Brahmsky vs Chomsky
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Transcript of Brahmsky vs Chomsky
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Understanding Noam Chomsky: AReconsideration
Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr.
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.*George
Orwell
Twenty years ago, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman proposed what they called
a propaganda model for how the U.S. corporate media operates (Chomsky &
Herman 1988). In a striking appropriation of the term, propaganda, wrenched
from its dominant Cold War usage*in which it was applied most often to direct
state control and conscious manipulation of misinformation under totalitarian or
authoritarian regimes*the authors demonstrated that, in a way, liberal democracies
are not so different. Under capitalism, corporate censorship also operates, perhaps
less obviously, directly, or consciously, but just as systematically, skewing perceptions
of the news, they said. The media in so-called free societies also sell a reduced,
distorted picture of the world to consumers.Two decades later, Chomsky continues to work from this same basic premise,
apparently indifferent to the emergence of the field of Cultural Studies and its range
of options for understanding media (something Marshall McLuhan had urged us to
do long before [1964]). Though the endemic anti-communism that he and
Herman once found at work in the press in abundance*editing peoples perceptions
of anything remotely having to do with this alternative system of government and
economy throughout the 1970s and 1980s*admittedly plays less of a shaping role
today, the rest of their approach has not discernibly altered in response to new
research methods or events.
Exemplifies a Dangerous Trend
What accounts for Chomskys remarkable consistency and uniqueness, in the rapidly
evolving and diversified field of politics and culture since the end of the Cold War? I
believe the stringency of his political opinions (though, as a scientist, he would call
them more than mere opinions) can be linked to the astringent quality of the
Gabriel Noah Brahm is based at the University of California Santa Cruz. The author wishes to thank Forrest G.
Robinson for conversations about this essay and Gregory J. Lobo for his critique, and Zehra Altayli, D. P. Turner,David Watson, C. P., and Linda, for their encouragement. Correspondence to: Gabriel Noah Brahm, Humanities
1, Suite 503, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA. Email: [email protected]
ISSN 0739-3180 (print)/ISSN 1479-5809 (online) # 2006 National Communication Association
DOI: 10.1080/07393180601046279
Critical Studies in Media Communication
Vol. 23, No. 5, December 2006, pp. 453461
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propaganda theory itself, and an obsession with self-interpreting facts*all of this
governed by an uptight psychology that is far from irrelevant, one which both
Geoffrey Galt Harpham (1999) and Larrisa MacFarquhar (2003) have characterized
as narcissistic and authoritarian.1
After a brief review of some competing models of media, I will extend thesepsycho-biographically inflected analyses in a speculative direction*not to prove
anything about the real life of an icon, but in order to interpret Chomskys strikingly
rigid public behavior patterns as symptomatic of a moralizing and antipolitical
approach to the very idea of politics itself. For if politics is understood as a terrain of
uncertainty, disagreement, contestation and conciliation over both facts and values,
information and interpretation, decision and judgment, a field of agonistic
competition that no one can fully master either in practice or theory (Crick, 1962;
Mouffe, 1994; Wolin, 1960/2004), then Chomskys mono-perspectival rationalism is
yet another in a long series of totalizing dreams of escape from politics intosomething more like technoscience, typical of the history of Western thought and its
will to power since the metaphysics of Plato and embodied also in Descartes
(Arendt 1958).
My contention is that Chomsky exemplifies a dangerous trend for the Left because
moralism, as Wendy Brown has recently pointed out (2006), and as Machiavelli wrote
long ago, tends to be not only ugly, but also self-defeating. As Nietzsche
demonstrated, it tempts the moralizer to become invested in their own powerlessness
as source and proof of (self-)righteousness, while tending to disown action itself as
immoral*
because unintended consequences and dirty hands rarely exemptanyone. My analysis, therefore, while focusing on a single representative figure of
the Left, is meant to have wider implications for the culture of impotent blame and
resentment that has replaced our politics. Again, by politics and (the) political, I
mean the open bidding for power over contestable claims without guarantees*
metaphysical, religious, scientific, or even moral. By moralism, I mean, of course,
not the exercise of ethical judgment per se, as part of such contestation (something
we could frequently use more of) but the simplistic reduction of nearly every aspect
of public life*the shaping of collective power, conflict over competing interests and
struggle for influence, differences of opinion and interpretation*
to the logic ofprivate reproach grounded in ostensibly unassailable standards.
Chomskys constant resort to what he calls truisms*self-interpreting facts that
imply self-evident values*is fundamentally at odds with the sort of contestation and
free decision I am talking about. While his blunt appeal to bedrock Cartesian
rationality appears to offer ammunition to progressive forces, he actually leaves us ill-
equipped for the more nuanced and risky tasks of partial discernment and impure
negotiation that politics always requires. Reconsidering Chomsky, in other words,
means in a way reconsidering much of the history of what we mean by media and its
representations, politics and democracy, ever since Plato promised to bring us out of
the cave.
454 G. N. Brahm Jr.
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Beliefs Passionate*
and Puritanical
The word propaganda itself is already a clue; tending as it does to imply a neat and
clear, if temporarily obfuscated, distinction between fact and fiction, true and false
information. Propaganda exists of course*
for there are sometimes cases when onewill feel for good reason that this is the correct term, and the right kind of distinction
to make. But it is a choice to make; and therefore wrong to say it can always be the
model for critical studies in media communication. Yet this one overriding
conceptual framework undoubtedly dominates Chomskys attitude to everything.
The relevant facts are missing, and when we supply*or he supplies*these to
enough people, then propaganda will be defeated and the corporations and the state
along with it. Politics is sublimated into epistemology, we might say. Information, in
other words, cures the corruption which lack of it creates*all by itself. The big
business media, with its stranglehold on the means of production, filters or limits
what we see and hear. The antidote is to witness all the bad things America does that
we are not told about (supporting dictators, ignoring genocide, etc.), and behold all
the good ways that things could be which are never proposed (from universal health
care as an approach to medicine, all the way up to anarcho-syndicalism as a form of
government and economy). To know the bad is to do the good.
In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman explain that five filters in
particular strain out the pulp from all the news that fits: Ownership, Advertising,
Sourcing, Flak, and Anti-Communism. Owners refuse to print or broadcast ideas
they do not like. Advertisers will not fund them anyway. Only some people (like
politicians and business leaders) are given the microphone, they also are the ones who
can afford PR agents, and journalists select experts to express tolerable opinions
only. Flak or negative feedback is scary mainly when it comes with the threat of never-
ending law-suits (and guess who can afford to pay the lawyers). Perhaps today one
might substitute Anti-Terrorism for Anti-Communism, but the point is basically
the same: Whatever they do is bad, so what we do is good by definition. We are said
to be blinded by this opposition, and unable to think rationally because of it.
There is something solitary and pure about this simple set of beliefs; something
sainted about this passionate faith in knowledges trump-card status and Correct
Informations ability to save us*
and something astringent and puritanical. Bycontrast, trends in Cultural Studies have emphasized messiness, desire, and
complicity*the role of fantasy, along with interpretation and the constructedness
of facts as these come to us always embedded with power, overdetermining our beliefs
in complicated ways.
Other Models Unconsidered
In keeping with these insights: Ideology, Discourse, and Simulation offer three more
important models to consider, although I am unaware of Chomskys ever havingconsidered them in any serious way.
Critical Forum: Chomsky 455
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As Roland Barthes (1972, pp. 912) brilliant, sparkling, and influential treatise,
Mythologies, shows in impressive detail, media operate on at least several levels, and
not only one: cognition. To start, not only denotation but connotation as well is
worthy of analysis. Signs represent not just facts (excluded or otherwise), but
meanings too. Tracking down what Barthes calls the History (class struggle,primarily) in our Nature (the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying),
he offers a semioclasm to pulverize the false-obviousness of the myths of consumer
culture.
In doing so, Barthes (1972, p. 12) continually reminds us of our own implication
in these myths, as he chooses to call them (keeping in mind that myths are not merely
lies or propaganda, but systems of belief), by virtue of our desire. Thus, instead
of claiming to be outside the diverse phenomena*from news to ads to films,
etc.*which he analyzes as ideology, Barthes openly declares his implication in the
field he reflects on and transforms. Instead of claiming the scientists right tounsullied objectivity, yet without surrendering to classification as a mere literary
artist, Barthes proposes a serious study of media that claim[s] to live to the full the
contradictions of [our] time. The desiring subject of Ideology, Barthes shows, is
complicit through bad faith in the myths that at once distort its perceptions and
sustain its identity*as later authors, from Althusser to Zizek, will elaborate.
Another nuanced Ideology approach came from Herbert Marcuse (1964), who
suggested that media not only filter information (as Chomsky shows) but create
false needs or legends of what is necessary to happiness. Subjects convinced on
some level that they need certain things to be fulfilled are not only passively deceived
by a lack of accurate information, but trained to become actively self-deceiving by asurplus of affect attached to certain notions/interpretations of what it means to be
human. In sum, the Ideology model explains why consumers of media are not only
kept from knowing about certain things, but have themselves a need not to know,
which they (we!) continually (self-)service.
Edward Said (1981, p. 139), in Covering Islam , used Michel Foucaults ideas of
power-knowledge and discourse, to deploy what we might call a Discourse model
of how media works to construct otherness. Instead of filtering or restricting
information, useful data about subordinated groups proliferates through institutions
designed for it, serving the colonizers wish to observe the other in painstaking detailand extend his control in the process. Humanistic knowledge and understanding all
have to be produced*through disciplines creating authorized knowers, conference
panels gathered into anthologies, proliferating sociological and anthropological
studies, etc. The news, therefore, never simply draws on or fails to draw on (filters)
the truth about Islam, for example. Western news agencies report not on what the
Muslim other simply is, but what they are made to be by discourse that emerges out
of profoundly inegalitarian contacts and histories. Besides, as Said puts it:
how does one interpret another culture unless prior circumstances have made thatculture available for interpretation in the first place? And these circumstances, sofar as the European interest in alien cultures is concerned, have always beencommercial, colonial, or military expansion, conquest, empire.
456 G. N. Brahm Jr.
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Once the productive role of power in the construction of facts and the active role of
desire in the reception of representations have been acknowledged, what more can
there be left to say? Jean Baudrillard is (in)famous for his Simulation model of the
hyperreality that postmodern mass media gives us. Extending some of McLuhans
(1964) insights about media as a total environment, in which to alter one of oursenses is to alter the ratio of all the others, Baudrillard heckles our prepostmodern
nostalgia for a reality that is not already in some sense a copy of a copy or
produced by a code. If Said has taken us into the terrors of the intersubjective
colonial encounter, where power-knowledge produces self-and-other in Fanonian
struggle, Baudrillard takes us into the universe of the Matrix*where there are no
others left anymore, but only the self in its cocoon of virtual reality and simulated
exoticism.
Simulations, Baudrillard shows, have a life of their own. Past a certain point,
discourse is no longer safely assumed to be discourse about anything but itself. Self-perpetuating. Sublime. Far from filters, the contemporary media operate*if a
metaphor is needed*by means of scanners, projectors, nanobots, all bombarding
and invading the subject with a surfeit of hi-tech sensory s(t)imulation. Much of what
passes for information, Baudrillards provocative musings suggest, comes neither
filtered nor even distorted from outside the communications system, but is
immanent and internal to it all along.
So why, then, with all this Nietzschean-, Heideggerian-, Hegelian-, Marxian-, and
Freudian-inspired ferment, has Chomsky remained so aloof, and resolutely
Platonico-Cartesian in his understanding of media and politics? I suspect the imageof Descartes alone in his room staring at the stove, proving through rational analysis,
synthesis, and deduction, based on clear and distinct conceptions alone, captures
something of the position of a man like Chomsky. As does the plight of Socrates,
surrounded by imbeciles who never quite get what he is saying.
What Planet Are You From?
Look at another of Chomskys favorite metaphors: He is always asking how a
reporter from Mars would see a given situation. It is his way of saying: Step back
and be objective. But this is certainly the wrong image for politics. We are not from
Mars. Immanuel Wallerstein, for example (hardly a dupe of American propaganda,
discourse, ideology, or simulation), writes that after 9/11, he realized he had an
ethical responsibility to acknowledge that he sees the United States from the inside.
Donna Haraway (1991) has brought our attention to what she calls situated
knowledges, particularly in regards to gender (Chomsky is from Mars, Haraway is
from Venus?). For both ethical and epistemological reasons, writers from Camus to
Michael Walzer have advocated a careful balance between critical connection and
critical distance (Walzer 2002), and agonized over getting that balance right. In
short, the view from nowhere is exactly the wrong metaphor for how we arrive atpolitical judgments.
Critical Forum: Chomsky 457
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So, then, what planet is Chomsky really from? Where is Noams gnosis at, and what
is his perspective? There is a telling scene in the popular documentary film,
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. David Barsamian, in one of
his countless interviews with the guru, asks the star of the show to recount the story
of Young Noam and the School Yard. Feigning reticence, but clearly happy enoughto oblige, a more mature Noam allows himself to be tugged reluctantly down
memory lane. It was important to me, but I dont know why it should be of any
significance to anyone else, he says, ducking his head and scratching his neck
bashfully, as if confused why anyone would take an interest in Lil Ol Me. This shy
pose is somewhat belied by another scene in the film, however, where Chomsky is
shown modestly joking with an audience about a publishers blurb that calls him
the most important intellectual alive. Indeed, why should anyone be curious about
the life of such a person? Chomsky, the 167-minute film bearing his name in the title
warns us, is against the idea of personalities whose personal lives are supposed tohave some significance.
Well, you drew certain conclusions from the experience, Barsamian nudges, a
therapist seducing his client along with the films audience. And so his interlocutor
opens up, going on to recount for us what he refers to, again, self-deprecatingly, as a
typical story about a standard fat kid. The older kids were picking on the boy. I
remember thinking, somebody ought to do something, Chomsky says; and he stands
at the weaker childs side, until I got scared. As he walks away, he feels shame, for he
has deserted the powerless and vulnerable and outnumbered and totally innocent
youth* leaving him to his cruel (if standard) fate. I thought, Im not going to do
that again, the adult Chomsky teaches. Should have stayed, the shame remains.If these cliched memories seem a bit contrived and self-conscious (not to mention
weirdly emotionless) in someone over 60 at the time of the telling, colored and even
overdetermined by subsequent investments, they are not unbelievable. What is
standard is by definition within the range of the plausible. The only thing not so
normal is floating them as a symbol for a mature persons political commitment.
While the ostensible lesson is one we can all relate to, the effect as a symbol for
politics is more ambiguous. Who is the innocent victim and who the gratuitously
cruel bully in international conflicts, for example, is often less obvious than in
childhood memories of good and evil.Yet the point, as Barsamian rightly suggests, is that conclusions were drawn.
Then? When? That same afternoon? Or a little later, maybe? If this is Chomskys real
idea of propaganda, it is a bit primitive. They are conclusions, anyway, which the
viewer is invited and expected and, oh so gently, encouraged to share*to accept as
truisms. This is one of Chomskys favorite words, for it means no arguing, no
discussion, no debate. His favorite kinds are truisms like this one, about power and
powerlessness, and always supporting the perceived victim. You oughta stick with
the underdog, he explicates the punch line, in his trademark deadpan style.
The serious point, however, is that young Chomsky, a decent lad, identifies with
the wounded Fat Kid, just as he will soon, according to the same films narrative,come also to identify, at a young age, with the principles of anarchism*encircled on
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the even harsher playground of the Spanish Civil War. This time, our hero witnesses
the whole world walk away, and a pure and innocent political form*anarchy*is
crushed, as the world averts its gaze. As Harpham (1999) also observes, this seems to
have had a lasting impact.
Chomskys self-righteous accusations, hurled endlessly at the American govern-ment and the corporate media*always the same targets, always the same litany*
suggests the cynical mind of one trapped at that stage. His story is that of an
intellectually precocious youth, hence vulnerable to being deeply disappointed by the
discovery, at an early age, that life can be cruel, and there can be no one to help you
when you need it most. Politics is as simple as that: Lord of the Flies stuff. Denounce
the dictator, protect Piggy from the wild boys.
Questioning Truisms
For the Propaganda theory and its four or five filters, it is all as simple as
announcing the plain facts. The kid was beaten! Nobody cared! Which means that
political matters, for the one who sees hidden injustices everywhere, can always be
reduced to matters of knowledge. Judgment and action are as simple as applying a
couple of (literally two) truisms, stated in Hegemony or Survival (Chomsky, 2005).
What are these elementary truths? (1) Universality and (2) Consequences. Though
these are truisms, they can be examined. Do they bear scrutiny?
What Chomsky means by Universality is that we should apply the same rules to
ourselves as to others. Be consistent from case to case. The U.S. did not bomb East
Timor, but it (belatedly) reacted to MiloSevics Serbia when it was slaughteringMuslims (again) in 1999. What he means by Consequences is: You are responsible for
the predictable consequences of your actions. But why not your inactions as well?
What would Chomskys stalwart, mathematically consistent anti-interventionism
have us do in a case like Rwanda, for example, where half a million Tutsis were
slaughtered?
So one might ask another sort of question: Must a political actor, a government or
a group of citizens, always treat everyone the same? There is something admirable to
aim at, in the idea of Universal Human Solidarity, no doubt. But until we get to
Utopia, can we ever act out of patriotism rather than sheer unleavened Universalism?May we ever distinguish between friend and enemy? Is it ever understandable that a
country act on its perceived national self-interest? Must we treat every kind of regime
the same*or may we sometimes wish to distinguish between attacking an outright
theocratic or otherwise fascistic dictatorship, responsible for heinous crimes, and
letting a semiliberal, capitalist, quasi-democracy responsible for some awful things go
for a while? We ought to build a world of perfect justice and rules that apply equally
to all; truism accepted. But may we also, on our way there, try to distinguish between
terrorist violence and genuine liberation struggles, for example?
Consequences seems an acceptable truism. You and I and those we elect are indeed
responsible for the predictable (as Chomsky likes to explain sternly) consequencesof our actions. But are there ever, in politics of all things, sometimes complicated
Critical Forum: Chomsky 459
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situations in which it is hard or even impossible to know with any certainty what the
consequences of action (or inaction) will be? Indeed, for political thinkers like
Hannah Arendt, these precisely were and are, by definition, the truly political
circumstances and the real stuff of politics. The cases requiring judgment and
decision. And not just tallying up of information. For where there is certainty andpredictability and mastery, there is really no need for judgment per se*much less
conciliation and certainly not compromise or complicity. Maybe not even courage, at
least the most profound kind, the kind we need to act when we think we are right but
we are not sure.
Without these facile, antipolitical axioms, Noam Chomskys political geometry, as
he might like to imagine it*so clean, pure, rational, and incontestable*falls like a
house of cards. It holds up today no better than his Propaganda model, in an age of
Ideology, Discourse, and Simulacra. Nor, it should also be pointed out, can the
Propaganda approach account for the undeniably progressive aspects of adistinctively American tradition of freedom of speech in the public sphere, the way
a careful historian like Paul Starr explains it, in his recent book, The Creation of the
Media (2004). So for those of us less sure if our truisms are true*but enjoying the
privileges and responsibilities of freedom*it again becomes possible to ask, with
Michael Ignatieff: Was the current war in Iraq a part of the burden of power in a
unipolar world? Or was it after all a huge mistake from the very beginning? In part,
because information was withheld, perhaps. But surely also because it proved too
costly in the event. Was it Paul Bremmer who went wrong in dismissing the Iraqi
army, as many now suggest, or was it plain misguided going into Iraq to begin with?
And why? What other mistakes were made that might have been done differently?Might Anthony Zinnis strategy have proved more effective at averting the fiasco
that Thomas Ricks (2006) book documents? What should we do now? Free of
Chomskys truisms, axioms, and epistemophilia, it becomes possible to ask, with
Christopher Hitchens (2003), questions that always involve making difficult
judgments: On balance, is the world better or worse off, for being rid of Baathist
dictatorship in Iraq and the oppressive Taliban government in Afghanistan? Were we
right to at least try to reverse the shame of past complicity with these reactionary
forces? Or, with Michael Walzer (2004): Was the latter intervention just, while the
former, as he argues, unjust when it began?But thats the point. Walzer is an example of somebody who argues. In contrast, for
all his brilliance as a scientist, Chomskys legacy as a political thinker and moralist is a
tone of condescension, and an oracular practice more appropriate to presenting
proofs in a linguistics seminar than participating in political dialogue. He may have
discovered the deep structures of language, but he has not discovered any such thing
concerning media or politics. It is a shame for the left especially that his followers*
in whom he inspires a weirdly slavish devotion*seem to think he has. I do not
present the above as rhetorical questions concerning the war, by the way. They have
answers, and we should seek (to cocreate) them. But I present them as questions,
which the facts, however unfiltered, will never decide on their own, without citizenstaking responsibility for their active role in a postfoundational political and
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discursive universe. This means making choices with no absolute guidelines to assure
us that we are right or that we will win. But at least the adult conversation can finally
take place. Outside the school yard, on planet Earth.
Note
[1] In contrast to Harpham and Macfarquhars insightful critiques, the two recent book-length
studies of Chomsky, by Barsky (1997) and Rai (1996), are remarkably uncritical.
References
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Brown, W. (2006). Edgeworks. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Chomsky, N. (2005). Hegemony or survival. New York: Penguin.
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Haraway, D. (1991). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of
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Critical Forum: Chomsky 461