Vincennes, the "Thinking Forest": Knowledge as a Self-Fashioning Practice in the Works of Foucault, Deleuze and Rancière

• In Event: International Studies of the Sociologies of the Knowledge of Science, Visual Cultures and Affective Economies in Education, Part I

Proposal

This paper proposes an analysis of the afterlife of May 68 in Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière’s work to provide a lens to think an alternative in educational studies and its contemporary notions of practices and differences and exclusions. We seek to examine how some of the ideas that led to the creation of the “anti-institutional institution” where these figures taught in the aftermath of the revolt – the Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes (CUEV) – were absorbed and transformed in their works. Created by the government in response to student demands, CUEV (1968-1980) constituted the most radical expression of the desire to restructure the French university, presenting itself as an alternative to the outdated model of the Sorbonne. The social sciences were thus called upon to reform higher education under the principles of self-education, multidisciplinarity and “openness to the world”. The philosophy department, with its political radicalism and heteroclite student population, was perhaps the locus where the idea that philosophy – and, by extension, the humanities – is not only intended for anyone who wishes to engage with it but should also be appropriated by each individual according to their particular interests was most intensely articulated. We aim to capture in the aforementioned trio’s writings and pedagogical reflections this specific function of scientific endeavor that is less concerned with the production of an expertise designed to shape and calculate social reality than with conceiving research as the subject of knowledge’s means of self-constitution. To revisit Foucault's analysis according to which the development of human sciences led to the dissolution of Man, grand narratives and the figure of the traditional intellectual; to examine the need for a “philosophical and non-philosophical understanding of philosophy” as a cornerstone of Deleuze’s thought; and lastly, to recognize the founding role that educational research into non-erudite forms of knowledge played in Rancière's work, is thus to summon Vincennes against the forces of homogenization that began developing in the last quarter of the 20th century and which completely dominate the present-day academic landscape.

Authors

• Tomás Vallera, Institute of Education, University of Lisbon

• Jorge Ramos do Ó, Institute of Education, University of Lisbon