RE:

So I guess this really is the debate at the heart of my recent questions about ethics.

Chomsky: We can imagine a better world, a more just world, a world based in a universal human code of ethics, and we should work toward the actualization of that world.

Foucault: What is unjust in the world is performed through us, even the most benign of our institutions reenact structures of power, all claims to a universal code of human ethics are necessarily corrupted by this inescapable performance of injustice, and any action toward the actualization of a better world is freighted with this performance of injustice. (That is what he's saying, right?)

But I think they are both right. We're doomed to failure, but we are obligated to try anyway.

-R


Well I would not rush to say that both believe that we are doomed to failure. That is probably the reason why both are even debating this matter, not because it is a dead end, but rather they are searching for futures to struggle toward. At first glance, Chomsky and Foucault seem to be speaking two different intellectual languages: Chomsky the Cartesian and Foucault the genealogicist. For Chomsky the object reality, the future eden, exists somewhere in the future. Through technology, knowledge, and political struggle, "we" can all exist in a future where, according to Kropotkin, "all is for all." For Foucault, the knowledge, technology, and politics is in itself socio-historically constituted, beliefs in an anarcho-communist utopia is produced from this socio-historical context: in this instance the juridicial powers and rights birthed from the enlightenment. For Foucault, the object is merely a representation, not reality, and as time passes, as further ruptures occur, discourses of equality, justice, freedom will change, the very individual will be changed, thus, the future imagined in the present, may not be the "just" society in the future. For Foucault it is not enough to imagine a just society and strive toward it, but rather, the very ideas of just (and other enlightenment thought) must be deconstructed to find what ideas have been repressed and marginalized. In this sense, both do want a better future, but Chomsky judges the "ideal" future through the "ideal" now, while Foucault asserts that the "ideal" now will not be the future's ideal present. Still, looking at both, one can easily see how they are both trapped within enlightenment thought. Other forms of social structures, reason and progress, the ideas of self, and the very idea of time itself, have not been put through the critical ringers of the subaltern. Only when we begin to really critically look at the local, can we truly begin to deconstruct the universal.