The Role of the Intellectual in Social Movements

In the 17th and 19th century there was a burgeoning literature of coding. Foucault adds that he really wanted to allow prisoners or the mentally ill people to speak within these settings because they were giving these localized accounts of their experiences with power. The role of theory is not to be totalizing, it shouldn't be to say that there's this homogenous mass of people that are experiencing homogenous form of oppression against by this homogenous oppressor. Instead, you have to account for the various multiplicities, the different local struggles that people go through.