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 a celebrated intellectual figurehead on the left. In your articles, you always seem negative about his overall contribution. Why is that?
Chris Knight: I’m not negative at all. Whenever I read Chomsky on, say, US policy in the Middle East, I’m always in wholehearted support. Who else tells the truth so bluntly and so fearlessly?
RA: So why the criticism? Some articles – in the Weekly Worker, for instance – have been pretty savage.
CK: That’s a different Chomsky. In those articles I’m talking about the scientist. Distinguishing between this person and the activist, an interviewer once asked him: ‘What do they say to each other when they meet?’. Chomsky replied: ‘There is no connection, apart from some very tenuous relations at an abstract level…’
RA: So Chomsky’s really two people?
CK: In the 1960s he was so active people thought there must be six Chomskys! But, yes, two at least. When he speaks or writes politically, his passions are engaged and he takes full personal responsibility. In his scientific role, something quite different seems to be happening. According to his own account, one modular component of his brain – ‘the science-forming capacity’ – functions autonomously as a computational device. It’s almost as if Chomsky the activist wasn’t responsible for the science. That comes from a different region of his brain.
RA: Our readers might find this hard to believe. What does he actually say?
CK: ‘The one talent that I have which I know many other friends don’t seem to have’, Chomsky explains, ‘is I’ve got some quirk in my brain which makes it work like separate buffers in a computer.’ One component produces science for a definite intellectual constituency while the rest of him produces political stuff for a quite different audience. As a scientist, he’s anxious to avoid slipping over into politics; as an activist, he strives to avoid anything to do with science. Each separate role comes with its own appropriate conceptual approach and corresponding language, resistant to translation across the divide. ‘Now exactly how one can maintain that sort of schizophrenic existence I am not sure’, Chomsky admitted on another occasion, ‘it is very difficult’. In his scientific capacity, Chomsky views language as a biological ‘organ’ or ‘device’. As such, it’s devoid of humour, metaphor, emotion, communicative intent, social meaning or anything else people normally think of as language. Meanwhile, the other Chomsky continues to speak and write much like the rest of us. He uses language precisely to communicate – to denounce his own state, his own government, his own employers, his own institutional milieu. Short of denouncing his own science, Chomsky opposes just about everything he embodies in his alternative role…