language. If language is lodged in what Chomsky calls ‘the mind/brain’,
economic production is lodged in what might be called ‘the mind/hand’. Yet
economics is not concerned exclusively with the study (which is fascinating
and of vital importance) of the human hand or brain: economic structures
(the productive forces) and economic relations (the relations of production)
have their effective autonomy, which are attributable to their social nature.
The same goes for language.
The second characteristic is fetishism. It reduces what is essentially a practice –
human language – to a series of ‘things’ inscribed in the brain of the speaker
or her genes: a Universal Grammar and a Language Acquisition Device (because
the parameters have to be triggered). The reduction, by way of spatial metaphors
(localisation, inscription), moves from practices to mechanisms, from human
intelligence to artificial intelligence, to the calculating machine, which furnishes
the constitutive metaphors: the human brain contains programs, and so on.
Except that computers, however powerful and intelligent, do not have inter-
personal – because interlocutory – relations and do not engage in class struggle.
And this fetishism entails two consequences, which are the final two harmful
characteristics of Chomsky’s philosophy of language.
The third characteristic is the refusal of history. Clearly, Chomsky is aware
of the existence of linguistic change. For him, however, such phenomena are
irrelevant. Individual languages – their vocabularies, for example – can indeed
change, but such alterations do not affect the language, which knows neither
history nor development, other than phylogenetic development, which affects
the entire species, and ontogenetic development, whereby the relevant
parameters for her individual linguistic situation are triggered in each speaker.
(Like the arm, the language organ grows.) This assumes that language is an
individual phenomenon and not a property of communitiesof speakers.
Chomsky’s a-historicism is simply the flip side of his a-social conception of
language.
But this refusal of history is consistent with the fourth characteristic:
naturalism. This naturalism (the science of language is a natural science, the
language organ is a natural phenomenon) involves a belief in human nature
(the language faculty forms part of it) and its relative fixity (the biological
endowment of the human species only changes at the pace of evolution and
contains nothing from which to construct a history of it). The rules of grammar
(since each Chomskyan monad foresees the organisation of languages even
in detail) are therefore laws of nature, not defeasible conventions or pragmatic
Critique of Linguistics • 35