[lbo-talk] Chomsky on Foucault

[Brian Siano]

On Mon, 1 Sep 2003 10:10:31 -0400, Dennis Perrin <dperrin at comcast.net> 
wrote:

> <http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=41&ItemID=4107>
>
> You certainly see this on the "Manufacturing Consent" DVD Special 
> Features section. Foucault prattles on on on on while Chomsky strains to 
> make sense of what he's saying. I've known more than a few lefties who 
> find value in Foucault's work, and like Chomsky I don't understand it. 
> Are there any Foucault fanciers here who might give it a go?

There's a collection called _The Essential Foucault_, and Paul Rabinow has 
a decent introduction which serves as a nifty "Foucault primer." I'd 
suggest that.

I like Foucault, but it's mainly because I like the performance; a 
particular choice of word, some odd insight shoved onto the middle of a 
sentence. His basic insights are, frankly, something that would have 
occurred to Chomsky years ago. He tends to rest on the observation that any 
kind of social policy is going to have to exert some kind of coercion on 
people, and as a result, even liberal institutions like hospitals and 
psychiatry will operate to mark people different, rationalize society's 
norms and prejudices in rationalist terms, etc.

Stated so baldly, it's not hard to say "Okay, got it, what's so special 
about seeing _that_?" Well, it was special when he first wrote about it, so 
I'd give him credit for that. But if a writer has a handful of simple ideas 
at the core of their work, we could either take a "Been there, done that" 
attitude, or enjoy how the writer embroiders the basics. I liked Foucault's 
embroidery.

There's lots to watch out for in Foucualt. For one thing, he wasn't the 
best historian around. There's a tale of a "Ship of Fools" which was just a 
medieval legend, but F thought it actually happened. (Chomsky also faulted 
his history of linguistics in _The Order of Things_.) I tend to think of 
him in the same way I think of Neitzsche-- some fun insights, a riotous 
intelligence, and a really iconoclastic position, but the actual historical 
facts they cite may be, well, wanting.

And one thing I dislike about Foucault is what I really dislike about so 
much of pomo-deconstruction stuff. There's a huge tendency to adopt an 
overly precise jargon with a vaguely engineering-military feel to it, to 
make one's theories seem much more rigorous. Terms like "differentiating 
practices," "strategies of discourse," and the like don't add much to 
understanding anything.

As for the political value of Foucault's work, I'm very doubtful. He spends 
a lot of time attacking humane institutions as citadels of power and 
control, and true or not, he then takes that stance to argue that human 
institutions will _always_ be expressions of power and control. Not the 
most hopeful position-- what does that leave anyone with a desire to help? 
I can see why his work found an audience among a lot of walking wounded, 
who loved reading about how oppressive and evil and all-encompassing 
everything was.

Robert Hughes had a good coment on Foucault. He one said that, when he was 
writing his history of Australia, _The Fatal Shore_, he got absolutely 
_nothing_ out of Foucault's work. Here was a work of history that dealt 
with the founding of a whole _nation_ out of what Foucault would call the 
'carceral,' the need to distance the criminal and separate the prisoner... 
and Hughes felt that, while Foucault was eloquent on the desires of the 
_state_, he had said nothing about the inner lives of the _prisoners_. I a 
way, Foucault's own work had erased the prisoner as thoroughly as any other 
fever-dream of power.