More than a little ironic, then, that he has done his best to contribute to the much greater marginalization of the anarchist perspective. In These Times , and Z Magazine , but has never mentioned Anarchy , Fifth Estate , or other anti-authoritarian publications. Uncritically championing the liberal-left media while totally ignoring our own media can hardly be an accident or an oversight. The real answer, painfully obvious, is that he is not an anarchist at all. Long a professor of linguistics and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he achieved fame and fortune for his conceptions of the nature of language.
Language develops along an intrinsically determined path, very much like a physical organ.
In other words, language, that most fundamental part of culture, has no real relationship with culture and is a matter of instinct-driven formation through biological specialization. Here, as everywhere else, Chomsky cannot even seem to imagine any problematics about origins of alienation or fundamental probings about what symbolic culture really is, at base. Language for Chomsky is a strictly natural phenomenon, quite unrelated to the genesis of human culture or social development. A severely backward, non-radical perspective, not unrelated to his unwillingness to put much else into question, outside of a very narrow political focus. Not surprisingly, it was a rather strange affair, given the professor's general antipathy to all three topics.