Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library

ANARCHISM, INTEllECTUALS FIND THE STRTE
SPECIALIZATION AND THE INTEllECTUAL DIVISION OF LABOR
216
You mentioned somewhere [Language and Responsibility] the role of the
intellectual in mantaining social order and deftnding the interest of the
elite, and then criticized the idea that social knowledge (history, international
politics, etc') requires special tools (theory, methodology) that ordinary
people donI: and can't have. At the same time, the criticism that denounces
this perverse specialization of social knowledge is itself specialized, in the
sense that it demands a great deal of effort that only a proftssional intellectual
or a hard working dilettante can do. How can the critical intellectual
escape this dilemma of criticizing specialization and being a specialist himself
I think that you have to be honest. If you were ro ask me, could I explain
to you what I teach in my graduate courses in linguistics in five minutes, I'd
say "no" because it requires too much background, there's (00 much understanding,
and there's technical knowledge required and so Oil. But if you asked
me to explain Brazil's debt crisis in five minures I'd say "yes" because it's relatively
straightforward. And in fact vinually everything in social and political
affairs is right on the surface. Nobody understands very much in the sciences:
when you get beyond big molecules it becomes pretty descriptive. The areas in
which there is . ie;nificam, non-superficial knowlede;e are pretty rare. If it's
there, you respect that it's there, so I'm not going to give a talk in quantum
physics because I don't know any.
On the other hand, these questions are really accessible to everybody. One
of the things that intellectuals do is make them inaccessible, for various reasons,
including the reasons of domination and personal privilege. It's very natural
for intellectuals to try to make simple things look difficult. It's like when
the medieval church was creating mysteries to maintain it's importance. Read
The Grand Inquisitor by Dostoyevsky-it says it beautifully. The Grand
Inquisitor explains that you have to create mysteries because otherwise the
common people will be able to understand things. They have to be subordinated
so you have to make things look mysterious and complicated. That's the
test of the intellectual. It's also good for them: then you're an important person,
talking big words which nobody can understand. Sometimes it gets kind
of comical, say in post-modern discourse. Especially around Paris, it has
become a comic strip, I mean it's all gibberish. But it's very inflated, a lot of
television cameras, a lot of posturing. They try to decode it and see what is the
actual meaning behind it, things that you could explain to an eight-year old
child. There's nothing there. But these are the ways in which contemporary
intellectuals, including those on the Left, create great careers for themselves,
power for themselves, marginalize people, intimidate people and so on. In the