Noam Chomsky's 'Critique' of Postmodernism

In this episode, I present--and criticize--Chomsky's views on French Intellectuals.

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Twitter: @DavidGuignion
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[SuperGoforitall]

There seem to be some gross misrepresentations of Chomsky's points in this video. I recommend using direct quotes or showing the actual clips. In those videos he qualifies his points far more than you make it seem. He never says women and gay people are no longer subjugated. He says there have been major improvements, yet more work is needed. He also doesn't take on the view that Northern industrialists are equally as bad as slave owners. He makes a point that historically wage labor was viewed in a similar light to slavery and that maybe those arguments have some merit due to the fact that workers were exposed to disgusting conditions. Hopefully, people will actually look at those videos.

[bizikimiz]

So when Slavoj Zizek watches Lacan on TV while wearing a T-shirt with Guevara's face, that is plain talk about everyday issues. The everyday problems part is correct. But even misunderstanding Lacan takes a lot of effort, and double so for Foucault. But unlike with Lacan, in Foucault's case, the inaccessibility is more the language than the difficulty of passing on the knowledge of a nearly ineffable discipline. In big part this is what Chomsky seems to have problems with: artificial inaccessibility.

[troyarchers]

I am curious, because Chomsky references it directly, what is to be made of Sokal's hoax and "Fashionable Nonsense." Chomsky sees ignoring or obfuscating notions of scientific truth in favor of ascribing to an ideology and intellectual culture that rewards people for bombastic social critique that may indeed be rooted more in an ideological framework than truth as damaging to social progress. Having been through graduate school in literature, I have found this to be true with regard to some scholars. Don't get me wrong. Foucault's work is very valuable in its critique of social institutions and their hegemonic role, but some scholars can cloak themselves in Foucauldian or generally "postmodern" language in order to make points that are at times patently absurd.
Once, when I was at a conference on Woolf, I asked a presenter what she made of Woolf's explicit support of eugenics in her letters and other sources, especially with regard to people needing to be exterminated. She said she had to read those comments in light of Woolf's feminism, that she must have favored eugenics in an effort to have "healthier, stronger women." THIS kind of thing is what is being critiqued when we think about fashionable nonsense. As long as Woolf's work is seen as being on the side of the oppressed, she can apparently be defended because she is against the patriarchy.
Lastly, when you say Chomksy says "they are truisms, " "they are incomprehensible, " and "they are wrong, " and that this is confusing, this point seems almost disingenuous. You're acting like he is treating the same statement with all of these labels. Some of the ideas he references, like Latour's claim that tuberculosis is a social construct, are wrong or needlessly bombastic (whether Latour meant it as a statement about the innateness of historical contingencies or as a genuine point is not clear to me). Some of the ideas, like that power and authority shape what people think of as truth, ARE INDEED truisms. Those same points are found in Durkheim and Wollstonecraft and even in Plato.

[muphart]

I think you got some stuff about Chomsky wrong. No disagreement about his being wrong about postmodernism, but I've never seen him say anything like "humans are naturally getting better over time". The context of his comments that say things are better now than before, is in response to people asking how to do activism when it seems so ineffectual. His point is that activism is very hard and takes very long to work, but it does work.

He also didn't equate wage labor to chattel slavery. He just said the south had a point about the North's poor treatment of workers.

[CaptMang]

I thought Chomsky was saying "insulated" as to say that French intellectuals lack any sort of pragmatism and their philosophies don't have any applicability in the real, modern day world--rather than saying that they weren't considering other non-French texts.

[traposucio]

Thanks for the video. But I can't believe you've gone through doing this critique without even bothering to check out what Anarchism is. Most your arguments are simply ignorant of very basic aspects of Chomsky's thought as a whole so you just don't understand his critique and assume ignorance from any argument of his. And not really. He knows significantly more you, pal. Sorry. Not that I agree with his arguments entirely, tho. There's value to postmodern critical theory. But I agree with him about the Gramscian hegemony in academic social sciences (particularly in the US) and that much of it has become a garbage factory.

[vanfanel]

My fav man taking a jab at Chom-chom, my other fav man.
I totally agree with you here. I have a feeling Chomsky expected a more "praxis-oriented" philosophical engagement from the French philosophers he criticizes. That's probably one of the reason he refuses to engage seriously with their ideas, and brushes them away as "overly complicated gibberish".

Great video as usual 🤘

[ownedinc]

Edward Said interestingly critiqued thought in a manner similar to Chomsky. His "secular criticism" saw the difficult language contained within French intellectual thought as being detached from the world and excluding most of the public from participation is such discourse.

[edwardharvey]

I thought that I would see a video about Chomsky, when in fact I saw a video of a French intellectual apologist. Chomsky’s greater criticism is of social scientists engaging in sophistry. That the language in the literature is tends to use complex terms and concepts in ways that do not always make sense. The main idea behind Chomsky’s criticism is that social scientists are trying to gain the reputation of higher intelligence that is common among physics, engineers, chemists, and the like, but lacking the rigor to do so legitimately. The results from physics are entirely predictive whereas the output from social scientists is rarely repeatable. Thus the narratives from the so-called intellectuals, ie social scientists, can not be trusted. In America we have people like Jordan Peterson, Jonathon Haidt, Steven Pinker, and Dan Ariel, and the like. It seems they tend to say what they believe to be true and not what can be proven. Yet they are paraded around as if they were great thinkers. Thus the crisis of credibility of psychology and other social sciences.

[emileconstance]

Thanks for the thoughtful commentary. I'll just make two brief points. First, Chomsky doesn't say that French postmodernism is incomprehensible and consists merely of truisms dressed up in obscure language. What I believe he says is that it is EITHER one or the other of these two things, so in some instances it is incomprehensible and at other times it consists of truisms that are repackaged in obscurantist language (so not a contradiction as you suggest). Whether Chomsky's assertions re postmodernism are factual is another issue--my sense is that his statements about postmodernism are too broad--so, there is some truth to them, but in many instances French postmodern thought is both comprehensible and original/insightful.

Secondly, there has been significant progress w/ regard to racial and gender equality. In fact, by many metrics, women (in the US) are doing significantly better than men--60% of college graduates are women, while a mere 40% are men. Further, if one looks not merely at the top earners, who are predominantly men, but also takes into consideration those w/ the lowest incomes, the latter are also predominantly men. Men account for the overwhelming majority of suicides, drug overdoses, workplace injuries and deaths, and have shorter life spans than women, etc. So yes, things are vastly superior for women than they were 30 years ago, 100 years ago, and so on. But "wage slavery" still persists, and is a more severe problem than, say, gender inequality. Of course, "wage slavery" is less severe than in the 19th-century, and so there has been some progress--see for example, the end of child labor, the 40-hr work week, labor rights, etc.--but even some of this progress has been turned back (e.g., unions have been weakened over the past four decades, the min. wage has been stagnant at $7.25/hr. going on 13 years, economic inequality has increased, real wages have decreased for the working class over the past few decades, housing is increasingly unaffordable, etc. So the exploitation of the working class persists, and is quite egregious, despite the fact that there have been some occasional (but inadequate) rights extended to workers.

[stueyapstuey]

The notion that French 'post-structuralists' (& structuralists) only left Marxism in the 1970's is laughable. Within the French left, the famous argument between Camus and Sartre had already driven major disagreements due to the prevailing attitudes to Algeria and political expediency. But the move away from Marxism isn't really Chomsky's criticism - it is parroted by Peterson from Stephen Hicks' totally political (and crassly simplified) account.
Chomsky's main criticism is against the linguistic analysis presented in French structuralism and post-structuralism, and its failure to move away from Saussure's very limited account of language and reference (esp. relevant in Derrida). Chomsky's main contention - which to my mind is pretty much irrefutable - is that language isn't merely a social or, ideational phenomena, but a biologically determined one. Derrida's reliance on the phenomenological basis for linguistic knowledge (out of Heidegger and Husserl), and Foucault's insistence that 'a language is necessarily fascistic' foreground power or, philosophical issues in place of the necessary biological or, material grounding for language. Chomsky argued, convincingly, that innateness as a biological necessity for linguistic acquisition was a commonplace in the empirical sciences and that the post-structuralist skepticism of meaning and the referent etc. (or discourse in general) was losing that fundamental basis.
In formal/academic linguistics, Derrida isn't really considered a useful thinker, Foucault not at all and Saussure, while helpful in the designation of various linguistic analytical terms, has only very limited applicability. This is an important issue to consider when the main focus of structuralist and post-structuralist thought was an interrogation of 'the sign' and its relation to the 'referent' (ie its real in the world) and how that structures discursive practices. To be somewhat bluntly rephrase Chomsky - if these guys are going to use a critique of language to formalize their arguments, surely they should understand a lot more of what 'linguistics' has taught about language!

[Kulah-SS]

12:22 What is his definition of power and why does he describe it as something so amorphous?
It seems this concept is absolutist and universal.

[hermitdelirus]

If I recall you briefly mentioned Schopenhauer as one of the influences of post-modern thought. Is this only throught Nietzsche or is there a direct reading of Schopenhauer in post-modern french philosophy too? I know briefly that there is a bit of Schopenhauer on Deleuze and Guatarri's work. That would help me a lot considering I'm working on Schopenhauer and need some homework on post-modern philosophy.

[Jukainari]

There is a Spanish female philosopha who might explain this quite better. Her name is Amelia Valcarcel, her sense of humor and critiques on postmodernism are simple outstanding

[gustavojmata]

In regard to wacky theories, what are your thoughts on a) Lacan's use of mathematical expressions and b) Sokal's "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" article in ‛Social Text’?

[viljamtheninja]

11:26 I think a point is that Foucault's idea isn't to criticize the idea that these ideas "sprout up from nowhere", because noone believes that, it's to criticize the idea that they are eternal truths suddenly found by science; it's to point out that they are culturally contingent.

[jipangoo]

Ask yourself:

What does post-structuralism add in the way of tangible benefits. Does it solve problems in the world????

No.

[gabrielraoust]

Re complicated wording of ”french intellectuals”: it has simply very much to Do with the french language itself and How french and philosophy is thought. French language delights in sounding complicated. It almost ”tastes” like a sophisticated meal. English is very very different.

[maldinialbertini]

You are missing Chomsky’s criticism almost entirely. Chomsky comes from the anarchist tradition that recognized the power principles Foucault was discussing. The radical enlightenment also emerges as another part of the broad agreement that all these thinkers maintain.

[jameshunt]

I haven't finished the video yet, I am about ten minutes in. I have watched Chomsky at length and I don't recall him, ever, making the assertion that postmodernists are saying, that because of power structures, postmodernists believe in some defeatist mantra of there's no point in doing anything(paraphrasing). I think Chomsky's criticism is that it is constuctionist in nature and they think that only power matters and that postmodernism's only purpose is as a tool, which is of no good to anyone except for the intellectuals who use it, to increase their own power through the exact methodology it is an analysis of. Also, I would imagine that Foucault would be, generously, described as a moral relativist given as he did some things that were pretty damn morally relative, I mean the guy in all likelihood knowingly spread HIV and quite possibly did some other questionable stuff too. To be honest I think there's a strong possibility Foucault was a psychopath who largely created a mantra to further his own personal power, but that is my speculation, so take it with a pinch of salt, but it's probably worth some thought.