30 März 2013

Thoughts on declarationofwar byNorthKorea.

It is possible that shit hit the fan in the future.
Am studying Euclid. Must master Lang., Math., Phys. and understand the works ofWittgenstein and Russell before I die.
If war commences and ends, either result, Unjustpower. One StateCapitalism, another Leninism. Unless the population inNorthKorea overthrows the regime, it will not make any difference.
NewYorkTimes loves this threat. FoxNews. Not that I give a shit. Is the country too insignificant for effort which is started with bullshitpretext?

27 März 2013

Excerpt. Transcript. CurbYourEnthusiasm. TrickOrTreat.

[Whistle of LarryDavid]
What is that?
It's Wagner.
Really?
[Sound of whistle, LarryDavid]
It's called SiegfriedIdyll. He wrote it as a birthdaypresent for his wife, Cosima. She woke up in the morning and she heard this beautiful music and she came out on this landing and he was conducting this orchestra.
That's so beautiful, too.
So romantic.
Now, listen to this. [Whistle of LarryDavid]
Excuse me. Are you jewish? Are you jewish?
You want to check my penis? Is that what you want to do?
The real question is, What were you whistling?
What is the real question?
What were you whistling?
HelloDolly?
It was Wagner.
Was it?
I want to what a jew is whistling Wagner for.
Do you want to know?
One of the great antisemists in the world. You know what you are?
What am I?
You're a selfloathing jew.
Am I? Let me tell you something. I do hate myself but it has nothing to do with being jewish, okay?
No, it doesn't have anything to do with being jewish. There were millions of jews taken to the concentrationcamps, Wagner playing in the background. Hitler's favourite composer.
They got a mentalasylum a couple of blocks down. I suggest you go and check yourself in.
Where is your heritage? Where is your Judaism?
Judaism, where are you? Where are you, Judaism?
// This attitude that you're better.
// muzzle on you, foam in your mouth.
Please, thank you.
That's something you need to think about, all right?
//

Excerpt. Transcript. HalfBaked1998.

Yo, Thurgood, why don't you let your boy, TheGuy, to lend you some money? You certainly let him stay here long enough.
Man, that's Brian's boy. I didn't let him stay here.
I don't know him, man.
Hey, what day is it?
Saturday.
Is it january?
No, man, it's august.
Oh, wow, august. Hey, I couldn't help overhearing you guys. You know, if you want to double your profits, you should rob that lab. Tomorrow's sunday. There'll be no one in there. Just go in and rob the place blind. It'll work, I promise you.
Hey, uh, seeing as how we don't know who you are, are you planning on moving out anytime soon?
Thurgood, why don't you fjust ocus on one thing at a time? I'll be fine. The robbery is what's important now.

Thoughts on Smashed2012.

Fliming completed in19days.
Completely, reallocation and camerahandheld.
Great performance ofMaryElizabethWinstead.
Allegedly, SusanBurke whose autobiographicalexperience was heavily incorporated into screenplay cried at the first screening atSundanceFF as did Winstead.
Screenplay, another disguisedbiography.
They should film something much more at downtownLosAngeles.
Laughed hard at the scene (in(conveniencestore)).
Honest. Great movie.

Thoughts on ClintonHedges.

Saw him yesterdayafternoon at McGovernStellaLink neighborhood library. Was studying frenchvocab.
He is scheduled to volunteer as a "mentor" to children.
Am positive that he dropped out of lawschool, which he was forced to enter because of the wishes of his parents. Wouldn't be surprised if I discover that his mother is a MalignantCunt controlling and manipulative, federaljudge inHarrisCounty.
According to someone, his desire is to become a librarian. He will become happier if he frankly confesses his desire and pursues it.
Wonder how much the restaurant is to completion. Not that I give a shit.
Have more "solid" understanding of germanlanguage. Must study change in variouscases. Latin, also.

21 März 2013

Lyric. RoleModels2008. Beth.

Beth, I hear you calling
But I can't come home right now
Because me and the boys are slaying
And we just can't find the sound
None of these lyrics have anything to do with I want to say
But it's got a pretty melody
And I get to sing your name
That seems pretty cool
Beth, you are so awesome
And I miss you so much
Your beautiful, your positive attitude, and your whispering eyes
We don't have to get married
But I'm still in love with you
We can just be together
like TimRobbins and SusanSarandon
.Good actors.
Tim and Sue
Beth, I'm so lonely without you
I hope you'll be all right
You and me should make up tonight

09 März 2013

Chomsky. ChomskyFoucault Debate. The New Press.


1.     Elders: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the third debate of the International Philosophers' Project. Tonight's debaters are Mr. Michel Foucault, of the College de France, and Mr. Noam Chomsky, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Both philosophers have points in common and points of difference. Perhaps the best way to compare both philosophers would be to see them as tunnellers through a mountain working at opposite sides of the same mountain with different tools, without even knowing if they are working in each other's direction. But both are doing their jobs with quite new ideas, digging as profoundly as possible with an equal commitment in Philosophy as in Politics: enough reasons, it seems to me for us to expect a fascinating debate about Philosophy and about Politics. I intend, therefore, not to lose any time and to start off with a central, perennial question, The question of humannature. All studies of man, from History to Linguistics and Psychology, are faced with the question of whether, in the last instance, we are the product of all kinds of external factors, or if, in spite of our differences, we have something we could call a common humannature, by which we can recognise each other as humanbeings. So my first question is to you, Mr. Chomsky, because you often employ the concept of humannature, in which connection you even use terms like innateideas and innatestructures. Which arguments can you derive from Linguistics to give such a central position to this concept of humannature?
2.     Chomsky: Well, let me begin in a slightly technical way. A person who is interested in studying Languages is faced with a very definite empiricalproblem. He's faced with an organism, a mature, let's say adult, speaker, who has somehow acquired an amazing range of abilities, which enable him in particular to say what he means, to understand what people say to him, to do this in a fashion that I think is proper to call highly creative, that is, much of what a person says in his normal intercourse with others is novel, much of what you hear is new, it doesn't bear any close resemblance to anything in your experience; it's not random novel behaviour, clearly, it's behaviour which is in some sense which is very hard to characterise, appropriate to situations. And in fact it has many of the characteristics of what I think might very well be called creativity. Now, the person who has acquired this intricate and highly articulated and organised collection of abilities-the collection of abilities that we call knowing a language-has been exposed to a certain experience; he has been presented in the course of his lifetime with a certain amount of data, of direct experience with a language. We can investigate the data that's available to this person; having done so, in principle, we're faced with a reasonably clear and well-delineated scientific problem, namely that of accounting for the gap between the really quite small quantity of data, small and rather degenerate in quality, that's presented to the child, and the very highly articulated, highly systematic, profoundly organised resulting Knowledge that he somehow derives from these data. Furthermore, we notice that varying individuals with very varied experience in a particular language nevertheless arrive at systems which are very much congruent to one another. The systems that two speakers of English arrive at on the basis of their very different experiences are congruent in the sense that, over an overwhelming range, what one of them says, the other can understand. Furthermore, even more remarkable, we notice that in a wide range of languages, in fact all that have been studied seriously, there are remarkable limitations on the kind of systems that emerge from the very different kinds of experiences to which people are exposed. There is only one possible explanation, which I have to give in a rather schematic fashion, for this remarkable phenomenon, namely the assumption that the individual himself contributes a good deal, an overwhelming part in fact, of the general schematic structure and perhaps even of the specific content of the Knowledge that he ultimately derives from this very scattered and limited experience. A person who knows a language has acquired that Knowledge because he approached the learning experience with a very explicit and detailed schematism that tells him what kind of language it is that he is being exposed to. That is, to put it rather loosely: the child must begin with the Knowledge, certainly not with the Knowledge that he's hearing English or Dutch or French or something else, but he does start with the Knowledge that he's hearing a humanLanguage of a very narrow and explicit type, that permits a very small range of variation. And it is because he begins with that highly organised and very restrictive schematism, that he is able to make the huge leap from scattered and degenerate data to highly organised Knowledge. And furthermore I should add that we can go a certain distance, I think a rather long distance, towards presenting the properties of this system of Knowledge, that I would call innateLanguage or instinctiveKnowledge, that the child brings to Languagelearning; and also we can go a long way towards describing the system that is mentally represented when he has acquired this Knowledge. I would claim then that this instinctive Knowledge, if you like, this schematism that makes it possible to derive complex and intricate Knowledge on the basis of very partial data, is one fundamental constituent of humannature. In this case I think a fundamental constituent because of the role that Language plays, not merely in communication, but also in expression of thought and interaction between persons; and I assume that in other domains of human intelligence, in other domains of human cognition and behaviour, something of the same sort must be true. Well, this collection, this mass of schematisms, innate organising principles, which guides our social and intellectual and individual behaviour, that's what I mean to refer to by the concept of humannature.
3.     Elders: Well, Mr. Foucault, when I think of your books like The History of Madness and Words and Objects, I get the impression that you are working on a completely different level and with a totally opposite aim and goal. When I think of the word schematism in relation to humannature, I suppose you are trying to elaborate several periods with several schematisms. What do you say to this?
4.     Foucault: Well, if you don't mind I will answer in french, because my english is so poor that I would be ashamed of answering in english. It is true that I mistrust the notion of humannature a little, and for the following reason: I believe that, of the concepts or notions which a Science can use, not all have the same degree of elaboration, and that, in general, they have neither the same function nor the same type of possible use in scientificdiscourse. Let's take the example of Biology. You will find concepts with a classifyingfunction, concepts with a differentiatingfunction, and concepts with an analyticalfunction: some of them enable us to characterise objects, for example, that of tissue. Others to isolate elements, like that of hereditaryfeature; others to fix relations, such as that of reflex. There are, at the same time, elements which play a role in the discourse and in the internal rules of the reasoning practice. But there also exist "peripheral"notions, those by which scientificpractice designates itself, differentiates itself in relation to other practices, delimits its domain of objects, and designates what it considers to be the totality of its future tasks. The notion of life played this role to some extent in Biology during a certain period. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the notion of life was hardly used in studying nature: one classified naturalbeings, whether living or nonliving, in a vast hierarchical tableau which went from minerals to man; the break between the minerals and the plants or animals was relatively undecided; epistemologically, it was only important to fix their positions, once and for all, in an indisputable way. At the end of the eighteenth century, the description and analysis of these naturalbeings showed, through the use of morehighly perfected instruments and the latest techniques, an entire domain of objects, an entire field of relations and processes which have enabled us to define the specificity of Biology in the Knowledge of Nature. Can one say that research into life has finally constituted itself in biologicalScience? Has the concept of life been responsible for the organisation of biologicalKnowledge? I don't think so. It seems to me more likely that the transformations of biologicalKnowledge at the end of the eighteenth century, were demonstrated on one hand by a whole series of new concepts for use in scientific discourse and on the other hand gave rise to a notion like that of life which has enabled us to designate, to delimit and to situate a certain type of scientificdiscourse, among other things. I would say that the notion of life is not a scientificconcept; it has been an epistemological indicator of which the classifying, delimiting and other functions had an effect on scientificdiscussions, and not on what they were talking about. Well, it seems to me that the notion of humannature is of the same type. It was not by studying humannature that linguists discovered the Laws of consonantmutation, or Freud the principles of the analysisofdreams, or culturalanthropologists the structure of myths. In the History of Knowledge, the notion of humannature seems to me mainly to have played the role of an epistemological indicator to designate certain types of discourse in relation to or in opposition to Theology or Biology or History. I would find it difficult to see in this a scientific concept.
5.     Chomsky: Well, in the first place, if we were able to specify in terms of, let's say, neural networks the properties of humancognitivestructure that make it possible for the child to acquire these complicated systems, then I, at least, would have no hesitation in describing those properties as being a constituent element of humannature. That is, there is something biologicallygiven, unchangeable, a foundation for whatever it is that we do with our mentalcapacities in this case. But I would like to pursue a little further the line of development that you outlined, with which, in fact, I entirely agree, about the concept of life as an organising concept in the biologicalSciences. It seems to me that one might speculate, a bit further speculate in this case, since we're talking about the future, not the past, and ask whether the concept of humannature, or of innateorganisingmechanisms or of intrinsicmentalschematism or whatever we want to call it, I don't see much difference between them, but let's call it humannature for shorthand, might not provide for Biology the next peak to try to scale, after having, at least in the minds of the biologists, though one might perhaps question this, already answered to the satisfaction of some the question of what life is. In other words, to be precise, is it possible to give a biologicalexplanation or a physicalexplanation. Is it possible to characterise, in terms of the physical concepts presently available to us, the ability of the child to acquire complexsystems of Knowledge; and furthermore, critically, having acquired such systems of Knowledge, to make use of this Knowledge in the free and creative and remarkably varied ways in which he does? Can we explain in biologicalterms, ultimately in physicalterms, these properties of both acquiring Knowledge in the first place and making use of it in the second? I really see no reason to believe that we can; that is, it's an article of faith on the part of scientists that, since Science has explained many other things, it will also explain this. In a sense, one might say that this is a variant of the bodymindproblem. But, if we look back at the way in which Science has scaled various peaks, and at the way in which the concept of life was finally acquired by Science after having been beyond its vision for a long period, then I think we notice at many points in History, and in fact the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are particularly clear examples, that scientificadvances were possible precisely because the domain of physicalScience was itself enlarged. Classic cases are Newton'sgravitationalforces. To the Cartesians, action at a distance was a mystical concept, and in fact, to Newton himself, it was an occult quality, a mystical entity, which didn't belong within Science. To the common sense of a later generation, action at a distance has been incorporated within Science. What happened was that the notion of body, the notion of the Physical had changed. To a Cartesian, a strictCartesian, if such a person appeared today, it would appear that there is no explanation for the behaviour of the heavenly bodies. Certainly, there is no explanation for the phenomena that are explained in terms of electromagneticforce, let's say. But, by the extension of physicalScience to incorporate hitherto unavailable concepts, entirely new ideas, it became possible to successively build more and more complicated structures that incorporated a larger range of phenomena. For example, it's certainly not true that the PhysicsoftheCartesians is able to explain, let's say, the behaviour of elementary particles in Physics, just as it's unable to explain the concepts of life. Similarly, I think, one might ask the question whether physicalScience as known today, including Biology, incorporates within itself the principles and the concepts that will enable it to give an account of innatehumanintellectualcapacities and, even more profoundly, of the ability to make use of those capacities under conditions of freedom in the way which humans do. I see no particular reason to believe that Biology or Physics now contain those concepts, and it may be that to scale the next peak, to make the next step, they will have to focus on this organising concept, and may very well have to broaden their scope in order to come to grips with it.
6.     Foucault: Yes.
7.     Elders: Perhaps I may try to ask one more specific question leading out of both your answers, because I'm afraid otherwise the debate will become too technical. I have the impression that one of the main differences between you both has its origin in a difference in approach. You, Mr. Foucault, are especially interested in the way Science or scientists function in a certain period, whereas Mr. Chomsky is more interested in the socalled whatquestions: why we possess Language, not just how Language functions, but what's the reason for our having Language. We can try to elucidate this in a more general way. You, Mr. Foucault, are delimiting eighteenthcenturyRationalism, whereas you, Mr. Chomsky, are combining eighteenthcenturyRationalism with notions like freedom and creativity. Perhaps we could illustrate this in a more general way with examples from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
8.     Chomsky: Well, first I should say that I approach classicalRationalism not really as a historian of Science or a historian of Philosophy, but from the rather different point of view of someone who has a certain range of scientific notions and is interested in seeing how, at an earlier stage, people may have been groping towards these notions, possibly without even realising what they were groping towards. So one might say that I'm looking at History not as an antiquarian, who is interested in finding out and giving a preciselyaccurate account of what the thinking of the seventeenth century was. I don't mean to demean that activity, it's just not mine. But rather from the point of view of, let's say, an artlover, who wants to look at the seventeenth century to find in it things that are of particularvalue, and that obtain part of their value in part because of the perspective with which he approaches them. And I think that, without objecting to the other approach, my approach is legitimate, that is, I think it is perfectly possible to go back to earlier stages of scientific thinking on the basis of our present understanding, and to perceive how great thinkers were, within the limitations of their time, groping towards concepts and ideas and insights that they themselves could not be clearly aware of. For example, I think that anyone can do this about his own thought. Without trying to compare oneself to the great thinkers of the past, anyone can.
9.     Elders: Why not?
10. Chomsky: look at.
11. Elders: Why not?
12. Chomsky: All right [laughs], anyone can consider what he now knows and can ask what he knew twenty years ago, and can see that in some unclear fashion he was striving towards something which he can only now understand if he is fortunate. Similarly, I think it's possible to look at the past, without distorting your view, and it is in these terms that I want to look at the seventeenth century. Now, when I look back at the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, what strikes me particularly is the way in which, for example, Descartes and his followers were led to postulate mind as a thinkingsubstance independent of the body. If you look at their reasons for postulating this second substance, mind, thinkingentity, they were that Descartes was able to convince himself, rightly or wrongly, it doesn't matter at the moment, that events in the physicalworld and even much of the behavioural and psychological world, for example a good deal of sensation, were explicable in terms of what he considered to be Physics, wrongly as we now believe, that is, in terms of things bumping into each other and turning and moving and so on. He thought that,  in those terms, in terms of the mechanical principle, he could explain a certain domain of phenomena, and then he observed that there was a range of phenomena that he argued could not be explained in those terms. And he, therefore, postulated a creative principle to account for that domain of phenomena, the principle of mind with its own properties. And then later followers, many who didn't regard themselves as Cartesians, for example, many who regarded themselves as strongly antirationalistic, developed the concept of creation within a system of rule. I won't bother with the details, but my own research into the subject led me ultimately to Wilhelm von Humboldt, who certainly didn't consider himself a Cartesian, but nevertheless in a rather different framework and within a different historical period and with different insight, in a remarkable and ingenious way, which, I think, is of lasting importance, also developed the concept of internalised form, fundamentally the concept of free creation within a system of rule in an effort to come to grips with some of the same difficulties and problems that the Cartesians faced in their terms. Now I believe, and here I would differ from a lot of my colleagues, that the move of Descartes to the postulation of a secondsubstance was a veryscientific move; it was not a metaphysical or an antiscientific move. In fact, in many ways, it was very much like Newton's intellectual move when he postulated action at a distance. He was moving into the domain of the occult, if you like. He was moving into the domain of something that went beyond wellestablishedScience, and was trying to integrate it with wellestablishedScience by developing a theory in which these notions could be properlyclarifiedandexplained. Now, Descartes, I think, made a similar intellectualmove in postulating a secondsubstance. Of course, he failed where Newton succeeded; that is, he was unable to lay the groundwork for a mathematicaltheory of mind, as achieved by Newton and his followers, which laid the groundwork for a mathematicaltheory of physicalentities that incorporated such occult notions as action at a distance, and later electromagneticforces, and so on. But then that poses for us, I think, the task of carrying on and developing this, if you like, mathematical theory of mind; by that, I simply mean a precisely articulated, clearly formulated, abstract theory which will have empirical consequences, which will let us know whether the theory is right or wrong, or on the wrong track or the right track, and, at the same time, will have the properties of mathematicalScience, that is, the properties of rigour and precision and a structure that makes it possible for us to deduce conclusions from assumptions and so on. Now it's from that point of view that I try to look back at the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and to pick out points, which I think are really there, even though I certainly recognise, and in fact would want to insist, that the individuals in question may not have seen it this way.
13. Elders: Mr. Foucault, I suppose you will have a severe criticism of this?
14. Foucault: No, there are just one or two little historical points. I cannot object to the account which you have given in your historical analysis of their reasons and of their modality. But there is one thing one could nevertheless add. When you speak of creativity as conceived by Descartes, I wonder if you don't transpose to Descartes an idea which is to be found among his successors or even certain of his contemporaries. According to Descartes, the mind was not so very creative. It saw, it perceived, it was illuminated by the evidence. Moreover, the problem which Descartes never resolved nor entirely mastered, was that of understanding how one could pass from one of these clearanddistinctideas, one of these intuitions, to another, and what status should be given to the evidence of the passage between them. I can't see exactly either the creation in the moment where the mind grasped the truth for Descartes, or even the real creation in the passage from one truth to another. On the contrary, you can find, I think, at the same time, in Pascal and Leibniz, something which is much closer to what you are looking for, in other words in Pascal and in the whole Augustinianstream of Christianthought, you find this idea of a mind in profundity; of a mind folded back in the intimacy of itself which is touched by a sort of unconsciousness, and which can develop its potentialities by the deepening of the self. And that is why the grammar of Port Royal, to which you refer, is, I think, much more Augustinian than Cartesian. And,  furthermore, you will find in Leibniz something which you will certainly like: the idea that, in the profundity of the mind is incorporated, a whole web of logicalrelations which constitutes, in a certain sense, the rational unconscious of the consciousness, the not yet clarified and visible form of the reason itself, which the monad or the individual develops little by little, and with which he understands the whole world. That's where I would make a verysmall criticism.
15. Elders: Mr. Chomsky, one moment please. I don't think it's a question of making a historical criticism, but of formulating yourownopinions on these quite fundamentalconcepts.
16. Foucault: But one's fundamental opinions can be demonstrated in precise analyses such as these.
17. Elders: Yes, all right. But I remember some passages in your History of Madness, which give a description of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in terms of repression, suppression, and exclusion, while, for Mr. Chomsky, this period is full of creativity and individuality. Why do we have at that period, for the first time, closed psychiatric or insane asylums? I think this is a veryfundamental question.
18. Foucault: On creativity, yes! But I don't know, perhaps Mr. Chomsky would like to speak about it.
19. Elders: No, no, no, please go on. Continue.
20. Foucault: No, I would like to say this: in the historicalstudies that I have been able to make, or have tried to make, I have, without any doubt, given very little room to what you might call the creativity of individuals, to their capacity for creation, to their aptitude for inventing by themselves, for originating concepts, theories or scientific truths by themselves. But I believe that my problem is different to that of Mr. Chomsky. Mr. Chomsky has been fighting against linguisticBehaviourism, which attributed almost nothing to the creativity of thespeakingsubject. Thespeakingsubject was a kind of surface on which information came together little by little, which he afterwards combined. In the field of the History of Science,  or, more generally, the History of Thought, the problem was completely different. The History of Knowledge has tried for a long time to obey two claims. One is the claim of attribution, Each discovery should not only be situated and dated, but should also be attributed to someone. It should have an inventor and someone responsible for it. General or collective phenomena on the other hand, those which by definition can't be attributed, are normally devalued. They are still traditionally described through words like tradition, mentality, modes, and one lets them play the negative role of a brake in relation to the originality of the inventor. In brief, this has to do with the principle of the sovereignty of the subject applied to the History of Knowledge. The other claim is that which no longer allows us to save the subject, but the truth, so that it won't be compromised by History, it is necessary not that the truth constitutes itself in History, but only that it reveals itself in it,  hidden to men's eyes, provisionally inaccessible, sitting in the shadows, it will wait to be unveiled. The History of truth would be essentially its delay, its fall or the disappearance of the obstacles which have impeded it until now from coming to light. The historical dimension of Knowledge is always negative in relation to the truth. It isn't difficult to see how these two claims were adjusted, one to the other: the phenomena of collective order, the commonthought, the prejudices of the myths of a period, constituted the obstacles which the subject of Knowledge had to surmount or to outlive in order to have access finally to the truth; he had to be in an ["]eccentric["]position in order to ["]discover["]. At one level, this seems to be invoking a certain Romanticism about the History of Science: the solitude of the man of truth, the originality which reopened itself onto the original through History and despite it. I think that, more fundamentally, it's a matter of superimposing the theory of Knowledge and the subject of Knowledge on the History of Knowledge. And what if understanding the relation of the subject to the truth were just an effect of Knowledge? What if understanding were a complex, multiple, nonindividualformation, not subjected to the subject, which produced effects of truth? One should then put forward positively this entire dimension which the History of Science has negativised. Analyse the productive capacity of Knowledge as a collective practice; and consequently replace individuals and their Knowledge in the development of a Knowledge which, at a given moment, functions according to certain rules which one can register and describe. You will say to me that all the Marxist historians of Science have been doing this for a long time. But, when one sees how they work with these facts and especially what use they make of the notions of consciousness, of Ideology as opposed to Science, one realises that they are, for the main part, more or less detached from the theory of Knowledge. In any case, what I am anxious about is substituting transformations of the understanding for the History of the discoveries of Knowledge. Therefore, I have, in appearance at least, a completely different attitude to Mr. Chomsky apropos creativity, because, for me, it is a matter of effacing the dilemma of the knowingsubject, while, for him, it is a matter of allowing the dilemma of the speakingsubject to reappear. But, if he has made it reappear, if he has described it, it is because he can do so. The linguists have for a long time now analysed Language as a system with a collectivevalue. The understanding as a collectivetotality of rules, allowing such and such a Knowledge to be produced in a certain period, has hardly been studied until now. Nevertheless, it presents some fairly positive characteristics to the observer. Take, for example, Medicine at the end of the eighteenth century: read twenty medicalworks, it doesn't matter which, of the years1770to1780, then twenty others from the years1820to1830, and I would say, quite at random, that, in fortyorfiftyyears, everything had changed. What one talked about, the way one talked about it, not just the remedies, of course, not just the maladies and their classifications, but the outlook itself. Who was responsible for that? Who was the author of it? It is artificial, I think, to say Bichat, or even to expand a little and to say the first anatomical clinicians. It's a matter of a collective and complex transformation of medical understanding in its practice and its rules. And this transformation is far from a negative phenomenon: it is the suppression of a negativity, the effacement of an obstacle, the disappearance of prejudices, the abandonment of old myths, the retreat of irrational beliefs, and access finally freed to experience and to reason; it represents the application of an entirely new grille, with its choices and exclusions; a new play with its own rules, decisions and limitations, with its own innerLogic, its parameters and its ["]blind alleys["], all of which lead to the modification of the point of origin. And it is, in this functioning, that the understanding itself exists. So, if one studies the History of Knowledge, one sees that there are two broad directions of analysis. According to one, one has to show how, under what conditions and for what reasons, the understanding modifies itself in its formativerules, without passing through an originalinventor discovering the ["]truth["]; and, according to the other, one has to show how the working of the rules of an understanding can produce, in an individual, new and unpublishedKnowledge. Here my aim rejoins, with imperfect methods and in a quite inferior mode, Mr. Chomsky's project. Accounting for the fact that, with a few rules or definite elements, unknowntotalities, never even produced, can be brought to light by individuals. To resolve this problem, Mr. Chomsky has to reintroduce the dilemma of the subject in thefieldofgrammaticalanalysis. To resolve an analogous problem in the field of History with which I am involved, one has to do the opposite, in a way: to introduce the point of view of understanding, of its rules, of its systems, of its transformations of totalities in the game of individual Knowledge. Here and there, the problem of creativity cannot be resolved in the same way, or rather, it can't be formulated in the same terms, given the state of disciplines inside which it is put.
21. Chomsky: I think, in part, we're slightly talking at ["]crosspurposes["], because of a different use of the term, creativity. In fact, I should say that my use of the term creativity is a little bit idiosyncratic, and therefore the onus falls on me in this case, not on you. But, when I speak of creativity, I'm not attributing to the concept the notion of value that is normal when we speak of creativity. That is, when you speak of scientificcreativity, you're speaking, properly, of the achievements of a ["]Newton["]. But in the context in which I have been speaking about creativity, it's a normalhumanact. I'm speaking of the kind of creativity that any child demonstrates when he's able to come to grips with a new situation: to describe it properly, react to it properly, tell [some]one something about it, think about it in a new fashion for him, and so on. I think it's appropriate to call those acts creative, but, of course, without thinking of those acts as being the acts of a ["]Newton["]. In fact, it may very well be true that creativity in theArts or theSciences, that which goes beyond the normal, may really involve properties of, well, I would also say of humannature, which may not exist fully developed in the mass of mankind, and may not constitute part of the normal creativity of everydaylife. Now, my belief is that Science can look forward to the problem of normal creativity as a topic that it can perhaps incorporate within itself. But I don't believe, and I suspect you will agree, that Science can look forward, at least in the reasonable future, to coming to grips with true creativity, the achievements of the greatartist and the greatscientist. It has no hope of accommodating these unique phenomena within its grasp. It's the lower levels of creativity that I've been speaking of. Now, as far as what you say about the History of Science is concerned, I think that's correct, and illuminating,  and particularly relevant, in fact, to the kinds of enterprise that I see lying before us in Psychology, and Linguistics, and the Philosophy of the mind. That is, I think there are certain topics that have been repressed or put aside during the scientificadvances of the past few centuries. For example, this concern with lowlevelcreativity that I'm referring to was really present in Descartes also. For example, when he speaks of the difference between a parrot, who can mimic what is said, and a human, who can say new things that are appropriate to the situation, and, when he specifies that as being the distinctive property that designates the limits of Physics and carries us into the Science of the mind, to use modernterms, I think he really is referring to the kind of creativity that I have in mind. And I quite agree with your comments about the other sources of such notions. Well, these concepts, even, in fact, the whole notion of the organisationofsentencestructure, were put aside during the period of great advances that followed from SirWilliamJones and others and the development of comparativePhilology as a whole. But now, I think, we can go beyond that period when it was necessary to forget and to pretend that these phenomena did not exist and to turn to something else. In this period of comparativePhilology and also, in my view, structuralLinguistics, and much of behaviouralPsychology, and in fact much of what grows out of the empiricist tradition in the study of mind and behaviour, it is possible to put aside those limitations and bring into our consideration just those topics that animated a good deal of the thinking and speculation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and to incorporate them within a much broader and I think deeper Science of man that will give a fuller role, though it is certainly not expected to give a complete understanding to such notions as innovation and creativity and freedom and the production of new entities, new elements of thought and behaviour within some system of rule and schematism. Those are concepts that I think we can come to grips with.
22. Elders: Well, may I, first of all, ask you not to make your answers so lengthy? [Foucault laughs.] When you discuss creativity and freedom, I think that one of the misunderstandings, if any misunderstandings have arisen, has to do with the fact that Mr. Chomsky is starting from a limited number of rules with infinite possibilities of application, whereas you, Mr. Foucault, are stressing the inevitability of the grille of our historical and psychological determinisms, which also applies to the way in which we discover new ideas. Perhaps we can sort this out, not by analysing the scientificprocess, but just by analysing our own thought process. When you discover a new fundamentalidea, Mr. Foucault, do you believe, that, as far as your own personal creativity is concerned, something is happening that makes you feel that you are being liberated, that something new has been developed? Perhaps afterwards you discover that it was not so new. But do you yourself believe that, within your own personality, creativity, and freedom are working together or not?
23. Foucault: Oh, you know, I don't believe that the problem of personalexperience is so very important.
24. Elders: Why not?
25. Foucault: In a question like this. No, I believe that there is, in reality, quite a strong similarity between what Mr. Chomsky said and what I tried to show, in other words, there exist, in fact, only possiblecreations, possibleinnovations. One can only, in terms of Language or of Knowledge, produce something new by putting into play a certain number of rules which will define the acceptability or the grammaticality of these statements, or which will define, in the case of Knowledge, the scientific character of the statements. Thus, we can roughly say that linguists before Mr. Chomsky mainly insisted on the rules of construction of statements and less on the innovation represented by every new statement, or the hearing of a new statement. And in the History of Science or in the History of Thought, we placed more emphasis on individual creation, and we had kept aside and ["]left in the shadows["] these communalgeneralrules, which obscurely manifest themselves through every scientificdiscovery, every scientificinvention, and even every philosophicalinnovation. And to that degree, when I no doubt wrongly believe that I am saying something new, I am nevertheless conscious of the fact that in my statement there are rules at work, not only linguisticrules, but also epistemologicalrules, and those rules characterise contemporaryKnowledge.
26. Chomsky: Well, perhaps I can try to react to those comments within my own framework in a way which will maybe shed some light on this. Let's think again of a humanchild, who has, in his mind, some schematism that determines the kind of language he can learn. Okay. And then, given experience, he very quickly knows the language, of which this experience is a part, or in which it is included. Now this is a normalact; that is, it's an act of normalintelligence, [averageintelligence] but it's a highlycreative act. If a Martian were to look at this process of acquiring this vast and complicated and intricate system of Knowledge on the basis of this ridiculouslysmall quantityofdata, he would think of it as an immense act of inventionandcreation. In fact, a Martian would, I think, consider it as much of an achievement as the invention of, let's say, any aspect of a physicaltheory on the basis of the data that was presented to the physicist. However, if this hypotheticalMartian were then to observe that every normalhumanchild immediately carries out this creative act and they all do it in the same way and without any difficulty, whereas it takes centuries of genius to slowly carry out the creative act of going from evidence to a scientifictheory, then this Martian would, if he were rational, conclude that the structure of the Knowledge that is acquired in the case of Language is basically internal to the humanmind, whereas the structure of Physics is not, in so direct a way, internal to the human mind. Our minds are not constructed so that, when we look at the phenomena of the world theoreticalPhysics comes forth, and we write it down and produce it. That's not the way our minds are constructed. Nevertheless, I think there is a possible point of connection and it might be useful to elaborate it, that is, how is it that we are able to construct any kind of scientifictheory at all? How is it that, given a small amount of data, it's possible for various scientists, for various geniuses even, over a long period of time, to arrive at some kind of a theory, at least in some cases, that is more or less profound and moreorless empirically adequate? This is a remarkable fact. And, in fact, if it were not the case that these scientists, including the geniuses, were beginning with a very narrow limitation on the class of possible scientifictheories, if they didn't have built into their minds somehow an obviously unconscious specification of what is a possible scientifictheory, then this inductive["]leap["] would certainly be quite impossible, just as if each child did not have built into his mind the concept of humanLanguage in a very restricted way, then the inductive leap from data to Knowledge of aLanguage would be impossible. So even though the process of, let's say, deriving knowledge ofPhysics from data is far more complex, far more difficult for an organism such as ours[HomoSapiens], far more ["]drawn out["] in time, requiring intervention of genius, andsoonandsoforth, nevertheless, in a certain sense, the achievement of discovering physicalScience or Biology or whatever you like, is based on something rather similar to the achievement of the normalchild in discovering the structure of his language: that is, it must be achieved on the basis of an initial limitation, an initial restriction on the class of possible theories. If you didn't begin by knowing that only certain things are possible theories, then no induction would be possible at all. You could go from data anywhere, in any direction. And the fact that Science converges and progresses itself shows us that such initial limitations and structures exist. If we really want to develop a theory of scientificcreation, or, for that matter, artisticcreation, I think we have to focus attention precisely on that setofconditions that, on the one hand, delimits and restricts the scope of our possibleKnowledge, while, at the same time, permitting the inductive["]leap["] to complicatedsystems of Knowledge on the basis of a small amount of data. That, it seems to me, would be the way to progress towards a theory of scientificcreativity, or, in fact, towards any question of Epistemology.
27. Elders: Well, I think if we take this point of the initial limitation with all its creative possibilities, I have the impression that, for Mr. Chomsky, rules and freedom are not opposed to each other, but more or less imply each other. Whereas I get the impression that it is just the reverse for you, Mr. Foucault. What are your reasons for putting it the opposite way, for this really is a very fundamental point in the debate, and I hope we can elaborate it. To formulate the same problem in other terms: Can you think of universalKnowledge without any form of repression? [Important question.]
28. Foucault: Well, in what Mr. Chomsky has just said there is something which seems to me to create a little difficulty, perhaps I understood it badly. I believe that you have been talking about a limited number of possibilities in the order of a scientifictheory. That is true if you limit yourself to a fairly short period of time whatever it may be. But if you consider a longer period, it seems to me that what is striking is the proliferation of possibilities by divergences. For a long time, the idea has existed that the Sciences, Knowledge, followed a certain line of progress, obeying the principle of growth, and the principle of the convergence of all these kinds of Knowledge. And yet, when one sees how the european understanding, which turned out to be a worldwide and universal understanding in a historical and geographical sense, developed, can one say that there has been growth? I, myself, would say that it has been much more a matter of transformation. Take, as an example, animal and plant classifications. How often have they not been rewritten since theMiddleAges according to completely different rules: by symbolism, by NaturalHistory, by comparativeAnatomy, by theTheoryOfEvolution. Each time this rewriting makes the Knowledge completely different in its functions, in its economy, in its internal relations. You have there a principle of divergence, much more than one of growth. I would much rather say that there are many different ways of making possible simultaneously a few types of Knowledge. There is, therefore, from a certain point of view, always an excess of data in relation to possible systems in a given period, which causes them to be experienced within their boundaries, even in their deficiency, which means that one fails to realise their creativity; and from another point of view, that of the historian, there is an excess, a proliferation of systems for a small amount of data, from which originates the widespread idea that it is the discovery of new facts which determines movement in the History of Science.
29. Chomsky: Here, perhaps again, let me try to synthesise a bit. I agree with your conception of scientificprogress; that is, I don't think that scientificprogress is simply a matter of the accumulated addition of newKnowledge and the absorption of newtheories, and so on. Rather I think that it has this sort of ["]jagged pattern["] that you describe, forgetting certain problems and ["]leaping["] to new theories. .
30. Foucault: And transforming the same Knowledge.
31. Chomsky: Right. But I think that one can perhaps hazard an explanation for that. Oversimplifying grossly, I really don't mean what I'm going to say now literally, one might suppose that the following general lines of an explanation are accurate: it is as if, as human beings of a particular biologicallygivenorganisation, we have in our heads, to start with, a certain set of possible intellectual structures, possible Sciences, okay? Now, in the lucky event that some aspect of reality happens to have the character of one of these structures in our mind, then we have a Science: that is to say that, fortunately, the structure of our mind and the structure of some aspect of reality coincide sufficiently so that we develop an intelligibleScience. It is precisely this initial limitation in our minds to a certain kind of possibleScience which provides the tremendous richness and creativity of scientificKnowledge. It is important to stress, and this has to do with your point about limitation and freedom, that were it not for these limitations, we would not have the creative act of going from a little bit of Knowledge, a little bit of experience, to a rich and highly articulated and complicated array of Knowledge. Because, if anything could be possible, then nothing would be possible. But it is precisely because of this property of our minds, which in detail we don't understand, but which, I think, in a general way, we can begin to perceive, which presents us with certain possible intelligiblestructures, and which in the course of History and insight and experience begin to come into focus or ["]fall out["] of focus and so on; it is precisely because of this property of our minds that the progress of Science, I think, has this erratic and ["]jagged["] character that you describe. That doesn't mean that everything is ultimately going to fall within the domain of Science. Personally I believe that many of the things we would like to understand, and maybe the things we would most like to understand, such as the nature of man, or the nature of a decentsociety, or lots of other things, might really fall outside the scope of possiblehumanScience.
32. Elders: Well, I think that we are confronted again with the question of the innerrelation between limitation and freedom. Do you agree, Mr. Foucault, with the statement about the combination of limitation, fundamental limitation? .
33. Foucault: It is not a matter of combination. Only creativity is possible in putting into play of a system of rules. It is not a mixture of order and freedom. Where perhaps I don't completely agree with Mr. Chomsky, is when he places the principle of these regularities, in a way, in the interior of the mind or of humannature. If it is a matter of whether these rules are effectively put to work by the humanmind, all right; all right, too, if it is a question of whether the historian and the linguist can think it in their turn; it is all right also to say that these rules should allow us to realise what is said or thought by these individuals. But to say that these regularities are connected, as conditions of existence, to the humanmind or itsnature, is difficult for me to accept: it seems to me that one must, before reaching that point, and in any case, I am talking only about the understanding, replace it in the field of other humanpractices, such as Economics, Technology, Politics, Sociology, which can serve them as conditions of formation, of models, of place, of apparition, etc. I would like to know whether one cannot discover the system of regularity, of constraint, which makes Science possible, somewhere else, even outside the human mind, in social forms, in the relations of production, in the classstruggles, etc. For example, the fact that, at a certain time, madness became an object for scientificstudy, and an object of Knowledge in theWest, seems to me to be linked to a particular economic and social situation. Perhaps the point of difference between Mr. Chomsky and myself is that, when he speaks of Science, he probably thinks of the formalorganisation of Knowledge, whereas I am speaking of Knowledge itself, that is to say, I think of the content of variousKnowledges which is dispersed into a particular society, permeates through that society, and asserts itself as the foundation for Education, for theories, for practices, etc.
34. Elders: But what does this theory of Knowledge mean for your theme of the death of man, or the end of the period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?
35. Foucault: But this doesn't have any relation to what we are talking about.
36. Elders: I don't know, because I was trying to apply what you have said to your anthropologicalnotion. You have already refused to speak about your own creativity and freedom, haven't you? Well, I'm wondering what are the psychological reasons for this.
37. Foucault: Well, you can wonder about it, but I can't help that.
38. Elders: Ah, well.
39. Foucault: I am not wondering about it.
40. Elders: But what are the objectivereasons, in relation to your conception of understanding, of Knowledge, of Science, for refusing to answer these ["]personalquestions["]? When there is a problem for you to answer, what are your reasons for making a problem out of a personal question?
41. Foucault: No, I'm not making a problem out of a personal question, I make of a personal question an absence of a problem. Let me take a very simple example, which I will not analyse, but which is this: How was it possible that men began, at the end of the eighteenth century, for the first time in the History of Western thought and of Western Knowledge, to open up the corpses of people in order to know what was the source, the origin, the anatomical needle, of the particular malady which was responsible for their deaths? The idea seems simple enough. Well, four or five thousand years of medicine in theWest were needed before we had the idea of looking for the cause of the malady in the lesion of a corpse. [Foucault concentrates on influence obscure and opressive of socialinstitutions.] If you tried to explain this by the personality of Bichat, I believe that would be without interest. If, on the contrary, you tried to establish the place of disease and of death in society at the end of the eighteenth century, and what interest industrialsociety effectively had in quadrupling the entire population in order to expand and develop itself, as a result of which medicalsurveys of society were made, bighospitals were opened, etc. If you try to find out how medicalKnowledge became institutionalised in that period, how its relations with other kinds of Knowledge were ordered, well, then you could see how the relationship between [among] disease, the hospitalised, illperson, the corpse, and pathologicalAnatomy were made possible. Here is, I believe, a form of analysis which I don't say is new, but which in any case has been much too neglected; and personal events have almost nothing to do with it.
42. Elders: Yes, but nevertheless it would have been very interesting for us to know a little bit more about your arguments to refute this. Could you, Mr. Chomsky, and as far as I'm concerned, it's my last question about this philosophical part of the debate. Give your ideas about, for example, the way theSocialSciences are working? I'm thinking here especially about your severe attacks on Behaviourism. And perhaps you could even explain a little the way Mr. Foucault is now working in a more or less behaviouristic way.
43. Chomsky: I would like to depart from your injunction very briefly, just to make one comment about what Mr. Foucault just said. I think that illustrates very nicely the way in which we're digging into the mountain from opposite directions, to use your original image. That is, I think that an act of scientificcreation depends on two facts: one, some intrinsicproperty of the mind, another, some set of social and intellectual conditions that exist. And it is not a question, as I see it, of which of these we should study. Rather we will understand scientificdiscovery, and similarly any other kind of discovery, when we know what these factors are and can therefore explain how they interact in a particular fashion. My particular interest, in this connection at least, is with the intrinsiccapacities of the mind; yours, as you say, is in the particular arrangement of social and economic and other conditions.
44. Foucault: But I don't believe that difference is connected to our characters, because, at this moment, it would make Mr. Elders right, and he must not be right.
45. Chomsky: No, I agree, and.
46. Foucault: It's connected to the state of Knowledge, of knowing, in which we are working. TheLinguistics with which you have been familiar, and which you have succeeded in transforming, excluded the importance of the creativesubject, of the creative speakingsubject, while the History of Science such as it existed when people of my generation were starting to work, on the contrary, exalted individual creativity.
47. Chomsky: Yes.
48. Foucault: and put aside these collective rules.
49. Chomsky: Yes, yes.
50. Questioner: Ah.
51. Elders: Yes, please go on.
52. Questioner: It goes a bit back in your discussion, but what I should like to know, Mr. Chomsky, is this: you suppose a basic system of what must be in a way elementary limitations that are present in what you call humannature, to what extent do you think these are subject to historical change? Do you think, for instance, that they have changed substantially since, let's say, the seventeenth century? In that case, you could perhaps connect this with the ideas of Mr. Foucault?
53. Chomsky: Well, I think that, as a matter of biological and anthropological fact, the nature of humanintelligence certainly has not changed in any substantial way, at least since the seventeenth century, or probably since CroMagnonman. That is, I think that the fundamental properties of ourintelligence, those that are within the domain of what we are discussing tonight, are certainly very ancient, and that, if you took a man from fivethousand or maybe twentythousandyears ago, and placed him as a child within today's society, he would learn what everyone else learns, and he would be a genius or a fool or something else, but he wouldn't be fundamentally different. But, of course, the level of acquiredKnowledge changes, socialconditions change, those conditions that permit a person to think freely and break through the bonds of, let's say, superstitious constraint. And as those conditions change, a given human intelligence will progress to new forms of creation. In fact, this relates very closely to the last question that Mr. Elders put, if I can perhaps say a word about that. Take BehaviouralScience, and think of it in these contexts. It seems to me that the fundamental property of Behaviourism, which is in a way suggested by the odd term, BehaviouralScience, is that it is a negation of the possibility of developing a scientifictheory, that is, what defines Behaviourism is the very curious and selfdestructive assumption that you are not permitted to create an interesting theory. [The same is true in Psychoanalysis.] If Physics, for example, had made the assumption that you have to keep to phenomena and their arrangement and such things, we would be doing BabylonianAstronomy today. Fortunately, physicists never made this ridiculous, extraneous assumption, which has its own historical reasons and had to do with all sorts of curious facts about the historical context in which Behaviourism evolved. But looking at it purely intellectually, Behaviourism is the arbitrary insistence that one must not create a scientifictheory of humanbehaviour, rather one must deal directly with phenomena and their interrelation, and no more. Something which is totally impossible in any other domain, and I assume impossible in the domain of humanintelligence or humanbehaviour as well. So, in this sense, I don't think that Behaviourism is a Science. Here is a case in point of just the kind of thing that you mentioned and that Mr. Foucault is discussing, Under certain historical circumstances, for example, those in which experimentalPsychology developed, it was, for some reason which I won't go into, interesting and maybe important to impose some very strange limitations on the kind of scientifictheoryconstruction that was permitted, and those verystrange limitations are known as Behaviourism. Well, it has long since run its course, I think. Whatever value it may have had in 1880, it has no function today except constraining and limiting scientificinquiry and should therefore simply be dispensed with, in the same way one would dispense with a physicist who said: you're not allowed to develop a generalphysicaltheory, you're only allowed to plot the motions of the planets and make up more epicycles, andsoonandsoforth. One forgets about that and puts it aside. Similarly one should put aside the very curious restrictions that define Behaviourism. Restrictions which are, as I said before, very much suggested by the term, BehaviouralScience, itself. We can agree, perhaps, that behaviour, in some broad sense, constitutes the data for the Science of man. But to define a Science by its data would be to define Physics as the theory of meterreadings. And, if a physicist were to say, Yes, I'm involved in ["]meterreadingScience["], we could be pretty sure that he was not going to get very far. They might talk about meterreadings and correlations between them and such things, but they wouldn't ever create physicaltheory. And so the term itself is symptomatic of the disease in this case. We should understand the historical context in which these curious limitations developed, and having understood them, I believe, discard them and proceed in theScience of man as we would in any other domain, that is, by discarding entirely Behaviourism and, in fact, in my view, the entireEmpiricisttradition from which it evolved.
54. Questioner: So you are not willing to link your theory about innatelimitations, with Mr. Foucault's theory of the grille. There might be a certain connection. You see, Mr. Foucault says that an upsurge of creativity in a certain direction automatically removes Knowledge in another direction, by a system of grilles. Well, if you had a changing system of limitations, this might be connected.
55. Chomsky: Well, the reason for what he describes, I think, is different. Again, I'm oversimplifying. We have more possibleSciences available intellectually. When we try out those intellectual constructions in a changing world of fact, we will not find cumulative growth. What we will find are strange["]leaps["]. Here is a domain of phenomena, a certain Science applies very nicely. Now, slightly broaden the range of phenomena, then anotherScience, which is very different, happens to apply very beautifully, perhaps leaving out some of these other phenomena. Okay, that's scientificprogress and that leads to the omission or forgetting of certain domains. But I think the reason for this is precisely this set of principles, which unfortunately, we don't know, which makes the whole discussion rather abstract, which defines for us what is a possible intellectualstructure, a possible["]deepScience["], if you like.
56. Elders: Well, let's move over now to the second part of the discussion, to Politics. First of all, I would like to ask Mr. Foucault why he is so interested in Politics, because he told me that in fact he likes Politics much more than Philosophy.
57. Foucault: I've never concerned myself, in any case, with Philosophy. [He was a historian, not a scientist or a philosopher.] But that is not a problem. Your question is, Why am I so interested in Politics? But if I were to answer you very simply, I would say this: why shouldn't I be interested? That is to say, what blindness, what deafness, what density of Ideology would have to weigh me down to prevent me from being interested in what is probably the most crucial subject to our existence, that is to say, the society in which we live, the economic relations within which it functions, and the system of power which defines the regular forms, and the regular permissions and prohibitions of our conduct. The essence of our life consists, after all, of the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves. So I can't answer the question of why I should be interested; I could only answer it by asking why shouldn't I be interested?
58. Elders: You are obliged to be interested, isn't that so?
59. Foucault: Yes, at least, there isn't anything odd here which is worth question or answer. Not to be interested in Politics, that's what constitutes a problem. So instead of asking me, you should ask someone who is not interested in Politics and then your question would be wellfounded, and you would have the right to say, Why, damn it, are you not interested? [They laugh and the audience laughs.]
60. Elders: Well, yes, perhaps. Mr. Chomsky, we are all very interested to know your political objectives, especially in relation to your wellknown AnarchoSyndicalism or, as you formulated it, libertarianSocialism. What are the most important goals of your libertarianSocialism?
61. Chomsky: I'll overcome the urge to answer the earlier very interesting question that you asked me and turn to this one. Let me begin by referring to something that we have already discussed, that is, if it is correct, as I believe it is, that a fundamental element of humannature is the need for creative work, for creative inquiry, for free creation without the arbitrary limiting effect of coercive institutions. Then, of course, it will follow that a decent society should maximise the possibilities for this fundamental humancharacteristic to be realised. That means trying to overcome the elements of repression and oppression and destruction and coercion that exist in any existing society, ours for example, as a historical residue. Now, any form of coercion or repression, any form of autocraticcontrol of some domain of existence, let's say, privateownership of capital or Statecontrol of some aspects of humanlife, any such autocraticrestriction on some area of humanendeavour, can be justified, if at all, only in terms of the need for subsistence [noun, the action or fact of maintaining or supporting oneself at a minimum level], or the need for survival, or the need for defence against some horrible fate, or something of that sort. It cannot be justified intrinsically. Rather it must be overcome and eliminated. And I think that, at least in the technologicallyadvancedsocieties of theWest we are now certainly in a position where meaninglessdrudgery [noun, hard, menial, or dull work] can very largely be eliminated, and to the marginal extent that it's necessary, can be shared among the population, where centralised autocraticcontrol of, in the first place, economicinstitutions, by which I mean either privateCapitalism, or StateTotalitarianism, or the various mixedforms of StateCapitalism that exist here and there, has become a destructive vestige of History. They are all vestiges that have to be overthrown, eliminated in favour of direct participation in the form of workers's councils or other freeassociations that individuals will constitute themselves for the purpose of their socialexistence and their productivelabour. Now, a federated, decentralised system of freeassociations, incorporating economic as well as other socialinstitutions, would be what I refer to as AnarchoSyndicalism and it seems to me that this is the appropriate form of socialorganisation for an advancedtechnologicalsociety, in which humanbeings do not have to be forced into the position of tools, of cogs in the machine. There is no longer any social necessity for humanbeings to be treated as mechanicalelements in the productiveprocess; that can be overcome and we must overcome it by a society of freedom and freeassociation, in which the creativeurge that I consider intrinsic to humannature, will in fact be able to realise itself in whatever way it will. And again, like Mr. Foucault, I don't see how any human being can fail to be interested in this question.
62. Elders: Do you believe, Mr. Foucault, that we can call our societies in any way democratic, after listening to this statement from Mr. Chomsky?
63. Foucault: No, I don't have the least belief that one could consider our society democratic. [Laughs.] If one understands, byDemocracy, the effective exercise of power by a population which is neither divided nor hierarchically ordered in classes, it is quite clear that we are very far from Democracy. It is only too clear that we are living under a regime of a dictatorship of class, of a power of class which imposes itself by violence even when the instruments of this violence are institutional and constitutional. And to that degree, there isn't any question of Democracy for us. Well. When you asked me why I was interested in Politics, I refused to answer because it seemed evident to me, but perhaps your question was, How am I interested in it? And had you asked me that question, and, in a certain sense, I could say you have, I would say to you that I am much less advanced in my way. I go much less far than Mr. Chomsky, that is to say, I admit to not being able to define, nor for even stronger reasons to propose, an ideal social model for the functioning of our societyscientificortechnological. On the other hand, one of the tasks that seems immediate and urgent to me, over and above anything else, is this: that we should indicate and show up, even where they are hidden, all the relationships of politicalpower which actually control the socialbody and oppress or repress it. What I want to say is this: it is the custom, at least in europeansociety, to consider that power is localised in the hands of theGovernment and that it is exercised through a certain number of particular institutions, such as the administration, the police, the army, and the apparatus of theState. One knows that all these institutions are made to elaborate and to transmit a certain number of decisions, in the name of the nation or of theState, to have them applied and to punish those who don't obey. But I believe that politicalpower also exercises itself through the mediation of a certain number of institutions which look as if they have nothing in common with the politicalpower, and as if they are independent of it, while they are not. One knows this in relation to the family, and one knows that the university and in a general way, allschoolsystems, which appear simply to disseminate Knowledge, are made to maintain a certain socialclass in power, and to exclude the instruments of power of another socialclass. Institutions of Knowledge, of foresight and care, such as Medicine, also help to support the politicalpower. It's also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases, related to Psychiatry. It seems to me that the real politicaltask in a society, such as ours, is to criticise the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticise and attack them in such a manner that the politicalviolence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them. This critique and this fight seem essential to me for different reasons: firstly, because politicalpower goes much deeper than one suspects; there are centres and invisible, littleknown points of support, its true resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn't expect it. Probably it's insufficient to say that behind the Governments, behind the apparatus of theState, there is the dominant class. One must locate the point of activity, the places and forms in which its domination is exercised. And, because this domination is not simply the expression in political terms of economicexploitation, it is its instrument and, to a large extent, the condition which makes it possible; the suppression of the one is achieved through the exhaustive discernment of the other. Well, if one fails to recognise these points of support of classpower, one risks allowing them to continue to exist; and to see this classpower reconstitute itself even after an apparent revolutionary process.
64. Chomsky: I would certainly agree with that, not only in theory but also in action. That is, there are two intellectualtasks: one, and the one that I was discussing, is to try to create the vision of a futureJustsociety, that is, to create, if you like, a humanistic social theory that is based, if possible, on some firm and humane concept of the humanessenceorhumannature. That's one task. Another task is to understand veryclearly the nature of power and oppression and terror and destruction in our own society. And that certainly includes the institutions you mentioned, as well as the central institutions of any industrialsociety, namely the economic,commercialandfinancialinstitutions and in particular, in the coming period, the great multinationalcorporations, which are not very far from us physically tonight. [i.e. Philips at Eindhoven] Those are the basic institutions of oppression and coercion and autocraticrule that appear to be neutral despite everything. They say, Well, after all, we're subject to Democracy of Marketplace, and that must be understood precisely in terms of their autocratic power, including the particular form of autocratic control that comes from the domination of market forces in an inegalitarian society. Surely we must understand these facts, and not only understand them but combat them. And in fact, as far as one's own political involvements are concerned, in which one spends the majority of one's energy and effort, it seems to me that they must certainly be in that area. I don't want to get personal about it, but my own certainly are in that area, and I assume everyone's are. Still, I think it would be a great shame to put aside entirely the somewhat more abstract and philosophical, if you like, task of trying to draw the connections between a concept of humannature that gives full scope to freedom, and dignity, and creativity, and other fundamentalhumancharacteristics, and to relate that to some notion of socialstructure in which those properties could be realised and in which meaningful humanlife could take place. And, in fact, if we are thinking of socialtransformation or socialrevolution, though it would be absurd, of course, to try to sketch out in detail the goal that we are hoping to reach, still we should know something about where we think we are going, and such a theory may tell it to us.
65. Foucault: Yes, but then isn't there a danger here? If you say that a certain humannature exists, that this humannature has not been given in actual society the rights and the possibilities which allow it to realise itself. That's really what you have said, I believe. And if one admits that, doesn't one risk defining this humannature which is at the same time ideal and real, and has been hidden and repressed until now, in terms borrowed from our society, from our civilisation, from our culture? I will take an example by greatly simplifying it. TheSocialism of a certain period, at the end of the nineteenth century, and the beginning of the twentieth century, admitted that, in effect, in capitalistsocieties, man hadn't realised the full potential for his development and selfrealisation, that humannature was effectively alienated in the capitalistsystem. And it dreamed of an ultimately liberated humannature. What model did it use to conceive, project, and eventually realise that humannature? It was, in fact, the bourgeoismodel. It considered that an alienated society was a society which, for example, gave pride of place to the benefit of all, to a sexuality of a bourgeois type, to a family of a bourgeois type, to an Æsthetic of a bourgeois type. And it is moreover very true that this has happened in theSovietUnion and in the popularDemocracies. A kind of society has been reconstituted which has been transposed from the bourgeois society of the nineteenth century. The universalisation of the model of the bourgeois has been the utopia which has animated the constitution ofSovietsociety. The result is that you too realised, I think, that it is difficult to say exactly what humannature is. Isn't there a risk that we will be led into error? MaoTseTung spoke of bourgeois humannature and proletarian humannature, and he considers that they are not the same thing.
66. Chomsky: Well, you see, I think, in the intellectualdomain of politicalaction, that is, the domain of trying to construct a vision of a Just and free society on the basis of some notion of humannature. In that domain, we face the very same problem that we face in immediate politicalaction, namely, that of being impelled to do something, because the problems are so great, and yet knowing that whatever we do is on the basis of a very partial understanding of the social realities, and the human realities in this case. For example, to be quite concrete, a lot of my own activity really has to do with theVietnamWar, and good deal of my own energy goes into civildisobedience. Well, civildisobedience in theUnitedStates is an action undertaken in the face of great, considerable uncertainties about its effects. For example, it threatens the socialorder in ways which might, one might argue, bring about Fascism, and that would be a very bad for America, for Vietnam, for Holland, and for everyone else. You know, if a great Leviathan like the United States were really to become fascist, a lot of problems would result. So that is one danger in undertaking this concrete act. On the other hand, there is a great danger in not undertaking it, namely, if you don't undertake it, the society of IndoChina will be torn to shreds by Americanpower. And in the face of these uncertainties, one has to choose a course of action. Well, similarly in the intellectual domain, one is faced with the uncertainties that you correctly pose. Our concept of humannature is certainly limited. It's partial, socially conditioned, constrained by our own characterdefects and the limitations of the intellectualculture in which we exist. Yet, at the same time, it is of critical importance that we know what impossible goals we're trying to achieve, if we hope to achieve some of the possible goals. And that means that we have to be bold enough to speculate and create socialtheories on the basis of partial Knowledge, while remaining very open to the strong possibility, and, in fact, overwhelming probability, that, at least, in some respects we're very far off the mark.
67. Elders: Well, perhaps it would be interesting to delve a little deeper into this problem of strategy. I suppose that what you call civildisobedience is probably the same as what we call extraparliamentaryaction?
68. Chomsky: No, I think it goes beyond that. Extraparliamentaryaction would include, let's say, a masslegaldemonstration, but civildisobedience is narrower than all extraparliamentaryaction, in that it means direct defiance of what is alleged, incorrectly in my view, by theState to be Law.
69. Elders: So, for example, in the case of Holland, we had something like a population census. One was obliged to answer questions on official forms. You would call it civildisobedience if one refused to fill in the forms?
70. Chomsky: Right. I would be a little bit careful about that, because, going back to a very important point that Mr. Foucault made, one does not necessarily allow theState to define what is legal. Now, theState has the power to enforce a certain concept of what is legal, but power doesn't imply Justice or even Correctness, so that theState may define something as civildisobedience and may be wrong in doing so. For example, in theUnitedStates, theState defines it as civildisobedience to, let's say, derail an ammunitiontrain [a train which contains ammunition] that's going toVietnam, and theState is wrong in defining that as civildisobedience, because it's legal and proper and should be done. It's proper to carry out actions that will prevent the criminalacts of theState, just as it is proper to violate a trafficordinance in order to prevent a murder. If I had stopped my car in front of a traffic light which was red, and then I drove through the redtrafficlight to prevent somebody from, let's say, ["]machinegunning["] a group of people, of course that's not an illegal act, it's an appropriate and proper action. No sane judge would convict you for such an action. Similarly, a good deal of what theStateauthorities define as civildisobedience is not really civildisobedience. In fact, it's legal, obligatory behaviour in violation of the commands of theState, which may or may not be legal commands. So one has to be rather careful about calling things illegal, I think.
71. Foucault: Yes, but I would like to ask you a question. When, in theUnitedStates, you commit an illegal act, do you justify it in terms of Justice or of a superiorlegality, or do you justify it by the necessity of the classstruggle, which is, at the present time,  essential for the proletariat in their struggle against the rulingclass?
72. Chomsky: Well, here I would like to take the point of view which is taken by the USSupremeCourt and probably other courts in such circumstances, that is, to try to settle the issue on the narrowest possible grounds. I would think that ultimately it would make very good sense, in many cases, to act against the legalinstitutions of a given society, if, in so doing, you're striking at the sources of power and oppression in that society. However, to a very large extent, existing Law represents certain humanvalues, which are decent humanvalues, and existing Law, correctly interpreted, permits much of what theState commands you not to do. And I think it's important to exploit the fact. It's important to exploit the areas of Law which are properly formulated and then perhaps to act directly against those areas of Law which simply ratify some system of power.
73. Foucault: But, but, I, I.
74. Chomsky: Let me get.
75. Foucault: My question, my question was this, When you commit a clearly illegal act.
76. Chomsky: Which I regard as illegal, not just theState.
77. Foucault: No, no, well, theState's.
78. Chomsky: That theState regards as illegal.
79. Foucault: That theState considers as illegal.
80. Chomsky: Yeah.
81. Foucault: Are you committing this act in virtue of an idealJustice, or because the classstruggle makes it useful and necessary? Do you refer to idealJustice, that's my problem.
82. Chomsky: Again, very often, when I do something which theState regards as illegal, I regard it as legal : that is, I regard theState as criminal. But, in some instances, that's not true. Let me be quite concrete about it and move from the area of classwar to imperialistwar, where the situation is somewhat clearer and easier. Take InternationalLaw, a veryweak instrument as we know, but nevertheless one that incorporates some veryinteresting principles. Well, InternationalLaw is, in many respects, the instrument of the powerful. It is a creation of States and their representatives. In developing the presently existing body of InternationalLaw, there was no participation by mass movements of peasants. The structure of international Law reflects that fact; that is, international Law permits much too wide a range of forceful intervention in support of existing power structures that define themselves as states against the interests of masses of people who happen to be organised in opposition to states. Now, that's a fundamental defect of InternationalLaw and I think one is justified in opposing that aspect of InternationalLaw as having no validity, as having no more validity than the divineright of kings. It's simply an instrument of the powerful to retain their power. But, in fact, InternationalLaw is not solely of that kind. And in fact there are interesting elements of InternationalLaw, for example, embedded in the NurembergPrinciples and theUnitedNationsCharter, which permit, in fact, I believe, require the citizen to act against his own State in ways which theState will falsely regard as criminal. Nevertheless, he's acting legally, because InternationalLaw also happens to prohibit the threat or use of force in internationalaffairs, except under some very narrow circumstances, of which, for example, the war in Vietnam is not one. This means that in the particular case of the Vietnam War, which interests me most, theAmericanState is acting in a criminal capacity. And the people have the right to stop criminals from committing murder. Just because the criminal happens to call your action illegal when you try to stop him, it doesn't mean it is illegal. A perfectlyclear case of that is the present case of thePentagonPapers in the UnitedStates, which, I suppose, you know about. Reduced to its essentials and forgetting Legalisms, what is happening is that theState is trying to prosecute people for exposing its crimes. That's what it ["]amounts["] to. Now, obviously that's absurd, and one must pay no attention whatsoever to that distortion of any reasonable judicialprocess. Furthermore, I think that the existing system of Law even explains why it is absurd. But if it didn't, we would then have to oppose that system of Law.
83. Foucault: So it is in the name of a purerJustice that you criticise the functioning of Justice? There is an important question for us here. It is true that in all socialstruggles, there is a question of Justice. To put it more precisely, the fight against classJustice, against itsInustice, is always part of the social struggle, To dismiss the judges, to change the tribunals, to amnesty the condemned, to open the prisons, has always been part of social transformations as soon as they become slightly violent. At the present time in France, the function of Justice and the police is the target of many attacks from those whom we call the gauchistes. But, if Justice is at stake in a struggle, then it is as an instrument of power, it is not in the hope that finally one day, in this or another society, people will be rewarded according to their merits, or punished according to their faults. Rather than thinking of the socialstruggle in terms of Justice, one has to emphasise Justice in terms of the socialstruggle.
84. Chomsky: Yeah, but surely you believe that your role in the war is a Justrole, that you are fighting a Justwar, to bring in a concept from another domain. And that, I think, is important. If you thought that you were fighting an Unjust war, you couldn't follow that line of reasoning. I would like to slightly reformulate what you said. It seems to me that the difference isn't between legality and idealJustice; it's rather between legality and betterJustice. I would agree that we are certainly in no position to create a system of idealJustice, just as we are in no position to create an idealsociety in our minds. We don't know enough, and we're too limited, and too biased, and all sorts of other things. But we are in a position, and we must act as sensitive and responsible humanbeings in that position to imagine and move towards the creation of a bettersociety and also a bettersystemofJustice. Now this better system will certainly have its defects. But, if one compares the better system with the existing system, without being confused into thinking that our better system is the ideal system, we can then argue, I think, as follows: The concept of legality and the concept of Justice are not identical; they're not entirely distinct either. Insofar as legality incorporates Justice in this sense of better Justice, referring to a better society, then we should follow and obey the Law, and force theState to obey theLaw and force the great corporations to obey theLaw, and force the police to obey theLaw, if we have the power to do so. Of course, in those areas where the legalsystem happens to represent not betterJustice, but rather the techniques of oppression that have been codified in a particular autocraticsystem, well, then a reasonable humanbeing should disregard and oppose them, at least in principle. He may not, for some reason, do it in fact.
85. Foucault: But I would merely like to reply to your first sentence, in which you said that if you didn't consider the war you make against the police to be just, you wouldn't make it. I would like to reply to you in terms of Spinoza and say that the proletariat doesn't wage war against the ruling class because it considers such a war to be Just. The proletariat makes war with the rulingclass because, for the first time in History, it wants to take power. And, because it will overthrow the power of the ruling class, it considers such a war to be Just.
86. Chomsky: Yeah, I don't agree.
87. Foucault: One makes war to win, not because it is Just.
88. Chomsky: I don't, personally, agree with that. For example, if I could convince myself that attainment of power by the proletariat would lead to a terroristpoliceState, in which freedom and dignity and decent humanrelations would be destroyed, then I wouldn't want the proletariat to take power. In fact, the only reason for wanting any such thing, I believe, is because one thinks, rightly or wrongly, that some fundamental humanvalues will be achieved by that transfer of power.
89. Foucault: When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has just triumphed, a violent, dictatorial and even bloody power. I can't see what objection one could make to this. But, if you ask me what would be the case if the proletariat exerted bloody, tyrannical and Unjust power towards itself, then I would say that this could only occur if the proletariat hadn't really taken power, but that a class outside the proletariat, a group of people inside the proletariat, a bureaucracy, or petitbourgeois elements had taken power.
90. Chomsky: Well, I'm not at all satisfied with that theory of revolution for a lot of reasons, historical and others. But, even if one were to accept it for the sake of argument, still that theory maintains that it is proper for the proletariat to take power and exercise it in a violent and bloody and Unjust fashion, because it is claimed, and in my opinion falsely, that that will lead to a more Just society, in which theState will wither away, in which the proletariat will be a universal class and so on and so forth. If it weren't for that future justification, the concept of a violent and bloody dictatorship of the proletariat would certainly be Unjust. Now, this is another issue, but I'm very sceptical about the idea of a violent and bloody dictatorship of the proletariat, especially when expressed by selfappointedrepresentatives of a vanguardparty, who[m], we have enough historical experience to know and might have predicted in advance, will simply be the new rulers over this society.
91. Foucault: Yes, but I haven't been talking about the power of the proletariat, which, in itself, would be an Unjustpower. You are right in saying that this would obviously be too easy. I would like to say that the power of the proletariat could, in a certain period, imply violence and a prolonged war against a socialclass over which its triumph or victory was not yet totally assured.
92. Chomsky: Well, look, I'm not saying there is an absolute. For example, I am not a committed pacifist. I would not hold that it is, under all imaginable circumstances, wrong to use violence, even though use of violence is, in some sense, Unjust. I believe that one has to estimate relative Justices. But the use of violence and the creation of some degree of Injustice can only be justified on the basis of the claim and the assessment, which always ought to be undertaken veryveryseriously and with a good deal of scepticism that this violence is being exercised because a more Justresult is going to be achieved. If it does not have such a grounding, it is really totally Immoral, in my opinion.
93. Foucault: I don't think that, as far as the aim which the proletariat proposes for itself in leading a classstruggle is concerned, it would be sufficient to say that it is, in itself, a greaterJustice. What the proletariat will achieve by expelling the class which is, at present, in power and by taking over power itself, is precisely the suppression of the power of class in general.
94. Chomsky: Okay, but that's the further justification.
95. Foucault: That is the justification, but one doesn't speak in terms of Justice but in terms of power.
96. Chomsky: But it is in terms ofJustice. It is because the end that will be achieved is claimed as a Justone. No Leninist, or whatever you like, would dare to say, We, the proletariat, have a right to take power, and then throw everyone else into crematoria. If that were the consequence of the proletariat taking power, of course it would not be appropriate. The idea is, and for the reasons I mentioned I'm sceptical about it, that a period of violentdictatorship, or perhaps violentandbloodydictatorship, is justified because it will mean the submergence and termination of classoppression, a proper end to achieve in humanlife. It is because of that final qualification that the whole enterprise might be justified. Whether it is or not is another issue.
97. Foucault: If you like, I will be a little bit Nietzsche-an about this, in other words, it seems to me that the idea of Justice in itself is an idea which, in effect, has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power. But it seems to me that, in any case, the notion of Justice itself functions within a society of classes as a claim made by the oppressed class and as justification for it.
98. Chomsky: I don't agree with that.
99. Foucault: And in a classless society, I am not sure that we would still use this notion of Justice.
100.                Chomsky: Well, here I really disagree. I think there is some sort of an absolute basis, If you press me too hard I'll be in trouble, because I can't sketch it out, ultimately residing in fundamental humanqualities, in terms of which a real notion of Justice is grounded. I think it's too hasty to characterise our existing systems of Justice as merely systems of class oppression. I don't think that they are that. I think that they embody systems of classoppression and elements of other kinds of oppression, but they also embody a kind of groping towards the true humanly, valuable concepts of Justice and decency and love and kindness and sympathy, which I think are real. And I think that in any future society, which will, of course, never be the perfect society, we'll have such concepts again, which we hope, will come closer to incorporating a defence of fundamental humanneeds, including such needs as those for solidarity and sympathy and whatever, but will probably still reflect, in some manner, the inequities and the elements of oppression of the existing society. However, I think what you're describing only holds for a very different kind of situation. For example, let's take a case of [inter]nationalconflict. Here are two societies, each trying to destroy the other. No question of Justice arises. The only question that arises is, Which side are you on? Are you going to defend your own society and destroy the other? I mean, in a certain sense, abstracting away from a lot of historical problems, that's what faced the soldiers who were massacring each other in the trenches in theFirstWorldWar. They were fighting for ["]nothing["]. They were fighting for the right to destroy each other. And, in that kind of circumstance, no questions of Justice arise. And, of course. there were rationalpeople, most of them in jail, like KarlLiebknecht, for example, who pointed that out and were in jail because they did so, or BertrandRussell, to take another example on the other side. There were people who understood that there was no point to that mutual massacre in terms of any sort of Justice and that they ought to just ["]call it off["]. [stop it.] Now those people were regarded as madmen, or lunatics, or criminals, or whatever, but, of course, they were the only sane people around. And, in such a circumstance, the kind that you describe, where there is no question of Justice, just the question of who's going to win a struggle to the death, then I think the proper human reaction is, ["]Call it off["], [Stop it.], don't win either way, try to stop it. And, of course, if you say that, you'll immediately be thrown in jail, or killed, or something of that sort, the fate of a lot of rationalpeople. But I don't think that's the typical situation in humanaffairs, and I don't think that's the situation in the case of classconflict or socialrevolution. There I think that one can and must give an argument. If you can't give an argument, you should extract yourself from the struggle. Give an argument that the socialrevolution that you're trying to achieve is in the ends of Justice, is in the ends of realising fundamental humanneeds, not merely in the ends of putting some other group into power, because they want it.
101.                Foucault: Well, do I have time to answer? [Deviation.]
102.                Elders: Yes.
103.                Foucault: How much?
104.                Elders: Two minutes.
105.                Foucault: I would say that is Unjust.
106.                Chomsky: Absolutely.
107.                Foucault: No, but I don't want to answer in so little time. I would simply say this, that finally this problem of humannature, when put simply in theoreticalterms, hasn't led to an argument between us, ultimately we understand each other very well on these theoretical problems. On the other hand, when we discussed the problem of humannature and politicalproblems, then differences arose between us. And, contrary to what you think, you can't prevent me from believing that these notions of humannature, of Justice, of the realisation of the essence of humanbeings, all that, are all notions and concepts which have been formed within our civilisation, within our type of Knowledge and our form of Philosophy, and that as a result form part of our classsystem. And one can't, however regrettable it may be, put forward these notions to describe or justify a fight which should, and shall in principle, overthrow the very fundaments of our society. This is an extrapolation for which I can't find the historical justification. That's the point.
108.                Chomsky: It's clear.
109.                Elders: Mr. Foucault, if you were obliged to describe our actual society in pathological terms, which of its kinds of madness would most impress you?
110.                Foucault: In our contemporary society?
111.                Elders: Yes.
112.                Foucault: If I were to say, with which malady contemporary society is most afflicted?
113.                Elders: Yes.
114.                Foucault: The definition of disease and of the insane, and the classification of the insane has been made in such a way as to exclude, from our society, a certain number of people. If our society characterised itself as insane, it would exclude itself. It pretends to do so for reasons of internalreform. Nobody is more conservative than those people who tell you that the modernworld is afflicted by nervousanxiety or schizophrenia. [I discovered  that it is true from experience.] It is, in fact, a cunning way of excluding certain people or certain patterns of behaviour. So I don't think that one can, except as a metaphor or a game, validly say that our society is schizophrenic or paranoid, unless one gives these words a nonPsychiatricmeaning. But, if you were to push me to an extreme, I would say that our society has been afflicted by a disease, a verycurious, a veryparadoxical disease, for which we haven't yet found a name, and this mentaldisease has a verycurious symptom, which is that the symptom itself brought the mentaldisease into being. There you have it. [Violà.]
115.                Elders: Great. Well, I think we can immediately start the discussion.
116.                Questioner: Mr.Chomsky, I would like to ask you one question. In your discussion you used the term proletariat; what do you mean by proletariat in a highlydeveloped technologicalsociety? I think this is a Marxist notion, which doesn't represent the exact sociological state of affairs.
117.                Chomsky: Yes, I think you are right, and that is one of the reasons why I kept hedging on that issue and saying I'm very sceptical about the whole idea, because I think the notion of a proletariat, if we want to use it, has to be given a new interpretation fitting to our present social conditions. Really, I'd even like to drop the word, since it's so loaded with specifichistorical connotations, and think instead of the people who do the productive work of the society, manual and intellectual work. I think those people should be in a position to organise the conditions of their work, and to determine the ends of their work, and the uses to which it's put; and, because of my concept of humannature, I really think of that as partially [partly] including everyone. Because I think that any humanbeing who is not physically or mentally deformed, and here I again must disagree with Mr. Foucault and express my belief that the concept of mentalillness probably does have an absolutecharacter, to some extent, at least, and is not only capable of, but is insistent upon doing productivecreativework if given the opportunity to do so. I've never seen a child who didn't want to build something out of blocks, or learn something new, or try the next task. And the only reason why adults aren't like that is, I suppose, that they have been sent to school and other oppressive institutions, which have ["]driven that out of them["]. Now, if that's the case, then the proletariat, or whatever you want to call it, can really be universal, that is, it can be all those humanbeings who are impelled by what I believe to be the fundamental humanneed to be yourself, which means to be creative, to be exploratory, to be inquisitive.
118.                Questioner: May I interrupt?
119.                Chomsky: to do useful things, you know.
120.                Questioner: If you use such a category, which has another meaning in Marxist.
121.                Chomsky: That's why I say maybe we ought to drop the concept.
122.                Questioner: Wouldn't you do better to use another term? In this situation, I would like to ask another question : which groups, do you think, will make the revolution?
123.                Chomsky: Yes, that's a different question.
124.                Questioner: It's an irony of History that, at this moment, young intellectuals, coming from the middle and upper classes, call themselves proletarians and say we must join the proletarians. But I don't see any classconscious proletarians. And that's the great dilemma.
125.                Chomsky: Okay. Now I think you're asking a concrete and specific question, and a very reasonable one. It is not true, in our given society, that all people are doing useful, productive work, or selfsatisfying work, obviously that's very far from true, or that, if they were to do the kind of work they're doing under conditions of freedom, it would thereby become productive and satisfying. Rather there are a very large number of people who are involved in other kinds of work. For example, the people who are involved in the management of exploitation, or the people who are involved in the creation of artificial consumption, or the people who are involved in the creation of mechanisms of destruction and oppression, or the people who are simply not given any place in a stagnating industrialEconomy. Lots of people are excluded from the possibility of productive labour. And I think that the revolution, if you like, should be in the name of all human beings; but it will have to be conducted by certain categories of human beings, and those will be, I think, the human beings who really are involved in the productive work of society. Now what this is will differ, depending upon the society. In our society, it includes, I think, intellectual workers; it includes a spectrum of people that runs from manuallabourers to skilledworkers, to engineers, to scientists, to a very large class of professionals, to many people in the socalled serviceoccupations, which really do constitute the overwhelming mass of the population, at least in theUnitedStates, and I suppose probably here too, and will become the mass of the population in the future. And so I think that the studentrevolutionaries, if you like, have a point, a partial [part] point : that is to say, it's a very important thing, in a modernadvancedindustrialsociety, how the trained intelligentsia identifies itself. It's very important to ask whether they are going to identify themselves as socialmanagers, whether they are going to be technocrats, or servants of either theState or privatepower, or, alternatively, whether they are going to identify themselves as part of the workforce, who happen to be doing intellectuallabour. If the latter, then they can and should play a decent role in a progressive socialrevolution. If the former, then they're part of the class of oppressors.
126.                Questioner: Thank you.
127.                Elders: Yes, go on please.
128.                Questioner: I was struck, Mr. Chomsky, by what you said about the intellectual necessity of creating new models of society. One of the problems we have in doing this with student groups in Utrecht is that we are looking for consistency of values. One of the values you more or less mentioned is the necessity of decentralisation of power. People [who are] ["]on the spot["] should participate in decisionmaking. That's the value of decentralisation and participation. But, on the other hand, we're living in a society that makes it more and more necessary, or seems to make it more and more necessary, that decisions are made on a worldwidescale. And, in order to have, for example, a more equaldistribution of welfare, etc., it might be necessary to have more centralisation. These problems should be solved on a higher level. Well, that's one of the inconsistencies we found in creating your models of society, and we should like to hear some of your ideas on it. I've one small additional question, or rather a remark to make to you, that is, how can you, with your verycourageous attitude towards thewarinVietnam, survive in an institution like MIT, which is known here as one of the great war contractors and intellectual makers of this war?
129.                Chomsky: Well, let me answer the second question first, hoping that I don't forget the first one. Oh, no, I'll try the first question first, and then remind me if I forget the second. In general, I am in favour of decentralisation. I wouldn't want to make it an absolute principle, but the reason I would be in favour of it, even though there certainly is, I think, a wide margin of speculation here, is because I would imagine that, in general, a system of centralised power will operate very efficiently in the interest of the most powerful elements within it. Now a system of decentralised power and free association will of course face the problem, the specific problem that you mention, of inequity. One region is richer than the other, etc. But my own guess is that we're safer in trusting to what I hope are the fundamental humanemotions of sympathy and the search for Justice, which may arise within a system of free association. I think we're safer in hoping for progress on the basis of those humaninstincts than on the basis of the institutions of centralisedpower, which, I believe, will almost inevitably act in the interest of their most powerful components. Now that's a little abstract and too general, and I wouldn't want to claim that it's a rule for all occasions, but I think it's a principle that's effective in a lot of occasions. So, for example, I think that as democraticsocialistlibertarian,  UnitedStates would be more likely to give substantial aid to EastPakistanirefugees than a system of centralisedpower which is basically operating in the interest of multinational corporations. And, you know, I think the same is true in a lot of other cases. But it seems to me that that principle, at least, deserves some thought. As to the idea, which was perhaps lurking in your question anyway, it's an idea that's often expressed, that there is some technical imperative, some property of advancedtechnologicalsociety that requires centralisedpower and decisionmaking, and a lot of people say that, from RobertMcNamara on down. As far as I can see, it's perfectnonsense, I've never seen any argument in favour of it. It seems to me that moderntechnology, like the technology of dataprocessing, or communication, and so on, has precisely the opposite implications. It implies that relevantinformation and relevantunderstanding can be brought to everyone quickly. It doesn't have to be concentrated in the hands of a small group of managers who control all knowledge, all information and all decisionmaking. So Technology, I think, can be liberating, it has the property of being possibly liberating, it's converted, like everything else, like the system of Justice, into an instrument of oppression because of the fact that power is badly distributed. I don't think there is anything in modernTechnology or moderntechnologicalsociety that leads away from decentralisation of power, quite the contrary. About the second point, there are two aspects to that. One is the question how MIT tolerates me, and the other question is how I tolerate MIT. [Laughter.] Well, as to how MIT tolerates me, here again, I think, one shouldn't be overly schematic. It's true that MIT is a majorinstitution of warresearch. But it's also true that it embodies very important libertarian values, which are, I think, quite deeply embedded in Americansociety, fortunately for the world. They're not deeply embedded enough to save theVietnamese, but they are deeply embedded enough to prevent far worse disasters. And here, I think, one has to qualify a bit. There is imperial terror and aggression, there is exploitation, there is racism, lots of things like that. But there is also a real concern, coexisting with it, for individual rights of a sort which, for example, are embodied in theBillOfRights, which is by no means simply an expression of classoppression. It is also an expression of the necessity to defend the individual againstStatepower. Now these things coexist. It's not that simple, it's not just all bad or all good. And it's the particular balance in which they coexist that makes an institute that produces weapons of war be willing to tolerate, in fact, in many ways even encourage, a person who is involved in civildisobedience against the war. Now, as to how I [NoamChomsky] tolerate[s] MIT, that raises another question. There are people who argue, and I have never understood the logic of this, that a radical ought to dissociate himself from oppressive institutions. The logic of that argument is that Karl Marx shouldn't have studied in theBritishMuseum which, if anything, was the symbol of themostviciousImperialism in the world, the place where all the treasures an empire had gathered from the rape of the colonies, were brought together. But I think KarlMarx was quite right in studying in theBritishMuseum. He was right in using the resources and, in fact, the liberalvalues of the civilisation that he was trying to overcome, against it. And I think the same applies in this case.
130.                Questioner: But aren't you afraid that your presence at MIT gives them a cleanconscience?
131.                Chomsky: I don't see how, really. I mean, I think my presence at MIT serves marginally to help, I don't know how much, to increase studentactivism against a lot of the things that MIT as an institution does. At least I hope that's what it does. [Of course he does.]
132.                Elders: Is there another question?
133.                Questioner: I would like to get back to the question of centralisation. You said that Technology does not contradict decentralisation. But the problem is, can Technology criticise itself, its influences, and so forth? Don't you think that it might be necessary to have a centralorganisation that could criticise the influence of Technology on the wholeuniverse? And I don't see how that could be incorporated in a smalltechnologicalinstitution.
134.                Chomsky: Well, I have nothing against the interaction of federated freeassociations; and in that sense centralisation, interaction, communication, argument, debate, can take place, and so on and so forth, and criticism, if you like. What I am talking about is the centralisation of power.
135.                Questioner: But, of course, power is needed, for instance to forbid some technological institutions from doing work that will only benefit the corporation.
136.                Chomsky: Yeah, but what I'm arguing is this, If we have the choice between trusting in centralisedpower to make the rightdecision in that matter or and trusting in freeassociations of libertariancommunities to make that decision, I would rather trust the latter. And the reason is that I think that they can serve to maximise decent humaninstincts, whereas a system of centralised power will tend, in a general way, to maximise one of the worst of humaninstincts, namely the instinct of rapaciousness, of destructiveness, of accumulating power to oneself and destroying others. It's a kind of instinct which does arise and functions in certain historicalcircumstances, and I think we want to create the kind of society where it is likely to be repressed and replaced by other and morehealthy instincts.
137.                Questioner: I hope you are right.
138.                Elders: Well, ladies and gentlemen, I think this must be the end of the debate. Mr. Chomsky, Mr. Foucault, I thank you very much for your ["]farreaching["] discussion over the philosophical and theoretical, as well as the political questions of the debate, both for myself and also on behalf of the audience, here and at home.