Memorable Quotes from "Prison Talk"

"You determine one moment as being central in the history of repression: the transition from the inflicting of penalties to the imposition of surveillance." (Interviewer in Pink)

"That's correct -- the moment where it became understood that it was more efficient and profitable in terms of the economy of power to place people under surveillance than to subject them to some exemplary penalty" (38).

"Look at the immense campaigns to christianise the workers during [the nineteenth century]. It was absolutely necessary to constitute the populace as a moral subject and to break its commerce with criminality, and hence to segregate the delinquents and to show them to be dangerous not only for the rich but for the poor as well, vice-ridden instigators of the gravest social perils" (41).

"The problem thereafter was not to teach the prisoners something, but rather to teach them nothing, so as to make sure that they could do nothing when they came out of prison. The futile character of penal labor, which was linked initially to a didactic plan, now came to serve a different strategy" (42).

"The first assessments had been drawn up of the failure of the prison, people knew that it didn't reform, but on the contrary manufactured criminals and criminality, and this was the moment when the benefits accrued from this process of production were also discovered. Criminals can be put to good use, if only to keep other criminals under surveillance" (45).

"No crime means no police. What makes the presence and control of the police tolerable for the population, if not fear of the criminal? This institution of the police, which is so recent and so oppressive, is only justified by that fear. If we accept the presence in our midst of these uniformed men, who have the exclusive right to carry arms, who demand our papers, who come and prowl on our doorsteps, how would any of this be possible if there were no criminals? And if there weren't articles every day in the newspapers telling us how numerous and dangerous our criminals are?" (47).

"And I don't say that humanity doesn't progress. I say that it is a bad method to pose the problem as: 'How is it that we have progressed?'. The problem is: how do things happen? And what happens now is not necessarily better or more advanced, or better understood, than what happened in the past" (50).

• I'm amazed that what he's saying is basically common sense kind of stuff...but I've never really thought about it this way before. Smart man...really smart man.

"But power in its strategies, at once general and detailed, and its mechanisms, has never been studied. What has been studied even less is the relation between power and knowledge, the articulation of each on the other" (51).

• Wondering whether the study of rhetoric might tie into this. Certainly, I think of Burke's consubstantiation theories here...those who are able to make people think they are alike will have more power than those who can't. One's rhetorical prowess is closely tied into the power they can assume, I'm just not sure this is what Foucault is really getting at here. Have people really studied how the most persuasive techniques have changed throughout time and attempted to postulate on why? I know we discussed this in 779.02...but has it been studied?

"The exercise of power itself creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information" (51).

"Knowledge and power are integrated with one another, and there is no point in dreaming of a time when knowledge will cease to depend on power; this is just a way of reviving humanism in a utopian guise. It is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power" (52).