Foucault, Interviews (1971) published in "Language, Counter-Memory, Practice" & "Partisan Review"

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).