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Mr. Fish and Mr. Chomsky
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Mr. Fish and Mr. Chomsky
Our very own Dwayne Booth — who cartoons and sometimes writes under the name Mr. Fish, of course — has a new post up on Truthdig, recounting a 2008 interview with provocateur extraordinaire Noam Chomsky, who is, in Mr. Fish's words, "all by himself, The Beatles of smart guys." (Chomsky is also a Philly native, for what it's worth.) It's a worthwhile, if lengthy read, and a bit unlike any interview with Chomsky I've seen elsewhere. A taste:
MF: Was that more about some form of academic freedom than artistic freedom? Are they more or less the same thing?
NC: There are always attacks on academic freedom, but I think it's better protected now than it has been in the past. There is repression and [there are] bad things that happen, but if you look over time it's nothing like what it's been in the past. I mean, take surveillance, let's say, bad thing. What was in the '60s? The FBI was all over the place, the Army had surveillance systems, the CIA had surveillance, way more than what it is now. Now you can do things with electronic surveillance, OK, big deal. I was active in the resistance and took for granted that the phone was probably tapped, but it never constrained us. If you had to do something that you didn't want the FBI to hear, you did it privately. Everybody knew that whatever group you were in was infiltrated, and you could usually guess who the infiltrators were, but if you wanted to do something serious, say help a deserter, you did it with an affinity group. If you think about repression, as bad as it may be today, it doesn't even come close to COINTELPRO. That was running through four administrations—mainly Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, where it was stopped—and it went all the way to political assassination. Is that happening now?
MF: Depends on who you ask, I guess.
NC: And [Woodrow] Wilson's Red Scare made it all look tame. So, sure, bad things are happening, but we shouldn't exaggerate. There have been a lot of gains.
MF: Still, and getting back to my point about the mollification of the artistic community, there seems to be fewer and fewer expectations that an artist will or even should engage in world politics.
NC: Expectations from whom?
MF: From the public, the dominant culture, the government, certainly.
NC: The corporate media aren't going to encourage them to be subversive, but has that ever been the case for art?
MF: No, but the amount of discouragement from the private sector seems new. At one time, it wasn't so outlandish for a person to say that he or she wanted to become a painter or a novelist or a playwright—it was a lifestyle, in fact, that suggested its own spiritual reward, and politics was traditionally considered to be part of the lifestyle, usually dissent.
NC: But that's a different kind of change. The freelance intellectuals, whatever they were, the writers and artists, over the years have drifted towards institutions, so now instead of being a [full-time] novelist you'll be a novelist on the side and teaching creative writing at the university. That wasn't an option in the '40s and '50s.
MF: And that's the loss, the sidelining of passion, of truth-seeking.
NC: Well, it's an institutional change. To some people it may have restrictive consequences, maybe impose internal conditions on the work they do, but it certainly doesn't have to.
[...] via Mr. Fish and Mr. Chomsky :: The Clog :: Blog Archive :: Staff Blog :: Philadelphia City Paper. [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Dave St Clair, Archibald Bates, Orson Winkler, Hatty Pumpworth, Whaley Harris and others. Whaley Harris said: Mr. Fish and Mr. Chomsky http://twurl.nl/b5h1z7 #ulf [...]
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