I expected more from you, Noam!
I watched a couple of youtube videos recently. One was part of a debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault on the concept of justice. The other was a summary of Chomsky’s critiques of post-modernism throughout his years.
Noam Chomsky says postmodernism is a sham. Just a bunch of egoists and self interested people forming a clique of obscurity to gate keep knowledge and perform wisdom, simulating radicalism while effectively aiding conservatism. Perhaps that is the effect. It is no question the people can’t understand them, it’s probably difficult for them to understand each other.
Chomsky also insists that we must theorize the future social order we’d like to be in so we can have some direction. Foucault sees the risk in doing so if constructing such a vision means pursuing ideals such as justice or human nature, both of which we inherit from our bourgeois society and our unique historical moment.
Both are right. The task, as Foucault insists, is undoubtedly to reveal the groundlessness of the precise workings of our institutions and thus the groundlessness of power itself (and further, of Being). Chomsky is right that we need a vision. Spartacus is proof.
The vision, however, can only be unconcealed through the analysis Foucault and the other post modernists advocate. By seeing that we must be the groundless ground of the Abgrund (abyss), we can begin to move towards social ownedness. We can take up a ground (e.g., a stance, belief, identity, path of action, etc.) in full knowledge of its contingency and with a resolve to leave it open to transformation. We can trace a path that facilitates the cultivation of anticipatory resoluteness, that is, which facilitates individual liberation and its extension to social dimensions. Anarchism, which Chomsky advocates for, requires a deep connection with Truth, which, in some strange sense, is non-truth. Luckily, this path has already been traced by our friend Aldous Huxley, who ingeniously wrote Island and demonstrated how the Perennial Philosophy could be woven into the practice of daily life to promote Good Being, from which Good Doing can flow.
Where Chomsky is wrong is in trying to achieve anarchism while holding onto the truth of bourgeois ideals such as justice or human nature. These ideals, as Foucault attempts to show Chomsky, are unique to our age. They are not ideals embedded in the universe. In mistaking our ideals for timeless truths, and in believing our social issues lie in our simply not living up to them, we forget that these ideals were shaped by the very systems we are trying to escape, and that clinging to them locks us into the same frameworks of power, order, and subjecthood that produced the crisis in the first place.
Chomsky discusses protesting the Vietnam War as a form of civil obedience that he devotes his time to. He acknowledges that his actions may bring about extreme repression and even fascism but that in moments of injustice one must do something, and thus the risk must be taken. Foucault, I’m sure, must have sighed internally. Chomsky’s heart is in the right place, but he hasn’t engaged seriously enough with philosophy. The philisophical commitment to uncertainty Foucault was impressing on Chomsky, and which Chomsky tried to signal alignment with through his testament of his participation in civil disobedience, doesn’t call upon us to take dramatic risks. Rather, it calls upon us to sit with existential uncertainty, sitting with mystery without collapsing it into familiar frameworks; it asks us to let the Other transform our very Being.
Foucault could have referred Chomsky to passage 220 in DeBord’s Society of the Spectacle, which reads:
“By rushing into sordid reformist compromises or pseudo-revolutionary collective actions, those driven by an abstract desire for immediate effectiveness are in reality obeying the ruling laws of thought, adopting a perspective that can see nothing but the latest news. In this way delirium reappears within the camp that claims to be opposing it. A critique seeking to go beyond the spectacle must know how to wait.”
Chomsky couldn’t understand the postmodernists because he is not a philosopher, even if he is a social theorist. He clearly held contempt towards the post modernists. He may have felt embarrassed by Foucault in their debate. He was young when they debated, and seems to have held a grudge throughout the rest of his adult life, referring to Foucault and his colleagues as “the strange bubble of French intellectuals.” The post modernists were on magazine covers and he wasn’t. He claimed they were rich, as if to say they are self interested and thus can’t be right about anything. I doubt they were all that rich. Mike Gene, who compiled a series of interviews with one of those French intellectuals, Jean Baudrillard, titled Baudrillard Live, describes the philosopher living a rather standard lifestyle:
“Baudrillard lives in central Paris, in a quarter alive with restaurants, cinemas, small shops. We entered his apartment block and, in the absence of a lift, climbed some wide circular stairs. At the entrance, we paused for breath, rang the bell. It was immediately apparent that we were not in the presence of a morose, dull, conceited and pretentious French intellectual, but a genial, witty character. We were offered coffee and then wine. The apartment is unpretentious, well used, with little evidence of wealth or luxury. Rather plain drapes had been thrown across the furniture, black and white photos (his own perhaps) on the walls, a large mirror above the fireplace, a large television, a video recorder, a CD player and a pile of discs. We were seated at a table placed against one of the walls. Here we talked for over an hour before the interview began.”
Conveniently, Chomsky neglects to mention his own net worth of $5 million. In all his critiques, Chomsky doesn’t once engage with a post modernist idea in good faith. He only employs ad hominem tactics and depicts post modernism through straw man characterizations and out of context quotes. In accusing post modernists of hypocrisy, Chomsky reveals his own hypocrisy (quite pathetically, I’m sorry to say). He is unable to admit his ignorance and learn. He refuses to sit with something he can’t comprehend, and trust there may be value in it if he could be patient. Does Lao Tzu not ask us, “who can sit still while mud settles?”
Chomsky is in error in the Nietzschean sense;
“Error (the belief in the ideal) is not blindness ; error is cowardice.”
The post modernists are merging Freud, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Marx as they restage Zhuangzhi, Buddha, and Maharishi. In doing so they reveal the path lies in the merger of Bookchin, Baudrillard, Gray, and Becker. Chomsky though he misses the deeper Truth, remains valuable. Himself, in combination with Parenti, Davis, and Goldman embody the force of elite and systemic critique required for the merger of the intelligentsia with the people. If we could incorporate their passionate directness into our resolve to be unresolved, if we could adopt a stance of negative capability, and if we could trust in the people, perhaps we could catalyze a movement with the rhythm of Bob Marley, J. Cole, Tonio K, and John Lennon.
If Chomsky could just be patient, and maybe read more carefully, he would see that he and the post-modernists were close in thought. DeBord, at the end of Society of the Spectacle, advocates for anarchism, just like Chomsky did in his debate with Foucault. The difference is that DeBord was able to advocate for anarchism and incorporate the post modern critique. He wrote:
“The self-emancipation of our time is an emancipation from the material bases of inverted truth. This “historic mission of establishing truth in the world" can be carried out neither by the isolated individual nor by atomized and manipulated masses, but only and always by the class that is able to dissolve all classes by reducing all power to the de-alienating form of realized democracy—to councils in which practical theory verifies itself and surveys its own actions. Only there are individuals "directly linked to world history”—there where dialogue has armed itself to impose its own conditions.”
To be simpler: The inverted truth DeBord refers to is when the contingency of ideals is forgotten. Ideals and their material manifestaions, institutions, are made to look solid and unchanging, but nothing has fixed ground. All is always shifting. To free ourselves (the self-emancipation of our time), we have to move away from the institutions that are built on these false idealistic foundations. These abstractions include the state, money, and the idea of a fixed self. We must free ourselves from subservience to abstract ideals, and return to the living moment. We build new forms of life through councils and affinity groups that stay open to change and that verify their effectiveness in real time through communal feedback. In these spaces, truth arrives as an event we feel, an unconcealing of what is meaningful that comes forth through the unfolding process of our shared relations.
Nonetheless, it is not a surprise Chomsky laughs at the postmodernists. People have laughed at the Tao forever.
Tao Te Ching – Verse 41
When a superior man hears of the Tao,
he immediately begins to embody it.
When an average man hears of the Tao,
he half believes it, half doubts it.
When a foolish man hears of the Tao,
he laughs out loud.
If he didn’t laugh,
it wouldn’t be the Tao.
Thus it is said:
The path into the light seems dark,
the path forward seems to go back,
the direct path seems long,
true power seems weak,
true purity seems tarnished,
true steadfastness seems changeable,
true clarity seems obscure,
the greatest art seems unsophisticated,
the greatest love seems indifferent,
the greatest wisdom seems childish.
The Tao is nowhere to be found.
Yet it nourishes and completes all things.
(translation by Stephen Mitchell, 1995)
Lean into the paradox! Onward!
Peter S. Baron (http://www.petersbaron.com) is the author of If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society.
