After ten years on my shelf, I finally picked up and read The Chomsky-Foucault Debate. I knew a fair bit about Chomsky’s philosophy and much less about Foucault’s, but came away with increased admiration for both. I found Foucault’s responses to indicate a very subtle and thoughtful approach to historical and conceptual questions and I was impressed by how much agreement there was between him and Chomsky.
Where they mostly disagree is on the nature of political justice as well as the idea of human nature. Chomsky has famously argued that there must be something like a human nature, by which he means an inborn set of cognitive capacities inherited from our genetic ancestors. These would allow human beings to solve the practical induction problem of there being no way to determine the difference between a linguistic noise and a non-linguistic one by simple sensory exposure. They would also explain the similarity in structure between all languages, the ability of children from any part of the world to learn the language of any other part, and so on.
Foucault is sceptical of the idea of human nature because of the observed plasticity of concepts in general through history. Something that is seen as an eternal necessity in one era is rejected as trivially false in another. More notably, the ways in which concepts, such as ‘human nature’, are understood often seems to be the result of the wish of the powerful to marginalize, exclude, or punish certain groups in society. So, for example, one human trait might be deemed natural, or part of human nature, so that those who lack it can be confined to institutions, subjected to degrading treatments, or teased. Terms referring to torturous acts can be medicalized in order to seem like neutral, benign practices. All of this has the effect of rendering a substantial sub-group of the population oppressed and without a voice, so changes in our understanding of the human being, biology, medicine, and social institutions are not necessarily indicative of progress toward truth or enlightenment. Indeed, Foucault expresses a very deep scepticism of the very concept of such progress simply because every concept will be subject to such arbitrary mangling: this includes such concepts as ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’, ‘objectivity’, ‘rationality’, ‘evidence’, ‘science’, and so on. No idea can be assumed to be free of the ad hoc manipulations of the powerful.
In essence, Chomsky agrees with this on the social and political level. He accepts that powerful groups – state governments, multi-national corporations, and so on – purposely, if not always explicitly, exert tremendous control on the generation and distribution of ideas in society: what gets heard, as opposed to silenced; taken seriously, as opposed ridiculed; presented as settled instead of controversial; dismissed as absurd as opposed to respected; and so on, is in various ways a product of what powerful groups and individuals want the general public to think. He believes there is effectively greater ideological control in the United States than in fascist Spain (the control is exerted subtly rather than by government force).
Where Chomsky disagrees is at the individual level. No matter how concepts may be contorted and disfigured, it is absurd to suppose that individual human beings are formless, perfectly plastic blobs, simply waiting for the imprint of their ideological environment. After all, a perfectly formless entity – it surely couldn’t rightly be an object in any interesting sense – would be unable to absorb any imprinting: to draw an imperfect analogy, you could press your hand into the vacuum of space all you want and never leave a print; but if you press your hand into clay, then a mark will be formed. So, human beings must have some kind of structure of receptivity in order to be subject to conceptual manipulation and, therefore, to be able to take up concepts in the first place. Chomsky thinks this is compatible with the kind of historical abuses aptly pointed out by Foucault.
To put it another way, without a background of relatively fixed form, the concepts of manipulation, change, or distortion would have no application. If literally everything goes, then nothing does: clay can only be deformed because if it has an internal structure to begin with. On this, I am firmly on Chomsky’s side: if there is change, of either a benign or malicious kind, then there must be some structure to be altered.
So one question I have is what the impact is of Foucault’s observation – which I also think is true – that many medical, scientific, philosophical, political, economic, social, etc., terms and concepts have gone through significant historical changes. What are we to make of the fact that what is considered a benign, even beneficent ‘medical’ intervention in 1880 is considered an unthinkable attempt at social control or even torture today? What is the implication of this sort of historical variability?
Well, it seems to me that the answer is at a certain level pretty straightforward, though things get complicated pretty quickly. First, as noted above, such alternation couldn’t have any impact on human beings if we weren’t the kinds of creature who are, innately, subject to conceptual impact. You can shout obscenities at a rock or twig all you want, or you can offer the most soothing words you know, and you won’t change its response to the forces of gravity. You can calmly and soothingly insult your dog and not impact its self-esteem in any way. Yet, with human beings, even the most subtle form of insult can trigger large responses, and certainly institutional settings can change our sense of what is possible for us to achieve because of our observation of what is acceptable/rewarded and what is unacceptable/punished. So, the kind of historical, conceptual plasticity rightly noted by Foucault in fact depends on the kind of human nature that Chomsky defends, i.e. one that is subject to conceptual impact. The fact that the concept ‘human nature’ itself has undergone historical transformations doesn’t contradict this.
But there is something more intriguing to me that comes out of the discussion between Chomsky and Foucault on political justice. Chomsky believes that it is part of our inherited human nature that we strive for creativity and meaningful engagement with our surroundings. Indeed, it is his argument that the learning or usage of language, even in its most basic forms, is an ongoing act of creativity that is outside the scope of explanation by current principles of natural science. So, he thinks it is of our essence to be creative and free, and that this has implications for the proper arrangement of society: it should be one in which individuals are, insofar as possible, enabled to pursue creative, meaningful interactions with their surroundings. Moreover, systems can be judged as relatively just or unjust along such a dimension, i.e. how amenable they are to such freedom and creativity.
What surprised me most of all in reading the debate was how strongly Foucault rejected this, in large part, so far as I can tell, because it all rests on notions of both ‘human nature’ and ‘justice’ that, he believes, can have no fixed, ahistorical content. What is ‘just’ for one context is the height of malevolence in another. Hence there is simply no hope of measuring justice, even in theory because there is no measure outside of a given context. Now, in one sense I think this is what one would expect if one were to hold that human beings and human ideas are all inherently formless: there could hardly be a fact as to what promotes or degrades human well-being if there are no facts about well-being. Foucault says:
“When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has just triumphed, a violent, dictatorial, and even bloody power. I can’t see what objection one could make to this” (p. 52).
He says later:
“it seems to me that the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power” (p. 54).
So this really suggests that it is the idea that human concepts have no essence – they are inherently without form – that supports a rather nihilistic conclusion: that there is nothing we can say by way of criticism when the powerful abuse the powerless. It is just what is done, and words will be twisted to mean whatever the relevant group – powerful or powerless – want them to mean. If this is true, however, then there is no difference between good and bad uses of a concept, so there can be no such thing as
One thing that is going on is that Foucault thinks that the concepts we have can’t be used to fight and overthrow the system in which the concepts are born:
“you can’t prevent me from believing that these notions of human nature, of justice, of the realization of the essence of human beings, are all notions and concepts which have been formed within our civilization, within our type of knowledge and our form of philosophy, and that as a result form part of our class system; and one can’t, however regrettable it may be, put forward these notions to describe or justify a fight which should – and shall in principle – overthrow the very fundaments of our society. This is an extrapolation for which I can’t find the historical justification” (pp. 57-58).
Now there is a sense of what we might call “taint creep” here: since all concepts are born in a system that is tainted to a certain degree, they are all thoroughly and irredeemably tainted themselves. I’m not sure why we should believe this. But this can’t be quite right, because outside of a conceptual system, the notion of “taint” lacks application.
Of course, this might be simply a prediction or empirical claim: as a matter of fact, using concepts such as “justice”, which are born in a classist system, simply will fail to have any impact in overthrowing or substantially changing that system. I gather that the evidence for this comes in the final sentence of the above quotation, namely that Foucault hasn’t found any historical example of concepts within a system being employed to overthrow that system. An analogy might be as follows: as long as one limits oneself to the vocabulary of capitalism, one will be unable to overthrow capitalism, or even properly conceive of this overthrow, because the terms one uses will carry, implicitly perhaps, the justification for capitalism.
Okay, but can one not, even within the framework of capitalism, say, recognize certain limitations, such as great inequality, for example? Upon seeing this, can one not conceive of the need to modify or even overthrow the system, in order to eliminate this problem? Notice that in the quotation above, Foucault points out the inadequacy of concepts such as “justice” to carry out a fight that should overthrow the fundamentals of society. How can he suggest that this should be done, unless he conceives of a flaw in the current system that implies some action is normatively required? Or, is “should” here merely an expression of personal taste, in which case why take it seriously?
More importantly, if any social change is to occur, human beings are going to have to organize, communicate, and act in some sort of concerted effort. This will require the employment of language and appeal to concepts: cohesive social effort of the type required is impossible otherwise. Let us grant that Foucault is right and that all concepts are born of some social context. If that means all concepts and ideas are tainted, then all attempts at change will require tools tainted by the vested interests of those who create and control concepts.
Does it follow, however, that the result of such changes will be similarly tainted? I don’t think so. There is some kind of projection fallacy going on here: even if all the hammers used to build a house are made of wood, it doesn’t follow that the house is made of wood. If a house is built out of sand, water, and a binding agent such as cement, one is left with a house that is neither sand, nor water, nor cement but, rather, concrete. Properties of those things that construct something new are not necessarily transferred to that something new: some may be, but it is far from necessary. I imagine that Foucault’s point may be that whatever revolution we construct, the result will be at least in part a new conceptual system, and all concepts do necessarily carry the biases, distortions and power grab of some group or another. Perhaps, but this doesn’t show that improvement is impossible: maybe there is no ideal landing spot available to us, no matter how revolutionary our actions, but perhaps some conceptual biases will be better for human beings than others.
Of course, this is where I imagine Foucault insisting that “better for” is simply the invention of a few, used to placate themselves that they are doing the “right” thing and so feel better about whatever the results of their actions may end up being. I don’t see any reason to believe this, unless one thinks that all properties of concepts, including their genetic ones, transfer to whatever those concepts are used to build, and this seems fallacious to me.
But I detect something else in the passages quoted above. If all concepts, being born somewhere in some social context, are thereby unfit to serve the purposes of critiquing their social, political, or economic, system, then this would suggest that we need to transcend concepts/ideas altogether in order to achieve genuine political insight. If the concepts that exist necessarily recapitulate the systems in which they are born, then escaping a system means escaping conceptual thought. This ties up with the denial of human nature, with the insistence that we, and perhaps all beings, are formless: the constraints implicit in conceptual systems are ill-suited to represent that which is without form. This is interesting, but I think it is fatally flawed: that which is utterly formless, can sustain no imperatives, no creativity, neither advance nor retreat, nothing at all really. A formless realm of thought, as Chomsky points out, is one in which nothing goes because anything does. A truly limitless system of concepts would be one in which anything can mean anything in any way, which means it is impossible to interpret, at least by creatures such as ourselves; but then it is not clear how it could lead to anything at all, never mind social change.
In the end, I think the choice boils down to a Chomskean notion that progress, however small, can be made within a corrupt system so long as we open our minds and seek justice and fairness, or else a kind of fatalistic surrender in which no cohesive action is conceivable. As Chomsky argues, creativity requires the friction provided by conceptual limits, and this includes thinking creatively about how to improve the lives of human beings. I think Foucault’s arguments that this is impossible either because concepts such as justice can never escape the power systems in which they are born, or else because concepts are simply not suited to the job of revolutionary thinking, seems to be either fallacious because it makes a kind of genetic fallacy, or else hopeless, because it amounts to the idea that, in order to truly change things, we must access a purely limitless conceptual realm, which seems like a contradiction in terms: ‘limitless’ and ‘conceptual’ are at odds.
Perhaps that is our lot: there is simply nothing to say about the world, really; all is projection and there simply can be no objective facts at all, not even ones about small, incremental improvements. This view is, however, self-undermining because in order for there to be projections at all, there must be some things that can be impressed upon and some effects of such impressions, as argued above. If the world were truly without inherent form, this would include human minds as well, and there would be no way for concepts to have any impact whatsoever, and even historical plasticity would be an illusion, though even illusion would be impossible, for they have a certain form. That fact that there is illusion, entails that there is form to the human mind because the formless cannot be subject to illusion.
So, I think it is safe to side with Chomsky: there are facts about human nature, and there could very well be facts about what is better or worse for that nature. This does not entail that human nature, or natural nature, is fixed and timeless; either could be subject to change with time. But at any given time in which there is so much as the acceptance of a concept, or the illusion of natural structure, is one in which there is some form of structure in the world, no matter how obscure it may seem to us.
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