The situation is clear. On the one hand, there is the science of language,
which is concerned with biological phenomena – language as mental organ
and innate faculty; on the other, there is political critique, to which Chomsky
gives a name and a literary referent – political satire as practised by Orwell.
On the one hand, we have the I-language; on the other, what Chomsky
sometimes calls (when he does not characterise it as literature or ‘folk-
linguistics’) the E-language – i.e. external linguistics.
I could end the discussion here, express my agreement with Chomsky’s
critique of American imperialism, acknowledge that satire is not science,
and that if there is a serious critical study of ideology (in the sense in which
Marx engaged in a serious critical study of capital), it has nothing to do with
the science of language. But serious problems remain that warrant critical
examination.
The first is the division between internal and external linguistics. These
two disciplines seem to share an object. English does not possess a word to
contrast languewith langage; a single word is used which does not facilitate
a distinction between the concepts. This would not matter if it did not induce
confusion about the phenomena that fall under the jurisdiction of one or the
other of the two disciplines. As we have seen, when he expounds his theory
of the I-language, Chomsky talks not only about highly abstract universals,
but also about semantic and syntactic phenomena that are likewise of great
concern to external linguistics. A detour via the absurd will hammer the point
home. Jack Goody^18 refers to anthropologists or mythologists inspired by
Chomsky who maintain that mythical narratives form part of the innate
genetic inheritance of the human monad, that they are therefore always –
already contained in the recesses of the human mind – which explains the
universal character of these narratives. It therefore seems to possess a tendency
to expand that constantly extends the portion of the innate, in order to furnish
a scientific explanation of as many phenomena as possible. The two disciplines –
internal linguistics and external linguistics – therefore have border conflicts
and obviously only confront another out of self-defence.
But the critique of Chomsky’s position must go further. The ultimate
justification of naturalist internal linguistics is that language is a specific
property of the human species. For chimpanzees do not speak – not even
bonobos, a species of dwarf chimpanzees who are the best equipped for
38 • Chapter Two
(^18) See Goody 1997.