English 6340: The Thought of Michel Foucault	Instructor: Luanne Frank
Spring, 2000	Office: 522 Carlisle
	Phones: 478-7794/ 272-2692
	Office hours: TTH 12:30-3:30 & by appt.

TEXTS

Background Comments on Foucault

Deconstruction, post-structuralism, critique of the subject, dissolution of the transference, development of the "hyper-I" on the one hand, and loosening into being the "body without organs" on the other - these are all evolutionary forms of a single heritage of thought aiming to bring to consciousness and thereby depotentiate, dispossess, dismantle, and somehow step beyond the thought structures & patterns - of action that determine the forms thinking and living take in the modern West.

This heritage traces its ancestry patrilinearly to a single great One who, however, speaks from the shoulders of his own thought-ancestors. These are Freud, Nietzsche, Hegel, Herder, and Hamann, to name a few. He speaks to describe and if possible evolve outside the inheritance of constraints laid down by Husserl, Kant, Descartes, Aristotle, and Plato, among others. While non-combative, his descriptions are still conceived of as "destruction-discursive" critique of the dominant forms of Western thought. This One is Martin Heidegger.

His most influential (not most notorious) son by far has been Michel Foucault, mild of visage but not of mind, who in a series of startling works excavated the undergirdings of Western humanism - subterranean fastnesses in whose invisibility lay their strength, and in whose articulations, as they were brought to light, Foucault himself and Derrida & others, in ever bolder moves, planted their still explosive charges.

Michel Foucault burst on the French intellectual world with The Order of Things in 1966. The work was translated into English in 1971 and the rest is history. Within a few years, and largely on the strength of this single work, Foucault became the most cited scholar in the world. I mention his bursting onto his nation's avant garde intellectual scene with this work. But it was not in fact Foucault's first. It was the one that made his name. It was the one that brought down on him the anathema of historians en masse, and of conventional though original minds like that of George Steiner. It was the one that taught us to think differently, to see that whatever we might mean by knowledge, it was not necessarily the same thing in different periods. It taught us definitively that, whatever the forms might be in which our truths and even our lives are cast, these forms are made of the soluble stuff of ideas. They can be dissolved. He taught us how to step back, out of these forms, taught that there was a place we could stand outside them and thus gain a perspective on them. This place wasn't, as it were, nowhere. It, too, had its rules, its systematicity, but for the first time, we were able to note how we had been formed, produced, constructed, subjected, and that the forces that the constructing agencies were not necessarily natural. They were artificial: languages, thought systems, ideas.

Foucault says: "My entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger.. .It is possible that if I had not read [him] I would not have read Nietzsche. These are the two fundamental experiences I have had."

Comments preceding the foregoing: "Foucault plunged into the study of German so he could read the original texts. 'I began by reading Hegel, then Marx, and I set out to read Heidegger. I still have here the notes I took when I was reading [him]. I've got tons of them! And they are much more important than the ones I took on Hegel and Marx.' "
          --From Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, p. 30.

Course Procedures

1. Reads and studies a given assignment at home.
2. Reads and discusses this assignment in class.
3. Write a one-page paper summarizing the contents of the assignment and using them to elucidate a humanistic "text" - usually a literary one.
4. Presents this paper aloud, & distributes copies of it, to other class members.

1. Reading a given assignment at home.
   1. The date that appears beside the assigned text on the "schedule of assignments" is the date by which this reading is due to have been completed.
   2. The importance of this reading cannot be overestimated. It provides a base on which the in-class reading and discussion can build. Roughly estimated, three times as much of the text-covered-in-class becomes understandable during class if read ahead of time as if not.
2. Reading and discussion of assignment in class
   1. This reading is designed to cover swiftly as much of the text as possible. Fast though it moves, it is, nonetheless, a bona fide reading. That is, it grounds itself in the words of the text, takes the text "itself" as its initial point of departure rather than summary statements or sets of assumptions about the text.
   2. This reading, too, is important, and it is essential that the student be present for it. This has to do with the fact that what is produced in the way of interpretation(s) during class is often heavily class- and moment-dependent - a function of conditions obtaining in the class at any given time (who is there, how there they are, what they are thinking, and what they are willing to say or suppress). An exchange of ideas often takes place that assumes the nature of a dialectic. Thus although a set of intentions determines a set of goals for every class meeting, the actual intellectual destinations arrived at during the class period will inevitably differ (somewhat or substantially) from the goals precisely because of the dialectical nature of the course. A not negligible aim and aspect of the class meeting is the production of unforeseen connections and meanings in addition to the firming of previously noted meanings through review. Thus, while some of the "content" of a class meeting is unmistakably deliverable both ahead of time ("read the text") and after the fact ("get someone's notes"), much is not. What may be of greatest value (what takes place productively in the minds/psyches of the interlocutors during the course of the class meeting) may not be.

      Said slightly otherwise: Although much of Procedure #2 takes place in what appears to be a lecture format, making the course at times seem to resemble an information delivery-and-retrieval system, much of what in fact gets produced by the instructor and student(s) is not finally predictable and thus not deliverable either ahead-of-time of after-the-fact in a suitably condensed version by either instructor or students, as it took place. (Much of what takes place does so in the psyches of the individual participants, where, because of the size of the class and the class's limited available time, it inevitably remains. This does not mean it is lost. It does mean that it cannot be recuperated. In any case, another's notes are an indifferent substitute for one's own thoughts.) In short, the student absent from a Procedure #2 class meeting is more absent than from a class of the information-retrieval type, whose contents, by design, follow an essentially replicable textbook format, for which, as a substitute for a class meeting, another's notes are useful indeed.

   1. Writing a paper summarizing assigned theoretical material and elucidating a humanistic "text" across it. The paper based on a particular assignment exhibits a number of characteristics:
      1. It is one page in length. One page means one eight and one-half by eleven inch sheet or one eight and one-half by fourteen. The one-page format allows space enough for thought development and condensation enough to enable everyone in class to present her/his paper aloud in its entirety.
      2. It may use all but one line of the space available to it exclusively for its text. That is, no title is and no margins are necessary. At least one - the tope - line-space will be kept free for the writer's name and the identification of the assignment (Paper #2: Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit).
      3. Its lines will be numbered at the left-hand side of the page by hand or, if there is a margin, by computer.
      4. Its print-size will be comparable (at its smallest) to elite type. It will be no smaller than computer 10-point and is welcome at 12-point. The instructor needs to be able to read the print without a magnifying glass. To date, no maximum number of words has been stipulated, though an upper-limit for number of words may need to be invoked.
      5. Its content should consist of two types of material, presented in this order: 1) material summarizing the assignment-in-question, and 2) and "application" of the contents-in-question (usually theory to a humanistic "text." The text is typically a literary work but can also be a film, or, if the student is working in a discipline emphasizing non-literary texts, a work of graphic art, a piece of music or a musical tradition, a city plan, an architectural work. The student in doubt about the suitability of a desired artifact ("text") should consult with the instructor.

   Due Dates of Papers, Item Revisions, and Rewrites

   Due date: A paper is due on its due date. A paper not available for presentation aloud to the class on its due date will have failed to fulfill the assignment and cannot be made up except in cases of emergency or schedulings, such as for conferences, established prior to the course.

   Revisions: Revisions of items marked for revision are required as follows:

   1. Number on the original paper, and in brightly-colored marker, all items marked for revision.
   2. Make a two-columned sheet.
   3. Entitle the left-hand column "original." Write the original form of your word, phrase, or passage, here, numbering it in the left-hand margin as it is numbered on the original sheet.
   4. Write the revision in the right-hand column.
   5. Turn in the revision sheet(s) on the class day following the one on which your original was returned to you with markings.

      Rewrites: Rewrites are permitted and encouraged, after the revisions described above have been completed satisfactorily. The grade on the rewrite will not take the place of the grade on the original paper. It can, however, raise that grade by one letter. There is no time limit established for turning in rewrites.

   Grading

   Course grades will be arrived at by averaging the grades of the papers written during the semester.

   Attendance

   Attendance is crucial. Since this is a graduate class, no stipulations about attendance are made, but it is assumed that only an emergency will keep the student from class.

   Plagiarism and other forms of Academic dishonesty

   It is assumed that the student will do all of his/her own work. Should there appear evidence that work turned in by the student is attributable to the work of scholars in the field or to other students or still other persons, and the student has not provided due written acknowledgment to these persons, the case of the student whose work contains the borrowed and unattributed material will be submitted to the university committee on ethics.

   Description of how Class Time Will be Spent

   The tentative schedule indicates approximately how class time is spent and on what. The following is offered as supplementary material.
   1. On the days with a reading assignment due, class time is devoted to lecture and to reading together, discussing, and questioning the meaning of specific aspects of the material assigned. 1. On days with a paper due, class time is devoted to listening to papers delivered in their entirety by each student and to commenting on them, both on the basis of having heard them and, if there is time, on the basis of reading them silently together.

   
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