> Now to get back to Chomsky, and his "mechanical Marxism": He has
> analized the role, the ideological function, of intellectuals, the
> societal function and defined limits of the university; how academics
> by institutional pressures not to try to talk to people but to mystify
> people with their expertise, or with the extreme narrowness of their
> chosen subject of study, in a way that Miles explicitly rejects, and
> in a way that I have never heard you acknowledge. It is part of the
> institutional role of intellectuals to sometimes mystify and sometimes
> obscure and to be the guardian-priesthood of knowledge. It is the
> institutional role of intellectuals to make sure that the wrong kind
> of learning doesn't get into the wrong hands, that it gets into the
> hands of the right people and then in only a limited form. It is part
> of what I have called an _ethics of rhetoric_ when an intellectual
> betrays his class and his masters, and tries to do just the opposite.
> I'll take Chomsky's "mechanical Marxism" as a starting point for
> analysis, because I think it is both historically correct and an
> accurate description of the assigned role of intellectuals in our
> society.
Yes. Daumal's prefatory remarks to "A Night of Serious Drinking" (see below) supports the above and combines the threads on language with that on the intelligentia. I highly recommd the book -- a modern version of Guliver's Travels & Tale of a Tub.
Joanna ___________________________________________________
"I refuse to accept that a clear thought can ever be inexpressible. Appearances, however, are against me. For just as there is a level of pain at which the body ceases to feel because, should it become involved in its pain, should it groan but once, it would seemingly crumble and return to dust; and just as there is a peak at which pain takes to the air on its own wings--so there is a level of thought where words have no part to play. Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable. And yet things merely appear so. If human discourse is capable of expressing perfectly no more than a mean level of thought, it is because the mean of humankind thinks with this degree of intensity; it is to this level that it assents, it is to this measure of exactness that it agrees. If we fail to make ourselves understood clearly, we should not blame the tool we use.
Clear discourse presupposes three conditions: a speaker who knows what he wishes to say, a listener in a state of wakefullness, and a language common to both. But it is not enough for a language to be clear in the way that an algebraic proposition is clear. It must also have a real, not simply a possible, content. Before this happens, the participants must have, as a fourth element, a common experience of the thing which is spoken of. This common experience is the gold reserve that confers an exchange value on the currency which words are; without this reserve of shared experiences, all our pronouncements are checks drawn on insufficient funds; algebra, in fact, is no more than a vast intellectual credit exercise, a counterfeiting operation which is legitimate because it is acknowledged: each individual knows that it has its object and meaning in something other than itself, namely arithmetic. But it is still not enough for language to have clarity and content, as when I say, "that day, it was raining" or "three plus two make five"; it must also have a goal and an imperative.
Otherwise, from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble, and from babble to confusion. In this confused state of languages, men, even though they have a common experience, have no language with which to exchange its fruits. Then, when this confusion grows intolerable, universal languages are invented, clear and hollow, where words are but counterfeit coins no longer backed by the gold of authentic experience, languages which allow us from childhood to swell our heads with false knowledge. Between the confusion of Babel and these sterile esperantos, no choice is possible. It is these two forms of non-understanding, but more particularly the second, which I shall attempt to describe. "