This sense of a democracy of interlocutors in Obrist’s interviews, the suspicion that between and beneath these conversations others are going on even as he and his current interviewee speak, is partly a matter of the discursive form of the Q&A. In an interview with Paul Rabinow in 1984, Michel Foucault expressed an antipathy toward polemics, preferring instead the interview or dialogue. Questions and answers, he said, “depend on a game — a game that is at once pleasant and difficult — in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of dialogue.” (The polemicist, on the other hand, “proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance.”) Obrist’s interviews attempt to go further, to establish the rules for an infinite conversation and street plans for unrealizable routes.
Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Conversation Series by M/M Paris
Images: M/M via But Does It Float
Text: “The Conversation Series” by Brian Dillon