[lbo-talk] Chomsky on Foucault

[Dennis Perrin]

> The problem with general denunciations of "abstractions" and "big words"
> is that 1) there is a tremendous amount about human affairs that is *not*
> immediately obvious, not an accepted "truism" (where have we heard that
> word before...) and 2) one person's abstraction is another's Common
> Sense.
>
> -- Shane

I'm not disparaging the concept of Big Word Explanations of things -- auto
repair has a language all its own, and to those outside the garage it can
sound utterly alien, even though it precisely describes a part or a type of
repair. I get that. I guess my main beef with Foucault and the like is that
they're dealing with philosophy and politics, two areas where I think
absractions are used to muddy, and not clarify, meaning, thus granting one a
sense of intellectual power over others. That's what I object to.

DP