What Is the Origin of an Idea? Foucault on the Creative Self
On September 13, 1971, Michel Foucault wrote to Fons Elders, who was preparing to moderate a televised debate with Noam Chomsky. His request was simple:
“I do not wish that during the television broadcast you want to devote to me, any biographical information be given any place. I consider indeed such information to have no importance for the subject matter at hand.”
The request is striking. When someone is invited to appear on television, biographical information would normally seem harmless, perhaps even useful. We expect to know something about the person who is going to speak: where he comes from, what he has studied, what experiences have shaped his ideas. Biography seems to provide a natural introduction to thought.
Foucault rejects precisely this assumption. But his wording is important. He does not say that biography is false, embarrassing, or private. He says that it has “no importance for the subject matter at hand.”
This distinction is important. Foucault is not necessarily refusing to speak about himself, he is refusing to make his life an explanation of what is being discussed.
The significance of this refusal becomes clearer in the interview with Elders that accompanies the letter. There, Foucault speaks directly about his own work, but he does so in terms that shift attention away from lived experience and toward systems of relations.
That September conversation therefore gives us part of the answer to a question that becomes particularly revealing two and a half months later, when Elders asks Foucault about the origins of a new idea: if biography and personal experience are not the decisive level, then where should we look when we want to understand the appearance of something new?
2. Systems Rather Than Lived Experience
In the September 1971 interview with Elders, Foucault speaks explicitly about the relation between his own work and structuralism. His formulation is unusually direct:
« Les structuralistes sont des gens pour lesquels ce qui compte essentiellement, ce sont les systèmes de relations, et donc pas du tout l’expérience vécue des individus… Ce que je fais appartient au fond, comme le structuralisme, à cette grande interrogation sur la souveraineté du sujet. »
“Structuralists are people for whom what essentially matters are systems of relations, and therefore not at all the lived experience of individuals… What I am doing belongs, fundamentally, like structuralism, to this great questioning of the sovereignty of the subject.”
Whatever distinctions might later be drawn between Foucault and other forms of structuralism, what matters here is what Foucault himself says in 1971. He places his work alongside structuralism because both participate in a questioning of the sovereignty of the subject. He immediately describes this orientation through a contrast: what matters are systems of relations rather than the lived experience of individuals.
This gives us a way to understand the letter. If the important question concerns systems of relations, then the person who occupies a particular position within those systems cannot automatically be treated as the ultimate source of explanation. Foucault's experiences, personality, and biography may tell us something about Foucault, but they do not by themselves explain why a particular statement can appear or why it can make sense.
The issue, then, is not whether individuals exist or whether their experiences are real. It is a question of explanatory priority.
A familiar account of intellectual creation begins with the individual: a person has an experience, develops an insight, and expresses it in language. The individual appears as the origin of the act. Foucault's approach asks us to reverse that movement. Instead of beginning with the person and asking what caused the person to say something, we can begin with the statement and ask what makes it possible.
The difference is subtle but fundamental.
The question is no longer simply: Who produced this idea?
It becomes: What makes this idea possible and intelligible?
This is one practical meaning of the questioning of the “sovereignty of the subject.” The subject does not disappear, but it is no longer automatically the deepest level at which an explanation must stop.
The significance of this shift becomes clearer when, two months later, Elders turns to the question of creativity.
3. The Creative Self
On November 28, 1971, Foucault and Chomsky met for the televised debate moderated by Elders. At one point, Elders turns to the question of creativity. He asks what happens when someone discovers a new fundamental idea. Is something happening within the individual's personality in which creativity and freedom work together?
“When you discover a new fundamental idea, Mr. Foucault, do you believe, that as far as your own personal creativity is concerned something is happening that makes you feel that you are being liberated; that something new has been developed?”
It is a natural question. If a new idea appears, it seems reasonable to ask about the person who produced it. What did the experience feel like? Did the individual experience the discovery as an act of freedom? Did personality, intellectual history, or some particular experience contribute to it?
Foucault does not follow the question in those terms. He answers:
“Oh, you know, I don’t believe that the problem of personal experience is so very important in a question like this…”
When Elders asks why, Foucault immediately gives a more precise answer:
“When I no doubt wrongly believe that I am saying something new, I am nevertheless conscious of the fact that in my statement there are rules at work, not only linguistic rules, but also epistemological rules, and those rules characterise contemporary knowledge”.
He speaks of “possible creations” and “possible innovations.” In language or knowledge, he explains, something new can be produced only by putting certain rules into play: rules that determine the acceptability or grammaticality of statements or, in the case of knowledge, their scientific character.
This is the crucial move. Foucault shifts attention away from what creativity feels like for the person who creates and toward the conditions under which something can count as a creation or innovation at all.
Elders asks about creativity in the individual. Foucault redirects the question toward the conditions under which something can function as a creative or innovative statement.
The difference can be expressed schematically:
person → experience → creative act
becomes:
rules → possible innovation → statement
The second sequence does not deny that someone speaks or produces a statement. What it denies is that the person's experience is sufficient to explain the status of what has been produced.
Suppose someone produces a sentence that nobody has ever uttered before. Its novelty alone does not tell us whether it is grammatical, meaningful, scientifically significant, or even intelligible. Those properties depend upon rules that are not contained within the individual act itself. The same applies, for Foucault, to innovation within knowledge. Something can appear as new only within a field in which its novelty, acceptability, or scientific character can be determined.
The experience of discovery may therefore be real and important to the person who has it without being the most illuminating explanation of the resulting statement.
Foucault's response relocates the explanatory problem. The question is no longer primarily what happens inside the person when a new idea appears, but what makes that idea possible as a particular kind of statement.
Seen this way, the November exchange is not an isolated refusal. It makes concrete the orientation Foucault had articulated in September. The earlier interview gives us the contrast between systems of relations and lived experience, and the questioning of the sovereignty of the subject. The later debate puts that orientation to work on a concrete problem: what does it mean for something to be new?
Elders asks Foucault to look inward. Foucault directs the question toward the conditions under which something new can appear.
4. Learning to Read Foucault
This exchange offers a useful lesson in how to read Foucault.
When a question is posed in terms of the individual, we instinctively expect an answer at the same level. What did he experience? What did he intend? What kind of personality did he have? What made him creative?
Foucault asks us to consider that these may not be the most revealing questions.
The difficulty, then, is not always that Foucault's answer is obscure. Sometimes the difficulty lies in the level at which the question has been posed.
We can ask: Who produced this statement?
But Foucault invites us to ask: What makes this statement possible?
The two moments from 1971 therefore belong together, but they do different things. The letter establishes a methodological refusal: biography has no importance “for the subject matter at hand.” The September interview gives that refusal a theoretical formulation in terms of systems of relations and the questioning of the sovereignty of the subject. The November debate then puts the position to work on a concrete problem: the appearance of something new.
The result is not a rejection of creativity, nor a denial that individuals think, speak, or experience discovery. It is a refusal to treat the creative individual as the final explanation of creativity.
Foucault does not ask us to forget the individual. He asks us not to stop with the individual. That shift may be one of the simplest ways into a thinker whose answers can otherwise seem deliberately evasive. When Foucault appears to refuse a question, the first thing to ask may be whether he is refusing the question itself—or the level at which it has been posed. Sometimes the answer is not elsewhere. It is at another level.
Bibliography
Chomsky, N., & Foucault, M. (1971). Human nature: Justice versus power [Televised debate]. International Philosophers’ Project, Dutch television.
Chomsky, N., & Foucault, M. (2006). The Chomsky-Foucault debate: On human nature. The New Press.
Davidson, A. I. (Ed.). (1997). Foucault and his interlocutors. University of Chicago Press.
Elders, F. (Ed.). (1974). Reflexive water: The basic concerns of mankind. Souvenir Press.
Foucault, M. (2013). Freedom and knowledge: A hitherto unpublished interview (L. Claris, Trans.; F. Elders, Ed.). Elders Special Productions BV.
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