JAC Volume 11 Issue 2

Language and the Facilitation of Authority: The Discourse of Noam Chomsky

Robert De Beaugrande

In his revealing interview with JAC, Noam Chomsky declares it a “real fallacy” if a linguist tries to be “socially useful”; there’s “a lot of careerism in this,” and it shows “very poor moral judgment.” Moreover, “studying the way in which language is used to facilitate authority” is not “intellectually interesting” and is of “marginal human significance.” These standards make him and his followers the most “moral” linguists we’ve had and their work the most “intellectual” and “significant,” but they do not explain their skyrock­eting careers.

Still, Chomsky’s own discourse in the interview is such a striking use of language to facilitate authority that it cries out for study. I propose to apply discourse analysis to Chomsky’s interview—a method he might call immoral and insignificant but whose results, I hope to show, can be fairly interesting. Rather than assigning structural descriptions to invented John-and-Mary sentences (as proper language scientists ought to do), the analyst works to uncover the key moves in actual discourse and to relate them to the fabric of legitimizing ideologies and interests and to their inherent tensions, conflicts, and contradictions, often designed to disguise privileges and inequalities as the “natural order” or “the way the world is.”

Idealism and Radical Dualism

The two dominant and conflicting ideologies here are idealism and scientism. From Plato down to Chomsky, idealism has professed to exalt knowledge (under such labels as “ideas” and “truth”) for its abstractness, generality, and permanence, and to devalue experience for its concreteness, specificity, and mutability. The high-minded and disinterested qualities of this campaign have at times disguised more expedient motives: to market as genuine insights wishful thinking about the human mind, to legitimize the construction of theses by magisterial speculation, to save the labors of empirical demonstration, and to disqualify opponents as small-minded theorizers about the accidental, the trivial, and the idiosyncratic. These motives constitute the authoritarian and partisan underside of idealism, the implicit rhetoric of its explicit logic, and the pressure points where its discourse shows stress and fissures. Rationalism and rationalization are not just etymologically related.

By setting such contrary values, idealism encourages a radical dualism between knowledge and experience. The seventeenth-century rationalists hoped to submerge the dualism and annex scientism to its framework of authority by using empiricism itself to justify their anti-empiricist position. In his “Notes against a Certain Programme” of 1647,which Chomsky invokes Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Descartes says, “Nothing reaches our mind on external objects through the organs of sense beyond certain corporeal movements, but even these” are not “conceived by us in the shape they assume in those organs of sense; hence, it follows that the ideas are innate in us” (Aspects 48). This argument, which Chomsky accepted without reservation,¹  is echoed in the “Port-Royal Logic” of 1662: no idea “in our minds has taken its rise from sense,” because ideas have “rarely any resem­blance to what takes place in the sense and in the brain,” and “some have no connection with any bodily image” (Aspects 49). In modern terms, by denying ~at sensory impressions give rise to abstractions unconnected to mental imagery, the argument hinged crucially on an unduly strict empiricist thesis—namely, that left to itself the brain could only process sensory information in analog terms, for example, by making a mental replica of the object being perceived (hence “resemblance” through “shape”). Thus, the rationalist refutation would hold only if the very empiricism it attacked were rue in the most literal sense. The claim that ideas are innate was made plausible by denying the capacity of the mind to process sensory information abstractly; yet, that very capacity is what the “innate ideas” were supposed to explain. Empiricism was further raided by endowing these “ideas” with a quasi-biological status: “Ideas are innate in the sense that in some families,” says Descartes, “diseases like gout or gravel” are innate (qtd. in Aspects 49).

A favorite domain of these “ideas” has naturally been mathematics. Chomsky calls on Leibniz to testify: the senses give us only “examples, i.e. particular or individual truths,” whereas “the truths of numbers,” that is, “all arithmetic and geometry, are in us virtually” to “set in order what we already have in the mind” (Aspects 50). Leibniz too made the leap to biology: ‘Necessary truths must have principles whose proof does not depend on examples nor consequently” on the senses and which “form the soul” of our thoughts, “as necessary thereto as the muscles and sinews are for walking” (50).

These moves, whereby idealism explicitly claimed to refute empiricism while implicitly presupposing its validity, return in Chomsky’s own proceedings. His most intricate and controversial theorizing is often devoted to papering over the rationalist dualism between knowledge and experience with the tried but not very true argument: (1) the world reaches the mind through sensory analogs of stimulating movements and objects; (2) human knowledge is too organized and complex to have been generated this way; (3) ergo, the organization of knowledge is run by innate ideas and biological determinism.

Chomsky’s ancestry is complicated because he wants to sever rational­ism altogether from its seventeenth-century ties to theology, theodicy, and theocracy and to found it solely on natural science. His theorizing is thus more acutely entrained in the contradiction of invoking natural science to support rationalist idealizations about language and mind while shielding them against real or potential scientific counterevidence. Since such evi­dence is highly likely to come from the social sciences, he makes them the object of his most categorical attacks and dismissals. Like his ancestors, he appeals instead to less threatening sciences: mathematics, which is relatively free of empirical content, and biology, whose empirical findings are reassuringly remote from his own mentalism. The indirectness of biological evidence allows him optimal latitude for deciding which linguistic theses it can be claimed to support.

 

Change and the Role of the Intellectual

Chomsky’s theorizing puts him in a peculiar position regarding the traditional role of the intellectual. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the role required two steps: discovering the “natural order” and then measuring up the prevailing order against it. The means and arguments for discovering the natural order were relatively rich and diverse: mathemat­ics, logic, natural science (especially physics and astronomy, which were in the process of merging), and theology—plus a palette of philosophies grouped mainly around rationalism, empiricism, and enlightenment. And the prin­ciples were comfortably abstract, general, and flattering: human virtue, true moral nature, divine providence, and so on. The means for discovering the prevailing order, however, were relatively sparse and undifferentiated, since even empiricism relied at that time on speculation when human phenomena rather than, say, physics or astronomy were involved. And the human phenomena were uncomfortably concrete, specific, and unflattering: violent conflicts, unjust rulers, and all manner of inequalities.

The second step opened out onto two asymmetrical options. If the prevailing order compared favorably, the intellectual’s task was complete, and in Chomsky’s pessimistic portrayal this result is precisely the one “intellectuals” are enlisted and paid to attain. If the prevailing order compared unfavorably, the intellectual’s task was incomplete and much -harder: to discover and state how the prevailing order might be brought closer to the natural order. The latitude for performing this task depended on the rigidity of the institutions wherein the intellectuals worked. Rationalism and idealism, which flourished in absolute monarchies like France and:

Prussia, proposed to strive for ideal states that best accord with innate ideas, a solution with little force for social change. Empiricism and pragmatism—which fared better in more egalitarian societies like Switzerland, England, and America—advocated improving human nature through education by experi­ence, and the need for general public education was soon widely recognized.

Though the twentieth-century intellectuals have retained their role, the options are more checkered and the prospects of achieving change more perplexing. In Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1989, intellectuals actually took the lead in transforming the prevailing order, after having been severely persecuted over the years for their criticisms of it. But such triumphs are rare, and the fate of too many intellectuals has been either to be co-opted into the prevailing order or else to be cut off from any effective means for acting upon it. Ironically, Chomsky’s dualism has enabled him to suffer both these fates, -the first as a scientist and the second as an activist, and now he is an old Angry Young Man anxious to blame anybody but himself.

His ostensible hope for change rests on “our moral nature,” another entity compounded from idealism and determinism (does it develop like, puberty?). For him, the way you would study moral judgment is “clear,” because it’s a carbon copy of the way he thinks you should study language. You take people and ask what is the nature of the moral system they have though he doesn’t say if you ask yourself (as he would) or the people (as social science would). Without having examined such studies, which he thinks we’re “not in a position” to undertake, he asserts that people make moral judgments “in coherent ways and with a high degree of consistency He attributes this to “a theory or a system or a structure” underlying an unbounded range of moral judgment,” rather like a grammar for generating (assigning ethical descriptions to) an infinite set of moral sentences. True to philosophies of past centuries, he suggests that “shared moral understanding comes from our inner nature”; and “progress” in human history is “stimu­lated” by “a deeper understanding of our own moral nature” (18).

Recent empirical research in sociology, social psychology, and discourse analysis,² disciplines he misprizes one and all, have conclusively shown that moral judgments and their justifications in modern societies reveal not coherence and consistency but a startling lack of them. Such findings undermine his recipe for “progress in human history.” And if the 1980s have brought people closer to an “underlying system,” its most consistent values include selfishness and greed.

 

Chomsky’s Dualism

Chomsky’s personal response to the inherited dualism between knowledge and experience is a fresh dualism—namely, two contrary solutions to the same problem. As a linguist, he accentuates and legitimizes the dualism in various guises—for example, in competence versus performance or deep structure versus surface structure—and moves away from objectivity. Whereas his first book Syntactic Structures had espoused the “aim” of “replacing obscure intuition with a rigorous and objective approach” (56), Aspects championed “intuition” and decried “objective methods” as unfit for “the actual situation in which the linguist must, for the present, proceed” (19). He then cudgeled the social and behavioral sciences for demonstrating that “objectivity can be pursued with little consequent gain in insight and under­standing” (Aspects 20). Now in the JAC interview, he bluntly says, “The idea of neutral objectivity is largely fraudulent” (5).

As a political activist, he adopts the contrary solution by assuming that the only knowledge one needs is what one gets directly and objectively from ordinary experience: “In the analysis of social and political issues it is sufficient to face the facts”; only “Cartesian common sense, which is quite evenly distributed, is needed,” the “willingness to look at the facts with an open mind, to put simple assumptions to the test” (Language 5). This faculty presumably empowers him to tell us “that’s the way the world is” or “you 2 might want the world to be some other way but that’s the way it is,” which he just happens to say when he needs to justify himself for taking morally questionable positions on linguistic issues: here, for refusing to “study the -way in which language is used to facilitate authority” and for championing the languages of the rich and powerful over indigenous and minority languages whose speakers are going to be “worse off” than if they had learned English Such appeals to “the way the world is” provide alibis both for the social irrelevance of his linguistics and for the moral inconsistencies in his political activism.

The well-known discrepancy between the linguistic and the political sides of his career is thus necessary because he insists on two separated levels of understanding, depending on whether or not he holds credentials If he does, the domain is complicated and technical; if he doesn’t, it’s simple and accessible. So if his credentials for “discussing or debating social issues” are -“repeatedly challenged,” he doesn’t obtain credentials in social science but avows that the “alleged complexity” and “depth” of the social sciences is an “illusion created by the system of ideological control” to “make the issues seem remote from the general population” and to “persuade them of their incapacity to organize their own affairs or understand the social world in -which they live” (Language 4). This additional alibi not merely exonerates his lack of credentials, but advertises it as his political weapon to clarify the issues by simplifying them properly for the “general population.” Credentials Chomsky doesn’t have are therefore unnecessary and tainted. In Orwellian paradox, a contradiction whose social and political grounding Chomsky does recognize, ignorance is knowledge.

In this sense, his linguistic and political stances are more similar than has been widely supposed:-they are both opportunistic projections of his own views and limitations, the one onto the natural order and the other onto the prevailing order. The conflict lies in the incompatible means he uscs for the projection: abstraction and idealization on the one side versus immediacy and cynicism on the other. He compensated for the idealizations which rendered his linguistic theory sparse and largely limited it to abstract sen­tence structures by devising correspondingly ran fled notations and complex constraints. Ironically, the outcome was a brand of linguistics that perfectly fits his own conspiracy theory by “making the issues seem remote from the general population.” The technicality and complexity helped conceal the fundamental dualism between his theoretical theses and the actual data and experience of language.

 

“Chomsky’s Problem”

Chomsky’s self-projection is further complicated by his unswerving determination to uncover and denounce serious flaws in everyone’s theories and models except his own. Like the negative campaigners dominant in current politics, he sets forth complicated arguments to undercut all oppos­ing views. Instead of justifying his view with extensive corpuses of realistic language data, he presents it as the only alternative to a carefully constructed straw man and, for good measure, questions the intellectual and moral character of the linguists whose view his straw man purports to embody.

“Chomsky’s problem” (of which his “Plato’s problem” is a major corol­lary) is his self-centered resolve to equate the world as it is with the world as he sees it by situating his personal interests and limitations in the things themselves.³ If his approach prevents him from grasping an issue, then the issue itself is at fault: it isn’t “interesting,” it “lacks depth,” and “there is nothing to say about it,” or “nothing’s known about it,” because “we don’t understand much about it,” since “everything is pure speculation,” and so on. The narrowness and dualism of his approach oblige him to assign this status to a wide range of issues whose importance and relevance has long since been established by other approaches, notably in discourse analysis and social psychology, two disciplines whose legitimacy he must therefore deny. This denial peaks in the charge that people studying such issues arc making a “very poor moral judgment” for the sake of careerism—the same charge we might well raise against him.

To link the conflicting frameworks of authority he invokes, he oscillates between idealist philosophy and natural science by jumping over social science and much of cognitive and educational psychology, including peda­gogy and, of course, rhetoric and composition. Like his ancestors, he makes interpretive short circuits to connect up his idealizing theses about language and mind with biological principles and necessities. In Aspects, he presents the odd thesis that information regarding situational context need not “play any role in determining how language is acquired” once the “acquisition device” has been “set in operation” (33)—convenient because his theorizing about both language and acquisition disregards contexts. As evidence for the thesis he makes a conjecture about “animal learning”: the lamb’s “theory of visual space” does not “depend on” ‘mother-neonate contact,” which merely “facilitates” it (34). What the biologists in fact “observed” (his term), however, was the “facilitation,” not its irrelevance to some theory of visual space. Thus, the scientific, biological finding does not support his thesis except through his own non-biological interpretation, although it may well impress, distract, or intimidate potential disbelievers.

“Plato’s problem’ is a corollary of “Chomsky’s problem” and was prefigured by the rationalists: if you cannot understand how a given human accomplishment is attained, such as the acquisition of knowledge or of language, you literally—that is, organically—build it into the mind. And Chomsky sees Plato’s problem “always” and “universally,” ‘anywhere you look,” in “any domain,” in “any form of human activity” because his radical dualism between knowledge and experience leaves him no other way to explain the acquisition of anything.

His Cartesian ancestors still had the theological recourse of arguing that proffers the alternative (the “only” alternative he allows for this straw man) of “inner determinism,” which he opportunistically attributes to “every natural scientist studying organic systems,” though as we have seen it came from rationalist philosophy. Since even Chomsky admits that empiricist doctrine had much appeal in the context of eighteenth-century struggles for scientific naturalism,” he turns that doctrine into a straw man as well (Aspects 59). Like his ancestors, he reduces and misrepresents the empiricist ap­proach as a crude atomistic behaviorism that “limits” all “acquisition” of knowledge to “peripheral processing mechanisms” and “primitive uncondi­tioned reflexes” (Aspects 47). The “approach” is then said to assume the “taxonomic principles of segmentation and classification” developed by his adversaries in modern linguistics. This last link in the chain of argument is the weakest, since taxonomic linguists never (though Chomsky did) offered their methods as a model of language acquisition, nor did these methods in ­any way operate though “peripheral processing” or “unconditioned flexes.”

Chomsky’s straw-man version of empiricism is accused of being not “scientific” but “dogmatic and aprioristic” in saying that” arbitrarily selected data-processing mechanisms” are the “only ones available,” and in “attrib­uting a complex human achievement to months or at most years of experience rather than to millions of years of evolution or to principles of neural organization” that are” even more deeply grounded in physical law” (Aspects 207, 59). This accusation helps snatch biological determinism away from empiricism and reserve it for the rationalist approach, to which Chomsky finds it “difficult to see an alternative” because the obvious alternative has been craftily designed to seem unacceptable (207). And he actually praises rationalism for entailing no “dogmatic assumptions as to the nature of mental processes” and “no preconceptions” about “the internal structure” f the “language acquisition device,” although it does precisely that, and to conspicuous extreme (Aspects 48).

 

Chomsky’s Method

To the degree that Chomsky does perceive his own dualism between knowledge and experience, he apparently hopes to transcend it simply by blurring it and then dismissing its consequences. His treatment of the mind/body dualism is a good illustration. He begins again by reducing and misrepresenting the contrary position, in this case by equating body with the “intuitive mechanics” prevailing before Newton—“you know, things pushi­ng and pulling each other.” Next, he says the theory of mechanics “was blown out of the water” by Newton, who in fact created a far more powerful but less intuitive theory of mechanics by uniting celestial and terrestrial motion—a step which genuinely moved toward replacing theology with natural science. But Chomsky admits only his own straw-man “theory of mechanics,” after whose refutation by Newton “there is no classical mind/body problem” because “there shouldn’t be” and “the logic is the same.” He contradicts himself at once by invoking “numerous examples showing that the way we study the traditional phenomena of mind departs from the way we study other aspects of physical reality.” Three characteristic moves should be noted here: equating “should be” with “is,” passing over obvious contradictions that ensue, and including “phenomena of mind” under “aspects of physical reality.”

This inclusion is vital for Chomsky’s standard tactic of constructing idealizations and justifying them as biological necessities, thereby solving both “Plato’s problem” and his own while fending off counterarguments. Hence, “a rich structure of understanding” is claimed to “arise independ­ently of any evidence because it’s just part of our nature”; and “the develop­ment of cognitive systems, including systems of knowledge,” is “substantially directed by our biological nature.” Put in a more simplistic metaphor, the acquisition of “rich competence” from “limited experience” is attributed to “inner determinism” just as “when a child eats, it grows.” Or, “deep universals” in language are “just as much a part of our nature as the fact that we have arms and not wings.” Or again, the “facts” of language are said to point to “a highly determinate very definite structure of concepts and of meaning that is intrinsic to our nature” and “just kind of grows in our minds, the same way we grow arms and legs.”

This “structure” in turn constitutes the tidy preserve of “meanings” Chomsky judged admissible for linguistics and semantics, to be expressed in “descriptive feature matrices” in his “lexicon.” The features determined by context, on the other hand, being “unspecified in underlying structures,” can make “no contribution to sentence interpretation”—a truly astonishing con­clusion (Aspects 182). Evidently, the idealization of meanings requires that they be fixed and determinate, and that interpretation consist of putting together their lexical features like so many building blocks. So Chomsky has to follow Katz and Fodor in saying that “the meaning of a sentence is based on the meaning of its elementary parts and manner of their combination” (Aspects 162). And since those parts are specified in “underlying” or “deep” structure, he has to conclude that “the manner of combination provided by the surface structure is in general almost totally irrelevant to semantic interpretation” (162). This conclusion too is astonishing, especially for a syntax-centered approach, but Chomsky is forced into it by the idealizing and unimaginative design of his theory. Besides, the more outrageous the conclusion, the more likely it is to give him opportunities to use his greatest talent: public debating.

Moreover, such conclusions allow his genuinely seventeenth-century belief in a timeless “basically fixed structure of meaning” to act as a deflector of unwelcome complications. Only when we use these “rich semantic structures in our interactions with one another and our interactions with the world” are they subjected to “interest-relativity, intrusion of value, relativity to purposes and intentions, modifiability,” and so on. So disregarding the use of language and meaning with its untidy “fluidity and indeterminacy” that “we don’t understand very much about” is the proper scientific choice, and, as a recent stipulation, the “moral” one as well.

Appeals to determinism and fixity are awkward because they imply that when Chomsky changes his mind the “mind” of humanity changes as well. In Aspects, he invoked “the best information now available” (without saying what it was) as proof that “a child cannot help constructing” a transforma­tional grammar “any more than he can control his perception of solid objects or his attention to line and angle” (59). When Chomsky later dispensed with transformations, he must have determined that “the best information avail­able” was all wrong and the child was doing no such thing. But he avoids such issues by overlooking his own inconsistencies and assuming we will too—for example, when in the interview he includes “rules” among the “things” people have “inside the skin” only two pages after averring that, according to the work of the 1980s, “there don’t seem to be any rules.” Or when he announces that “kernel sentences” play “no distinctive role” in the “inter­pretation of sentences” (Aspects 18) without recalling his earlier labor­saving announcement that “to understand a sentence it is necessary to know the kernel sentences from which it originates,” so that “the general problem of analyzing the process of understanding’ is thus reduced” to “explaining how kernel sentences are understood” (Syntactic 92). Each new thesis and each new version of his theory is asserted with the same aggressive confidence as the very mirror of nature and with the same cheerful expectation he will be believed as fervently as ever; and his grammar is still “transformational” in the practical sense that he can’t stop transforming it. Even today, after changing his mind time and again to gain some momentary advantage in an argument, he has no qualms about telling us where “the truth” lies (9 times in the interview) and what is “true” (19 times), and he doth protest too much by adducing “crucial facts which are in fact true facts.”

If he sees an advantage, not even the most basic concepts of linguistics are secure. The very first sentence of Syntactic Structures (the book begins on page 11 so it will have over 100 pages of text) reads: “Syntax is the study of the principles and procedures by which sentences are constructed.” Toward the book’s end, he insists his own theory is “completely formal and non-seman­tic,” “meaning” being no more relevant for “constructing a grammar” than “the hair color of speakers” (93). He exempts himself from “the burden of proof’ for his thesis by placing it “completely on linguists who claim” to “develop some grammatical notion in semantic terms” (94). In a footnote, Chomsky shares Nelson Goodman’s hope that “the meaning of words can be at least in part reduced” to “reference of expressions” (102). Predictably, “semantic reference” was later said to “facilitate syntax-learning but not affect the manner” and, therefore, like “information about situational con­text,” should not be relevant for theories of “acquisition” (Aspects 33).

In the interview, however, the term syntax is redefined as whatever “has to do with mental representations and the structure of mental representa­tions” and with “the relation between words and concepts.” The majority of researchers in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics itself, who assign these issues to semantics, are summarily brushed aside and their results annexed. “Most of what is called semantics is syntax,” and “plenty of people who call their work semantics” are “not dealing with semantics at all.”⁴ As in the footnote to Syntactic Structures, Chomsky allows “real semantics” to keep only “the relation between representation and things in the world,” and “about that there is almost nothing to say.” Besides, says Chomsky in the interview, “that’s the part that’s subject to holism and interest relativity and values and so on,” about which, again, “there doesn’t seem to be anything general to say.” So, like Saddam Hussein seizing Kuwait and saying it’s an Iraqi province, Chomsky seizes semantics and renames it “syntax,” his own territory, leaving behind only an issue he has nothing to say about and dumping there the factors that disturb his tidy view of “fixed determinate meaning.”

Juggling terminology has long been a commodious way for Chomsky to secure his authority. In Aspects, he advanced a strong argument that a “theory of language” can be regarded as a hypothesis about the “language-forming capacity of humans.” He therefore proposed to formulate problems of linguistic theory as “questions about the construction of a hypothetical language acquisition device” (30,47). But what he “formulated” was terms and ideals, not testable hypotheses. Just as he had proceeded in Syntactic Structures by “never considering the question of how one might have arrived at the grammar,” he now adopted an “idealized instantaneous’ model” wherein “successful language acquisition” happens in one “moment” (Syn­tactic 56; Aspects 36). This leap (like Athena from the head of Zeus) authorized him to postpone “considering” the “order and manner” that “linguistic data” are presented and “the continual accretion of linguistic skill and knowledge” (Aspects 36,202). And since he could not “imagine how in detail” his model might be tested (neither can I), he stipulated that “in this case, no evaluation procedure will be necessary as a part linguistic theory” (Aspects 36).

The missing model of child learning a language was unimaginatively but strategically supplied by a model of the Chomskyan linguist constructing a grammar—strategic in his campaign to dismiss all competing theories (espe­cially those of the descriptive structuralists) that did not purport to be a model of the child. The child’s achievement was thus circumscribed as “having developed and internally represented a generative grammar,” that is, “a theory” and “a system of rules that determine how sentences are to be formed, used, and understood” (Aspects 25). Just as the rationalists had suggested that experience reaches the mind as atomistic sensations so that “innate ideas” must be at work, Chomsky portrayed data in “actual speech” as “finite,” “scattered,” and “restrictive in scope”—indeed, “degenerate in quality,” rife with “non-sentences,” “fragments, and deviant expressions” so that a generative grammar must be at work (Aspects 43,311,58,201,25). And the terminology was deployed to clinch the argument, replace empirical testing, and hide the Chomskyan dualism behind two “systematic ambigui­ties”: “using the term grammar” both for the native speaker’s internally represented theory of his language”’ and for “the linguist’s account of this”; plus using “theory of language” “both for the child’s innate predisposition” and for “the linguist’s account” (Aspects 25). This correspondence is pre­cisely what any linguistic theory must be required to demonstrate.

How the linguist can obtain an account is itself unclear if “any interesting generative grammar will be dealing, for the most part, with mental processes” that are “far beyond the level of actual or even potential consciousness” (note the keyword interesting, whose role we’ll examine later), and if “the speaker’s reports and viewpoints about his behavior and competence may be in error” (Aspects 8). But, like many other problems, this one became a virtue, since it saved the labor of gathering data or interviewing informants: Chomsky went on to assert that “sharpening the data by objective test” is of “small importance” for “new and deeper understanding of linguistic structure” (20).

Chomsky’s evasions about how grammars get constructed by children or linguists are all the more problematic in view of his famous “unanswerable” attack upon structuralist grammars for “natural languages,” whose “inade­quacy” he purported to have “established beyond any reasonable doubt” (Aspects 54, 67). As we’ve seen, his main thrust was to blur the distinction between atomistic behaviorism and linguistic fieldwork and to disqualify the structuralists for a claim they never even made. Intransigently ignoring the grammars produced for over 350 languages by the Summer Institute of Linguistics alone, mainly through tagmemics (1964 estimate by Kenneth Burke), ⁵ Chomsky said flatly that “knowledge of grammatical structure cannot se” from the “operations” of structural linguistics, and he claimed that the methods of “taxonomic linguistics are intrinsically incapable of yielding items of grammatical knowledge that must be attributed to the speaker of language” (Aspects 54,67). The irony is indigestibly rich: Chomsky baldly asserted that a theory of language is a hypothesis about language learning, dismissed out of hand rival theories which never pretended to be such a hypothesis, transformed his own theory into one with a mere “systematic ambiguity,” and then skipped over the whole learning process by adopting an ideal instantaneous model”! Thus, he flailed the structuralists for failing to dress the very issue his own theory addressed only in the emptiest and most abstract way.

Few who were targeted in that memorable onslaught can be anything but dumbfounded by Chomsky’s remarks in the interview that “one should not try persuade” and that he “tries to refrain from efforts to bring people to ;ach his conclusions.” He grants that “you’d probably lose the audience by ,t doing it,” but warns it is “an authoritarian practice one should keep away from.” Such warnings come distinctly late in his own case. If trying to undercut” someone else is indeed a mark of the “vile nature of human beings,” he would rank among the vilest linguists, along with his cohorts sees, Katz, Fodor, Klima and the rest of the jargonizing MIT elite he unleashed, armed with slippery theoretical arguments about “adequacy” and evaluation,” on practical-minded American linguists. But he prefers to think of himself merely “laying out the territory” so “other people can use their own intellectual powers to work out for themselves what they think is right or wrong.”

 

Chomsky, Creativity, and Composition

Among the disciplines which have suffered from Chomsky’s opportunis­tic theorizing and defensive evasions have been not merely sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, but composition. Searching for theoretical expertise n language, we were offered only unhelpful idealizations and over complicated notations, both of which left behind the impression that transforma­tions of sentence structure are the essence of language competence and that communication by language consists chiefly of assigning structural descrip­tions to sentences.

If we ask him for advice, “Chomsky’s problem” reappears: since he lacks credentials on the teaching of language and composition, the issues must, like social problems, be simple and hence unrelated to the complicated ones he reserves for what he likes to call “technical linguistics.” He justly doubts hat linguistics (meaning, as always, his approach) has “anything to contribute.” It certainly offers nothing to help students “wrestle with complex ideas and find ways of expressing them,” the activities Chomsky, like most of us in composition, would place “at the heart of the writing program.” Nor are any means offered to enlist writing in “intellectual,” “cultural,”’ and “moral progress.”

We should recall here his spurious justification for the claim that his theory could “attempt an explicit formulation of creative processes” in terms of “technical devices for expressing a system of recursive processes, as developed in mathematics (Aspects 8). Again, he was seeking support by appealing to an impressive but irrelevant technicality. Recursion is anything but creative; it can only crank out the same thing at fixed increments. Language is “creative” not merely because we can make sentences steadily longer and more complex, but because we can modify and adapt the conven­tional patterns and meanings Chomsky takes as the sole concern of linguis­tics. And the means, motives, and effects of doing so are among the factors he has already idealized out of language—witness his inclusion of creative modifiability among the issues (like “interest” and “value”) he separates from the “determinate, very definite structure of meaning” and thus by implication among the issues he dumped into what was left of “semantics” after his summary annexation of the rest.⁶

But Chomsky expressly made “the syntactic component” the “sole creative part” of the grammar. Taking him at his word, composition researchers hit upon sentence combining, which cannot count as a pedagogi­cal application of Chomsky’s theory, however, for at least two reasons, one practical and one theoretical. From a practical standpoint, sentence combin­ing neither adhered to the detailed design of transformational grammar (for example, to the “derivational history” of each sentence) nor was intended to test that design (for example, to adjudicate whether the “passive transforma­tion” should be “obligatory”).⁷ From a theoretical standpoint, sentence combining ignored Chomsky’s expedient thesis that the child “discovers” a “deep and abstract theory” (a generative grammar) “only remotely related to experience by long and intricate chains of unconscious quasi-inferential steps” and makes no “conscious formulation and expression” of “rules” (Aspects 58). This thesis leads him in the interview to the astonishing sophistry that guidelines for usage which must be “taught” are “probably wrong” or “don’t make any sense.”⁸ In fact, they are in “violation of natural law,” doubtless meaning: contrary to the biological necessities which create “fixed deterministic meaning,” compel “the child to construct a transforma­tional grammar,” and generally make happen whatever Chomsky’s theoriz­ing calls for but can’t account for any other way.

Since Chomsky “doesn’t know of any methods” in educational theory either, it too must be just as simple as social science. His declaration that “teaching is mostly common sense” not merely ignores decades of reputable and innovative research in educational psychology and language teaching and implies that specialized teacher training is pointless, but it also clashes dramatically with his own portrayal of the educational system as a means for enforcing subservience. He tells us that “ninety-nine percent of good teaching is getting people interested in the task or problem and providing a rich environment to pursue what they find interesting,” befitting his earlier advice, from the context of his Platonic rejection of “rhetoric,” for the teacher to “enable students to figure out things for themselves” rather than getting them to “reach his conclusions.” But this advice could hardly be followed if the purpose of the educational system is indeed “to turn people into submissive atomized individuals who don’t interfere with the structures of power and authority but rather serve those structures.” The logical contradiction here could be avoided only through the tortuous assumption (which he doesn’t advance) that ninety-nine percent of good teaching consti­tutes an insignificant exception (say one percent?) among the activities in the educational system.

The goals of writing are included under “forms of empowerment,” but Chomsky’s statement of these goals again contradicts his dark assessment of power in education: to “enrich one’s own thought,” to “enlighten others,” and to “enter into constructive discourse with others which they all gain by.” Predictably, he extols the natural sciences as a model for English composi­tion courses, striving to “stimulate critical analysis, self-analysis, and analysis of culture and society” as well as to “develop systems of intellectual self-defense.” He forgets that his notion of natural science is diametrically opposed to social science, which really does analyze culture and society. And his advice is again not helpful if the educational system “interferes to prevent deviations” because “that’s the way institutions work”—that is, “that’s the way the world is.”

Activism and the Intellectual

Seeing education and social science as instruments of conformism is directly related to Chomsky’s vision of the intellectual—one as opportunistic and self-contradictory as his vision of linguistics: “The dominant view among intellectuals” is that “you’d better control people with propaganda for their own good.” They constitute a “specialized class” of “smart guys” who are “capable of running things” and who judge “the mass of people” totally incapable. They pass through “gates and filters” by being “submissive and obedient” all through school and their professional careers, until they attain positions in “high places” as “cultural managers.” There, they enjoy respect and recognition because they refrain from “subverting structures of power”—for example, by doing scholarship in the universities, which is basically “low­ level clerical work” (trahison de clericals?).

Chomsky plainly considers himself an intellectual and sometimes uses the first person (“we smart guys,” “we’re obedient”). So two contradictory theses about intellectualism arise, and the interview provides support for both: either he also serves power structures (for instance, by handling linguistics as “clerical work”) or else his work is such a distinguished and influential except for that the controls can not be as tight as he maintains. The contradiction disappears if we adopt a third, less evident thesis Chomsky would not accept: that both his politics and his linguistics constitute con­spicuous deviations but have been accepted and encouraged because they ultimately reinforce prevailing power structures. His politics are applauded because they provide reverse evidence for the claim that the United States is the “freest country in the world.” The domination, repression, and conceal­ment he denounces are necessary in the first place because in the U.S. you “can’t tell people what they’re going to do,” so “you have to fool people into it by fear and so on.” His linguistics has been generously funded, for example, by the military,⁹ whom he now requites by citing “the Pentagon system” as a indicator of America’s “internalized democratic understanding and free­dom,” so that the military must “force the public to subsidize high-technol­ogy industry.” In an efficient fascist society, in contrast, “you just give orders”; and if popular organizations dispute them ‘you send out the death squads.”

And his generously funded linguistics has repaid its dues by blocking research on ‘the use of language to impose authority”—not just indirectly, in that such use can hardly be treated in terms of assigning structural descrip­tions to sentences, but directly in that Chomsky roundly declares it “a topic that’s not intellectually interesting and has no intellectual depth to it at all, like most things in the social sciences.” This declaration hinges on Chomsky’s bizarre but convenient tenet that there is “very little overlap” between what is “intellectually interesting” and what is “humanly significant.” This notion of “intellectually interesting” has nothing to do either with his vision of the intellectual as a servant of power or with the” interest” that intrudes on “fixed determinate meaning—On the contrary. In Language and Responsibility, he distinguishes “things that are interesting in themselves like human action” versus those which are interesting because they “have some bearing’ on ‘theoretical” and ~explanatory principles” or on “hidden structures that have some intellectual interest” (58). The second kind of interest, the only one surviving in the interview, calls for “abstraction” and “idealization.” And opposition to “idealization” amounts to the” insistence that we shall not have meaningful intellectual work” (Language 57). The ratio seems clear: the more abstract and idealized the approach, the more interesting and meaningful it must be—flattering for Chomsky’s theory and derogatory for sociolinguistics, which Chomsky was in this very context booting out from “the rational study of language” (Language 56). Once more, the remoteness of his theory from human actions and other experiential and empirical data is advertised as an asset. His conspiracy theory helps out by supplying the perverse alibi that “if you’re understood and appreciated, it’s almost proof that you’re not on the right track,” so let’s all be as incomprehensible and outrageous as he is.

Chomsky’s views on society and politics fall on the other side, among the ‘humanly significant,” and now his values are suddenly Just the reverse: the more specific and immediate, the better. Thus, “doing something to help Salvadoran peasants who are getting slaughtered” is “overwhelmingly more significant” than “studying the way in which language is used to facilitate authority. This comparison leads to the already cited charge that choosing the latter issue is to make a “very poor moral judgment.” Chomsky remarks that professional training as a linguist “doesn’t help you to be useful to others”—correct if you’re trained in his method.

On the face of ii, Chomsky seems to be advocating the most direct activism. But he contradicts this semblance in the context of another argument attempting to rationalize his political role. First, he hails the American ‘classlessness” that makes ‘complete equals” of “a university professor and garage mechanic talking together” This salute may be a gesture of Chomsky’s nostalgia for his own childhood in a “193~ working class environment” among “unemployed workers” who relished the Budapest String Quartet—the “richest intellectual environment he’s ever seen.” Also it may be a residual solidarity with the masses, a vestige of the Marxist-Leninist thought whose essence” he purports to “capture” with a crude parody. (I, on the other hand, was once hounded out of a garage mechanic’s job when the shop owner learned I held two master’s degrees, and his daughter was so unintellectual she’d never heard of the city of Berlin where I got them. And having lived and worked in the German Democratic Republic, I know that Marxism-Leninism never named “radical intellectu­als” for the “vanguard role” but assigned ft to the socialist or communist party whose membership should be mainly working-class, and who should help the masse not because they are “dumb” and “stupid” but because they are excluded from control over production.)

Second, he hails this classlessness as rich compensation for the fact that intellectuals aren’t “taken seriously’ in the United States. Here, he rationalizes away, indeed glorifies, “one of the good things about the United States,” and account for the fact that he is very rarely asked to comment on international affairs by press, radio, or television”; but how this can be a compensation Is not clear if he cites the same neglect as more proof of “ideological control” and “conformist attitudes.”

Third, he undercuts his own political activism by actually justifying the American government and the media for paying no attention” when “Intel­lectuals’ do such things as “sign an international statement against the war it, Vietnam.” “Intellectuals aren’t taken seriously,” he contends, because ‘there’s absolutely no reason to,’ and the failure of their ‘statements” to make the newspapers is quite “correct.’ So Chomsky must know how little he is achieving for the victims of power like Salvadoran peasants by doing things like “demonstrating in Washington about the Romero assassination.”

If death squads make fascist societies more “efficient” from the top down, demonstrations make democratic societies more efficient from the bottom up—but only if the moral and intellectual integrity of the demonstrators is taken very seriously on a wide scale, as for example with that of Czechoslo­vakian intellectuals such as Vaclav Havel, who paid for their oppositional views by going to prison or doing menial jobs, while Chomsky was on an “enemies list” and “nothing happened” to him (Language 21).. And despite his suggestion to the contrary, “the demonstration” does “advance his career,” namely as a public speaker who is paid more these days for political than for linguistic addresses.

His admission and defense of the public disinterest in intellectual opposition to human crimes like warfare helps explain why he might be “very much in favor of corruption” and call on all of us to “applaud” it as “one of the best things there is.” His rationale is the most cynical sophistry in the whole interview: “money-hunger” is less “dangerous” than “power hunger”; a corrupt leader is going to “rob people but not cause much trouble.” A political activist who fails to see that money is power and who says mass robbery isn’t “much trouble” can only be described as shallow and corrupt himself. In much of the Third World, the corruption of the rich and powerful is simply the other side of the same coin from the starvation and slaughter of “peasants” Chomsky professes to be helping by protesting after an arch­bishop (a true and moral intellectual) who has already been assassinated.

The Future of Intellectualism

Let us hope both linguistics and intellectualism will survive Professor Chomsky’s self-centered renditions of them by turning to more relevant and worthwhile issues and examining them from unified scientific and social perspectives. The pressure is mounting, both on linguists who treat their relevance too casually, and on intellectuals who take their relevance too readily for granted out of narcissistic rather than democratic motives.

Few would deny that science and intellectualism arc in crisis in the United States, and the fate of being either co-opted or excluded by real power structures is relentlessly becoming more imminent. But the model for linguists and intellectuals of the future must not be Chomsky: careerist, opportunist, vociferous debater, marketeer of labor-saving idealizations, creator of dubious justifications for astonishing conclusions, juggler of terminologies, brandisher of irrelevant technicalities, fabricator of alibis, reducer and misrepresenter of counterarguments, defamer of his adversar­ies’ intelligence and morality, disdainer of socially useful science, applauder of corruption, and apologist for governmental indifference to protests against war and colonialism.

The future of the science of language lies in its potential to contribute to critical awareness and analysis, both in the sciences and in daily life. The future of intellectualism lies in seeking a comprehensive and empirically sound conception of both the natural order and the prevailing order, and in transcending personal overconfidence, opportunism, dilettantism, sophis­try, and cynicism. The human race is “likely to self-destruct” less through nuclear holocaust than through the uncritical thought and discourse (includ­ing “the breakdown of independent thought” into “consumerism”) that justify complacency, self-interest, and inequality. We must focus on real discourse and seek out its hidden assumptions and contradictions by every available means. Here, I have tried to provide a taste by taking Chomsky at his word, by probing how his own discourse is constructed to “facilitate authority.”

University of Florida
Gainesville, Florida

 

NOTES

Works Cited