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short interview called “Foucault and Prison,” after Foucault had died, that “Foucault had been the only one, not to survive the past [Deleuze mentions the past of May 1968], but to invent something new at all levels” (Deleuze 2007, 272). According to Deleuze, the GIP was an entirely new kind of group. What made the GIP new, according to Deleuze, was its “complete independence.” It was completely independent because, being “localized,” it concerned itself only with the prisons (Deleuze 2007, 276–277). It was not based on an ideology, or, more precisely, it was not based on something like a morality or a universal truth; it was not a totalizing movement. It had nothing to do with a political party or a political enterprise. What was at issue for the GIP was not a sociological study of prisons. It was not reformist, and it did not want to propose an ideal prison (FDE1a, 1072). What was at issue for the GIP was “to let those who have an experience of the prison speak,” “literally to hand over the speaking to the inmates” (FDE1a, 1043, 1072). The former inmates and families of inmates were to speak “on their own account” and “in their own name” (Deleuze 2004, 206, 209). As the “GIP Manifesto” says, “We shall not ind the information [we are seeking] in the oficial reports. We are asking for information from those who, somehow, have an experience of the prison or have a relation to it” (FDE1a, 1043). The GIP sought to avoid, as Deleuze says in “Intellectuals and Power,” “the indignity of speaking for others” (Deleuze 2004, 208).

In fact, the GIP tried to avoid the indignity of speaking for others by distributing a questionnaire to the inmates. The GIP was not, however, allowed to distribute the questionnaire inside the prisons. Instead, every Saturday, Foucault tells us in an interview published in March 1971 (FDE1a, 1046), he and other members of the GIP went to the visitor gate of La Santé Prison and distributed the questionnaire to the families of inmates who were waiting in line. The irst Saturday, Foucault says, the families of the inmates gave the GIP members a cold welcome. The second time, people were still distrustful. The third time, however, was different. Someone said that “all that is just talk, it should have been done a long time ago.” Then suddenly, exploding with anger, a woman starts to tell her entire story: she speaks of the visits, the money she gives to the inmate she is visiting, the wealthy people who are not in prison, she speaks of the ilth in the prisons. Thus the woman speaks in her own name, on her own account. And, when she starts to tell her story, it seems that the GIP has succeeded in letting those who have an experience of the prison speak. The GIP had given speech over to the inmates. As Deleuze says, “This was not the case before” (Deleuze 2007, 277).

What was made known by the questionnaire? The questionnaire was composed of eleven sections. The section topics and the questions contained in them are not surprising. They concern the conditions of visitations, conditions of the cells, the food, what sort of exercise, what sort of work, knowledge of rights, and the types of discipline and punishments used in the prisons. However, two questions seem remarkable. On the one hand, under the category of “Visites,” the questionnaire asks

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whether its respondent can describe the conditions of visitations and, in particular, “those conditions which appear to you to be the most intolerable.” On the other hand, under the category of “Discipline,” and after asking about solitary coninement, the questionnaire asks the respondent what is “most intolerable after being deprived of freedom.” The only apparently extant copy of the GIP questionnaire is, in fact, illed in by an unknown former inmate. In response to the question of what constitutes the most intolerable conditions of the visits, the former inmate had written that it is “the ‘screws’ [that is, the police] behind your back who are trying to see whether you are exchanging family letters. It’s shameful.” The answer to the second question of what is most intolerable after solitary coninement is: “One is, all the same, on solid ground [after being freed from solitary coninement]. [But] one has suffered.” These answers indicate that what the inmates spoke of was shame and suffering. It is the shame and the suffering in the prisons that was the most intolerable. The knowledge of intolerable shame and suffering explains why Deleuze says that Foucault “was very shocked by the results [of the questionnaire]. We found something much worse [than bad food and poor medical treatment], notably, the constant humiliation” (Deleuze 2007, 273). The pamphlet that the GIP published was called “Intolerable.” And Foucault says in an interview that “simply, I perceive the intolerable” (FDE1a, 1073).

We come now to the second question: what did the GIP do? This question itself contains two other questions that are inseparably connected. What did the GIP do with the information about intolerable suffering, shame, and humiliation? What did the inmates and families become as a result of what the GIP did? The two questions are inseparable because, as Foucault reports, the GIP wanted to minimize “the difference between those making the inquiry and collecting the information and those who are responding to the inquiry and providing information” (FDE1a, 1046). In a rare occasion, Foucault then speaks of an “ideal”: “The ideal would be for us that the families communicate with the prisoners, that the prisoners communicate among themselves, that the prisoners communicate with public opinion. That is, we’d like to break apart the ghetto” (FDE1a, 1046). All that the GIP was doing was providing the “means,” the means to express, the means to communicate, the means to make the information circulate “from mouth to ear, from group to group” (FDE1a, 1046–1047). By being simply a “means” to express the intolerable in its “raw state” (FDE1a, 1073), the GIP broke apart the ghetto-like difference but also made the intolerable “echo” (FDE1a, 1045). In “Foucault and Prison,” Deleuze also speaks of the “echo” made by the GIP. In fact, he says that the GIP “ampliied” the inmates’ voices; its means made their voices “resound” (retentissement) (Deleuze 2007, 280).

In fact, in this late interview, Deleuze says that “the goal of the GIP was less to make [the inmates] speak than to design a place where people would be forced to listen to them, a place that was not reduced to a riot on the prison roof, but would ensure that what they had to say passes through” (Deleuze 2007, 277). The conclusion we must

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draw is that in the GIP, the ones doing the inquiry became means or, as Deleuze would say, “relays” (Deleuze 2007, 289, 206–207). But then, moving to the side of the ones responding to the inquiry (the second part of our question), we must notice that they, too, were no longer simply inmates or prisoners. In a 1972 text for Le Nouvel Observateur, Deleuze says the inmates are judging the forms that their collective actions must take within the framework of the speciic prison within which they ind themselves (Deleuze 2004, 204). In the same text, Deleuze recounts that a new kind of public gathering is taking place. It has nothing to do with “public confession” or with a “traditional town meeting.” Instead, former prisoners are coming forward and saying what was done to them, what they saw: physical abuse, reprisals, lack of medical care (Deleuze 2004, 205). In fact, Deleuze reports that at one such gathering the prison guards tried to shout down the former inmates. The inmates, however, silenced the prison guards by describing the brutality that each one had committed. The inmates used the very sentence that the prison guards had used to intimidate the inmates: “I recognize him” (ibid.). Thus, at the least, we have to say that the inmates became speakers. But they also became writers by simply responding to the questionnaire. The importance of writing is seen in the fourth GIP pamphlet (from late 1972), which published, without correcting punctuation or spelling (that is, in their “raw state”), letters written from prison by a certain “H. M.” Deleuze wrote a short commentary to accompany the publication of the letters. Deleuze claims that H. M.’s letters bear witness to complementary or opposed personalities, all of which, however, “are participating in the same ‘effort to relect.’” In fact, Deleuze says that H. M.’s correspondence “is exemplary because its heartfelt relections express exactly what a prisoner is thinking” (Deleuze 2004, 244). We can then even conclude that the ampliication of the inmates’ voices was done so that they became thinkers.

We come then to the third question: what happened then? As Deleuze says in “Foucault and Prison,” the GIP was a “thought-experiment,” but like all experiments it had mixed results (Deleuze 2007, 273). On the side of the ones responding to the questionnaire, there were risks. Accompanying the protests and uprising that continued over the two-year period, there was a rash of suicides in the prisons as a kind of last-ditch protest. In fact, H. M. committed suicide, and the fourth GIP pamphlet was devoted to suicides in the prisons. On the side of the ones collecting the information, the GIP side, there were risks too. In a 1971 interview, Foucault speculated that the authorities might react to the GIP’s actions by throwing all of its members in jail. Most importantly, however, soon after the GIP was disbanded in 1972, the prison authorities clamped down on the prisons again. As Deleuze reports in “Foucault and Prison,” Foucault came to believe that the GIP had been a failure (Deleuze 2007, 279). Foucault had the impression that the GIP had served no purpose. “It was not repression,” Foucault says in Deleuze’s words, “but worse: it was as if someone speaks but nothing was said” (Deleuze 2007, 277). Yet, Deleuze insisted that the GIP had been a success in a different way. Although it did not succeed in

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bringing about long-lasting concrete changes in the French prisons, the GIP did produce “new conditions for statements.” It was successful, according to Deleuze, insofar as it made possible “a type of statement about the prison that is regularly made by the inmates and the non-inmates, a type of statement that had been unimaginable before” (Deleuze 2007, 280). In other words, we could say that the GIP’s success appeared not in the prisons themselves but in the statements, concepts, and books it made possible. For instance, the former inmate Serge Livrozet wrote a book called De la prison à la revolte, for which Foucault wrote a preface (Livrozet 1999;

FDE1a, 1262–1267). Although the GIP documents constantly state that they are not trying to raise the inmates’ consciousness (FDE1a, 1044), and although Foucault constantly says that the GIP is not providing the inmates with knowledge (FDE1a, 1289), the GIP in fact gave the inmates and their families a new way of relating to themselves. The GIP not only was a relay for the inmates’ voices but also a relay for thinking. In this way, the GIP was a success in the uniication of theory and practice or philosophy and politics.

Leonard Lawlor

See Also

Philosophy

Politics

Power

Prison

Gilles Deleuze

Suggested Reading

Artières, Philippe. 2013. Groupe d'information sur les prisons. Intolérable. Paris: Gallimard. (2013). 2013. Révolte de la prison de Nancy. 15 janvier 1972. Paris: Le Point du Jour, 2013.

Artières, Philippe, Laurent Quéro, and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel. 2003. Le groupe d’information sur les prisons. Archive d’une lutte, 1970–1971. Paris: Editions de L’IMEC.

Deleuze, Gilles. 2007. “Foucault and Prison,” in Two Regimes of Madness, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 272–281.

Livrozet, Serge. 1999. De la prison à la révolte. Paris: L’esprit frappeur.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1994. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York:

Columbia University Press, pp. 66–111.

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I shall here show that, with respect to the sweeping self-redescription cited previously, Foucault ably assessed himself. Problematization is a notion that informs the full array of Foucault’s inquiries (Koopman 2013). To show this in compact fashion, I shall address the following two questions in turn: What is problematization for Foucault? Where does problematization appear in Foucault?

What is problematization for Foucault? Problematization should be seen as a key piece of analytical equipment in Foucault’s methodological repertoire. Regarded as such, the notion plays a dual role. In its irst role, problematization is a form of analytic activity, or a modality of philosophic inquiry. In this sense, “problematization” is a verb. It denotes something that the inquirer does. It is often said that Foucault problematized the seemingly stable assumptions of heteronormative sexuality. Indeed, he did. After reading Foucault, and living for a while with that reading, it is dificult not to feel as if our sexuality is terribly problematic. Sex has been a problem for us for a long time. Foucault helps us feel the full force of the problem and the particular locales where that force is most excited. The problem at hand is not the result or product of Foucault’s analysis. To think so would be to ascribe more power to a philosopher than any philosopher ever could have. Philosophers do not make problems so much as they clarify and intensify them. It is not that Foucault turned sex into a problem but rather that Foucault gave coherence to a problem we all already implicitly had a sense of. Every teenager knows how problematic sexuality is. But very few teenagers, and not many more adults, understand this set of problems in a way that facilitates ethical responsiveness. What Foucault offers is a way of understanding ourselves through our problems such that we might more usefully respond to who we are. If Foucault problematized, it was because something was already in some way problematic, and yet not coherently or sensibly so. If problematization in the irst sense is a mode of the activity of inquiry, then problematization in the second sense is the object of inquiry corollary to such activity. In this sense, “problematization” is a noun, referring to that bundle of problematic material that we ind problematic, about which we feel anxious, and over which we tend to obsess, both as individuals and at the more general level of society and culture. One way of summarizing Foucault’s notion of problematization in its two senses is to see acts of problematization as giving coherence to the extant problematization that is the object on which the act operates. The activity of problematization renders an object of problematization more coherent – but also more challenging.

Problematization in this dual sense possesses all of the hallmarks of Foucault’s work. Problematizations are historical objects, and therefore are to be analyzed as historical phenomena. Problematizations are composed of a bundle of contingently combined practices and therefore are to be analyzed in terms of the way they are both funded by practices and further sponsor the elaboration of new practices. The problematization that is disciplinary power, for example, was both funded by monastic rituals of temporal structure and military rituals of spatial organization and at

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the same time served to sponsor a wide swath of modern practices such as spatiotemporal techniques of imprisonment. Problematizations that are made possible by practices also make further practices possible. In this sense, problematizations form conditions of possibility for the present and act as limits on who we are and who we might yet become. Whereas for Kant such limits were uncrossable laws of reason as such, for Foucault these limits form deep historical barriers to who we take ourselves to be. As historical but not transcendental limits, problematizations are capable of being crossed over. But this would never be easy, nor would it ever be obvious to us how we might restructure the problematizations in which we ind ourselves placed.

One function played by problematization as an act of inquiry is to make clear just how dificult it is, how problematic it feels, to respond to the problematizations in which we ind ourselves embedded. There are certain things to which we feel that we must devote some kind of work. Nobody escapes the thrall of sex today (even if for some that thrall takes the form of censuring the sex lives of others). Sex for us is one of those things about which nobody can be agnostic. Nobody has nothing, nothing at all, to say about sex. Yet how dificult it is for any of us to respond usefully to this problematic. There is a vast ensemble of practices, techniques, and rationalities in which our sex is all wrapped up and packaged. Adopting a free and ethical relation to our sexuality proves enormously dificult as a result. We ind ourselves the subjects of profound constraints. There remains the nagging motivation that we must somehow ind a way to ethically respond to these conditions of who we are and who we could yet become. We, all of us, are just like those teenagers struggling with their sexuality. We, all of us, were at some time, and still remain at some times, those teenagers. Perhaps for biographical reasons Foucault felt these problems more poignantly than many of us do. But we all know some of what he felt. If in his inal writings Foucault was devoting himself to elaborating the problematization of sexuality in antiquity, then there is the sense that this problematization somehow still informs who we are today, such that part of what Foucault was doing was elaborating the conditions of his own action, and presumably with an eye toward facilitating a more free and relective ethical relation to the self.

Two examples, both Foucault’s own, can conclude this discussion of how problematization functions in Foucault’s work. Elaborating on the retrospective selfinterpretive claim cited earlier, Foucault continues in the interview: “In History of Madness the question was how and why, at a given moment, madness was problematized through a certain institutional practice and a certain apparatus of knowledge” (ibid.). According to this self-interpretation, the project of that book was to analyze the practical conditions of knowledge and power that contingently coalesced at different moments in modernity so as to institute disruptions and dificulties concerning madness and unreason that motivated the elaboration of those new practices, institutions, and techniques that eventually led to our contemporary practices treating objects of mental illness. Foucault continues in response to his interviewer:

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“Similarly, in Discipline and Punish I was trying to analyze the changes in the problematization of the relations between crime and punishment through penal practices and penitentiary institutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (ibid.). The project of this book, likewise, was to analyze the congeries of practices that in the years under consideration began to form a composite problematization that motivated the elaboration of radically different punitive and criminal mechanisms than had been customary until that time.

Where does problematization appear in Foucault? Having speciied how problematization functions in Foucault’s work, we are now in a good position to assess the accuracy of his self-interpretive claim that this notion informs his work at least as far back as the early 1960s. Most readers are accustomed to the frequent references to this notion in Foucault’s late writings of the early 1980s. But few have tracked the notion further back. Yet once one goes looking for it, one inds this idea at key junctures in most of Foucault’s major works.

It should be noted in the irst place that the notion of problematization was not explicitly thematized as such in Foucault’s work until the late seventies. It was in his 1978 Collège de France course lectures, posthumously published under the title of Security, Territory, and Population, that the concept irst appears to have assumed explicit methodological status. The inaugural lecture of the series, given on January 11, offers a comparative discussion of three episodes of illness (leprosy in the Middle Ages, the plague at the end of the Middle Ages, and smallpox in the context of eigh- teenth-century practices of inoculation) in terms of the “problem” structuring each episode: “In short, it will no longer be the problem of exclusion, as with leprosy, or of quarantine, as with the plague, but of epidemics and the medical campaigns that try to halt epidemic or endemic phenomena” (ECF-STP, 10). A little later into the course, the February 1 lecture opens with a discussion of “the speciic problems of population” and “the problem of government” (ECF-STP, 88). Throughout the remaining lectures, the category of “the problem” assumes increasing methodological gravity in Foucault’s analyses of the forms of power, government, and political rationality characteristic of the objects of his inquiry. In work prior to 1978, the concept (as well as the words “problématisation” and “problématique” themselves) appears, though in obviously inchoate usages, as for example in other mid-seventies writings, including the 1975 book Discipline and Punish (EDP, 227), the Abnormal course lectures from winter 1975 (ECF-AB, 134, 139), and the short 1976 essay “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century” (EFR, 274). In even earlier work, we ind the idea itself clearly anticipated in Foucault’s archaeological writings. Foucault wrote in The Order of Things of “an archaeological analysis of knowledge itself” as explicating “the conditions that make a controversy or problem possible” (EOT, 76). And even as early as History of Madness (a work, by the way, that would surely be as genealogical as it is archaeological on any interpretation of these distinct but compatible historical methodologies) there are a handful of key passages in which Foucault seems to be