Foucault's Strange Eros by Lynne Huffer

Author:Lynne Huffer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

THE UNTIMELY SPEECH OF THE COUNTER-ARCHIVE

Many of Foucault’s critics have argued that the GIP’s politics is a failed politics precisely because of the problem of speech and the tendency of intellectuals to speak for others. Most notably, in “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asserts that Foucault’s aim to give voice to prisoners and the mad in his own retreat from subjectivity nonetheless reaffirms the speech of Western subjects while the subalterns they represent remain silent. Along similar lines, Cecile Brich has argued that what she views as “the failure of the GIP” is due to its “communicative hegemony” over prisoners’ discourses.78 Criticizing the GIP’s use of a “restrictive questionnaire format” and a “remarkably biased selection” of testimonies put forward for publication in the “Intolerable” booklets,79 Brich argues that these methods not only “failed to ensure the participation of a representative sample of informants” but also reproduced a pattern where prisoners “contribute experiences, while analysis and commentary was provided by the GIP intellectuals.”80 Prisoners’ lives, she argues, are not presented in their own terms. Rather, they are “encased” within the overbearing “interpretive framework” of the “enquête-intolérance,”81 the questionnaires through which the GIP gathered information for publication in their “Intolerance” pamphlets. These questionnaires, Brich argues, “bear the unmistakable stamp of Foucault’s thought.”82 Aligning herself with Spivak, Brich focuses on the enquête-intolérance, accusing the GIP, and Foucault specifically, of turning prisoners into “objects of an interaction closely resembling an interrogation or a psychological examination.”83 In Brich’s view, the GIP is ultimately just another “Panopticon.”84

But Foucault was well aware of the dangers of the enquête. “This judicial model of the enquête,” Foucault says in 1972, “is based in an entire system of power” that “defines what will be constituted as knowledge.”85 Contrasting the enquête with the essay, the meditation, or the treatise, Foucault traces the enquête’s genealogy as an “inquisitorial” mode of knowing that gives rise to the empirical sciences.86 “We belong to an inquisitorial civilization,” Foucault writes, one that practices the “extraction, displacement, accumulation of knowledge. The inquisition: a form of power-knowledge essential to our society. The truth of experience is the daughter of the inquisition.”87

In this context, Brich’s empiricist call for better representation of prisoners’ experiences—her call that we stop speaking for others so they might speak for themselves—fails to acknowledge those inquisitorial foundations of an empiricism caught in the dilemma of speaking unreason: the paradox of making intelligible the murmur of confinement. The GIP’s recursive, counter-archival replay of Madness erodes those foundations. As the return of sovereign confinement in biopower demonstrates, that inquisitorial structure is actualized in modernity as rationalized data-gathering methods that are of a piece with the mass confinements of the police—the gridlike dispositif of what Foucault calls a “police apparatus” for the “surveillance of populations.”88 To be sure, the GIP as an activist organization does not escape this relation of complicity any more than the empiricist in her call for a more accurate recording of subaltern speech. But as an untimely speech in the archive, the GIP disrupts and destabilizes the inquisitorial roots of biopower’s empiricist methods.

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