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The Anxiety of Influence A complex teacher-student relationship was under construction here--one that has provoked speculation, particularly among Harris's friends and followers. Harris's involvement in Chomsky's political and linguistic work, and the proximity between his own and Chomsky's approaches, has triggered debate about influence, authority, and power struggles. Similarly, speculation about the relationship between Chomsky and his students has sparked discussion and even controversy in more recent times. A number of commentators have talked about the proximity of Chomsky's linguistic theories to those of Harris. In "The Fall and Rise of Empiricism" (1976), Jerrold Katz and Thomas Bever write, "[Co]ontrary to popular belief, transformations come into modern linguistics, not with Chomsky, but with Harris's rules relating sentence forms. These are genuine transformations, since they are structure-dependent mappings of phrase markers onto phrase markers. That this is so can be seen from the examples of transformations Harris gives" (292). Even the 1986 edition of the New Encyclopedia Britannica has something to say about this relationship: "Since [Zellig] Harris was Noam Chomsky's teacher, some linguists have questioned whether Chomsky's transformational grammar is as revolutionary as it has been taken to be, but the two scholars developed their ideas of transformation in different contexts and for different purposes. For Harris, a transformation relates surface structure sentence forms and is not a device to transform a deep structure into a surface structure, as it is in transformational grammar." This kind of anxiety-of-influence inquiry, which often leads to psycho-analytic-style postulations and projections or else Foucauldian-style power analyses, excites the imaginations of some observers. In a recent gossipy history of linguistics since the 1940s called The Linguistic Wars, Randy Allen Harris maintains that there have been huge power struggles over the years between Chomsky and his own students and colleagues. Chomsky's opinion of this type of thinking in general, and of the R. A. Harris book in particular, is predictably denunciatory, to say the least: "There [are] a few people (neither students nor colleagues of mine, for the most part) who see themselves as having been involved in 'power struggles,' but that is part of their life, not mine ­ actually, their fantasy life. I was never involved" (14 Aug. 1995). Any close teacher-student relationship is bound to involve an exchange of influence, and will often give rise to some bad feeling. But Chomsky believes that the field of linguistics is especially likely to set the stage for such interpersonal dynamics. As he sees it, the problem lies in the rift between linguistics as it is described by historians of linguistics such as R. A. Harris, Dell H. Hymes, or P. H. Matthews, and as it is actually practiced by linguists: "All of this has to do with the extremely sharp break that took place from the early '50s (and if you count my private hobby, from the late '40s)" (31 Mar. 1995). This break is not clearly demarcated in well-known histories of linguistics, such as those by P. H. Matthews or Dell H. Hymes. The general impression conveyed in these texts is that Chomsky was following up on, rather than radically questioning, previous work in the field. Chomsky deplores the stance that many who are active in the area of linguistics research have adopted towards the origins and development of their discipline: By the early '60s, linguistics was going off on a totally different course, and the people actively engaged in it aren't interested in history (I disagree with that attitude, but it's a fact, just as people active in research in chemistry don't tend to care much about the history of the subject, even if it's recent history). The result is that history is often written by outsiders most of whom have only the vaguest understanding of what was happening, or have special axes to grind. (31 Mar. 1995) R. A. Harris doesn't give the impression that he has an "axe to grind," although in his historical chronicle he clearly takes sides against Chomsky on most issues. More striking, though, is his soap-opera style of fashioning a narrative: intrigues are developed, villains are created, and plots thicken. The work of R. A. Harris is an example of the so-called Foucauldian genre of history, an approach that emphasizes the power struggles among key players. One has the impression in reading this kind of work that these struggles are what drive researchers (including Chomsky) to pursue one or another avenue of research. This kind of work lends an air of intrigue to the field but, for Chomsky, contributes little to our understanding of it. In the context of his studies, Chomsky continued to attempt "to make sense of Zellig Harris's Methods and procedural approaches to language altogether in the operationalist style of the day" (3 Apr. 1995), while still working on generative transformational grammar as a kind of hobby. He remained at Penn primarily because of Harris and the newfound stimulation of political and philosophical discussion. But he strongly believed that the things he really cared about, libertarian politics and a new vision of the entire field of language studies, were essentially personal interests (hobbies) that ultimately had to be pursued beyond the institution.