Creativity Without Essence: Chomsky, Foucault, and the Constitution of the Object

Introduction

The 1971 debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault is often recalled as a confrontation between two incompatible views of human nature. One of the most persistent points of tension concerns the notion of creativity. Chomsky insists on creativity as a defining feature of language and of the human mind, whereas Foucault appears reluctant to grant it a central explanatory role in the history of knowledge. At first sight, this contrast suggests a substantive disagreement about what creativity is. A closer examination, however, indicates that the divergence runs deeper: it concerns not a shared object viewed from different angles, but the constitution of different objects under the same term. Ferdinand de Saussure’s methodological reflections provide a precise framework for understanding how this divergence arises and why it resists resolution.

Saussure and the Non-Givenness of the Object

In the Course in General Linguistics, Saussure invites the reader to consider the French word nu (“naked”). What initially appears to be a stable linguistic object fragments upon analysis into several distinct entities: a sound pattern, an expression of an idea, and a historical derivative of Latin nūdum. Saussure’s conclusion is unequivocal: “The object is not given in advance of the viewpoint: far from it. Rather, one might say that it is the viewpoint adopted which creates the object” (Saussure, 2011). These are not complementary perspectives on a single underlying reality. Each analytical approach constructs its own object according to its internal criteria, and none can claim methodological priority in advance.

Although formulated within linguistics, this claim has broader epistemological implications. Scientific objects do not preexist the conceptual frameworks that render them intelligible. They emerge through specific theoretical cuts, each governed by its own relations, exclusions, and explanatory aims. This principle proves decisive when applied to the concept of creativity.

Creativity as a Linguistic–Cognitive Object in Chomsky

Within Chomsky’s framework, creativity is not an empirical trait encountered independently in the world. It is produced by a tightly articulated theoretical grid that includes innateness, biological endowment, generative rules, the distinction between competence and performance, and the hypothesis of universal grammar. Drawing on Wilhelm von Humboldt’s notion of “free creation within a system of rules,” Chomsky treats creativity as a normal and universal feature of linguistic competence. Speakers routinely generate and understand indefinitely many novel expressions, not through imitation, but through the internalization of a finite set of formal principles.

In the debate, Chomsky explicitly distances this everyday creativity from exceptional artistic or scientific achievement, he is not talking about Newton, Beethoven, or Picasso: “I’m speaking of the kind of creativity that any child demonstrates when he’s able to come to grips with a new situation” (Chomsky & Foucault, 2006). Creativity, in this sense, names a rule-governed capacity of the individual subject. Its defining properties are relational: it is opposed to imitation, incompatible with behaviorist explanations, linked to grammatical competence, and anchored in the mind/brain. Once these relations are removed, no residual object remains. There is no creativity “in itself” waiting to be described. Chomsky’s creativity is therefore a Chomskyan object, constituted within and sustained by his theoretical architecture.

Creativity as a Historical–Collective Object in Foucault

Foucault approaches creativity from a fundamentally different problem-space. His historical analyses are not concerned with individual capacities, but with the conditions under which knowledge becomes possible at all. He identifies two assumptions that have long structured the history of science: first, that every discovery must be attributed to a sovereign subject; second, that truth exists independently of history and merely awaits its eventual revelation. Together, these assumptions elevate individual invention while casting collective phenomena—traditions, shared assumptions, discursive norms—as obstacles to knowledge.

Against this model, Foucault develops an account of knowledge as a collective practice governed by historical rules of formation. These rules are not reducible to individual intentions, nor are they fully accessible to consciousness. When medical discourse undergoes profound transformation between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the change cannot be plausibly assigned to a single author. It reflects a reorganization of what can be said, seen, and practiced within the field. In this context, creativity does not designate an originating faculty, but an effect of historical transformations: “a collective and complex transformation of medical understanding in its practice and its rules” (Chomsky & Foucault, 2006).

Here, creativity is constituted in relation to power, discourse, epistemes, and collective practices. It refers to shifts in discursive possibility rather than to the productive acts of individual subjects. This is why Foucault remains suspicious of attribution, invention, and the figure of the creative genius. The object called creativity occupies a different theoretical space altogether.

A Saussurean Diagnosis of the Divergence

Viewed through a Saussurean lens, the Chomsky–Foucault disagreement no longer appears as a conflict over a shared object. Instead, it emerges as the encounter of two distinct object-formations that happen to share a name. Chomsky’s creativity is a cognitive-linguistic construct tied to the speaking subject and formal generative systems. Foucault’s creativity is a historical-discursive construct tied to transformations in regimes of knowledge and power. To ask which account is correct presupposes that creativity exists independently of the theoretical operations that bring it into view. Saussure’s warning applies with full force: the object is not waiting to be discovered; it is produced by the viewpoint that defines it.

Conclusion

This diagnosis does not reduce the debate to a verbal misunderstanding. Each construction of creativity is internally constrained, theoretically motivated, and accountable within its own domain. What it does undermine is the expectation of convergence. Once creativity is no longer treated as a pre-given essence, the demand that Chomsky and Foucault agree on its nature loses its footing. Their disagreement becomes intelligible as a divergence between analytical levels rather than a clash of incompatible claims. More broadly, Saussure’s insistence on the constitutive role of viewpoints offers a way to clarify persistent interdisciplinary tensions, revealing that shared terms often conceal fundamentally different objects of knowledge.

References

Chomsky, N., & Foucault, M. (2006). The Chomsky–Foucault debate: On human nature (F. Elders, Ed.). New Press.

Saussure, F. de. (2011). Course in general linguistics (W. Baskin, Trans.). Columbia University Press.