References
RA – "Revolutionary Action: “Until Now”" in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice
PR – "A Conversation with Michel Foucault" in Partisan Review
Questions
How should we approach Foucault’s idea on education? Relation of articles to topic.
“Acting outside or inside the university” (RA 223) – relation to resistance.
Some ways in which we relate to the “whole of society” and how to critique them? (RA 233).
How does the French situation (May 1968) Foucault is describing relate to our contemporary situation in the US (e.g. chauvinism, issue of race)?
What do we think about Foucault’s discussion of the lecture vs. seminar form? (PR 199-200).
What do we make of the category of repression? (RA 218).
How do the categories on pages 228 & 230 function as a starting point to analyze education?
Could we collectively track the different descriptions of the university as embedded in a “complex system” (PR 192).
Psychiatric patients versus university students (PR 193).
Would working with students/patients involve an ethnography of the excluded? (RA 229).
Discussion
Foucault’s lectures in the College de France are prefaced in a way that emphasized how lonely Foucault felt due to the lack of interaction with students and how he felt this was a performance. However, in PR 199 he is more sympathetic to the format of the lecture as a less imposing format (in contrast to a seminar) where students can be critical, make objections, and take what they want/need.
Seminar seems to mask the fact that knowledge or ideas could be imposed. It appears as if freedom was respected but Foucault asks if “students coming out of [the] seminar will be more twisted” (PR 199) than if they attended the lecture.
Critique of reformers: concern between seminar and lecture formats in terms of the value of freedom. Is Foucault appealing to a normative value of freedom appropriately located or is he just undoing their position from within (but then repression as a category does not make much sense)?
Motto of the CGC: “[S]eminars and work groups are necessary, but more so, I believe for training in methods than the exercise of freedom” (PR 201).
Relation of freedom and the genealogical method.
If the lecture/seminar distinction is related to the exercise of freedom, how are we to see that in connection to the broad topic of education and some Foucauldian subtopics such as examination?
Direct action of students (May 1968) is an important context to understand the lecture/seminar distinction but also how Foucault related to those actions and to the reforms that were introduced in the university.
List of technical-philosophical terms
State apparatus – “A professor is [...] part of the state apparatus” (PR 198)
Mechanism – “Full range of hidden mechanisms” (RA 225)
Psychiatrization and invisible hand of power (RA 229)
“Desubjectification”, “destruction of the subject as the pseudosovereign”, “subjected sovereignty” (RA 222).
Repression (RA 218, etc.).
Implicit systems (PR 198).
Experiences (RA 231).
Neutralization and integration/ “absorption” (PR 195).
G. I. P. (RA 227).
Revolution & ideology (RA 228).
Utopia(s) (RA 231).
