it often appeared to me that in opposing as one did in the traditional way through reformism and revolution, one did not give one- self the means to think what could yield to a real, profound and radical transformation. It seems to me that very often in the reforms of the penal system one accepted implicitly and sometimes even explicitly the system of rationality that had been defined and put into place a long time ago, and that one tried simply to know what the institutions and the practices would be that would permit realization of the project and at- tanment of its ends. By isolating the system of rationality underlying punitive practices, I wanted to indicate what postu- lates of thought it was necessary to reexamine if one wanted to transform the penal system.
? I do not say that one had necessarily to free oneself from them; but I believe that it is very important when one wants to do a work of transformation to know not only what are the institutions and their real effects, but equally what is the type of thought that sustains them: what can one still ac- cept of this system of rationality? What part, on the contrary, deserves to be set aside, transformed, or abandoned? I had tried to do the same thing in regard to the history of psychiat-
? What Calls for Punishment? 281
? lie institutions. And it's true that I have been somewhat sur- prised and fairly disappointed to see that all that did not derive firom any enterprise of reflection and thought that might have been able to re-unite, around the same problem, very different people: judges, theoreticians of penal law, employees of peni- tentiary institutions, lawyers, social workers, and people with prison experience. It's true, on that side, no doubt for social and cultural reasons, that the 1970s have been extremely dis- appointing. Many criticisms have been launched in every di- rection; often these ideas have had certain influence, but there rarely has been a crystallization of questions posed as a collec- tive enterprise, to determine in any case what are the transfor- mations to be made. In any case, for my part and despite my desire, I have never had the possibility of a working contact with any professor of penal law, any judge, or any political party--that's obvious. Thus the Socialist Party, founded in
1972, which for nine years was able to prepare its assumption to power and which to a certain point echoed in its discourse several themes developed in the course of the 1960s and 1970s, never made a serious attempt to define in advance what its real practice would be when it came to power. It seems institutions, groups and political parties that might have been able to promote this work of reflection did nothing. . .
? Q: One has the impression that the conceptual sys- tem hasn't evolved at all. Although jurists and psychiatrists recognize the pertinence and the novelty of your analyses, they collide, it would seem, with the impossibility of translat- ing them into practice and into research on what is ambigu- ously called "a politics of criminality. "
? MF: You are posing a problem that is indeed very important and difficult. You know that I belong to a genera- tion of people that has seen most of the utopias framed in the
? 252 What Calls for Punishment?
? 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century collapse one after another, and that has also seen the perverse and sometimes disasterous effects that could follow from projects which were the most generous in their intentions. I have al- ways insisted on not playing the role of the prophet intellec- tual who tells people in advance what they must do and pre- scribes to them the frameworks of thought, the objectives and the means--all drawn from his own brain while working in an office among his books. It has seemed to me that the work of an intellectual, what I call a "specific intellectual," is to try to isolate, in their power of constraint but also in the contingency of their historical formation, the systems of thought that have now become familiar to us, that appear evident to us, and that have become part of our perceptions, attitudes and behavior. Next, it is necessary to work in common with practitioners, not only to modify institutions and practices but to elaborate forms of thought.
Q: What you have called the "idle chatter of crimi- nologists" and which no doubt has been poorly understood, is it precisely the fact that this system of thought in which all these analyses have been carried out for a century and a half has not been put into question?
? MF: Yes, that's it. Perhaps that phrase was a httle too off-hand. Let's take it back then. But I have the impression that the difficulties and contradictions that penal practice has encountered over the last two centuries have never been deeply re-examined. And now, one hundred and fifty years later, the same notions, the same themes, the same reproaches, the came criticisms, the same demands are being repeated, as if nothing had changed, and in a sense, indeed nothing has. From the moment when an institution presents so many draw- backs, arouses so much criticism, and can only give rise to the
? What Calls for Punishment? 283
? indefinite repetition of the same discourse, "idle chatter" is a serious symptom.
? Q: In Discipline and Punish, you analyze this "strat- egy" which consists in transforming certain illegalisms into delinquency, making a success out of this apparent failure of the prison. Everything happens as if a certain "group" more or less consciously used this means to arrive at certain effects which would not be announced. One has the impression, per- haps false, that that's a ruse of power that subverts the projects and undermines the discourse of humanist reformers. From this point of view, there would be some similarity between your analysis and the model of Marxist interpretation of his- tory (I am thinking of the paper in which you show that a certain type of illegalism is singled out for repression whereas others are tolerated). But one does not see clearly, in contrast with Marxism, what "group" or what "class" or what interests are at work in this strategy.
? MF; In the analysis of an institution different things must be distinguished.
