Several of the GSIs have showed/will be showing these debates in section, as a way of introducing Michel Foucault (and it's kind of cool that we can finally watch one of our theorists on film!). Here, Foucault debates Noam Chomsky (linguist, jack-of-all-trades, political activist, anarcho-libertarian-socialist?) on the nature and location of power in society, on human nature (and whether we can even say what "human nature" is), and on the possibilities of realizing a better, brighter future.
Part One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kawGakdNoT0
Part Two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43Ai5WPHqWA
Keep in mind possible comparisons between Foucault and: (1) Durkheim; (2) Marx; and (3) Gramsci.
Last Post/Reflection
16 years ago
9 comments:
Just a thought after a supposed Durkheim LSD-induced critique and our first Foucault introduction: When will we wise up and at the very least finally brechen (as Lenin would put it) the double-noun "human nature," thereby dissociating the concept of human from the overly biological discourse regarding nature?
Sure, human activity exists within a physical space and in relation to a physicality, but as Bourdieu reminds us, even physical space interacts with and is transformed by symbolic space.
I suppose, then and according to the youtube clips, Foucault's criticism would see the so-called "natural" as problematic since the construction of "human nature" will always be a byproduct of the civilization in which the "natural" is constituted in its terms. This criticism, of course, thinks beyond Chompsky's reaching for a Utopia [capital U] constructed by a Human Nature [capital H and N], as if these concepts were available like Platonic "forms" floating in the ether somewhere, one day and someday comprehensible to us through recollection or between reincarnations.
Maybe it's time to move beyond the rather 18th Century-ish tired term, "human nature," and find a new vocabulary that appreciates human ambiguity or something else?
wow, that was incredibly insightful, aaron. not to mention the crux of possibly the biggest philosophical debate in (our) history. correct me if i'm wrong, but you're highlighting the difference of nature versus nurture. actually, on reading your comment again i'm not quite sure i grasp what you're saying. can you explain it again?
and in case anyone else out there is a wiki fan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nature#State_of_nature
Hey Charita,
Yes. The original comment can be, to an extent, distilled or at least understood in relation to the nature/nurture debate, although I think Foucault would complicate the issue even further.
But first, I do mean to say that human activity, realized heretofore, has been constituted almost exclusively or primarily by "nurture." Although certainly not using the term "nurture," Foucault makes this argument through his acknowledgement that "there is a danger" in, say, supposing that a concept like justice is unattached from the culture, society, or civilization in which "justice" finds articulation, an idea that now seems not so revolutionary.
Perhaps more complicated, Foucault also seems to assert that "justice" is a romantic fantasy that sustains, in this case, power inequalities (although I wish he might have elaborated a bit more on this idea in the youtube clip).
I suppose, too, Foucault would argue that "nurturing" institutions (like school, counseling, the Church, health care, social welfare programs, etc.) act as suffocating prisons that, by our taking pleasure in the "nurturing," seduce us even as they function repressively and coercively.
However, I hesitate to completely acknowledge the original comment's connection to the nature/nurture debate for three reasons:
1. Because "nurture" has the connotation of bringing something into fruition, into adulthood, into a particular conclusive embodiment (thereby, linking the idea of "nurture," to a degree, into the "nature" that it attempts to criticize).
2. Because "nurture" implies an uncritical, lacking contestation or even acknowledgment of the power relations imbedded in the act of "nurturing" more generally understood: the nurturee as passive recipient of the nurturing separate from the empowered, authoritarian nurturer (in this case, society and its institutions).
3. And because I originally did not intend to break up the concept of "human nature" to mobilize yet another dichotomous distinction between "nurture" and "nature."
Rather, I hoped the comment might jump start a conversation about other ways to think about human life and human fulfillment, ways that move beyond normative calculations of what is "good" and, therefore, what should be made "general."
What do you think? Can we describe the human (as Locke and Hobbes did, according to the link you provided) without exacting yet another norm or normativity?
I think it's incredibly difficult to describe humans without using any normative ideas. And I think nearly all theorists fall into some sort of normative stance when they try to put their theory into practice because then they are suggesting what humans "ought" to do. For example, Foucault says we should struggle against power. Isn't that a type of normative idea?
I feel like if we continue along this vein, everything is "normative". We are born into a society and from that moment onward we are taught values and norms for that society. It seems that Foucault is suggesting the only thing we can do to fight against this universal relation to power is to criticize it. What do we find wrong about the way humans are treated today? I think that in this way, we can decipher what "human" needs and nature is.
From Mike Levien:
this is what chomsky, reflecting on the debate, later said about foucault:
"Usually, when you talk to someone, you take for granted that you
share some moral territory. Usually, what you find is self-
justification in terms of shared moral criteria; in that case, you
can have an argument, you can pursue it, you can find out what's
right and what's wrong about the position. With him, though, I felt
like I was talking to someone who didn't inhabit the same moral
universe. I mean, I liked him personally. It's just that I couldn't
make sense of him. It's as if he was from a different species, or
something" (203).
I see. Yeah, I think it's because Foucault takes a very different approach to ..well, everything. He doesn't have a grand theory like the other theorists we have studied previously. Most of us have a pretty linear way of thinking. We think of the past, present, and future. We think of origins and destinations and we think in terms of growth and regression. So for me, personally, it's a bit harder for me to understand Foucault because it's not, well, structured. But that's exactly the point. We're so constrained by structure, why are we so imprisoned?! haha but I can see how it would be incredibly difficult to have a discussion with him because it's a different wavelength.
Grappling with the idea that when we are describing human nature, we are "exacting" norms, I think about Socrates': "All I know is I know nothing."
This is why I think I made this mental connection.... While our language impels us to form normative ideas and utterances, we can still accept that what we think and communicate is not final. In order to have written anything in the first place, Foucault did have to make an argument based in knowledge and implying a "should" (ie. like Charita said, he asserts that we should struggle against power). That might be his point: we cannot escape power or definition of the "normative" until death, but we can struggle against it. That is to say, normative thinking, definitions of an ideal, of Utopia, all are constraints on the individual, and true knowledge is being able to struggle against these "definites" and relinquish the claim to know something as pure truth. Is this what he meant by "power knowledge" on pg. 28?
Charita, Kristina, and G-Blasi,
I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about Foucault and the possibility that he is exacting a normative stance in his argument that we "should" struggle against power. While I still doubt that I can fully articulate the puzzle, let's start with a basic clarification: Foucault critiques Chompsky's Utopia because Foucault asserts it will likely stamp upon humanity a template that legitimizes future constraints on the very liberty it attempts to liberate.
Now, I agree that Foucault cannot conceive of a world in which power relations do not proliferate. He does not mold a potential utopia. As such, without utopic solutions in which discourses of freedom and liberty get flesh, blood and guts, normative stances fail to emerge as fully embodied sites of articulation in Foucault's work. His normative stances never quite run, walk, or even crawl about. In many ways, amidst pages and pages of critique, his argument for struggle barely even breathes.
And, yet, to say that Foucault's work is not conscious of its own power to, particularly, shape behavior, would be to underestimate a very wily fellow. Here, then I would like to introduce Foucault's notion of playing with power rather than within in it. Sure, the normative claim that people should struggle appears to be working within (rather than with) the realm of calculated normative stances, but the dictum (if that) appears to function as a life philosophy, like Buddhist right mind and action, rather than a template upon which humanity might be shaped, controlled, and, ultimately, render legible in its "humanity."
In this regard, the claim works more locally and contextually. In fact, Foucault's ticket out of the normative bog that saturates utopic phantasmagorias may be best understood by his notion of the particular "aesthetic of existence," discussed at the end of the Daily Californian article. While I have yet to feel I fully understand what he means by "an aesthetic which could in itself be an aesthetic of existence," the stance here is not deliberatively proscriptive but rests in the aestheticism of human action, an aestheticism that does not take on catholic or global resonances.
Or perhaps more clearly, there is beauty in struggle not as a proscriptive promise, but as a way of critically living within a coercive, caged existence, without which we would be perpetually and drunkenly fumbling around for a key that simply does not exist.
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