>Chomsky has no theory of the subject -- i.e. why millions of Americans
>desperately want to believe that Saddam Hussein = Osama bin Laden, despite
>mountains of evidence to the contrary. Foucault, by contrast, spends lots of
>time tracing out how power works *within* subjects, i.e. why it is that so
>many people end up extolling their oppressors and identifying with their
>conditions of captivity. That's very far from Plato's cave, which assumes the
>sort of equivalency of all cognitions which needs to be explained in the first
>place.
But that's just what gets our plain-speaking types all riled up. If you just speak the truth in simple sentences - that would counter all the lies told by the government and the media. I've gotten more correspondence, most of it critical, about the Zizek interview and the associated "Beliving impossible things" edit in LBO #105 than I've ever gotten about anything I've run in the newsletter <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/LBO_current.html>. My correspondents (with some exceptions) agree: It's the lies and the lying liars who tell them (TM) and not the credulity of the public that produces nonsense like Osama = Saddam. Doesn't Chomsky believe that humans are hardwired for truth and it's only the lies of the powerful that confuse them?
Doug