Co-research as Counterinstitution

The stakes of the current shared interest in the idea and the practice of political inquiry are highlighted by the co-research led by Romano Alquati and the Prisons Information Group in which Michel Foucault participated. Each of these experiences produces knowledge through an “antisociology,” that is, through a refusal of the separation of inquiry from political intervention within two incarnations of capitalist power: technologically advanced factories and the prisons. This positioning also invites one to consider political inquiry as a fully fledged mode of organization, to be understood in the context of the debate of the 1960s and 1970s: we propose using Foucauldian thought to understand this form of inquiry as an “antagonistic apparatus” that acts as a “counterinstitution.”