TRUTH AND POWER : an interview with Michel Foucault. (1979).

Critique of Anthropology, 4(13-14), 131–137.

doi:10.1177/0308275x7900401311 131

TRUTH AND POWER : an interview with Michel Foucault

*

Fontana: Can you perhaps briefly outline the project which

as le you from the study of madness in the classical
period to the study of criminality and delinquence?
Foucault: When I was working in the years 50-55 one of
the most serious being posed was that
problems which was
of the political status of science and the ideological
functions that science could fulfil. The Lysenko affair
was not reallythe centre of this, but I think that
at
around the whole appalling business, which was for so
long suppressed and carefully hidden, all kinds of
interesting questions were thrown up. Two words seem
to encapsulate these questions: power and knowledge.
I think that, in part, I wrote Madness and Civilisation
in the light of these questions. at I wanted to say
was this: If one poses the question of the relation
between such sciences as theoretical physics or organic
chemistry and the political and economic structures of
society, is one not in fact asking too complicated a
question? Is one not in fact expecting too much from
possible explanations? If on the other hand we take a
science such as psychiatry, would this problem not in
fact be much easier to resolve, both because of psychiatry’s
much less highly developed epistemological frame, but
because psychiatric practice is connected to a whole series
of institutions, of immediate economic demands, political
exigences and social regulations? Thus through a ’dubious’
’

science such as psychiatry would we not be able to see

with greater clarity the interrelationships between power
and knowledge? I wanted in The Birth of the Clinic to
pose this question again, this time in relation to
medicine, a science which undoubtedly has a more specific
scientific structure than psychiatry itself has, but is
still one which is also very closely identified with
social structures. What in fact somewhat threw me was
the fact that the question in which I was interested in
asking had virtually no interest at all for the people
to whom it was addressed. They felt that it was a question
that was politically irrelevant and epistemologically
insignificant.
There are, it seems to me, three reasons for this. The
first is the problem that marxist intellectuals in France
had (and in this respect they were playing the role assigned
to them by the PCF) which was to be recognized by university
institutions and by the Establishment. They were thus
forced to ask the same questions as them and address them-
selves to the same problems and the same areas: &dquo;We have
tried to be good marxists, we are not unaware of your
preoccupations but we are the only ones who can throw
light on your old problems.&dquo; Marxism wanted to be
accepted as the means by which the liberal tradition of

*
First published in L’Arc 70, 1977, ppl6-22.
132

the universities would be renewed (much the same thing

can be seen during the same period, operating at a much
wider level, in the way in which commun.ist party members
presented themselves as the only ones capable of re-
interpreting and reinvigorating the nationalist tradition).
From this, in terms of the area in which I am interested,
we can understand their interest in the most academic
and the most elevated of problems in the history of
science. Medicine and psychiatry were neither very noble
nor were they serious, and had none of the grandeur of
the structures of classical rationalism.

The second reason was that post-stalinist stalinism, by

excluding from marxist discourse any area which was not
a timid repetition of what had already been said, did
not allow areas which had not already been opened up to
be approached. There were no formulated concepts, no
validated vocabulary which could be used to ask questions
on the effects of power and psychiatry, or the functioning
of medicine; while on the other hand the endless debates,
which started with Marx, were carried on by Engels and
Lenin, and still continue today, between the academics
and themarxists, had nourished a whole discursive tradition
on ’Science’ in the 19th-century sense of the term.

The marxists paid for their fidelity to the old positivism

and the price was their radical deafness in respect of all the
questions of pavlovian psychiatry; and for some of the
doctors who were close to the PCF, political psychiatry
and psychiatry as politics were not worth considering.
Whet for my part I tried to do in this area was received
in resounding silence by the French intellectual left.
It was only around 1968, despite the marxist tradition
and despite the PCF, that all these questions took on their
political importance with an acuteness that I had not been
able to predict, and which demonstrated how timid and
diffident my previous books had in fact been. Without the
political opening-up tha.t occurred in those years I would
undoubtedly not have had the courage to take up the thread
of these problems and to pursue my investigations in the
areas of penal law, prisons, discipline.

Finally there is perhaps a third reason.But I am not

altogether sure that it did play a I wonder
role.
however if the intellectuals of the PCF (or thcse who
were close to it) did not in fact refuse to pose the
problem of incarceration, the political use made of
psychiatry and in a more general way the disciplinarian
partitioning of society. Undoubtedly only very few of
them, in 1955-60, knew of the real extent of the Gulag,
but I think that many of them were aware of it and many
of them felt that in matters such as these it was better
in all respects not to talk: it was a danger zone, the
lights were red. Of course it is difficult to make any
retrospective judgements on the extent of their knowledge.
But in any case you are well aware of the ease with which
the party (which clearly itself knows everything) could
circulate directives, prevent others from talking of such
things and excommunicate those who do talk...
 133

An edition of the Petit Larousse which has just been

published says: Foucault: a philosopher whose theory of
history is based on the notion of discontinuity. This
leaves me speechless. I obviously did not explain all
this adequately in The Order of Things, even though I
did discuss it quite a lot. It seems to me that in
various forms of empirical knowledge such as biology,
political economy, psychiatry, medicine etc, the rhythm
of transformations did not adhere to the gentle, continuist
schemes of development that are conventionally applied.
The dominant biological image of the increasing maturity
of a science still underlies not a few historical accounts,
but it does not seem to me to be at all historically
relevant. In a science such as medicine for example,
up to the end of the 18th century there was a certain
kind of discourse in which slow transformations - lasting
25-30 years - not only broke with the ’True’ propositions
which could up till then be formulated, but also, more
profoundly, with the ways of talking, of seeing, with all
the practices which supported medicine: they were not
simply new discoveries; it was a new order in discourse
and in knowledge. This happened over a few years and
once the texts had been analysed with care. It is also
irrefutable. My particular problem did not at all lie in
saying: ah, here we are, long live discontinuity - we live
in discontinuity so let us stay there; rather the problem
was to pose the question: how are we to explain the fact
that there are certain moments in certain orders of
knowledge, abrupt deconstructions, dramatic transforma-
tions which do not correspond to the calm and continuous
picture that is produced in normal practice? What is
important in such changes is not that they are very rapid
abrupt or widespread, but rather that their rapidity and
their extent are the indications of something else: a
change in the rules of formation of the statements which
are accepted as scientifically true. There is thus no
change of content (a refutation of old mistakes, the
production of new truths), nor is it a change in the
theoretical form (a renewal of the paradigm, a change of
the systematic totality). What is in question is what
governs the statements and the manner in which they govern
each other in order to constitute an ensemble of scientific-
ally acceptable propositions which can as a result of this
be verified or rejected through scientific procedures. In
brief it is a problem of the rules, the politics of the
scientific statement. At this level it is important to
know not so much what the power is that weighs on science
from without, but what effects of power operate between
the scientific statements; what is to some degree their
internal organisation of power; how and why at certain
moments they are modified in an overall way. It was these
different areas that I attempted to approach and to describe
in The Order of Things. It must be said that I was not at
that time attempting to explain them. That had to be done
in another later work. What was however missing was the
problem of the discursive order or the effects of power
appropriate to the stated game. I confused this too
much with the systematicness, the theoretical form, the
134

paradigm. This contral problem of power, which still

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

Fontana: The notion of discontinuity must therefore be

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

Foucault: Structuralism has undoubtedly been the most

systematic attempt to take the notion of the event not
only out of anthropology but also out of a whole range
of other sciences and even out of the limits of history.
I don’t know many other people who are more antistructural-
ist than I am. But what is of considerable importance is
not to make of the event what the structuralists made of
structure. We must not reduce everythingto the same
level, the level of the event, but rather understand that
there are a series of different types of events which do
not have the same weight, the same chronological signific-
ance, nor the same capacity to produce effects.

The problem is simultaneously to distinguish different

events, differentiate the networks and the levels to
which they belong, reconstruct the links between them and
see in what way some grow out of the others. It is at
this point that I reject those analyses which concern the
symbolic or the area of significant structures and instead
turn to analyses that are undertaken in reference to the
geneology of relations of force, strategic developments,
tactics. I think that what we have to use as a point of
reference is not the model of language or of the sign
but war or battles. The historic force which propels and
determines us is in fact warlike; it is not concerned with
language. It is the relation of power, not the relation
of meaning, that is important. History has no ’meaning’,
which does not mean that it is absurd or incoherent. It
is on the contrary understandable and should be analysed
down to the last detail; but analysed in terms of the
understanding of battles, struggles and tactics. Neither
dialectic (as the logic of contradiction) nor semiology
(as the structure of communication) can account for the
intrinsic intelligibility of confrontation. This intelli-
gibility, ’the dialectic’, is a way of evading reality -
which is always risky and unprotected, by bying it down
to the hegelian skeleton; and ’semiology’ is the way of
evading its violent, bloody, mortal nature, by tying it to
the calm, platonic form of language and dialogue.
 135

Fontana: We could perhaps categorically state that you

were the first to pose the question of power to discourse
and to pose this question at the moment when the kind of
analysis which worked through the concept of the text,
the object of the text with its accompanying methodology
(in other words, semiology, structuralism, etc) was dominant.
Foucault: I don’t think I was the first to pose the
question and I am in fact surprised by the difficulty
that I had in formulating it. When I look back over it
now I wonder what I think I was talking about, in for
example Madness and Civilisation or The Birth if the Clinic,
if not power. Now I am fully aware of having virtually
never used the word, and not to have had this whole area
of analysis available, I can however say that this was
clearly an inability which was at the same time directly .

linked to the political situation in which we found

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

Foucault: Yes, if
you like, to the extent that it is true
that people of my generation were brought up as students
by these two kinds of analysis: one which constantly
returned to the constituting subject and the other which
sent him to the economy, in the last instance, to
136

ideology and to the interplay between the superstructures

and the infrastructures.

Fontana: I would like to ask, keeping within the same

methodological framework, how you place yourself in
relation to the geneological approach? What is its
importance as a means of asking questions about conditions
of possibility, about modalities and the constitution of
the objects and domains that you have yourself analysed?

Foucault: I wanted to see how problems such as the

constitution of particular objects could be resolved from
within a historical frame, rather than being posed in
relation to a constituting subject. We have to get rid
of the constituting subject, of the subject itself, in
other words undertake an analysis which can account for
the constitution of the subject in historical terms.
What I call genealogy is a form of history which takes
account of the constitution of knowledge, discourses,
domains of the object etc, without having to refer to a
subject which is either transcendant in relation to the
field of events, or which flits through history with no
identity at all.

Fontana: Marxist phenomenology and a certain form of

marxism undoubtedly be seen as obstacles.
can
But there are also two concepts which are impediments
today, ideology and repression.
Foucault: The notion of ideology seems to me to be one
that is difficult to use for three reasons. The first
is that, whether one wants it or not, it is always in
opposition to something else which is reality. Now I
feel that the problem is not to make a division between
what in any discourse is seen as relating to reality and
another part which relates to something else, but to see
historically how these effects of truth have been pro-
duced within discourses which are neither true nor false.
The second problem is that I think ideology inevitably
refers to something as the subject. Thirdly, ideology
is put in a secondary position in relation to something
else which has to function as ideology’s infrastructure
or economic or material etc. determinant. For these
reasons I think that this is a notion that one can only
use with considerable caution.

The notion of repression is itself more dangerous, or I

at any rate have had considerable problems in freeing
myself from it to the extent that it seems that it is
so identified with a whole range of concepts directly
to do with power. When I wrote Madness and Civilisation
I implicitly used the concept of repression. I think that
I still felt that some kind of madness which was voluble
and anxious did exist, and that the mechanisms of power
and psychiatry came to repress it and to reduce it to
silence. Now it seems to me that the notion of repression
is entirely unable to account for what power itself
produces. When one defines the effects of power by
 137

repression one gives a purely juridical concept to this

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