Critical Studies in Media Communication Vol. 23, No. 5, December 2006, pp.

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Understanding Noam Chomsky: A Reconsideration

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: gbrahm@ucsc.edu
ISSN 0739-3180 (print)/ISSN 1479-5809 (online) # 2006 National Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/07393180601046279

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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 these psycho-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 into something 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 exempt anyone. 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 of private 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 illequipped 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.

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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 one will 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 neverending 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. By contrast, 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 having considered them in any serious way.

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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 to unsullied 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 a surplus 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 detail and 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 that culture available for interpretation in the first place? And these circumstances, so far as the European interest in alien cultures is concerned, have always been commercial, colonial, or military expansion, conquest, empire.

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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 our senses 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. Selfperpetuating. 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 image of 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 at political judgments.

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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 enough to 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 to have 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 government 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 slaughtering Muslims (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) consequences of our actions. But are there ever, in politics of all things, sometimes complicated

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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 and predictability 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 a distinctively 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 citizens taking 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
Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barsky, N. (1997). Noam Chomsky: A life of dissent . Cambridge: MIT. Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies . New York: Hill & Wang. Brown, W. (2006). Edgeworks . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chomsky, N., & Herman, E. (1988). Manufacturing consent . New York: Pantheon. Chomsky, N. (2005). Hegemony or survival . New York: Penguin. Crick, B. (1962). In defence of politics . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haraway, D. (1991). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women . New York: Routledge. Harpham, G. (1999). Chomsky and the Rest of Us, Salmagundi (winter spring). Hitchens, C. (2003). A long short war: The postponed liberation of Iraq . New York: Plume. Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimensional man . Boston: Beacon Press. MacFarquhar, L (2003). The Devils accountant, The New Yorker (March 31). McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media . New York: Penguin. Mouffe, C. (1994). The return of the political . New York: Verso. Poster, M. (1988). Jean Baudrillard: Selected writings . Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press. Rai, M. (1996). Chomskys politics . New York: Verso. Ricks, T. (2006). Fiasco: The American military adventure in Iraq . New York: The Penguin Press. Said, E. (1981). Covering Islam . New York: Vintage, Random House. Showalter, E. (1997). Hystories . New York: Columbia. Starr, P. (2004). The creation of the media . New York: Basic Books. Walzer, M. (2002). The company of critics . New York: Basic Books. Walzer, M. (2004). Arguing about war. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wolin, S. (2004). Politics and vision . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1960).