I made the following comment:
This is a
weasel article full of half-truths and very slippery deductions. Chomsky
himself is to blame (as always ) for not going the whole hog and
following reason along the path it beat after Kant and the French revolution
using Hegel and especially Marx. But Hawkes is either disingenuous or blind to
his own analytical shortcomings here (pot kettle black as Chomsky might be
tempted to say).
In the first
place, rooting language in a biological capability doesn't turn people into
objects or language into a non-social phenomenon. We use our brains to orient
ourselves in the world as subject (or let's say a self-orienting object among
non-self-orienting objects) and language is one of our special human faculties
for doing this. Science and logic and so on have nothing to do with capitalism
as such, they are formalized and institutionalized human capacities and
activities that have developed in various kinds of societies to improve our
self-orientation. Capitalism as a form of society drove this development much
further than any previous society. Now capitalism is incapable of taking things
any further and socialism will either take over the baton or humanity will
collapse into an unimaginable state of barbarism.
Hawkes
gestures abstractly at Marxism in what he writes, but makes damn sure not to
give chapter or verse or make any concrete observations.
Chomsky is
empirical and rational, and driven by scientific curiosity. Once something
appears to him to be empirically and rationally validated he takes it as a
basis for a next step. In this he is ruthlessly logical. The US government lies
and goes to war using violence and atrocities for the benefit of big capital.
The US media establishment supports it to the hilt. So get used to it.
Structuralist and behaviourist linguistics only scratched the surface of human
language and drew all kinds of misguided conclusions about it. Chomsky blew
them out of the water by taking structuralist method as far as it would go and
transcending it, as any good philosopher and/or scientist would. As Syntactic
Structures brilliantly demonstrated in 1957, and I was privileged to discover
in 1965.
Anyhow, more
of a conundrum in Chomsky is the modesty of his approach. What is revolutionary
is the ruthlessness with which he holds to scientific principles and the
insistence with which he asserts his findings and pursues their logic, not the
content of his findings as such. The problem for reactionaries and trimmers and
eclectics (like Hawkes) is that they don't understand the depth of his
certainty and conviction once his principled conditions for reasonable proof
are met. The trimmers are swept around like dust by winds and tides (Dante has
them blowing about helplessly on the banks of the Styx, despised even by Charon
and refused even the basic courtesy of admission to Hell - they have done
nothing worthy of eternal residence anywhere ). Like all good
scientists, Chomsky gives us an Archimedian "pou sto" (somewhere to
stand) - a stable fulcrum that we can use our levers with to move the earth.
One that winds and tides swirl around, not one swirled around by winds and
tides.
