jøker bjerre - chomsky, wittgenstein og lacan

8/7/2019 Jøker Bjerre - Chomsky, Wittgenstein og Lacan

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This paper is published atwww.wittgenstein-network.dk . It waspresented at the conference “The Grammar of Politics: Wittgensteiand Political Philosophy” held in November 2005 and arranged byThe Wittgenstein Network. Publication is prohibited without theauthor’s submission.

Everything Politics is, Chomsky is not 1

Henrik Jøker Bjerre, University of Aarhus

Plato’s Problem and Orwell’s Problem.

Two metaphorically phrased problems elegantly define Noam Chomsky’s work that is so raddivided between a scientific-linguistic part and a part devoted to a remarkable political engageChomsky himself refers to them as “Plato’s Problem” and “Orwell’s Problem”, respectively. Thproblem is to explain how, given so little evidence, we know so much. How is it possible that hbeings very quickly and based on a very limited amount of “empirical evidence”, in the shape of talk, etc., are able to formulate endless numbers of new sentences? This is “Plato’s Problem”, be

as it is well known, Plato solved the question why Socrates’ conversation partners were apparentto “remember” various cognitive capacities, which they didn’t themselves know they had, by refthe capacities to an existence prior to the individual’s birth: the immortal soul. The latter problcourse, is the exact opposite: How is it possible that we know so little, given that we have soevidence? (McGilvray: 238, Chomsky 1986: ch. 3 & 5). This is “Orwell’s Problem”, because itproblem of how those in power are able to produce “manufactured consent” in their subjectsthough there is more than enough evidence to give reason to doubt the official truth. George Or

version of this problem in1984 was the invention of the concept of “newspeak”: by calling w“peace”, slavery “freedom”, etc., the State is able to trick or coerce its subjects into actively accthings, which they would oppose had they been described as what they really are.

1 This paper was presented at the conference “The Grammar of Politics”, arranged by the Danish Wittgenstein Netwo(Aarhus, November 2005). It was first published in Krtaca, Slovenia, (Ljubljana 2006).



Chomsky’s own answers to the two problems are, roughly said, firstly to transfer Plato’s immortto the genetically predisposed “language organ” or “universal grammar” in the human brain

secondly, to locate contemporary political newspeak in the powerful Western conglomerates ofmedia, business and politics. Pressing the point, however, the two problems could almost be seeparadox, if not even a self-contradiction, inherent in Chomsky’s work: On the one hand, humainfinitely creative, highly complex and intelligent organisms, and on the other hand they are smindless sheep, ready to follow even the most absurd manipulations of their shepherds. I actuallythere is some such paradox inherent in Chomsky’s work seen as a whole, and that it manifests itsboth levels: on the linguistic as well as on the political. I also think it is in both cases relatedlimited view of rule following, one that could benefit from a more productive encounter Wittgensteinian philosophy. Chomsky simply refers the ability of rule following to the human and maintains that since there is no fact of the matter “out there” that explicitly shows me what tothe sense of merely repeating it, since for instance I am able to add two numbers, I have nevebefore, the capacity to do so must be given by an innate state:

I have no grounds for my knowledge in any general sense of the term and no reasons for followirules: I just do it. If I had been differently constituted, with a different structure of mind/brain would have come to know and follow different rules (or none) on the basis of the same exper(Chomsky 1986: 225).

Based on this general view of the innate human capacity for rule following, Chomsky draws his pof an “ordinary common sense”, which applies to all humans (with an intact language organ). Theis simply structured in such a way as to anticipate an immense amount of possible combinatiosigns, according to some basic, standard procedures. Following this picture, and on the assumptiEnglish speakers can readily understand twenty-word sentences, Steven Pinker has estimated twould take 100 billion centuries for a person just to hear them all.” (McGilvray: 218) (This linversion of the mathematical sublime certainly does fill us with awe at how we are constantly aconstruct new meanings – it even gives some hope for the originality of this paper). Chomsky bethat a private language is in fact possible in this specific sense: As one individual’s application universal species design – even the most deserted lonely freak would be able to follow rules beca



would nonetheless be an instance of the human species with a common (pre-) linguistic set up inside the head”, as James McGilvray repeatedly says, see e.g. McGilvray: 204). It should comesurprise that this solution to “Plato’s Problem” is difficult to accept for most Wittgensteinians,

will have to take this for granted here, and, since this paper first of all is intended to shred Wittgensteinian light on Chomsky’spolitical thought, instead concentrate on how rule followinconsiderations of a particular sort could also be said to be of importance in the understandiChomsky’s solution of Orwell’s Problem. I think it will be clear that his solution of this problemas the solution of Plato’s Problem, draws heavily on the relatively rudimentary image of an “orcommon sense”.

Hey! You remind me of Vladimir Danchev!

Noam Chomsky has been called the conscience of the American people, which indeed seemsclose to his own image of himself. “There are few Danchevs here,” as he states, “except at the rmargins of political debate” (Chomsky1986: 286). Chomsky definitely sees himself as someone margins of political debate, (although it might have become slightly difficult to uphold this psince his election this autumn as nothing less than the number 1 public intellectual of the world, web site of the US journal Foreign Policy.) The comparison with Danchev does make some Vladimir Danchev was a newscaster at the Soviet radio in Moscow, who in 1983 repeatedly calthe Afghan people not to capitulate and succumb to the Soviet invasion of their country. Outragethis act was in its encouragement of armed resistance to his own countrymen, Danchev was, accto Chomsky, first of all an embarrassment to the official ideology because of his outright descriptthe employment of Soviet forces in Afghanistan as an “invasion.” According to official rhetorUSSR was notinvading anyone; it was defending the Afghan people against terrorists supported fabroad (the Mujahedins that were best friends with the CIA until recently). It is not difficult to s

parallel to Chomsky’s own tireless efforts in relation to the US invasions of Vietnam and more reof Iraq. As he wrote himself in 1986:

For the past 22 years, I have searched in vain for even a single reference in mainstream U.S. jouror scholarship to a “U.S. invasion of South Vietnam,” or U.S. “aggression” in South Vietnam.



U.S. doctrinal system, there is no such event. There is no Danchev, although in this case it tocourage to tell the truth, merely honesty.” (Chomsky 1986: 278-9).

The absence of critical journalism on Vietnam in US media is all the more surprising, since it re“nothing but honesty”. A straight forward perception of what actually took place, based on opeavailable sources, could only be meaningfully rendered as an “invasion”. Any other description be deceptive. How on earth was it possible that no one broke the silent pact of the politically cwhen there were not even any serious repercussions to be expected – unlike the situation for VlDanchev, who was of course immediately hospitalized? The lack of American dissidence is surpbecause it seems very nearly impossible that there isn’t one, given what Chomsky considers asand what he considers as the requirements to understand and act on them. As Milan Rai has put it

Luckily, all that is required for “intellectual self-defence” is “ordinary common sense,” a“willingness to look at the facts with an open mind, to put simple assumptions to the test, and to an argument to its conclusions.” (McGilvray: 239). [These are partly Chomsky’s own words].

It seems, on Chomsky’s account, that nothing less than each single individual of the entire mainsjournalism and scholarship in the US is either devoid of “ordinary common sense” or unashadishonest. Although I do agree that the “ordinary common sense” that Chomsky is addressing sebe a very rare case, if not an outright phantom, I think he is jumping to conclusions, and I thinkforced to doing so, in fact,because of his universal grammar and an accompanying rather altmodisch conception of ideology. Thus, when John Junkerman in his 2002/3 documentary tribute to Chomsky cites an American mayor for the appraisal “Everything politics is, Chomsky is not,” theis to underline that Chomsky actually, as an extremely rare exception, manages to live up to histandards of decency, courage and “willingness to look at the facts with an open mind”, i.e. wbeing biased or merely promoting his own particular point of view. I agree with the statement, that my point would be exactly the opposite: Chomsky is “above politics” in the sense that, wh

does continue to deliver highly impressive amounts of facts in the shape of journalistic evidendoes not really begin to tarry with the problem why, in the age of free distribution of informatiothe internet, the immensely creative and intelligent human species doesn’t care to summon enresolve to at least scroll through his homepage 5-10 minutes a week, be it in the halftime of the nafootball league. If the “universal grammar” theory is right, wouldn’t this actually be enough to



started? I think this lack of explanation of why we don’t even use the sources of information thatare infact available is related to the gap between Plato’s Problem and Orwell’s Problem in Chomsky’s This is Chomsky’s own description of the gap:

Roughly, where we deal with cognitive structures, either in a mature state of knowledge and beliethe initial state, we face problems, but not mysteries. When we ask how humans make use ofcognitive structures, how and why they make choices and behave as they do, although there is mucan say as human beings with intuition and insight, there is little, I believe, that we can sscientists. (Chomsky 1975: 138).

The general reluctance in Chomsky’s thought to say too much about “how we make choicebehave as we do” in my view is connected to his very un-Wittgensteinian approach to the prob

rule following. If everything interesting there is to say about our cognitive capacities must wacorroboration from neurophysiology, then it remains a futile effort to say anything on our choicbehaviour from a social-constructivist, or even from a traditionally philosophical perspeUltimately, we may even have to accept that concepts such as freedom and self-consciousne“mysteries” principally inaccessible to inquiry. This postponement of a principled philosopinvestigation of the rules of human conduct in my view not only limits the scope of the current staaffairs in Chomskyian linguistic theory; it also – and in this context more importantly – lunexplained, on the verge of obscurity, why humans tend not to make use of their “ordinary cosense” in crucial political questions, which Chomsky so regrets.

In § 202 of thePhilosophical Investigations , Wittgenstein writes: “And hence also ‘obeying a rule’ ispractice. And tothink one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule.” (Chomsky, incidentally, agrees wthese formulations, while as already mentioned, he disagrees with Wittgenstein’s conclusion thatherefore not possible to obey a rule “privately” (Chomsky 1986: 229).). My aim in this papeunfold thereverse of the latter of these sentences from § 202 as the basis of what I will c

“ideological rule following”. The reversed sentence would read: “And tothink one isnot obeying a ruleis not not to obey a rule.” This is exactly the sense in which Chomsky is “elevated” above real podiscourse: he imagines a position of enunciation (his own) from which there is no (ideological) ruis followed in the Wittgensteinian sense. The Wittgensteinian point to make is that just beChomskythinks he doesn’t follow any ideological rules, it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t.



How shameful! Underneath his clothes he is naked!

According to the Lacanian definition of subjectivity, the subject of the enunciated is the subject articulated in language. The subject of enunciation, on the other hand, is the subject that speaks, occupies the position from which something is enunciated. When Chomsky for instance say“There is a kind of a margin for survival in the Third World that relates to the degree of Amdissidence” (Chomsky 2003: 12), the enunciated is what he says in this statement. Chomsky subject of the enunciated is the one that is in as far as he says this. In a specific sense heis theenunciated, much as when Wittgenstein says in theTractatus (5.542) that “A says p” has the same formas “’p’ says p”. What there is, the fact, is that “p” is said. The position of the enunciation, on thehand, relates to how, where, and when he said it, what he was part of in saying it (in this cdiscussion among American academics in Massachusetts, 1989). The subject of enunciation tspeaks, takes position, whereas the subject of the enunciated is (that which is said). The strbetween these two subjects is mirrored quite closely in theTractatus , 5.631:

Thereis no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas.If I wrote a book calledThe World as I found it , I should have to include a report on my body, anshould have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this bmethod of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subjectalone couldnot be mentioned in that book.– (My accentuation (bold).)

And (a page) later, in 5.641:

The philosophical self [das philosophische Ich] is not the human being, not the human body, human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the wnot a part of it.

In an important sense, thereis no subject. It is the limit, not a part of the world. In Wittgenstein, therno res cogitans in the Cartesian sense, but nevertheless a “philosophical self”, which is not the hubeing, but the limit of the world (my world). Wittgenstein, like Jacques Lacan, is anti-humanisinner worldly subject that I am is not the philosophical subject (which thinks). Descartes’ mistak



to equate these two subjects with each other: I think, therefore I am. Or: I think, therefore the subenunciation and the subject of the enunciated are one and the same. They are bothin the world. AWittgensteinian version would sound something like: it (the philosophical subject) thinks, there

am. “There is no such thing as the subject that thinks” – it has no being. There are only manifestin the world, such as the empirical or psychological “I”, but, as he says in 5.633: “Wherein the world isa metaphysical subject to be found?” Lacan explicitly draws on Descartes himself to illustradistinction. In a number of varieties, he distinguishes between the subject of enunciation ansubject of the enunciated exactly as that whichthinks , and that whichis, e.g.: "I think therefore I am(not)" or “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think” (Evans 1996: 26). What Iwhat is spoken, enunciated. But that which is spoken is not the subject that speaks. You don’t seye (I). (“Eye” in English, of course, is homophone with “I”, which gives a wonderful poindoesn’t appear immediately in the German version of 5.633: “Aber das Auge siehst du wirklich nThe minimal difference between these two aspects of subjectivity is the basis of psychoanalysmore precisely: the subject of enunciation is the subject of the unconscious. This subject is not a not some soul or spiritual kernel of subjectivity, but rather the position itself, which the “empisubject is not aware of. Or as Bruce Fink puts it: “The unconscious has no being – it is where Iam not– but it does plenty of thinking.” (Fink 2004: 102-3). Note that when Wittgenstein mention“human soul” as the subject of psychology; he does neither refer to, nor anticipate the psychoansubject, but the subject of empirical psychology. And remember also that Wittgenstein praised for inventing anew way of speaking by way of the unconscious, not for discovering a nemetaphysical dimension.

How can Descartes, then, be regarded as the first to define the features of the ideological phanFirst of all, as already mentioned, he claimed the inexistence of the difference between the subjthe enunciated (I am) and the subject of enunciation (I think). In other words, the doubt, the dista

the subject from itself, was annihilated in thecogito ergo sum . The ability to think/doubt was thatwhich drew the individual from the armchair to the pure, logical cogito. What cannot be doubtedsomething doubts. Descartes, however, jumped to conclusions when he stated that that which dothe same as that which was sitting in the armchair. That cogitoergo sum . This annihilation of inner difference then, in turn, establishes a neutral basis for the apprehension of the world. The s



characteristic of the Cartesian phantasm is the necessity of unconditional trust in the benevolenWhile thecogito ergo sum defines a neutral basis as a thinking substance in the world, the other thin the world must also be possible to describe as they appear, in order for the subject to “get bac

the world” from the exile of radical doubt, i.e. in order for the whole Cartesian machinery of scidescriptions and explanations to get up and running. This re-entrance is provided by God. He cwant to deceive me, since he is infinitely good, and thus the basic coordinates and features of theof appearance must be trustable. Theres cogitans becomes an unproblematic thing among otheunproblematic things. The first is possible because of the equation of the “I think” with the “I amsecond because God guarantees that the other things present themselves in agreement withessence (as well). Here we have, in other words, the two features that also define ideology: My pof enunciation is unproblematic, neutral or unbiased (there is no split between the subject oenunciated and the subject of enunciation), and the facts of the world can be represented stforwardly as they appear to me because of some fundamental trust that things are as they pthemselves. I am stable and unbiased, and the symbolic order is stable as well. Whilpsychoanalysis, God tends to play a less predominant role than he did in the 17th century, the figure of the Father is still taking his place. Remember Žižek’s interpretation of how Freud’s daughter firstto enjoy eating strawberry cake: Her appetite for strawberry cake was mediated by the comfofeeling of sitting at the table eating, while her parents were sitting nearby, obviously happy to seechild so fond of the strawberry cake they gave her. That strawberry cakes are available, tasty andfor you, is guaranteed by the Father/the parents. Their approval makes it valid. It is because ofundamental trust that we are able to know right from wrong, or indeed follow rules. Because trust that someone knows (really knows) on our behalf how and why things are, we trust that things and must be seen and done inthis way. The fantasy is the transcendental schematism, as Slavoj Žižputs it: “Fantasy does not mean that when I desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reafantasize about eating it; the problem is, rather:how do I know that I desire strawberry cake in the first

place? ” (Žižek 1997: 7). Put in another way: the fantasy is a necessary condition for being abfollow any rule at all. For the child there is as a matter of fact a guarantor: someone who is suppoknow how the world is structured and why (the figure of the father or parent). Although therpossible coming-to-awareness of the origins of one’s desires and ideas, there is no neutral outside fantasy as such, from which one can take things for what they really are. On the contra



the extent that we are unaware of or denying the fantasmatic foundation of knowledge, i.e. to thethat we claim to take a position outside fantasy as such, we are exactly following the earliest andbasic fantasmatic structures. You could even say that the purpose of therapy is to gain a pa

remember that I came to enjoy strawberry cakes because I loved the feeling of my parents’ gaze when eating them. After going through this fantasy, I might establish a new present – that couldinclude a more autonomous appreciation of strawberry cakes. But the new present would nopresent in a vacuum: Any world view needs some basic fantasy to be at all possible, at the verythe “as if”, which Kant introduces as the replacement of the Ding-an-sich: We must experiencworld according to principles that guide us “as if” it were a rational, coherent and meaningful wWere we to insist on a re-entrance without any fantasmatic leap, we wouldn’t get anywhedefinition of ideology could therefore be the convictionnot to be under any spell of ideology , and of course this definition seems to describe Noam Chomsky’s self-perception rather precisely. Again,my reversal of § 202 of the PI: Tothink that you are not following a rule is not enough to establish thyou are not in fact following a rule.

Chomsky’s sympathy is with the innocent child with “ordinary common sense”, who exclaims themperor is naked. No one saw it, or maybe they did, but they didn’t have the courage to proclaiobvious. Ordinary common sense + honesty = critique of ideology. Jacques Lacan’s position is more refined and could rather be described as the exclamation: “My God, how shameful! Undehis clothes, he is naked!” That is to say: Although the emperor is in fact well dressed, he is still nmore than the figure that holds the place of the emperor. There is no epistemically neutral descrthat unmasks the workings of power once and for all, but there is an ability in language users to aquestion the validity of the current rule of law (to doubt or think), or more precisely: to remain that there is no necessity in the prevailing order, and that the emperor could always be beheadedis why Lacan famously stated that the madman, who thinks that he is a king, is no crazier than th

who thinks that he is a king. In as far as the king identifies with his symbolic mandate to such a that he doesn’t see that that is all it is, or in other words: in as far as he believes that there difference between his position of enunciation and the content of what he is (described as), hecrazy as the madman. Another Lacanian paraphrase of the cogito could thus be: “I don’t therefore I am (the king).” Doesn’t there in this sense seem to be a tendency in powerful politici



One of the rather simple ways of interpreting dreams before Freud was to take all dreams to hdirect physical cause. If the alarm clock goes, we dream of a giant bell banging to our head, if theslides down, we dream we are in Siberia, etc. By incorporating the external irritation into the drea

are able to prolong our sleep. In much the same way, the appearance of the child in the dream cocaused by smoke from the next room. Freud’s interpretation, based on his principle of dreams afulfilments, was that the father wanted to imagine that the son was still alive. This wish was grana moment in the dream. Lacan radicalizes this interpretation: Whatever the reason why theappears in the dream, the reason why the father wakes up is more interesting. It is, namely, noirritation of the smoke that gets unbearable, but the Real of the dream, i.e. the extremely traufeeling of guilt in front of the child: why didn’t you save me? In this precise sense, the dream is escape from reality, on the contrary: awakening into reality is an escape from the Real of the dThe father escapes into reality by awakening – he rushes into the room, stops the fire, etc., and tgets away from the terrifying image of his guilt. Isn’t this logic also the one behind our reluctanask questions that question the very fundamentals of our reality, say, Western capitalist consumeInstead of confronting the immense tasks that face humanity; disease, hunger, war, climatic chetc., and the accompanying unbearable guilt that haunts the rich and the healthy, we escape into by getting busy with a lot of “important” tasks that make us comfortably stressed and give us a fof justification: I am a responsible son/husband/father/colleague/citizen, but you can’t expect also be responsible for the poor and the repressed here and everywhere else in the world! Here Slavoj Žižek concludes his interpretation of the burning child (which I have been drawing on):

It is exactly the same with ideology. Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to einsupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a suppour “reality” itself. […] The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel. (Žižek 1989:

I believe this relation between reality and the Real could in fact also be termed in the idiom Tractatus : The world (reality) is everything that is the case. It is my world, it includes everythingthe facts – and can be handled, structured, understood. But: “Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechli2

2 Note that the Pears/McGuiness translation renders this as “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words”. translation in my view entirely obfuscates the meaning of the sentence. The inexpressible is exactly not athing .



(The Real). This shows itself (6.522). The feeling of the world as a limited whole is mystical (6.4although the world is comprehensible within the limits of my language, there is no external autthat guarantees the coherence and appropriateness of the “world as I found it” (5.631). In Lacane

big Other doesn’t exist, but it functions nonetheless. The crucial move in Wittgenstein here is thmystical is not some spherical or extraterrestrial substance (a spook of some sort), but the veryabsence of a substance or an authority that sustains the meaning and coherence of the world as it ismystical isthat the world is, not which things exist in it, i.e. it is mystical that thereis no explanationavailable to us,why it is. At a certain point, the child realizes that his father cannot answer all hisquestions. Reality is structured around a certain lack (of explanation); an “empty place”, as Kantit, left by theoretical philosophy which couldn’t “realize this thought, i.e. could not transform it incognition [Erkenntnis] of a creature that acts in such a way – not even the possibility of it.” (KanThis lack simultaneously marks an openness: there is a crack in the apparently coherent ontoledifice (or here: the social reality). While this is mystical and grand, it is also terrifying: It indicatwe are left to ourselves to “fix it”.

So, if we are held captive by a picture (that covers the crack) – an ideological one – then the quseems to be: Do we really want to get out of the bottle? Is it at all “recommendable” to start mbackward and give up on the increasingly comfortable social reality, we have build ourselvesquestion is, in other words: Why escape from the Matrix to a gloomy and lonely Real world ouwhen you can have champagne and all the women you want inside the (reality of the) Matrixphilosophers,especially Wittgensteinians, this question has another version: Do we really want tothe fly out of the bottle and disclose that there are no philosophical theories that ultimately explaworld? What about our jobs?!) Isn’t there a very recognizable propensity in Cypher’s ultagreement in the first Matrix movie to give up and forget the Real outside the Matrix in order to bto live out his virtual life to the full? This is the famous exchange between Agent Smith and Cy

who likes juicy steaks about as much as Freud’s daughter liked strawberry cakes:

Cypher: You know, I know that this steak doesn’t exist. I know when I put it in my mouth the Matelling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, do you know what I’ve realized?[Cypher takes a bite of the steak and chews it]Cypher: Ignorance is a bliss.



Agent Smith: Then we have a deal?Cypher: I don’t want to remember nothing. Nothing! You understand? And I want to be rich. Somimportant. Like an actor. You can do that, right?Agent Smith: Whatever you want, Mr. Reagan.

In a certain sense, this is already enough to reject Chomsky’s answer to Orwell’s Problem: Thevery strong inclination in all of us not to want to know, i.e. not to want to escape frombottle/Matrix, because the truth that awaits us is terrifying and overwhelming. It is simply easier toneself away to social reality and avoid the realization of the lack of foundation under one’s feCartesian language: it is easier to stop thinking. Incidentally, this inclination to accept the coordinates of reality, while avoiding the enormous task posed by the categorical imperative, aexactly fits Kant’s definition of “radical evil”. The categorical imperative, according to Kant, “filthe empty place that was left at the end of the dialectics of Reason. Since the Supreme Beinguarantees the rationality and legitimacy of the world as it is could not be proven theoretically, his left with an imperative to try to make it right. Since, in other words, the Leibnizian justificatEvil as only small misfortunes in a greater, universal good in the best of all worlds cannmaintained, human must face the abyss of freedom and try to think for itself, according to the prof universal laws. Evil in Kant is a certain not-wanting-to-see, a postponement of moral responsat the benefit of comfort, pleasure and enjoyment. It is choosing the Matrix over the Real.

What the Lacanian differentiation between reality and the Real can do, is to give a model of “howhy [humans] make choices and behave as they do” (cf. Chomsky’s mystery above), i.e. why than inclination in us not to want to know about the world outside our social reality, why it attractive alternative to stay in the maze rather than finding the exit. Like the father in the storythe burning child, we prefer reality with its practical tasks, to the Real of our repressed guilt. Gthis, a critique of ideology would have to take another course than Chomsky’s. Bluntly put, not oit possible to scrutinize and criticize the heap of facts that Chomsky presents to us and thpostpone indefinitely the question of whether he was really “right” (like a significant amouconservative homepages are busy doing: didn’t Chomsky actually support Pol Pot; wasn’t he hexaggerating the number of casualties in the US bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factKhartoum, Sudan, etc.),; it has also become common knowledge that there is no such thing as a n



position of enunciation. Hasn’t post-Wittgensteinian perspectivism exactly been so successfutoday even the most strictly nationalist conservatives are ready to dismiss factual evidence aanother possible point of view? “Sadly, a very big amount of Iraqi civilians are dying from the U

occupation, but do you want Saddam Hussein back?” Maybe it is time to reassert Truth as the repolitical agenda? Not as matter-of-fact-truth about the endless amount of states-of-affairs in the but as the truth of a particular situation or ideology. That is to say, maybe it is time to inteWittgenstein’s “Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches” as theTruth of the world of facts, along the linesof Lacan’s aphorism: “What is refused in the symbolic order returns in the real”.

The struggle takes place on the level of the enunciation

Slavoj Žižek has several times described a Lacanian approach to the problem of anti-Semitismpoint is, basically, that we don’t get rid of anti-Semitism by “choosing” to rely only on matters oabout Jews – the problem is not whether they arereally collecting money, exploiting workers, andseducing our women etc. – the problem is which function this image of Jews performs in oulibidinal economy. Imagine a debate between a convinced Nazi and a matter-of-fact liberal critiordinary common sense. The Nazi claims that Jews are a threat to society, because they are sexploiting, undermining, etc. The liberal replies with statistics that show how many Jews are acworking in banks, holding political office, etc. Isn’t it here too easy to reject the liberal by maintthat he is simply too naïve, or, indeed, that he is held captive by an “idealist liberal picture” human rights, helping the whole world etc.? Maybe the Jews haven’t openly outmanoeuvred ubut that exactly shows how clever they are – hiding their real agenda! Turning the tables insituation would mean to address the problem of why the Jew is so important. Which lack or inseis this obsessive focus supposed to cover? In general, the question is, in other words, what is dexcluded, repressed from our social reality in order to maintain a picture of it as coheren

harmonic? One of Lacan’s many definitions of the end of analysis is that the analysand must idwith his symptom. This would mean that overcoming anti-Semitism implies identifying with thHe holds the key to understanding what we have become, since it is only by recognizing our owin the image of the Jew (as the subject supposed to… steal, conspire, long for power, etc.) that weffectively come to see the situation clearly and let the fly out of the bottle. Obviously, today, o



reading of Lacan, it would be worth while examining which role the Muslim plays in the libeconomy of most Western countries. Similarly, a political approach aiming at clarification, theand letting the fly out of the bottle, would investigate the roles that asylum seekers, unempl

homeless people, beggars, criminals etc. play in our self-perception as someone who must be ex(while still remaining within reach) in order for us to maintain purity and order.

If I am right, and the metaphysical subject in Wittgenstein can actually be interpreted along the lithe Lacanian subject of the enunciation, then I think an interesting reading is possible of Wittgenstein says in 6.43 of theTractatus on changing the limits of the world (remember that in 5.6the metaphysical subject was described as the limit of the world, not somethingin the world):

If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the worlthe facts – not what can be expressed [enunciated] by means of language.

What the good or bad exercise of the will can alter is the limit of the world, the position oenunciation. The totality of facts in the natural world includes facts about human behaviour, cannot be described in terms of a “good” or “bad” free will in any metaphysical sense (this was Kproblem in the third antinomy), but – to put it a little bit profanely – how werelate to the facts of theworld can. In as far as the subject of the enunciation is another name for the unconscious, thiagain echoes what Alenka Zupanč ič has called the psychoanalytic postulate of freedom: that we chooour own unconscious. This is also described in 5.641 of theTractatus :

In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wawane as a whole.The world of the happy man is different from that of the unhappy man.

This doesn’t mean that any antagonism and conflict can be resolved by looking at the eye o

beholder, of course. It means, rather, that critique of ideology works better at the level of enuncthan on the level of the enunciated. The question is not so much what is said, but who is saying why. In this respect, I believe that American filmmaker Michael Moore actually serves as an exIf you remember his film “Fahrenheit 9/11” that caused some disturbance in the American pub2004, the debate about it was not so much about the content of the enunciated. Most of the



consisted of interviews with people that plainly stated their own opinion, and then short sequencethe archives of various American networks: The attacks on the World Trade Centre, Bush at thcourse, Wolfowitz combing his hair before an interview, Bush reading to children in a kinderg

etc. What really caused accusations of manipulation, and very rightly so, was that Moore unashachanged the position of enunciation of most of the participants. When pop star Britney Speainstance, expressed that she kind’a thought we should all just back our president, her stupiditvastly overstated by an immediate cut to a desperate, crying woman in Iraq, standing in frobuildings totally devastated by the American attack. And when Bush, making a toast at a dinneramong obviously very wealthy people, joked that “Some people call you the elite; I call you my he was actually taking part in a tradition, where prominent politicians help broadly resporganisations collect money for charity. The style of those dinner parties are traditionally informironic – which is emphasized by the fact that Al Gore at the same event said that if everyone wcontribute generously, he would promise never to mention health care reform again. In the however, Bush’s joke was taken as part of the evidence that the attack on Iraq was really a mattermoney and the social and economic position of friends and relatives of the Bush family. What wasaid in the film was not manipulated, but how and why it was said was grossly manipulated – to the that you could even talk about artificial production of slips of the tongue. Nevertheless, it seemsactually provoked some thinking about what was really the agenda of the “coalition of the wilMaybe this method should be more seriously examined. In the age of spin doctors and poadvertising, it might be an interesting Wittgensteinian experiment to investigate “What would hif someone saidthis in that context?”

References:

Chomsky, Noam: Reflections on Language (Pantheon Books, New York, 1975).Chomsky, Noam: Knowledge of Language (Praeger Publishers, New York, 1986).Chomsky, Noam: Understanding Power (Vintage, London, 2003).



Evans, Dylan: An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Routledge,London, 1996).

Fink, Bruce: Lacan to the Letter (University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

Freud, Sigmund: Die Traumdeutung (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a.M., 1999).Kant, Immanuel: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, 1990).McGilvray, James: The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky (Cambridge University Press,

2005).Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Tractatus logico-philosophicus (Routledge, London, 1961).Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Tractatus logico-philosophicus (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M., 1984).Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell, Oxford, 1963).Žižek, Slavoj: The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso, London, 1989).Žižek, Slavoj: The Plague of Fantasies (Verso, London, 1997).

jøker bjerre - chomsky, wittgenstein og lacan

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