Chomsky and Foucault on human nature and power

Notes from a televised debate between N. Chomsky and M. Foucault in 1971 (video and transcript).

Chomsky begins with examples from linguistics to illustrate the notion of "innate structures". Children are successful in learning the language because they can use "innate language" or "instinctive knowledge" to transform limited data they get exposed to into organized knowledge. This instinctive knowledge, which allows children to build complex knowledge structures from partial data, is a fundamental constituent of human nature. Such a constituent (a collection of innate organizing principles) must be available in other domains, such as human cognition, behavior, and interaction. This is what Chomsky refers to as human nature.

Foucault mistrusts the notion of human nature - it is one of the concepts that while not being strictly scientific, has the ability to "designate, delimit and situate" certain types of discourses. For Chomsky it is ok to start with the concept of human nature as somewhat mystical (similar to gravitational forces or other scientific concepts) and later explain it through physical components (e.g., neural networks). Chomsky describes his approach as looking at the earlier stages of scientific thinking (great thinkers, more specifically) and understanding how they were able to arrive at concepts and ideas not available to anybody before.

Foucault makes a distinction between individual attribution of a discovery and collective production of knowledge, which can be referred to as "tradition", "mentality", or "modes". The former has been highly valued, while the latter is usually negativized. Another distinction is between knowledge as human activity and truth. The latter may be hidden from humans, but it will be unveiled. Attribution and relation to truth are interconnected. Throughout history we see examples of how the subject of truth (the individual revealing it) has to overcome myths and common thought, he has to "discover". What if this close relation of subject to truth is an effect of knowledge? What if truth is a complex non-individual formation? Can we replace individuals in the production of knowledge?

This position highlights a difference between Chomsky's and Foucault's approach to creativity. According to Foucault, Chomsky had to introduce the speaking subject into linguistics because language has been commonly studied as a system with a collective value. In language we have a few rules and elements and an unknown system of totalities that can be brought to light by individuals. In the history of knowledge, it's similar, but one has to overcome the dominance of individual creativity to show that there are rules and elements that can be transformed without explicitly passing through an individual.

Throughout the debate both scholars touch on many concepts from science and politics. Some of them are described below to highlight their differences:

Concept	Chomsky	Foucault
Domain (Focus)	Language	Knowledge
Human nature	Comprised of innate structures that allow for learning and arriving at complex knowledge based on partial information	A historical construct that can organize knowledge, but also can delimit how we see human behavior
Creativity	A common human act of thinking about a new situation, describing it and acting in it	An individualistic act that has been emphasized throughout history without looking at general communal rules that are behind it
Freedom	Limited number of rules with infinite possibilities of application	"Grille" of many determinisms that affects how we arrive at knowledge and understanding
Ideal model of society	A federated, decentralised system of free associations, incorporating economic as well as other social institutions	No such model can be proposed, it is more important to expose the power that controls society, especially institutions such as education and medicine that appear neutral

Somewhere in the middle, Chomsky also tried to bring their differences closer:

CHOMSKY: ... That is, I think that an act of scientific creation depends on two facts: one, some intrinsic property 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 scientific discovery, 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.

While Foucault didn't completely agree to that, the conversation was still building upon each other's ideas:

FOUCAULT: ... ultimately we understand each other very well on these theoretical problems. On the other hand, when we discussed the problem of human nature and political problems, then differences arose between us. And contrary to what you think, you can’t prevent me from believing that these notions of human nature, of justice, of the realisation of the essence of human beings, 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 class system; 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.

SynBERC, anthropological inquiry and methods of research

Recently I've been searching for guidance on how to describe ethnographic methodology in a grant proposal and found P. Rabinow and A. Stavrianakis' commentary Movement space: Putting anthropological theory, concepts, and cases to the test, where they reflect on the challenges of anthropological inquiry, on what it means to observe in heterogeneous and changing spaces. I had no time to read it slowly and carefully, so now just filling this gap.

The essay is a response to another collection of essays, but also a reflection on previous ethnographic research with Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center SynBERC (I wish I paid more attention to it during my own dissertation research). An honest public account like that contributes to the ethics and methodology discussions more than any published "research" article.
Raising the question of "to what end" in anthropological inquiry, Rabinow and Stavrianakis' essay recollects previous collaborative participant-observations as attempts to bring the ethics that exists outside of the instrumental rationality of science into multidisciplinary research projects.

Flourishing is the concept they used to challenge and change the currently existing relations between knowledge and care (see Rabinow, Paul. "Prosperity, Amelioration, Flourishing: From a Logic of Practical Judgment to Reconstruction." Law and Literature 21, no. 3 (2009): 301-20, jstor). Flourishing helps to examine research practices from a holistic perspective, as practices that are performed by human beings without ethical compartmentalization into scientific, individual, and citizen values.

Then the discussion moves to temporality in anthropological research and the distinction between "contemporary" and "present" in ethnography. This distinction was hard for me to understand. Observations are made in the present, but somehow contextualization with experiences from the past (history) helps to challenge the "ethnographic present". Does it mean that something (objects or practices) maybe present but not contemporary? Or that contemporary may include the past? In other words, the distinction present vs contemporary vs modern allows us to stay tuned to the constant changes and not to fix descriptions as existing in certain times only. Sometimes it seemed that contemporary referred to attempts to reconcile diverse or contradicting practices (e.g., the practices of observation and observers and the practices of the observed).

An interesting point was made on citation (again, as a response to someone else's point). It is about acknowledging more recent work on similar issues.  Understanding that that's rules of the game (esp. to get grants), Rabinow writes that excessive citation also constrains thinking and writing, and authorizes such practices. Why would someone go back to reading and citing Weber, Foucault, or Dewey? Not because what they said is still relevant and true (althrough some of it is), but because they paid so much attention to problem formation, to the need for conceptual tools, and to the importance of experimentation with form.

Back to SynBERC, it is striking how empty expressions of support from bioscientists and engineers masked indifference and ultimately lack of respect and willingness to change. What made things worse was that social scientists' effort to develop effective modes of governance and interaction were blocked and downgraded to non-action and "soothing public relations". Moreover, the social scientists themselves failed to coordinate and reflect on their complicity with dominating technoscientific norms and values.

Even though I really appreciated this account of anthropological "failure" (as seen by others, but not by the authors who conceptualize it as an "anthropological test"), there is a larger purpose in it. As the authors put it,

... it is time to thematize the new configurations of power relations in which anthropologists are working today. Critique as denunciation, still the dominant mode in anti-colonial narratives, is no longer sufficient for the complexities of contemporary inquiry. We are arguing for a more fine-grained acceptance of the fact that by refusing the binaries of inside and outside, one’s responsibility for one’s position in the field is made available for reflection and invention.

Anthropology's major task is to map heterogeneity of human and cultural forms, including:

• cultural heterogeneity with an underlying generality (American anthropology)
• heterogeneity within common institutional forms such as kinship and law (British anthropology)
• variations in structural patterns of society and the mind (French anthropology)

However, accounts of heterogeneity lost their force, in some ways losing their criteria of validity under the pressure of current norms of conducting research. At the same time critical evaluation of such criteria is an important task in changing present times. Such evaluation can be done through testing - constant re-evaluation of the existing conceptual tools in the context of new situations and experiences. The rest of the detailed discussion on testing was dense, but less relevant to me, so it was also harder to follow. 

One of the take-aways is that anthropology needs to be a collaborative endeavor, where individual inquiries examine specific cases and then many inquirers create a common space of concepts, problems, and cases. The constant movement between specific cases and topology of cases creates a space where anthropology can make justifiable warrantable claims about more than one case, i.e., about heterogeneity and associated generality.

Data politics and the dark sides of data

A bit lengthy post about the dark sides of data discusses whether data and its vast amounts and ubiquitous collection mechanisms help to "tell the truth to power", i.e., to change the world for the better. Will picking up the traces and revealing wrongdoing fix the world? Most likely not, because it's not clear whether we will care or do anything because of data. Here is a great quote:

... lawyers cannot fix human rights abuses, scientists cannot fix global warming, whistle-blowers cannot fix secret services and activists cannot fix politics, and nobody really knows how global finances work - regardless of the data they have at hand...

The framework of countering power and problems with data need to be revised. It's not about quantity or even quality of data, but about using whatever little we know to address not only our understandings (i.e., our rational capacities), but also our feelings and beliefs. Here is what gets in the way (those dark sides that everyone should think about):

• corporate infrastructure for data and its cultures that creates an illusion of free and neutral services (i.e., services that have no monetary and no political cost)
• non-transparency of most digital data and lack of control over it, which prevents us from copying, deleting, or processing our own data
• de-politicizing of digital data or constructing data as fuel for innovation and services rather than a ground for moral, ethical, and political decisions

The post is rather pessimistic, but changes do not happen at once, so we should probably keep trying.

Habermas, Bakhtin and Wikipedia

A nice scholarly work, which, unfortunately, suffered from the constraints of the research article genre: Cimini, N., & Burr, J. (2012). An aesthetic for deliberating online: Thinking through “universal pragmatics” and “dialogism” with reference to Wikipedia. The Information Society, 28(3), 151-160. Routledge. doi: 10.1080/01972243.2012.669448. If the authors were allowed to write in an essay style, they could have elaborated on their own insights rather than trying to objectify their analysis and fit it into categories of empirical research.

The paper begins with an observation that Habermasian theory of "universal pragmatics" is often used to support the claims that the Internent with its forums, chats, and other forms of massive distributed communication has a potential to become a vehicle for deliberative democracy based on the principles of openness, accountability, and rationality. Habermas wrote a lot about rational deliberations and its potential to facilitate justice and democracy. He was criticized a lot for being idealistic and for implying that everybody can be articulate, rational and willing to participate (the homogenization of discourse communities). To go beyond such normative homogenizing theorizing the authors suggest to use the Bakhtinian notions of "dialogism" and "carnival". They look at two cases on Wikipedia: stem cells and transhumanism in an attempt to demonstrate how by using both Habermasian and Bakhtinian approaches we can combine the normative and the empirical and figure out what kind of interventions are needed to bring social change.

Bakhtin was concerned with power and how it is reproduced within the language. Similarly to Foucault, he also sought to explain how power relations can be subverted through language. Bakhtin used the novels of Dostoevsky to show that the characters in those novels interacted in a dialogue in which each voice had an equal right. This, according to Bakhtin, was a form of continuous dialogism that could facilitate re-definitions of the world. Bakthin also introduced the term “carnivalesque” to describe how the carnival situation relied on laughter and grotesque to promote change and “the merry negation of uniformity and similarity”. Carnivalesque literature (Rabelais' "Gargantua and Pantagruel"), like carnivals themselves, suspended hierarchic distinctions and allowed for reconsideration of notions of usual life.

The Wikipedia articles on stem cells and transhumanism had a lot of ad hominem argumentation, claims to authority and other elements of irrational discourse. However, the authors show that such irrational argumentation actually helped to reach consensus:

Again, the delicate consensus that was achieved among these various editors was brought about through a clash of opposing points of view, rather than through reasoned or rational discussion. As was the case with the display of userboxes and in the debates over stem cells, discussed earlier, this exchange on genetic engineering further undermines the idea that Wikipedia approximates rational discourse. We can see both the purchase of grotesque language in political deliberation (a crapshoot), forcing a response from Loremaster, and in that response yet more attempts to construct personal authority through unverifiable accounts of “best knowledge.” In the end, however, this was not an obstacle to communicative reason. Instead, these seemingly irrational methods of argumentation facilitated further discussion and eventually agreement, inclining Loremaster to reconsider his views and later provide evidence in support of his claims...

Basically, the paper invites us to reconsider the idea that rational discourse is the only way to achieve meaningful consensus. The authors suggest paying more attention to "the emancipatory potential of seemingly irrational methods of persuasion" (section "Conclusion", para 1). It's a powerful idea that needs elaboration (which was not done here). I wasn't convinced that Bakhtinian ideas were helpful here, but again I don't think the authors had a chance to work on it properly. What I would be interested in exploring is whether having a goal (e.g., a stable entry in Wikipedia) improves chances of consensus and whether online communication (as opposed to f2f) mitigates conflict. It'd also be nice to see clearly outlined suggestions for interventions mentioned at the beginning of the paper.

Alternatives to economic growth: re-use, recycle and focus on communities

A very interesting review article by Barry Smart "Another ‘Great Transformation’ or Common Ruin?" in Theory, Culture & Society, 2011, vol. 28, pp. 131-151. The article considers critical responses to economic growth and examines three alternatives to the model of capitalist economic growth: de-growth, regeneration of "the communist hypothesis", and transition to a sustainable economy. They are very similar and basically have literal meanings, i.e., not focusing on growth, re-thinking communism in positive terms, and work on sustainability. Still, a few details below:

De-growth (Latouche) is a response to evidence on the negative consequences of capitalist economic growth and the detrimental impact of increasing rates of production and consumption. The idea that everything (jobs, pensions, public spending) should depend on economic growth is incompatible with the finite world.

De-growth is based on eight processes: re-evaluation, reconceptualization, restructuring, redistribution, re-localization, reduction, re-use and recycling. First three question the values of constant growth and wealth accumulation. Redistribution calls for a reduction in disparity of wealth and income. Re-localization refers to organization of local production and distribution. Reduction - lower consumption of goods, resources, and services (e.g., tourism). All this would reduce labor time and free people's time for self-development and other forms of activities, such as micro-social activities and civic labor.

Since global capitalism is based on consumerism and is ridden with crises, attempts to repair it with state interventions or environmental ideas won't work. Zizek proposed another alternative - to re-think communism, i.e., to disconnect it from pathologies and perversions of the 20th century and imagine it in a context where the working class can be divided into intellectual workers, manual laborers and unemployed ‘outcasts’, each with their own way of life and conceptions of the others.

There is a lot that can be thought or said about this, but unfortunately, the article doesn't do that. Wouldn't the distinctions between intellectual and labor workers lead to the same wealth and income disparities that exist in capitalist societies now? How can social and financial hierarchies be reconciled with ideas of equality, shared benefits, and sustainability? For somebody who shares ideas of sustainability and de-growth (to some extent), arguments in the article make perfect sense. But can skeptics and non-believers be somehow convinced that this is what should be done? Where is the minimal common ground that can serve as a starting point of a conversation about change and transformation? Haven't seen it so far...

Paper: Technical capital

Zhang, W. (2010). Technical capital and participatory inequality in eDeliberation: An actor-network analysis. Information, Communication & Society, 13(7), 1019-1039.

Intro: Capital is a set of usable resources and powers that function in fields. Bourdieu discussed economic, cultural, symbolic and social capitals, which can transform into one another and from one field to another. This paper argues that with the incorporation of ICTs into the field of politics, technical capital should be added as a form of capital as well.

Technical capital is a structural (i.e., independent of the consciousness and will of agents and constitutive of fields) relation between technologies and other actors. Accumulation of technical capital happens through the establishment and maintenance of the relations with technologies.

Data: surveys from two cases - the Electronic Dialogue 2000 and the Healthcare Dialogue projects. Both projects consisted of groups of citizens who engaged in a series of moderated chats about 2000 US presidential campaign and about the country's healthcare reform.

Analysis: Mean comparisons, OLS regressions, qualitative content analysis of open-ended questions.

Results: SES variables (education, age, income, gender) have impact on participation. Inventory of actors includes funders, designers, moderators, participants, internet, chatroom, time. Inventory of capitals included economic, social, cultural, symbolic, technical. Technical capital contributed to inequalities according to the surveys. E.g., people were unable to access a computer, had technical failures, had no means to repair their computers, etc.
Conclusion: Disadvantaged groups have more difficulties in establishing and maintaining a relationship with the technologies. They are also less successful in converting other capitals into the technical capital in need.

My opinion: The idea of technical capital is interesting and theoretically fruitful. Some ANT ideas also seem to be interesting, but they were not elaborated in the paper. The empirical part is rather obvious, but still important considering the enthusiasm regarding participatory potential of digital media.

The self-imposed limits of LIS by Ron Day

The paper The self-imposed limits of library and information science: Remarks on the discipline, on the profession, on the university, and on the state of "information" in the U.S. at large today by Ron Day is published in InterActions, a UCLA publication. It begins by raising three related issues: the marginalization of critical thought, the lack of interest in studying public information (mass media and education), and the construction of individuals as 'information seeking' and 'information using'. However, by the end it does not directly address these questions (except maybe the first one). Rather it argues for a change in attitudes and approaches towards information, knowledge, research, and scholarship. Here are a few notes from this paper.

Critique is not a negative term that refers to opposition to the norm. In Kantian terms it's understanding of the formal conditions for understanding, practical action, and judgments of taste. It is the questioning of assumptions from which a research starts, whether they be theological or scientific-empirical assumptions. Empirical research approaches knowledge as facts discoverable through application of theory and method and ignores the possibilities of these facts being constructed by theories and methods. The studies of information that are construed as studies of empirical entities erase the conditions of knowledge production, of understanding that information is not the essence of some substance (as wax is the essence of candle).

It is important to question dogmatically derived assertions and critique the powers of expression. These powers are manifested in the formal arrangement of materials as well as in statements (form and content of expressions). Preventing dogmatism is the orientation of critical analysis.

The modern epistemology of systems emerged as the development of classifications. In various classifications individuals are seen as representatives of classes arranged by a system. Systems often ignore the historical development of individuals. Such synchronic identities may be called 'individuals', while historically determined measures may be called 'singularities'. The political struggle is often confined to the struggle for the rights of certain individuals as seen in terms of classes sanctioned by the reigning state (race or gender). To overcome dogmatism and ideologies, we should view identities as singularities and allow such singularities challenge the world and question conditions and re-define the terms of their existence.

"The ideal of critique, however, is not toward simply being granted identity within the norm's grammar and logic of recognition and representation, but rather, toward justice, that is toward all beings being considered as equal, each according to the terms of its specific singularity, as well as its in-common being."