Return to Saussure

MIT Great Dome. AI image Introduction: Creativity and Complicity The 1971 debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault is often remembered for its confrontation between rationalism and historical critique. Yet some of its most philosophically suggestive moments occur not during the exchange between the two thinkers, but in the questions posed by the audience. One such intervention, concerning Chomsky’s employment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, exposes a tension that unsettles the very framework through which he imagines political transformation. Chomsky repeatedly grounds the prospect of social change in those engaged in what he calls the “productive work of society.” At first glance, this formulation appears to sustain a familiar distinction between creative labour and the managerial structures that organize exploitation. A closer reading, however, suggests that the opposition cannot remain intact once the institutional location of the revolutionary intellectual ...

Source: Wikipedia Introduction The conversation around AI and education often begins with a familiar accusation: students who use tools like ChatGPT are somehow cheating themselves, producing shallow work, or “learning less.” A recent MIT study has fueled the narrative, suggesting that AI usage diminishes cognitive engagement and recall. On the surface, the conclusion appears straightforward. But beneath the data lies a deeper issue: the debate itself is anchored in an outdated metaphysics of presence. The underlying assumption of this discourse is that intelligence is something wholly present, a possession of the mind, measurable once the tools are removed. In other words, cognition is treated as a book: bounded, stable, and self-contained. AI disrupts this illusion. It does not make students less intelligent. It exposes the obsolescence of a paradigm that still evaluates thought by what can be internalized and recalled. The old measures were never neutral; they were logocentric, ...