Chomsky’s influence on political life seemed to peak, at least in the United States, in the early Seventies, after which, we can’t help noting, the threat of being drafted and sent to Vietnam ended for many of his most ardent campus-radical supporters. (It probably hadn’t helped that he’d spoken up for the Khmer Rouge over in Cambodia and for the Palestinians back when the Israelis were still the guys in the white hats, then turned around and defended a book, which he later admitted he hadn’t read, that denied the historical reality of the Holocaust.) And there was the problem of Chomsky’s own prose style, a flat, humorless affair that left many readers hankering for Gary Trudeau and Doonesbury. But Chomsky kept writing—and writing and writing. By the 1990s some publishers were savvy enough to publish his political essays as short, reader-friendly paperbacks, making him more accessible to a mainstream audience. Then came the attack on the World Trade Center and the Bush administration’s response, which apparently caused some people to feel they needed an alternative to the daily media spin. Suddenly Chomsky was no longer a figure on the radical fringe. His fierce denunciations of U.S. foreign policy (he views America as the mother of all “rogue states” and the Bush administration’s “grand imperial design” as an out-of-the-closet version of the kind of global aggression and disregard for international law we’ve been guilty of since the end of World War II) resonated with many people who did not consider themselves radicals, or even leftists. Chomsky’s 9-11 (2001), Power and Terror: Post 9-11 Talks and Interviews (2003), and Hegemony or Survival (2004) all made the bestseller lists, and his backlisted political books have sold millions of copies.
RECOMMENDED READING: Aforementioned bestsellers, plus you might want to try Language and Mind, a series of three lectures Chomsky gave at Berkeley in 1967, for his clearest statement on the relations between his theory of language and his theory of human nature; follow with Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar (1966), an easy-to-understand reprise of his basic linguistic beliefs. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) is the classic working out of Chomsky’s mature theory, but if you stood even the slimmest chance of being able to read it, you wouldn’t be reading this. Many of the early political essays are collected in American Power and the New Mandarins (1969); a more recent collection is Deterring Democracy (1991). SUSAN SONTAG (1933-2004)
She delineated a new aesthetic, heavy on style, sensation, and immediacy. For Sontag (the Sontag of the Sixties, that is) art and morality had no common ground and it didn’t matter what an artist was trying to say as long as the result turned you on. For everyone from the Partisan Review crowd to the kids down at the Fillmore, she seemed like a godsend; she not only knew where it was at, she was where it was at. A serious thinker with a frame of reference to beat the band, a hard-nosed analytical style, and subscriptions to all the latest European journals, she would emerge from her book-lined study (where she had, presumably, been immersed in a scholarly comparison of Hegel’s philosophical vocabulary, Schoenberg’s twelve-tone theory, and the use of the quick cut in the films of Godard), clad in jeans, sneakers, and an old cardigan, to tell the world it was OK to listen to the Supremes. Maybe you never did understand what Godard was getting at— at least you knew that if Sontag took him on, he, too, was where it was at. Ditto Bergman, Genet, Warhol, Artaud, John Cage, Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Norman O. Brown, and the government of North Vietnam. Eclecticism was the hallmark of Sontag’s modernist (today, read postmodernist) sensibility. A writer who had, at the time, all the grace and charm of a guerrilla commando issuing proclamations to a hostile government, she came under heavy attack from her critics for her political naïveté (and revisionism); for the uncompromising vehemence of her assertions; and for suffering, as one writer put it, “from the recurring delusion that life is art.” Over the years, however, as life came more to resemble bad television—and after Sontag herself survived breast cancer—she changed her mind about a lot of things, denouncing Soviet-style communism as just another form of fascism and insisting that style wasn’t everything after all, that the content of a work of art counted, too. In a culture increasingly enamored of simple-minded stereotypes and special effects, Sontag crusaded for conscience, seriousness, and moral complexity. She also branched out: writing theater and film scripts, directing plays (notably, a production of Waiting for Godot in wartorn Sarajevo in 1993), and trying her hand at fiction—she produced a self-proclaimed “romance” (The Volcano Lover, 1992) that managed to get some rave reviews. Still, throughout her life she remained outspoken about politics. For example, she made plenty of enemies after September 11,2001, when she wrote in the New Yorker, “Whatever maybe said of the perpetrators … they were not cowards.” Her last piece, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” published in 2004, the same year that she was to die of cancer (after fighting the disease, on and off, for more than thirty years), reflected on the photographs of Iraqi prisoners tortured at Abu Ghraib. In it she declared, that, as representing both the fundamental corruption of any foreign occupation and the signature style of the U.S. administration of George W. Bush, “The photographs are us.”
RECOMMENDED READING: Against Interpretation (1966), a collection of essays that includes some of her best-known works, e.g., the title piece, “On Style,” and “Notes on Camp.” Styles of Radical Will (1966), another nonfiction grab bag whose high points are a defense of pornography (“The Pornographic Imagination”), a lengthy discussion of Godard (“Godard”), and one of her most famous—and certainly most readable—essays, “Trip to Hanoi.” On Photography (1977), the book that won her a large lay audience and innumerable enemies among photographers (and that helped a lot of people feel they finally knew what to make of Diane Arbus). Illness as Metaphor (1978), written during her own fight against cancer, dissected the language used to describe diseases and challenged the blame-the-victim attitudes behind society’s cancer metaphors. AIDS and Its Metaphors (1988), a kind of sequel to the above, exposed the racism and homophobia that colored public discussion of the epidemic. AND EIGHT PEOPLE WHO, AMERICAN OR NOT, HAD IDEAS WHOSE TIME, IT SEEMED AT THE TIME, HAD COME MARSHALL McLUHAN (1911-1980)
“The medium is the message,” of course. That is, the way we acquire information affects us more than the information itself. The medium is also, as a later version of the aphorism had it, “the massage”: Far from being neutral, a medium “does something to people; it takes hold of them, bumps them around.” Case in point—television, with its mosaic of tiny dots of light, its lack of clarification, its motion and sound, and its relentless projection of all of the above straight at the viewer, thereby guaranteeing that viewer an experience as aural and tactile as it is visual. And high time, too. Ever since Gutenberg and his printing press, spewing out those endless lines of bits of print, the eye had gotten despotic, thinking linear, and life fragmented; with the advent of the age of electronics man was at last returning to certain of his tribal ways—and the world was becoming a “global village.” There were those who dismissed McLuhan (for the record, a Canadian) as less a communications theorist cum college professor than a phrase-mongering charlatan, but even they couldn’t ignore entirely his distinction between “hot” and “cool” media (it’s the latter that, as with TV or comic books or talking on the phone, tend to involve you so much that you’re late for supper). Besides, McLuhan had sort of beaten his critics to the punch: Of his own work, he liked to remark, “I don’t pretend to understand it. After all, my stuff is very difficult.” R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER (1895-1983)