Classic Foucault vs. Chomsky (1971) Revisited

Chances are you've already seen this great debate. Chomsky believes in context-independent norms and Foucault doesn't, i.e. for Foucault norms are historical creations and for Chomsky norms are universal constants of natural reason. What does this imply? Uncertainty in Chomsky's world appears to be lower than in Foucault's world. You could in theory plan out political change in the first, but not in the second, because when norms are merely human creations getting somewhere is something that keeps unpredictably modifying the reference system which tells you where you are.

Now it is clear that meaning emergence occurs naturally all the time in and around us. But it is also clear that there are limits to the applicability of this model. The meaning of events changes over time, but not necessarily in the radical manner Foucault suggests. In fact, meaning typically emerges through gradual learning. Learning implies there is something out there you adapt to, and that reality doesn't adapt to you. But as Foucault would have it, social reality is something that you make up in the course of deconstructing inherited institutions, i.e. past fictions. If reason and learning are reduced to imagination and making up fictions, universal norms will appear as over-stretched fiction-empires, a territory ripe for fragmentation and colonization by unforeseeable forces, by individuals beyond present-day classifications and analysis. The old ways we see things need to be opened up by the new things we do.

Foucault's thinking isn't far from the idea of creative destruction. Right now the concept applies nicely to what's going on in the dying world of print media and to the emerging ways of looking at the internet-economy. Entrepreneurs are going at it and figuring ways out to become sustainable as they forge ahead. The process operates on the assumption that the whole thing will eventually end up making sense, even if we can't exactly figure out how right now.