Chomsky on the left ideology vacuum
At the end of this rambling response (link), Chomsky delivers a stunning point: left intellecuals don’t make ideology any more. So there’s a huge gap.
2 Comments »
Leave a comment
-
Archives
- June 2008 (10)
-
Categories
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
I don’t disagree with the main premises of Chomsky’s post as I understand them, but I also think he engages in as much demagoguery as he accuses others.
What I understood from his rant against Theory and Philosophy (and the way he used those terms I think warrants the capital letters) is that he is seeking a sort of Unified Field Theory from post-modern philosophers, and his argument is on the face disingenuous because he already knows that post-modernism cannot offer him one.
I agree with his conclusions that actions speak louder than words, and the sort of philosophers he describes (while ascribing the behaviors in specific to Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault et. al.–I don’t know how Barthes escaped his attack; perhaps Chomsky was driving the fatal bus and didn’t want to add insult to injury) is effete and ineffectual. So I agree with Chomsky that those who are waiting for a new Theory or a new Philosophy to reorder the world is like waiting for Godot. He/it’s never coming, and yet he/it is already here.
There are two main holes or problems I have with Chomsky’s rant, and one minor (in that it is not at all ascribable to Chomsky). Let’s dispense with the minor one: this listserv posting from Chomsky is from 1995. While I don’t think his position relative to the humanities vs. scientific method has changed, I don’t think he can be held to account for the currency of the argument that, essentially, no one is doing anything about “The Problem” (whatever that problem may be–here, I take it to be the inequalities of late Capitalism).
The major problems are these: he makes the same attack over and over through the years that those of us in the humanities can do nothing nor can we solve anything because our theorems are not scientifically provable nor universally applicable. I’ll refute that on two grounds, and I’ll use the same standard of proof that Chomsky does. I have the books around here to cite chapter & verse but the works are widely available and not worth the effort to look up for the preciseness because (as Chomsky says) the ideas really don’t represent new or distinct knowledge, they are patently obvious that I don’t take them to be anything startling–that is, Chommsky should be aware of them, too, and I cede that Chomsky is a much smarter researcher than I am. In fact, I quit college once in the 70s in some part due to the fact that I wanted to be a linguist and I could not understand Chomsky, nor could I find anyone to put his ideas into plain language, so like the great man, I must plead that either there’s nothing there, or I am too stupid to understand it, which may be likely.
His problem may be definitional. He understands the role of theory, as I read it, to be scientifically provable and universally applicable, as I said before. But Jacob Bronowski (surely not the first) explained the error of that thought, even within the scientific method. Bronowski didn’t tie to any metaphysical perspective, as Kant might have (in fact, Bronowski tried to pick up Kant’s discarded attempt to determine how much we could prove about what we know about ourselves and the world around us through direct observation and attributable to our own physical power, not to the gifts endowed by a creator. And that effort in sum, is what, I think, most people mean when they say theory (a way to speak about the way things work in the world) and philosophy (the limits of knowledge about the nature of the natural world).
Bronowski points out that everything in this universe is interrelated and cannot and will not be fixed in a moment of time, and that advances in the field of scientific research reveals to us facts that we used to think hidden or mysterious. The best science can do (and does well) is to describe the limits of that which is under study and say “these things I keep fixed, and the rest does not matter.”
Now, much of post-modern and post-post-modern philsophy and theory accepts this premise. Again, it is not earth shaking, and should be of no surprise to Chomsky, for there are many scientific facts once held inviolable that have been debunked (Hume would laugh? We would laugh at Hume, too!) through advances in science.
So, for the last 40 years or so, the post-modern glacial age, one of the major premises has been that the studies done by po-mo sociologists, anthropologists, rhetoricians, philosophers, historians (and on) is that there is no Universal Law implied in their conclusions, that the best we can hope to do is describe a local and situated practice and suggest that “all things being equal” (which often they are not) this solution that worked for us might work for you, too. But your mileage may vary.
The second problem, and the one more troubling to me, is the generalization that Chomsky makes that, paraphrasing, no one in philosophy or the humanities is doing anything or writing anything or proving anything worthwhile instead of just shutting up and doing something, like all of the activists, and just plain folk that Chomsky surrounds himself with.
I don’t mean to make this about Chomsky–I’ve read several of his books, both the academic and the (I wish) popular post-Capitalist ones, and I agree with much of what he says and writes. Point of fact, I use his essays on the purpose of education when I teach first year college writing. I find that many of the students we push through the American education system arrive in college still expecting to be told where to be and when as a higher priority than what do they want their education to “teach” them.
But his contentions also seem to me to be someone who is fighting ghosts past. Post-modernism came on the “scene” around the same time as Chomsky’s major initial breakthroughs. It serves no purpose at all to me to keep fighting about who’s point of view “won” because, at least in my field, we seem to solidly agree with Chomsky’s social positions about resisting the hierarchies of power, and the theories we learn and teach are largely centered around praxis and not disembodied theory, but practical action that puts in its service many overlapping and at times contradictory theories about the way things work in the world.
Maybe Chomsky gets little from Foucault, from Certeau or from Bourdieu, from Latour or from Bhabha, from Rorty or West, but there are plenty of us, and have been plenty of us, working in the service of local communities to work for the common good–defined locally but with an ideological eye to the future.
Like I say, I’ve read more recent Chomsky, so I don’t think he’s given up his tilt at ivory tower academicians, and that’s fine (and even necessary), but I think he doth protest too much. Some of us who would count ourselves as activists who’ve attended Chomsky’s talks and presentations don’t necessarily identify ourselves as also being from academia, and so perhaps he thinks there is a greater gulf than there really is.
Comment by jay steichmann | June 13, 2008
left ideology vacuum = The
Left, i.e., there is no such thing as left ideology…. unless you count worship of the State and theft by majority vote.
Comment by Mike | June 13, 2008