Whilst I’ve heard the name many times I’ve only recently discovered this persons work. Fascinating and frightening in equal measure the documentary below is a great introduction to his work as an activist and political & cultural critic. Whilst it was only made in 1992, and has dated in truly ghastly ways, it is inescapable how every idea explored is as relevant (and with the passing of time more urgent) today; the actors may have changed, but we’ve kept to the script.
I’m also curious about his work in linguistics, particularly the concepts of Generative Grammar he began exploring in 1957 in his book Syntactic Structures
a finite set of rules which are based on a subconscious set of procedures that can be applied to generate all those and only those sentences (often, but not necessarily, infinite in number) that are grammatical in a given language
I can see this having an impact on my own thoughts about generative processes in design and it’s visual language.