Michel Foucault on Attica

"Michel Foucault on Attica." Interview, Telos, Spring 1974: 154-61. Quoted, Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991) 311.

With the aid of John K. Simon and "a law professor who specialized in prison reform," Foucault visited the New York State prison at Attica in 1972, when Foucault was the guest of the U of Buffalo French Department, and a year after the bloody riot and its bloodier suppression at the prison. "He was struck, he told Simon later, by the 'Disneyland' aspect of the entrance, behind which was hidden a 'huge machine,' 'a machinery' of clean, neat corridors that determined, for those who went down them, trajectories that were direct, effective, and observable." See in this Category, Foucault's Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir).