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Fons Elders was hosting for Dutch Television a discussion between Michel Foucault, historian and philosopher of “discourses of modernity,” and Noam Chomsky, linguist.^§MS3.1.2e

We’ve already heard Chomsky speak a good deal in this book and its companion volume. Here he is again, this time in the television debate: “There is something biologically given, unchangeable, … for whatever it is that we do with our mental capacities.” To the extent that there is scope for human agency, it is to realize otherwise hard-wired bio-grammar in unique sentences. The task Chomsky leaves for himself is to develop a “mathematical theory of mind; by that I simply mean a precisely articulated, clearly formulated, abstract theory.”³⁸⁰

Then, from a bio-determinism that offers such narrow scope of agency,^§MS3.1.2j a huge leap into politics.^§AS2.2d “There is no longer any social necessity for human beings to be treated as mechanical elements in the productive process. … [P]rivate capitalism or state totalitarianism” – communism or “actually-existing socialism” – “[t]hey are all vestiges to be overthrown, eliminated in favor of direct participation in the form of workers’ councils or other free associations that individuals will constitute for themselves for the purpose of their social existence and productive labor.” And this, in a move “towards the true, humanly valuable concepts of justice and decency and love and kindness and sympathy, which I think are real.” Looking to the future, “the technology of data-processing, or communication … can be liberating … [though it can also be] converted … into an instrument of oppression because power is badly distributed.”³⁸¹

Now Foucault, historian of power, for whom a science like Chomsky’s is never more than an “epistemological indicator,”³⁸² a figment of discourse, itself another momentary configuration of power. Power takes its characteristically modern forms by the end of the eighteenth century, as exemplified in asylums,³⁸³ prisons,³⁸⁴ and hospitals,³⁸⁵ and their practices of confinement, rationalized by the new sciences of medicine and social regulation. So, “in the historical studies that I have been able to make, I have without doubt given very little room to what you might call the creativity of individuals.”³⁸⁶

As for politics, “I admit to not being able to define, nor for even stronger reasons to propose, an ideal social model.”^* And antagonisms based on economic inequalities: if “[t]he proletariat makes war with the ruling class, [it is] … because it wants to take power … One makes war to win, not because it is just.” This is why, following Nietzsche, Foucault “doesn’t speak in terms of justice but in terms of power.”³⁸⁷ No sides in the perennial struggle for power are to be privileged; no justice is to be attributed to any particular cause; all interests are as power-directed as each other.

If the essentials of meaning in Chomsky are to be found in language as bio-expression, in Foucault they are to be located in “discourse.” This is “not [just] the language used by discourse … but discourse itself as a practice,” where “the unity of discourse [is] in the objects themselves, in their distribution, in the interplay of their differences, in their proximity or distance … a group of rules that are immanent in the practice.”³⁸⁸

Take the famous sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” says Foucault in his Archaeology of Knowledge, assuming his reader will know that Chomsky its author.^§MS3.1.2f “In fact, to say that a sentence like this is meaningless presupposes that one has already excluded a number of possibilities – that it describes a dream, that it is part of a poetic text, that it is a coded message, that it is spoken by a drug addict – and that one assumes it must be a certain type of statement that must refer, in a very definite way, to some visible reality.”³⁸⁹

So what does Chomsky mean by this sentence? He was not dreaming, or being poetic, or speaking in code, or on drugs – this sentence is meaningfully famous as an example of meaninglessness but only within a frame of discursive practice that has eliminated dreams, poetry, code, or drugs as normal speech or text. Chomsky has defined as meaningful only those sentences that refer in a congruent way to empirical things. This is what he means, this is the nature of his science.

For Foucault, it is not enough “for a sequence of linguistic elements to be regarded and analysed as a statement.” It must also be analyzed in terms of its “material existence … Even if a sentence is composed of the same words, bears exactly the same meaning, and preserves the same syntactical and semantic identity, it does not constitute the same statement if it is spoken by some one in the course of a conversation, or printed in a novel; if it was written one day centuries ago, and if it now reappears in an oral formulation. The coordinates and the material status of the statement are part of its intrinsic characteristics.”³⁹⁰

The task of “enunciative analysis … reveals … what men ‘really meant’ not only in their words and texts, their discourses and their writings, but also in the institutions, practices, techniques, and objects that they produced, … this implicit, sovereign, communal ‘meaning.’” As a consequence, “statements (however numerous they may be) are always in deficit; on the basis of the grammar and of the wealth of vocabulary available at a given period, there are, in total, relatively few things that are said.”³⁹¹

But does “discursive practice” in Foucault include institutions, objects, actions? This is unclear. Mostly it seems that it doesn’t – discourse is text or reported speech in context, and his method in linguists’ terms a kind of pragmatics.^§MS0.3a So even though at times his method appears to capture multimodal meaning, in the end we have another reduction of meaning to language. Though, as if to equivocate, Foucault admits that “[t]his rarity of statements, the incomplete, fragmented form of the enunciative field, the fact that few things, in all, can be said, explain that statements are not, like the air we breathe, an infinite transparency.”³⁹²

Foucault also, but secondarily, directs attention to the visual, and its realization in the form of the “gaze” of power. His allegory of modern power is Jeremy Bentham’s hypothetical design for a prison, the Panopticon, a circular building with a guardhouse in the middle, guards able to see into every cell but the inmates unable to see each other. “Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions.”³⁹³

This architecture creates a “permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” The outcome is an “axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility.” Such is the prototypical design of modern institutions of power. “If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time.”³⁹⁴

But from the gaze, Foucault returns us to discourse, where in the hospital, for instance, “clinical experience represents a moment of balance between speech and spectacle. A precarious balance, for it rests on a formidable postulate: that all that is visible is expressible, and that it is wholly visible because it is wholly expressible.” The visible symptoms are reduced to linguistic diagnosis and medical taxonomy, “the organization of objectivity on the basis of sign values, the secretly linguistic structure of the datum.”³⁹⁵ So too, the gaze of the Panopticon is reducible to the classifications of criminality and the social discourse of law. The gaze of the teacher is reducible to the discourse of curriculum and testing.

Discursive power is for Foucault pervasive, so thoroughly internalized by participants that it becomes virtually unassailable. It is “not an institution, and not a structure. … Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points. … Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix.”³⁹⁶ It is as if, for Foucault, prisoners and warders, patients and doctors, students and teachers, were equally complicit in the replication of structures of power, as if there were no centers of power, as if power were so inevitable as to be impervious to change.

To return now to the frame of reference of our grammar of multimodality, the forms of expression of this power are broader than discourse and gaze. Power is realized in the spatial arrangement of buildings, the positioning of bodies, the imagery, the sounds and silences, and perhaps least directly in speech and text – the one transposable into the other. Their practical power arises from their transposability.

Not only are differential interests unbalanced, their relations are antagonistic, and as such they are always ready to be changed. They systematically favor one social group at the expense of another, and so contain intrinsic conflicts of interest which always beg resolution. However compliant the powerless, for the moment at least, the power they experience has been imposed. More than an undifferentiated matrix, in unequal societies there are centers of power and power is imposed on the many by the few. The antagonisms always beg reconfiguration, small or large. Power relations are not unassailable. Replication is not the only option. Hacks that make incremental changes the patterning of interests are possible; so are revolutionary changes that create fundamental transformations.

Foucault started visiting the United States from 1970, initially on lecture tours, spending more time there as the years went on. At one point, he contemplated moving to the US. One of his American revelations was a vibrant gay “subculture of sado-masochism” – his terminology.³⁹⁷ He spent a sabbatical at the University of California, Berkeley in 1975. There he was drawn, in the words of one of his biographers, to “the unusual array of pleasures to be found on Folsom Street – the hub of San Francisco’s ‘leather’ scene … [where d]epending on the club, one could savor the illusion of bondage – or experience the most directly physical sorts of self-chosen ‘torture.’” Foucault told an interviewer from the gay journal Body Politic, “The S/M culture is interesting,” because “there are roles and everybody knows very well that the roles can be reversed. Sometimes the scene begins with the master and the slave, and at the end the slave has become the master.”³⁹⁸

While Chomsky’s politics led him to sympathize with the worker-controlled enterprises and non-aligned globalism of Yugoslavia,^§AS2.4.2a Foucault’s politics was heading somewhere else. He visited Iran several times in 1978 during the social ferment that lead to the Islamic revolution. Here, he found what he thought to be the possibility of “a political spirituality.” He was impressed to see women wearing the veil as a political gesture. Religion in Iran had become, he said, “a real force … the force that can make a whole people rise up.”³⁹⁹ When the still-exiled Ayatollah Khomeini came to live in Paris shortly before his triumphal return to Tehran, Foucault was among the first to meet him. No mere politician, no figure of conventional governmental power, Foucault said, “Khomeini is the point of fixation for a collective will.”⁴⁰⁰

Or to retreat from politics, from any possible agenda for social change: “the historical ontology of ourselves must turn away from all projects that claim to be global or radical. In fact we know from experience that the claim to escape from the system of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another society, of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions.”⁴⁰¹ There’s no way out of here, Foucault’s insane joker might have said to his incarcerated thief. Looking back to his version of modernity, we see a scene of sado-masochistic compliance.

Foucault’s orientation to change now seems strangely dated. The institutions he chose for his talismans were always peculiar – not the mainstream of the market, not the enterprises where most adults spent their working days, not the family except for his late work on ancient Greece and Rome. The institutions he analyzed were in their genesis and still were in his time instruments of state power, places of peculiarly intense confinement outside the everyday sociabilities and diffuse power antagonisms of work, consumption, and family.

Since the time when Foucault wrote, asylums have been emptied, prisons and hospitals privatized, and, in the reconfiguration of global interests in the post-Cold War era, the modern state has been withered away in favor of markets. The first decades of the twenty-first century have been halcyon years for Milton Friedman’s capitalist idealism,^§AS2.4a with its peculiar dynamics of “freedom.”^§AS2.3a With few exceptions, the centralized power of authoritarian and welfare states has given way to the dispersed logic of the market.

In social media, the radial gaze of the Panopticon has been displaced by the “multisynopticon,”⁴⁰² with everyone’s seeing each other and narcissistically exhibiting themselves for the seeing. Deprivation of agency in centralized institutions and mass media has given way to social media where users become agents of their own meanings, whether these are felt to be oppressive or liberating and even if the platform owners appropriate these freely given meanings for private profit. In the negotiation of differential and antagonistic interests, the dominance of an all-encompassing, assimilating logic of power has given way to logics of differentiation.^§AS2.2.2 There are still today profound asymmetries of power, but their dynamics are quite different from Foucault’s modernity.

Had he lived to experience these days, Foucault might well have been pleased to see that we are today governed less, at least in terms of the old-fashioned expressions of power via state or state-sanctioned institutional control that he described. Our being governed now happens in other ways.

Foucault died of AIDS in 1984, at that time an incurable disease. His last words in his last lecture at the Collège de France on 28 March of that year: “There you are, listen, I had things to say to you about the general framework. But well, it’s too late. So thank you.”⁴⁰³

And earlier, of that framework he had said, “[t]o all those who wish to talk about man, his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who want to take him as a starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth … to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can only answer with a philosophical laugh – which means, to a certain extent, a silent one.”⁴⁰⁴

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³⁷⁹ Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, 1971 [2006], The Chomsky–Foucault Debate: On Human Nature, New York: The New Press, p. 30.

³⁸⁰ Ibid., pp. 7, 13.

³⁸¹ Ibid., pp. 38, 55, 64.

³⁸² Ibid., p. 6.

³⁸³ Michel Foucault, 1961 [1988], Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, translated by R. Howard, New York: Vintage Books.

³⁸⁴ Michel Foucault, 1975 [1977], Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by A. Sheridan, New York: Vintage Books.

³⁸⁵ Michel Foucault, 1963 [1973], The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, translated by A.M. Sheridan, London: Taylor and Francis.

³⁸⁶ Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, 1971 [2006], The Chomsky–Foucault Debate: On Human Nature, New York: The New Press, p. 15.

³⁸⁷ Ibid., pp. 40, 51, 54.

³⁸⁸ Michel Foucault, 1969 [1972]; The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A.M.S. Smith, New York: Pantheon, pp. 46, 48; Michel Foucault, 1966 [1970], The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Tavistock, p. xiv.

³⁸⁹ Michel Foucault, 1969 [1972]; The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A.M.S. Smith, New York: Pantheon, p. 90.

³⁹⁰ Ibid., p. 100.

³⁹¹ Ibid., pp. 118–19.

³⁹² Ibid., pp. 119–20.

³⁹³ Michel Foucault, 1975 [1977], Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by A. Sheridan, New York: Vintage Books, p. 200.

³⁹⁴ Ibid., pp. 200–01.

³⁹⁵ Michel Foucault, 1963 [1973], The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, translated by A.M. Sheridan, London: Taylor and Francis, pp. 115, 199.

³⁹⁶ Michel Foucault, 1976 [1978], The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, translated by R. Hurley, New York: Pantheon, pp. 93–94.

³⁹⁷ Didier Eribon, 1991, Michel Foucault, translated by B. Wing, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 315.

³⁹⁸ James Miller, 1993, The Passion of Michel Foucault, New York: Simon & Schuster, pp. 259–60, 263.

³⁹⁹ David Macey, 1993, The Lives of Michel Foucault, New York: Pantheon Books, p. 410.

⁴⁰⁰ Didier Eribon, 1991, Michel Foucault, translated by B. Wing, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 285–87.

⁴⁰¹ Michel Foucault, 1984, “What Is Enlightenment?,” pp. 32–50 in The Foucault Reader, edited by P. Rabinow, New York: Pantheon, p. 46.

⁴⁰² Petrilson Pinheiro, 2019, “The Age of Multisynopticon: What Does It Mean to Be (Critically) Literate Nowadays?,” pp. 237–60 in Linguística Aplicada Para Além Das Fronteiras, edited by R.F. Maciel, R. Tilio, D.M. de Jesus, and A.L. d’E.C. de Barros, Campinas, Brazil: Pontes; Thomas Mathiesen, 1997, “The Viewer Society: Michel Foucault’s ‘Panopticon’ Revisited,” Theoretical Criminology: An International Journal 1(2):215–32.

⁴⁰³ Michel Foucault, 1984 [2011], The Courage of Truth (the Government of the Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège De France, 1983–1984, translated by G. Burchell, London: Palgrave, p. 338.

⁴⁰⁴ Michel Foucault, 1966 [1970], The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Tavistock, pp. 342–43.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 305–311. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Michel Foucault Debates Noam Chomsky on Human Nature §AS2.5a