Otero, C.P. (ed.), Language and Politics, 2nd edition (expanded), Oakland, CA / Edinburgh, UK, AK Press, 2004, xviii + 802 pp. Introduction by C.P. Otero, index. ISBN 1-902593-82-0. US $28.00 / UK 19.00 paper.Reviewed by Michael LaneThe revised and expanded edition of Otero's Language and Politics is the largest collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky on any topic in one volume. I shouldn't have to introduce this linguist, philosopher, and political commentator to the readers of this journal. Why then should I bother to review the collection in detail here, rather than simply call attention to its publication in a list of books received? Besides the obvious--namely, that one is thinking of acquiring the up-to-date collection just described--I submit that there are at least two good reasons. Most importantly, having such a compendium allows one to trace subtle developments in Chomsky's thought on various issues. Chomsky's political admirers, particularly activists, rarely discuss his intellectual history, in contrast with how his disciples and critics treat his work in the small field of formal grammar. (The distinction between the two groups is widely acknowledged to be sharp.) Furthermore, the volume provides a lengthy example of what I think is one of the more troubling glosses on Chomsky's career by an admirer who is steeped in both his politics and his linguistics. The compiler and editor, Carlos Peregrn Otero, is an old friend and colleague of Chomsky's, and contrary to the AK Press release, he is Emeritus Professor (retired) of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California at Los Angeles, not Professor on Linguistics there [1]. The book consists of an impressive array of interviews from diverse and sometimes obscure sources: New Left Review, Business Today, Studies in Korean Linguistics, Z Magazine, the Dutch arts review Delta, etc. These are arranged in chronological order from 1968 to 2003, with the deliberate exception of the last interview in the collection, "Marxism, anarchism, and alternative futures," which dates to 1995. The first fifty-one of these interviews were included in the first edition of Language and Politics, which AK Press published in 1988, while the remaining six are new to the present edition. Otero's preface, "The third emancipatory phase of history," is an essay that runs for fifty pages, including notes. The editor has given titles to most of the transcripts, different from those in the original, either because they lacked distinctive titles or because they allowed him to emphasize favorite themes. For example, the first article in the volume was originally entitled "On Gesprek met Chomsky" ("Speaking with Chomsky"), but Otero has renamed it "The intellectual as prophet," in spite of admitting in an endnote that the use of the word "prophet" in the interview does not fit the definition he offers in his long introduction (of which, see more below). Of what specific value is the new expanded edition? It brings Chomsky up to date for a post-Cold War readership, including a generation that will very soon be coming of political age, and whose first distinctly political experience may be the "exemplary war" in Iraq. The book consists of classic Chomsky fare, generally more than satisfying, but sometimes less. I myself came to political maturity reading Chomsky, and his penetrating critique of US foreign and domestic policy thrilled me as much as the facts he brought to light infuriated me; I remember both laughing aloud at the irrefutable argumentation, which I thought should surely convince the most abject cynic, and throwing the book across the room because his catalogue of very cynical, wicked deeds so overwhelmed me. I still have and indubitably shall always have the greatest respect for Chomsky's honesty, integrity, and commitment to political activism; he is a stellar example of an intellectual who takes his social responsibilities very seriously, in a world in which the division of labor between individual "brain" and collective "brawn" is unfortunately still pronounced. Nevertheless, reading Chomsky now seems akin to eating comfort food: it is pleasant, filling, and reassuring, but sometimes I hanker for something exotic, daring, or visionary, something that shows me how the parts can be recombined to make something extraordinary, yet nutritious and palatable. (Anyone who knows how I feel about food understands why I chose a culinary metaphor to describe the sometimes fraught dialectic between tradition and invention.) If Chomsky provides us with several of the starter ingredients for political stone soup, then perhaps the best way to find out how we can elaborate on this successful recipe, or think of what we might serve up with it, is to study its gradual development, as I have already suggested. PoliticsI am especially steeped in Chomsky's political writings of the last couple of decades, his most prolific period in this regard, so it has been easy to forget that in the 1960s, when he first devoted himself to political activism, he emerged from a left-wing political milieu that discussed social change in terms that are unfamiliar to many in later political generations, who would nevertheless consider themselves his friends (less likely comrades in name). In "The intellectual as prophet" (1968), it is curious to see how much Chomsky sounds like a Marxist with functionalist characteristics, and how nave he might seem to us now, with the benefit of three decades of hindsight, in describing of conditions in various "actually existing socialist" countries, especially China. He speaks blithely of "economic conditions," "economic growth," and "the primitive accumulation of capital" necessary for various social transformations, as if these factors were discretely measurable and followed trajectories quite abstract or divorced from any recognizably human agency. He likewise seems to regard technology as if it were an autonomous force, a notion commonly explained in the twentieth century in terms of its adaptive function, when he speaks here of the dim prospects he perceives for technology under the sway of the capitalist state, because the class structure of society "distorts" technological development. Apparently as a corollary, Chomsky speaks of the "social organization" in nation-states like China and Cuba, as if these were organic totalities and, by implication, functional. Intimations of economic (or technological) determinism not only seem out of joint with contemporary social theory and political ecology, but they also seem, less directly and more problematically, out of step with Chomsky's philosophical commitment to the rational individual being at the heart of social agency. Nevertheless, some of the repeated, important themes in all of Chomsky's political works are already found in early conversations, such as his prescription in "Linguistics and politics" (New Left Review, 1969) that "we should set up the germs of new institutions where we can" (sounding remarkably voluntarist for the era). In the same interview, Chomsky also lays stress on the ideological overkill involved in destroying Vietnam despite its relative economic unimportance so as "to maintain an integrated world system" in which the United States clearly dominates. This is a point that he has made in his several books devoted to propaganda. It arises again clearly in this volume in discussions of shifting US rhetoric over the decades concerning political and military support for Israel (e.g. "Oil imperialism and the U.S.-Israel relationship," 1977), which has always been designed for the same end, US control of Middle Eastern petroleum, however superficially mutable it may be from time to time. I am somewhat frustrated by Chomsky's seeming reticence to develop further a theory of symbolic capital and investment, given his knowledge, acute analytical powers, and interest in the issues. Such a theory not only might explain the seismic shifts in official attitudes toward foreign lands but also how the very institutions that produce these effects reproduce themselves from day to day--and not just when crises occur, but also in a way that seems legitimate to so many people, whom one might think should be staggering and stupefied by the sway. It could be an interesting complement to work on the same general topic by the late French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu, who also committed himself to progressive political activism late in his life. Chomsky's famous prescience is nowhere more evident than in his early exchanges on US policy in the Middle East. In the interview just mentioned, Chomsky hammers home some themes found in his recent works on the wars against Iraq: for example, that the US has sought since at least the Second World War to control the energy reserves of the Middle East not for itself, but to make sure that nobody else has access to these cheap resources of energy; that to do so requires the collaboration of regional "thug" nations, then the Israel-Iran-Saudi Arabia constellation (now conceivably Israel-Iraq-Afghanistan); and that "the stronger these countries become, the more likely it is that they'll do something outside of the control of the U.S. foreign policy." That Chomsky's observations still ring true should cause us both to admire his political astuteness and wonder why other methods of political analysis, particularly on the left, have fallen comparatively short. Throughout the early interviews, Chomsky is not only characteristically humble about the effects of his political energies, but he is particularly candid about how uneasy he is being a professional intellectual with radical political priorities. This candidness is poignant for me, fresh out of graduate school with a PhD diploma, cherished not least because I had to fight to get it, and painfully aware of how many narcissistic pieces of work exist in the academy. Concerning the "difficult choices" confronting intellectuals, Chomsky says, "One choice is to become an almost full-time political activist. Now the present state of the world and America's role in the world would certainly justify such a commitment. On the other hand, there are plenty of people, including myself, who don't find that prospect in the least appealing, because there are other things we would like to do" (emphasis mine). He continues,
One of the most important interviews in the collection is that entitled "The treachery of the intelligentsia," which together with its preface is a rare and useful, if somewhat incomplete, summary explanation of the sordid Faurisson Affair of circa 1980. It falls short of Christopher Hitchens's masterful treatment of the subject in "Cassandra and the chorus" published in Grand Street in 1985 (reprinted in his Prepared for the Worst, Hogarth, 1990). The short of the scandal is that Chomsky signed a petition in 1979 (along with 500 other persons) demanding that the right to freedom of expression of the French Holocaust-denying historian Robert Faurisson be respected and protected, since Faurisson was facing criminal charges of "irresponsibility as a historian," "apology for war crimes," and "inciting racial hatred" for three letters he had lately written to the newspaper Le Monde questioning the evidence of Nazi gas chambers. French intellectuals, many of whom were on the fairly described institutional Left, immediately beset Chomsky, absurdly accusing him of apologizing for Faurisson's views--or worse, of sharing them. They moved in lockstep in a deeply perturbing display of peers of an institution trying to discipline one of their own. Meanwhile the French courts tried to duck the issue, with a Stalinist kind of twisted logic, claiming that they were not abridging Faurisson's freedom of expression, only holding him to account for what he "actually said". Thereafter followed an exchange of vituperative letters in Le Monde between Chomsky and his assailants that prompted Chomsky to write the formal essay and sort of open letter "Some elementary comments on the rights of freedom of expression." Chomsky's erstwhile friend and colleague Serge Thion published this essay as the foreword to a book on the affair, and ultimately Faurisson himself did the same in his Mmoire en dfense, without Chomsky's express permission. To add insult to injury, the French left-wing daily Libration sent a list of interview questions to Chomsky on the topic, but the editors apparently did not like the substance of Chomsky's typewritten answers and so changed them according to their priorities. Fortunately, Chomsky was able to prevent the publication of the altered version. He himself eventually published his unredacted reply in French through a small Parisian press as Rponses indites mes dtracteurs parisiens (1984). Otero's "The treachery of the intelligentsia" consists of the English version of Chomsky's text together with the original questions. The defect of his preface is that he assumes the reader already knows the Faurisson Affair in broad outline, and he does not make clear where the so called "interview" fits into this story. Chomsky has astutely remarked that such behavior from the French Left should be no great surprise, since it has always been elitist and totalitarian. This observation, incidentally, goes some way toward explaining the "young conservatives" among the French nouveaux philosophes, evident in the more or less reactionary stances of ex-PCF members like Jean-Franois Lyotard and Michel Foucault. Nonetheless, despite Chomsky's later self-assured pronouncements on the nature of the French intelligentsia, I suspect, given his tone at the time, that he was indeed surprised by the experience, and it left him with a bitter taste in his mouth. In "Language is the key to human nature and society" (1985), Chomsky states that "to construct a scientific theory from the data and to be able to recognize that it is a reasonable theory is possible only if there are some very sharp restrictive principles that lead you to go in one direction and not in another direction." As a scientist, after a fashion, I have no objection to the construction of theories in these broad terms: theories are only as sound as the questions we ask. However, I find it paradoxical, even ironic, that in the same interview, he raises his standard objection to socio-linguistics, that it has failed to see the "essence" of language, or at least, has only half of the picture, as if the part concerning actual language that he neglects were less important. Moreover, he sounds strangely like Foucault, one of the keenest observers of the construction of and restrictions on scientific discourse, with whom he is presumably at such odds. In the same year, "Politics and science," a previously unpublished interview with Celia Jakubowicz, a scholar of the French CNRS visiting MIT, picks up again on the issue of the political discipline imposed within the academic disciplines. Here Chomsky observes that "young graduate students who chose to study say [corporate control of the media], will be made to understand, very quickly, that there is no future in this course. If they persist, they will either be removed in some fashion (irresponsible, lacking in collegiality, etc.), or will find that opportunities for education and employment are limited or nonexistent." This rings very true to me at least. In the department from which I took my PhD degree, I witnessed how several--though not all--senior academics directed consensual orbits around their theoretical positions (and egos) with such simple stratagems as silent refusal to acknowledge or patronizing dismissal of alternative (often threatening) points of view. It is significant that these professors were the gatekeepers to financial and institutional resources, if they were not actually the hands that fed the students from their own larders (or at least bought them drinks at the pub). Bringing us up to the present is "The Iraq operation, before and after" (2002/2003). This consists of two question-and-answer exchanges between Chomsky and Michael Albert about the justification for invading and occupying Iraq offered by the Bush administration (in which I include the Blair government), originally Email communication posted on Z Magazine's website. Much as Chomsky has recently taken to citing a version of the Hippocratic Oath ("First do no harm ...") in assessing reasons for military intervention, he speaks of how "resort to large-scale violence has highly unpredictable consequences, as history reveals and common sense should tell us anyway." I'm tempted to think here that post-modernism has rubbed off on Chomsky despite his protestations, although unlike so many pomo-ers, Chomsky undoubtedly does not consider the currently much touted "unintended consequences" or "precautionary principle" in some depoliticized context of "risk society." Granted that the comparison is not direct, such rhetoric nonetheless sounds to me rather distant from his sweeping certitudes about "economic conditions" and "social organization" of the 1960s. In these communications, Chomsky, true to subversive form, appropriates the felicitous term "exemplary war" from the historian Roger Owen of Harvard, a term which I for one will try to put to good use. He also is given the opportunity to criticize his one time ally and now accuser Christopher Hitchens. It is interesting to see how cursory and cautious is Chomsky's rebuttal of Hitchens's suggestion that destabilization of corrupt and tyrannical regimes in the Middle East after the US invasion of Iraq would be a good result. He simply states that he does not understand what Hitchens's point is about destabilization per se, and besides that the left, to the extent that such a coherent body exists, has always opposed these regimes. As I presume most readers know, Hitchens has become, to the minds of most leftists, a notorious reactionary since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, and one could easily imagine that Chomsky would want to subject him to the same sustained criticism he served up to intellectuals of the French Left. I wonder whether he does not do so because he is loyal to Hitchens for past solidarity, because he thinks Hitchens may yet he an ally again, or because he understands forgiveness better than he once did. LanguageIn his more linguistically oriented discussions, Chomsky can sound remarkably post-structuralist too, even from an early time. In "The intellectual as prophet," already mentioned, Chomsky, speaking of revolutionary developments in several fields in the twentieth century, such as in physics and psychology, suggests that it would be "a very healthy thing for philosophy ... to rethink its own historical origins." In "The creative experience" (1969), he refers, not for the last time, to the sharp divide between the "rationalist" period from the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth century and the misnamed "scientific" period that followed, which is reminiscent of the kind of distinctions Foucault makes between the Renaissance, the Classical, and the Modern, but unaccompanied any attempt to explain the sudden shift in discursive priorities and organization. By the time of "Language is the key to human nature and understanding," Chomsky seems to have become less strident and more cautious in his explanation of the "language function." He speaks of language as being "much like" physical organs, rather than being fundamentally organic or genetic. It is in this interview, as I have already mentioned, that Chomsky repeats his critique of socio-linguistics, which is essentially negative. Otero places much of this discussion under his own rubric "Is anything really learned?" which intimates the "dominant," Cartesian (or quasi-Aristotelian) innateness hypothesis of the early Chomsky, whereby the acquisition of a language is the fulfillment of the category of mind (or at least one of its cognitive functions). According to this view, Universal Grammar consists of phrase structure rules and the confusingly named "lexicon" (in theory, a set of lexical categories, akin to traditional "parts of speech," marked as to their possible syntactic relations). I myself am a "recessive" Chomskyite with regard to the structures of language [2]; I am most interested in how Chomsky's transformational-generative model has proved a very useful heuristic tool, especially in the investigation of phonetic and syntactic change. For example, it has been used to explain plausibly (if not unequivocally) changes in the structure of verb phrases from Old English to Modern English and the presence or absence of the past-tense verbal augment in early ancient Greek in terms of a "conjunction reduction rule." Curiously, many such explanations imply, without violating the principles of the model, transformational movement not only between deep structures and surface structures, as is expected, but also between surface structures and deep structures. These conclusions need not imply that no corporeal, organic, or genetic mind / learning mechanism is involved in the generation of language, but at the same time they do imply that the reductionist version of the theory is simplistic at best and indeed in danger of reductio ad absurdum if pursued to its essentialist end. The point, in the context of glosses on Chomsky, is that Otero repeatedly advocates the "dominant" Chomskyite position as the only viable alternative to the "empiricism" of the "secular priesthood" (read "powers that be"). To this end, he recites Chomsky's argument, which has some merit, that teaching people that the "mind" is of a nature different from the rest of the human organism, and in particular that it is some kind of unstructured tabula rasa, is a way both of persuading people not to engage in critical inquiry into what constitutes the mind and of causing them to doubt their own rational faculties to the advantage of self-proclaimed experts and the powerful more generally. As I see it, the problem with such an "enlightened" position is that it sets up a straw person and hence misses possibly productive lines of inquiry that are neither reductionist nor anti-theoretical. For example, Edgley has argued that the recessive Chomskyite thesis is compatible with an empiricist theory of mind, though he thinks Chomsky is right to criticize behaviorists and others for being simplistic at best (see fn. 2). He also notes that Chomsky is either stating something trivial about the mind or something that requires more clarification (e.g. are the "structures" of mind substantive or formal, and to what extent are they transparent to reflection--that is knowable in their own right?). I suggest that the ramifications of the reductionism of some TG grammarians can be seen in the 1991 interview "After the fall" (the title alluding to the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Bloc). Here Chomsky admits to the "paradox" arising from continuing research into language along the lines he has suggested, which shows the structures of language to resemble those of inorganic systems more than organic systems, in spite of his constant appeals to organic monism. Strict symmetry and lack of redundancy are characteristic of the former, whereas, for example, biological systems tend to be "messy" and highly redundant. Indeed, Chomsky confesses, "I don't like to say it, but I've always noticed it." I cannot help but think that this paradoxical outcome is an artifact of the method. On the one hand, in the same interview, Chomsky seems to defend the "closed system" methodology of TG theory on grounds that some things are essentially knowable and others not. This is a truism of the scientific enterprise: that one had to define what one is talking about in the first instance in order to come to any definite conclusions. However, it does not preclude there being complex and heterogeneous systems and that the probability of a theory may benefit from several independent lines of inquiry pointing in the same direction. Yet on the other hand, one finds Chomsky here and elsewhere expressing interest in the sort of complex, non-linear systems, which were so celebrated in lay science a decade or so ago, and which defy reduction to initial conditions. So one might wonder whether there is not more leeway both in Chomsky's linguistic and political theories for conceptions of paradigmatic incommensurability and systematic contradiction. That he has used "language function" and "language mechanism" interchangeably should come as no surprise in light of his admission. "Marxism, anarchism, and alternative futures"The only interview that Otero does not put in chronological order is the last, whose title I give above. He is right to do so, not just for the reasons he offers--to wit, that it is the most visionary in the collection--but also that it provides a neat summary of many of the theoretical themes I have identified here. The interview is relatively late (1995), so it gives us insights into Chomsky's developed thoughts on several topics. Here again, Chomsky displays scientific modesty compared with the statements he made when he was younger. I dare point out how his recent rhetoric sounds vaguely Lyotardian, though I would not impute to him Lyotard's apologies for capitalism: "life is a complex affair, we understand very little about humans and society, and grand pronouncements are generally more a source of harm than of benefit" (emphasis mine). He also gives an example of his interest in "chaotic" systems: "Physics can't really explain how water flows from the tap in your sink. When we turn to vastly more complex questions of human significance, understanding is very thin, and there is plenty of room for disagreement, experimentation, both intellectual and real-life exploration of possibilities, to help us learn more." Nonetheless, Chomsky insists that most truths about human society and political principles are "simple-minded." I am curious how he squares this with his early rhetorical reversal of the classic Platonic question, namely, "How is it that we know so little about society, when we have so much evidence of it?" not to mention with his certainty that human nature can be reduced to innate qualities. Not wanting to get into pedantic arguments about the meaning of "nature," I still think that one question we can all agree upon is that the human condition, at least, consists in large part of shared symbolic systems and hence the investigation of them will tell us how more or less simple or complex the truths of human society really are. Granted that Chomsky has repeatedly refused to connect his political analysis with his linguistic theory--indeed, he has explicitly avoided over-theorizing politics--I am once again left wondering whether Chomsky has ignored an important part of the human picture, possibly to his (and our) detriment. Perhaps for this reason, Chomsky gives a rather nuanced answer concerning the definition of "anarchism" and "participatory democracy": "I'm reluctant to use polysyllables like 'philosophy' to refer to what seems ordinary common sense.... I'm sorry if this seems evasive. It is. But that's because I don't think either the concept of anarchism or of participatory democracy is clear enough to be able to answer the question whether they are the same." I'm sure Chomsky is wise enough to avoid direct appeals to so fickle a standard as "common sense," however currently dominant or recessive his rationalist--or more precisely, innatist--stance. He is, of course, entitled to his modesty--a quality that he has always possessed in admirable abundance--and not be expected to make grand enunciations about the road to social revolution or the like. However, these like others of his later statements, mentioned previously, may indicate the limits to Chomsky's way of thinking. As I suggested in the introduction to this review, the collection of interviews may be read in this light, as a starting point for moving forward with the best that Chomsky has had to offer--and even a small selection is a great deal--so as perchance to clarify such terms as "anarchism" and "participatory democracy." One thing that anarchists have lacked as a political tendency or movement, for better or worse, at least since the heady syndicalist days, is a distinctive body of theory, or even a forum in which to develop it through mutual education. (An important exception to both instances may be the "social ecology" espoused by Janet Biehl and Murray Bookchin, my reservations with their style and substance notwithstanding.) Unfortunately, much of contemporary anarchism in practice (theoretical or otherwise) is still a philosophy of first principles, sometimes highly dogmatic; and in making the present comments, I do not mean to encourage the aforementioned didactic tendency that I think is so pervasive. Rather, I think that people who call themselves anarchists, however well founded their ethical and political principles, ought to take a more anthropological approach to building social models by trying to understand the multifarious ways in which people actually live their lives and make sense of the world. In the 1990s, there was a tendency among young anarchists to examine their relationship with the radical political movements of their parents' generation. Although I think this took an unwholesome turn toward Maoist populism, it was a re-examination of anarchist premises that offered a shot in the arm for the torpor that can be induced by constant harking back to the Spanish Civil War and the glory days of the IWW. Of course, herein lies the paradox, that self-styled anarchists (are there any other kind?) with an anti-hierarchical attitude and non-doctrinaire method may so transform their own practical principles that they will cease at some point to be recognizable as methodological anarchists, except in wide-ranging comparison with certain historical movements. In short, anarchists need to situate critically their own theoretical practices, or they risk continuing to preach like a bunch of Benedictines. A political philosophy defined largely according to what it is not (with important historical exceptions) is perforce going to have a troubled relationship with more positively defined theories and tendencies. This may be reflected in the ambivalent comments Chomsky occasionally makes about Marx, an explicit topic of discussion in this last interview. At different times, Chomsky has expressed support for Marx's critique of capitalism and has denounced soi-disant Marxists for failing to understand Marx (e.g. in "Politics and science," 1983). In "Marxism, anarchism, and alternative futures," Chomsky seems explicitly to subscribe to a version of Erich Fromm's biographical outline of Marx: "My impression, for what it is worth, is that the early Marx was very much a figure of the late Enlightenment, and the later Marx was a highly authoritarian activist, and critical analyst of capitalism, who had little to say about socialist alternatives." Naturally, this begs the question of how Marx turned from a humanist to an authoritarian, much as Chomsky begs the question of how the rationalism he espouses gave way to the empiricism he decries during Marx's lifetime. Chomsky's remark also seems to me to give short shrift to the impact of Marx's way of thinking. Just as Freud's concept of the subconscious is his most lasting legacy to psychology in general, so too Marx's concept that social agencies themselves can be transformed in the course of the transformation of material social conditions is his most lasting legacy to sociology in general. This is not the same as saying that Marx believed that human being is a tabula rasa of some sort, upon which extraneous social forces impress themselves, only that being human (supposing that one finds the term "human nature" controversial) is complex and involves multiple contingencies. Nor can I think of any reason why this need violate Chomsky's observations on human organic capacities. I think it would be well if anarchists explored further the different kinds of social agency that are effective at different social scales and in different forms of knowledge, rather than assuming a rigid methodological individualism, as they often do. "The third emancipatory phase of history"I can hardly avoid making a few comments on Otero's long introduction, in large part because it both reflects the uncritical stance many of his political admirers take and provides examples of the kind of cultural and historical thinking that Chomsky's theory of human agency cannot justify (nor the empirical evidence support). To be fair, I have doubts about whether Chomsky himself would agree with much of what is written here; he may make special critical allowances for old friends. The title of the introduction (above) speaks for itself: history is treated as a sort of expression that transcends any specific human activity. Similarly, Otero's description of the historical contribution of the "Jewish" and "Greek" cultures (two "exceptionally endowed peoples") to "our civilization" rests comfortably in this narrative scheme, in contrast with a more theoretically astute discussion of the practices that shape such social identities. Likewise, the paradigmatic contrast between "Russian populism" and "Prussian statism" lacks subtlety. Could such just-so stories be why we know so little about society in spite of the supposed abundance of evidence at our fingertips? Otero plants Chomsky firmly in a "prophetic tradition" that preaches critical thinking and liberation, as opposed to the hierarchical and dogmatic cohanim priesthood, although he admits to "oversimplifying considerably." This distinction might be a profitable heuristic, in the way, for example, that Cornel West has lately discussed prophecy, were it not encumbered here by cultural history. Indeed, it may be helpful to compare the different effects of the dominant and recessive versions of TG grammar, discussed above. However, if Otero's hard innatist stance (including recitation of the tabula rasa argument) is any indication, then he may also take his political typology to be very real. The upshot, ironically, is that in spite of the historical narrative drawn with so broad a brush, Otero ends up focusing on Chomsky's presumably extraordinary or unique characteristics as an individual, even adducing a version of Chomsky's argument about variation in individual ability: he insists that we should be happy that not everyone is such a genius who can show us the way. His excusing himself of "hero worship" rings more than a little hollow. In fact, it all smacks of hagiography, down to the details of Chomsky's childhood revelations and long-suffering patience with his demoniac adversaries. It seems to appeal to Chomsky's "natural authority," a problematic concept for anarchists of all stripes. It also reveals how wide a disjuncture between the agency of rational thought and the agency of history exists in his theory. While not wishing to diminish Chomsky's well earned reputation for cool-headed rational discourse, I think should call attention, with respect to Otero's biographical sketch, to aspects of Chomsky's behavior that are reassuringly "of this world," like his increasing recourse to sarcasm and sometimes surreal humor--for example, his conjuring up the image of Santa Claus joining the invasion of Iraq as though it were the Macy's Thanksgiving parade (in "The Iraq operation")--and his sharp disdain for what less genteel critics would call "bullshit." The latter proclivity is much evident in Chomsky's famous, exhaustive review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior in 1959, in which Chomsky turns Skinner's terminology of stimuli and responses against its author. I'll quote here a passage that still makes me giggle with delight every time I read it:
In short, I think the better part of Otero's introduction is unhelpful to the development of anarchism or any other sort of forward-looking radical thought. The rest of the bookOf course, a thorough book review requires that I make points about the editing, layout, and format. The editor rightly calls attention to the index, new in his second edition, which is detailed and has a nested format and is very helpful in a book of over 800 pages. Perhaps it is the academic in me, but finding a book without an index (which AK Press has been known to produce) makes me grind my teeth. Either Otero or AK has highlighted key words in the collection of interviews that made up the first edition, and these are given usefully as heading titles in the table of contents. Someone has gone to the trouble of inserting true headings in the later set of transcripts, which are likewise helpful. Unfortunately, the party responsible did not spend commensurate effort editing this set, as it is noticeably much worse proofread than the first lot (which is remarkably free of error, given its size). Finally, I feel I should mention that the URL given for the Workers Solidarity Movement (Ireland) magazine Red & Black Revolution has already changed: it is now Buy the book. (Don't steal from AK.) Keep it beside your bed. Delve into it from time to time, in order to keep yourself real, especially after a long day of being overwhelmed by the CNN version of the world. Wake up and reflect on it critically in the morning, as you wait for the coffee to kick in. It's not the Bible on the prie-dieux. Move forward into the new day with your knowledge. Notes1. Incidentally, contrary also to AK's blurb and back cover copy, Chomsky is not "the founder of the modern science of linguistics" by any stretch of the imagination, as his references to such luminaries in the field as Bloomfield, Sapir, and Saussure being part of his academic learning should make clear. I hope this claim on their part, along with the hyperbole comparing him with Marx, Shakespeare, and the Bible would be obviously counter-productive and hence embarrassing. [Back] 2. I owe the terminology of "dominant" and "recessive" to Roy Edgley's "Innate ideas," in Knowledge and Necessity, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, Vol. III, New York, St Martin's Press, pp. 16-33, a version of which appears in Challenges to Empiricism, H. Morick ed., Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Co, Inc., 1980. [Back] Feedback should be sent to me, Michael Lane, at mflane@acephale.org | ARCHIVESMarch 2006November 2005July 2005May 2005February 2005October 2004September 2004August 2004July 2004June 2004May 2004 |