Noam Chomsky Went Gangnam Style … Ever So Briefly?

I’m usu­al­ly pret­ty dialed into this stuff, but some­how this one slipped by me last fall. Dur­ing the Gang­nam Style craze, MIT shot a par­o­dy video where Noam Chom­sky, the father of mod­ern lin­guis­tics, made a cameo appear­ance. Maybe it slipped by me because the appear­ance is brief. About 5 sec­onds, start­ing at the 3:20 mark. We were on the ball enough, how­ev­er, to spot anoth­er par­o­dy by Ai Wei­wei and then we had Slavoj Žižek demys­ti­fy­ing the whole Gang­nam Style phe­nom­e­non, com­plete with wild hand ges­tic­u­la­tions and fran­tic rubs of the nose. Any­way, one day this will make for some good archival footage — pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al meets inter­na­tion­al pop cul­ture craze — so we’re adding it to the trove.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Spells Out the Pur­pose of Edu­ca­tion

A Shirt­less Slavoj Žižek Explains the Pur­pose of Phi­los­o­phy from the Com­fort of His Bed

Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er (1971)


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Comments (4)
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  • sia says:

    To con­duct such a thing at a uni­ver­si­ty and MIT at that… you peo­ple know how to bring shame to every­thing we val­ue, eh?

  • Leon says:

    Very inter­est­ing. It looks like they’re hav­ing a lot of fun. And now I want to hear about Zizek demys­ti­fy­ing the Gang­nam Style thing. He’s always pret­ty inter­est­ing, even when I don’t agree with him.

  • Denn Guerrier says:

    “Shame to every­thing we val­ue”, eh?

    To “con­duct” a par­o­dy video, in the vein of cel­e­bra­tion of prob­a­bly the most extreme exam­ple of a memet­ic video in our cul­ture … memet­ics being some­thing that I’m quite cer­tain Noam Chom­sky is on board with.

    Seems like you just don’t appre­ci­ate any­thing out­side of your nar­row per­spec­tive, eh?

  • Alissa Clough says:

    Sweet! It “trans­lates” to Boston so well! Chom­sky IS the Big Dad­dy!
    (of lin­guis­tics and high­er learn­ing, if noth­ing else)…

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