131

TRUTH AND POWER :

an

* interview with Michel Foucault

Fontana: Can you perhaps briefly outline the project which as le you from the study of madness in the classical period to the study of criminality and delinquence?
Foucault:

When I

being posed was that of the political status of science and the ideological The Lysenko affair functions that science could fulfil.
the most serious
not
was

working in problems which

was

the years 50-55

one

of

the centre of this, but I think that appalling business, which was for so long suppressed and carefully hidden, all kinds of interesting questions were thrown up. Two words seem to encapsulate these questions: power and knowledge. I think that, in part, I wrote Madness and Civilisation at I wanted to say in the light of these questions. If one poses the question of the relation was this: between such sciences as theoretical physics or organic chemistry and the political and economic structures of society, is one not in fact asking too complicated a question? Is one not in fact expecting too much from possible explanations? If on the other hand we take a science such as psychiatry, would this problem not in fact be much easier to resolve, both because of psychiatrys much less highly developed epistemological frame, but because psychiatric practice is connected to a whole series of institutions, of immediate economic demands, political exigences and social regulations? Thus through a dubious science such as psychiatry would we not be able to see with greater clarity the interrelationships between power and knowledge? I wanted in The Birth of the Clinic to pose this question again, this time in relation to medicine, a science which undoubtedly has a more specific scientific structure than psychiatry itself has, but is still one which is also very closely identified with
was

really

at

around the whole

social structures. What in fact somewhat threw me was the fact that the question in which I was interested in asking had virtually no interest at all for the people to whom it was addressed. They felt that it was a question that was politically irrelevant and epistemologically

insignificant.
The There are, it seems to me, three reasons for this. first is the problem that marxist intellectuals in France had (and in this respect they were playing the role assigned to them by the PCF) which was to be recognized by university institutions and by the Establishment. They were thus forced to ask the same questions as them and address themselves to the same problems and the same areas: &dquo;We have tried to be good marxists, we are not unaware of your preoccupations but we are the only ones who can throw light on your old problems.&dquo; Marxism wanted to be accepted as the means by which the liberal tradition of

First

published

in LArc

70, 1977, ppl6-22.

132

the universities would be renewed (much the same thing can be seen during the same period, operating at a much wider level, in the way in which commun.ist party members presented themselves as the only ones capable of reinterpreting and reinvigorating the nationalist tradition). From this, in terms of the area in which I am interested, we can understand their interest in the most academic and the most elevated of problems in the history of Medicine and psychiatry were neither very noble science. nor were they serious, and had none of the grandeur of the structures of classical rationalism.
reason was that post-stalinist stalinism, by excluding from marxist discourse any area which was not did a timid repetition of what had already been said, not allow areas which had not already been opened up to be approached. There were no formulated concepts, no validated vocabulary which could be used to ask questions on the effects of power and psychiatry, or the functioning

The second

of medicine; while on the other hand the endless debates, which started with Marx, were carried on by Engels and Lenin, and still continue today, between the academics and themarxists, had nourished a whole discursive tradition on Science in the 19th-century sense of the term.

The marxists paid for their fidelity to the old positivism and the price was their radical deafness in respect of all the questions of pavlovian psychiatry; and for some of the doctors who were close to the PCF, political psychiatry and psychiatry as politics were not worth considering. Whet for my part I tried to do in this area was received in resounding silence by the French intellectual left. It was only around 1968, despite the marxist tradition and despite the PCF, that all these questions took on their political importance with an acuteness that I had not been able to predict, and which demonstrated how timid and diffident my previous books had in fact been. Without the political opening-up tha.t occurred in those years I would undoubtedly not have had the courage to take up the thread of these problems and to pursue my investigations in the areas of penal law, prisons, discipline.
But I am not I wonder however if the intellectuals of the PCF (or thcse who were close to it) did not in fact refuse to pose the problem of incarceration, the political use made of psychiatry and in a more general way the disciplinarian partitioning of society. Undoubtedly only very few of them, in 1955-60, knew of the real extent of the Gulag, but I think that many of them were aware of it and many of them felt that in matters such as these it was better in all respects not to talk: it was a danger zone, the lights were red. Of course it is difficult to make any retrospective judgements on the extent of their knowledge. But in any case you are well aware of the ease with which the party (which clearly itself knows everything) could circulate directives, prevent others from talking of such things and excommunicate those who do talk...
reason.
a

Finally there is perhaps a third altogether sure that it did play

role.

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An edition of the Petit Larousse which has just been published says: Foucault: a philosopher whose theory of history is based on the notion of discontinuity. This I obviously did not explain all leaves me speechless. this adequately in The Order of Things, even though I It seems to me that in did discuss it quite a lot. various forms of empirical knowledge such as biology, political economy, psychiatry, medicine etc, the rhythm of transformations did not adhere to the gentle, continuist schemes of development that are conventionally applied. The dominant biological image of the increasing maturity of a science still underlies not a few historical accounts, but it does not seem to me to be at all historically relevant. In a science such as medicine for example, up to the end of the 18th century there was a certain kind of discourse in which slow transformations - lasting 25-30 years - not only broke with the True propositions which could up till then be formulated, but also, more profoundly, with the ways of talking, of seeing, with all the practices which supported medicine: they were not simply new discoveries; it was a new order in discourse This happened over a few years and and in knowledge. once the texts had been analysed with care. It is also irrefutable. My particular problem did not at all lie in saying: ah, here we are, long live discontinuity - we live in discontinuity so let us stay there; rather the problem was to pose the question: how are we to explain the fact that there are certain moments in certain orders of knowledge, abrupt deconstructions, dramatic transformations which do not correspond to the calm and continuous picture that is produced in normal practice? What is important in such changes is not that they are very rapid abrupt or widespread, but rather that their rapidity and their extent are the indications of something else: a change in the rules of formation of the statements which are accepted as scientifically true. There is thus no change of content (a refutation of old mistakes, the production of new truths), nor is it a change in the theoretical form (a renewal of the paradigm, a change of the systematic totality). What is in question is what governs the statements and the manner in which they govern each other in order to constitute an ensemble of scientifically acceptable propositions which can as a result of this be verified or rejected through scientific procedures. In brief it is a problem of the rules, the politics of the scientific statement. At this level it is important to know not so much what the power is that weighs on science from without, but what effects of power operate between the scientific statements; what is to some degree their internal organisation of power; how and why at certain moments they are modified in an overall way. It was these different areas that I attempted to approach and to describe in The Order of Things. It must be said that I was not at that time attempting to explain them. That had to be done in another later work. What was however missing was the problem of the discursive order or the effects of power appropriate to the stated game. I confused this too much with the systematicness, the theoretical form, the

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This contral problem of power, which still remains one that I have not adequately isolated, can be seen, in very different forms, at the meeting point between Madness and Civilisation and The Order of Things.

paradigm.

Fontana: The notion of discontinuity must therefore be There is however a returned to its proper position. concept which is even more significant, more central to In relation to your thinking, the concept of the event. this concept an entire generation has for a long time been in an impasse because as a result of the work of ethnographers, even the greatest of them, a dichotomy hss been set up between on the one hand the structures (that which can be thought) and on the other the event, the area of the irrational (that which cannot be thought), that which does not and cannot enter the mechanism and the process of analysis, at least in the forms which these had taken within structuralism.

Structuralism has undoubtedly been the most systematic attempt to take the notion of the event not only out of anthropology but also out of a whole range of other sciences and even out of the limits of history. I dont know many other people who are more antistructuralist than I am. But what is of considerable importance is
Foucault:

of the event what the structuralists made of We must not reduce everythingto the same level, the level of the event, but rather understand that there are a series of different types of events which do not have the same weight, the same chronological significance, nor the same capacity to produce effects.
not to make structure.

The

problem

is

simultaneously

to

distinguish different

events, differentiate the networks and the levels to which they belong, reconstruct the links between them and see in what way some grow out of the others. It is at this point that I reject those analyses which concern the symbolic or the area of significant structures and instead turn to analyses that are undertaken in reference to the geneology of relations of force, strategic developments, I think that what we have to use as a point of tactics.
reference is not the model of language or of the sign but war or battles. The historic force which propels and determines us is in fact warlike; it is not concerned with language. It is the relation of power, not the relation of meaning, that is important. History has no meaning, which does not mean that it is absurd or incoherent. It is on the contrary understandable and should be analysed down to the last detail; but analysed in terms of the understanding of battles, struggles and tactics. Neither dialectic (as the logic of contradiction) nor semiology (as the structure of communication) can account for the intrinsic intelligibility of confrontation. This intelligibility, the dialectic, is a way of evading reality which is always risky and unprotected, by bying it down to the hegelian skeleton; and semiology is the way of evading its violent, bloody, mortal nature, by tying it to the calm, platonic form of language and dialogue.

135
Fontana: We could perhaps categorically state that you the first to pose the question of power to discourse and to pose this question at the moment when the kind of analysis which worked through the concept of the text, the object of the text with its accompanying methodology (in other words, semiology, structuralism, etc) was dominant.

were

Foucault:

I dont think I
am

was

question and I
now

in fact

surprised by

the first to pose the the difficulty

When I look back over it that I had in formulating it. I wonder what I think I was talking about, in for example Madness and Civilisation or The Birth if the Clinic, if not power. Now I am fully aware of having virtually never used the word, and not to have had this whole area of analysis available, I can however say that this was clearly an inability which was at the same time directly linked to the political situation in which we found I do not know from what position (whether ourselves. on the right or on the left) it would have been possible On the right it was only in terms to have the question. of the constitution, of sovereignty, etc., and thus put in juridical terms; from the point of view of marxism it was posed in terms of the state apparatuses. No one looked for the way in which it is exercised concretely and in detail, with its specificity, its techniques and its tactics. They were content to denounce the other, the adversary, in polemical and generalised ways: power in the Soviet Union was called totalitarian by its opponents and in western capitalism the marxists denounced it as class domination - the mechanism of power was never examined. It was only possible to begin work of this kind after 1968, in other words after the daily struggles which were led from the base, with those who had to battle against the finest threads in the network of power. It is at this level that the realities of power are in fact manifest and at the same time the real potential richness of these analyses of power to account for what until then To put remained outside the area of political analyses. it very simply, incarceration in a psychiatric hospital the imposition of mental normalisation of individuals, penal institutions, all obviously have very limited importance if we look at them from a strictly economic point of view. But if we look at the general operations of power they are undoubtedly crucial. In so far as one asks the question about power and subordinates it to the economic instance and to the system of interests that it ensures, we are inevitably led to consider that these things have very little importance. Has the formulation of the problematic been the objective obstacle of a particular kind of Marxism and a particular kind of phenomenology? Fontana:

impe e by

you like, to the extent that it is true of my generation were brought up as students by these two kinds of analysis: one which constantly returned to the constituting subject and the other which sent him to the economy, in the last instance, to Foucault:

Yes, if

that people

136
to the interplay between the superstructures and the infrastructures.

ideology and

I would like to ask, keeping within the same Fontana: methodological framework, how you place yourself in What is its relation to the geneological approach? importance as a means of asking questions about conditions of possibility, about modalities and the constitution of the objects and domains that you have yourself analysed?
I wanted to see how problems such as the constitution of particular objects could be resolved from within a historical frame, rather than being posed in We have to get rid relation to a constituting subject. of the constituting subject, of the subject itself, in other words undertake an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject in historical terms. What I call genealogy is a form of history which takes account of the constitution of knowledge, discourses, domains of the object etc, without having to refer to a subject which is either transcendant in relation to the field of events, or which flits through history with no

Foucault:

identity
marxism

at all.

phenomenology and a certain form of undoubtedly be seen as obstacles. But there are also two concepts which are impediments today, ideology and repression.
Fontana: Marxist
can

Foucault: The notion of ideology seems to me to be one The first that is difficult to use for three reasons. is that, whether one wants it or not, it is always in opposition to something else which is reality. Now I feel that the problem is not to make a division between what in any discourse is seen as relating to reality and another part which relates to something else, but to see historically how these effects of truth have been produced within discourses which are neither true nor false. The second problem is that I think ideology inevitably

refers to something as the subject. Thirdly, ideology is put in a secondary position in relation to something else which has to function as ideologys infrastructure or economic or material etc. determinant. For these reasons I think that this is a notion that one can only use with considerable caution.
The notion of repression is itself more dangerous, or I at any rate have had considerable problems in freeing myself from it to the extent that it seems that it is so identified with a whole range of concepts directly to do with power. When I wrote Madness and Civilisation I implicitly used the concept of repression. I think that I still felt that some kind of madness which was voluble and anxious did exist, and that the mechanisms of power and psychiatry came to repress it and to reduce it to silence. Now it seems to me that the notion of repression is entirely unable to account for what power itself produces. When one defines the effects of power by

137

repression one gives a purely juridical concept to this power, power is identified with a law that says no, it I feel that has above all the power of a prohibition. this is a totally negative, narrow, limited definition If of power, which has become in some odd way divided. power has only ever been repressive, if all it does is to say no, do you really think that one would obey it? What makes power effective, what makes one obey it, is not simply that it is felt as a power that says no, but that in fact it produces things, it produces pleasure, it creates knowledge, produces discourse; it has to be seen as a productive network which runs through the social body, and is far more than just a negative instance whose function is to punish. In Surveiller et Punir what I wanted to show was the way that from the 17th to 18th centuries on there was a real technological take-off in the productivity of power. This is shown not only in the development of the vast apparatuses of power (army, police, fiscal administration) by the absolute monarchies of the classical period, but above all this period saw the creation of a new economy of power, in other words of procedures which enabled the effects of power to be distributed in such a way that they were continuous, uninterrupted, adapted, individualised throughout the entire social structure. These new techniques were not only much more efficient and much less extravagent (less expensive, less delayed in their results, less susceptible of being avoided or resisted) than the techniques which had previously been used and which were based on a complex range of tolerances which were more or less enforced (from recognised privilege to endemic criminality) and expensive ostentation (staggering interventions and discontinuities of power whose most violent form was the exemplary punishment, which was exemplary precisely because it was exceptional.
(translated by Felicity Edholm)