It's not often I get asked to be a public supporter of the man regularly voted "the most important intellectual alive" - however controversial - on a national public radio show in the US. So when you do, you do...
It was this October 3rd, the show was WBUR's On Point, and the main interviewee was Noam Chomsky, basking in the attention afforded by Hugo Chavez's brandishing of his book at the UN. I was asked by them to represent what Chomsky's impact was in the UK. I suppose I was minimally qualified - in the mid-nineties I wrote about him for the Independent, and once did an extensive interview with him for BBC Radio Scotland around the same time (some old colleagues from the Beeb are working on WBUR, so I'm sure they put my name up).
In any case, it was a great show, with Chomsky correctly portraying himself as something of a conservative figure - maintain the rule of international rule of law for all, and equally, seems to be his guiding principle. My bit - there are audio links on this site - goes on from 40.10 minutes into the programme.
As a few listeners have already told me, it seemed the only time Noam got excited in the whole interview was when I recalled his love of the Scottish Enlightenment, and how their universalist visions of rationality and democracy had shaped his own thought, both in politics and linguistics. But though he's a global treasure, I don't think Chomsky's all you need to mount an effective critique against unjustified power and manipulative media. There's too much 'play' in the matter... As I wrote in 1997:
Yet there is more media beyond news media - and it is just as important in the "manufacture of consent", or at least of our moral and emotional identities. Chomsky's puritan empiricism - partly derived from his thoroughly scientific view of language and the brain - becomes faintly comic whenever he considers the carnival of popular culture. I once interviewed him for the BBC and, after 45 minutes of stunning political and economic criticism, I ventured to ask him about what the American masses were actually watching. Wasn't a sit-com like Roseanne (with its gleeful deconstruction of right- wing "family values"), or a cartoon show like The Simpsons (as profound a satire on the emptiness of everyday capitalist culture as you could get), in some way progressive? Wasn't this radical popular culture? Quietly, as ever, Chomsky swept this idea aside. "This isn't real popular culture, the real art of the people. This is just stuff which is served up to them to rot their minds. Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth."
As Barsky gently hints in his biography, Chomsky's severely rationalist mind-set could be something of a blind spot in his theory of how the media affect the masses. Maybe there's more to our consumption of culture than just a compensatory fantasy for powerlessness. Our desire to see the latest Hollywood blockbuster, even though we tolerate "high levels of personal restriction" in our lives as citizens and workers, is "arguably a phenomenon of considerable complexity", says Barsky. And perhaps it's exactly that kind of complexity which fails, or at least modifies, a Chomskian reading of New Labour. Even though the agenda was (and remains) painfully neo- Thatcherite, why did that large minority of the popular buy the ticket - and in exactly the right cinemas - to see Blair: The Movie? Chomsky remains a powerful brand, reliable and long-term. But we need more than the ascetic anarchist - and the cognitive scientist - to understand these thoroughly mediated times.
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