Only rarely … Expand. Birth of the Prison; The History of Sexuality. See also R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Lawson and L. Appignanesi eds. Dismantling Truth: Reality in the Postmodern World. Politics And Ambiguity. Chomsky , " An Interview , " Radical Philosophy. Mind and Politics Berkeley. University of California Press,.
Now, the person who has acquired this intricate and highly debte and organized collection of abilities—the collection of abilities that we call knowing a language—has been exposed to a certain experience; he has been presented in the course of HUMAN NATURE! On one hand, conscience-guiding constituted a constant bind: Feudality developed between individuals a tissue of personal bonds of an altogether different type than the pastorate.
If it is a matter of whether these rules are effectively put to work by the human mind, all right; all right, too, if it is a question of whether the historian and the linguist can think it in their turn; it is all right also to say that these rules should allow us to realize what is said or thought by these individuals. Perhaps the point of difference between Mr. The shepherd has a target for his flock.
What were the political disagreements between you and Foucault? Marxism itself has become too often a sort of church, a theology. Hence the importance of Nietzsche. First of all I would like to ask Mr. There was no living tradition or popular movement granscript which they could gain support. Last, because such a trial would trap us into playing the arbitrary and boring part of either the rationalist or the irrationalist.
The principles of non-demonstrative inference do not fulfill the need. This new configuration has a further political significance.
Create Alert Alert. Share This Paper. Passion of Michel Foucault. This is a study of Michel Foucault's life in philosophy. Foucault was probably the most influential Western philosopher since Sartre. Hailed as an original thinker, he has also been criticized as a … Expand. His analysis … Expand. ELDERS: But what does this theory of knowledge mean for your theme of the death of man or the end of the period of the nine- teenth to twentieth centuries?
ELDERS: But what are the objective reasons, in relation to your conception of understanding, of knowledge, of science, for re- fusing to answer these personal questions? When there is a problem for you to answer, what are your reasons for making a problem out of a personal question? P O W E R 31 the end of the eighteenth century, for the first time in the his- tory of Western thought and of Western knowledge, to open up the corpses of people in order to know what was the source, the origin, the anatomical needle, of the particular malady which was responsible for their deaths?
The idea seems simple enough. Well, four or five thousand years of medicine in the West were needed before we had the idea of looking for the cause of the malady in the lesion of a corpse.
If you tried to explain this by the personality of Bichat, I believe that would be without interest. If, on the contrary, you tried to establish the place of disease and of death in society at the end of the eighteenth century, and what interest industrial society effectively had in quadrupling the entire population in order to expand and develop itself, as a result of which medical surveys of society were made, big hospitals were opened, etc. ELDERS: Yes, but nevertheless it would have been very interest- ing for us to know a little bit more about your arguments to re- fute this.
Could you, Mr. P O W E R give your ideas about, for example, the way the social sciences are working? And perhaps you could even explain a little the way Mr. Foucault is now working in a more or less be- havioristic way. Foucault just said. That is, I think that an act of scientific cre- ation depends on two facts: one, some intrinsic property of the mind, another, some set of social and intellectual conditions that exist.
And it is not a question, as I see it, of which of these we should study; rather we will understand scientific discovery, and similarly any other kind of discovery, when we know what these factors are and can therefore explain how they interact in a particular fashion. My particular interest, in this connection at least, is with the intrinsic capacities of the mind; yours, as you say, is in the particular arrangement of social and economic and other con- ditions.
P O W E R 33 existed when people of my generation were starting to work, on the contrary, exalted individual creativity and put aside these collective rules. Chomsky, is this: you suppose a basic system of what must be in a way elementary limitations that are present in what you call human nature; to what extent do you think these are subject to historical change? In that case, you could perhaps connect this with the ideas of Mr.
CHOMSKY: Well, I think that as a matter of biological and an- thropological fact, the nature of human intelligence certainly has not changed in any substantial way, at least since the seven- teenth century, or probably since Cro-Magnon man. And as those conditions change, a given human intelligence will progress to new forms of creation. In fact this relates very closely to the last question that Mr. Elders put, if I can perhaps say a word about that. It seems to me that the fundamental property of behaviorism, which is in a way suggested by the odd term behavioral science, is that it is a negation of the possibility of developing a scientific theory.
That is, what defines behaviorism is the very curious and self-destructive assumption that you are not permitted to create an interesting theory. If physics, for example, had made the assumption that you have to keep to phenomena and their arrangement and such things, we would be doing Babylonian astronomy today.
Fortu- nately physicists never made this ridiculous, extraneous as- sumption, which has its own historical reasons and had to do with all sorts of curious facts about the historical context in which behaviorism evolved. But looking at it purely intellectually, behaviorism is the arbitrary insistence that one must not create a scientific theory of human behavior; rather one must deal directly with phenom- ena and their interrelation, and no more—something which is totally impossible in any other domain, and I assume impossi- ble in the domain of human intelligence or human behavior as well.
Here is a case in point of just the kind of thing that you men- tioned and that Mr. Well, it has long since run its course, I think. One forgets about that and puts it aside. Similarly one should put aside the very curious re- strictions that define behaviorism; restrictions which are, as I said before, very much suggested by the term behavioral science itself. We can agree, perhaps, that behavior in some broad sense constitutes the data for the science of man.
But to define a sci- ence by its data would be to define physics as the theory of meter-readings. And so the term itself is symptomatic of the disease in this case. We should understand the historical context in which these curious limitations developed, and having understood them, I believe, discard them and proceed in the science of man as we would in any other domain, that is by discarding entirely behaviorism and in fact, in my view, the entire empiricist tradi- tion from which it evolved.
You see, Mr. We have more possible sciences available intellectually. When we try out those intel- lectual constructions in a changing world of fact, we will not find cumulative growth. What we will find are strange leaps: here is a domain of phenomena, a certain science applies very nicely; now slightly broaden the range of phenomena, then an- other science, which is very different, happens to apply very beautifully, perhaps leaving out some of these other phenom- ena.
First of all I would like to ask Mr. Foucault why he is so interested in politics, because he told me that in fact he likes politics much more than philosophy. But that is not a problem. P O W E R 37 what density of ideology would have to weigh me down to pre- vent me from being interested in what is probably the most crucial subject to our existence, that is to say the society in which we live, the economic relations within which it functions, and the system of power which defines the regular forms and the regular permissions and prohibitions of our conduct.
The essence of our life consists, after all, of the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves. Chomsky, we are all very inter- ested to know your political objectives, especially in relation to your well-known anarcho-syndicalism or, as you formulated it, libertarian socialism. What are the most important goals of your libertarian socialism? P O W E R will follow that a decent society should maximize the possibili- ties for this fundamental human characteristic to be realized.
That means trying to overcome the elements of repression and oppression and destruction and coercion that exist in any ex- isting society, ours for example, as a historical residue.
It can- not be justified intrinsically. Rather it must be overcome and eliminated. P O W E R 39 to me that this is the appropriate form of social organization for an advanced technological society, in which human beings do not have to be forced into the position of tools, of cogs in the machine. There is no longer any social necessity for human be- ings to be treated as mechanical elements in the productive process; that can be overcome and we must overcome it by a so- ciety of freedom and free association, in which the creative urge that I consider intrinsic to human nature will in fact be able to realize itself in whatever way it will.
And again, like Mr. Foucault, that we can call our so- cieties in any way democratic, after listening to this statement from Mr. When you asked me why I was interested in politics, I refused to answer because it seemed evident to me, but per- haps your question was, How am I interested in it?
That is to say that I admit to not being able to define, nor for even stronger reasons to propose, an ideal social model for the func- tioning of our scientific or technological society. On the other hand, one of the tasks that seems immediate and urgent to me, over and above anything else, is this: that we should indicate and show up, even where they are hidden, all the relationships of political power which actually control the social body and oppress or repress it.
What I want to say is this: it is the custom, at least in Euro- pean society, to consider that power is localized in the hands of the government and that it is exercised through a certain num- ber of particular institutions, such as the administration, the police, the army, and the apparatus of the state. But I believe that political power also exercises itself through the mediation of a certain number of institutions which look as if they have nothing in common with the political power, and as if they are independent of it, while they are not.
One knows this in relation to the family; and one knows that the university, and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the in- struments of power of another social class.
Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, also help to support the political power. P O W E R 41 It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.
And because this domination is not simply the expression in political terms of economic exploitation, it is its instrument and, to a large extent, the condition which makes it possible; the suppression of the one is achieved through the exhaustive discernment of the other.
Well, if one fails to recognize these points of support of class power, one risks allowing them to continue to exist; and to see this class power reconstitute itself even after an apparent revolutionary process. That is, there are two intellectual tasks: one, and the one that I was discussing, is to try to create the vision of a future just society; that is to create, if you like, a humanistic social theory that is based, if possible, on some firm and humane concept of the human essence or human nature.
P O W E R Another task is to understand very clearly the nature of power and oppression and terror and destruction in our own society.
And that certainly includes the institutions you men- tioned, as well as the central institutions of any industrial society, namely the economic, commercial and financial in- stitutions and in particular, in the coming period, the great multi-national corporations, which are not very far from us physically tonight [i.
Surely we must understand these facts, and not only un- derstand them but combat them. Still, I think it would be a great shame to put aside entirely the somewhat more abstract and philosophical task of trying to draw the connections between a concept of human nature that gives full scope to freedom and dignity and creativity and other fundamental human characteristics, and to relate that to some notion of social structure in which those properties could be re- alized and in which meaningful human life could take place.
P O W E R 43 social revolution, though it would be absurd, of course, to try to sketch out in detail the goal that we are hoping to reach, still we should know something about where we think we are going, and such a theory may tell it to us. If you say that a certain human nature exists, that this human nature has not been given in actual society the rights and the possibilities which allow it to realize itself.
I will take an example by greatly simplifying it. And it dreamed of an ultimately liberated human nature. What model did it use to conceive, project, and eventually realize that human nature? It was in fact the bourgeois model. It considered that an alienated society was a society which, for example, gave pride of place to the benefit of all, to a sexu- ality of a bourgeois type, to a family of a bourgeois type, to an aesthetic of a bourgeois type.
P O W E R this has happened in the Soviet Union and in the popular democracies: a kind of society has been reconstituted which has been transposed from the bourgeois society of the nineteenth century. The universalization of the model of the bourgeois has been the utopia which has animated the constitution of Soviet society. The result is that you, too, realized, I think, that it is diffi- cult to say exactly what human nature is.
Mao Tse- Tung spoke of bourgeois human nature and proletarian human nature, and he considers that they are not the same thing. CHOMSKY: Well, you see, I think that in the intellectual domain of political action, that is the domain of trying to construct a vi- sion of a just and free society on the basis of some notion of human nature, we face the very same problem that we face in immediate political action, namely, that of being impelled to do something, because the problems are so great, and yet knowing that whatever we do is on the basis of a very partial under- standing of the social realities, and the human realities in this case.
For example, to be quite concrete, a lot of my own activity really has to do with the Vietnam War, and some of my own en- ergy goes into civil disobedience. Well, civil disobedience in the U. For example, it threatens the social order in ways which might, one might argue, bring about fas- cism; and that would be a very bad thing for America, for Viet- nam, for Holland, and for everyone else. P O W E R 45 a lot of problems would result; so that is one danger in under- taking this concrete act.
In the face of these uncertainties one has to choose a course of action. Well, similarly in the intellectual domain, one is faced with the uncertainties that you correctly pose. I suppose that what you call civil disobedience is probably the same as what we call extra-parliamentary action? One was obliged to answer questions on official forms. You would call it civil disobedience if one refused to fill in the forms?
I would be a little bit careful about that, be- cause, going back to a very important point that Mr. Foucault made, one does not necessarily allow the state to define what is legal. So one has to be rather careful about calling things illegal, I think.
When, in the United States, you commit an illegal act, do you justify it in terms of justice or of a superior legality, or do you justify it by the necessity of the class struggle, which is at the present time essential for the proletariat in their struggle against the ruling class? CHOMSKY: Well, here I would like to take the point of view which is taken by the American Supreme Court and probably other courts in such circumstances; that is, to try to settle the issue on the narrowest possible grounds.
However, to a very large extent existing law represents certain human values, which are decent human values: and ex- isting law, correctly interpreted, permits much of what the state commands you not to do. Are you com- mitting this act in virtue of an ideal justice, or because the class struggle makes it useful and necessary?
Let me be quite concrete about it and move from the area of class war to imperialist war, where the situation is somewhat clearer and easier. Take international law, a very weak instrument as we know, but nevertheless one that incorporates some very inter- esting principles.
Well, international law is, in many respects, the instrument of the powerful: it is a creation of states and their representatives. In developing the presently existing body of international law, there was no participation by mass movements of peasants.
The structure of international law reflects that fact; that is, international law permits much too wide a range of forceful in- tervention in support of existing power structures that define themselves as states against the interests of masses of people who happen to be organized in opposition to states.
But, in fact, international law is not solely of that kind. P O W E R 49 example, embedded in the Nuremberg principles and the United Nations Charter, which permit, in fact, I believe, require the citizen to act against his own state in ways which the state will falsely regard as criminal. This means that in the particular case of the Vietnam War, which interests me most, the American state is acting in a criminal capacity.
And the people have the right to stop criminals from committing murder. A perfectly clear case of that is the present case of the Pen- tagon Papers in the United States, which, I suppose, you know about.
Reduced to its essentials and forgetting legalisms, what is happening is that the state is trying to prosecute people for ex- posing its crimes. Furthermore, I think that the existing system of law even explains why it is absurd.
There is an important question for us here. P O W E R injustice, is always part of the social struggle: to dismiss the judges, to change the tribunals, to amnesty the condemned, to open the prisons, has always been part of social transforma- tions as soon as they become slightly violent.
CHOMSKY: Yeah, but surely you believe that your role in the war is a just role, that you are fighting a just war, to bring in a con- cept from another domain.
And that, I think, is important. I would like to slightly reformulate what you said. I would agree that we are certainly in no position to create a system of ideal justice, just as we are in no position to create an ideal society in our minds. But we are in a position—and we must act as sensitive and responsible human beings in that position—to imagine and move towards the creation of a better society and also a better system of jus- tice. Now this better system will certainly have its defects.
Insofar as legality incorporates justice in this sense of better justice, referring to a better society, then we should follow and obey the law, and force the state to obey the law, and force the great corporations to obey the law, and force the police to obey the law, if we have the power to do so. Of course, in those areas where the legal system happens to represent not better justice, but rather the techniques of op- pression that have been codified in a particular autocratic sys- tem, well, then a reasonable human being should disregard and oppose them, at least in principle; he may not, for some reason, do it in fact.
The proletariat makes war with the ruling class because, for the first time in history, it wants to take power. And because it will overthrow the power of the ruling class, it considers such a war to be just. In fact the only reason for wanting any such thing, I believe, is because one thinks, rightly or wrongly, that some fundamental human values will be achieved by that transfer of power. FOUCAULT: 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.
But even if one were to accept it for the sake of argument, still that theory maintains that it is proper for the proletariat to take power and exercise it in a violent and bloody and unjust fashion, because it is claimed, and in my opinion falsely, that that will lead to a more just society, in which the state will wither away, in which the proletariat will be a universal class, and so on and so forth.
P O W E R 53 the idea of a violent and bloody dictatorship of the proletariat, especially when expressed by self-appointed representatives of a vanguard party, who, we have enough historical experience to know and might have predicted in advance, will simply be the new rulers over this society.
I would like to say that the power of the proletariat could, in a certain period, imply violence and a prolonged war against a social class over which its triumph or victory was not yet to- tally assured. For example, I am not a committed pacifist. I would not hold that it is under all imaginable circumstances wrong to use vio- lence, even though use of violence is in some sense unjust. I be- lieve that one has to estimate relative justices. But the use of violence and the creation of some degree of injustice can only be justified on the basis of the claim and the assessment—which always ought to be undertaken very, very seriously and with a good deal of skepticism—that this vio- lence is being exercised because a more just result is going to be achieved.
If it does not have such a grounding, it is really to- tally immoral, in my opinion. P O W E R justice. What the proletariat will achieve by expelling the class which is at present in power and by taking over power itself, is precisely the suppression of the power of class in general. Whether it is or not is another issue. FOUCAULT: If you like, I will be a little bit Nietzschean about this; in other words, it seems to me that the idea of justice in it- self is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain po- litical and economic power or as a weapon against that power.
P O W E R 55 functions within a society of classes as a claim made by the op- pressed class and as justification for it. I think that they embody systems of class op- pression and elements of other kinds of oppression, but they also embody a kind of groping towards the true humanly valu- able concepts of justice and decency and love and kindness and sympathy, which I think are real.
P O W E R two societies, each trying to destroy the other. No question of justice arises. The only question that arises is, Which side are you on? Are you going to defend your own society and destroy the other?
They were fighting for nothing. They were fighting for the right to destroy each other. And in that kind of circumstance no questions of justice arise.
And of course there were rational people, most of them in jail, like Karl Liebknecht, for example, who pointed that out and were in jail because they did so, or Bertrand Russell, to take another example on the other side. There were people who un- derstood that there was no point to that mutual massacre in terms of any sort of justice and that they ought to just call it off. Now those people were regarded as madmen or lunatics and criminals or whatever, but of course they were the only sane people around.
On the other hand, when we discussed the problem of human nature and political problems, then differences arose between us. Foucault, if you were obliged to describe our ac- tual society in pathological terms, which of its kinds of mad- ness would most impress you? FOUCAULT: The definition of disease and of the insane, and the classification of the insane have been made in such a way as to exclude from our society a certain number of people. If our so- ciety characterized itself as insane, it would exclude itself.
It pretends to do so for reasons of internal reform. P O W E R 59 modern world is afflicted by nervous anxiety or schizophrenia. It is in fact a cunning way of excluding certain people or cer- tain patterns of behavior. There you have it. Well, I think we can immediately start the discussion. Chomsky, I would like to ask you one question.
In your discussion you used the term proletariat; what do you mean by proletariat in a highly developed technological soci- ety? Because I think that any human being who is not physically or mentally deformed—and here I again must dis- agree with Monsieur Foucault and express my belief that the concept of mental illness probably does have an absolute char- acter, to some extent at least—is not only capable of, but is in- sistent upon doing productive, creative work, if given the opportunity to do so.
P O W E R 61 do you think, will make the revolution? And that the great dilemma. Rather there are a very large number of people who are in- volved in other kinds of work. For example, the people who are involved in the management of exploitation, or the people who are involved in the creation of artificial consumption, or the people who are involved in the creation of mechanisms of de- struction and oppression, or the people who are simply not given any place in a stagnating industrial economy.
Lots of people are excluded from the possibility of productive labor. And I think that the revolution, if you like, should be in the name of all human beings; but it will have to be conducted by certain categories of human beings, and those will be, I think, the human beings who really are involved in the productive work of society. Now what this is will differ, depending upon the society.
P O W E R called service occupations, which really do constitute the over- whelming mass of the population, at least in the United States, and I suppose probably here too, and will become the mass of the population in the future. If the latter, then they can and should play a decent role in a progressive social revolution. Chomsky, by what you said about the intellectual necessity of creating new models of society. One of the problems we have in doing this with student groups in Utrecht is that we are looking for consistency of values.
One of the values you more or less mentioned is the necessity of de- centralization of power. People on the spot should participate in decision-making. And in order to have, for example, a more equal distribution of welfare, etc.
That is: how can you, with your very coura- geous attitude towards the war in Vietnam, survive in an institution like MIT, which is known here as one of the great war contractors and intellectual makers of this war?
In general, I am in favor of decentralization. Now a system of decentralized power and free association will of course face the problem, the specific problem that you mention, of inequity—one region is richer than the other, etc. So, for example, I think that a democratic socialist libertar- ian United States would be more likely to give substantial aid to East Pakistani refugees than a system of centralized power which is basically operating in the interest of multi-national corporations.
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