> Shane Taylor wrote:
>
>> The problem with general denunciations of "abstractions" and "big words"
>> is that
>
> Anyone read Chomsky's linguistics? I haven't gazed at so much as a page,
> but I'll bet it's not comprehensible to the proverbial carpenter next
> door (though I doubt that Noam's neighbor in Lexington, Mass., is a
> pounder of nails). Foucault wasn't writing agitprop for a large audience -
>
> he was writing philosophy and history for a scholarly audience.
I've read some of Chomsky's linguistics-- and you're right. He's a very technical writer, but he's also addressing a very technical subject. And he's writing mainly for other linguists, so when he refers to the S-bar rule or whatnot, he's talking to an audience which doesn't require a footnote or explanation.
I have found that the basic idea _behind_ Chomsky's linguistics can be described to people who aren't linguists. And there are many really good books which make his general ideas accessible-- Howard Gardner's _The Mind's New Science_, John Casti's _Paradigms Lost_, Howard Campbell's _Grammatical Man_, _and most recently, Randy Allen harris's _The Linguistics Wars_ and Steven Pinker's _The Language Instinct_, all give a good summary descriptions. And if Chomsky were talking to a New England carpenter (Norm Abram?), I'm sure he could give him a good outline of his work. But it's like physics: if you want to go beyond the general idea, you have to learn some very high-level math'n'logic.
I remember an interview with Chomsky where he indictaed why he's suspicious of so much of the pomo philosophy. I'll paraphrase; he said that if he wanted to find out about something he didn't understand, like quantum electrodynamics, he could go to someone at MIT and ask for some guidance, or find a book on the subject. And he'd probably get a description that was understandable; he could probably get a good enough sense of the subject to feel he understood it, somewhat. But he never _got_ that with Derrida's work. He never got the same answer twice, or the terms were used in very idiosyncratic ways, or there was the implication that the insights were _so_ profound they required extensive and detailed study. So he began to suspect that there really wasn't anything there.
> And we're getting close to the territory that Zizek talked about in my
> interviews with him - facts are not enough, as much as Chomsky would like
> to believe so. People often don't want to hear, don't want to know, and
> to understand the reasons behind that (and get around the defenses) you
> need the much-maligned theory.
I think it depends on the theory, actually. As Chomsky once said, the labor movement didn't need the work of Derrida or Lacan to know what's right and wrong, or that powerful interests were working against them, or that corporations were screwing them. He's a big believer in a common sense of morality. I figure, if the theory speaks to _that_, then Zizek's point makes decent sense.