Sunday, April 30, 2000
Lecture Hall, 5:00 p.m.

Biography

Writings on the Web

Books

Biography

                 He was introduced to linguistics by his father,
                 William, a Hebrew scholar of historical linguistics. He
                 studied under Zellig Harris at the University of
                 Pennsylvania, where he received bachelor�s (1949)
                 and master�s (1951) degrees. He received his Ph.D.
                 from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955, but he
                 conducted most of the research leading to the degree
                 at Harvard from 1951 to 1955. He started teaching
                 modern languages and linguistics at the
                 Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955,
                 where he became a full professor in 1961 and the
                 Ferrari P. Ward professor of foreign languages and
                 linguistics in 1966.

                 His theory of transformational grammar set out in
                 Syntactic Structures (1957) revolutionized the
                 development of theoretical linguistics. He broke with
                 the dominant structural school, which held that
                 language is basically a system of syntactical and
                 grammatical habits established by training and
                 experience. Chomsky argued that humans have an
                 innate facility for understanding the formal principles
                 underlying the grammatical structures of language.
                 He argued that this explained how young children
                 can infer the grammatical rules underlying ordinary
                 sentences after hearing the speech of their elders and
                 then use those rules to generate an infinite number
                 and variety of sentences that they never heard
                 before.

                 Chomsky�s work virtually defined the methods of
                 linguistic analysis used in the second half of the 20th
                 century, though his assertions have not been widely
                 accepted. His other books on linguistics include
                 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Cartesian
                 Linguistics (1966), The Sound Pattern of English
                 (with Morris Halle, 1968), Language and Mind (1968;
                 revised, 1972), The Logical Structure of Linguistic
                 Theory (1975), Reflections on Language (1975),
                 Language and Responsibility (1979) and Language
                 and Problems of Knowledge (1988).

                 Chomsky also became known for his opposition to
                 the United States� involvement in the Vietnam War
                 during the late 1960s and early 70s. His political
                 tendencies toward socialism and anarchism are a
                 result of what he calls "the radical Jewish community
                 in New York." He published a book of essays called
                 American Power and the New Mandarins (1969)
                 which is considered to be one of the most substantial
                 arguments ever against American involvement in
                 Vietnam. His other books criticizing American foreign
                 policy and the role of giant corporations and the
                 mass media include Towards a New Cold War (1982),
                 Pirates and Emperors (1986), On Power and Ideology
                 (1987), Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in
                 Democratic Societies (1989) and World Orders, Old
                 and New (1994).

The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and
the Palestinians Excerpt

Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human
Nature and the Social Order Excerpt

What Lippman lays out in Public Opinion and in a subsequent book called The Phantom Public are the basic rules of behavior of those people who are interested
     in influencing public opinion. While some of the technologies have changed, the
     basic strategies that Lippman lays out are there from the beginning, and what is
     clear is, Never talk to people about real ideas. Never try to inform people about
     what issues are at play. Go to the gut. Symbols are more powerful than ideas. If
     you give people ideas they�re going to argue with each other. They�re going to
     debate things. But if you hit them with symbols, particularly symbols that have
     been separated from ideas and which have a kind of universal poignancy, you can
     turn a heterogeneous mass of opinion into a homogenous perception, a
     homogenous will. What Lippman says in the 1920s is that the key to persuasion is
     to intensify feeling and to degrade signification. This is his terminology.
     Politicians and steering committees and corporate boards have been behaving
     along those terms every since.

     Bernays was this guy who introduced mass psychology to the standard practice of
     PR. Bernays takes Lippman�s theory of public opinion and puts it into practice to
     sell soap, bacon, cigarettes, all kinds of things. He was the double nephew of
     Freud. His mother was Freud�s sister. His father was Freud�s wife�s brother. So this
     is a guy who was born in Vienna, who came to the U.S. early on in this century.
     Literally the unconscious is like dinner conversation at the Bernays�s household.
     One of the most famous of his promotions is when he went to work for the
     American Tobacco Company. One of the problems at the time was that women
     were not smoking enough in public. Why? You have to realize that this is a period
     of time when the health problems surrounding tobacco were considered relatively
     minuscule and where even doctors are giving testimonials in cigarette
     advertisements and women are being encouraged to reach for a Lucky Strike
     instead of a sweet, that this is a good diet aid. But still, there is this idea that a
     cigarette, this kind of miniature phallic symbol, is a symbol of masculine rights,
     precisely because men can smoke in public and women can�t. So he goes to a
     group of feminists?his wife, Doris Fleishman, was a feminist and very actively
     involved in these issues and pushed him in many of his campaigns. He goes to
     this group of former suffragettes and convinces them that they should have a
     march down Fifth Avenue carrying cigarettes in the air as torches of freedom. So
     he takes the symbol of masculine power, puts it in the hands of women, has them
     march, and all of a sudden the cigarette is not about tobacco, not about taste, not
     about smoke, it�s about freedom.

Wasn�t Bernays the pioneer in getting expert medical opinion to promote certain
advertising campaigns? Dentists agree, Doctors recommend.

     Bernays talks about is what he calls �opinion leaders.� You don�t want to waste
     your PR on everybody. There are certain people within the society who function as
     opinion leaders. At times those people may be celebrities around certain issues or
     sports stars. But one of the conventional opinion leaders, of course, is the doctor,
     the lawyer, the dentist, depending on what you�re talking about. So Bernays went
     to certain compliant doctors and got them to go along, but then also took that
     opinion leader and held him up for public visibility with the idea that the opinions
     of some will have influence over the opinions of others.

     But there are also occasions where even though the massive public relations
     industry, which is so well funded and organized, simply falls flat on its face. I
     think of the Three Mile Island incident and its aftermath.

     Part of why the history of PR is so interesting is because you see that it�s a
     history of a battle for what is reality and how people will see and understand
     reality. PR isn�t functioning in a vacuum. PR is usually functioning to try to protect
     itself against other ideas that are percolating within a society. So under no
     circumstances should what I�m saying about Bernays in terms of the use of social
     psychology indicate that these are automatic processes that always work. They
     don�t always work. They don�t always work because to some extent, despite what
     Lippman said, people don�t just function by pictures in their heads. They also
     experience things from their own lives. Often their experiences are at odds with
     the propaganda that�s being pumped out there.

     One of the most dramatic examples of this was during the Vietnam War. Because
     one of the standard drills about what happened in Vietnam and why the U.S. lost
     the war is that there were all these cameras out in the field that started sending
     pictures home. The U.S. had been sending cameras out into the field in the
     Second World War. That was part of the assumption, that bringing pictures home
     was part of the way in which you created an identification between people at
     home and the boys at the front. So the war photography done during the Second
     World War, rather than turning people off, provided a kind of visual bond between
     people back home and the GIs overseas. But what happens in Vietnam is that a
     technique that might have made sense in the Second World War because of what
     we were fighting for and who we were fighting against, all of a sudden becomes
     an Achilles heel. The very openness of the battlefield to journalists and
     photographers, which had been part of the way you fight a war in the 1940s,
     becomes a way you don�t fight a war in the 1960s. If you look at the Gulf War
     policy?every millimeter of visibility of that war was processed through the
     Pentagon?you see the way in which all of a sudden the war apparatus is saying,
     We need to rethink how we do this stuff and we need to present them with
     pictures where there�s no more blood and no more dirt.

That was true before the Gulf War. Grenada and Panama were also two very
carefully orchestrated media events.

     I didn�t tell that story about the First World War just for the hell of it. To some
     extent, just like Teflon is a development of war and all kinds of other new
     materials and technologies, war has often been the place where some of the most
     sophisticated propagandistic techniques or public information techniques have
     been developed. There�s no question they walk into Vietnam using weapons which
     are no longer applicable. In the case of Vietnam, the propaganda strategy and the
     reality of the war were at odds, and the U.S. has been laundering all information
     about foreign policy ever since.

     One of the interesting stories that you tell in PR is the Kuwaiti incubator incident
     in the fall of 1990. It involved Hill & Knowlton, one of the largest PR firms in the
     world, who incidentally were on the payroll of the Kuwaiti royal family. How did
     Hill & Knowlton engineer consent against Iraq and mobilize American public
     opinion for war?

     Hill & Knowlton and Burson-Marsteller are two huge corporations which are PR
     businesses, both of which are attached to huge advertising agencies. Hill &
     Knowlton is connected to J. Walter Thompson and Burson-Marsteller is connected
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