I sit in the library of the MIT Humanities Library and struggle
to think of questions that will stimulate a real conversation rather than a
reprised performance of every interview with Prof Noam Chomsky. “Bring a fresh
perspective to it,” my daughter advised, over a flurry of WhatsApp messages.
“Ask him if he believes linguistics scholars should engage in teaching new
language learners,” said my husband over email, reflecting his own strongly
held opinions about linking scholarship to practice.
But as I trawl through the hundreds—thousands—of articles,
interviews, videotaped conversations, reviews and criticisms featuring the most
famous dissident of them all, I am more and more daunted. I have been given 25
minutes, which I might be able to stretch into half an hour, and I feel burdened
by the intensity of my need to make the conversation interesting as it might be
polite.
So let’s begin with my own perspective. I was introduced to
Chomsky not in the newspapers or through a political space, but in a journalism
classroom, through his collaborative work with Edward Hermann, a package of
ideas that stripped away some of our idealism about the Western liberal press. This
work opened our eyes to the nexus between power and money, ownership and control,
and how it all worked in the service of entrenched corporate and political interests.
Initially, he was this faraway radical figure who stood out in American
academia with his alignment to the left, much further left than any “left-leaning
liberal media”. In doing so, he was closer in spirit to the left movements in
India, and over time, his politics articulated itself in response to issues in
the global south. In later years we began seeing his name appear on statements protesting
a variety of incursions on civil liberties, on letters taking a position
against this government action or another, not just in the US but overseas,
closer and closer to home: Kashmir, Gujarat, and earlier this year, the events
on JNU campus.
He’s been labelled the most famous political dissident of
our times. Never mind the gradual erosion of his theory of universal grammar
and the idea that human beings have an innate capacity for language—most recently,
in a scathing treatise by Tom
Wolfe that Chomsky dismisses as a not-so-thinly veiled attack on his politics.
Over the years, Noam Chomsky has grown into this larger-than-life figure who
represented everything that was right about academia, the coming together of
the intellectual life and political and civic activism, the possibility of
speaking truth to power even when working within its structures.
It was actually when I read about Tom Wolfe’s criticism in
an article
in The Chronicle of Higher Education that I decided to explore the possibility
of recording an interview with Prof Chomsky for Bol Hyderabad (UoH’s campus
community radio station), given that I was on the campus where he continues to
occupy an office and a not insignificant part of the intellectual imagination. I
learned from the article that Chomsky always responds to email and is extremely
approachable, so I thought, why not, I’ll just send him an email. Sure enough,
he responded within the hour saying he would be happy to meet. It took a few
more emails back and forth before we could find a time, given his extensive
travel and speaking schedule.
And so I arrived in his office on the eighth floor of the
silver and brick Stata Centre on MIT Campus, which houses the Department of
Linguistics and Philosophy. Bev, his secretary, is friendly and welcoming but
obviously protective of the 88-year-old celebrity she has been charged with
assisting. Her cocker spaniel wanders around the narrow corridors that lead to
Prof Chomsky’s office and stops to drink from a bowl near her desk. “Noam’s running a bit late—and he apologises
for making you wait,” she says, as she looks up with a smile. Her desk is
surrounded by “Gnome” paraphernalia, amusing nods to his rock star status. “But
he won’t be more than ten minutes. Would you like some water while you wait?”
I wander around the space, peering at the framed posters on the
wall that recall landmark protests over the years: Vietnam, East Timor, Iraq.
In his room, which is in a bit of disarray because books and boxes are being
moved around, two young people from Colombia wait to get a photograph and a
book signed. Bev shows me into the next room, apologizing for the disarray and
suggesting that we’d be more comfortable there.
Shortly after, Noam Chomsky arrived and after the
photo-taking and signing, joined me at the small circular table in the room
where I was waiting. He listened, smiling and patient, to my introduction,
which in retrospect seemed rather superfluous. He is someone who doesn’t need
an explanation for why one wants to interview him. He already knows. And he
probably knows all the questions as well. Despite this, he engaged with mine
seriously and at length. He spoke quietly and firmly (I was worried at times
about my recorder picking up his voice) but took his time with each question.
We spoke about the separation of intellectual or disciplinary inquiry from
political engagement, the ways in which academics could do both, the
opportunities that classrooms provide for sensitizing young minds to the need
for political change without encroaching on instructional time and space. He
has often commented that the intellectual questions (of linguistics and
philosophy, in his case) are far more interesting than the social and political
ones, but “unfortunately, the world outside won’t go away, so it demands my
attention”.
His name is often attached to petitions and letters
demanding explanation or justice, and I was curious to know how he chooses
which issues to align himself with. “How do you decide which ones to sign?”
Obviously, it’s impossible to know exactly what is going on in every corner of the
world. “Well, you build up a network of people you trust, and you depend on
them for information,” he said. And so we have newspaper headlines that
proclaim Chomsky’s support for the student movement at JNU or UoH, giving some
measure of global visibility and bringing it into the network of left-informed protest
movements worldwide.
There’s no denying that Chomsky has been very lucky in
having the space that he does, within MIT and within American academia in
general, to create a platform for dissent and protest. His job has never been
under threat, despite what might be seen as conflicts of interest between the
University’s mission and his own. The early success and visibility, arguably, afforded
by his work in linguistics created a platform for the dissemination of his political
views—although Chomsky emphasizes that he began taking a political position and
writing about it as a teenager.
We wind through his hopes (he has quite a bit) and anxieties
(mostly to do with climate change) about the state of the world, and my time
seems to have gone all soon as Bev shows up at the door, and Prof Chomsky gets
up, his age now evident in his movement. But I can’t let him go without
claiming my own Gnome-memento, so I ask Bev if she would do the honors.
“Let’s get you in front of Bertrand,” she says, and Noam obligingly walks back into his cluttered room.
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