> And this is exactly my problem with Chomsky: by referring to this "inner
> essence of autonomy and freedom", he's contributing to the ideology
> about human nature that helps capitalism to thrive. In fact, I'll go so
> far as to claim that capitalism couldn't function without the ideology
> of the essentially free individual! This insight--that people who
> purportedly challenge and undermine power relations can in fact
> reinforce them--is nicely analyzed by the Foucaults, Butlers, and
> Zizeks. If you pooh-pooh it all as intellectual elitism, you're tacitly
> approving and valorizing ideological claims like Chomsky's that sustain
> capitalism and all of its brutal forms of exploitation.
Well, the anarcho-capitalist and the anarchist do share the conviction that the first need which must be met is the need for freedom. In anarcho-capitalism the idea is to shatter, atomize and then re-organize as subjects the community of workers. But underlying capitalism is the expansion of the community of elites from a small number of military elites to a large and fluid class of owners. This may not be much of an expansion of community in our terms, but it is a huge expansion.
Anarchism depends on the fundamental communitarian impulse of people. This is not a thing Chomsky talks about because it's presumed. His is a theory of self-organization.
Human nature does, of course, exist. We are not pure intellectual beings with equanimity towards all possible modes of society. We are a social primate with bodies, minds, languages and societies formed by evolution. The great variation evident at highly abstracted levels of social structure are, nonetheless, filled out - and thus formed - by iterations of simple human processes, many of which are not all that different than they were thousands of years ago.
> One more try: Orwell's point about impoverishing language as a means of
> social control still stands. If we wish to contain thought and behavior
> in narrow, socially approved parameters, we should eliminate all
> "jargon" and make language as "simple" as possible. (I can't resist:
> the will to "simple" language is an instantiation of--the will to power!)
Elites try to stop social evolution at the point of maximum power. They do this by language, but through two methods.
1) Undermine the meaning of simple speech (advertising, NewSpeak, George Bush).
2) Abstract language so that it is not available to the uninitiated.
These are separate processes with the same aim. Elites want either to control the common tongue or "Balkanize" the common tongue. The masses of people want constantly evolving consensus - a common tongue that evolves to become more common and more flexible.
One has to judge academic speech in this way: is the complexity adding to or subtracting from this process of evolution? Clearly Karl Marx added to the process. I would argue that Milton Friedman added to the process. The role of the public intellectual is to satisfy the urge for new terms and definitions - right or wrong. Judith Butler, I think, is an example (and she's just the one we pick on) of an intellectual who represents an effort by academia to control language. She's a language warlord, if you will. Her work acts more to abstract speech from rather than add to the evolution of the common tongue. She is not a public, but a privatizing intellectual.
The same may be said for intellectuals in general and Butler is by no means the worst - she's just the one we pick on because her writing style is sort of extraordinary.
boddi