Prison liberation by association: Michel Foucault and the George Jackson Atlantic

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ABSTRACTThis article documents how Michel Foucault used his status as a prestigiously chaired French intellectual to relay the speech of prisoners as part of the Groupe d'information sur les prisons (GIP) at the turn of the seventies. While discussions of the GIP's oppositional work have helped to explain some of the strategic resistances that the group mounted to combat the carceral system in France, one cannot overemphasize the ways in which relays and networks informed and animated the work of the GIP. This article develops the concept of “relay,” and demonstrates how relay networks were mobilized in GIP activism. Foucault and the GIP's prison activism is contrasted with Jean-Paul Sartre's status as a committed, universal intellectual, and particular attention is given to the transnational and group dynamic of the GIP's activist work. Of particular significance is the GIP's inclusion of the assassination of George Jackson and the Attica prison uprisings in its work on the French prison system. The purpose of this inclusion, this article argues, was to relay revolt. Considered in the context of the prison liberation struggle, Foucault's corpus – a compound of concepts like power, knowledge, discourse, subject, truth, and the universal and specific intellectual – is given to immediate and urgent application in an informational project whose operation provides pertinent lessons about the utility of Foucault's thinking on the role of the intellectual and the production of discourse. Central to the political practice of the GIP was its functioning as a group: it was not the work of a morally inspired, engaged intellectual, it was a product – and process – of its associations.