Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault
The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature
Would it be weird to say that I enjoyed this book? It seems like one ought to find a Chomsky-Foucault debate provocative, perhaps interesting, but enjoyable? Nonetheless, there it is — I enjoyed reading this. After my claim that I was going to read something lighter than a French novel about a WWII internment camp, I picked this. And liked it. Something is wrong with me.
I’m not sure that I find the title so apt. For one thing, the debate is fundamentally not really a debate at all. Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, both thinkers wholeheartedly agree that colonial policy is a losing game. Where they disagree is really only in how to talk about it. Secondly, the book is only about human nature to a limited extent. There is some disagreement as to whether linguistic structures are innate to the human brain vs. contingent on human culture, but the conversation doesn’t dwell there long. It quickly moves into more interesting territory — the power and nature of the state. Chomsky’s perspective is more easily pigeonholed: he’s an anarcho-syndicalist, and believes in working toward a real liberation in which those worst off no longer serve as cannon fodder for the powerful. Chomsky is also straightforward in disconnecting his philosophy of language from his politics; for him, the two are separable, and while the former pays the bills, the latter is ultimately more important.
Foucault, as we might expect, is much more embedded. He’s interested in how power structures constrain human relations and human communication, in which the state is not merely a bureaucracy but a cultural network that steers the very way that we can think about the world.
Here again, Chomsky doesn’t really disagree; he just chooses to focus his work at a different layer. And while I’m sympathetic to Chomsky’s politics and find it the more direct approach, I also find Foucault’s approach gets more to the fundamentals of living. The problem with pitting The People vs. The State is that it places the individual or the citizenry outside the state, which is a bit dangerous. Here in the U.S., we really don’t have anything like a democracy anymore. We ostensibly have a government for the people, but I don’t think we can convincingly argue that we have a government by the people. Geography aside, there is no way to cut up Congress demographically to represent anything like America. It’s still rich white guys, with a handful of rich white girls.
So if government by the people doesn’t exist (and maybe it can’t in modern America), the best we can do is to assure government for the people. But then we get the separation of governors vs. governed, state vs. populace, and Chomsky can’t be happy with that. Foucault seems uncommitted to any particular government structure, and would mostly reject that State vs. Populace is the useful divide to recognize. He’s more interested in revealing the dynamics of institutions — families, churches, government, schools — to lay bare who is controlling whom, and through what means, and toward what ends. For Foucault, we can’t ever be free from power relationships, but we can unveil them and scrutinize them, as to rearrange or dismantle those we find harmful.
And so the debate is really a non-debate, but mostly an exploration of common issues from different perspectives. With a new presidency, we have the opportunity to undo the closed style of paranoid government ushered in by the Nixon era that has become the status quo. One thing the Obama campaign showed us is how to dissolve the divide between the governor and the governed — the “we” in his “yes we can” was what won the election. Whether he can leverage that “we” to participate in the actual governance or whether it will become more cannon fodder for the powerful is up to us to decide.