Abstract
Perhaps the most banal question one can ask of an activist effort is this: Did it work? Did you accomplish something? Did you get something done? I want to ask this very banal question of the Prisons Information Group. I do so, however, with the conviction that the philosophical analysis requisite to answering such a question will uncover something significant about the nature of work, about the subject of work, and their relative failures.
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Notes
Allen Janis, “The Value of Scientific Failure,” in Scientific Failure, ed. Tamara Horowitz and Allen Janis (Washington DC: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), 13–18.
Martin Heidegger, Beingand Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (1927; New York: SUNY, 1996), 68.
Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1781; Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1988), Chapter 1.
GIP, “(Manifeste du GIP)” (1971), FDE1, no. 86, 1043.
Daniel Defert, “Quand l’information est une lutte” (1971), FGIP-AL, 69–73; Foucault, “(Sur les prisons)” (1971), FDE1, no. 87, 1043–1044, and “Je perçois l’intolérable” (1971), FDE1, no. 94, 1071–1073.
Foucault, “Le grand enfermement” (1972), FDE1, no. 105, 1169.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995 (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2007), 277.
Paul Thibaud, Jean-Marie Domenach, and Foucault, “Toujours les prisons” (1980), FDE2, no. 282, 917.
Ibid., 915.
Cecile Brich, “The Groupe d’information sur les prisons: The Voice of prisoners? Or Foucault’s,” Foucault Studies 5 (2008): 27.
Foucault, “Prisons et révoltes dans les prisons” (1973), FDE1, no. 125, 1297.
See Sharon Shalev, Supermax: Controlling Risk through Solitary Confinement (New York: Willan, 2009) and Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2013).
Foucault and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Enquête sur les prisons: brisons les barreaux du silence” (1971), FDE1, no. 88, 1049.
Daniel Defert, “Sur quoi repose le système pénitentiaire” (1971), FGIP-AL, 127.
GIP, “Préface” to Intolerable 1 (1971), FDE1, no. 91, 1065.
Foucault, “Le Discours de Toul” (1972), FGIP-AL, 167.
Francois Colcombet, Foucault, and Antoine Lazarus, “Luttes autour des prisons” (1979), FDE2, no. 273, 811.
Ibid.
Foucault, “Préface” to De la Prison à la Révolte (1973), FDE1, no. 116, 1265.
Serge Livrozet, De la Prison à la Révolte (1973; Paris: L’Esprit Frappeur, 1999). Livrozet was a former prisoner, GIP activist, and a founding member of the CAP.
Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Ibid., 43.
Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 16.
See Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 234.
Anne Guérin, Prisonniers en révolte: Quotidien carcéral, mutineries et politique pénitentiaire en France, 1970–1980 (Marseille: Agone, 2013), 40–41.
Ibid., 96.
Ibid., 41.
Audrey Kiefer, Michel Foucault: Le GIP, l’histoire et l’action, 91–92. Cp. Guérin, Prisonniers en révolte, 101, and Loic Delbaere, “La plate-forme des revendications du CAP,” Le système pénitentiaire à travers les luttes des détenus de 1970 à 1987 (Universitéde Haute Bretagne, Rennes II, 2001–2002), 3.2.2.1. These demands were addressed incrementally across the first nine issues of Le Journal du CAP.
Michelle Perrot, Les ombres de l’histoire: Crime et châtiment au XIXiemesiècle (Paris: Flammarion, 2001), 34.
Philippe Artières and Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, “Avant-propos,” in D’Aprés Foucault: Gestes, Luttes, Programmes (Paris: Les Prairies ordinaries, 2007), 9 and 23.
Foucault, “Sur la sellette” (1975), FDE1, no. 152, 1593.
Defert, “L’émergence d’un nouveau front: les prisons,” 323 and 326. For more on the question of women in French prisons at the time, see Guérin, “Et les femmes?” Prisonniers en révolte, 301–329. See also the book by FHAR leader, Guy Hocquenghem, titled Homosexual Desire (1972; Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).
Artières, “Un instrument en héritage,” 340. For more information, see La France en guerre, 1954–1962: Expèriences métropolitaines de la guerre d’indépendence algérienne, ed. Raphaëlle Branche and Sylvie Thénault (Paris: Autrement, 2008).
Brady Heiner, “Foucault and the Black Panthers,” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 11.3 (2007): 313–356.
Steve Champion, Dead to Deliverance: A Death Row Memoir (Vestal: Split Oak Press, 2010), 11 and 48.
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© 2016 Perry Zurn
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Zurn, P. (2016). Work and Failure: Assessing the Prisons Information Group. In: Zurn, P., Dilts, A. (eds) Active Intolerance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137510679_5
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