MIT professor Noam Chomsky, the subject of Michel Gondry’s new documentary Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, is one of America’s greatest living intellectuals. His political ideas have been profiled in movies before, most notably in the documentary Manufacturing Consent by the recently deceased Canadian filmmaker Peter Wintonick. But Chomsky’s revolutionary concepts in linguistics — his academic field of specialty — have not been profiled to nearly the same degree.

There’s a reason for this. Chomsky’s outspoken critiques of American imperialism and military adverturism are based on his notion of the basic responsibilities of a public intellectual and an informed citizen. He sees his far-left analyses of geopolitics as the result of research that he, as a professional from a certain privileged position, is capable of undertaking, whereas others cannot. But beyond that question of access, Chomsky believes that his political conclusions are based in “Cartesian common sense,” truths that any rational mind would discover once obfuscatory systems (such as bombardment by corporate media) are removed.

By contrast, Chomsky’s linguistics work is specialized science; it is not accessible to all, nor should it be. In his discussions with Gondry, Chomsky articulates his belief (a tenet of modern science) that complex effects ought to be reducible to simple explanations. But how will one arrive at these explanations? How will causes and effects be sorted out? In Chomsky’s case, he changed the terms of linguistics by observing that the basic patterns of grammar exist in all languages, for all individuals, irrespective of historical circumstance. This claim to universality contravened the pre-Chomskian, descriptivist model of linguistics, which focused on data collection and the structural analysis of historical changes in language(s). You could do this, Chomsky argued, but ultimately the basis of language is innate, a human evolutionary adaptation or mutation. More.

See: Nashville Scene

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