Protesters demonstrate outside one of MIT's nuclear missile laboratories, November 1969. Courtesy of MIT Museum. All rights reserved.
In my previous articles, ‘Chomsky’s Choice’ and ‘Why Chomsky felt “guilty most of the time”’, I described the linguist’s double-edged relationship with the US military. Chomsky’s research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was sponsored by the US Defense Department, who had ambitious military applications in mind. On the other hand, Chomsky loathed the American military and all its works, and needed to know that no ideas he came up with could possibly be of military use. His political conscience led him to adopt a lofty, unprecedentedly other-worldly approach to language, treating grammar as if it were a mathematical object and, at every stage, renouncing messy reality in favour of the most extreme theoretical abstraction.
My aim has been to show how Chomsky’s twin intellectual outputs – abstract theory for the military, concrete activism against the military – are best viewed together as a unitary strategic response to what must have been genuine dilemmas. Only a grasp of Chomsky’s conflict-ridden institutional situation can explain why he needed to adopt such extreme positions on each side. Language, he has always argued, is neither social nor communicative but simply a computational object performing its unconscious operations silently in the individual mind/brain. His commitment to such a peculiarly individualistic, dehumanised and unrealistic philosophical approach has embroiled him in countless theoretical difficulties over the years. One major advantage, however, was that it allowed him to disconnect his socially aware activism from an allegedly value-free, politically neutral version of linguistics emanating under military sponsorhip from MIT. Once this disconnect had been achieved, his activism could proceed free of interference from his science, and conversely his science free of interference from his activism.
