Noam Chomsky - Postmodernism I

are the young are the trends you've been speaking about in US University if you think they're responsible for a lot of what's coming out of the academic collapse mainly post-modernism do you think that has a particular place in the doctrinal system mainly people wanted to be subversive but not rock the boat or do you think there's some other explanation for that well you know individuals have their own reasons and you have to look and ask why they're doing this but if you look at the phenomena as a whole its effect has been I think the effect is pretty clear it allows people to take a very radical stance you know more radical than though but to be completely dissociated from anything that's happening for many reasons one reason is nobody can understand a word they're saying so they're already dissociate it's kind of like a private lingo and it's very you know there's a lot of material reward that comes from it like if you're part of that system you can run around the conferences and get big professorships and you know all this kind of stuff so there's a lot of sort of conventional material reward and it has this very radical look to it so you feel you know everybody well let me just give you an example I gave a talk couple days less Saturday less Saturday at piers 8 University the Palestinian University of the West Bank and it was a you know you like everywhere big mass audience political talk mostly criticizing the Palestinian Authority because I was in you know you always tell people what they want here so why criticize Israel I do it on the other side of the word but the and the audience most of the audience very supportive and they liked and they understood it the guys with the jackets and ties were pretty angry but that's normal however as I left with the Arab friend of mine who organized it he said actually an Arab but he's Israeli Arab was a member of the Knesset Parliament but an old kind of guy he sort of let he was sitting in the back of the a he as we walked out he kind of laughed and he told me eat you know I said most of the especially younger people liked a lot but he one critical really critical comment from a young woman faculty member who sort of liked the general political thrust of it but told him it was very naive and he said you know why was I even he laughed and he said well it's because you said that people do things on moral grounds and you talked about truth okay and that's old-fashioned nonsense you know that's kind of this old enlightenment stuff we know perfectly well that nobody does it I mean I talked about how apartheid was overthrown you know how was necessary to have splits inside the white society which there were the white society had been unified they would have smashed the ANC but there were splits from the inside and basically on moral grounds people didn't want to tolerate it that was quite important something you know talked about that well that's naive because nobody doesn't anything on moral grounds all power plays you know read Foucault and so on and so forth if you can understand it and truth is kind of like an old-fashioned concept you know there's no truth and so on and so forth yeah that stuff goes on all over I mean that the next day I gave a talk at an Israeli University and then it was critical of Israel United States and talked about Palestinians and there were commentators and one of the commentators was the Dean and you know he hated it of course in the historian and he said he also said it was naive because I was talking as if there's there's a objectivity in history I was running through the history of what happened and saying how you should interpret what's going on now in those terms it is complete naive I mean everybody knows there's no objectivity and there's no truth and it's this narrative and that narrative and so on and so forth that's very convenient it sounds very radical you know and it's extremely convenient you can beat people over the head with perfect you know self-confidence because there's no reality anyway and it's just their narrative and your narrative in the third world it has it's particularly grotesque in my it's bad enough here I don't like it here or other rich countries but when you get to third world countries it's really grotesque because the you know there the separation of the radical intelligentsia from popular struggle is a much more you know it shows much more dramatically I'm people are much poorer and they're suffering much more and these guys are usually pretty pretty very rich in fact often and it's ugly but I think it has served the function I don't want to say that the people who are involved in it necessarily do it for this reason in fact I know extremely good people who are very active and I respect and like and so on who are right in this stuff I don't know why but that's their means something to them but as a general phenomenon I think that's the way it's worked it's worked as a way of insulating sectors of a kind of radical intelligentsia from popular movements and actual activism and serving and it served as an instrument of power I think I suspect that's the reason why it's so readily tolerated in the universities and it's all over the place in the third world as well no because of the function it serves

Channel: Chomsky's Philosophy

Views: 338,453

Keywords: Postmodernism (Literary School Or Movement), Philosophy (Field Of Study), Noam Chomsky (Author), Michel Foucault (Author), Epistemology (Field Of Study), Knowledge (Quotation Subject)

Id: OjQA0e0UYzI

Length: 5min 21sec (321 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 13 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Lamont-Cranston]

Who was the old Arab Israeli friend in the Knesset?