Foucault Studies, No 5, pp. 26‐47,January 2008
ARTICLE
The Groupe d’information sur les prisons: The voice of prisoners? Or
Foucault’s?
Cecile Brich, Leeds University
In 1971 Michel Foucault founded the ‘Groupe d’information sur les prisons’ (GIP),
which planned to gather and publicise testimonies about prison conditions in France.
The GIP had no reformist agenda, butrather aimed to enable prisoners themselves to
speak out on prison issues and decide for themselves what should be done about
them. The GIP membership thus theoretically included prisoners, ex‐prisoners and
prisoners’ families alongside the intellectuals and professionals who founded it. They
collected information from prisoners via questionnaires, inmates’ letters and
personal narratives, and endeavoured to alert public opinion to the insalubrious
nature of prisons, and to the unjust and inhumane treatment endured by countless
inmates. The GIP organised demonstrations, distributed tracts, gave press
conferences and published a variety of documents, in the form of articles in the press
and through a series of pamphlets. The GIP’s campaign was successful on a number
of fronts, winning the right for prisoners to read the daily press, for instance, and
leading to a series of actions initiated by prisoners, from a wave ofrooftop protests to
the creation of the Comité d’action des prisonniers (Prisoners’ Action Committee),
pursuing the fightfor prisoners’rights through the 1970s.
The work of the GIP has thus far mostly been discussed in hagiographical
mode, most extensively in Foucault’s biographies, and in a handful of articles and
unpublished French dissertations. Scholarly commentary on the work of the GIP has
hitherto chiefly focused on the relationship between the public pronouncements of
the GIP and Foucault’s ideas on power and the role of intellectuals.1
For the most
part, however, these analyses are limited to emphasising the originality of the GIP’s
approach on the basis of the statements published by the GIP, which they take at face
1
See for instance: Michelle Perrot, Les Ombres de l’histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 2001); François
Boullant, Michel Foucault et les prisons (Paris: PUF, 2003); Gérard Mauger, ‘Un nouveau
militantisme’, Sociétés et Représentations 3 (1996): 51‐77; Keith Gandal, ‘Michel Foucault:
IntellectualWork and Politics’, Telos 67 (1986): 121‐134.Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
value. The announcement that the GIP wanted to give prisoners the opportunity to
speak out without intermediary2
, forinstance, has thus been repeatedly commended
as testimony to Foucault’s ethics, endlessly echoing Gilles Deleuze’s claim that
Foucault was ‘the first […] to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the
indignity of speaking for others’3
. Macey comments that: ‘The goal of Foucault’s
political activity was the empowering of others by giving, for instance, prisoners the
voice they were denied.’4
Halperin similarly argues that Foucault ‘consistently
refused to speak for others, working instead to create conditions in which others
could speak forthemselves’5
. The GIP’s work is thus generally acknowledged as ‘the
advent of a new form of activism, allowing someone’s speech to be heard directly,
ratherthan speaking on behalf of’
6
.
No critical assessment of the GIP’s work has as yet investigated the extent to
which the GIP’s methods accorded with their pronouncements, and how the
dynamics of their communication with prisoners affected the information which they
were able to collect. This article proposes to address precisely these issues.
While the GIP’s procedures were no doubt often original, and went some way
towards letting prisoners speak for themselves, I would like to argue that the
intellectuals’ role within it was a rather more complex one than critics have so far
maintained. Although their goal was to give prisoners the practical means to express
themselves, I will show that the methods it used, and the responses it elucidated,
suggest that the prisoners’ discourse was not simply ‘set free’, as Artières contends7
,
but was also subtly constrained by the GIP’s agenda.
I argue that the GIP’s discourse cannot be reduced to the publication of
prisoners’ testimonies, but can rather be understood as the product of a dialogical
process involving the intellectuals’ investigative methods and editorial decisions on
the one hand, and the prisoners’responses and contributions on the other.
Sylvain Dambrine suggests that the GIP was a movement which made
prisoners access the status of discursive subjects8
. He does not, however, substantiate
this claim. I propose to investigate this assertion by analysing the statements and
methodology of the GIP in order to assess how prisoners were constructed in the
discourse of the GIP, and what types of statements [énoncés] they were expected to
2
Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits [hereafter DE] (Paris: Gallimard,“Quarto”, 2001 [1994]), vol.1, p.
1072.
3
Gilles Deleuze, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, in Language, Counter‐Memory, Practice, ed. D. F.
Bouchard (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 209.
4
David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: HutchinsonRandom House, 1993), p. 257.
5
David Halperin, Saint Foucault (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 53.
6
Philippe Artières, ‘Les Écrits de la révolte. La prise de parole des détenus (1970‐72)’, Drôle
d’époque 8 (2001): 47, original emphasis, my translation.
7
Ibid, p. 37, my translation.
8
Sylvain Dambrine, ‘Passages du mur: des subjectivations de prisonniers’ in Vacarme 29 (2004):
146.
27Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
formulate. I will thus construct a fuller picture of the ‘discursive subjects’ which
prisoners became through the work of the GIP.
RATIONALE
The impetus forthe creation of the GIP in January 1971 lay in the attention drawn to
the penitential regime by a group of political prisoners on hunger strike during the
winter 1970‐71. In the aftermath of May 68, a number of drastically repressive
measures were brought in by the government in orderto regain control in the face of
continuing social unrest. Among these, a bill known as the loi anti‐casseurs (‘anti‐
wreckers’ law9
) was passed in June 1970, which made the organisers of
demonstrations liable for any disturbances, and thus led to the incarceration of
increasing numbers of political protesters. Concurrently, the government ordered the
dissolution of the Maoist organisation Gauche prolétarienne (GP), founded in 1968;
several hundreds of members of the clandestine ex‐GP would subsequently be
arrested. The political prisoners’ movement caught the attention of a few
intellectuals, including Michel Foucault and Daniel Defert, who decided to form the
‘Groupe d’information sur les prisons’, with the support of historian Pierre Vidal‐
Naquet, and of Jean‐Marie Domenach, then editor of the Catholic monthly Esprit. The
GIP proposed to gather information inside French prisons, building a case for a de
facto trial of the prison service.
The GIP’s original rationale can be glimpsed in a number of its statements,
such as an article published on 15 March 1971 in J’accuse, indicating a carefully
thought out strategy on its part:
We want to break the double isolation in which prisoners are trapped: through our
investigation, we want them to be able to talk to each other, to share what they know,
and to communicate from prison to prison and from cell to cell. We want inmates to
address the population, and for the population to speak to them. These individual
experiences, these isolated rebellions must be transformed into a shared body of
knowledge, and into coordinated action. […] Our investigation is not designed to amass
facts, but to increase ourintolerance, and transform it into active intolerance.10
The GIP’s aim, it is suggested here, was primarily to start a debate: amongst
prisoners, and between prisoners and the rest of the population. This simple
dialogue, however, was practically hampered by prison regulations, which forbade
communication with unauthorised persons (i.e. everyone but close family members),
while the daily press was not allowed inside and radio broadcasts were regularly
censored. The GIP’s investigation was thus not an end in itself, for the sake of
gathering information, but rather a means to an end: a way to set up a vast
9
Macey’s translation, op.cit., p. 258.
10 DE, vol. 1, p. 1044, my translation.
28Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
communication network, between and around prisoners, so as to allow for
discussion and coordinated action to take place.
The GIP’s project appears to rest on an implicit model of the outbreak of
revolts, whereby individual experience can be processed in such a way as to become
a trigger for uprising. The simultaneous articulation of similar experiences is
expected to amplify their impact and legitimate dissatisfaction hitherto dismissed as
merely personal and psychological,ratherthan collective and political.
Indications of an expected course of events in the article cited above and
elsewhere suggest that the GIP was virtually engineering a rebellion unbeknown to
those who were to be its actors – the prisoners themselves. The repetition of ‘we
want’ constantly reinstates the GIP as the principal orchestrator and decision‐maker
of the manoeuvres to be made, regardless of the prisoners’ wishes. The movement
seems to have partly acted as a real life testing ground for Foucault’s hypotheses;
interestingly, the editors of Dits et écrits note that Foucault delayed publication of
Discipline and Punish for two years, so as to evade the charge of having been
motivated solely by theoretical interest.
It is on 8 February 1971, at the press conference that marked the end of the
political prisoners’ second hunger strike, that the public announcement of the
creation of the GIP was made. The statement, signed by Foucault, Vidal‐Naquet and
Domenach and published in several newspapers, explains that ‘together with a
number of magistrats, lawyers, journalists, doctors and psychologists, we have
founded a Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons’
11
. Prisoners are thus not included
amongst the investigators at this stage, nor are they explicitly addressed with any
more precision than as among ‘those who have some experience of prison or some
connection with it, in whatever capacity’12
, even though the statement would be
published in Esprit, which was available in prisons.
The proposed role of those who would have relevant experience or
information is ‘to contact us and pass on what they know. We have compiled a
questionnaire, which is available on request. As soon as we have received enough
responses, we will publish them.’13 Prisoners are thus seemingly addressed solely as
sources of information, while the processing and use of the information remains the
investigators’ monopoly. This first official GIP statement thus casts prisoners rather
as passive objects of the GIP’s investigation, leaving the leading roles to the
intellectuals and professionals.
The GIP’s request for prisoners to send in personal narratives of prison life
and answers to a pre‐established questionnaire can be argued to cast them
simultaneously as subjects and objects of the GIP’s investigation. The relatively
passive role which they are given supposes that they are, to an extent, approached as
11 Translation in Macey, op.cit., p.258.
12 DE, vol.1, p. 1043, my translation.
13 Ibid., my translation.
29Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
objects to be interrogated, in such a way as to extract data from them to be used by
the researchers as they see fit. By having made key decisions about the investigative
procedures and the role to be played by prisoners within them, the GIP can be seen
to have created a certain position for inmates to occupy, thereby subjecting them to
its own vision of what subjectivity they should take on. The ambiguities of this
subjectivation process are explored further in the following sections, where I discuss
some of the methodological problems pertaining to the GIP’s investigation.
METHODOLOGY
Though the GIP’s avowed aim was to hand the floor over to prisoners, the methods
by which it did so can be shown to have simultaneously imposed significant
constraints upon prisoners’ voices. These constraints operated in a number of ways
at different stages of the investigation, beginning with the imposition of the written
medium to impart information to the GIP, the restrictive questionnaire format and
the limitation of testimonial genres to questionnaire answers and factual personal
accounts, through to the remarkably biased selection put forward for publication. I
shall look at each of these constraints in turn, considering the way in which they
limited prisoners’ discourse, and assessing the extent to which they recalled typically
institutional practices. I will show that by thus imposing a degree of constraint on
prisoners’ participation, and specifically on the discursive subject positions available
to them, the GIP effectively delimited a subjectivity which inmates were expected to
take up.
First of all, the GIP’s investigative methods failed to ensure the participation
of a representative sample of informants. From the first invitation from the hunger
strikers’ ‘comrades’ to send information to Foucault, to the GIP’s reliance on written
questionnaires, the written medium is privileged. For the significant proportion of
prisoners who have difficulty reading and writing, orfor whom French was not their
native language, writing will have been alienating at the very least, if not absolutely
unmanageable.
The fact that the questionnaire’s dissemination was illegal inside prisons
means that questionnaires were, however, often covertly read out to prisoners by
visiting family members orfellow prisoners who had managed to smuggle in a copy,
and the answers were collected orally. The formulation of some of the answers
published in the GIP’s brochure Enquête dans vingt prisons indicates that they were
given orally, and compiled by a third party: ‘According to the questions I have asked
prisoners…’14
. Among those is this revealing answerto the question ‘Have you been
the victim of censorship?’: ‘People don’t write much in prison, because of spelling;
they are ashamed of their spelling before the censors.’15 The GIP’s privileging of the
14 Le G.I.P.: Enquête dans vingt prisons(Paris: Champ Libre, 1971), p. 27 – my translation.
15 Ibid., p.29 – my translation.
30Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
written medium will thus probably have led to under‐representation of illiterate
prisoners and non‐French‐speakers, though perhaps more so in the letters sent in
than in questionnaires, on account of their ad hoc dissemination in prisons.
The Administration pénitentiaire’s annualreport indicates that French prisons
housed 29,026 prisoners on 1 January 1970.16 The number of questionnaires sent out
by the GIP, by contrast, approximated one thousand, but the number of answers
received was around 50.17 Letters, prison narratives and diaries were also sent to the
GIP by 20 or so inmates and ex‐cons. The total of the GIP’s informants thus
represented only a tiny fraction of the prison population, favouring French‐speaking,
literate and relatively politicised and articulate respondents, which may not be
deemed representative of the whole of the prison population. However, given the
drastic restrictions on all forms of communication with prisoners, the GIP’s aim of
enabling inmates directly to express their grievances to the ‘outside’ was difficult to
achieve without recourse to the written medium, even though this will have
prevented many from taking part in the investigation.
QUESTIONNAIRES
One of the GIP’s key investigative tools, announced in their founding declaration,
was the dissemination of a questionnaire destined to collect information on prison
conditions from prisoners themselves. Interestingly, the authorship of the
questionnaire seems to constitute a moot point. The first announcement of the
availability of the questionnaire appeared in the GIP’s manifesto, which did not
mention any involvement of prisoners or ex‐prisoners in the GIP at that stage. In an
article published in La Cause du peuple‐J’accuse(25 May 1971), Daniel Defert (founding
member of the GIP) states that it is prisoners themselves who drew up the
questionnaire. Defert seems anxious to minimize the intellectuals’ involvement and
maximize the prisoners’, so that the role of ex‐inmates in the drafting of the initial
version of the questionnaire may be suspected to have been rather less than Defert
claims.
By contrast, the historians who retraced the early meetings of the GIP
altogether discount ex‐prisoners’ involvement at that stage, maintaining that the
questionnaire was written by a small group of young philosophers and sociologists
(including Jacques Donzelot, Daniel Defert, Danielle Rancière, Christine Martineau)
around Michel Foucault18
.
16 In Le Monde, 2/09/1970.
17 Elie Kagan and Alain Jaubert, UneJournée particulière(Lyon: Ædelsa Éditions, 2004), p. 40.
18 Philippe Artières, Laurent Quéro and Michelle Zancarini‐Fournel (eds), Le Groupe d’information
surles prisons. Archives d’unelutte 1970‐1972 (Paris: Editions de l’IMEC, 2003), p.30.
31Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
The GIP’s claim that ‘This is not a sociological investigation’19 arguably
referred not so much to the professional training of its investigators as to the
purposes of the investigation. A covering letter to the questionnaire insists that the
GIP’s investigation is to be understood as an act of resistance20
, foregrounding the
significance of the investigation’s motives over its format. Thus it is not a
sociologists’ investigation because it does not share the aims that sociological
investigations usually have. The meaning of the enquiry is a function of the socio‐
political stance which the enquirers adopt, perhaps in the sense in which Pêcheux
argues that ‘Words, expressions, propositions, etc […] change their meaning
according to the positions held by those who use them, which signifies that they find
their meaning by reference to these positions’21
.
However, it could also be argued that the choice of the questionnaire format
was actually crucial to the GIP’s goals, not least in that it positioned its authors as
social scientists. The questions could thus be described as ‘énoncés’ in the sense that
Foucault proposed in The Archaeology of Knowledge: ‘To describe a formulation qua
statement [énoncé] does not consist in analysing the relations between the author and
what he says (or wanted to say, or said without wanting to); but in determining what
position can and must be occupied by any individual if he is to be the subject of it.’22
Thus, the questionnaire format positions its authors as social scientists, regardless of
how they wish to present themselves; the genre is that of the scientific institution,
automatically casting its subjects as institutional researchers: ‘The positions of the
subject are […] defined by the situation that it is possible for him to occupy in
relation to the various domains or groups of objects: he is subject questioning
according to a certain grid of explicit or implicit interrogations, and listening
according to a certain programme of information’23
.
The institutional stamp carried by the questionnaire format in turn grants
scientific authority to the investigative procedure. Questionnaires have been
sanctioned by the social scientific establishment as a valid means of generating
standardised knowledge. Their formal rigour is arguably instrumental in allowing
the constitution of a ‘shared body of knowledge’ [‘savoir commun’], which the GIP
foregrounded as one of the chief aims of the investigation. The involvement of
sociologists in the GIP’s investigative methods, whether acknowledged or not, thus
seems wholly cogent with the GIP’s rationale, of helping prisoners produce
knowledge about their situation.
19 Ce n’est pas une enquête de sociologues’, in Artières et al, op.cit., p.52.
20 ‘ce n’est pas une enquête sociologique, une enquête‐curiosité, c’est une enquête‐intolérance’,
ibid., p.53.
21 Michel Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, trans. H. Nagpal, (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1982), p.111.
22 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, (London & New
York:Routledge, 2003 [1972]), p.107.
23 Ibid. pp.57‐58, translation adapted.
32Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
However, the GIP’s reliance on questionnaires can be considered
problematical on a number of grounds. Firstly, the use of a strict question‐answer
format has been shown to generate power asymmetry in the relationship between
those asking the questions and those answering them.24 The GIP’s recourse to
questionnaires may therefore be thought to have imposed an unequal interaction
pattern on prisoners.
The GIP questionnaire set the topics, signalled by the sub‐headings ‘visits’,
‘letters’, ‘your rights’, ‘cells’ etc., which remained unchanged even as some of the
questions were added or amended following initial feedback. A considerable part of
the GIP’s discourse indeed consisted in politicising the daily life and material
conditions of prisoners. In a 1973 interview Foucault explains how his rationale in
asking prisoners to testify to their living conditions is inscribed in the redefinition of
the political initiated by the late Sixties liberation movements. As Artières notes,
since 1968 prisons had remained the only place not to be reached by the collective
‘speaking out’ undertaken by sections of the population hitherto denied access to the
political platform, from women and gays to workers and students25
. In a 1972 article,
Jacques Donzelot, who was involved in the GIP, clarifies the GIP’s position in
relation to movements largely influenced by psychoanalytic notions of liberation
through speech, contending that the GIP aimed to move beyond merely freeing the
voices of the oppressed, to formulate a potent political discourse. The GIP, he states,
did not encourage prisoners to speak out for self‐expression’s sake, but saw that their
testimonies should have a very specific content, revolving around their living
conditions26
.
The GIP’s strategy was thus very clearly defined in relation to the protest
movements of the preceding years. One of its key premises built on the idea that the
personal is political, and it therefore insisted that prisoners designate their daily
living conditions as their primary concern. While it also drew on the contemporary
power of the silenced voice finally speaking up for itself, the GIP nonetheless
distanced itself from the clinical associations of confession, to rather channel
testimonies in the direction of pre‐defined claims grounded in verifiable information
on material conditions.
The range of issues deemed relevant was thus pre‐selected by the GIP, and can
be suspected to have stopped other problems coming to the fore: as Drew and
Heritage found, in question‐answer settings, ‘professionals may prevent particular
issues becoming topics in their own right’27
. Incidentally, Gudjonsson remarks that
24 See for instance: Roger Fowler et al, Language and Control (London, Boston and Henley:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979); Norman Fairclough, Language and Power , 2nd edn (London
and New York:Routledge, 2001 [1989]).
25 Artières, op.cit, p.37.
26 Jacques Donzelot, ‘Travail social et lutte politique’, Esprit 413 (1972): 654‐73.
27 Paul Drew and John Heritage (eds), Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.49.
33Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
the police are aware of this effect and ‘ask specific questions in orderto […] allow the
police officerto have greater control overthe interview’28
.
Further, the validity of both closed and open survey questions has been
challenged: Foddy contends that the ‘suggestion that open questions do not suggest
answers to respondents [in contrast to closed ones] is not necessarily valid’29
. Open
questions have been observed to yield markedly different answers from closed
versions of the same questions. Though this has been attributed to the inadequacy of
the closed response options, Foddy remarks that ‘such an outcome can just as easily
be the result of respondents having to guess what kinds of answers the researcher
wants in response to open questions. The central issue is not which format produces
the most valid responses but whether or not respondents know what kinds of
answers they should give.’30 Respondents are thus thought not to answer absolutely
freely, but rather to attempt to conform to what they assume the researcher’s
expectations to be. This problem will certainly have applied to the GIP questionnaire:
prisoners will have responded according to what they thought the GIP required.
Leading forensic linguist Roger W. Shuy further warns that: ‘The way a question is
asked can influence or even determine the answer given. […] Lawyers have long
recognized the dangers of “leading questions,” for example, and the courts try to
prevent this from happening.’31
These problematic aspects of the questionnaire format point to a rather more
complex relationship between the GIP and the prisoners than the former simply
offering a platform to the latter. The prisoners’ involvement in the GIP was thus
restricted, at this early stage in the movement, to answering questions concerning
material conditions of imprisonment. The GIP also suggested, however, that
prisoners sent in ‘detailed narratives of imprisonment.’32
PRISON NARRATIVES
What ‘detailed narratives of imprisonment’ (‘des récits détaillés de détention’) might
involve is perhaps open to interpretation. They may arguably refer to second‐hand
reports of events, but it is likely that they would be taken as autobiographical
accounts of prison life. Whatevertheir exact contents, however, the suggested format
28 Gisli Gudjonsson, The Psychology of Interrogations, Confessions and Testimony (Chichester: Wiley,
1992), p. 9.
29 William Foddy, Constructing Questions for Interviews and Questionnaires: Theory and Practice in
SocialResearch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 129.
30 Ibid. p.152.
31 Roger W. Shuy, Languages Crimes: The Use and Abuse of Language Evidence in the Courtroom
(Oxford, UK and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993), p.174, original emphasis.
32 In Philippe Artières, Laurent Quéro and Michelle Zancarini‐Fournel (eds), Le Groupe
d’information sur les prisons. Archives d’une lutte 1970‐1972 (Paris: Editions de l’IMEC, 2003), p.
42, my translation.
34Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
is unambiguously that of narrative: ‘récit’. The suggestion of a narrative genre by the
GIP is particularly interesting in light of Foucault’s comments on prisoners’
autobiographies in the preface to Serge Livrozet’s book, Dela Prison à la révolte(1973).
Foucault condemned the prevalence of the autobiographical genre as ensuring that
‘the convict cannot have thoughts, as s/he may only have recollections. His/her
memory alone is accepted, not his/her ideas’33
. Whether wholly autobiographical or
not, the GIP’s ‘récits de détention’ likewise arguably preclude analytical critique,
political manifesto, or any other non‐narrative genres prisoners might have wished
to adopt.
Foucault’s analysis of the significance of the prisoners’ testimonies lays
particular emphasis on first‐person enunciation and communication, rather than on
contents. In a 1972 interview Foucault thus stated that ‘in our pamphlets, it was the
inmates themselves who spoke out and revealed the facts. Since these facts were only
known in restricted circles, it was important for the public to hear the voice of
prisoners, and for prisoners to know that they themselves were speaking out’34
. This
observation clearly stresses the importance of viva voce dialogue between prisoners
and ‘public opinion’, or ‘contact’ in Debray’s words35
, rather than the terms of the
discourse they held.
In requesting personal narratives the GIP can be said to have aligned itself
with what Scannell shows to be the dominant distribution of discourse in the media,
where ‘public persons [such as intellectuals] are entitled to opinions, private persons
to experiences’36:
To have an opinion is to be entitled to comment on events, to have views about them, to
assess their significance. To have an experience is to be entitled to describe an event that
happened to oneself and to say how one felt about it. […] Public persons […] speak as
representatives of institutions, as agents not as persons, and their views have generalised
weight and authority. They are accredited spokespersons, whose views are legitimated
and legitimating. Private individuals appear in news, become newsworthy, accidentally
and usually disastrously. They are often the victims or witnesses of catastrophes and are
interviewed for what they saw orfor how it affected them […]37
The GIP reproduced this pattern by inviting prisoners to contribute experiences,
while analysis and commentary was provided by the GIP intellectuals. They thus
conformed to a generic convention reflecting the fact that ‘the powerless are not seen
33 ‘le condamné ne peut pas avoir de pensée puisqu’il ne doit avoir que des souvenirs. Sa
mémoire seule est admise, non ses idées’, in Serge Livrozet, De la Prison à la révolte (Paris:
l’Esprit Frappeur, 1999 [1973]), p. 6, my translation.
34 DE, vol.1, p. 1297, my translation.
35 Régis Debray, L’État séducteur. Les Révolutions médiologiques du pouvoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1993),
p. 127.
36 Paddy Scannell, ‘Public Service Broadcasting and Modern Public Life’, in Culture and Power, ed.
Paddy Scannell et al(London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 1992), p. 344.
37 Ibid.
35Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
as credible sources of knowledge and explanation and tend as a result to be
marginalised’38
.
By the same token, however, for the GIP to combine prisoners’ experience
with intellectuals’ public pronouncements may be considered an efficient strategy in
that it will have met discursive expectations, and hence have been more easily
accepted and understood. In a 1975 interview first published in 2004, Foucault
clarified his view on the role of the intellectual in relation to the discourse of
powerless groups:
To me, the intellectual has no right to privilege his/her own discourse overthat of others.
Rather, s/he tries to make room for the discourse of others. This does not mean that s/he
should keep silent, forthis would be verging on masochism… His/her role is to open up
possibilities in discourse, and to blend his/her discourse with others’, to intertwine it with
that of others, like a support.39
This position is quite different from the GIP statements that insisted that it only put
forward prisoners’ voices without intervening in any way. Contrary to previous
claims that the GIP intellectuals aimed to remain silent, Foucault now suggests that
such a position would be masochistic. He rather argues that the intellectual’s role is
to open up recognised discursive channels for others, and to intertwine his/her
discourse with theirs so as to lend them its institutional support. This view more
accurately reflects the way that the GIP operated, in that the intellectuals, and
Foucault in particular, indubitably intermingled their own discourse with the
prisoners’, and thereby enabled the latterto find its way into the media.
In the same interview, Foucault repeats that the GIP intellectuals did not
intend to remain silent and let prisoners alone speak – contrary to earlier GIP
pronouncements:
What we tried to do with the prison issue was […] to weave together discourses which
were on an equal footing. We did not keep quiet if an inmate was speaking, we did not
acknowledge that he had the right to shut us up, but nor did we assume the right to
speak in his place. It seemed to us that the fact of being on the outside was neither
qualifying nor disqualifying for us. It was one position in relation to prison – a position
allowing us to speak about prison without speaking on behalf on inmates.40
Foucault’s claim that neitherthe prisoners’ discourse northe intellectuals’ was given
more prominence breaks with both the GIP’s insistence that the inmates’ voices take
precedence, and with Foucault’s consistent theoretical view that the discourses of
intellectuals occupy a privileged place in the order of discourse, and that this is
precisely why, as in the previous quote, they can provide supportfor others’ voices.
Foucault’s defence, that the fact of speaking from outside prisons does not
invalidate a discourse about it, is probably made in response to ex‐inmate Serge
38 Romy Clark and Roz Ivanič, The Politics of Writing. (London and New York: Routldge, 1997), p.
33.
39 In Le Monde 19‐20/09/04, my translation.
40 Ibid.
36Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
Livrozet, who led the Melun protests in 1972 and founded the Comité dʹAction des
Prisonniers on his release in 1973. Following Foucault’s anonymous publication of an
article on illegalism and delinquency in the daily left‐wing newspaper Libération,
Livrozet railed against the intellectual’s analysis in an interview with the same
newspaper: ‘These specialists in analysis are a pain. I don’t need anyone to speak for
me and proclaim what I am.’41 Mills remarks that Livrozet ‘clearly felt that Foucault’s
position was not simply that of facilitator’42
. It may be in light of such a challenge
that Foucault saw fit to justify intellectuals’ right to comment on subjects on which
theirresearch can shed a different and complementary light.
As if anticipating potential criticism that, by mixing the GIP’s discourse with
the prisoners’, the GIP might be said to have unduly interfered with it by giving it a
more authoritative shape, Foucault continues:
You’re going to tell me: it is the intellectuals who are moulding this discourse… Big deal!
The intellectual, in a given society, is precisely the ‘discourse officer’. Whatever happens
in the order of discourse is inevitably going to be his/her business. S/he might be for or
against it, but no operation can take place within the order of discourse without the
intellectual’s intervention.43
Here Foucault effectively admits that the prisoners’ voices could not have become a
discourse, that is, have had the potential to wield any power, had they not been
framed by intellectuals – as only they have access to the order of discourse and can
alterthe configuration of discourses in a society.
PUBLICATIONS
As soon as information had been gathered, it was crucial to the GIP’s strategy that it
be rapidly spread and shared, to enable the emergence of a collective voice, and of a
‘shared body of knowledge’ (‘savoir commun’)44
. To this end the GIP published a
number of articles, particularly in the Maoist press and in the Catholic monthly
Esprit. They also published five brochures, four of which appeared under the
especially created series title “Intolérable”.
Defert contends that: ‘we did not hold any specific discourse of our own; the
heterogeneity of the GIP’s publications bears witness to this’45
. While the GIP’s
output undoubtedly covers a wide range of issues, and treats them in a variety of
ways, from polemical essays on George Jackson’s death to word for word
reproduction of questionnaire answers, I would like to suggest that the GIP’s
41 ‘Les spécialistes de l’analyse nous emmerdent, je n’ai besoin de personne pour prendre la
parole et expliquer ce que je suis.’ (Libération 19‐02‐1974), trans. Betsy Wing, in Eribon, Michel
Foucault,(London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1991 [1989]), p. 234.
42 Sara Mills, Michel Foucault (London and New York:Routledge, 2003), p. 77.
43 In Le Monde 19‐20/09/04, my translation.
44 GIP, Le G.I.P.: Enquête dans vingt prisons(Paris: Champ Libre, 1971), p. 4.
45 Daniel Defertin Artières et al, op.cit, p. 324, my translation.
37Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
publications did not always impartially reflect prisoners’ contributions. The editorial
power exercised by the GIP in its publication of prisoners’ testimonies, together with
the ideological standpoints discernible in their presentation of the issues they
addressed, can rather be said to express, if not a unified ‘discourse’, at least a
significant voice in the dialogical end products.
The first brochure to be published by the GIP, entitled Enquête dans vingt
prisons, appeared in June 1971. The booklet, consisting of a selection of the
questionnaire answers gathered by then, is prefaced with a three‐page introduction
attributed to Michel Foucault. The tone set by his opening paragraph is far from
neutral:
Expressed through courts, prisons, hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, occupational
medicine, universities, the press, and informational organs – through all these
institutions, under different disguises, exists a form of oppression that is deeply rooted in
the political. 46
Foucault thus introduces the prisoners’ answers to the GIP’s questionnaire with a
very powerful framework within which to interpret them: courts and prisons are to
be understood not as providing an impartial service, for instance, but as a form of
oppression which is above all political. Foucault places the judiciary on a par with
other institutions considered neutral and democratic, and whose avowed mission is
indeed to care for and benefit all citizens: an independent justice system is widely
hailed as a hallmark of democracy, while prisons allegedly serve the common good
by simultaneously protecting those on the outside, and seeing to the rehabilitation of
those on the inside. Yet Foucault challenges this idyllic picture of democratic
institutions in no uncertain terms: far from neutrally serving the population, they
ensure its oppression. Prisoners, specifically, are thereby cast primarily as victims of
the oppression exercised by the judiciary.
The political dimensions of this oppression become clearer in the next
paragraph:
This oppression has always been recognized by the exploited class, which has constantly
resisted it, but has been thoroughly subjected to it. Now this oppression has become
intolerable to other social strata – intellectuals, technicians, lawyers, doctors, journalists,
etc. It still purports to be exercised through these professionals, with their help and
complicity, but it is now failing to take account of their interests, and above all their
ideology. Those in charge of distributing justice, health, knowledge, and information, are
becoming aware of the oppressive force of a political power at the heart of their own
practices. Their growing resistance is now joining forces with the proletariat in its long
struggle.47
Here Foucault presents ‘political oppression’ in terms of his own evolving
understanding of powerrelations. While partly relying on Marxist class terminology
(‘the exploited class’, ‘the proletariat’), he distances himself from the idea that the
46 Le G.I.P.: Enquête dans vingt prisons, p. 3, trans. BetsyWing, in Eribon, op.cit., p. 228.
47 Ibid., translation adapted.
38Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
exploited are blinded by ideology: rather he argues that they are fully aware of the
injustices committed against them, and are constantly engaged in resistance, but
have not hitherto been able to defeat oppressive forces.
Foucault presents oppression as not simply exercised by economic forces at
the service of the bourgeoisie, but as operating through a heterogeneous network
comprising a range of fields, including science, medicine, justice, and information. In
his later lectures on power, Foucault would emphasise that he was not concerned
with the operation of power within central institutions such as State apparatuses,
where it is expected and regulated by laws, butrather with the continued impact of it
beyond those institutions: ‘power at its extremities, in its ultimate destinations, [...]
those points where it becomes capillary, that is, [...] its more regional forms and
institutions’48
. His claim that increasing numbers of professionals have come to feel
the exercise of power within their own practices is cogent with his focus on the
impact of disciplinary practices brought to bear upon individual bodies by specific
professional practices.
Foucault thus presents the GIP’s work in relation to his own understanding of
the workings of power: he offers a theoretical framework within which the prisoners’
responses can be read as combating power at its very points of application: ‘attacking
[power] where it is exercised under another name: that of justice, technique,
knowledge, objectivity’49
. This discourse thus casts prisoners as not simply protesting
prison conditions, but as taking on poweritself in one of the many forms in which it
is exercised in modern Western society. Prisoners are thus presented as occupying a
key position in the modern power configuration.
The prisoners’responses are clearly not published simply on their own terms,
as both the GIP and critics have sustained50
, but they are rather encased within a very
strongly‐worded interpretive framework: they are an integral part of an ‘enquête‐
intolérance’, which is essentially ‘a political act […] the first episode in a struggle […] a
front, an offensive front […] the struggle which will prevent oppression being exercised’
51
.
The GIP thus presents the questionnaire responses through a distinctive discourse of
anti‐oppressive struggle, of which only partial echoes can be found in the prisoners’
input. It therefore appears as primarily the GIP’s own discourse, rather than the
prisoners’, and frames the latter as agents of a political struggle against oppression.
Though Boullant argues that Foucault kept in the background, and unilaterally
listened to prisoners52
, this preface bears the unmistakable stamp of Foucault’s
thought, and foregrounded his own ideas rather than faithfully reporting prisoners’
responses.
48 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf,
1980), p. 96.
49 Le G.I.P.: Enquête dans vingt prisons, p. 3, my translation.
50 Cf. Boullant, op.cit., pp. 14‐15; Artières op.cit., pp. 44‐46.
51 Enquête, pp. 3‐4, emphasis original, translated in Macey, op.cit., pp. 268‐69.
52 In L’Humanité 19/06/04.
39Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
Following this introductory contextualisation of the GIP’s investigation, the
brochure’s contents are summed up as follows:
In order to disseminate the information as rapidly as possible, we have written this
pamphlet on the basis of the first questionnaires:
1. By way ofillustration, two of the completed questionnaires are reproduced in full.
2. We also include two narratives which follow the order of the questions.
3. Finally, the most characteristic answers are brought together under the main
questionnaire headings.53
These points indicate several ways in which the GIP operated a selection of texts for
publication out of all the material that they initially received. Two filled out
questionnaires were deemed worthy of publishing in their entirety; two continuous
narratives were included in the midst of the dominant question‐answer format; and
finally, a number of answers were selected as ‘characteristic’. The GIP thus
undoubtedly brought its own judgement to bear upon what material should be
widely publicised, and what could be omitted. As Macey notes, ‘the absence of any
statistical breakdown of the responses makes the very notion of “characteristic”
rather dubious’54
. While the necessity of such a selection was probably dictated by
practical concerns regarding the length of the pamphlet, the order in which the texts
appear within the brochure suggest that it was also used to foreground radical views
in line with the GIP’s activist agenda.
The first document in the brochure is a completed questionnaire seemingly
published in its entirety, simply headed with the name of the Parisian men’s prison
from which it emanated: ‘La Santé’. The answers are remarkably articulate – much
more so than might be expected from the average levels of literacy recorded in
prisons. This prisoner can thus be suspected, from the outset, not to be representative
of the prison population at large. As one reads on, it becomes apparent that he holds
clear political sympathies, as he bemoans the lack of access to Marxist publications
within the prison.
The questionnaire answers are thus fronted by a strongly politicised and
articulate prisoner – whom later questions further reveal to have been one of the
prisoners involved in the hunger strikes organised by the political prisoners of the
ex‐Gauche prolétarienne. None of the answers compiled in the remainder of the
brochure express clear political views, suggesting that such a set of answers might
have constituted the exception rather than the rule among the questionnaires
collected. Yet the GIP chose to give it the most prominent place. The fact that it is
largely coherent with Foucault’s radical introduction would seem to suggest that this
questionnaire was selected on account of subversive contents supporting Foucault’s
53 Enquête, p. 4, my translation.
54 Macey, op.cit., p. 268.
40Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
activist aims, rather than Foucault’s introduction having been based on
overwhelmingly politicalresponses from the prisoners.
The GIP’s last brochure, Cahiers de revendications sortis des prisons lors des
récentes révoltes, published in 1972, highlights the growing gap between some of the
GIP’s initial aims, and the struggles taken up by prisoners themselves. The GIP’s
introduction to the Cahiers echoes its manifesto and first declarations,repeating some
of the GIP’s initial statements almost word for word. The consistency displayed by
the GIP’s discourse in no way reflects the relatively independent course taken up by
prisoners’ collectives inside prisons. As against the innovative means of political
struggle called for by intellectuals, the Cahiersrather betray the adoption by prisoners
of traditional forms of political action. Prisoners indeed summed up their grievances
as numbered bullet points spelling so many suggestions for timid reforms, such as
the ‘right to a transistor in each cell’, ‘longer visiting hours’, or the ‘right to buy
paperback books’55
.
The original political subjectivity which the GIP tried to outline was thus not
taken up by prisoners, who rather opted for more traditional modes of political
struggle, and aligned their discourses either to a reformist agenda (as above), or to
Marxist‐inspired revolutionary declarations.56
COMMUNICATIVE HEGEMONY
The GIP intellectuals’ alliance with prisoners can be seen not to have yielded the
results which Foucault expected. Deleuze reports that Foucault felt the GIP had
achieved nothing.57 In this section I review the key strengths and weaknesses of the
GIP’s strategy, and I argue that the failure of the GIP can be attributed to its
imposition of a hegemonic discourse on prisoners, defining subject positions for
them which they neither wanted to nor could adopt.
The originality of the GIP’s approach resided in its endeavour to contrive a
new way of championing the cause of an oppressed group. Although the use of
questionnaires to gather information is problematic on a number of counts, it did
nonetheless provide a way of transforming prisoners’ experience into ratified
knowledge. In this the GIP can be argued to have contrived a means of interceding
between the powerless and the spheres of power, while breaking away from the
prevailing intellectual tradition of defending people’s causes from a humanist,
theoretical position, as representatives of universal truths.
Discussing the role of intellectuals in the aftermath of 1968, Foucault
commented that: ‘the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer need him to
55 In GIP, Cahiers derevendicationssortis des prisonslors desrécentesrévoltes(Paris: Gallimard, 1972),
p. 15.
56 Cf. Livrozet, op.cit.
57 In Eribon, op.cit., p.234.
41Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far betterthan
he and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves. But there exists a system
of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this
knowledge’58
. The GIP can be said to have attempted to tackle this de facto
censorship of the masses’ discourse by channelling it through the approved
mechanism of knowledge production which questionnaires constitute.
Foucault envisioned that: ‘The intellectual’s role is no longer to place himself
“somewhat ahead and to the side” in order to express the stifled truth of the
collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him
into its object and instrument in the sphere of “knowledge”, “truth”,
“consciousness”, and “discourse”’59
. The GIP’s work can be said to have put
Foucault’s and other intellectuals’ privileged place in the order of discourse at the
service of those who were excluded and oppressed by that very order. As objects and
instruments of power, the GIP intellectuals lent theirlicence to manufacture truths to
those who would challenge that very power, thereby subverting and short‐circuiting
the order of knowledge’s allegiance to the repressive exercise of power.
Though as many have noted, the GIP’s work thus exemplified Foucault’s
conception of the new role of intellectuals60
, it can be argued that the success of its
work nonetheless largely relied on the continuing prestige of intellectuals as bearers
of universal truths. Halperin remarks that Foucault used ‘his prestigious social
location to create specific opportunities for the voices of the disempowered to be
heard, recorded, published, and circulated’61
. It is indeed doubtful that, had the
movement been led by lesser‐known individuals, it would have generated as much
interest in the media – and thereby held as much sway with ‘public opinion’.
Thus, though Foucault insisted that the movement aimed to remain
‘anonymous’62
, the vast majority of the press coverage of its actions foregrounded
Foucault’s name, and later Sartre’s and Mauriac’s as they joined in the various
protests. The fact that these intellectuals stepped back from the struggle after the
creation of the Comité d’Action des Prisonniers (CAP) can further be regarded as one
of the main factors accounting for the decrease of media exposure of the prisoners’
movement after 1972. In a 1976 article Defert and Donzelot thus express concern at
the lack of coverage of the work of the CAP, wondering: ‘They are going on with it,
but whatresponse are they getting?’63
The position of power occupied by the GIP intellectuals, while an asset in
exerting influence in official spheres, may however have hindered communication
58 In Language,Counter‐Memory, Practice, p. 207.
59 Ibid., pp. 207‐08.
60 Cf. Gandal, op.cit.; Mauger, op.cit.; Jean‐Claude Monod, Foucault: La police des conduites (Paris:
Michalon, 1997); Barry Smart, Michel Foucault(London and New York:Routledge, 1985).
61 Halperin, op.cit., p. 52.
62 DE, vol.1, p. 1172.
63 ‘Ils continuent, mais avec quel écho?’ Trans. BetsyWing, in Eribon, op.cit., p. 234.
42Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
with prisoners. The communication breakdown between the GIP and prisoners is
evidenced first and foremost in the poor take‐up among potential respondents. I
suggest that this may be due to the fact that the GIP chose to communicate with
prisoners through the dissemination of written questionnaires in French, in spite of
the higher rate of literacy difficulties, and the proportional over‐representation of
non‐French speakers, in the prison population.
Analysis of the only completed questionnaire that has been archived further
reveals a stark contrast between the GIP’s flawless grammar and elaborate wording,
and the brevity, broken syntax, tentative spelling and use of dialect and slang which
characterise the inmate’s answers. I would like to argue that, whether or not the
GIP’s linguistic choices impeded comprehension, this prisoner’s failure to fulfil
expectations implicit in open questions by answering at length, for instance, may be
read as unwillingness or inability on the respondent’s part to submit to the
conventions of a genre outside of his ordinary communicative repertoire.
Foucault himself would later remark on the class divide perpetuated by the
judiciary: ‘in the courts society as a whole does not judge one of its members, but […]
a social category with an interest in order judges another that is dedicated to
disorder’64
. Citing a striking passage from Rossi’s 1829 Traité de droit pénal, he then
goes on to comment on the resulting linguistic gap commonly found in the
courtroom:
The language of the law, which is supposed to be universal, is, in this respect,
inadequate; it must, if it is to be effective, be the discourse of one class to another, which
has neitherthe same ideas as it nor even the same words: ‘How are we, with our prudish,
contemptuous languages, overloaded with formality, to make ourselves understood by
those who have never heard anything but the crude, poor, irregular, but lively, frank,
picturesque dialect of the market, the tavern and the fair… What language, what method
should we use when drawing up laws that will act effectively on the uneducated minds
of those less capable of resisting the temptations of crime?’ (Rossi, I, 33) Law and justice
do not hesitate to proclaim their necessary class dissymmetry.65
Foucault thus shows that legislators have long been aware of the social asymmetry
between judges and defendants, and of the confusion that can arise from the
resulting clash of sociolects in the courtroom. Stubbs notes that ‘it is within such
institutions that strangers, from different social classes and language backgrounds,
are in interaction with each other. There are therefore likely to be misunderstandings
in precisely those encounters which lead to important decisions in people’s lives.’66
The GIP’s questionnaire may have been read by prisoners as yet another
cross‐examination session, to be carried out in the language of the prosecutor rather
than that of the accused. It is with mitigated success that the GIP thus attempted to
lend the powerless the intellectual clout of its jargon, as the vast majority of prisoners
64 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A.Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 276.
65 Ibid.
66 Michael Stubbs, Text and Corpus Analysis(Oxford and Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), p. 103.
43Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
failed to take part. It is paradoxical that it should have shown some sensitivity in
insisting on having the information gathered made public in the prisoners’ ‘own
words’, while expecting respondents to understand the GIP’s language in the first
place. In Briggs’s formulation, the GIP can be said to have been guilty of
“communicative hegemony” – where communicative hegemony ‘refers to
researchers’ efforts to impose their own communicative strategies on their subjects or
consultants regardless of the possibility that these techniques may be incompatible
with those persons’ own communicative repertoire’.67
The questionnaires thus constituted an ambiguous medium in the GIP’s
investigation, simultaneously granting everyday personal experience the status of
positive knowledge, and constraining prisoners’ input by a set of questions devised
to suit a strategy planned by the GIP, with little (if any) input from prisoners or ex‐
prisoners themselves.
Theorists of discourse argue that: ‘Discourse conventions carry with them
prototypical identities: possible selves for real writers, “subject positions” that they
inhabit when they participate in this discourse.’68 Imposing certain discourse
conventions on prisoners can therefore be thought to have created specific subject
positions forthem to take up. Dambrine suggests that the GIP gave inmates access to
the status of ‘discursive subject’69
, but what sort of discursive subjectivity were
prisoners able to take on?
The majority of commentators take atface value the GIP’s claim that, thanks to
their movement, prisoners were finally able to speak forthemselves. However, in her
seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Spivak points up a number of problems
with Foucault’s descriptions of the role of GIP. First of all, she remarks that
Foucault’s pronouncement that ‘the oppressed can know and speak for themselves
[…] reintroduces the constitutive subject’ which Foucault’s theoretical work has
repeatedly called into question.70 The implication that prisoners are knowing subjects
who can express their views without the corrupting mediation of discourse
contributes to ‘restor[ing] the category of the sovereign subject within the theory that
seems most to question it’.71 Foucault’s depiction of prisoners as ‘knowing and
speaking for themselves’ is indeed inconsistent with his suggestion, in The
Archaeology of Knowledge (1972 [1969]), that it is discourses that shape subjects, rather
than sovereign subjects consciously and deliberately articulating their own original
thoughts.
67 Charles L. Briggs, Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in
Social ScienceResearch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 90.
68 Clark and Ivanič, op. cit. p. 140.
69 Dambrine, op. cit. p. 146.
70 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture, ed. by C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p. 279.
71 Ibid. p. 278.
44Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
Spivak argues that the GIP’s position is also problematic from a political point
of view. She notes that, in claiming that they let prisoners speak for themselves, ‘the
intellectuals represent themselves as transparent’72: they deny their own influential
role in bringing the movement to the media’s attention and shaping its whole
strategy. Spivak suggests that the self‐denying posturing of the GIP intellectuals
could be criticised as ‘interested individualistic refusals of the institutional privileges
of power bestowed on the subject [as opposed to the oppressed non‐subjects]’73: in
representing themselves as absent, the intellectuals fail to interrogate their own
relationship with groups who have less access to the order of discourse, and the
institutional responsibility which they can be thought to carry vis‐à‐vis less
privileged sections of society. Thus, Howe concludes, radical political practice ‘must
attend to its own ruses of power if it is to avoid underwriting a delusionary politics
of self‐representing subalterns speaking for themselves’74
. The long unpublished
1975 interview75 which I have discussed above sees Foucault partly answering these
criticisms when he describes his privileged position in the order of discourse as
having been instrumental in helping to formulate the prisoners’ demands as a
discourse in its own right.
Gandal acknowledges that any formulation of discourse on the part of
prisoners should, in Foucaldian terms, be understood as a form of subjectivation, and
may therefore be at odds with his critique of subjection:
In the case of the prisons, what Foucault was attempting to struggle against were the
forms of subjection that constituted the convict as other and that condemned him to
brutal treatment in the prison and a marginalization that did not end when he got out. Of
course, Foucault’s political work around the prisons also involved forms of subjection: it
contributed to the creation of new identities for prisoners as they articulated their
experiences. But rather than dividing prisoners from the rest of society, these forms of
subjection, these practices of speaking and of developing new knowledge about
themselves, provided links between prisoners and people on the outside.76
Gandal thus notes that the GIP shaped new identities for prisoners by making them
voice their experiences. These identities, he contends, are not objectionable in as
much as they do not separate prisoners from the rest of the population, but rather
enable them to communicate with the outside. The form of subjectivation exercised
on prisoners by the GIP can therefore be viewed as positive identity constitution.
Halperin equally argues that the GIP’s methods did not involve any
questionable constraints on prisoners. He states that Foucault’s purpose was
72 Ibid. p. 275.
73 Ibid. p. 280.
74 Adrian Howe, Punish and Critique: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Penality (London and New
York:Routledge, 1994), p. 211.
75 Le Monde 19‐20/09/04.
76 Gandal, op.cit., p.129.
45Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
to authorize those who are normally the objects of expert discourses, who are spoken
about while remaining silent themselves, to speak on their own behalf – not so that they
might confess to the authorities the truth of their being, of course, but so that they could
articulate their own needs, point out the conditions that were particularly odious to them,
and advance their own political projects.77
Though the aims of the GIP were no doubt different from those of the authorities and
repressive institutions which invite and rely on confession, the methods which they
used do bear some disturbing resemblances.
Indeed, by requesting personal narratives, the GIP made prisoners voice their
experiences of prison in a first‐person genre not dissimilarto confession. In addition,
the assessment of the impact of prison conditions on detainees partly relied on the
objects of its inquiry – the prisoners – constituting themselves as self‐monitoring
subjects. In order to answer some the GIP’s questions, they had to turn inwards and
watch their own thoughts and behaviour so as to isolate those conditions and factors
which they found most intolerable, and hence most urgently wished to bring to
public attention. It could therefore be argued that the GIP constituted prisoners as
self‐monitoring subjects through a process similar to that through which the
Panopticon shapes its inmates’ subjectivity. Answering the questionnaire also placed
prisoners in the inferior position of those subjected to question‐answer examinations
in institutional settings, such as suspects in police interrogations and defendants in
court, where this procedure contributes to marking individuals out as criminal
subjects.
CONCLUSION
I have tried to demonstrate that, contrary to the GIP’s own claims, which have been
uncritically echoed by the vast majority of commentators, the GIP did not simply
give prisoners a platform, but inevitably contributed to channelling, moulding and
mediating inmates’ discourse.
The various public pronouncements of the GIP described prisoners as an
oppressed and exploited class who would now rebel against their scapegoat status
and lead the struggle against the insidiously repressive power of so‐called
democratic institutions. The GIP thereby constructed inmates as key political agents
in an unprecedented rebellion against newly‐identified sites of power.
Prisoners’ subjectivity was not only shaped by the GIP by portraying them in
this way in its declarations, but also by delineating subject positions for them to
adopt within the GIP’s investigation by expecting them to formulate certain types of
statements (énoncés). Foucault suggested in The Archaeology of Knowledge that énoncés
define subject positions for those who utter them.
78 By positioning prisoners as
77 Halperin, op.cit., p. 55.
78 Foucault, op.cit., p.107.
46Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
47
respondents to questionnaires designed by sociologists, and as authors of first‐
person narratives, the GIP made those of the inmates who answered them adopt the
position of objects of an interaction closely resembling an interrogation or a
psychological examination, where prisoners had little scope for influencing the
dynamics of the dialogue and the topics dealt with. Even as they may be argued to
have been subverted by their use within a specific political strategy, the historically
loaded genres which the GIP thus called on inmates to adopt may still be seen to
have delineated specific subjectivities for prisoners. The ‘discursive subjects’
constructed by the GIP can therefore be argued to have been shaped by constraints
comparable with those which Foucault would later argue constitute criminal subjects
in modern Western societies.
Though the GIP repeatedly claimed to be letting prisoners speak for
themselves, I have shown that the methods it used to collect testimonials, and the
way it framed prisoners in its various statements and publications in fact imposed a
number of constraints on both the form and contents of prisoners’ contributions –
constraints which may be argued to have shaped specific subjectivities for prisoners.
ARTICLE
The Groupe d’information sur les prisons: The voice of prisoners? Or
Foucault’s?
Cecile Brich, Leeds University
In 1971 Michel Foucault founded the ‘Groupe d’information sur les prisons’ (GIP),
which planned to gather and publicise testimonies about prison conditions in France.
The GIP had no reformist agenda, butrather aimed to enable prisoners themselves to
speak out on prison issues and decide for themselves what should be done about
them. The GIP membership thus theoretically included prisoners, ex‐prisoners and
prisoners’ families alongside the intellectuals and professionals who founded it. They
collected information from prisoners via questionnaires, inmates’ letters and
personal narratives, and endeavoured to alert public opinion to the insalubrious
nature of prisons, and to the unjust and inhumane treatment endured by countless
inmates. The GIP organised demonstrations, distributed tracts, gave press
conferences and published a variety of documents, in the form of articles in the press
and through a series of pamphlets. The GIP’s campaign was successful on a number
of fronts, winning the right for prisoners to read the daily press, for instance, and
leading to a series of actions initiated by prisoners, from a wave ofrooftop protests to
the creation of the Comité d’action des prisonniers (Prisoners’ Action Committee),
pursuing the fightfor prisoners’rights through the 1970s.
The work of the GIP has thus far mostly been discussed in hagiographical
mode, most extensively in Foucault’s biographies, and in a handful of articles and
unpublished French dissertations. Scholarly commentary on the work of the GIP has
hitherto chiefly focused on the relationship between the public pronouncements of
the GIP and Foucault’s ideas on power and the role of intellectuals.1
For the most
part, however, these analyses are limited to emphasising the originality of the GIP’s
approach on the basis of the statements published by the GIP, which they take at face
1
See for instance: Michelle Perrot, Les Ombres de l’histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 2001); François
Boullant, Michel Foucault et les prisons (Paris: PUF, 2003); Gérard Mauger, ‘Un nouveau
militantisme’, Sociétés et Représentations 3 (1996): 51‐77; Keith Gandal, ‘Michel Foucault:
IntellectualWork and Politics’, Telos 67 (1986): 121‐134.Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
value. The announcement that the GIP wanted to give prisoners the opportunity to
speak out without intermediary2
, forinstance, has thus been repeatedly commended
as testimony to Foucault’s ethics, endlessly echoing Gilles Deleuze’s claim that
Foucault was ‘the first […] to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the
indignity of speaking for others’3
. Macey comments that: ‘The goal of Foucault’s
political activity was the empowering of others by giving, for instance, prisoners the
voice they were denied.’4
Halperin similarly argues that Foucault ‘consistently
refused to speak for others, working instead to create conditions in which others
could speak forthemselves’5
. The GIP’s work is thus generally acknowledged as ‘the
advent of a new form of activism, allowing someone’s speech to be heard directly,
ratherthan speaking on behalf of’
6
.
No critical assessment of the GIP’s work has as yet investigated the extent to
which the GIP’s methods accorded with their pronouncements, and how the
dynamics of their communication with prisoners affected the information which they
were able to collect. This article proposes to address precisely these issues.
While the GIP’s procedures were no doubt often original, and went some way
towards letting prisoners speak for themselves, I would like to argue that the
intellectuals’ role within it was a rather more complex one than critics have so far
maintained. Although their goal was to give prisoners the practical means to express
themselves, I will show that the methods it used, and the responses it elucidated,
suggest that the prisoners’ discourse was not simply ‘set free’, as Artières contends7
,
but was also subtly constrained by the GIP’s agenda.
I argue that the GIP’s discourse cannot be reduced to the publication of
prisoners’ testimonies, but can rather be understood as the product of a dialogical
process involving the intellectuals’ investigative methods and editorial decisions on
the one hand, and the prisoners’responses and contributions on the other.
Sylvain Dambrine suggests that the GIP was a movement which made
prisoners access the status of discursive subjects8
. He does not, however, substantiate
this claim. I propose to investigate this assertion by analysing the statements and
methodology of the GIP in order to assess how prisoners were constructed in the
discourse of the GIP, and what types of statements [énoncés] they were expected to
2
Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits [hereafter DE] (Paris: Gallimard,“Quarto”, 2001 [1994]), vol.1, p.
1072.
3
Gilles Deleuze, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, in Language, Counter‐Memory, Practice, ed. D. F.
Bouchard (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 209.
4
David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: HutchinsonRandom House, 1993), p. 257.
5
David Halperin, Saint Foucault (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 53.
6
Philippe Artières, ‘Les Écrits de la révolte. La prise de parole des détenus (1970‐72)’, Drôle
d’époque 8 (2001): 47, original emphasis, my translation.
7
Ibid, p. 37, my translation.
8
Sylvain Dambrine, ‘Passages du mur: des subjectivations de prisonniers’ in Vacarme 29 (2004):
146.
27Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
formulate. I will thus construct a fuller picture of the ‘discursive subjects’ which
prisoners became through the work of the GIP.
RATIONALE
The impetus forthe creation of the GIP in January 1971 lay in the attention drawn to
the penitential regime by a group of political prisoners on hunger strike during the
winter 1970‐71. In the aftermath of May 68, a number of drastically repressive
measures were brought in by the government in orderto regain control in the face of
continuing social unrest. Among these, a bill known as the loi anti‐casseurs (‘anti‐
wreckers’ law9
) was passed in June 1970, which made the organisers of
demonstrations liable for any disturbances, and thus led to the incarceration of
increasing numbers of political protesters. Concurrently, the government ordered the
dissolution of the Maoist organisation Gauche prolétarienne (GP), founded in 1968;
several hundreds of members of the clandestine ex‐GP would subsequently be
arrested. The political prisoners’ movement caught the attention of a few
intellectuals, including Michel Foucault and Daniel Defert, who decided to form the
‘Groupe d’information sur les prisons’, with the support of historian Pierre Vidal‐
Naquet, and of Jean‐Marie Domenach, then editor of the Catholic monthly Esprit. The
GIP proposed to gather information inside French prisons, building a case for a de
facto trial of the prison service.
The GIP’s original rationale can be glimpsed in a number of its statements,
such as an article published on 15 March 1971 in J’accuse, indicating a carefully
thought out strategy on its part:
We want to break the double isolation in which prisoners are trapped: through our
investigation, we want them to be able to talk to each other, to share what they know,
and to communicate from prison to prison and from cell to cell. We want inmates to
address the population, and for the population to speak to them. These individual
experiences, these isolated rebellions must be transformed into a shared body of
knowledge, and into coordinated action. […] Our investigation is not designed to amass
facts, but to increase ourintolerance, and transform it into active intolerance.10
The GIP’s aim, it is suggested here, was primarily to start a debate: amongst
prisoners, and between prisoners and the rest of the population. This simple
dialogue, however, was practically hampered by prison regulations, which forbade
communication with unauthorised persons (i.e. everyone but close family members),
while the daily press was not allowed inside and radio broadcasts were regularly
censored. The GIP’s investigation was thus not an end in itself, for the sake of
gathering information, but rather a means to an end: a way to set up a vast
9
Macey’s translation, op.cit., p. 258.
10 DE, vol. 1, p. 1044, my translation.
28Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
communication network, between and around prisoners, so as to allow for
discussion and coordinated action to take place.
The GIP’s project appears to rest on an implicit model of the outbreak of
revolts, whereby individual experience can be processed in such a way as to become
a trigger for uprising. The simultaneous articulation of similar experiences is
expected to amplify their impact and legitimate dissatisfaction hitherto dismissed as
merely personal and psychological,ratherthan collective and political.
Indications of an expected course of events in the article cited above and
elsewhere suggest that the GIP was virtually engineering a rebellion unbeknown to
those who were to be its actors – the prisoners themselves. The repetition of ‘we
want’ constantly reinstates the GIP as the principal orchestrator and decision‐maker
of the manoeuvres to be made, regardless of the prisoners’ wishes. The movement
seems to have partly acted as a real life testing ground for Foucault’s hypotheses;
interestingly, the editors of Dits et écrits note that Foucault delayed publication of
Discipline and Punish for two years, so as to evade the charge of having been
motivated solely by theoretical interest.
It is on 8 February 1971, at the press conference that marked the end of the
political prisoners’ second hunger strike, that the public announcement of the
creation of the GIP was made. The statement, signed by Foucault, Vidal‐Naquet and
Domenach and published in several newspapers, explains that ‘together with a
number of magistrats, lawyers, journalists, doctors and psychologists, we have
founded a Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons’
11
. Prisoners are thus not included
amongst the investigators at this stage, nor are they explicitly addressed with any
more precision than as among ‘those who have some experience of prison or some
connection with it, in whatever capacity’12
, even though the statement would be
published in Esprit, which was available in prisons.
The proposed role of those who would have relevant experience or
information is ‘to contact us and pass on what they know. We have compiled a
questionnaire, which is available on request. As soon as we have received enough
responses, we will publish them.’13 Prisoners are thus seemingly addressed solely as
sources of information, while the processing and use of the information remains the
investigators’ monopoly. This first official GIP statement thus casts prisoners rather
as passive objects of the GIP’s investigation, leaving the leading roles to the
intellectuals and professionals.
The GIP’s request for prisoners to send in personal narratives of prison life
and answers to a pre‐established questionnaire can be argued to cast them
simultaneously as subjects and objects of the GIP’s investigation. The relatively
passive role which they are given supposes that they are, to an extent, approached as
11 Translation in Macey, op.cit., p.258.
12 DE, vol.1, p. 1043, my translation.
13 Ibid., my translation.
29Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
objects to be interrogated, in such a way as to extract data from them to be used by
the researchers as they see fit. By having made key decisions about the investigative
procedures and the role to be played by prisoners within them, the GIP can be seen
to have created a certain position for inmates to occupy, thereby subjecting them to
its own vision of what subjectivity they should take on. The ambiguities of this
subjectivation process are explored further in the following sections, where I discuss
some of the methodological problems pertaining to the GIP’s investigation.
METHODOLOGY
Though the GIP’s avowed aim was to hand the floor over to prisoners, the methods
by which it did so can be shown to have simultaneously imposed significant
constraints upon prisoners’ voices. These constraints operated in a number of ways
at different stages of the investigation, beginning with the imposition of the written
medium to impart information to the GIP, the restrictive questionnaire format and
the limitation of testimonial genres to questionnaire answers and factual personal
accounts, through to the remarkably biased selection put forward for publication. I
shall look at each of these constraints in turn, considering the way in which they
limited prisoners’ discourse, and assessing the extent to which they recalled typically
institutional practices. I will show that by thus imposing a degree of constraint on
prisoners’ participation, and specifically on the discursive subject positions available
to them, the GIP effectively delimited a subjectivity which inmates were expected to
take up.
First of all, the GIP’s investigative methods failed to ensure the participation
of a representative sample of informants. From the first invitation from the hunger
strikers’ ‘comrades’ to send information to Foucault, to the GIP’s reliance on written
questionnaires, the written medium is privileged. For the significant proportion of
prisoners who have difficulty reading and writing, orfor whom French was not their
native language, writing will have been alienating at the very least, if not absolutely
unmanageable.
The fact that the questionnaire’s dissemination was illegal inside prisons
means that questionnaires were, however, often covertly read out to prisoners by
visiting family members orfellow prisoners who had managed to smuggle in a copy,
and the answers were collected orally. The formulation of some of the answers
published in the GIP’s brochure Enquête dans vingt prisons indicates that they were
given orally, and compiled by a third party: ‘According to the questions I have asked
prisoners…’14
. Among those is this revealing answerto the question ‘Have you been
the victim of censorship?’: ‘People don’t write much in prison, because of spelling;
they are ashamed of their spelling before the censors.’15 The GIP’s privileging of the
14 Le G.I.P.: Enquête dans vingt prisons(Paris: Champ Libre, 1971), p. 27 – my translation.
15 Ibid., p.29 – my translation.
30Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
written medium will thus probably have led to under‐representation of illiterate
prisoners and non‐French‐speakers, though perhaps more so in the letters sent in
than in questionnaires, on account of their ad hoc dissemination in prisons.
The Administration pénitentiaire’s annualreport indicates that French prisons
housed 29,026 prisoners on 1 January 1970.16 The number of questionnaires sent out
by the GIP, by contrast, approximated one thousand, but the number of answers
received was around 50.17 Letters, prison narratives and diaries were also sent to the
GIP by 20 or so inmates and ex‐cons. The total of the GIP’s informants thus
represented only a tiny fraction of the prison population, favouring French‐speaking,
literate and relatively politicised and articulate respondents, which may not be
deemed representative of the whole of the prison population. However, given the
drastic restrictions on all forms of communication with prisoners, the GIP’s aim of
enabling inmates directly to express their grievances to the ‘outside’ was difficult to
achieve without recourse to the written medium, even though this will have
prevented many from taking part in the investigation.
QUESTIONNAIRES
One of the GIP’s key investigative tools, announced in their founding declaration,
was the dissemination of a questionnaire destined to collect information on prison
conditions from prisoners themselves. Interestingly, the authorship of the
questionnaire seems to constitute a moot point. The first announcement of the
availability of the questionnaire appeared in the GIP’s manifesto, which did not
mention any involvement of prisoners or ex‐prisoners in the GIP at that stage. In an
article published in La Cause du peuple‐J’accuse(25 May 1971), Daniel Defert (founding
member of the GIP) states that it is prisoners themselves who drew up the
questionnaire. Defert seems anxious to minimize the intellectuals’ involvement and
maximize the prisoners’, so that the role of ex‐inmates in the drafting of the initial
version of the questionnaire may be suspected to have been rather less than Defert
claims.
By contrast, the historians who retraced the early meetings of the GIP
altogether discount ex‐prisoners’ involvement at that stage, maintaining that the
questionnaire was written by a small group of young philosophers and sociologists
(including Jacques Donzelot, Daniel Defert, Danielle Rancière, Christine Martineau)
around Michel Foucault18
.
16 In Le Monde, 2/09/1970.
17 Elie Kagan and Alain Jaubert, UneJournée particulière(Lyon: Ædelsa Éditions, 2004), p. 40.
18 Philippe Artières, Laurent Quéro and Michelle Zancarini‐Fournel (eds), Le Groupe d’information
surles prisons. Archives d’unelutte 1970‐1972 (Paris: Editions de l’IMEC, 2003), p.30.
31Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
The GIP’s claim that ‘This is not a sociological investigation’19 arguably
referred not so much to the professional training of its investigators as to the
purposes of the investigation. A covering letter to the questionnaire insists that the
GIP’s investigation is to be understood as an act of resistance20
, foregrounding the
significance of the investigation’s motives over its format. Thus it is not a
sociologists’ investigation because it does not share the aims that sociological
investigations usually have. The meaning of the enquiry is a function of the socio‐
political stance which the enquirers adopt, perhaps in the sense in which Pêcheux
argues that ‘Words, expressions, propositions, etc […] change their meaning
according to the positions held by those who use them, which signifies that they find
their meaning by reference to these positions’21
.
However, it could also be argued that the choice of the questionnaire format
was actually crucial to the GIP’s goals, not least in that it positioned its authors as
social scientists. The questions could thus be described as ‘énoncés’ in the sense that
Foucault proposed in The Archaeology of Knowledge: ‘To describe a formulation qua
statement [énoncé] does not consist in analysing the relations between the author and
what he says (or wanted to say, or said without wanting to); but in determining what
position can and must be occupied by any individual if he is to be the subject of it.’22
Thus, the questionnaire format positions its authors as social scientists, regardless of
how they wish to present themselves; the genre is that of the scientific institution,
automatically casting its subjects as institutional researchers: ‘The positions of the
subject are […] defined by the situation that it is possible for him to occupy in
relation to the various domains or groups of objects: he is subject questioning
according to a certain grid of explicit or implicit interrogations, and listening
according to a certain programme of information’23
.
The institutional stamp carried by the questionnaire format in turn grants
scientific authority to the investigative procedure. Questionnaires have been
sanctioned by the social scientific establishment as a valid means of generating
standardised knowledge. Their formal rigour is arguably instrumental in allowing
the constitution of a ‘shared body of knowledge’ [‘savoir commun’], which the GIP
foregrounded as one of the chief aims of the investigation. The involvement of
sociologists in the GIP’s investigative methods, whether acknowledged or not, thus
seems wholly cogent with the GIP’s rationale, of helping prisoners produce
knowledge about their situation.
19 Ce n’est pas une enquête de sociologues’, in Artières et al, op.cit., p.52.
20 ‘ce n’est pas une enquête sociologique, une enquête‐curiosité, c’est une enquête‐intolérance’,
ibid., p.53.
21 Michel Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology, trans. H. Nagpal, (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1982), p.111.
22 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, (London & New
York:Routledge, 2003 [1972]), p.107.
23 Ibid. pp.57‐58, translation adapted.
32Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
However, the GIP’s reliance on questionnaires can be considered
problematical on a number of grounds. Firstly, the use of a strict question‐answer
format has been shown to generate power asymmetry in the relationship between
those asking the questions and those answering them.24 The GIP’s recourse to
questionnaires may therefore be thought to have imposed an unequal interaction
pattern on prisoners.
The GIP questionnaire set the topics, signalled by the sub‐headings ‘visits’,
‘letters’, ‘your rights’, ‘cells’ etc., which remained unchanged even as some of the
questions were added or amended following initial feedback. A considerable part of
the GIP’s discourse indeed consisted in politicising the daily life and material
conditions of prisoners. In a 1973 interview Foucault explains how his rationale in
asking prisoners to testify to their living conditions is inscribed in the redefinition of
the political initiated by the late Sixties liberation movements. As Artières notes,
since 1968 prisons had remained the only place not to be reached by the collective
‘speaking out’ undertaken by sections of the population hitherto denied access to the
political platform, from women and gays to workers and students25
. In a 1972 article,
Jacques Donzelot, who was involved in the GIP, clarifies the GIP’s position in
relation to movements largely influenced by psychoanalytic notions of liberation
through speech, contending that the GIP aimed to move beyond merely freeing the
voices of the oppressed, to formulate a potent political discourse. The GIP, he states,
did not encourage prisoners to speak out for self‐expression’s sake, but saw that their
testimonies should have a very specific content, revolving around their living
conditions26
.
The GIP’s strategy was thus very clearly defined in relation to the protest
movements of the preceding years. One of its key premises built on the idea that the
personal is political, and it therefore insisted that prisoners designate their daily
living conditions as their primary concern. While it also drew on the contemporary
power of the silenced voice finally speaking up for itself, the GIP nonetheless
distanced itself from the clinical associations of confession, to rather channel
testimonies in the direction of pre‐defined claims grounded in verifiable information
on material conditions.
The range of issues deemed relevant was thus pre‐selected by the GIP, and can
be suspected to have stopped other problems coming to the fore: as Drew and
Heritage found, in question‐answer settings, ‘professionals may prevent particular
issues becoming topics in their own right’27
. Incidentally, Gudjonsson remarks that
24 See for instance: Roger Fowler et al, Language and Control (London, Boston and Henley:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979); Norman Fairclough, Language and Power , 2nd edn (London
and New York:Routledge, 2001 [1989]).
25 Artières, op.cit, p.37.
26 Jacques Donzelot, ‘Travail social et lutte politique’, Esprit 413 (1972): 654‐73.
27 Paul Drew and John Heritage (eds), Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.49.
33Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
the police are aware of this effect and ‘ask specific questions in orderto […] allow the
police officerto have greater control overthe interview’28
.
Further, the validity of both closed and open survey questions has been
challenged: Foddy contends that the ‘suggestion that open questions do not suggest
answers to respondents [in contrast to closed ones] is not necessarily valid’29
. Open
questions have been observed to yield markedly different answers from closed
versions of the same questions. Though this has been attributed to the inadequacy of
the closed response options, Foddy remarks that ‘such an outcome can just as easily
be the result of respondents having to guess what kinds of answers the researcher
wants in response to open questions. The central issue is not which format produces
the most valid responses but whether or not respondents know what kinds of
answers they should give.’30 Respondents are thus thought not to answer absolutely
freely, but rather to attempt to conform to what they assume the researcher’s
expectations to be. This problem will certainly have applied to the GIP questionnaire:
prisoners will have responded according to what they thought the GIP required.
Leading forensic linguist Roger W. Shuy further warns that: ‘The way a question is
asked can influence or even determine the answer given. […] Lawyers have long
recognized the dangers of “leading questions,” for example, and the courts try to
prevent this from happening.’31
These problematic aspects of the questionnaire format point to a rather more
complex relationship between the GIP and the prisoners than the former simply
offering a platform to the latter. The prisoners’ involvement in the GIP was thus
restricted, at this early stage in the movement, to answering questions concerning
material conditions of imprisonment. The GIP also suggested, however, that
prisoners sent in ‘detailed narratives of imprisonment.’32
PRISON NARRATIVES
What ‘detailed narratives of imprisonment’ (‘des récits détaillés de détention’) might
involve is perhaps open to interpretation. They may arguably refer to second‐hand
reports of events, but it is likely that they would be taken as autobiographical
accounts of prison life. Whatevertheir exact contents, however, the suggested format
28 Gisli Gudjonsson, The Psychology of Interrogations, Confessions and Testimony (Chichester: Wiley,
1992), p. 9.
29 William Foddy, Constructing Questions for Interviews and Questionnaires: Theory and Practice in
SocialResearch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 129.
30 Ibid. p.152.
31 Roger W. Shuy, Languages Crimes: The Use and Abuse of Language Evidence in the Courtroom
(Oxford, UK and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993), p.174, original emphasis.
32 In Philippe Artières, Laurent Quéro and Michelle Zancarini‐Fournel (eds), Le Groupe
d’information sur les prisons. Archives d’une lutte 1970‐1972 (Paris: Editions de l’IMEC, 2003), p.
42, my translation.
34Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
is unambiguously that of narrative: ‘récit’. The suggestion of a narrative genre by the
GIP is particularly interesting in light of Foucault’s comments on prisoners’
autobiographies in the preface to Serge Livrozet’s book, Dela Prison à la révolte(1973).
Foucault condemned the prevalence of the autobiographical genre as ensuring that
‘the convict cannot have thoughts, as s/he may only have recollections. His/her
memory alone is accepted, not his/her ideas’33
. Whether wholly autobiographical or
not, the GIP’s ‘récits de détention’ likewise arguably preclude analytical critique,
political manifesto, or any other non‐narrative genres prisoners might have wished
to adopt.
Foucault’s analysis of the significance of the prisoners’ testimonies lays
particular emphasis on first‐person enunciation and communication, rather than on
contents. In a 1972 interview Foucault thus stated that ‘in our pamphlets, it was the
inmates themselves who spoke out and revealed the facts. Since these facts were only
known in restricted circles, it was important for the public to hear the voice of
prisoners, and for prisoners to know that they themselves were speaking out’34
. This
observation clearly stresses the importance of viva voce dialogue between prisoners
and ‘public opinion’, or ‘contact’ in Debray’s words35
, rather than the terms of the
discourse they held.
In requesting personal narratives the GIP can be said to have aligned itself
with what Scannell shows to be the dominant distribution of discourse in the media,
where ‘public persons [such as intellectuals] are entitled to opinions, private persons
to experiences’36:
To have an opinion is to be entitled to comment on events, to have views about them, to
assess their significance. To have an experience is to be entitled to describe an event that
happened to oneself and to say how one felt about it. […] Public persons […] speak as
representatives of institutions, as agents not as persons, and their views have generalised
weight and authority. They are accredited spokespersons, whose views are legitimated
and legitimating. Private individuals appear in news, become newsworthy, accidentally
and usually disastrously. They are often the victims or witnesses of catastrophes and are
interviewed for what they saw orfor how it affected them […]37
The GIP reproduced this pattern by inviting prisoners to contribute experiences,
while analysis and commentary was provided by the GIP intellectuals. They thus
conformed to a generic convention reflecting the fact that ‘the powerless are not seen
33 ‘le condamné ne peut pas avoir de pensée puisqu’il ne doit avoir que des souvenirs. Sa
mémoire seule est admise, non ses idées’, in Serge Livrozet, De la Prison à la révolte (Paris:
l’Esprit Frappeur, 1999 [1973]), p. 6, my translation.
34 DE, vol.1, p. 1297, my translation.
35 Régis Debray, L’État séducteur. Les Révolutions médiologiques du pouvoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1993),
p. 127.
36 Paddy Scannell, ‘Public Service Broadcasting and Modern Public Life’, in Culture and Power, ed.
Paddy Scannell et al(London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 1992), p. 344.
37 Ibid.
35Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
as credible sources of knowledge and explanation and tend as a result to be
marginalised’38
.
By the same token, however, for the GIP to combine prisoners’ experience
with intellectuals’ public pronouncements may be considered an efficient strategy in
that it will have met discursive expectations, and hence have been more easily
accepted and understood. In a 1975 interview first published in 2004, Foucault
clarified his view on the role of the intellectual in relation to the discourse of
powerless groups:
To me, the intellectual has no right to privilege his/her own discourse overthat of others.
Rather, s/he tries to make room for the discourse of others. This does not mean that s/he
should keep silent, forthis would be verging on masochism… His/her role is to open up
possibilities in discourse, and to blend his/her discourse with others’, to intertwine it with
that of others, like a support.39
This position is quite different from the GIP statements that insisted that it only put
forward prisoners’ voices without intervening in any way. Contrary to previous
claims that the GIP intellectuals aimed to remain silent, Foucault now suggests that
such a position would be masochistic. He rather argues that the intellectual’s role is
to open up recognised discursive channels for others, and to intertwine his/her
discourse with theirs so as to lend them its institutional support. This view more
accurately reflects the way that the GIP operated, in that the intellectuals, and
Foucault in particular, indubitably intermingled their own discourse with the
prisoners’, and thereby enabled the latterto find its way into the media.
In the same interview, Foucault repeats that the GIP intellectuals did not
intend to remain silent and let prisoners alone speak – contrary to earlier GIP
pronouncements:
What we tried to do with the prison issue was […] to weave together discourses which
were on an equal footing. We did not keep quiet if an inmate was speaking, we did not
acknowledge that he had the right to shut us up, but nor did we assume the right to
speak in his place. It seemed to us that the fact of being on the outside was neither
qualifying nor disqualifying for us. It was one position in relation to prison – a position
allowing us to speak about prison without speaking on behalf on inmates.40
Foucault’s claim that neitherthe prisoners’ discourse northe intellectuals’ was given
more prominence breaks with both the GIP’s insistence that the inmates’ voices take
precedence, and with Foucault’s consistent theoretical view that the discourses of
intellectuals occupy a privileged place in the order of discourse, and that this is
precisely why, as in the previous quote, they can provide supportfor others’ voices.
Foucault’s defence, that the fact of speaking from outside prisons does not
invalidate a discourse about it, is probably made in response to ex‐inmate Serge
38 Romy Clark and Roz Ivanič, The Politics of Writing. (London and New York: Routldge, 1997), p.
33.
39 In Le Monde 19‐20/09/04, my translation.
40 Ibid.
36Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
Livrozet, who led the Melun protests in 1972 and founded the Comité dʹAction des
Prisonniers on his release in 1973. Following Foucault’s anonymous publication of an
article on illegalism and delinquency in the daily left‐wing newspaper Libération,
Livrozet railed against the intellectual’s analysis in an interview with the same
newspaper: ‘These specialists in analysis are a pain. I don’t need anyone to speak for
me and proclaim what I am.’41 Mills remarks that Livrozet ‘clearly felt that Foucault’s
position was not simply that of facilitator’42
. It may be in light of such a challenge
that Foucault saw fit to justify intellectuals’ right to comment on subjects on which
theirresearch can shed a different and complementary light.
As if anticipating potential criticism that, by mixing the GIP’s discourse with
the prisoners’, the GIP might be said to have unduly interfered with it by giving it a
more authoritative shape, Foucault continues:
You’re going to tell me: it is the intellectuals who are moulding this discourse… Big deal!
The intellectual, in a given society, is precisely the ‘discourse officer’. Whatever happens
in the order of discourse is inevitably going to be his/her business. S/he might be for or
against it, but no operation can take place within the order of discourse without the
intellectual’s intervention.43
Here Foucault effectively admits that the prisoners’ voices could not have become a
discourse, that is, have had the potential to wield any power, had they not been
framed by intellectuals – as only they have access to the order of discourse and can
alterthe configuration of discourses in a society.
PUBLICATIONS
As soon as information had been gathered, it was crucial to the GIP’s strategy that it
be rapidly spread and shared, to enable the emergence of a collective voice, and of a
‘shared body of knowledge’ (‘savoir commun’)44
. To this end the GIP published a
number of articles, particularly in the Maoist press and in the Catholic monthly
Esprit. They also published five brochures, four of which appeared under the
especially created series title “Intolérable”.
Defert contends that: ‘we did not hold any specific discourse of our own; the
heterogeneity of the GIP’s publications bears witness to this’45
. While the GIP’s
output undoubtedly covers a wide range of issues, and treats them in a variety of
ways, from polemical essays on George Jackson’s death to word for word
reproduction of questionnaire answers, I would like to suggest that the GIP’s
41 ‘Les spécialistes de l’analyse nous emmerdent, je n’ai besoin de personne pour prendre la
parole et expliquer ce que je suis.’ (Libération 19‐02‐1974), trans. Betsy Wing, in Eribon, Michel
Foucault,(London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1991 [1989]), p. 234.
42 Sara Mills, Michel Foucault (London and New York:Routledge, 2003), p. 77.
43 In Le Monde 19‐20/09/04, my translation.
44 GIP, Le G.I.P.: Enquête dans vingt prisons(Paris: Champ Libre, 1971), p. 4.
45 Daniel Defertin Artières et al, op.cit, p. 324, my translation.
37Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
publications did not always impartially reflect prisoners’ contributions. The editorial
power exercised by the GIP in its publication of prisoners’ testimonies, together with
the ideological standpoints discernible in their presentation of the issues they
addressed, can rather be said to express, if not a unified ‘discourse’, at least a
significant voice in the dialogical end products.
The first brochure to be published by the GIP, entitled Enquête dans vingt
prisons, appeared in June 1971. The booklet, consisting of a selection of the
questionnaire answers gathered by then, is prefaced with a three‐page introduction
attributed to Michel Foucault. The tone set by his opening paragraph is far from
neutral:
Expressed through courts, prisons, hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, occupational
medicine, universities, the press, and informational organs – through all these
institutions, under different disguises, exists a form of oppression that is deeply rooted in
the political. 46
Foucault thus introduces the prisoners’ answers to the GIP’s questionnaire with a
very powerful framework within which to interpret them: courts and prisons are to
be understood not as providing an impartial service, for instance, but as a form of
oppression which is above all political. Foucault places the judiciary on a par with
other institutions considered neutral and democratic, and whose avowed mission is
indeed to care for and benefit all citizens: an independent justice system is widely
hailed as a hallmark of democracy, while prisons allegedly serve the common good
by simultaneously protecting those on the outside, and seeing to the rehabilitation of
those on the inside. Yet Foucault challenges this idyllic picture of democratic
institutions in no uncertain terms: far from neutrally serving the population, they
ensure its oppression. Prisoners, specifically, are thereby cast primarily as victims of
the oppression exercised by the judiciary.
The political dimensions of this oppression become clearer in the next
paragraph:
This oppression has always been recognized by the exploited class, which has constantly
resisted it, but has been thoroughly subjected to it. Now this oppression has become
intolerable to other social strata – intellectuals, technicians, lawyers, doctors, journalists,
etc. It still purports to be exercised through these professionals, with their help and
complicity, but it is now failing to take account of their interests, and above all their
ideology. Those in charge of distributing justice, health, knowledge, and information, are
becoming aware of the oppressive force of a political power at the heart of their own
practices. Their growing resistance is now joining forces with the proletariat in its long
struggle.47
Here Foucault presents ‘political oppression’ in terms of his own evolving
understanding of powerrelations. While partly relying on Marxist class terminology
(‘the exploited class’, ‘the proletariat’), he distances himself from the idea that the
46 Le G.I.P.: Enquête dans vingt prisons, p. 3, trans. BetsyWing, in Eribon, op.cit., p. 228.
47 Ibid., translation adapted.
38Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
exploited are blinded by ideology: rather he argues that they are fully aware of the
injustices committed against them, and are constantly engaged in resistance, but
have not hitherto been able to defeat oppressive forces.
Foucault presents oppression as not simply exercised by economic forces at
the service of the bourgeoisie, but as operating through a heterogeneous network
comprising a range of fields, including science, medicine, justice, and information. In
his later lectures on power, Foucault would emphasise that he was not concerned
with the operation of power within central institutions such as State apparatuses,
where it is expected and regulated by laws, butrather with the continued impact of it
beyond those institutions: ‘power at its extremities, in its ultimate destinations, [...]
those points where it becomes capillary, that is, [...] its more regional forms and
institutions’48
. His claim that increasing numbers of professionals have come to feel
the exercise of power within their own practices is cogent with his focus on the
impact of disciplinary practices brought to bear upon individual bodies by specific
professional practices.
Foucault thus presents the GIP’s work in relation to his own understanding of
the workings of power: he offers a theoretical framework within which the prisoners’
responses can be read as combating power at its very points of application: ‘attacking
[power] where it is exercised under another name: that of justice, technique,
knowledge, objectivity’49
. This discourse thus casts prisoners as not simply protesting
prison conditions, but as taking on poweritself in one of the many forms in which it
is exercised in modern Western society. Prisoners are thus presented as occupying a
key position in the modern power configuration.
The prisoners’responses are clearly not published simply on their own terms,
as both the GIP and critics have sustained50
, but they are rather encased within a very
strongly‐worded interpretive framework: they are an integral part of an ‘enquête‐
intolérance’, which is essentially ‘a political act […] the first episode in a struggle […] a
front, an offensive front […] the struggle which will prevent oppression being exercised’
51
.
The GIP thus presents the questionnaire responses through a distinctive discourse of
anti‐oppressive struggle, of which only partial echoes can be found in the prisoners’
input. It therefore appears as primarily the GIP’s own discourse, rather than the
prisoners’, and frames the latter as agents of a political struggle against oppression.
Though Boullant argues that Foucault kept in the background, and unilaterally
listened to prisoners52
, this preface bears the unmistakable stamp of Foucault’s
thought, and foregrounded his own ideas rather than faithfully reporting prisoners’
responses.
48 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf,
1980), p. 96.
49 Le G.I.P.: Enquête dans vingt prisons, p. 3, my translation.
50 Cf. Boullant, op.cit., pp. 14‐15; Artières op.cit., pp. 44‐46.
51 Enquête, pp. 3‐4, emphasis original, translated in Macey, op.cit., pp. 268‐69.
52 In L’Humanité 19/06/04.
39Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
Following this introductory contextualisation of the GIP’s investigation, the
brochure’s contents are summed up as follows:
In order to disseminate the information as rapidly as possible, we have written this
pamphlet on the basis of the first questionnaires:
1. By way ofillustration, two of the completed questionnaires are reproduced in full.
2. We also include two narratives which follow the order of the questions.
3. Finally, the most characteristic answers are brought together under the main
questionnaire headings.53
These points indicate several ways in which the GIP operated a selection of texts for
publication out of all the material that they initially received. Two filled out
questionnaires were deemed worthy of publishing in their entirety; two continuous
narratives were included in the midst of the dominant question‐answer format; and
finally, a number of answers were selected as ‘characteristic’. The GIP thus
undoubtedly brought its own judgement to bear upon what material should be
widely publicised, and what could be omitted. As Macey notes, ‘the absence of any
statistical breakdown of the responses makes the very notion of “characteristic”
rather dubious’54
. While the necessity of such a selection was probably dictated by
practical concerns regarding the length of the pamphlet, the order in which the texts
appear within the brochure suggest that it was also used to foreground radical views
in line with the GIP’s activist agenda.
The first document in the brochure is a completed questionnaire seemingly
published in its entirety, simply headed with the name of the Parisian men’s prison
from which it emanated: ‘La Santé’. The answers are remarkably articulate – much
more so than might be expected from the average levels of literacy recorded in
prisons. This prisoner can thus be suspected, from the outset, not to be representative
of the prison population at large. As one reads on, it becomes apparent that he holds
clear political sympathies, as he bemoans the lack of access to Marxist publications
within the prison.
The questionnaire answers are thus fronted by a strongly politicised and
articulate prisoner – whom later questions further reveal to have been one of the
prisoners involved in the hunger strikes organised by the political prisoners of the
ex‐Gauche prolétarienne. None of the answers compiled in the remainder of the
brochure express clear political views, suggesting that such a set of answers might
have constituted the exception rather than the rule among the questionnaires
collected. Yet the GIP chose to give it the most prominent place. The fact that it is
largely coherent with Foucault’s radical introduction would seem to suggest that this
questionnaire was selected on account of subversive contents supporting Foucault’s
53 Enquête, p. 4, my translation.
54 Macey, op.cit., p. 268.
40Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
activist aims, rather than Foucault’s introduction having been based on
overwhelmingly politicalresponses from the prisoners.
The GIP’s last brochure, Cahiers de revendications sortis des prisons lors des
récentes révoltes, published in 1972, highlights the growing gap between some of the
GIP’s initial aims, and the struggles taken up by prisoners themselves. The GIP’s
introduction to the Cahiers echoes its manifesto and first declarations,repeating some
of the GIP’s initial statements almost word for word. The consistency displayed by
the GIP’s discourse in no way reflects the relatively independent course taken up by
prisoners’ collectives inside prisons. As against the innovative means of political
struggle called for by intellectuals, the Cahiersrather betray the adoption by prisoners
of traditional forms of political action. Prisoners indeed summed up their grievances
as numbered bullet points spelling so many suggestions for timid reforms, such as
the ‘right to a transistor in each cell’, ‘longer visiting hours’, or the ‘right to buy
paperback books’55
.
The original political subjectivity which the GIP tried to outline was thus not
taken up by prisoners, who rather opted for more traditional modes of political
struggle, and aligned their discourses either to a reformist agenda (as above), or to
Marxist‐inspired revolutionary declarations.56
COMMUNICATIVE HEGEMONY
The GIP intellectuals’ alliance with prisoners can be seen not to have yielded the
results which Foucault expected. Deleuze reports that Foucault felt the GIP had
achieved nothing.57 In this section I review the key strengths and weaknesses of the
GIP’s strategy, and I argue that the failure of the GIP can be attributed to its
imposition of a hegemonic discourse on prisoners, defining subject positions for
them which they neither wanted to nor could adopt.
The originality of the GIP’s approach resided in its endeavour to contrive a
new way of championing the cause of an oppressed group. Although the use of
questionnaires to gather information is problematic on a number of counts, it did
nonetheless provide a way of transforming prisoners’ experience into ratified
knowledge. In this the GIP can be argued to have contrived a means of interceding
between the powerless and the spheres of power, while breaking away from the
prevailing intellectual tradition of defending people’s causes from a humanist,
theoretical position, as representatives of universal truths.
Discussing the role of intellectuals in the aftermath of 1968, Foucault
commented that: ‘the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer need him to
55 In GIP, Cahiers derevendicationssortis des prisonslors desrécentesrévoltes(Paris: Gallimard, 1972),
p. 15.
56 Cf. Livrozet, op.cit.
57 In Eribon, op.cit., p.234.
41Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far betterthan
he and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves. But there exists a system
of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this
knowledge’58
. The GIP can be said to have attempted to tackle this de facto
censorship of the masses’ discourse by channelling it through the approved
mechanism of knowledge production which questionnaires constitute.
Foucault envisioned that: ‘The intellectual’s role is no longer to place himself
“somewhat ahead and to the side” in order to express the stifled truth of the
collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him
into its object and instrument in the sphere of “knowledge”, “truth”,
“consciousness”, and “discourse”’59
. The GIP’s work can be said to have put
Foucault’s and other intellectuals’ privileged place in the order of discourse at the
service of those who were excluded and oppressed by that very order. As objects and
instruments of power, the GIP intellectuals lent theirlicence to manufacture truths to
those who would challenge that very power, thereby subverting and short‐circuiting
the order of knowledge’s allegiance to the repressive exercise of power.
Though as many have noted, the GIP’s work thus exemplified Foucault’s
conception of the new role of intellectuals60
, it can be argued that the success of its
work nonetheless largely relied on the continuing prestige of intellectuals as bearers
of universal truths. Halperin remarks that Foucault used ‘his prestigious social
location to create specific opportunities for the voices of the disempowered to be
heard, recorded, published, and circulated’61
. It is indeed doubtful that, had the
movement been led by lesser‐known individuals, it would have generated as much
interest in the media – and thereby held as much sway with ‘public opinion’.
Thus, though Foucault insisted that the movement aimed to remain
‘anonymous’62
, the vast majority of the press coverage of its actions foregrounded
Foucault’s name, and later Sartre’s and Mauriac’s as they joined in the various
protests. The fact that these intellectuals stepped back from the struggle after the
creation of the Comité d’Action des Prisonniers (CAP) can further be regarded as one
of the main factors accounting for the decrease of media exposure of the prisoners’
movement after 1972. In a 1976 article Defert and Donzelot thus express concern at
the lack of coverage of the work of the CAP, wondering: ‘They are going on with it,
but whatresponse are they getting?’63
The position of power occupied by the GIP intellectuals, while an asset in
exerting influence in official spheres, may however have hindered communication
58 In Language,Counter‐Memory, Practice, p. 207.
59 Ibid., pp. 207‐08.
60 Cf. Gandal, op.cit.; Mauger, op.cit.; Jean‐Claude Monod, Foucault: La police des conduites (Paris:
Michalon, 1997); Barry Smart, Michel Foucault(London and New York:Routledge, 1985).
61 Halperin, op.cit., p. 52.
62 DE, vol.1, p. 1172.
63 ‘Ils continuent, mais avec quel écho?’ Trans. BetsyWing, in Eribon, op.cit., p. 234.
42Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
with prisoners. The communication breakdown between the GIP and prisoners is
evidenced first and foremost in the poor take‐up among potential respondents. I
suggest that this may be due to the fact that the GIP chose to communicate with
prisoners through the dissemination of written questionnaires in French, in spite of
the higher rate of literacy difficulties, and the proportional over‐representation of
non‐French speakers, in the prison population.
Analysis of the only completed questionnaire that has been archived further
reveals a stark contrast between the GIP’s flawless grammar and elaborate wording,
and the brevity, broken syntax, tentative spelling and use of dialect and slang which
characterise the inmate’s answers. I would like to argue that, whether or not the
GIP’s linguistic choices impeded comprehension, this prisoner’s failure to fulfil
expectations implicit in open questions by answering at length, for instance, may be
read as unwillingness or inability on the respondent’s part to submit to the
conventions of a genre outside of his ordinary communicative repertoire.
Foucault himself would later remark on the class divide perpetuated by the
judiciary: ‘in the courts society as a whole does not judge one of its members, but […]
a social category with an interest in order judges another that is dedicated to
disorder’64
. Citing a striking passage from Rossi’s 1829 Traité de droit pénal, he then
goes on to comment on the resulting linguistic gap commonly found in the
courtroom:
The language of the law, which is supposed to be universal, is, in this respect,
inadequate; it must, if it is to be effective, be the discourse of one class to another, which
has neitherthe same ideas as it nor even the same words: ‘How are we, with our prudish,
contemptuous languages, overloaded with formality, to make ourselves understood by
those who have never heard anything but the crude, poor, irregular, but lively, frank,
picturesque dialect of the market, the tavern and the fair… What language, what method
should we use when drawing up laws that will act effectively on the uneducated minds
of those less capable of resisting the temptations of crime?’ (Rossi, I, 33) Law and justice
do not hesitate to proclaim their necessary class dissymmetry.65
Foucault thus shows that legislators have long been aware of the social asymmetry
between judges and defendants, and of the confusion that can arise from the
resulting clash of sociolects in the courtroom. Stubbs notes that ‘it is within such
institutions that strangers, from different social classes and language backgrounds,
are in interaction with each other. There are therefore likely to be misunderstandings
in precisely those encounters which lead to important decisions in people’s lives.’66
The GIP’s questionnaire may have been read by prisoners as yet another
cross‐examination session, to be carried out in the language of the prosecutor rather
than that of the accused. It is with mitigated success that the GIP thus attempted to
lend the powerless the intellectual clout of its jargon, as the vast majority of prisoners
64 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A.Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 276.
65 Ibid.
66 Michael Stubbs, Text and Corpus Analysis(Oxford and Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), p. 103.
43Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
failed to take part. It is paradoxical that it should have shown some sensitivity in
insisting on having the information gathered made public in the prisoners’ ‘own
words’, while expecting respondents to understand the GIP’s language in the first
place. In Briggs’s formulation, the GIP can be said to have been guilty of
“communicative hegemony” – where communicative hegemony ‘refers to
researchers’ efforts to impose their own communicative strategies on their subjects or
consultants regardless of the possibility that these techniques may be incompatible
with those persons’ own communicative repertoire’.67
The questionnaires thus constituted an ambiguous medium in the GIP’s
investigation, simultaneously granting everyday personal experience the status of
positive knowledge, and constraining prisoners’ input by a set of questions devised
to suit a strategy planned by the GIP, with little (if any) input from prisoners or ex‐
prisoners themselves.
Theorists of discourse argue that: ‘Discourse conventions carry with them
prototypical identities: possible selves for real writers, “subject positions” that they
inhabit when they participate in this discourse.’68 Imposing certain discourse
conventions on prisoners can therefore be thought to have created specific subject
positions forthem to take up. Dambrine suggests that the GIP gave inmates access to
the status of ‘discursive subject’69
, but what sort of discursive subjectivity were
prisoners able to take on?
The majority of commentators take atface value the GIP’s claim that, thanks to
their movement, prisoners were finally able to speak forthemselves. However, in her
seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Spivak points up a number of problems
with Foucault’s descriptions of the role of GIP. First of all, she remarks that
Foucault’s pronouncement that ‘the oppressed can know and speak for themselves
[…] reintroduces the constitutive subject’ which Foucault’s theoretical work has
repeatedly called into question.70 The implication that prisoners are knowing subjects
who can express their views without the corrupting mediation of discourse
contributes to ‘restor[ing] the category of the sovereign subject within the theory that
seems most to question it’.71 Foucault’s depiction of prisoners as ‘knowing and
speaking for themselves’ is indeed inconsistent with his suggestion, in The
Archaeology of Knowledge (1972 [1969]), that it is discourses that shape subjects, rather
than sovereign subjects consciously and deliberately articulating their own original
thoughts.
67 Charles L. Briggs, Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in
Social ScienceResearch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 90.
68 Clark and Ivanič, op. cit. p. 140.
69 Dambrine, op. cit. p. 146.
70 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture, ed. by C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p. 279.
71 Ibid. p. 278.
44Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
Spivak argues that the GIP’s position is also problematic from a political point
of view. She notes that, in claiming that they let prisoners speak for themselves, ‘the
intellectuals represent themselves as transparent’72: they deny their own influential
role in bringing the movement to the media’s attention and shaping its whole
strategy. Spivak suggests that the self‐denying posturing of the GIP intellectuals
could be criticised as ‘interested individualistic refusals of the institutional privileges
of power bestowed on the subject [as opposed to the oppressed non‐subjects]’73: in
representing themselves as absent, the intellectuals fail to interrogate their own
relationship with groups who have less access to the order of discourse, and the
institutional responsibility which they can be thought to carry vis‐à‐vis less
privileged sections of society. Thus, Howe concludes, radical political practice ‘must
attend to its own ruses of power if it is to avoid underwriting a delusionary politics
of self‐representing subalterns speaking for themselves’74
. The long unpublished
1975 interview75 which I have discussed above sees Foucault partly answering these
criticisms when he describes his privileged position in the order of discourse as
having been instrumental in helping to formulate the prisoners’ demands as a
discourse in its own right.
Gandal acknowledges that any formulation of discourse on the part of
prisoners should, in Foucaldian terms, be understood as a form of subjectivation, and
may therefore be at odds with his critique of subjection:
In the case of the prisons, what Foucault was attempting to struggle against were the
forms of subjection that constituted the convict as other and that condemned him to
brutal treatment in the prison and a marginalization that did not end when he got out. Of
course, Foucault’s political work around the prisons also involved forms of subjection: it
contributed to the creation of new identities for prisoners as they articulated their
experiences. But rather than dividing prisoners from the rest of society, these forms of
subjection, these practices of speaking and of developing new knowledge about
themselves, provided links between prisoners and people on the outside.76
Gandal thus notes that the GIP shaped new identities for prisoners by making them
voice their experiences. These identities, he contends, are not objectionable in as
much as they do not separate prisoners from the rest of the population, but rather
enable them to communicate with the outside. The form of subjectivation exercised
on prisoners by the GIP can therefore be viewed as positive identity constitution.
Halperin equally argues that the GIP’s methods did not involve any
questionable constraints on prisoners. He states that Foucault’s purpose was
72 Ibid. p. 275.
73 Ibid. p. 280.
74 Adrian Howe, Punish and Critique: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Penality (London and New
York:Routledge, 1994), p. 211.
75 Le Monde 19‐20/09/04.
76 Gandal, op.cit., p.129.
45Brich : The Groupe d’information surles prisons
to authorize those who are normally the objects of expert discourses, who are spoken
about while remaining silent themselves, to speak on their own behalf – not so that they
might confess to the authorities the truth of their being, of course, but so that they could
articulate their own needs, point out the conditions that were particularly odious to them,
and advance their own political projects.77
Though the aims of the GIP were no doubt different from those of the authorities and
repressive institutions which invite and rely on confession, the methods which they
used do bear some disturbing resemblances.
Indeed, by requesting personal narratives, the GIP made prisoners voice their
experiences of prison in a first‐person genre not dissimilarto confession. In addition,
the assessment of the impact of prison conditions on detainees partly relied on the
objects of its inquiry – the prisoners – constituting themselves as self‐monitoring
subjects. In order to answer some the GIP’s questions, they had to turn inwards and
watch their own thoughts and behaviour so as to isolate those conditions and factors
which they found most intolerable, and hence most urgently wished to bring to
public attention. It could therefore be argued that the GIP constituted prisoners as
self‐monitoring subjects through a process similar to that through which the
Panopticon shapes its inmates’ subjectivity. Answering the questionnaire also placed
prisoners in the inferior position of those subjected to question‐answer examinations
in institutional settings, such as suspects in police interrogations and defendants in
court, where this procedure contributes to marking individuals out as criminal
subjects.
CONCLUSION
I have tried to demonstrate that, contrary to the GIP’s own claims, which have been
uncritically echoed by the vast majority of commentators, the GIP did not simply
give prisoners a platform, but inevitably contributed to channelling, moulding and
mediating inmates’ discourse.
The various public pronouncements of the GIP described prisoners as an
oppressed and exploited class who would now rebel against their scapegoat status
and lead the struggle against the insidiously repressive power of so‐called
democratic institutions. The GIP thereby constructed inmates as key political agents
in an unprecedented rebellion against newly‐identified sites of power.
Prisoners’ subjectivity was not only shaped by the GIP by portraying them in
this way in its declarations, but also by delineating subject positions for them to
adopt within the GIP’s investigation by expecting them to formulate certain types of
statements (énoncés). Foucault suggested in The Archaeology of Knowledge that énoncés
define subject positions for those who utter them.
78 By positioning prisoners as
77 Halperin, op.cit., p. 55.
78 Foucault, op.cit., p.107.
46Foucault Studies, No. 5, pp. 26-47.
47
respondents to questionnaires designed by sociologists, and as authors of first‐
person narratives, the GIP made those of the inmates who answered them adopt the
position of objects of an interaction closely resembling an interrogation or a
psychological examination, where prisoners had little scope for influencing the
dynamics of the dialogue and the topics dealt with. Even as they may be argued to
have been subverted by their use within a specific political strategy, the historically
loaded genres which the GIP thus called on inmates to adopt may still be seen to
have delineated specific subjectivities for prisoners. The ‘discursive subjects’
constructed by the GIP can therefore be argued to have been shaped by constraints
comparable with those which Foucault would later argue constitute criminal subjects
in modern Western societies.
Though the GIP repeatedly claimed to be letting prisoners speak for
themselves, I have shown that the methods it used to collect testimonials, and the
way it framed prisoners in its various statements and publications in fact imposed a
number of constraints on both the form and contents of prisoners’ contributions –
constraints which may be argued to have shaped specific subjectivities for prisoners.
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