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Wherefore Zellig Harris?

During the tenure of his Harvard fellowship (1951 ­ 55) Chomsky spent much of his time in Cambridge, but still maintained his relationship with Zellig Harris, who continued to teach at the University of Pennsylvania. From the mid-1950s on, however, Chomsky had little contact with Harris, and from the mid-1960s none at all. Harris's linguistics project, as we have seen, became of marginal interest to Chomsky, who had by then taken off in a different direction. Linguistics, at that time, looked to Chomsky as though it were destined to reproduce the same exercise to the point of absurdity:

I remember as a student being intrigued [by linguistics] ­ the problems were fun and everything ­ but we were all wondering what we were going to do in ten years. Suppose you've done a phonemic analysis of every language. Suppose you've done an IC[immediate constituent] analysis of every language. It's fun to do. It's like a cross-word puzzle. It's challenging and hard. But it's going to be over in ten years. That's the way the field looked. It looked as if it were essentially over. (qtd. in R. A. Harris 83)
Zellig Harris, Chomsky recalls, "had this idea of trying to do something new by looking at the structure of discourse. He tried to use the features of linguistic analysis for discourse analysis" (qtd. in R. A. Harris 83). From this project discourse analysis was born. Chomsky was in search of transformations "to model the linguistic knowledge in a native speaker's head," while Harris was interested in "such practical purposes as machine translation and automated information retrieval" (R. A. Harris 84). Their linguistic interests were irrevocably diverging. Chomsky's last communications with Harris were in the early 1960s, "when [Harris] asked me to [approach] contacts at the [National Science Foundation] for a research contract for him, which I did. We then spent a couple of days together in Israel, in 1964. After that, there was no contact. No falling out, just a mutual understanding, better left unsaid" (23 June 1994).

Prior to his death in the early 1990s, Harris completed a political book, which he wanted to publish in England because he felt that the working classes there were more highly developed. It has just recently been accepted for publication, thanks to the efforts of Harris's wife, Bruria, and those of Seymour Melman, Norman Epstein, and others. Both Chomsky and Melman read the book in manuscript form, and Chomsky remarked that it contained "many interesting things." Melman assisted with the scholarly apparatus of the manuscript and sent it on to Chomsky, who contributed "a few missing references and the like" (18 Feb. 1993).

For those who know Chomsky and knew Harris, their relationship, despite its early demise, remains important for many reasons. The values, the intellectual rigor, and the concern for emancipatory movements that pervade the many works of both men testify to their tenacity and integrity as intellectuals and individuals. They inspired one another. Russell Jacoby does not mention Harris in his work The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, but what he says about Chomsky, Murray Bookchin, Paul Goodman, and Isaac Rosenfeld could be applied equally to Harris: "to the extent that they are anarchists, they distrust large institutions, the state, the university, and its functionaries. They are less vulnerable to the corruptions of title and salary because their resistance is moral, almost instinctual." Marxists charge that anarchists think ethically, not strategically. Jacoby, however, is convinced that this is one source of their power: "Marxist intellectuals can and do convince themselves to subordinate mind and ethics to a larger goal or distant cause that frequently slips out of sight. Anarchist intellectuals are less susceptible to this logic. To use the language of historical materialism, it is no accident that currently an anarchist, Noam Chomsky, is the most energetic critic of intellectuals apologizing for American foreign policy" (96 ­ 97).


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