I'm at the office and do not have have immediate access to one of the many many many places where Foucault says that resistance to domination is inevitable, but when I get home or over the weekend I will provide you with a few. It's in D&P, for one, and an number of interviews. I am actually surprised that you are not familiar with this aspect of F's views.
As for Chomsky, I am happy to see him criticized, both for his political and his linguistic views. About the latter I am barely qualified to offer an opinion, but his statute is what I have indicated: he's either the starting point or the target of all modern linguistic theory. That's the judgment of the profession, not an idiosyncratic one of mine. If we talk more broadly about his views of human nature, I think he has the view that most scientists have, that it's a bundle of different potentials that can be differently realized in different circumstances.
As for his political views and works, I although Chomsky is one of three people whose work radicalized me (the other two being Old Chuck and A.J. Langguth, a NY Times reporter who wrote a book about US torture programs in S.Am. in the 1960s and 70s), I'm hardly a groupie, and a comprehensive catalog of my criticism and reservations would be quite long. Short version: in his analyses C is a vulgar Marxist who doesn't acknowledge it, but whose work has the advantages and defects of vulgar Marxism. He overestimates the role of foreign policy in the political economy of the US ruling class and underestimates the domestic determinants of that policy. He also has naive rationalist belief that merely piling up facts and logical arguments should change people's minds. So I am hardly a naive Chomsky fan who defends the Master's words come what may.
--- bitch <bitch at pulpculture.org> wrote:
> At 04:53 PM 12/7/2006, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> > >
> > > Now C doesn't know all this b/c he doesn't
> > > aprticipate in those discussions
> > > but is, for some reason, considered a heavy
> weight
> > > who did happen to know them.
> >
> >Maybe Chomsky is considered a heavyweight because
> he
> >is the pre-eminent linguistics scholar of all time
> >whose works set the standard and provide the
> received
> >view for all to attack and modify.
> >
> >Actually I thinkj he understands F better than you
> >suggest. C's human nature is pretty thin, basically
> a
> >capacity to speak gramatically and produce new
> >sentences. He also holds that there is sort of an
> >instinct to be free, but Foucault agrees with this,
> as
> >noted in a previous post, he holds that while
> >domination is inescapable, resistance to it is
> >inevitable. So actually they are on the same page
> on
> >this point about human nature. For the rest, F
> likes
> >to play up constructivist stories about human
> history,
> >while C likes to talk about the evils of
> imperialism,
> >so they are not singing from the same hymnbook.
>
>
> what was the quote from Foucault which makes you
> think this about Foucault?
> you asked a question, you didn't quote F. do you
> have quotes from his work
> in general where F says anything to back this up?
>
>
> god. now i have to content with you being another
> chomsky fan who can't
> stand it when someone criticizes him. oh, the
> blaspheme!
>
>
> "You know how it is, come for the animal porn,
> stay for the cultural analysis." -- Michael Berube
>
> Bitch | Lab
> http://blog.pulpculture.org
>
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>
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