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The Enigma of Noam Chomsky

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The Enigma of Noam Chomsky Chris Knight The Enigma of Noam Chomsky Responding to Chomsky’s interview in Radical Anthropology in Issue 2, Chris Knight explores the paradoxical relationship between his activism and his science. Radical Anthropology: Chomsky is as a computational device.4 It’s He uses language precisely to a celebrated intellectual figurehead almost as if Chomsky the activist communicate – to denounce his own on the left. In your articles,1 you wasn’t responsible for the science. state, his own government, his own always seem negative about his That comes from a different region employers, his own institutional overall contribution. Why is that? of his brain. milieu. Short of denouncing his own science, Chomsky Chris Knight: I’m not negative at RA: Our readers might find this hard opposes just about everything he all. Whenever I read Chomsky on, to believe. What does he actually say? embodies in his alternative role. say, US policy in the Middle East, I’m always in wholehearted support. CK: ‘The one talent that I have RA: Are you saying he’s two- Who else tells the truth so bluntly which I know many other friends faced – telling one audience one and so fearlessly? don’t seem to have’, Chomsky thing and another something else? explains, ‘is I’ve got some quirk in RA: So why the criticism? Some my brain which makes it work like CK: The struggle to survive articles – in the Weekly Worker, for separate buffers in a computer.’5 under capitalism forces us all into instance2 – have been pretty savage. One component produces something like double-dealing for science for a definite intellectual much of the time. We’re forced CK: That’s a different Chomsky. constituency while the rest of him into collusion. We compete to find In those articles I’m talking about produces political stuff for a quite jobs, to survive as wage-slaves, the scientist. Distinguishing different audience. As a scientist, to establish at least a modicum of between this person and the he’s anxious to avoid slipping over economic security for ourselves. activist, an interviewer once asked into politics; as an activist, he Yet equally we need to hold our him: ‘What do they say to each strives to avoid anything to do with heads high, to maintain our self- other when they meet?’. Chomsky science.6 Each separate role comes esteem. It’s not always easy to replied: ‘There is no connection, with its own appropriate conceptual reconcile such conflicting priorities. apart from some very tenuous approach and corresponding It’s just that Chomsky exemplifies I prefer to think of him as the conscience of America. Once you view him in that light, the mysteries begin to clear relations at an abstract level…’ 3 language, resistant to translation this more sharply than most. across the divide. ‘Now exactly So ‘two-faced’ would be unfair. RA: So Chomsky’s really two how one can maintain that sort of I prefer to think of him as the people? schizophrenic existence I am not conscience of America. Once you sure’, Chomsky admitted on another view him in that light, the mysteries CK: In the 1960s he was so occasion, ‘it is very difficult’.7 begin to clear. ‘What is important’, active people thought there must as he explains, ‘is to expose the be six Chomskys! But, yes, two In his scientific capacity, Chomsky crimes of my own state, which at least. When he speaks or views language as a biological are often hidden from view by writes politically, his passions are ‘organ’ or ‘device’. As such, it’s the propaganda institutions’.8 His engaged and he takes full personal devoid of humour, metaphor, political writings are directed first responsibility. In his scientific role, emotion, communicative intent, and foremost against the military- something quite different seems to social meaning or anything else industrial elite employing him. be happening. According to his own people normally think of as When he began working at MIT, account, one modular component language. Meanwhile, the other in his own words, ‘funding was of his brain – ‘the science-forming Chomsky continues to speak and almost entirely the Pentagon. About capacity’ – functions autonomously write much like the rest of us. half the Institute’s budget was 22 Radical Anthropology coming from two major military which he moved. In May 1995, John scientific elite. How could anyone laboratories that they administered, Deutch was sworn in as Director cope – without a modular mind? and of the rest, the academic side, of the Central Intelligence Agency it could have been something like following a unanimous vote in We can surely understand the very 90% or so from the Pentagon. the Senate, making him head of personal horror, almost personal Something like that. Very high. So the intelligence community – in responsibility, Chomsky must have it was a Pentagon-based university. charge of all foreign intelligence felt while working as a respected And I was at a military-funded lab.’9 agencies of the United States. scientist in the belly of the beast. Shortly afterwards, Chomsky was Denouncing other people’s crimes, Chomsky was conducting his interviewed about how well he’d as he puts it, is all too easy. One researches within what had known Deutch as a professional must expose one’s own crimes – the originally been part of the MIT colleague at MIT. ‘We were crimes of one’s own government, Radiation Laboratory, in which radar actually friends’, replied Chomsky, one’s own institutional milieu had been developed during World ‘and got along fine, although we – to retain one’s self-esteem, to War II. Now that Soviet Russia had disagreed on about as many things be able to ‘look at oneself in the replaced Nazi Germany as the main as two human beings can disagree mirror without too much shame’.13 enemy, the military were interested about. I liked him. We got along Chomsky could reconcile his in developing electronic systems for very well together. He’s very honest, conscience with the job he loved We’re all supposed to keep political activism locked up in a separate box, insulated by a firewall from science. Mindless activism on the one hand; tongue-tied science on the other – that’s been the tragic result purposes of surveillance, weapons very direct. You know where only by publicly lashing out. He ‘command-and-control’ and so you stand with him.’ 11 Chomsky had to denounce the Pentagon – forth.10 Chomsky wasn’t going actively supported Deutch’s the military-industrial complex to roll up his sleeves and build candicacy for the President of sponsoring his own research. anything which actually worked. MIT, much to the surprise of his Insofar as that complex possessed a On the other hand, he had been colleagues. In the event, that bid conscience, Chomsky was it. He has inspired to take up linguistics failed owing to faculty opposition. retained that unique status to this thanks largely to his activist day. That’s why people come from friend Zellig Harris, one of whose It’s important to grasp what’s far and wide to listen to him. It’s not interests was machine translation. happening here. How many left- just his politics and it’s not just his The project to develop automatic wing academics or activists science. What attracts people – what translation by equipping a machine maintain friendships of that kind? carries conviction– is the painfully with something like ‘universal I’m not saying it’s necessarily evident tension between the two. grammar’ was officially part of wrong. Once you’ve committed Chomsky’s first job. Although he yourself to your chosen profession, RA: Yet you are implacably had other ideas, Chomsky evidently you may have little choice. opposed to his science? felt at home analysing language in But Chomsky’s ‘schizophrenic terms of postulated ‘mechanisms’, existence’ surely starts here, among CK: Chomsky resists the ‘devices’, ‘circuits’, ‘switches’, such intense social and professional behaviour of the military- ‘inputs’, ‘outputs’ and so forth. So contradictions. According to his industrial elite while endorsing it’s not that Pentagon pressure to own account, ‘the CIA does what and embodying its philosophy – its develop their ‘language machine’ it wants’, conducting assassinations, utterly bourgeois notion of ‘science’. distorted Chomsky’s thinking about bombings, invasions, mass murder Let me put it this way. Imagine the how to revolutionise linguistics. of civilians and various other crimes most reactionary possible ideology. It’s not that he took the money and against humanity.12 While aware of Imagine bourgeois individualism sold his soul. In purely intellectual the criminality of his institutional carried to its absolute logical terms, he was already there. milieu, Chomsky rubs shoulders extreme. Imagine a philosopher with these people, works for them, who took René Descartes’ dictum ‘I Now let’s consider the circles in is part of the same professional and think, therefore I am!’ as his point 23 Radical Anthropology of departure. Imagine going further is that I think they are relatively because it’s already there, being even than Descartes in insisting unimportant… Learning language present in every child thanks to its that language exists only in the is something like undergoing DNA. The child just has to find out individual head, not to enable social puberty. You don’t learn to do it; which locally conventional sound communication but merely to enable you don’t do it because you see to attach to the carburetor-concept thought. According to this ideology, other people doing it; you are just already in its brain. Asked whether no one else is required.
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