Foucault & Chmsky ( Was Re: [lbo-talk] Prose Style, was Time to Get Religion)

Miles Jackson cqmv at pdx.edu
Mon Dec 11 10:15:51 PST 2006


andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> Miles, as I have said here many times before, and no
> doubt will many times again, I do not mean by human
> nature a disposition that is independednt of all
> environmental constraintsw, but a disposition of human
> to behave certain ways in certain envirinmenonts. Thus
> to say that resistance is a correlary, effect, result,
> consequence, or tendency that human have to manifest
> in relations of power is ipso facto to talk about
> human nature.

Sure, if we resist power in certain contexts, that supports the claim that we have the capacity to resist power. However, we need to talk about more than "human nature" here: if we want to figure out why that behavior emerges, we'll need to analyze the surrounding context too.

This is distracting us from Foucault's point, though. He's not saying "There is no such thing as human nature"; he's saying "Let's study the ways in which people construct knowledge about human nature and see what roles those forms of knowledge play in sustaining power relations". Note that Foucault's point is completely orthogonal to any claims about "real" human nature. --It's like sociology of religion: we can study the role of Catholicism in a society, but whatever we find out is irrevelant to the question, "Are Catholic beliefs true?"

So studying human nature and studying the ideology of human nature are both important endeavors. The latter fascinates me, but I won't begrudge people who want to tackle the former.

Miles



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