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Posts tagged theory of change

Nov 13

adorno hated astrology.  I mean, if you’re waiting for adorno to like what you’re doing and see hope in it you’ll be waiting a long time.  I have to say though that he was Not Wrong, at least about astrology in the culture industries.   he attributed its popularity to the fact that “the semi-erudite vaguely wants to understand and is also driven by the narcissistic wish to prove superior to the plain people but he is not in a position to carry through complicated and detached intellectual operations”, which is snotty as fuck and kind of unfair but like, not entirely unfair?  it occupies your mind but doesn’t necessarily challenge it.  to me, reading about astrology does indeed feel really really similar to reading tvtropes or a similar kind of pop culture analysis website, or doing five million “which hunger games character are you?” quizzes*, which lets me feel like an “expert” in something without really ever thinking too hard.  I’m pretty sure doing much of that kind of thing is bad for you. 

Adorno also talks about the reliance of the astrological cold reading on people’s narcissism and consequent ability to make literally anything applicable to ourselves.  ouch.  but I am, actually, repelled by modern Western astrology’s endless categorisation and recategorisation of the self even as I find it seductive, for the same reasons that I find it seductive.  it’s fundamentally individualist, thus useless and deadening, and that’s why it’s so marketable, so consumable, such a narcotic. 

but on the other hand, one of the main reasons a lot of people are mad about astrology is that it’s about how you are irrevocably shaped by the astronomical (historical) conditions in operation at the time of your birth, and that’s really threatening b/c what about free will.  but isn’t the insistence that the individual is shaped by historical forces central to leftist thought? 

and this is all kind of a recent development, astrological predictions used to be less about the individual and more about events, broad historical trends; less about psychology and self-help and more about actual fortune-telling. 

modern Western newspaper horoscopes are focused on your sun sign; the sun rules the individual and the personality, and changes rapidly.  but the outer planets move through the zodiac slowly, with entire generations under the influence of the same position of neptune (which rules fantasy and idealism), pluto (sex, death, and transformation), saturn (work, limits, hardship) and uranus (revolution). 

solar astrology is totally individualist but what would a Uranian or Plutonic astrology look like?  it’d be more structural, surely.  astrological cold readings of a generation’s attitude to sex and death?  sign me up

I mean I agree that astrology often promotes of a sense of powerlessness in the face of an inhuman world, I just think it’s possible to work with that


Nov 9
“The missing link between Scott’s anarchist calisthenics and the day when breaking a big law might matter is the real movement which abolishes the present state of things — about which Two Cheers for Anarchism says nothing. Though it shares a family resemblance with the passive-aggressive rebellion that interests Scott, revolutionary politics requires the drawing of lines of antagonism through the here and now. Not just through the designation of illegitimate authorities, but also the identification of comrades and contestation across the divide. It’s the difference between a politics and an opinion.”

Los Angeles Review of Books - Anarchish: On James C. Scott’s “Two Cheers For Anarchism” (via ahipstory)

fight!  fight!  fight! 

on the one hand, this whole review is devastating and hilarious

on the other hand, malcolm harris has the douchiest bio imaginable

so now I don’t know who to barrack for

(via ahipstory)


Nov 7
this is the first true selfie I took on the webcam on the computer I’m writing on.  I was 21.  extremely asymmetrical haircuts were In.  I thought I should open with some kind of Important Selfie because this is a Notes Toward An Anarchist Theory of the Selfie post. 
I used to be really against putting any photos of myself on my blog.  partly I didn’t want to be seen as vain, or be judged by my appearance, which, can of feminist theory worms, my god.  I think it’s fair to say there’s some internalised misogyny there.  but it’s really a coming-of-age-as-an-anarchist thing.  When I was eighteen I went to my first global summit protest, the g20 in melbourne.  afterwards a lot of my friends were tracked down by their indiscretions and arrested.  it was pretty scary.  security culture became the buzzword du jour.  for quite a while after that I didn’t put my real name on things, I never gave my surname in meetings, I untagged photos of myself on facebook, I changed my phone number every year or so, I took my phone battery out in meetings, I talked in code words, I installed TOR, I put a sticker over my webcam before it could take a photo of me.  weird things that didn’t really take me off-grid (I mean, I still had a facebook account and a mobile phone, you know?).  I stopped doing that partly because I wasn’t willing to commit to the level of paranoia that would make any of the above worthwhile, but mostly because I realised it was causing more problems than it solved.  security culture makes you paranoid and cliquey.  it makes resistance movements faceless, grandiose, intimidating, hard to get involved in.  for someone with my privileges, living in the society I live in, the risks of political action are very rarely so great as to justify these sacrifices.  if I wanted to do something risky that I thought was worth it, I would think protect my anonymity then, sure, definitely.  but as a lifestyle — no.  Safeguarding your anonymity for pragmatic reasons is one thing, and I want to stress that I totally support this and that there are so so many good reasons why you might want to remain anonymous.  But anonymity as interchangeability, as its own virtue, as a liberal universalism even, in slogans like “we are everywhere” and “we are all [victim of brutality]” — that, I find questionable.  We are not all everywhere.  We come from different places.  I lose followers every time I post a picture of myself.  immediately, without fail.  I sometimes gain net followers but I always lose a few people.  I don’t mind, I think it’s fair enough. l don’t think women who look like me (or at least, women who look like the version of myself I choose to highlight) particularly need more visibility, and I totally get it if opinions from or blandly flattering pictures of normatively-feminine cis white women is not something you need more of in your life.  the GPOY has often been theorised on my dashboard as a form of feminist visibility or vulnerability/oversharing (see also karaj on feminist narcissism and rgr-pop on vanity).  Also, elsewhere, as a form of marketing of the self, girls doing the best we can to get social capital in a paradigm that judges on appearance.  That’s not really where I’m coming from.  My position on visibility is about two to four drinks away from “everybody stab out your eyes”; my position on self-disclosure has been described as advocating “the right of women to be like Ron Swanson”, which is not all that far off the mark.  It’s more that I just want to acknowledge my context, especially when I’m talking about feminism and the body.  I particularly don’t want to hide my whiteness.  (obviously whiteness is not just about how you look, but like, appearance is a pretty solid clue here.)  I like to have a face and a name, I like people to know some things about where I’m coming from, I like to attach myself to things I’ve said in the past and acknowledge them even if I’ve changed my mind.  I want to be accountable, and I want the flipside of that, I want a reputation, not necessarily a big reputation, but some credibility.  I want to be someone you can have a history with, build a relationship with.  I want roots.   none of this has to attach to my legal identity or even a friendship with me, my identities don’t have to cohere.  but a reputation does need something somewhere to attach to.  I follow almost eight hundred people and I have a clear idea of the personality and interests and history of only a few of them.  they’re predominantly people who’ve posted pictures of themselves.  it just makes them so much easier to remember.  you’ll note also that I’ve never changed my tumblr url.  I’ve never changed my name, either.  while there are a lot of great reasons to change your name and I wouldn’t presume to know the factors going into any individual’s choice in the matter, a lot of people I’ve known change their name so regularly or go by so many names that it feels like shedding history.  hunter made me notice that this one scumbag guy we know changes his name every time he burns bridges with another group of friends.  lorena has a really hard time taking it seriously when a white cis person changes their name to something more ~interesting~ sounding, it even makes her kind of mad, like, cool, you get to choose to be weird and exotic. I think a name is like a place.  there are a lot of potentially good reasons to move town.  plus nomadic cultures are a thing, of course, and some people have roots within them. but I’m uncomfortable with the whole anarchist traveller thing, because politically speaking, I’m in favour of roots, history, relationships, accountability. 
how many times have women in anarchism complained about abusive guys just going travelling as soon as they get confronted?  and I’ve talked a lot about how living my home town is really important to me in maintaining a sense of groundedness and connection to people who don’t share every facet of my politics, not disappearing down a countercultural rabbit hole. isn’t that supposed to be the point of anarchism or any other politics of decentralisation?  increasing the weight of human relationships, therefore the power of the community and of social pressure, therefore making hierarchical bureacracies unnecessary.  if those aren’t your politics that’s one thing, but if you do want to remove the state and also want to remove social pressure then aren’t you just kind of a brat?  absolutely none of this is prescriptive.  I’m just tired of safeguarding my own anonymity.  that’s my face.  you’ve seen it before.  my name is liz, if you didn’t know.  it’s not an uncommon name.  it’s not a remarkable face.  it doesn’t matter.  it’s a history and a geography. 

this is the first true selfie I took on the webcam on the computer I’m writing on.  I was 21.  extremely asymmetrical haircuts were In.  I thought I should open with some kind of Important Selfie because this is a Notes Toward An Anarchist Theory of the Selfie post. 

I used to be really against putting any photos of myself on my blog.  partly I didn’t want to be seen as vain, or be judged by my appearance, which, can of feminist theory worms, my god.  I think it’s fair to say there’s some internalised misogyny there.  but it’s really a coming-of-age-as-an-anarchist thing.  When I was eighteen I went to my first global summit protest, the g20 in melbourne.  afterwards a lot of my friends were tracked down by their indiscretions and arrested.  it was pretty scary.  security culture became the buzzword du jour.  for quite a while after that I didn’t put my real name on things, I never gave my surname in meetings, I untagged photos of myself on facebook, I changed my phone number every year or so, I took my phone battery out in meetings, I talked in code words, I installed TOR, I put a sticker over my webcam before it could take a photo of me.  weird things that didn’t really take me off-grid (I mean, I still had a facebook account and a mobile phone, you know?). 

I stopped doing that partly because I wasn’t willing to commit to the level of paranoia that would make any of the above worthwhile, but mostly because I realised it was causing more problems than it solved.  security culture makes you paranoid and cliquey.  it makes resistance movements faceless, grandiose, intimidating, hard to get involved in.  for someone with my privileges, living in the society I live in, the risks of political action are very rarely so great as to justify these sacrifices.  if I wanted to do something risky that I thought was worth it, I would think protect my anonymity then, sure, definitely.  but as a lifestyle — no. 

Safeguarding your anonymity for pragmatic reasons is one thing, and I want to stress that I totally support this and that there are so so many good reasons why you might want to remain anonymous.  But anonymity as interchangeability, as its own virtue, as a liberal universalism even, in slogans like “we are everywhere” and “we are all [victim of brutality]” — that, I find questionable.  We are not all everywhere.  We come from different places. 

I lose followers every time I post a picture of myself.  immediately, without fail.  I sometimes gain net followers but I always lose a few people.  I don’t mind, I think it’s fair enough. l don’t think women who look like me (or at least, women who look like the version of myself I choose to highlight) particularly need more visibility, and I totally get it if opinions from or blandly flattering pictures of normatively-feminine cis white women is not something you need more of in your life. 

the GPOY has often been theorised on my dashboard as a form of feminist visibility or vulnerability/oversharing (see also karaj on feminist narcissism and rgr-pop on vanity).  Also, elsewhere, as a form of marketing of the self, girls doing the best we can to get social capital in a paradigm that judges on appearance.  That’s not really where I’m coming from.  My position on visibility is about two to four drinks away from “everybody stab out your eyes”; my position on self-disclosure has been described as advocating “the right of women to be like Ron Swanson”, which is not all that far off the mark.  It’s more that I just want to acknowledge my context, especially when I’m talking about feminism and the body.  I particularly don’t want to hide my whiteness.  (obviously whiteness is not just about how you look, but like, appearance is a pretty solid clue here.) 

I like to have a face and a name, I like people to know some things about where I’m coming from, I like to attach myself to things I’ve said in the past and acknowledge them even if I’ve changed my mind.  I want to be accountable, and I want the flipside of that, I want a reputation, not necessarily a big reputation, but some credibility.  I want to be someone you can have a history with, build a relationship with.  I want roots.   none of this has to attach to my legal identity or even a friendship with me, my identities don’t have to cohere.  but a reputation does need something somewhere to attach to.  I follow almost eight hundred people and I have a clear idea of the personality and interests and history of only a few of them.  they’re predominantly people who’ve posted pictures of themselves.  it just makes them so much easier to remember. 

you’ll note also that I’ve never changed my tumblr url.  I’ve never changed my name, either.  while there are a lot of great reasons to change your name and I wouldn’t presume to know the factors going into any individual’s choice in the matter, a lot of people I’ve known change their name so regularly or go by so many names that it feels like shedding history.  hunter made me notice that this one scumbag guy we know changes his name every time he burns bridges with another group of friends.  lorena has a really hard time taking it seriously when a white cis person changes their name to something more ~interesting~ sounding, it even makes her kind of mad, like, cool, you get to choose to be weird and exotic. I think a name is like a place.  there are a lot of potentially good reasons to move town.  plus nomadic cultures are a thing, of course, and some people have roots within them. but I’m uncomfortable with the whole anarchist traveller thing, because politically speaking, I’m in favour of roots, history, relationships, accountability. 

how many times have women in anarchism complained about abusive guys just going travelling as soon as they get confronted?  and I’ve talked a lot about how living my home town is really important to me in maintaining a sense of groundedness and connection to people who don’t share every facet of my politics, not disappearing down a countercultural rabbit hole. isn’t that supposed to be the point of anarchism or any other politics of decentralisation?  increasing the weight of human relationships, therefore the power of the community and of social pressure, therefore making hierarchical bureacracies unnecessary.  if those aren’t your politics that’s one thing, but if you do want to remove the state and also want to remove social pressure then aren’t you just kind of a brat? 

absolutely none of this is prescriptive.  I’m just tired of safeguarding my own anonymity.  that’s my face.  you’ve seen it before.  my name is liz, if you didn’t know.  it’s not an uncommon name.  it’s not a remarkable face.  it doesn’t matter.  it’s a history and a geography. 


Oct 24

Anonymous asked: What are peoples reactions to being door knocked by that party? Are they generally open to talking about it?

yeah, they are actually.  it’s a progressive area and the particular party in question has a decent reputation.  if people aren’t interested I don’t push it — that’s not just aggressive and creepy, it’s also bad strategy, so it’s not like there’s a conflict there.  I only actually doorknocked one street or so, most of the time I put in was leafleting.  but it was a pretty positive experience, it’s reminded me that doorknocking is actually a really important thing to do in any political campaign, especially one that’s grounded in a particular geographic area.  it’s one of those basic, tedious, unglamourous, foundational things that gets obscured by locking yourself to the Prime Minister and dramatic shit like that. 


Oct 20

incommensurati:

breaking silence to rant. i am coming around to a position which is entirely critical of american studies, the north american academy entirely, for its real and absolutely unapologetic ignorance of transnationality except as its relates to current or past U.S. colonies. i wish this was something i could see as my own projection (because i began to think it when i noticed that my work isn’t solicited for many conference panels/talks/books in a north american context, aside from the people who know me well). but it’s not. i had this relevatory conversation with a thai anthropologist on saturday night at whateverjeanne’s housewarming. “the US is a trap,” he said. “no-one is really interested in south east asia. they’re all just interested in themselves. we have to make sure we get out.” he’s so right, and it’s stupid. it explains how isolated i feel academically, constant fomo or anxiety about not working hard enough, networking hard enough. it’s been hard relocating here; it’s hard when i realize that almost all of my peers went to grad school together or were in act-up together in the mid 90s or went to x college together or something. 

today i read lies journal on the train and thought about the heteronormativity of “against the couple form” and how feminist materialist communism is also a train of thought i am thinking, thinking up against, thinking alongside. and i missed the women and performance dinner because e. was sick and various other catastrophes, and have been so busy catching up with work that i didn’t un-rsvp. life: making me look like a flake since 1975.  

this is a bit of a tangent but something related I have been thinking about is how much I don’t like anarchist localism, especially coming from people from the US.  it has been really frustrating to see US-based radicals dismissing campaigns focused on people outside the US as a distraction from the issues at home.  The most recent example of this I can think of is critiques of the media presence of Pussy Riot.  do you have any idea how incredibly hard it is to get international attention to things not in the US?  Sometimes it’s not necessary to get Yanks on board, sometimes it’s more important that the people who pay attention really understand the context.  But Pussy Riot worked very hard and very cannily to get international attention, to shame Putin, it was part of their strategy, they need it.  They absolutely got more attention because they are slim young white pretty cis women and that is fucked-up.  But literally nobody on my dash who has critiqued that dynamic and added that Pussy Riot was a distraction from the issues “here” (always understood to be the US) ever ever reblogs stuff about people asking for help or political solidarity outside the US even if they aren’t white, cis, riot grrrl, etc. 

like, I’m obvs not saying that reblogging is the be all and end all of political support.  I’m also not saying “US Privilege” is a thing, that is a way of thinking about this dynamic that I’ve seen thrown around and it’s stupid.  but a lot of you in the US are super, super insular and that is affecting our chances of forming meaningful solidarity with one another.   A belief in change from below or decentralisation is not the same thing as this neo-isolationism. 


Oct 16

53. So it is not that such speech acts say ‘we are anti-racists’ (and saying makes us so); rather they say ‘we are this’, whilst racism is ‘that’, so in being ‘this’ we are not ‘that’, where ‘that’ would be racist. So in saying we are raced as whites, then we are not racists, as racism operates through the unmarked nature of whiteness; or in saying we are racists, then we are not racists, as racists don’t know they are racists; or in expressing shame about racism, then we are not racists, as racists are shameless; or in saying we are positive about our racial identity, as an identity that is positive insofar as it involves a commitment to anti-racism, then we are not racists, as racists are unhappy, or in being self-critical about racism, then we are not racists, as racists are ignorant; or in saying we exist alongside others, then we are not racists, as racists see themselves as above others, and so on.



54. These statements function as claims to performativity rather than as performatives, whereby the declaration of whiteness is assumed to put in place the conditions in which racism can be transcended, or at the very least reduced in its power. Any presumption that such statements are forms of political action would be an overestimation of the power of saying, and even a performance of the very privilege that such statements claim they undo. The declarative mode, as a way of doing something, involves a fantasy of transcendence in which ‘what’ is transcended is the very thing ‘admitted to’ in the declaration: so, to put it simply, if we admit to being bad, then we show that we are good… So it is in this specific sense that I have argued that anti-racism is not performative. Or we could even say that anti-racist speech in a racist world is an ‘unhappy performative’: the conditions are not in place that would allow such ‘saying’ to ‘do’ what it ‘says’.

Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism, Sara Ahmed

(via moniquemallo)


Oct 9

The use of the blac bloc tactic in all situations is not useful. As a matter of fact, in situations such as the one we have in Oakland, its repeated use has become counter-revolutionary.

Yesterday in Oakland was a good illustration of this, in which the blac bloc kids- besides busting up bank windows- also busted windows of parked cars and threw stuff at another car- to which the Black driver of said vehicle got out looking to fight the crowd.

Similarly, the crowd of folks at Somar were there for the end of Matthew Africa’s memorial- DJs and artists, and generally a group of folks who collectively probably know everybody in Oakland- I’m not exactly sure what or if anything happened before I saw the scene, but folks poured out of the club en masse to protect it, yelling at the march and telling folks to go home.

If “the job of the revolutionary is to make the revolution seem irresistible”, the use of blac bloc has been making a revolutionary movement pretty damn resistible in Oakland, CA.

When almost every conversation I have with folks from Oakland about Occupy Oakland, has the smashing of windows brought up as a reason people don’t like that grouping, scientifically it means the tactic is not working. It doesn’t matter that technically it’s only smashing corporate windows. It matters that people don’t want to join because of that. It’s not about violence/non-violence. The truth is that it’s not always corporate windows. I’m for certain tactics that would be classified as violent- even ones that have to do with fighting human beings. But what it’s about is a tactic that is detrimental in this situation. I would like to win, thank you. Not just lose with style. A style that the people around you don’t understand.

Many folks bring up Greece when debating these things. I’ve been to Athens. What I witnessed there was that the movement was tied in with the people. Most of those involved grew up in Athens, they also are part of militant campaigns that happen throughout the year, which the people support, moreover, they just know the people of the city of Athens. And, perhaps due to this situation, there are way more of them.

It’s not due to lack of outreach that Saturday’s “West Coast Anti-Capitalist March”- meaning, one that not only reached out to the whole west coast- was only able to draw 150-300 people. It’s because it’s not what the people care about- not framed in that way- and because others are either bored with the tactic or scared of being arrested because some kid breaks the window of some used car that probably costs less than their own Honda Civic. But, that was in SF. Most of the folks doing this don’t know anyone from Oakland, and- I believe- don’t plan on doing any sort of base building to find out where the pulse of the people actually are.

If you ask most people in East or West Oakland what their problems are- they’ll say being broke is there number one problem. Campaigns that use militant mass movement tactics to achieve changes in that situation are ones that have a revolutionary potential.

I’ve talked to many a person in Occupy Oakland and even in some anarchist collectives who agree with me on this, but the idea is that to criticize this publicly is to make the movement look divided. But, the public non-critique of this has the effect of making the movement look monolithic, hegemonic and uninviting. Instead, people talk shit about each other behind their backs, split and divide into smaller and smaller affinity groups. All the while, not critiquing the counter-revolutionary bullshit that’s making them irrelevant in the minds of the people they ostensibly want to organize.

Let’s get this shit right and win.

Boots Riley

This is the sort of thing I really want to incorporate into my sociology honours presentation regarding the ways in which white voices often overshadow those of POCs within social justice communities. The problem is finding scholarly sources for these discussions, which I think just brings my entire analysis full circle when we’re talking about whose voices are heard within academia and who gets published… I mean I guess that’s something I can argue within the presentation…

(via elchesay)

(via ayiman)


Oct 4

or: nobody likes a nineteen-year-old who keeps talking about the volunteer work they did in their gap year

I came to the conclusion that most people in America would really like to be able to get a job where they think they’re doing something noble and nice and good and it isn’t just for the money. But the reason they hate what they call the cultural elite is that they see it as a class that’s grabbed all the jobs where you can get paid to do something that isn’t just for the money—if it’s art, if it’s charity, if it’s intellectual, if it’s political, whatever it might be. Because those are all the things where, if you want to get a job in that area, they won’t pay you for the first year or two, because there are all those unpaid internships. They see these people who grab all the jobs where you get to be good and noble. And we don’t get to do that. If your father is an air-conditioner repairman from Nebraska, it’s conceivable that you might become a CEO, but you can’t imagine being the drama critic for the New York Times. So if you come from a background like that and you want to actually have a career which involves doing something noble in the world, what can you do? You can join the army. That’s about it. Or you can work for the church. That explains a lot of the focus of right-wing populism. The right wing figured that out, that people want enough to survive and to do good.

David Graeber, Beholden 

(via foxlot)


Oct 1

Lee proposes visibility from synchronised swimming to ‘eating ice-creams in public’ as a way forward for fat people to counter prejudice. I have argued previously (‘Permanent Daylight’, Overland 200) that visibility is not a political solution, particularly for feminists. Women – fat and thin – live with a particular kind of watchfulness, a sense of always being on display: the word ‘surveillance’ hints at the feeling but is better applied elsewhere.

Perhaps we lack a word subtle enough for the condition that I described in that essay as ‘a deep and systemic psychic distress … of perpetual visibility’. If visibility is a condition of women’s oppression, then why should we keep demanding to be seen? If all the billboards across the world were replaced overnight, and fat women took the place of bone-thin models advertising underwear and perfume, would this constitute victory? I wouldn’t think so: I’m still being sold stuff, and someone else – another woman – is still being objectified for the purpose of selling it to me. To demand visibility is to submit to capitalism’s strictures: to accept that being an image is more important than being a subject; to accept representation in place of participation.

Moreover, the rhetoric of visibility can be, and is, used by rulers against the ruled: to be visible is, on some level, to accede to the anti-terrorist logic that one has ‘nothing to hide’. I am much more interested in how radicals across the world – whatever their bodies – can work together at escaping these intertwined visibilities: the image-logic of capitalism, the coercive gaze of the state.

Anwyn Crawford, “Fat, privilege and resistance: A response to Jennifer Lee”, in Overland.

I am the first to complain about the pressure on women to be thin, especially in countercultural spaces, but Anwyn Crawford is killing it in this response. 


Sep 30

anyway, Chomsky

I rag on Chomsky’s vacuous and unoriginal political thought all the time.  He is just, like, the most boring guy in the world, and I’m bummed that he’s the Anarchist Public Intellectual most people know.  But Chomsky is not, by training, a social theorist or political scientist.  This is fine, of course, we would be in a pretty state if only tenured Social Theory professors were allowed to think about politics. 

but it does explain a lot.  

By training, Chomsky is a linguist.  He’s most famous in linguistics for advancing the idea that language is an inherent human trait, an idea derived from his assertion that all languages share an underlying biologically determined “deep grammar”. You can see traces of this kind of thinking in his insistence that all humanity needs is to be released from coercive governmental institutions, which will free our essential human nature.  (see, of course, his debate with Foucault on human nature.)

I’ve always thought this was kind of silly, but I never realised how specific his ideas are, how Eurocentric, how thoroughly they’ve been debunked, and how much certain interests were invested in them.  the other day linguistics student Pete was telling me about it, here’s the score:

- Chomsky believes that all languages operate according to the same (biologically determined) principles, and all that changes is the parameters that are applied.  He points to certain “universal” rules; for example, that every sentence must have a subject, and that every language must have some structure that allows a sentence to infinitely nest clauses (e.g. “The cat on the mat on the hearth on the foundations of the house on the hill on the…”)  read more about this. (link opens a pdf.)

- Student of Australian Indigenous languages Nicholas Evans points out that a lot of these supposedly universal rules do not apply to languages he has studied. He suggests that Chomsky’s thesis derives from Eurocentrism.  In other words, there is no “universal grammar”, just a whole bunch of related languages.  (preview Evans’ article/download pdf)

- Evans gets a whole bunch of hate mail from people who are really invested in Chomsky’s assertion that there exists such a thing as an inherent human nature that we can make claims about.  A lot of them are super-Christian, apparently. 

- Chomsky responds late, half-heartedly, and half-assedly; Evans’ work continues to be little known outside the field of linguistics.

- Meanwhile, Chomsky’s work on “universal” linguistics has led to a climate in the academy where a student of any language can be assumed, by extension, to be writing on all languages.  It becomes possible to become an authority in linguistics without doing any comparative study of languages, while knowing only English.  In the US in particular, this leads to a de-emphasis on the study of previously understudied languages, because what can they tell you that you can’t learn from any language, if there’s a universal grammar?  it becomes difficult/impossible to get a higher degree in linguistics without making a contribution to some overarching body of theory.  what this means is that basic descriptivist work of understanding less widely spoken languages is neglected, because you can’t just construct a grammar and a lexicon without using them as the basis for making claims about something “larger”.   This has serious consequences for the study and preservation of threatened languages. 

Chomsky is pretty happy to create a climate in linguistics that actively works against much-needed, quantitatively measurable, traditional linguistic work.  Yet when he’s talking politics, he continues to sound off about the depredations of post-modernism and its supposed flight from reality, real issues, real numbers, real facts.  The common thread here, I think, is that he doesn’t like difficult things. 


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