Chomsky: How’s it goin?
Fotohinia: Yes. Yes.
C: Good.
F: So, that’s the camera over there.
C: Oh.
F: Alright. Well –
C: Get this out of the way.
F: Umm.
C: How is this, What is this, what is this gonna be for?
F: It’s gonna be for YouTube.
C: So, Um, before we get started, I’d like to read a passage from 1984
F: Uh. To the future or to the past. To a time when thought is free. When men are different from one another and do not live alone. To a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone. From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink, greetings.
F: Uh. So. Uh. Professor can you come forward please.
NC: Sure
F: Thanks. Uh. So. Hello YouTube. This is Professor Noam Chomsky, whose reputation in the Who’s Who ranges…goes on for almost half a page…the 2008 Who’s Who. My name is Saeed Navid Fotohinia. I’m someone who’s been doing a lot of work with the United Nations. Uh. For example: this is a picture of me with Thabo Mbeki. Uh. This is a picture of me with Jean Chretien.
C: Getting around.
F: This is Castro. This is the Chief of Defence Staff, when I was in the military, when I was in the Canadian Forces. I was a Second Lieutenant and this is our only General in Canada, General Rick Hillier. And this is an article in the military, the Post Gazette entitled, “Message of Muslim Soldier Intended to Help Troops See Humanity”, and it starts off with: “By his own admission 2Lt. Saeed Fotohinia’s appearance is a contradiction: ‘Take a minute to see the image before you. First you may notice I am Middle Eastern by appearance; then you may notice I am military by dress. As an image I at once fit the profile of a terrorist and an anti-terrorist,’ he said, ‘a vivid oxymoron in green and brown juxtaposed against a glorious red and white.’” In fact, that paragraph is what I was whispering to Rick Hillier when we took that picture. Uh, so, I worked with the United Nations as the kind of organizer of the first youth summit in the history of…to be accredited in the history of the UN. And that took place in 2001 in South Africa and was a great success. However, 9/11 took place right after that, and uh…I’d like to read something from Michael Baer Terrorism get into a little bit of discussion: “Terrorism systematically undermines trust in a context of increasing mutual dependence. As systematically unsystematic violence, terrorism undermines trust on two levels: it undermines the citizen’s trust in their government’s ability or will to protect them, and b) it undermines the citizens trust in one another as individuals. Terrorism thus has the effect of deligitamizing and destabilizing the social institutions and relationships with ones that are based on fear or coercion. Now I bring that up because I know that a young man, who said he represented the voice of young people, whose real name is Sacha Baron Cohen, but who called himself Ali G, came and interviewed you in the same way that he interviews a lot of other very influential people in the world; and that is by asking questions that are very insincere and that don’t real seek a true answer, and just, instead, lampoon the person who is trying to answer it [sic.]. And um…do you think that 9/11 is a similar breech of the rules of etiquette by one party with a certain ideology on a different…uh…uh…plane.
C: I’m afraid I don’t see any comparison. 9/11 was a huge criminal atrocity. It was aimed at killing thousands of people…massive destruction…I don’t see anything amusing about it or anything ironic about it. It’s just a major crime. I must say I wasn’t terribly impressed by Ali G either. In fact I continued the interview only out of politeness; my immediate instinct was just to terminate it.
F: Well that’s what I mean. I mean, if Al Qaeda were polite (quote, unquote), they’d go to the United Nations.
C: That’s like saying if the United States were “polite”, it wouldn’t invade Iraq. It has nothing to do with politeness.
F: Well, I mean.
C: This is a matter of achieving political ends. And that, in fact, fits the definition of Terror.
F: But..
C: It’s the “threat or use of force to attain ideological, political, religious or other ends.”
F: How about friendship though? I mean, like a conversation doesn’t need to be about attaining political ends, or a tit-for-tat. It can be about mutual gain. And terrorists as much as the sham voice of young people are equally guilty..or..uh…you know..on a very specific level of…uh…bad manners.
C: You see I don’t think it’s “bad manners” to slaughter thousands of people. That’s not the right category. Or let me continue, you quoted someone, I’ve forgotten who, about the effect of Terror…
F: Michael Bauer.
C: Yeah. There are other comments on the effect of Terror. For example, one important comment is that Terror, if intensifies, tends to leave a culture of Terror, which domesticates the aspirations of the majority of the population and keeps them from even dreaming of pursuing their own ends. That’s an effect of Terror. I happen to be quoting from a Jesuit-led conference in San Salvador, where they’re talking about Reagan’s War on Terror – namely a hideous terrorist war which devastated El Salvador, killed tens of thousands of people, and happened to be, in significant measure, directed against the Church. This conference was led by the surviving Jesuits, many of them were slaughtered by Reagan’s terrorist forces. But I wouldn’t use the word impolite for that.
F: Well…
C: Would you use the word impolite for the Holocaust?
F: Would I?
C: Yeah.
F: Um. What I mean is…Uh I’m coming from a Linguistic approach, and I definitely share with you the deep sorrow as a person for what happened on 9/11. Personally, as someone who worked at a conference against racism a week before 9/11, I was very much affected by it because, here we were, at the United Nations speaking, writing – you know, young people, seven hundred young people from around the world – writing a declaration against racism and then, on my way back to Montreal, when I was in Heathrow, I hear about these terrible events that actually have changed the entire world. Um, there is no doubt in my that that was an extremely violent and an unmitigated crime against humanity.
C: Then why bring up the issue of politeness?
F: It’s a question of words. And you recently wrote a foreword to Andrea Moro’s The Boundaries of Babel, and he speaks of a kind of universal language, an approach to a universal grammar, and to give the audience in YouTube a flavour of what he talks about I’ll quote just a little bit from his Preface: “This book is the history of an encounter of the cultures Linguistics and the Neuroscience, or more precisely the Cognitive Neurosciences. It is also the attempt to expose a hidden revolution in contemporary science: the discovery that the number of possible grammar is not infinite, and that their number is biologically limited. I say hidden because, despite the fact that concepts…,” and he goes on from there.
C: You’re quoting Moro?
F: Yes.
C: Yeah.
F: Yeah. Is there a root to meaning? Has Terror lost all sense all value as a word? How can we approach the word “God” or swear words…a four-letter word…in a way that encompasses the new biological connection that is being uncovered in Linguistics?
C: Well, first of all, the discoveries that Moro is talking about in Linguistics and Neuroscience are quite real, but they don’t impinge on these issues. The connections are so remote that it’s hardly worth drawing. With regard to Terror, we can have a perfectly sencical discussion about it, if we are willing to free ourselves from ideological constraints. So just to be concrete, I’ve been writing extensively about Terror – books, and articles, and talks, giving talks and so on – ever since 1981. That’s when Ronald Reagan came to office and declared that the focus of his administration would be a War on Terror. And it became a huge issue after that. War on Terror. The way the administration described it was, you know, a plague of the modern age, a return to barbarism, and in time, destruction of civilization, so on and so forth. That’s been effaced from history, but the reason is, it instantly turned into a murderous, vicious, terrorist war, which slaughtered tens of thousands of people in Central America, hundreds of thousands in Southern Africa, and all sorts of other atrocities. And that’s not nice to remember, so therefore Reagan’s is off in the…George Orwell’s Memory Hole. But it was there. And, in fact, the Jesuit conference that I cited was referring to Reagan’s War on Terror. But we’re not supposed to think about that. Well, in writing about Terror I’ve committed a serious crime, and it’s denounced bitterly by American…Western intellectuals: namely I use the literal meaning of the term as it’s defined in the U.S. code, in the British…British Laws, in Army Manuals, and so on. Which is a perfectly sensible definition. The…I can’t repeat it verbatim, but something like um, “the calculated threat or use of force against civilian populations to achieve goals that are to..to intimidate…to achieve goals that are political, religious, or ideological in origin, and so on.” Yeah, fine definition of Terror.
F: Safe.
C: But you can’t use it.
F: No.
C: You can’t use it for a very simple reason: it doesn’t make a crucial distinction. It doesn’t distinguish between the terror that we carry out against them, which you’re not allowed to talk about…
F: Yeah.
C: And the terror which they carry out against us, which is a return to barbarism in the modern age, and so and so forth. So if the official definition is unusable and anyone who does use the official definition is a dangerous radical, and so on and so forth. Ah, but this, and therefore you have academic conferences trying to define terror, UN conferences and so on.
F: Actually…
C: It’s very hard to find a definition that makes the distinction that’s required: it excludes our terror but it includes their terror.
F: It’s a inverted psychology, where the, uh, to quote or paraphrase you: the oppressed is not the one who has a jackboot on his throat, it’s actually the one…uh…the one with the jackboot on the oppressed’s throat actually makes himself seem out…seem like the oppressed. Uh…so…to deal with that, I think the United Nations – and that’s why I interjected there – is arming itself with an arsenal of linguistic power…um…and in this Review Conference to the World Conference Against Racism of 2001, which is taking place on April 20th to 24th in 2009, in Geneva, the slogan for it is, uh, “Dignity”…”United Against Racism: Dignity and Justice for All.” And I think that, when it came…was agreed upon – I was there – when the High Commissioner for Human Rights was a former Canadian Chief of…sorry, not Chief of…Chair…Uh…Supreme Court Justice, whose name is Louise Arbour…and when it was announced, there seemed to be – for the first time in my experience with the United Nations – consensus! No…
C: There won’t be consensus as soon as you get down to particulars. So take Louise Arbour.
F: Okay.
C: She was the…ah…if I believe I am remembering correctly…I think she was the first prosecutor in the International Tribunal on the crimes in Yugoslavia…forgot the exact name. I believe it was…it might have been her successor – I don’t remember which. A group of International Lawyers, led by Canadian Lawyers, incidentally, brought to the Tribunal extensive documentations of NATO crimes: that was excluded from the discussion. And, in fact, the prosecutors simply said, “We take NATO word for it, that they didn’t commit any crimes. Okay so that was excluded from the discussion. Yeah, that’s what happens when you get down to details. We can talk about the crimes of others, but we cannot be honest about our own. Just like Terror, just like aggression. And there’s nothing sophisticated about this, you don’t need any Linguistics.
F: You have to…you can’t conflate…I mean…you know…an insult with an attack…a crime against humanity.
C: That’s why…
F: Like Ali G and Al Qaeda.
C: That’s why I objected to your original statements. Yes you cannot conflate them. We’re talking about totally different things: you insult somebody, okay; slaughtering them is quite different from insulting them. They have nothing to do with each other.
F: But the “Dignity and Justice for All” is a very powerful…
C: If you mean it.
F: …group of words.
C: If you mean it.
F: I mean.
C: On the other hand, if you what you mean is: ‘dignity and justice for all that we care about,’ it’s quite different.
F: Well let’s think about…
C: So let’s take 9/11 again.
F: Yeah.
C: Everybody agrees: terrible crime, changed the world.
F: Yes.
C: Could have been worse. Let’s do a thought experiment.
F: Okay.
C: Let’s imagine that on 9/11 that Al Qaeda had bombed the White House, killed the President, carried out a military coup, installed a vicious military dictatorship, which killed something like fifty to a hundred thousand people, tortured 700 000, established an International Terrorist Centre in the United States, which carried out military coups all over the world…
F: Right.
C: …assassinated people, and so on…
F: How much power would they have though?
C: Well…it’s…just listen to me for a minute.
F: Ok.
C: Suppose that that had happened.
F: Ok.
C: It would have been worse than 9/11, right?
F: It’ be…yes, it would be worse.
C: K. It happened. It happened on 9/11.
F: Ok.
C: It happened on 9/11 1973.
F: Ok.
C: That was the U.S.-backed coup in Chile. The only thing I’ve changed is…
F: Is that it’s the U.S.
C: …is per capita equivalence.
F: Yeah.
C: I’ve changed per capita equivalence – which is the right way to compare them. Other than that, it’s the same. Now why didn’t…that’s what called…
F: Well that’s the psy…inverted psychology of oppression.
C: It’s not inverted psychology; this is straight simple thinking, nothing sophisticated. Here is a huge crime (much worse than the second 9/11) – did it change the world, do we know about it, is it part of our consciousness? No. Cause we carried it out.
F: Well...we…I mean the United States and NATO…and Western…NATO…ah…developed countries…have a great deal more power than a Latin American…
C: So, it’s a very simple point. We don’t have to bring in Neuroscience or anything else. Nothing sophisticated. Are we willing to apply to ourselves the standards we apply to others? Very simple. Do we accept the principle of Universality? Namely, if it...if something’s a crime
F: There have to be responsibilities…
C: …it’s a crime when they commit it or when we commit it. Can we accept that or not? That’s a yes or no question. If yes, okay, then we’re in the same moral arra…
F: The system is not united. There has to be a united system whereby all agents who have a wield power can have some kind of…
C: No. I’m talking about a decision that individuals have to make: “Am I willing to accept the principle…
F: Okay.
C: …that if something’s a crime when they do it, it’s a crime when I do it.
F: Is it a Capital Crime?
C: That’s a separate question.
F: The United States is a Capital country.
C: Is it the same kind of crime when they do it than when I do?
F: Linguistically yes.
C: Am I willing to accept for myself the standards that I apply to others?
F: Okay.
C: If not, you’re out of the moral universe. There’s nothing to discuss.
F: There isn’t.
C: No. And if…and if it is then we can proceed sensibly.
F: And that’s what’s taking place.
C: The sophistication is just blowing smoke.
F: Let’s talk about oil. I mean…uh…within oil rich countries there seems autocracy that is reigning…no seems to be…no seems, there is. And so, the country…the entire world, becoming more and more dependant on oil producing countries, seems to be becoming more and more influenced, by that autocratic method of…uh…delivering a product, but, at a price – and it’s not a fair price. It’s not a…
C: Which? There’s many prices, which one are you talking about?
F: The degra…uh…degradation of democratic institutions.
C: That’s one price. Another price is destroying an environment in which our grandchildren might survive. Yeah, cause we’re using fossil fuels…
F: We’re using…
C: That’s another cost.
F: And the United States military, which I mention in my…uh…third book, Conditional Love, uhm, is transferring to the same type of synthetic oil for their Air Force that the Germans were using during…to back like over 50% of their military during World War Two, that happens to be a lot more harmful to the environment….Um…
C: Well, I’m missing your point.
F: Well, it…it’s not just fossil fuel use, but it’s also the breakdown of democratic institutions and institutions of negotiation, and replacing that with…
C: It’s also…
F: …institutions of military force.
C: It’s also the reason for atrocities like invading Iraq, killing a million people, driving out several million, destroying a country…
F: Yeah, it’s…
C: …a lot of crimes involved.
F: It’s a classic “anatomy of revolution” and I have at my disposal a perfect quote from Crane Brinton: “Dictatorships and revolutions are inevitably closely associated because revolutions to a certain extent break down or at least weaken laws, customs, habits, beliefs, which bind men together in society.
And when laws, customs, habits, beliefs bind men together
insufficiently force must be used to remedy that insufficiency.
Military force, is for short terms the most efficient kind of force
available for social and political uses, and military force demands a
hierarchy of obedience culminating in a generalissimo. As Ferrero
[another author] has put it, when ‘silken threads’ of habits,
tradition, legality are broken men must be held together in society by
‘iron chains of dictatorships.’ All this, however, is pretty much a
common place of our times.” Um…given that….
C: I don’t know why you’re reading it to me. I mean, a fraction of
that I agree with but I don’t see the relevance of it to what we’re
discussing.
F: Well, given that there seems to have been a kind of revolution
after 9/11 – I don’t think many people would disagree with that…
C: Why wasn’t there a revolution after the first 9/11, which had far
greater consequences?
F: Um…maybe it was because of the political impact that was so closely
tied to it, and, you know, media coverage.
C: It’s just that there’s a difference when you commit a crime against
rich and powerful people, and when the rich and powerful commit a
crime against others.
F: I agree with you.
C: Okay, so, that’s the difference. Let’s be honest about it.
F: No…I mean, definitely.
C: Fine.
F: Yeah, like I just quote you.
C: It has nothing to do with Crane Brinton – who I don’t happen to agree with.
F: Oh you don’t? Oh. Well I sometimes don’t understand what you write,
like in your Syntactic Structures – to get back to Linguistics – your
Preface starts off by: “Obscure and intuition-bound notions can
neither lead to absurd conclusions nor provide new and correct ones
and hence they fail to be useful in two important respect. I think
that some of those linguist who have questioned the value of precise
and technical development of Linguistic Theory may have failed to
recognize the productive potential in the method of rigorously stating
a proposed theory and applying it strictly to linguistic material with
no attempt to avoid unacceptable conclusions by ad hoc adjustments or
loose formulation.”
C: What’s problematic about that?
F: It’s just very difficult to understand.
C: I’m sorry…but I can’t spell it out more fully. But it sounds
straightforward to me.
F: “Avoid unacceptable conclusions by ad hoc adjustments or loose formulation.”
C: In other words, if you have some premises and they lead to an
unacceptable conclusion.
F: Okay.
C: You should either change your premises, find a mistake in your
reasoning, or do something rational. It doesn’t happen…you
shouldn’t…what you shouldn’t do is introduce some ad hoc assumption
that will get you that right…the conclusion you want…that would
deval…you know…change the premises, which would lead to a wrong
conclusion.
F: So “absurd conclusions are useful?” Um…. “Obscure and
intuition-bound notions can neither lead to absurd conclusions nor
provide…”
C: Oh that can sometimes be useful.
F: Absurd ones?
C: Sure.
F: Okay.
C: It shows that your assumptions are wrong.
F: Yeah, yeah.
C: You know, that’s standard. Don’t forget that’s talking about
Science, not talking about Human Affairs, where you can’t hope…it’s
too complex to hope for…ah…precise, formalized notions. We don’t
understand about ‘em.
F: Well…ah…this is where I get into your Cartesian background. I
disagree I’m from a Isaiah Berlin, Vico camp, Giambattista Vico, and
Vico was a adament opponent to Descartes. I mean mathematical
Cartesian Theory of Mind…Um…
C: We don’t know what Descartes’s Theory of Mind was because he
destroyed the Volume in which it was presented after the fate of
Galileo at the hands of the Inquisition.
F: Oh.
C: But I don’t accept the Cartesian framework, you’re picking the
title of a book, which was…the title of the book was about a certain
development in intellectual history…
F: No.
C: …which was heavily influenced…
F: It’s actually…
C: …by Descartes.
F: No, it wasn’t published in text, it was your debate with Foucault.
C: Oh. Okay.
F: In that debate, which was recently published…again, I think…you say
– and I know, you know, it’s a lot…very different to say something
than to…
C: It’s fine. Quote it.
F: …right it down. Okay, but the quote is…and this might be refreshing
to you… “but then that poses”…I can…can I?...okay…um… “Of course
Descartes failed where Newton succeeded, that is, he was unable to lay
the groundworks for a mathematical theory of mind, as achieved by
Newton and his followers, which…”
C: Not for mind…
F: Uh…
C: …as was achieved for mechanics of motion…
F: Uh…yeah, yeah.
C: Yup.
F: Uh…I don’t know if Newton…is that what you mean.
C: That’s what it says I’m sure.
F: But, “as achieved by Newton and his followers,”…whatever.
C: Yes. As achieved by Newton in the domain of which of physical theory.
F: But, um…we’re at thirty minutes…
C: Pardon?
F: We’re at thirty minutes. I’d like to talk about Newton, so we can scrap this.
C: Okay.
F: Okay. In my second book…uh…I’ll have to scrap that….um…I
actually…uh talk about Newton and his discussion of li…optics…very,
very…uh…critically. Basically, I look at refraction of light, as being
kind of misleading in how it treats the movement of light. Newton ends
up describing light as moving like a corpuscle: neither like a wave
nor a particle…some kind of corpuscle…and even like in the period of
Maxwell – Quantum Theory – they still haven’t dis…you
know…electro-magnetic force is so far the description of the behaviour
of light. So, I went back and I looked at refraction and wavelength,
and in the rainbow (a rainbow is just a refraction of light, like a
triangular prism) you have light coming in and being refracted into
the major colours, which is red, orange, green, blue, indigo…oh
wait…red, orange, yellow, green, blue…green, blue, indigo…and violet,
but indigo & violet are very similar. So this is the order that they
come in. And red is between wavelengths – and this is all sourced –
760 to 647. Let’s go from the other way, from the bottom, purple has
the shortest wavelength, fastest oscillation; so it goes from 380
nanometers to 424. So that’s purple. 424 to 491…
C: Yeah…why don’t you get to your point cause I don’t understand what
this is...where this is leading.
F: Okay. Basically this is the order that you come to in wavelength
range. No, just wavelength...you know, just median size. That’s
roughly where it is, after refraction. But if we look at the range of
each of these colours – I went to the Academy of Visual Arts…
C: Yeah, ok, yeah…
F: …in…in Vienna, and in front of it, besides the statue of Schiller,
there’s a statue of Goethe. And Goethe was adamantly against Newton:
in 1988 there was a book called…
C: That’s true, but what is the point?
F: …Goethe Contra Newton…well basically, if we look at the range of
these colours we’ll find that they’re not ordered hierarchically as
the rainbow is. There are certain colours that have a smaller range,
like yellow, than the third place. So if we re-organize these
according to the second spectrum of colour: you get red, green, blue,
orange, purple, yellow. Okay? So that’s one sensical arrangement of
colours, and the rainbow is another sensical arrangement of colours
amid the…hundreds of thousands?
C: ….as many as you can find….many other ways. There are lots of
criteria for arranging facts.
F: Yeah, but…
C: So what?
F: Well it hints to a new understanding of science.
C: It doesn’t lead to a new understanding of science. I mean that’s
familiar science. Yes, you can organize data on the basis of many
different criteria.
F: Yes, but, some of them are sensical and some of them are not.
C: Some of them happen to fit within explanatory theories, others are just data.
F: Yeah and Newton himself says that all observations…all theories
have to be based on the hypothesis, otherwise they’re…uhm… “Whatever
is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis.” So
this being deduced from the hypothesis…uh…is a new ordering of the
colours. But what’s interesting, is not this.
C: I think you’re misunderstanding Newton’s methodology. First of all,
he didn’t literarily mean deduced from the phenomena, nothing can be
deduced from the phenomena. Uh. He meant, we have to be clear about
when we’re talking about phenomena and when we’re introducing
assumptions.
F: Yes…
C: And we want the assumptions to be such that we can deduce from them
truths about the world we can verify…facts about the world we can
verify.
F: Yeah, but I mean if you look at this for one second, I’ll show you
how blue and green – blue, being detracted from orange, swings green
towards orange because green is attracted to orange’s yellow. That
momentum carries the swing around and orange is attracted to red,
because of it’s red. Blue is attracted to purple because of purple’s
blue, and that sticks purple to blue…
C: …yeah, I’m afraid you’ve lost me. I also don’t see what this has to
do with what we’re talking about.
F: …and then that swings again…hold on, and then, one more swing, like
this, in a similar fashion….
C: I’m sorry! I don’t follow what you’re trying to do and I also don’t
see where this is leading.
F: Well, I’ve given this to some people at McGill.
C: And what is you’re conclusion? Why are you mentioning any of this to me?
F: Well, basically that light and science, as explained by Newton, is
not as foolproof as they may seem. Light actually going as a corpuscle
is a hurricane.
C: Nobody believes that Newton has anything like a complete theory of
light, but at the most what you’d be saying is that Newton didn’t
explain everything you can imagine in the world. I think everyone
agrees to that.
F: Okay…um…
C: But…so what?
F: It’s a whole book. That’s my second book: Looking for Ultraviolet.
C: Okay.
F: Um…now let me ask you a question.
C: Yeah.
F: Um…what word do you think came first: chicken or egg?
C: That’s not a serious question because…
F: Why not? You hear a chicken, you can’t hear an egg. Like you reproduce…
C: You want to know about the evolution of chickens and eggs, well we
look into the…
F: No. I’m just talking about the word, like the human word for
chicken and egg.
C: There’s no first. I mean…
F: We can think about that…
C: We can trace the history of…etymology…the history of words back a
couple of thousand years.
F: Okay.
C: But, uh…in fact, language has been essentially unchanged for more
than fifty thousand years.
F: Yeah.
C: So what does it tells us if we find the origin of the English word
“Chicken” and the English word “Egg”? Doesn’t tell us anything.
F: Well, if, I mean, maybe, you know, some hunter-gatherer reproduced
the sound of a snake before the sound of an egg to another
hunter-gatherer.
C: There’s no evidence that the origins of language has anything to do
with things like that.
F: Well, Bio-linguistics has nothing to do with any of this?
C: Bio-linguistics does not deal with such questions. We cannot look
back 75000 years, roughly, and see how the language faculty developed.
F: Okay.
C: We don’t have tape-recordings from that era, we don’t have
evidence…we can sort of construct theoretical accounts, which have
some plausibility of how language might have possibly developed but
its not gonna talk about how individual words entered the language.
F: Right, and I don’t mean. I mean like the Chicken or Egg question
can answered if we think about the word.
C: I don’t think there’s a Chicken or Egg question, but let’s go on.
F: Okay. Where would you like to go on? We can go on…I have few fields
we can go into. I discovered a new way help back problems, or reduce
heart pressure…or control heart pressure.
C: Well it seems to me like you’ve got a wide range of interests and
concerns but I don’t know what it has to do with me.
F: Okay.
C: I can’t. I have nothing to say about it.
F: So…let’s go on.
C: I mean it’s fine. You should be doing all those things.
F: Well, you definitely opened up the field to non-experts to, maybe
like, cross the aisle, between science and social science. And that’s
what I think I’m trying to…
C: Yeah…I’m afraid, looking at the clock over there, I’m afraid we’ll
have to stop.
F: Okay, well, one more.
C: Yeah.
F: In your debate with Foucault.
C: Pardon?
F: In your debate with Foucault, you talk about how…you say: “…so one
might say that I’m looking at history, not as an antiquarian who’s
interested in finding out and giving a precisely accurate account of
what the thinking of the 19th Century was (I don’t mean to demean that
activity, it’s just not mine), but rather from the point of view of,
let’s say, an art lover who want to look at the 17th…uh…Century to
find in it things that are of particular value…”
C: Yeah.
F: “…that obtain part of their value, in part because of the
perspective with which he approaches them.” And I’m very grateful for
your time, so I brought you a….
C: Oh! [Unfold large drawing]
F: It’s called “State Thugs”
C: I’ll have to ponder that. Thank you. It was good to talk to you.
F: It’s been the conversation of my life.
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