Conversation with Michel Foucault Author(s): Millicent Dillon and Michel Foucault Reviewed work(s): Source: The Threepenny

Review, No. 1 (Winter - Spring, 1980), pp. 4-5 Published by: Threepenny Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4382926 . Accessed: 06/04/2012 14:09
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INTERVIEW

own subjectivity,our own relation to ourselves. Dillon: You said somethingin your talk about the tyrannyof the modern state as it relates to war and welfare. Foucault:Yes, if we think about the way in which the modern state began to worry about individuals-about the lives of individuals-there is a paradox in this history. At the same moment the state began to practice its greatest slaughters,it began to worry about the physical and mental health of each individual.The firstgreatbook on publichealthin Francewas written in 1784, five years before the Revolution,and ten yearsbeforethe Napoleonic wars. This game between death and life is one of the main paradoxes of the modern state. Dillon: Is the situation differentin
other societies, in socialist or Communist countries?

ConversationWith Michel Foucault

Millicent Dillon LEGENDARY Michel hisFoucault-philosopher, torian and, some say, magician of ideas-came to Stanford University last October to speak of his new work: identity and individuality as a political question. Head of the Department of the History of Systems of Thought at the College de France in Paris, Foucault was invited to Stanford to deliver the Tanner lectures. Admired, even lionized, in France, he has been alternately praised and criticized in this country, primarily in academic circles. He has been admired for the scope and originality of this thought, but he has been criticized for being contradictory, for a "lurking sentimentality" in his overzealous defense of criminals. In his previous work-books that include Madness and Civilization, Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality-Foucault has already examined how in concepts and institutions we have been "trapped in our own history." His ambitious intent has been to "untie all those knots which historians have patiently tied," to examine the technology of power which "reaches into the very grain of the individual, touches his body, intrudes into his gestures, his attitudes, his discourse, his apprenticeship, his daily life." In his Tanner lectures, "Each and Everyone: A Criticism of Political Rationality," Foucault sought to examine the origin of the power of the modern state over individuals. The pastoral shape of power, he claimed; originated with the metaphor of God as a shepherd in ancient Egyptian texts and in the Old Testament. Jehovah was regarded as a shepherd leading His flock, keeping watch over the behavior of each individual while guaranteeing the safety of the flock. According to Foucault, the pastoral "technology" united with the Greek political idea of the citizen-the rational individual sacrificing his life for the state, if need be-to produce the theme which the modern state is upon based. "Our modern society combines the city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game," he remarked. Throughout his week at Stanford, Foucault could be seen at various places on campus, gesturing, speaking with great intensity in a heavily accented English, striving for clarity in a language not his own. There is something deceptive and continuously surprising in his appearance. In repose, his face is serious, almost forbidding. But in conversation, he is transformed. He smiles often and his face becomes alive with the effort to convey his ideas. He is an intensely private man. The French Who's Who lists only a few personal facts about him: that he was born in 1926 in Poitiers (Vienne), that he was the son of Paul Foucault, a medical doctor,
4

T HE

and of Anna Malapert. Only once in the course of the following interview did he speak personally: "When I was a boy," he said, "I never thought of becoming a writer." But then, as if it were an interjection that had no special meaning-or no meaning distinct from the intellectual point he was making-he went on to elaborate his idea. But whatever the meaning of private or public to Foucault, it is clear that he is a man of great intellectual passion, even fervor. He is not an artist, he says, nor is he a scientist. He is someone who illuminates ideas with subjectivity. In his conversation, "personal" and "impersonal" become transformed into each other.

problemis to show and analyzethe way in which a set of power techniques is related to forms, political forms like states, or social forms. Goffman'sproblemis the institution itself. My problem is the rationalizationof the management of the individual.My own work is not a historyof institutionsor a history of ideas, but the historyof rationality as it works in institutionsand in the behaviorof people. All human behavioris scheduled and programmedthrough rationality. There is a logic in institutions and in behaviorand in politicalrelations. In even the most violent ones there is a rationality.What is most dangerousin violenceis its rationality. Of course violence itself is terrible. But the deepestroot of violence and its permanence come out of the form of the rationalitywe use. The idea has been that if we live in the world of reason, we can get rid of violence. This is quite wrong. Between violenceand rationalitythere is no incompatibility. problemis My

Dillon: In France your work is well known, part of the popular culture. Here you are known only in academic circles-the fate, it seems, of almost all intellectual critics in the United States. How do you account for this difference? Foucault: Since 1964 in France the university has been in a deep crisis, both political and cultural. There have been two movements: a movement among the students to try to get rid of the purely academic life, a movement also identified with other movements such as feminism and gay rights. The second movement has been among the teachers, away from the university. There has been an attempt among them to try to express their ideas in other places-to write books, to speak on radio or television. And then, French newspapers have always been much more interested in discussing ideas of this kind than American newspapers. Dillon: In your lectures you spoke of the necessity for individual selfrealization. In the U.S. there has been for some time, of course, a large movement for self-realization, an apolitical one, connected with encounter groups or groups like EST or groups of other kinds. Do you make a distinction between that "self-realization"and your use of the word? Foucault: In France too there is a movement of the same type and of the same intensity. I think of subjectivity in another way. I think that subjectivity and identity and individuality have been a great political problem since the '60's. I think there is a danger in thinking of identity and subjectivity as quite deep and quite natural and not determined by political and social factors. The psychological subjectivity that the psychoanalysts deal with-we have to be liberated from this kind of subjectivity. We are prisoners of certain conceptions about ourselves and our behavior. We have to liberate our

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Foucault: It is not very different in the Soviet Union and China from this point of view. The control over individual life in the Soviet Union is very strong. Apparently nothing in the life of the individual is a matter of indifference to the government. The Soviets killed 16 million people to build socialism. Mass slaughter and individual control are two deep characteristics of all modern societies. Dillon: There are critics in this country who are also concerned with the questions of the manipulation of individuals by the state and by other institutions. I think of Thomas Szasz, for example. How do you think of your work in relation to theirs? Foucault: This kind of problem I write about is not a new problem. It is not my own invention. One thing struck me in the American review of my books, particularly the review of my book on prisons. They say I am trying to do the same thing as Erving Goffman in his work on asylums, that I try to do the same thing but not as well. I am not a social scientist. I don't want to do the same thing. His problem is the way a certain type of institution works, the total institution-the asylum, the school, the prison. My

not to put reason on trial, but to know what is this rationality so compatible with violence. It is not reason in general that I am fighting. I could not fight reason. Dillon: You say you are not a scientist. Some people say you are an artist. But then I was present when a student came up to you with a copy of Discipline And Punish and asked you to sign it, and you said, "No, only artists should sign their work. And I am not an artist." Foucault: An artist? When I was a boy I never thought of becoming a writer. Now when a book is a piece of art, that is something important. Somebody like me, it is always to do something, to change even a small part of the reality-to write a book about madness, to change even the smallest part of our realitypeople's ideasI am not an artist, I am not a scientist. I am somebody who tries to deal with reality through those things which are always-oftenfar from reality. Dillon: I understand that you have worked and taught in Sweden, Poland, Germany, and Tunis. Did working in those countries have an important influence on you?
THE THREEPENNY REVIEW

Foucault: Because of my theoretical interests the time I spent in Sweden, Poland, and Germany, those societies near my own-but a little different-were very important. They looked sometimes like an exaggeration or an exacerbation of my own society. In 1955 to 1960, Sweden was, from a welfare, social-political point of view, much in advance of France. And a lot of the trends in France which were not perceptible were visible to me there-though the Swedes were blind to them themselves. I had a foot ten years back and a foot ten years ahead. I was in Poland for a year. From a psychological and cultural point of view, Poland is deeply related to France, but they live in a socialist system. The contradiction was very clear to me. If I had been in the Soviet Union, on the other hand, that would have been a different case. There, under a political system that has lasted more than fifty years, the behavior of the

ship. In the Greek city, the relationship to God was much more similar to that between a pilot and the passengers of a boat. Dillon: It is very odd-this may sound very strange-but it seems to me that even though many of your assumptions appear contradictory, there is something persuasive about your approach and your convictions. Foucault: I am not merely a historian. I am not a novelist. What I do is a kind of historical fiction. In a sense I know very well that what I say is not true. A historian could say of what I've said, "That's not true." I should put it this way: I've written a lot about madness in the early '60's-a history of the birth of psychiatry. I know very well that what I have done from a historical point of view is singleminded, exaggerated. Perhaps I have dropped out some contradictory factors. But the

PERSPECTIVE

A Case For Prisoners' Rights

Donna Brorby IGOT involved in the Ruiz v. Estelle case a year out of law school, four months before it went to trial. I come from a white middleclass background, and I did not know much about prisons. No one I have loved has ever done time. I should have known about prisons: I opposed poverty and injustice; I demonstrated against the war; I was aware of social issues. I grew up in a largely poor, largely Black, depressed city, where I was one of the local school board's tokens toward the integration of Black schools in the mid-sixties. I was going to be a civil rights lawyer. Had I thought about prisons at all, I would have assumed they were awful, repressive places populated by the poor. I would not have been able to get much beyond that. Out of law school, I wanted to champion the causes of the oppressed and the poor. But I was not sure, at the beginning, that I would be able to adopt "prisoners'rights" as a cause. Despite my strong feelings that the criminal justice system was unfair, my ambivalence, at least towards people who commit certain kinds of crime, had kept me out of criminal defense work. The first prisoner I interviewed as a witness was a murderer. I wondered beforehand what he would be like. I wondered about the details of his crimes. The whole time we talked, I was conscious of the fact that this guy had deliberately killed three people. It took two or three months before I ceased noticing what my witnesses and clients were in prison for. In Ruiz and the United States v. Estelle, the 25,000 prisoners in the Texas state prisons are challenging the constitutionality of the conditions of their confinement. Inmates, without the aid of lawyers, filed the federal court suit in 1973. Soon N.A.A.C.P. thereafter, Legal Defense Fund lawyers undertook to represent the inmates, and the United States Justice Department intervened on the side of the prisoners. The trial in Ruiz, the longest civil rights trial ever, concluded in September 1979. The court's decision is not expected until early in 1980. The central question in Ruiz is whether serving time in Texas prisons constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment," which is what the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution forbids. Certain state and federal laws tangentially regulate prison conditions, and the prisoners are asking federal district judge William Wayne Justice to order that the Texas Department of Corrections (or "TDC") comply with those statutes. The inmates are also invoking their First and Fourteenth Amendment right to pursue lawsuits without interference by prison officials, and their right to due process in prison disciplinary proceedings. But the primary legal question is whether TDC prison conditions amount to cruel and unusual punishment. TDC is not a medieval torture chamber. Prisoners are not slowly dismembered or drawn and quartered. It is not the best prison system in the United States (contrary to what its administrators are fond of asserting), but it is far from the worst in many respects. It is relatively clean, and it may be the only prison system that supplies prisoners with a shower and clean change of clothing every day. It is more successful than many systems in getting inmates out of their cells for school or work a good many hours each week. TDC is, however, probably the most repressive prison system in the country. Most if not all other prison systems treat the majority of their inmates as "minimum"or "medium" security risks, but TDC runs only "maximum security" institutions. Under maximum security conditions, prisoners are strictly regimented, their privacy and personal autonomy reduced to the absolute minimum. TDC's refusal to follow prevailing practice is especially anomalous given that Texas sends an exceptionally high proportion of convicted felons to prison, which means that TDC probably has a less dangerous population than most other systems. Even TDC Director Estelle believes that one-third of the inmate population could be released tomorrow with no ill effects on Texas' crime rate, and many would argue that his estimate is conservative. Nonetheless, TDC refuses to afford any substantial number of inmates the privacy and relative freedom possible in minimum and medium security prisons. In addition, more TDC inmates are disciplined and sent to solitary confinement for "disrespectful attitude" than for any other rule violation, and TDC considers "disrespectful attitude" one of the most serious of infractions. "Bad-eyeing" an officer is disrespectful. Officers' directions are orders, and asking "Why?" is disrespectful. Muttering in Spanish while complying with an order is disrespectful. Talking back, getting angry, or threatening to "talk to a lawyer about this," however quietly, is of course disrespectful. All prisons are by nature repressive, and it is difficult if not impossible to make a legal argument that repression of inmates, however extreme, is cruel and unusual. The fact of TDC's extreme repressiveness is far from the center of our legal argument in Ruiz. But that repressiveness, and the philosophy and attitudes that have spawned it, may be close to the center of what is really wrong with TDC. Maybe the scariest thing about TDC is that so many of

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people is much more modeled by the government. Dillon: When you speak of modeling, are you implying that it is inescapable, or do you believe that there is something in human beings that resists such modeling? Foucault: In human societies one can't find political power without domination. But no one wants to be commanded-though very often in a lot of situations, people accept it. If you take a historical view in most societies we know, the political structure is unstable. I am not speaking of nonhistorical sociesocieties. Their ties-primitive history is nothing like our own. But in all the societies that belong to our tradition there has been instability and revolution. Dillon: Your thesis about the pastoral shape of power is based upon the idea of an Old Testament God who guards and watches a people who obey. But what of the times the Israelites did not obey? Foucault: The fact that the flock doesn't follow the shepherd is quite normal. The problem is to know how people experience their relation to God. In the Old Testament, God as a shepherd is the way in which the Jews experienced that relationWINTER/SPRING 1980

book had an effect on the perception of madness. So the book and my thesis have a truth in the nowadays reality. What I am trying to do is provoke an interference between our reality and the knowledge of our past history. If I succeed, this will have real effects in our present history. My hope is my books become true after they have been written-not before. My English is not very good, so with this kind of sentence I've said, people will say, "You see, he's a liar." But let me try to say it another way. I have written a book about prisons. I have tried to underline trends in the history of prisons. "Only one trend," people could say. "So that's not exactly true." But two years ago there was turmoil in several prisons in France, prisoners revolting. In two prisons, the prisoners in their cells read my book. They shouted the text to other prisoners. I know it's pretentious to say, but that's a proof of a truth-a and actual political truth-which started after the book was written. I hope that the truth of my books is in the future. D (This interview was originally published in a somewhat different form by Stanford University News and Publications.)