To the delight and sat­is­fac­tion of hun­dreds of our read­ers, we recent­ly fea­tured an inter­view in which Noam Chom­sky slams post­mod­ernist intel­lec­tu­als like Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Lacan as “char­la­tans” and posers. The turn against post­mod­ernism has been long in com­ing, a back­lash the polit­i­cal right has made the­ater of for years, but that thinkers on the polit­i­cal left, like anar­chist Chom­sky, Marx­ist Vivek Chib­ber, and self-described “old left­ist” Alan Sokal have pur­sued with just as much vig­or (and more rig­or). In the inter­view clip above, Chom­sky makes a blan­ket cri­tique of what the inter­view­er calls the “left crit­i­cism of sci­ence” as impe­ri­al­ist, racist, sex­ist, etc. His answers shed quite a bit of light on what Chom­sky per­ceives as the polit­i­cal ram­i­fi­ca­tions of post­mod­ern thought as well as the ori­gins of the dis­course.

Chom­sky char­ac­ter­izes left­ist post­mod­ern aca­d­e­mics as “a cat­e­go­ry of intel­lec­tu­als who are undoubt­ed­ly per­fect­ly sin­cere” (I sus­pect this is a bit of unchar­ac­ter­is­tic politesse on his part). Nonethe­less, in his cri­tique, such thinkers use “poly­syl­lab­ic words and com­pli­cat­ed con­struc­tions” to make claims that are “all very inflat­ed” and which have “a ter­ri­ble effect on the third world.” Chom­sky argues (as does Chib­ber) that “in the third world, pop­u­lar move­ments real­ly need seri­ous intel­lec­tu­als to par­tic­i­pate. If they’re all rant­i­ng post­mod­ernists… well, they’re gone.” His assess­ment of post­mod­ern cri­tiques of sci­ence echoes his crit­i­cism of Zizek and Lacan. (Chom­sky appears to use the words “poly­syl­lab­ic” and “mono­syl­lab­ic” as terms for jar­gon vs. ordi­nary lan­guage.):

It’s con­sid­ered very left wing, very advanced. Some of what appears in it sort of actu­al­ly makes sense, but when you repro­duce it in mono­syl­la­bles, it turns out to be tru­isms. It’s per­fect­ly true that when you look at sci­en­tists in the West, they’re most­ly men, it’s per­fect­ly true that women have had a hard time break­ing into the sci­en­tif­ic fields, and it’s per­fect­ly true that there are insti­tu­tion­al fac­tors deter­min­ing how sci­ence pro­ceeds that reflect pow­er struc­tures. All of this can be described lit­er­al­ly in mono­syl­la­bles, and it turns out to be tru­isms. On the oth­er hand, you don’t get to be a respect­ed intel­lec­tu­al by pre­sent­ing tru­isms in mono­syl­la­bles.

This last point is some­thing Chom­sky elab­o­rates on as the impe­tus for post-struc­tural­ism in the acad­e­my, say­ing “it’s pret­ty easy to fig­ure out what’s going on. Sup­pose you’re a lit­er­ary schol­ar…. If you do your work seri­ous­ly, that’s fine, but you don’t get any prizes for it.” He makes the claim that human­i­ties schol­ars use mys­ti­fy­ing jar­gon and cook up “the­o­ry” in order to com­pete with the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cists and math­e­mati­cians, who get prizes, grants, and pres­tige for advanc­ing incred­i­bly com­pli­cat­ed sci­en­tif­ic work.

Even more than this gen­er­al accu­sa­tion against the­o­rists in the human­i­ties, Chom­sky makes the polit­i­cal point that French intel­lec­tu­als in Paris, “the cen­ter of the rot,” were the last group of left­ists to be ded­i­cat­ed, “flam­ing” Stal­in­ists and Maoists. In order to save face, such peo­ple had to sud­den­ly become “the first peo­ple in the world to have dis­cov­ered the gulags.” It’s a very damn­ing char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, and one he could no doubt sup­port, as he does all of his claims, with a dizzy­ing num­ber of spe­cif­ic exam­ples, though he declines to name names here. He does, how­ev­er, ref­er­ence Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s sad­ly out-of-print  Intel­lec­tu­al Impos­tures, a book that patient­ly expos­es French post-struc­tural­ist thinkers’ abuse of sci­en­tif­ic con­cepts. (Sokal, a physics pro­fes­sor, famous­ly punked a well-regard­ed human­i­ties jour­nal in the mid-nineties with a pho­ny arti­cle).

Chom­sky’s cranky con­trar­i­an­ism is noth­ing new, and some of his polemic recalls the ana­lyt­ic case against “con­ti­nen­tal” phi­los­o­phy or Karl Pop­per’s case against pseu­do-sci­ence, although his invest­ment is polit­i­cal as much as philo­soph­i­cal. The inter­view­er then moves on to reli­gion. Chomsky’s thoughts on that sub­ject are gen­er­al­ly nuanced and fair-mind­ed, but we don’t get to hear them here, alas, though he’s had plen­ty to say else­where.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Emp­ty ‘Pos­tur­ing’

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

Noam Chom­sky Spells Out the Pur­pose of Edu­ca­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness