Noam Chomsky - Postmodernism III

like anything that we understand about at all with regard to things as complicated as human affairs the answers are pretty trivial if they're not trivial we don't understand it there is category of intellectuals who are undoubtedly perfectly sincere whoo-hoo if you look at it from the outside what they're actually doing is using poetic words and complicated constructions which apparently they seem to understand because they talk to each other most of the time I can't understand what they kept talking about and you know the people are supposed to be in my field and it's over inflated and the lot of prestige and so on has a terrible effect in the third world in the first world rich countries it didn't really matter that much so if a lot of nonsense goes on in the Paris cafes or the Yale comparative learish department well okay on the other hand in the third world popular movements really need serious intellectuals to participate and if they're all ranting of postmodern absurdities well they're gone I mean I've seen real examples but give them to you but so there is that category and it's considered very left-wing and very advanced and so on and so forth well some of what appears in it actually makes sense but when you reproduce it in mono syllables it turns out to be true isms so yes it is perfectly true that if you look at scientists in the West they're mostly men it's perfectly true that women who 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 I mean all of this can be described literally in mono syllables and it turns out to be true isms when you okay on the other hand you don't get to be a respected intellectual by presenting truisms and mono syllables now a lot of the left criticism so when the left so-called left prism left when the left criticism so called happens to be accurate okay that's fine so if you point out a lot of things just like what I mentioned there are a lot of no that's fine point it out you know everybody understand it take a look to see it's true and so on and it had a lot of bullets so-called left criticisms these from pure nonsense in fact that's been demonstrated conclusively so there's a very important book by Jean Rico and Alan SoCal forget what it's called dangerous allusions or something where they simply go through the they happen to concentrate on Paris which is the center of the rot but it's all over and they go through the most respected French intellectuals and run through what they say about science and you know it is so embarrassing that you kind of cringe when you read it actually sometimes one of my fate was striking ones is one of the very few who actually is a scientist and know something about science let tor has a background in science and philosophy of science they go through an article of his and I think I'm remembering correctly in which he he's somebody in France had or somewhere had discovered that one of the pharaohs had died of tuberculosis and they did it by you know analysis of whatever DNA or something Latour wrote an article ridiculing this this is totally deserved because because he had welcomed a tuberculosis only discovered in the 19th century how could everything's a social construction and therefore it wasn't constructed yet so yes so it didn't have it I mean you know it's kind of at the level of Bush and Chirac but but it's taken very seriously and this is considered very leftist but one point to look at I think is that the description of intellectuals the description of journalists and now the description of this sector a part of what calls it's off the left you have something similar going on even though the price is much lower you have those guys sitting in the air-conditioned rooms bombing the hell out of the world for their careers for their for their status because of the reflexive lessons that they've learned and then over here you have people who are in literary criticism or whatever field they might be in who are also completely divorced from reality or obscuring it or dialling it up for similar reasons of course the price is much less high but it's there yeah but it's still rich countries it's just dependent it's still not like that bombing the world yeah but it's the same phenomenon they're hard to understand I mean if you they're nice people a lot of my friends if you look at what's happening I think it's it's pretty easy to figure out what's going on I mean suppose you're a little literary scholar or some elite University or you know anthropologist or whatever I mean if you do your work seriously that's fine you know but not very I mean you don't get a it prizes for it on the other end you take a look over in the rest of the university and you got these guys in the physics department and the math department and they have all kind our complicated theories which of course we can't understand but they seem to understand them and they have no principles and they deduce complicated things for the principles and they do experiments and you know they find either they work or they own work and so and that's really you know impressive stuff so I want to be like that too so I want to have a theory in literary and in the humanities you know Larry criticism through ecology and so on there's a field called theory we're just like the physicists they talk in comprehensively we can talk in comprehensively they have big words we'll have big words they draw you know far-reaching conclusions will draw foraging conclusions we're just as prestigious as they are now if they say well look we're doing real science you guys aren't that's white male sexist the you know bourgeois whatever the answer is how come how are we any different from them okay that's appealing other other things that went on remember that a lot of this stuff comes from Paris and interesting things were happening in Paris in the 1970s the French intellectuals were the last group of intellectuals in the world who were dedicating Li not 100% but you know it was very standard and respected to be a dedicated Stalinist and Maoist whatever the mid-seventies I was getting to be a pretty hard position to uphold so what you had if you take a look at what happened is there was a sudden shift people who had been flaming Maoists and Stalinists suddenly became the first people in the world to have discovered the gulag and went on a tear about how everyone else supports you know Stalinist and Maoist atrocities and we're France of course we have to be in front of everyone so therefore we've exposed it and now we're open this was called the new philosophy nor do floss or something and it went over all kyra member meaning I won't mention names cause is embarrassing one of the leading French cultural theorists who happened to visit me around 1974 and she was a flaming Maoist a couple of years later she was one of the first people who understood to of the you know discovered the smallest and Maoist atrocities well okay when he went through that transition you got to do something else how you going to be you know on the front pages okay along comes the invention of post structuralism

Channel: Chomsky's Philosophy

Views: 122,085

Keywords: postmodernism, chomsky, lacan, foucault, post-structuralism, science, philosophy

Id: dVe_ComujRg

Length: 8min 28sec (508 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 06 2016