Profile of a rebel

POWER etches itself effectively in our subjectivity by taking with one hand and giving with the other. If one were always to take, it would amount to mere intimidation. In the absence of adequate gratification the individual has to react or show his dislike. And when fulfilments are accessible, the individual will easily submit to state control. Individuals are, in this sense, logically defiant as they are naturally conservative and run of the mill.

Human history is witness to the authoritarian desire of the state to completely obliterate far-reaching ideas, refusing to allow any oppositional combative stance. Implicit in Noam Chomskys writings is one significant question: How is it possible for an individual to be unbiased or non-partisan?

Robert F. Barsky, in his book The Chomsky Effect, underlines Chomskys contribution not only to the field of linguistics but also to political thought, to issues including Vietnam, Israel and Palestine, East Timor and Latin America, to media studies, to law and to the imperative for the intervention of the intellectual for reasons of social transformation. The writer succeeds in bringing together areas such as teaching, political theory and public debate that form Chomskys long career as a dissident writer with the courage to speak truth to power. As Barsky argues, such an intellectual inspires both fanatical adulation and fierce vituperation to the extent that many scholars from the Right have built up arguments that go to show that he is a hoax.

Chomsky, writes Barsky, is an inspiration and a catalyst. Not just an analyst or advocate, he encourages people to become engaged to be dangerous and challenge power and privilege. All that his writings evoke and provoke in his admirers and critics as well as the attending contentiousness combine to produce the Chomsky Effect.

But included in this effect is the rise of Chomsky as an iconic figure with the status of a punk and a rock hero. Elaborating on the Chomsky hoax, David Harowitz writes, His venomous message is spread on tapes and CDs, and the campus lecture circuit; he is promoted at rock concerts by superstars such as Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, and U-2, whose lead Bono called Chomsky a rebel without a pause and Elvis of academia. Rock and Roll Confidential [a newsletter about rock music and social issues] regards him as a quote machine with all the rockers.

It is clear that the American state breeds individuals who concur with the state ideology; survival through pro-establishment views and love for the status quo is a political expediency. Opposed to such a class of people, writes Barsky, are activists such as Edward Said, Zellig Harris, Seymour Melman, Bertrand Russell and Chomsky, who belong to the discipline of comparative literature, philosophy or linguistics but do not go beyond the boundary of their professional areas and write extensively with serious involvement in world politics.

Chomsky has often maintained that he has as much qualification to comment on international affairs as any other leader, which implies that one really does not need to be a specialist to do so. He argues that those areas of inquiry that have to do with problems of immediate human concern do not happen to be particularly profound or inaccessible to the ordinary person.

You do not have to be an expert to know that consensus in society has a false assumption of being the general truth, which has the power of a discourse that puts across a make-believe world of international ethics. It is not difficult to understand the subterraneous agenda of crass imperialism which is given the camouflage of the white mans burden. To set the historical record right, Chomsky describes this delusion:

In the United States, the prevailing version of the white mans burden has been the doctrine, carefully nurtured by the intelligentsia, that the United States, alone among the powers of modern history, is not guided in its international affairs by the perceived material interests of those with domestic power, but rather wanders aimlessly, merely reacting to the initiatives of others, while pursuing abstract moral principles: the Wilsonian principles of freedom and self-determination, democracy, equality, and so on.

Is it possible to conceive of a society where such lies go undetected? Can dissidence ever be eliminated? It is, rather paradoxically, felt that silencing the dissident voice is a solution to all problems.

Banning dissident literature or imprisoning the critics of state policies cannot put an end to the views of those intellectuals who are disgruntled with the system. Chomsky reprimands intellectuals who remain silent and lack the courage to rise against state high-handedness.

Barsky elaborates skilfully how Chomsky has vehemently attacked those individuals who give up their calling and compromise their principles. Here, one warning given by Chomsky (which Barsky overlooks) has to be heeded: writing against repression, intellectuals have to remember that criticism can often lead to a negative effect on the victims. For example, the criticism of Saddam Hussein can lead to a hardening of attitudes; or the criticism of the Soviet Union during the Cold War could have led to the intensification of American aggression. But this does not mean that one should discontinue opposition. As Chomsky writes:

We should of course protest as strongly as we can the brutal internal repression and aggressive violence of the Communist system, recognising however that this honest protest will be converted into an instrument of Western aggression just as protest over Western atrocities within the Soviet bloc lends itself to the needs of ruling groups, enhancing their capacity to enforce their own domination and oppression. The Chomsky Effect thus throws up the important issue of the nature and function of the intellectual. This, Barsky feels, can be debated only if his critical politics is related to his function and his position in society.

All radical work for the transformation of society so as to put an end to oppression is carried out by Chomsky at the site of his academic or professional activity. Politics, as is often thought, operates not only outside the university. What goes on inside is as political as what goes on in overtly political areas.

This cultural-academic crisis has brought about a split between politics and aesthetics, between social ideas and literary values. Conformist academics live securely in true smugness, adopting unfathomable professional drivel and withdrawing from the public sphere.

Professional academic scholarship is invariably withdrawn, apolitical and private. The co-option of intellectual life by the universities marks the decline, if not the suppression, of the intellectual in a commodified and bureaucratised society. The intellectual derives all his authority and power from the university he or she is attached to and is content in being a closeted professor, with a secure income and no interest in dealing with literature and its relevance to the world outside the classroom. Unlike these scholars, Chomsky supersedes the professoriate, as Said puts it, with his free-ranging work, [his] credo of freedom and [his] discourse.

Community, history and nationality have an influence on an individual who exists in a sort of universal space, bound neither by national boundaries nor by ethnic identity. Such an individual, in the words of Edward Shils, must get beyond immediate experience and represent his societys general symbols and values and at the same time possess the attributes of commitment and risk, boldness and vulnerability so necessary for an intellectual to stand in opposition to think-tanks and refuse to be neutered.

The Chomsky effect encourages this type of involvement that refuses narrow affiliations to nationalism or religious following. For example, Chomsky stands up for the philosophy of anarchism which has a direct bearing on his political standpoint on an issue like anti-Semitism and Zionism.

Taking the Bakuninist type of revolutionary as an ideal for an all-engulfing social revolution, Chomsky supports the early radical Zionists, about whom most people, including contemporary Zionists, know very little. He does not link Zionism to organised religion or Israeli state politics but speaks of his admiration for the general questioning approach of the Jews to their world.

Raised in a Jewish tradition, Chomsky has always felt that it is necessary to realise in fact that Judaism is a religion founded upon the carrying out of certain rights, but it does not require an act of faith. You can be an observant Jew while at the same time be an atheist. Chomsky goes on to emphasise that he and his wife (who died recently) have always been non-believers.

The modern intellectual has to stand at the transnational borders, always adversarial, living a secluded yet socially engaging life, forever in conflict with the establishment, with the sole purpose of trying to change the body politic to make sure that there is enough testimony to injustice. A true intellectual must refuse the passive, unreflexive role designed for him by those who produce culture.

University-based intellectuals here need to be reprimanded for the progressive pulling out from the general issues of public concern and responsibility and the increasing complicity with institutionalised and professional structures of specialisation that leave no scope for radical commitment to society. There seems to be a failure of intellectual confidence, which, if revived, could effectively guarantee the overall efficacy of the academy. It is imperative to deacademise the university, refusing its disciplining into courses, methodologies and conferences which are utterly cut off from the political reality that they purport to address. The excessively professional is like a technician who advocates clear simple positions unlike the amateur who is a free thinker. The managerial neocons are of no relevance to transformation.

Case studies of Jean-Paul Sartre, Russell and Chomsky show how robustly they combined academics with a vocation to act in the world with the purpose of sharing their views with the people and always stand up for justice and freedom of thought. For instance, Said examines in Gramscian terms the historical process behind the deradicalisation of intellectuals in the present century.

He underscores the inclusion of intellectual life into the centres of learning where he is, in the words of Bruce Robins, shut out or sold out. Only those who can market their goods or credentials are accepted; the public and critical function of the intellectual seems to have almost disappeared, though a few like Chomsky have lived out their ideas in a manner that is socially and politically consequential. The intellectuals representations of a cause or an idea through his articulation are not intended to serve the interests of the powerful system that he works for, but are, in the words of Said, the activity itself, dependent on a kind of consciousness that is sceptical, engaged, unremittingly devoted to rational investigation and moral judgment.

Chomsky has constantly been of the view that the intellectual has to reprimand the ongoing propaganda of misrepresentation approved by imperialist powers in their fabrication of truth and look into the future as a visionary of a utopian world free from abuse and control. The only path to assertion of the self is to take up anti-authoritarian positions manifested in ones unswerving critical writings.

The solution lies in the recognition of true democracy, the rule of everyone by everyone, a democracy without qualifiers. The need of the hour is for the Left to move on from the rather simplistic notions of the rule of the proletariat and classlessness to the idea of the multitude, to emphasise the commonality and singularity of all radical and oppositional discourse, as is so well argued by Hardt and Negri in their book Multitude.

Radical global social transformation now becomes possible within the new global order where the oppressed can engage in meaningful contemporary forms of resistance striving for liberation and democracy. The aspiration is for a global democracy superseding the limitations of the national form of democracy. At such a juncture of human history there is nothing nobler to do than to resist authority.

Barsky has, indeed, engaged in an incisive study of one of the most stimulating and visionary writers of today who has helped in the eradication of borders, linking areas of human activity, which makes it feasible to initiate a more global democracy. In this global village that Marshall McLuhan had talked about, there is a possibility of people coming together in various forms of resistance.

In such a dismal scenario, and in the context of social and cultural pressures of conformity and specialisation, one of the ways can be the development and evolution of counter-structures and counter-narratives by rediscovering history suppressed and denied by the state. Dissidence has always been with us.

People take part in justifiable political protest against their government out of principle, out of loyalty to a cause or out of a conviction that the world can be made better and stronger through dissent. And research shows that dissent is essential for any organisation; organisations with cultures that stifle dissent do not survive. Presumably the same is true of countries.

Barsky draws the reader to the background of social and political dissent emphasising that throughout history there have been a number of law-abiding citizens who believed that they had been driven by their conscience to raise their voice against anti-liberal issues.

Chomsky, too, has been a dissident throughout his life. In fact, we are all dissidents at one time or another. Protest has to be allowed in society, as we live in a world that is constantly changing, and it is by protest that the laws are changed for the betterment of future generations.