I've got a question. In this debate Chomsky and Foucaul

>Hep a doo a dippy woo woo wowa wee a flippy floo

That's what you sound like OP.

Congrats, you fell for the meme.

you dont speak dutch?
baka desu senpai

>>9062748
I know, right? ESL probably

>>9062748
dis

>>9062745
Anyone else kinda like but also hate foucaults work. He seems like an alright guy with some ok ideas nested in many extremely bad ideas and axioms.

Mostly its his influence that bothers me.

>>9062917
Ac-actually yeah that seems about right, where have you been all my life anon?

>>9062745
Essentially Chomsky says that human nature is real in a way that is somewhat knowable in scientific terms. Foucault thinks that any attempt to understand human nature, justice, etc. is framed by power relations, particularly the class struggle. That's about all I've got.

>>9062917
"Bad"

What makes an idea bad anon?

This is the early 1970s, right after the English publication of Foucault's _Les mots et les choses_ as _The Order of Things_. In the preface of the English edition, Foucault reacts against people who had diagnosed him as a structuralist, claiming not to be one.

But the fact is that The Order of Things (which is closer to the title Foucault originally wanted - because it indicates "orders" in which "things" "come to be," i.e. grids of specification) is ironically very close and related to the "order" which produced structuralism. In the very difficult preface of that very difficult book, probably Foucault's most daunting but much easier (again, ironically) once you understand the zeitgeist and presuppositions it was operating under, Foucault talks about knowledge as the ordering of objects on "tables" (_tableaux_) and shows how certain patterns and "rules" prefigure out ordering.

Foucault says later on that his mission in life is to relativise the Kantian project of revealing the conditions of the possibility of knowledge. This is what he and the structuralists wanted to do. Also consider that in the late '50s and the early '60s, so during the same zeitgeist, works like Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ and Hanson's _Patterns of Discovery_, Winch's _Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy_ were all making fundamentally similar claims.

Foucault also said much later in life, I think near his death, that his whole project had been Heideggerian and he owed a massive debt to Heidegger. If you compare Heidegger's statements on ontic vs. ontological knowledge, you'll see the same kind of "hermeneutic of suspicion" under which Foucault is operating. That is, we have ways of ordering our encounter with the world which are (let's say) "frames" -- the objects in the frame do really exist, but the frame itself brackets them in certain ways, ignores certain features, highlights certain others, etc. What Foucault wished to do at this phase of his career was analyse these frames (whether you want to call them grids, tables, regional ontologies, paradigms or normal sciences, "theory-laden perception," implicit "metaphysics," etc.).

In doing so he was greatly indebted to Bachelard and Canguilhem, the latter of whom was Foucault's former teacher. Canguilhem wrote about (loosely) how different scientific models for understanding biology, even in the fundamental sense of delineating what "biology" or "life" is in the first place, have real scientific effects. Bachelard wrote about similar things and was influenced by the kind of phenomenology Foucault encountered in Heidegger, and wrote about "epistemological ruptures," conceptual cul-de-sacs and radical breaks that allowed entirely new ways of seeing problems.

Foucault's main interest was in showing how our knowledge is always within grids of specification, and it's not so much a matter of "seeing what's really there in reality," but in how our concepts and language "structure" reality.

>>9062970
I dont wanna get to deep down the rabbit hole but id say a "bad" idea is one that leads to an increase in human suffering or in general an idea that has little practical application (if we are talking political ideas which foucault definitely were).

The concept of "discourse is power", "knowledge is simply power, not something rooted in anything objectively true" and ultimately "everything is power" inevitably lead to some dicey philosophical avenues. It totally discredits empiricism and evidence in public discussion, turns any political discussion into a battle rather than allowing a less cynical interpretation to be had and it also opens that ever dangerous idea in that "words are violence", if words themselves are violence they can be met with violence.

Even a glance at the current political climate will let you know why I think this is dangerous territory, it would be unfair to lay this all on Foucault but his work opened that can of worms and gave those worms a framework to attack.

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>>9062970

>>9062988
As a final note, this debate was kind of a failure but it was an interesting failure. Chomsky replies to Foucault's basic idea by deflecting to an almost pragmatic epistemology that incorporates this kind of milieu or zeitgeist, of relativising the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, but he's not willing to totally drink the postmodern Kool-Aid.

If this is because he understands it at a purely theoretical level, it's less interesting. But I think the reason Chomsky deflects to a more sober version of what Foucault is saying is precisely because Foucault isn't operating under the same "grid" that Foucault is, with relation to the problem. The ontology of region ontologies that Foucault is seeking here is, like all ontology, value-laden as well as "scientific," at the personal and the institutional level. There are reasons beyond simple science or descriptive elegance that drove Foucault and his structural and poststructural generation to want to talk about things in these terms, to talk about the limitations placed on knowledge, to desire the escape of "hardened-up" ontologies, ossified language. Chomsky is from an Anglo-American intellectual milieu that is VERY different.

It's the same thing with their politics in the debate. Foucault is very nihilistic. One of the criticisms of Foucault and his fellow travellers is that he has no positive pronouncements. They point out all the ways in which we are limited and confined, vaguely say we should escape these, and then quit. There's some recent scholarship indicating that later in his life Foucault turned to neoliberalism and to an interest in "phronesis," looking for different ethical ways of being in the world, which is similar to Heidegger's intellectual trajectory in many ways.

On the other hand Chomsky is fundamentally, to me anyway, pragmatic in all senses of the term, and much more straightforwardly Anglo in his underlying epistemology of science, truth, and ethics. There's a more instinctive realism, and a more instinctive Whiggishness there.

Quick thing on structuralism: One way of thinking about structuralism, and one of its foundational debts to Saussure, is that it interprets things spatially as well as temporally. Each act of knowledge or speech comes from a framework of POSSIBLE acts. Again, you can see the concern for ferreting out the limitations on our thought. The structuralist craze was fucking huge in France and had been germinating for a generation.

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>>9062995
Buying into the Utalitarian meme.

>>9063044
Not buying into utilitarianism/pragmatism entirely but if an idea leads to nothing but "My opinion based on pure gut intuition is just as valid as your opinion which is based on knowledge and hard evidence, so i dont have to listen since everything is socially constructed" shit flinging contests than yes the utility of the idea is lacking.

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>>9063062
I actually quite like Utilitarianism my self, the main problem as I see with it is that you are reducing people to a commodity. This can lead to situations where killing 5 percent of the population and redistributing it to the populace would result in more net happiness which under Utalitarianism you would be morally obliged to carry out. And if you attempt to amend the precepts to avoid these type of situations it knocks out the foundations of the argument. Furthermore if we are for euthanasia for infants born with spina bifada we logically must support it in other cases ( no problem to me but to others)

>>9063093
Im in the same boat, its an amazing philosophical tool but it falls just short of being a code to live by.

>>9063016
>>9062988
Okay so these frames of reality they collaboratively conceptualize are more like helpful ways of imagining possible structurings of reality. They did not think a grid or frame was literally the shape of reality?