Source: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Foucalt.png)
Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault sat down for a debate in the early 1970s. You can watch the whole thing here. The transcript, along with some related essays from both Chomsky and Foucault, is available to buy as a book. It’s known as the Chomsky-Foucault debate.
I wasn’t new to either Chomsky or Foucault when I watched and read the Chomsky-Foucault debate. And the short debate format has its clear limits. But I did come away with a few impressions and lessons learned.
I’ll lay those out.
Chomsky on Human Nature
On human nature, it’s not so much that Chomsky and Foucault disagree. It’s more that they approach issues from different angles.
Chomsky’s argument for the existence of something called ‘human nature’ is pretty straightforward and analytic. The environment is too impoverished to account for even the everyday creativity people show in language, which is only one example of human creativity among many (i.e., psychological behaviorism is false). Therefore, there must be some kind of innate linguistic schema and guide to representation. This, plus whichever other innate structures go along with it, is a part of something called ‘human nature.’
Simple enough. Chomsky very well might overplay his hand a bit. At least according to some people who talk about, say, affordance theory. But the basic idea is easy enough to understand and not obviously wrong. There are questions remaining about what this innate structure looks like and how narrowly it guides people. If it’s more open-ended than Chomsky predicts, it’s probably not too useful a guide to, say, complex human social structures.
Foucault on Human Nature
Foucault’s work, particularly prior to 1971, was heavily grounded in the history of science and technology. See, for example, Madness and Civilization or The Birth of the Clinic. He criticizes prior focus on the Great Man Theory at the expense of the collective cultures, systems of classifications and rules, etc. of scientific institutions.
Foucault points out that scientific terminology serves a variety of different roles, from classification to differentiation to analysis. He sees ‘human nature,’ in particular, as serving the function of enlarging the scientific domain, pushing the border between science and non-science, and serving the economic and political interests of those who want to take certain features of society and assign to them a status of permanence.
Chomsky and Foucault agree that biology probably can’t offer a full explanation for the operations of linguistic structures. And they agree that if there’s an innate structure, it’s not robust enough to justify the particular nature of human social institutions. They also agree that science operates according to certain background rules and norms. But Chomsky sees continuity where Foucault sees sharp breaks. Foucault comes off as much closer to, say, the Thomas Kuhn of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Political Vision
The second major part of the Chomsky-Foucault debate is a discussion of political vision. I find they cut this part a bit short. Chomsky swerves directly from the natural creativity of language to a moral argument against anything that restricts this natural creativity. He points out that features of contemporary society like private ownership limit creativity by limiting and guiding its expressions. He points to federated, democratic social institutions (e.g., those found under anarcho-syndicalism) as best encouraging these natural tendencies.
Chomsky’s general approach is to use theory to drive moral and political action.
I think there’s an argument to be made here. But, as is, Chomsky’s presentation is probably a naturalistic fallacy. Likely due to how brief it is. He could clean it up, perhaps, by arguing for some of the pragmatic benefits of anarchist institutions or for more specific connections between human nature and happiness.
Foucault starts with deep skepticism toward any attempt to use theory to drive action. Any attempt at theorizing, on the Foucaultian view, risks importing the standards and presuppositions of modern capitalism. Foucault pivots, or retreats, depending on your perspective on this, to criticism and de-legitimization of powerful institutions.
Justice
The issue of justice is where the Chomsky-Foucault debate heats up. They really disagree here.
Chomsky recommends a piecemeal route toward social change. He advocates cautiously using flawed state institutions for those purposes. He provides an elaborate discussion of the international justice system as an example. Chomsky acknowledges that it’s flawed and protects the powerful, but he thinks social movements can use its own principles against it as a part of a struggle for good. And he still advocates for this approach today.
Another example might be the first amendment in the United States. It’s deeply flawed, and it’s deeply connected to capitalist interests. But it’s a very useful tool for many social movements, and it does offer some protection for them. It’s a difficult balance to strike. Marx, in his earlier works would, of course, point out that these flawed institutions aren’t genuinely liberatory. But they might be useful.
For Foucault, any appeal to justice is always secondary to social struggle and popular power. The proletariat takes power first, and then thinks about justice second. Power comes first.
Are There Principles of Justice?
This is really a disagreement about whether there are universal principles of justice. Chomsky thinks there are, and Foucault thinks there aren’t. On Chomsky’s view, that which leads us in the general direction of fulfillment of our natural creativity and potential is justice. On Foucault’s view, justice is nothing more than what’s good for the dominant system of institutions and class relations.
I think Foucault may have backed off this view a bit in his later work, but here it’s pretty explicit. The moderator, and Chomsky, ask directly about violence. Foucault’s answer is that the proletarian revolution might be violent in some systems and eras, and non-violent in others. But this depends on contingent historical facts, and there’s no set of principles to which to appeal to judge whether this is just or unjust.
Evaluation
I think Foucault’s right to caution us against adopting too ingrained a notion of justice. And I think he’s absolutely correct that theorizing tends to re-produce the ideas and norms of dominant groups and institutions.
I’ve written about a number of situations where seemingly novel ideas are, at a minimum, influenced by the dominant systems in which we find ourselves. The relationship between strict monogamy and Keynesianism, on the one hand, and an openness to polyamory under financialized capitalism, on the other, is one good example.
That said, Foucault paints with a broad brush. And I think we probably want to maintain some ability to maintain a moral critique. Even if, as I fully accept, political and social struggle is far less closely related to morality than most people (even most leftists) think.
The Subject of Revolutionary Action
Anyone who’s done a public forum knows the Q&A session is often terrible. This one wasn’t too bad. Someone asks Chomsky a question about class politics, and he launches into an interesting little speech on the nature of class struggle.
What Chomsky advocates is setting aside the term ‘proletariat’. I think what he means by that term is the narrowly defined industrial worker. He wants to replace this focus with a broader conception of productive workers. He distinguishes between ‘productive workers’ like manual laborers, skilled laborers, engineers, scientists, et al., on the one hand, and non-productive ones like managers and marketers, on the other. It seems as though he sees the former as a vanguard class, pushing for control over their own work while struggling against the uselessness of the forces of mass consumption.
It’s an idiosyncratic distinction, and I think it sort of leaps directly out of early 1970s politics and social relations. We might compare it to, say, The ABCs of Capitalism, which draws a more traditional, but expanded, conception of the working-class.
Chomsky’s view has the apparent implication that, e.g., Walmart workers aren’t a potential revolutionary subject. Many aren’t happy in the work, and much of the work is just pushing out products for mass consumption. But that seems obviously wrong, and surely Chomsky misspoke on this point. Walmart workers are an exploited group, and a group that’s exploited in centrally important ways.
The Chomsky-Foucault Debate
No one really asked Foucault any questions during the Q&A. He sort of sat there like a lump while Chomsky got all the questions. That’s one of the bigger disappointments of the Chomsky-Foucault debate. I’d have liked to hear more, particularly on how far he really wants to take his apparently Thrasymachean view of justice.
My background is in analytic philosophy, I focus to a greater extent on foreign policy than most leftists, and I have more than a passing fondness for anarchist ideas. And so, you’d expect me to be pretty sympathetic to Chomsky here. At the same time, my own approach to philosophy is grounded in a study of the uses, history, and social implications of concepts and labels. That’s rather Foucaultian in some ways. And I even used a word play on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish for the title of my own book, Classify and Label.
The truth of it? I actually think Foucault got the better end of most of this discussion. His skepticism toward power, concepts, and theory is entirely warranted. Especially given the way the 1970s unfolded, with the fall of Keynesianism, the Bretton Woods system, and the rise of neoliberalism. He goes off the rails a bit in the section on justice. But, otherwise, what he says has more explanatory power and provides us with quite a program.
