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.The tendency of Bentham's thought is archaic in the importance it gives to the gaze; but it is very modern in the general importance it assigns to techniques of power.PERROT: There is no global State in Bentham: there is the installation of micro-societies, microcosms.BAROU: Does the deployment of the Panoptic system pertain to the whole of industrial society? Is it the work of capitalist society?FOUCAULT: Industrial society, capitalist society? I have no answer, except to say that these forms of power recur in socialist societies; their transposition was immediate.But on this point I would rather have the historian speak.PERROT: It's true that capital accumulation was the work of industrial technology and of the installation of a whole apparatus of power.But it is no less true that a similar process is repeated in Soviet socialist society.In certain respects Stalinism corresponds to the period both of capital accumulation and of the installation of a strong form of power.BAROU: This returns us to the notion of profit—how Bentham's inhuman machine proves a precious acquisition, for some at least.FoucnuLT: Of course! It takes the rather naive optimism of the nineteenth century `dandies' to imagine that the bourgeoisie is stupid.On the contrary, one has to reckon with its strokes of genius, and among these is precisely the fact of its managing to construct machines of power allowing circuits of profit, which in turn re-inforced and modified the power apparatuses in a mobile and circular manner.Feudal power, operating primarily through exaction and expenditure, ended by undermining itself.The power of the bourgeoisie is self-amplifying, in a mode not of conservation but of successive transformations.Hence the fact that its form isn't given in a definitive historical figure as is that of feudalism.Hence both its precariousness and its supple inventiveness.Hence the fact, the possibility, of its fall and((161))of the revolution has been integral to its history almost from the beginning.PERROT: One can note that Bentham gives a great deal of space to the question of labour; he returns to it again and again.FOUCAULT: That accords with the fact that techniques of power are invented to meet the demands of production.I mean production here in the broad sense—it can be a matter of the `production' of destruction, as with the army.BAROU: When you use the term labour' in your books, it's seldom in relation to productive labour.FOUCAULT: That's because I happened to be dealing with people situated outside the circuits of productive labour: the insane, prisoners, and now children.For them labour, insofar as they have to perform it, has a value which is chiefly disciplinary.BAROU: Labour as a form of dressage? Isn't it always that?FoucAULT: Certainly! There is always present this triple function of labour: the productive function, the symbolic function and the function of dressage, or discipline.The productive function equals practically zero for the categories of individuals I am concerned with, whereas the symbolic and disciplinary functions are very important.But most often the three components go together.PERROT: In any case Bentham seems to me very sure of himself, very confident in the penetrative power of the gaze.One feels he has a very inadequate awareness of the degree of opacity and resistance of the material to be corrected and integrated into society—the prisoners.And isn't Bentham's Panopticon at the same time something of an illusion of power?FoucAui.T: It's the illusion of almost all of the eighteenth-century reformers who credited opinion with considerable potential force.Since opinion could only be good, being the immediate consciousness of the whole social body, they thought people would become virtuous by the simple fact of being observed.For them, opinion was like a spontaneous re-actualisation of the social contract.They overlooked the real conditions of possibility of opinion, the `media' of opinion, a materiality caught up in the mechanisms of the((162))economy and power in its forms of the press, publishing, and later the cinema and television.PERROT: When you say they overlooked the media, you mean that they failed to see the necessity of working through the media?FOUCAULT: And failed to see that these media would necessarily be under the command of economico-political interests.They failed to perceive the material and economic components of opinion.They believed opinion would be inherently just, that it would spread of its own accord, that it would be a sort of democratic surveillance.Basically it was journalism, that capital invention of the nineteenth century, which made evident all the utopian character of this politics of the gaze.PERROT: These thinkers generally misunderstood the difficulty they would have in making their system take effect.They didn't realise that there would always be ways of slipping through their net, or that resistances would have a role to play.In the domain of prisons, the convicts weren't passive beings [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.The tendency of Bentham's thought is archaic in the importance it gives to the gaze; but it is very modern in the general importance it assigns to techniques of power.PERROT: There is no global State in Bentham: there is the installation of micro-societies, microcosms.BAROU: Does the deployment of the Panoptic system pertain to the whole of industrial society? Is it the work of capitalist society?FOUCAULT: Industrial society, capitalist society? I have no answer, except to say that these forms of power recur in socialist societies; their transposition was immediate.But on this point I would rather have the historian speak.PERROT: It's true that capital accumulation was the work of industrial technology and of the installation of a whole apparatus of power.But it is no less true that a similar process is repeated in Soviet socialist society.In certain respects Stalinism corresponds to the period both of capital accumulation and of the installation of a strong form of power.BAROU: This returns us to the notion of profit—how Bentham's inhuman machine proves a precious acquisition, for some at least.FoucnuLT: Of course! It takes the rather naive optimism of the nineteenth century `dandies' to imagine that the bourgeoisie is stupid.On the contrary, one has to reckon with its strokes of genius, and among these is precisely the fact of its managing to construct machines of power allowing circuits of profit, which in turn re-inforced and modified the power apparatuses in a mobile and circular manner.Feudal power, operating primarily through exaction and expenditure, ended by undermining itself.The power of the bourgeoisie is self-amplifying, in a mode not of conservation but of successive transformations.Hence the fact that its form isn't given in a definitive historical figure as is that of feudalism.Hence both its precariousness and its supple inventiveness.Hence the fact, the possibility, of its fall and((161))of the revolution has been integral to its history almost from the beginning.PERROT: One can note that Bentham gives a great deal of space to the question of labour; he returns to it again and again.FOUCAULT: That accords with the fact that techniques of power are invented to meet the demands of production.I mean production here in the broad sense—it can be a matter of the `production' of destruction, as with the army.BAROU: When you use the term labour' in your books, it's seldom in relation to productive labour.FOUCAULT: That's because I happened to be dealing with people situated outside the circuits of productive labour: the insane, prisoners, and now children.For them labour, insofar as they have to perform it, has a value which is chiefly disciplinary.BAROU: Labour as a form of dressage? Isn't it always that?FoucAULT: Certainly! There is always present this triple function of labour: the productive function, the symbolic function and the function of dressage, or discipline.The productive function equals practically zero for the categories of individuals I am concerned with, whereas the symbolic and disciplinary functions are very important.But most often the three components go together.PERROT: In any case Bentham seems to me very sure of himself, very confident in the penetrative power of the gaze.One feels he has a very inadequate awareness of the degree of opacity and resistance of the material to be corrected and integrated into society—the prisoners.And isn't Bentham's Panopticon at the same time something of an illusion of power?FoucAui.T: It's the illusion of almost all of the eighteenth-century reformers who credited opinion with considerable potential force.Since opinion could only be good, being the immediate consciousness of the whole social body, they thought people would become virtuous by the simple fact of being observed.For them, opinion was like a spontaneous re-actualisation of the social contract.They overlooked the real conditions of possibility of opinion, the `media' of opinion, a materiality caught up in the mechanisms of the((162))economy and power in its forms of the press, publishing, and later the cinema and television.PERROT: When you say they overlooked the media, you mean that they failed to see the necessity of working through the media?FOUCAULT: And failed to see that these media would necessarily be under the command of economico-political interests.They failed to perceive the material and economic components of opinion.They believed opinion would be inherently just, that it would spread of its own accord, that it would be a sort of democratic surveillance.Basically it was journalism, that capital invention of the nineteenth century, which made evident all the utopian character of this politics of the gaze.PERROT: These thinkers generally misunderstood the difficulty they would have in making their system take effect.They didn't realise that there would always be ways of slipping through their net, or that resistances would have a role to play.In the domain of prisons, the convicts weren't passive beings [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]