The Agony and the Acolyte

[Note:  This anecdote is a footnote to a larger topic treated in a previous essay

     Chomsky,  Freud,  and the problem of acolytes

into which it should  in time  be incorporated; but meanwhile, here you go.]

"I was wearing my herringbone jacket, and when the other man came in -- he was ten years older than me -- he was wearing an almost identical herringbone jacket.  The woman turned to him and said ‘What a nice jacket!’ … There I sat in the same jacket, making self-satiric gestures of Hey, look at me!  But they went right on talking about his jacket."

-- Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis:  The Impossible Profession (1981), p. 53

Analogs of this anecdote have been experienced by many;  I’ll only mention mine because it ties in with the theme of Chomsky and his acolytes.

~

At Berkeley, after switching from the Ph.D. program in math to that of linguistics, I T.A.’d one semester, during my first year as a graduate student, for George Lakoff, who at that point (ca. 1974) was a highly visible figure in linguistics, but not yet outside it.   George too had started out in mathematics, and we were both interested primarily in semantics, so it was a natural fit.  George had sat in Chomsky’s seminars, and had begun his career contributing to -- or thinking he was contributing to -- the fashionable generative enterprise that Chomsky  more than anyone  had set rolling.  So, I was  at that point  potentially a sort of Chomskyite acolyte paravail.  (Though by then, Chomsky and Lakoff had had a sharp falling-out, that was only to sharpen.  In theoretical content, their differences -- and subsequent careers -- somewhat recall those dividing Freud from Jung.)

Anyhow -- a bunch of us were sitting around a table  at a lively and informal discussion  in an upper room of Sproul Hall.  As a newbie, I was reticent about presuming to contribute, but at one point  something really germane occurred to me, and I said -- whatever, “Blah de blah de blah de blah.”

Crickets.  -- No, not even crickets:  that at least implies a pause.  No, the waters of discourse were in no way ruffled, but rolled on as though I -- or rather the empty spectre occupying my chair -- had said nothing.

OK fine.  But then around one minute later, Geoge Lakoff gets this really thoughtful look on his face, and says, “Hmmm….. “ -- The buzz of conversation is suspended as we await what the great man might say. -- “Y’know…” now smiling, and warming to the idea, “y’know, what I think, is,  Blah de blah de blah de blah.”

Almost everyone gasped at the brilliance of the insight.  Everyone except me, and Miriam P., who was sitting immediately to my right, and with whom I had casual but friendly relations.  She turned to me, uncertain if she had heard aright, and said:  “Didn’t you just say that?” -- I shrugged.  And soon disassociated myself from that particular clique. 

That proved to be a fateful step career-wise, since I never essayed to join another one.  Among the faculty, I probably hung around Malkiel more than anyone;  but since I was not in the Romance Philology program (and had not the requisite genital configuration), I was nothing like a Malkielita (as some were known).

After college, I had the option of accepting the offer of either Berkeley or Stanford (for the math program);  in either case  I probably would soon have switched to linguistics:  since in math, as in monasticism, one must have a Vocation.  As chance had it, UC Berkeley was increasingly a hotbed of anti-Chomskyism;  with a different fall of the die, at Stanford, I might well have enrolled among the Chomskettes/Chomsquinos/Chumaysikaat (an Arabic joke, that last one; a physics, the one in the middle).