John E. Joseph

This is a really smart article! Well-rooted in Thomas Kuhn, like all good scientific historiography, Joseph considers the Chomskyan "revolution," any simple acceptance of the existence of which has been hacked down by EFK Koerner, in a new light: not as Ursprung or as ultimately a non-event but as an "atavistic revolution," where he tries to reject his parents by aligning himself with his grandparents, so to speak. This requires a complicated oscillation between (at least) two operations: a rejection of the modernism (meaning the drawing of a line or creation of an aporia after which "real" work can be said to have begin) and an ironic distancing (a way to bridge that aporia while still guarding one's intellectual flank against the resistance of the disciplinary wisdom and the career exigencies, achieving the requisite amount or perception of novelty--depending on one's goal, to change a discourse or to achieve notice, in practice perhaps always both--in the context of what Joseph charmingly calls the "economy of dreams," that amount of originality which one is able to possess without being labelled a crackpot). The stakes are high, and the truth effaced as follows: "the first and perhaps most valuable lesson gained from historicity is the realisation that any sense we may possess of being the first to arrive at the truth is an illusion that will last only until the next generation falls victim to it."

In contrast to high-modern linguists like Saussure, Sapir, Bloomfield, each of whom Joseph demonstrates engaging in both these operations, Chomsky cleverly avoids the above fallacy: he creates an atavistic, not a modernist, aporia, aligning his heroes and himself with not an inch of ironic distance between them. But the strenght of his narrative is, as has been amply proven, also its downfall, as several generations of scholars from Salmon to Aarsleff to Robin Lakoff to Searle have beat Chomskyan linguistics bloody and kicked it while it was down. Tongue perhaps partially but certainly not fully in cheek, Joseph notes that in the thoroughness of their victory they really did Chomsky a favour: bereft to a great degree of his chosen ancestors, he went on to make himself sui generis, the magister figure a-borning, or a-bootstrapping, generative grammar style from inside his own skull. Very ha. Chapter appeared in Douglas A Kibbee, ed., Chomskyan (R)evolutions.… (mehr)