What is critique?

"What is critique?" is a question borrowed from Michel Foucault who delivered a lecture with this title in 1978. In this theory session we will try to start to ask this question again and figure out how to connect it to our own institutional environment and practices: as an art academy, as students and teachers, setting out to understand and create methodologies for works and projects, as an art of asking the right questions.

Foucault conceives critique in the modern Western world as "a certain way of thinking, speaking and acting, a certain relationship to what exists, to what one knows, to what one does, a relationship to society, to culture, and also a relationship to others that we could call, let's say, the critical attitude."

The aim of the session is to collect ideas, concrete proposals and practical formats for the course of this semester. they should address the question of critique from different perspectives and in different instances: close readings of texts and lectures on the issues of critique, criticism and criticality; but also enacting a certain mode of questioning ourselves and others about what we are doing and why.

What does it mean to be critical? How can critique be distinguished from arbitrary feedback, from having an opinion or being a matter of taste? How can we criticise ourselves and each others in a way that one is becoming "someone else that you were not in the beginning" (Foucault)?

Please note: The meeting has been moved from Wednesday to Thursday, January 9. It will take place in my office on 3rd floor (opposite to the video editing studio).

Florian Schneider

Some resources:
http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Foucault-Critique.pdf
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0806/butler/en