Noam Chom­sky has always had iras­ci­ble tendencies—when he doesn’t like some­thing, he lets us know it, with­out ever rais­ing his voice and usu­al­ly with plen­ty of foot­notes. It’s a qual­i­ty that has made the emer­i­tus MIT pro­fes­sor and famed lin­guist such a potent crit­ic of U.S. empire for half a cen­tu­ry, vig­or­ous­ly denounc­ing the Viet­nam War, the Iraq War(s), and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a cat­a­stroph­ic war with North Korea. Chom­sky isn’t a pro­fes­sion­al his­to­ri­an or polit­i­cal philoso­pher; these are avo­ca­tions he has tak­en on to bol­ster his argu­ments. But those argu­ments are strength­ened by his will­ing­ness to engage with pri­ma­ry sources and take them seri­ous­ly.

When it comes, how­ev­er, to his much-pub­li­cized feud with “Post­mod­ernism,” a term he uses lib­er­al­ly at times to describe almost all post-war French intel­lec­tu­al cul­ture, Chom­sky rarely con­fronts his oppo­nents in their own terms. That’s large­ly because, as he’s said on many occa­sions, he can’t make any sense of them. It’s not exact­ly an orig­i­nal cri­tique. Man­darins of French thought like Jean-Fran­cois Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Bau­drillard have been accused for decades, and not with­out mer­it, of know­ing­ly ped­dling bull­shit to a French read­er­ship that expects, as Michel Fou­cault once admit­ted, a manda­to­ry “ten per­cent incom­pre­hen­si­ble.” (Soci­ol­o­gist Pierre Bour­dieu asserts that the num­ber is much high­er.)

But Chomsky’s cri­tique goes fur­ther, in a direc­tion that doesn’t get near­ly as much press as his charges of obscu­ran­tism and overuse of insu­lar jar­gon. Chom­sky claims that far from offer­ing rad­i­cal new ways of con­ceiv­ing the world, Post­mod­ern thought serves as an instru­ment of oppres­sive pow­er struc­tures. It’s an inter­est­ing asser­tion giv­en some recent argu­ments that “post-truth” post­mod­ernism is respon­si­ble for the rise of the self-described “alt-right” and the rapid spread of fake infor­ma­tion as a tool for the cur­rent U.S. rul­ing par­ty seiz­ing pow­er.

Not only is there “a lot of mate­r­i­al reward,” Chom­sky says, that comes from the aca­d­e­m­ic super­star­dom many high-pro­file French philoso­phers achieved, but their position—or lack of a clear position—“allows peo­ple to take a very rad­i­cal stance… but to be com­plete­ly dis­so­ci­at­ed from every­thing that’s hap­pen­ing.” Chom­sky gives an exam­ple above of an anony­mous post­mod­ernist crit­ic brand­ing a talk he gave as “naïve” for its dis­cus­sion of such out­mod­ed “Enlight­en­ment stuff” as mak­ing moral deci­sions and refer­ring to such a thing as “truth.” In his brief dis­cus­sion of “the strange bub­ble of French intel­lec­tu­als” at the top of the post, Chom­sky gets more spe­cif­ic.

Most post-war French philoso­phers, he alleges, have been Stal­in­ists or Maoists (he uses the exam­ple of Julia Kris­te­va), and have uncrit­i­cal­ly embraced author­i­tar­i­an state com­mu­nism despite its doc­u­ment­ed crimes and abus­es, while reject­ing oth­er modes of philo­soph­i­cal thought like log­i­cal pos­i­tivism that accept the valid­i­ty of the sci­en­tif­ic method. This may or may not be a fair cri­tique: polit­i­cal ori­en­ta­tions shift and change (and at times we accept a thinker’s work while ful­ly reject­ing their per­son­al pol­i­tics). And the post­mod­ern cri­tique of sci­en­tif­ic dis­course as form of oppres­sive pow­er is a seri­ous one that need­n’t entail a whole­sale rejec­tion of sci­ence.

Are there any post-struc­tural­ist thinkers Chom­sky admires? Though he takes a lit­tle dig at Michel Fou­cault in the clip above, he and the French the­o­rist have had some fruit­ful debates, “on real issues,” Chom­sky says, “and using lan­guage that was per­fect­ly comprehensible—he speak­ing French, me Eng­lish.” That’s not a sur­prise. The two thinkers, despite the immense dif­fer­ence in their styles and frames of ref­er­ence, both engage heav­i­ly with pri­ma­ry his­tor­i­cal sources and both con­sis­tent­ly write his­to­ries of ide­ol­o­gy.

It is part­ly through the inter­play between Fou­cault and Chomsky’s ideas that we might find a syn­the­sis of French Marx­ist post-struc­tural­ist thought and Amer­i­can anar­chist polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy. Rather than see­ing them as pro­fes­sion­al wrestlers in the ring, with the post­mod­ernist as the heel and head­lines like “Chom­sky DESTROYS Post­mod­ernism,” we could look for com­ple­men­tar­i­ty and points of agree­ment, and gen­uine­ly read, as dif­fi­cult as that can be, as many of the argu­ments of post­mod­ern French philoso­phers as we can (and per­haps this defense of obscu­ran­tism) before decid­ing with a sweep­ing ges­ture that none of them make any sense.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Noam Chom­sky Calls Post­mod­ern Cri­tiques of Sci­ence Over-Inflat­ed “Poly­syl­lab­ic Tru­isms”

Noam Chom­sky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Emp­ty ‘Pos­tur­ing’

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

MIT Is Dig­i­tiz­ing a Huge Archive of Noam Chomsky’s Lec­tures, Papers and Oth­er Doc­u­ments & Will Put Them Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The non-exis­tence, or non-impor­tance, of the self has for mil­len­nia been an uncon­tro­ver­sial propo­si­tion in East­ern thought. But West­ern thinkers have tend­ed to embrace the con­cept of the iso­lat­ed self as, if not suf­fi­cient, at least nec­es­sary for a coher­ent account of human life. Yet there are many ways to describe what it means to have a self—an ego, an indi­vid­ual iden­ti­ty. Is the self a prod­uct of cul­ture, his­to­ry, and econ­o­my? Is it a col­lec­tion of sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ences to which no one else has access? Is it con­sti­tut­ed only in rela­tion to oth­er selves, or in rela­tion to an ulti­mate, unchang­ing, all-pow­er­ful Self?

For the Exis­ten­tial­ists, the self can be a prison, a trap, and a source of great anx­i­ety. Hei­deg­ger called self­hood a con­di­tion of being “thrown into the world.” By the time we real­ize where and what we are, accord­ing to restric­tive cat­e­gories of his­tor­i­cal thought and lan­guage, we are already there, inescapably bound to our con­di­tions, forced to per­form roles for which we nev­er audi­tioned. Jean-Paul Sartre took this notion of “thrown­ness” and gave it his own neu­rot­ic stamp. We are indeed tossed into exis­tences against our will, but the real con­dem­na­tion, he thought, is that once we arrive, we have to make choic­es. We are doomed to the task of cre­at­ing our­selves, no mat­ter how lim­it­ed the options, and there is no pos­si­bil­i­ty of opt­ing out. Even not mak­ing choic­es is a choice.

This extreme kind of free will, as Stephen Fry explains in the short, ani­mat­ed video above, stems from the prob­lem of human nature—there isn’t any. “Accord­ing to Sartre, there is no design for a human being,” says Fry, or in Sartre’s famous phrase, “exis­tence pre­cedes essence.” There is only the absur­di­ty of arriv­ing in a world with no plan, no God, no uni­ver­sal codes or fixed stan­dards of val­ue: just a dizzy­ing array of deci­sions to make. And yet, rather than mak­ing life triv­ial, the absurd con­di­tion described by Sartre lends sub­stan­tial weight to all of our choic­es, for in mak­ing them, he claimed, we are not only cre­at­ing our­selves, but decid­ing what a human being should be.

Illu­sions of cer­tain­ty and neces­si­ty obscure the con­tin­gent nature of exis­ten­tial choice, both the true inher­i­tance and the unremit­ting bur­den of every indi­vid­ual. What we become in life is up to us, Sartre thought, a propo­si­tion that caus­es us a good deal of anguish, since we can­not know the out­come of our choic­es nor under­stand the world in which we make them beyond our lim­it­ed capac­i­ty. And yet, we must act, Sartre thought, “as if every­one is watch­ing me.” This is not a pleas­ing thought, even if, for many, the idea might actu­al­ly lead to more care­ful, sober, and delib­er­a­tive decision-making—that is, when it does­n’t lead to par­a­lyz­ing dread.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Crash Course in Exis­ten­tial­ism: A Short Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Paul Sartre & Find­ing Mean­ing in a Mean­ing­less World

What Is an “Exis­ten­tial Cri­sis”?: An Ani­mat­ed Video Explains What the Expres­sion Real­ly Means

Exis­ten­tial Phi­los­o­phy of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus Explained with 8‑Bit Video Games

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Tucked in the after­ward of the sec­ond, 1982 edi­tion of Hubert Drey­fus and Paul Rabinow’s Michel Fou­cault: Beyond Struc­tural­ism and Hermeneu­tics, we find an impor­tant, but lit­tle-known essay by Fou­cault him­self titled “The Sub­ject and Pow­er.” Here, the French the­o­rist offers what he con­strues as a sum­ma­ry of his life’s work: span­ning 1961’s Mad­ness and Civ­i­liza­tion up to his three-vol­ume, unfin­ished His­to­ry of Sex­u­al­i­ty, still in progress at the time of his death in 1984. He begins by telling us that he has not been, pri­mar­i­ly, con­cerned with pow­er, despite the word’s appear­ance in his essay’s title, its argu­ments, and in near­ly every­thing else he has writ­ten. Instead, he has sought to dis­cov­er the “modes of objec­ti­fi­ca­tion which trans­form human beings into sub­jects.”

This dis­tinc­tion may seem abstruse, a need­less­ly wordy mat­ter of seman­tics. It is not so for Fou­cault. In key crit­i­cal dif­fer­ence lies the orig­i­nal­i­ty of his project, in all its var­i­ous stages of devel­op­ment. “Pow­er,” as an abstrac­tion, an objec­tive rela­tion of dom­i­nance, is sta­t­ic and con­cep­tu­al, the image of a tyrant on a coin, of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan seat­ed on his throne.

Sub­jec­tion, sub­jec­ti­fi­ca­tion, objec­tiviz­ing, indi­vid­u­al­iz­ing, on the oth­er hand—critical terms in Foucault’s vocabulary—are active process­es, dis­ci­plines and prac­tices, rela­tion­ships between indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions that deter­mine the char­ac­ter of both. These rela­tion­ships can be locat­ed in his­to­ry, as Fou­cault does in exam­ple after exam­ple, and they can also be crit­i­cal­ly stud­ied in the present, and thus, per­haps, resist­ed and changed in what he terms “anar­chis­tic strug­gles.”

Fou­cault calls for a “new econ­o­my of pow­er rela­tions,” and a crit­i­cal the­o­ry that takes “forms of resis­tance against dif­fer­ent forms of pow­er as a start­ing point.” For exam­ple, in approach­ing the carcer­al state, we must exam­ine the process­es that divide “the crim­i­nals and the ‘good boys,’” process­es that func­tion inde­pen­dent­ly of rea­son. How is it that a sys­tem can cre­ate class­es of peo­ple who belong in cages and peo­ple who don’t, when the stan­dard ratio­nal justification—the pro­tec­tion of soci­ety from violence—fails spec­tac­u­lar­ly to apply in mil­lions of cas­es? From such excess­es, Fou­cault writes, come two “’dis­eases of power’—fascism and Stal­in­ism.” Despite the “inner mad­ness” of these “patho­log­i­cal forms” of state pow­er, “they used to a large extent the ideas and the devices of our polit­i­cal ratio­nal­i­ty.”

Peo­ple come to accept that mass incar­cer­a­tion, or inva­sive med­ical tech­nolo­gies, or eco­nom­ic depri­va­tion, or mass sur­veil­lance and over-polic­ing, are nec­es­sary and ratio­nal. They do so through the agency of what Fou­cault calls “pas­toral pow­er,” the sec­u­lar­iza­tion of reli­gious author­i­ty as inte­gral to the West­ern state.

This form of pow­er can­not be exer­cised with­out know­ing the inside of people’s minds, with­out explor­ing their souls, with­out mak­ing them reveal their inner­most secrets. It implies a knowl­edge of the con­science and an abil­i­ty to direct it.

In the last years of Foucault’s life, he shift­ed his focus from insti­tu­tion­al dis­cours­es and mechanisms—psychiatric, carcer­al, medical—to dis­ci­pli­nary prac­tices of self-con­trol and the gov­ern­ing of oth­ers by “pas­toral” means. Rather than ignor­ing indi­vid­u­al­i­ty, the mod­ern state, he writes, devel­oped “as a very sophis­ti­cat­ed struc­ture, in which indi­vid­u­als can be inte­grat­ed, under one con­di­tion: that this indi­vid­u­al­i­ty would be shaped in a new form and sub­mit­ted to a set of very spe­cif­ic pat­terns.” While writ­ing his mon­u­men­tal His­to­ry of Sex­u­al­i­ty, he gave a series of lec­tures at Berke­ley that explore the mod­ern polic­ing of the self.

In his lec­tures on “Truth and Sub­jec­tiv­i­ty” (1980), Fou­cault looks at forms of inter­ro­ga­tion and var­i­ous “truth ther­a­pies” that func­tion as sub­tle forms of coer­cion. Fou­cault returned to Berke­ley in 1983 and deliv­ered the lec­ture “Dis­course and Truth,” which explores the con­cept of par­rhe­sia, the Greek term mean­ing “free speech,” or as he calls it, “truth-telling as an activ­i­ty.” Through analy­sis of the tragedies of Euripi­des and con­tem­po­rary demo­c­ra­t­ic crises, he reveals the prac­tice of speak­ing truth to pow­er as a kind of tight­ly con­trolled per­for­mance. Final­ly, in his lec­ture series “The Cul­ture of the Self,” Fou­cault dis­cuss­es ancient and mod­ern prac­tices of “self care” or “the care of the self” as tech­nolo­gies designed to pro­duce cer­tain kinds of tight­ly bound­ed sub­jec­tiv­i­ties.

• Four Lec­tures on Truth and Sub­jec­tiv­i­ty (1980)
• Six Lec­tures on Dis­course and Truth (1983)
• Three Lec­tures on “The Cul­ture of the Self” (1983)

You can hear parts of these lec­tures above or vis­it our posts with full audio above. Also, over at Ubuweb, down­load the lec­tures as mp3s, and hear sev­er­al ear­li­er talks from Fou­cault in French, dat­ing all the way back to 1961.

When he began his final series of talks in 1980, the philoso­pher was asked in an inter­view with the Dai­ly Cal­i­forn­ian about the moti­va­tions for his crit­i­cal exam­i­na­tions of pow­er and sub­jec­tiv­i­ty. His reply speaks to both his prac­ti­cal con­cern for resis­tance and his almost utopi­an belief in the lim­it­less poten­tial for human free­dom. “No aspect of real­i­ty should be allowed to become a defin­i­tive and inhu­man law for us,” Fou­cault says.

We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just pow­er in the nar­row sense of the word, refer­ring to the pow­er of a gov­ern­ment or of one social group over anoth­er: these are only a few par­tic­u­lar instances of pow­er.

Pow­er is any­thing that tends to ren­der immo­bile and untouch­able those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good.

Read Foucault’s state­ment of intent, his essay “The Sub­ject and Pow­er,” and learn more about his life and work in the 1993 doc­u­men­tary below.

Fou­cault’s lec­ture series will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch a “Lost Inter­view” With Michel Fou­cault: Miss­ing for 30 Years But Now Recov­ered

Michel Fou­cault and Alain Badiou Dis­cuss “Phi­los­o­phy and Psy­chol­o­gy” on French TV (1965)

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness