The Untimely Speech of the GIP Counter-Archive

Abstract

The politics of the GIP was a politics of speech: questionnaires, public interviews, pamphlets, press conferences, and the theatrical reenactment of a prison trial were the GIP’s primary weapons. But does the GIP’s short life span (1971–1973) mean, as many have claimed, that its politics of speech was a failure? This chapter explores the question of the GIP’s impact by reconceiving the time of its formal activity as a time of return to Foucault’s earlier analysis of speech and confinement in his 1961 book, History of Madness. Indeed, Madness was reissued in a new edition in 1972 at the height of the GIP’s activities. And although Foucault frequently affirmed the proximity of his anti-prison activities to his “former preoccupations”¹ in History of Madness, the GIP-Madness connection remains unexamined in Foucault scholarship. Resituating Foucault’s anti-prison activism as a return to madness stages the GIP’s politics of speech as a response to the exclusionary gestures by which deviants and abnormals—those we might label today as queer—are simultaneously produced and marginalized. Both prison and the asylum are formations that actualize the production of deviance, exposing what Foucault calls “unreason” as a function of recursive time.² In the “archeology of … silence”³ that is History of Madness, we glimpse unreason or hear its murmur through the archives of confinement: the “words and texts,” which, as Foucault puts it, “were not produced to accede to language.”⁴

I’m a voice that cries out in the desert.

—“H.M.” (1972)