Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)

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Dissemination, Reconciliation, Authority: On Some Intellectual Keywords / Brian Thill

 

Production and Dissemination 

<1> Ours is an era of reinvigorated anti-intellectualism. This is a global problem, to be sure, but it's a problem that is particularly acute in the public life of contemporary U.S. culture. As such, we intellectuals - especially those of us developing our intellectual labor from a leftist position - need to think much more about the dissemination of intellectual ideas and practices than many of us have up to this point. While it's common practice for us to examine, say, what Badiou means, or why Sartre matters, we seldom devote comparable attention to the small problem of who is actually reading or benefiting from our analyses of these figures, not to mention the works of these and other thinkers themselves. Nor do the majority of us laboring in academic and other cultural sites of intellectual production invest nearly as much energy in understanding how the larger world of intellectual discourse in general is being employed in the practices of everyday life - if it ever is - by those people considered 'outside' the spheres of any readily identifiable intellectual class. Academic intellectuals in particular move within a professional environment wherein the idea, the argument, and the monograph can often matter as much as anything, and where considerations of mass audience or non-professional effects of intellectual discourse are seldom considered deserving of serious anxiety or attention. As with intellectuals generally, academics have developed their individual areas of expertise within neatly defined professional disciplines that often dictate the scope of intellectual inquiry. And yet at the same time, one of the foundational assumptions of intellectual production (occasionally explicit, but more often implicit) is that the subjects of our critical analysis have a meaningful, even profound, social value beyond their own immediate existence as artifacts of intellectual production.

<2> How is it, then, that the producers of intellectual critique across a wide array of cultural fields - among them art, literature, politics, philosophy, science, and history - can so thoroughly neglect or downplay the problem of audience at the same time? How is it that we can so easily assert the immense social and political values of these categories of knowledge and experience even as we do so little to gain as wide and engaged an audience for them as possible? With our venues for intellectual expression established, our journals and professional associations identified and situated within strict hierarchies, our immediate institutional affiliations determined and our professional obligations fulfilled, we can forget all too often about the putative social values of our work and instead get down to the business of establishing ourselves within the confines of particular idiosyncratic intellectual communities. We can do this, furthermore, at no great cost to our sense of intellectual self-worth or our professional ambitions, since many of us have also internalized a sense of intellectualism as being an inherently rarefied form of cultural labor, forever confined to its status as a relatively esoteric or elitist set of practices taking place in the backwater of contemporary mass culture. And because versions of this sentiment are so common, the question of whether any of our thoughtful analyses of cultural politics, liberation, race, class, social justice, literacy, peace, gender, and equality will ever reach beyond limited intellectual circles is seldom, if ever, our primary concern.

<3> For this reason and many others, this is an important historical moment to revisit Alan Wald's definition of the intellectual in The New York Intellectuals, a work that remains, two decades after its publication, one of the central documents of U. S. leftist cultural history. Surveying the important work of the variegated intellectual class we now identify as the anti-Stalinist left, Wald incorporates into his historical analysis a crucial argument about the broader necessity of intellectualism as such. More than a work of intellectual history, Wald's project also speaks to the inherent value and necessity of committed intellectual engagement in the broadest sense. As he argues, an intellectual is defined "not by personal attributes but by social function; an intellectual is one who is occupationally involved in the production and dissemination of ideas" (22). Moreover, insofar as the intellectual engages thoughtfully with the complex relationships between theory and action, politics and culture, and individual autonomy and commitment to collective justice - and does so without resorting to dogmatism and ideological mystification - he is, above all else, "independent within a committed position." Most importantly, Wald concludes,

intellectuals who make conscious political commitments cannot proceed according to abstract formulae that simply enjoin one to be 'pro-union' or 'pro-socialist.' Their conscious choices must be informed by a certain degree of political acuity based on real experience, and the precise form of their commitment must be subject to a control - to a checking mechanism, a 'critical consciousness,' which is that element of autonomy that still functions within the limitations of socially determined existence. (372)

<4> Intellectuals who make political commitments: for Wald - indeed, for all of us who recognize the social value of intellectual labor - this phrase may seem, on some level, repetitive. That is, intellectuals in Wald's sense of the term count some notion of political commitment as one of the central features of their status as intellectuals. Even among those for whom the more narrowly defined spheres of politics proper (political theory, political history, policy analysis, and so forth) are not the central subjects of their immediate disciplinary expertise, the political dimensions of culture and society are fundamental to their sense of the potential values of intellectual engagement. But even if we were to put aside for the moment the familiar assertions that all realms of culture are in the last analysis "political," we should see in Wald's argument an opportunity to revisit the following questions: What is this political acuity in the service of, at the end of the day? What is its reason for being? And given that the immediate objects of intellectual study are often history, literature, philosophy, and the realms of humanistic ideas, why must we speak of "political commitment" with regards to the social function of intellectual labor in the first place? An audience beyond our familiar and limited ones would need clarification on such matters before we could hold out any hope that our ideas might have any clearly political dimension.

<5> Of course, these are not new questions, and they're certainly not exotic or necessarily provocative ones. But they remain questions for which we have not yet begun to develop significant answers, often because they are immediately dismissed as relatively unimportant in comparison to production itself as an intellectual imperative. An intellectual can still lay claim to the legitimacy of his labor even if it lacks any significant audience or cultural impact, but the prevailing wisdom suggests that he could not get away with failing to produce something concrete as evidence of his intellectual commitment. What must happen with these ornate intellectual products once they're created is often much less clear. For the moment, let us entertain the idea that we need to take Wald's inclusion of the matter of dissemination as seriously as we now take intellectual production if the critical consciousness we employ is to have a truly social function in any meaningful sense.

<6> For those of us who take seriously both the intellectual imperative of dissemination and the cultural and political histories of U. S. leftism that occupy Wald's analysis, there is, it seems, a twofold problem in the contemporary situation. First, many intellectuals work within a social order that often marginalizes and devalues their labor. As if this challenge to the possibilities of public intellectualism were not enough, this marginality exists alongside ever-growing socioeconomic and cultural restrictions on a myriad of forms of access, including but not limited to the availability of affordable systems of high-quality education, cultural literacy, ready access to digital and textual resources, and the formative influences of intellectual communities of many types. These obstacles, among others, prevent large segments of the global population from cultivating opportunities to equip themselves with the capacity and interest required to engage in sustained intellectual labor in the first place. Lastly, a significant portion of leftist intellectuals, despite their good intentions, have become too chastened in their marginal role, too comfortable with their relative isolation from other aspects of the greater public sphere, and too content with the isolated professional functions of their work. Combined, these individual elements lead to the production of intellectual work that, while often brilliant and engaging in its own right, goes largely unread by a sizeable audience, and therefore cannot hope to have any significant impact beyond certain rarefied disciplinary enclaves.

<7> Many people, both inside and outside of demarcated intellectual circles, would not consider any of this an actual problem. Some of us have come to believe that intellectual labor is by its very nature antithetical to mass comprehension or mass appeal; or that intellectuals needn't concern themselves with a wider audience, or that it is naive to hold to quaint ideas about the transformative capabilities of intellectual engagement. Even if we may have no particular investment in subscribing to any form of cultural elitism, and in fact do believe in the potentially transformative power of intellectual labor and ideas, one could make the argument that it still smacks of the worst sort of faux-populist hand-wringing to suggest that the relative marginality of intellectual culture is somehow a problem in and of itself. Or it may be the case that a certain blindness regarding questions of audience, or the larger problem of dissemination generally, could itself be understood as a reaction to the contemporary cultural conditions that do not seem to place a sufficiently high value on intellectualism, the public sphere, literacy, literature, theory, or culture in general. If this is the case, we could then read the marginality of intellectual labor within contemporary society as a symptom of a corrosive external force, rather than an indication of any failure on the part of an intellectual class that is relatively resigned to its current vitiated form. If we were to accept this version, intellectuals themselves could hardly be blamed for such a state of affairs.

<8> But if the exclusivity of our discourses and practices is already part of the received common sense of intellectualism, then how are we really to interpret the political valences of Wald's ideas about dissemination, political acuity, and the social functions of a critical consciousness directed at intellectual matters? His invocation of the sociopolitical imperatives of intellectual labor is evident in all manner of other intellectual projects, many of which, despite the particular objects of their analysis, insist on a certain political urgency or agency incorporated within the not immediately "political" work at hand. In one form or another, such implicit claims to political relevance and agency have become familiar companions to intellectual production, but it is the kind of familiarity bred of a glib acceptance of what we believe to be an unassailable truth of intellectual production: I think, therefore I am political. But believing that one's ideas matter outside of their narrow professional and institutional functions is a very different thing than those ideas actually making a significant difference to individuals beyond certain prescribed intellectual circles. In short, if intellectual labor is to have a public dimension and is to serve a wider array of functions, we should think critically about what it is that takes place once our ideas are out there in the world, and to consider the extent to which they are all too often not in fact engaging with the world in any significant way.

Commitment and Reconciliation

<9> If we think of our intellectual labors as efforts to do more than merely perform the work of the intellect or achieve some measure of professional success, it behooves us to devote greater attention to dissemination of the products of intellectual labor for yet another reason. By devoting much greater attention to the imperatives of dissemination and thereby considering anew the problem of audience, the intellectual can potentially alleviate the ease with which his or her individual process of deradicalization can take hold. The conservatizing force of intellectual deradicalization -  what Philip Rahv has astutely characterized as a process of embourgeoisement, or reconciliation with prevailing political attitudes -  was one of the chief legacies of the anti-Stalinist left that occupies the center of Wald's cultural project. It is also, I would argue, a significant factor among contemporary U. S. leftist and liberal intellectuals, many of whom have made their peace with the seemingly unconquerable fact of global capitalism, Third Way neoliberal economic policies, and the platforms and programs offered by the candidates of the ruling-class parties. As such, it is especially important to remember that Wald's admirable work is meant to provide us with much more than a crucial archive of U.S. leftist history and culture. He is explicit about his desire for such projects of recovery to do more than merely fill in the gaps left by historical amnesia - gaps that lead not only to reductive scholarship, but to a process of intellectual revisionism that can make the transition into more conservative political modes much easier. One of the primary goals of Wald's intellectual project is the fulfillment of the hope that the kind of intellectual project he undertakes can "allay the process of deradicalization that eventually overtakes almost all whose lives are based in institutions of teaching, scholarship, and publishing during conservative periods" (13) -  and we are certainly in the midst of one of those.

<10> Satisfaction with the generally limited dissemination of our intellectual ideas and reconciliation with the prevailing political climate might appear at first glance to be distinctly different matters. One has to do, it seems, with the intellectual's individual political sympathies over time, while the other has to do with his readers (or lack thereof). But the very precariousness of intellectual labor in contemporary society can function as yet another force that can hasten the processes of deradicalization and reconciliation. Once our intellectual labor is compelled to find its place within a market economy, its products are prone to evaluation chiefly in terms of their perceived values insofar as they fill a suitable niche within that social order. At the same time, contentment with rarefied forms of intellectual discourse, in which we speak predominantly to and with fellow members of our distinct intellectual enclaves, effectively translates into small audiences, which in turn translates into more easily established norms of intellectual discourse, even of the putatively transgressive variety. Consequently, intellectual defense of radical positions and goals is simplified. Professional, institutional, and disciplinary insularity - which is both cause and effect of our limited modes of intellectual dissemination - makes acts of interpretation and critique easier because it makes the scope and effect of any radical position attached to those critiques relatively small. All of this can pass, furthermore, under the illusion that precisely the opposite is taking place: if the wider world refuses to condemn capitalism, we proclaim, then we'll take our stand in the pages of Social Text, say, or at an academic conference! The critical or "radical" stance that employs the rhetoric of interrogation as its hermeneutic still takes place within the objectionable system (as all our overtures must - there is, of course, no "outside," no Archimedean perch available to us). But what is most damaging about our proclamations is that we make them in such a limited venue, and have such narrow expectations for their effects, that we can more quickly and easily become seduced by the supposed transgressiveness of our discourse. These factors, combined with our own internalized sense of the zones of intellectual comfort, thus produce a form of reconciliation by default. The more that we allow our commitments to intellectualism to exist chiefly in narrowly defined disciplinary or institutional forms, the more ground we cede to the wider social domain of anti-intellectualism. As a result, the subsequent political reconciliation takes any number of specific forms in our contemporary situation: in the movement from anti-capitalism to neoliberalism, or from 'utopian' to 'practical' reformist politics or appeals to the demands of realpolitik. More than just a narrative of deradicalization, this trajectory embodies a reconciliation of a particularly insidious kind, insofar as its intellectual adherents are incredibly adept at providing extensive and often seductive rationales for their political transformations. The subjects of Wald's cultural history were skilled at just this sort of thing; and we can easily identify versions of the same transformation across the contemporary political spectrum as well.

<11> But there is more. If we were to grant any legitimacy to what I've argued here, an even more fundamental question remains: How we are to go about dealing with this crisis of intellectualism when so many social forces seem to make wholesale transformations of the intellectual's understanding of his own role largely impossible? As C. Wright Mills recognized in White Collar, his seminal sociological account of the fate of the intellectual classes in postwar America, more and more intellectuals in this period were becoming dependent salaried workers, transformed into commodities and thereby forced to sell their intellectual labor on the market. In so doing, the "nominal worth" of the intellectual is determined by the market, and not by the social or cultural value of the intellectual ideas themselves (152-153). From the vantage point of our new century, it's clear that this is an even more accurate description now than it was when Mills first made it half a century ago, given the new levels of power and influence wielded by the key political players on the global socioeconomic stage. As Mills recognized, there are many serious consequences to this commodification. The intellectual was now becoming "a technician, an idea-man, rather than one who resists the environment, preserves the individual type, and defends himself from death-by-adaptation." He could learn as much as he wanted to about contemporary life, but the problem was that, despite this knowledge, the intellectual would find the possibility of political agency increasingly unattainable. "This generates a malady," Mills concludes, "that is particularly acute in the intellectual who believes his thinking would make a difference" (157). As a result, alienation and objectivity become "fit moods and ideologies for intellectuals caught up in and overwhelmed by the managerial demiurge in an age of organized irresponsibility; signals that 'the job,' as sanction and as censorship, has come to embrace the intellectual….These are the ideals of men who have the capacity to know the truth but not the chance, the skill, or the fortitude, as the case may be, to communicate it with political effectiveness" (160).

<12> The professional and institutional demiurge and its formulation of "the job" have indeed embraced many of us who identify ourselves as intellectuals. Even worse, beyond the chance, skill, or fortitude that Mills suggests we have lost, I would add that many of us have also lost the desire to communicate the political dimensions of intellectualism and the related desire to join our intellectual endeavors to some broader social function. The process of commodification, combined with a nagging sense of the shrinking outlets for political engagement, produces an almost inescapable instrumentalization of intellectual labor, wherein the intellectual, largely bereft of political power or the capacity to 'make a difference,' begins to direct the majority of his critical energies instead to producing work that can hope to provide some measure of individual success or security. For academics, this would include the kinds of work that may help one's chances at promotion or tenure; for journalists and investigative reporters, those stories that satisfy the demands of editorial discretion, corporate ownership, and the delicate economies of the mass audience; and for political appointees, those views that will ingratiate the right persons in power, and secure lucrative positions within the revolving market of politics and big business interests. In many cases, the narrative of individual alienation and objectivity that Mills describes has now come full circle, so that it is no longer simply a matter of "the job" defining the scope of intellectual life, but now also includes the intellectual's own tendencies to see his current modes of intellectual engagement as that which most accurately defines the true nature of his "job" -  each constraint, from without and from within, reinforcing the other in a closed system of growing intellectual lassitude.

<13> With such a view of intellectual life, the tendency in many cases is for the intellectual to fall back on what at first may appear to him to be the ultimate task: developing a more easily instrumentalized disciplinary or professional authority as the best (because most immediately "productive") application of his labor and intelligence. Disciplinary study, while serving a wide range of productive professional and technical functions, can also invite a narrower and more restrictive understanding of intellectual engagement with crucial social and political issues. The difference to be made now seems less a social or political one than an individualized, professionally organized one. Aside from the damage this does to intellectual causes in any collective political sense, it now becomes clear that the opposing social forces - right-wing punditry, campaigns of misinformation, cultural demagoguery, and more  -  employ the very same logic in their critiques of intellectualism: Shut up and teach, they say. Go read your precious books and write your unread missives. In short, they imply, one should do his "job" in the more narrowly defined sense, and leave the engagement with important social and political issues to the handful of authority-figures whose "job" it is to tell us what is to be done. From both sides, the notion of what qualifies as the proper role of intellectual labor has been cut to fit the fashions of the age of organized irresponsibility.

<14> The instrumentalization of intellectual labor thus becomes one of the chief methods through which a creeping form of political reconciliation can take hold, since the myriad of professional and institutional demands alone that are placed on us can threaten to overwhelm the broader commitments to the sociopolitical dimensions of intellectualism itself. And since we continue to believe that it is in the nature of most professionally regulated forms of intellectual production to be relatively exclusive, the imperatives of dissemination and their political corollaries are likewise whittled down into small and beautiful artifacts contemplated only by the familiar initiates. Without prescribing a necessarily reductive set of guidelines as to how each of us might most effectively resist these corrosive influences, it is sufficient for the moment to recognize that it would not consist exclusively of the most traditional methods of intellectual conversation: conferences, academic publications, op-ed columns, public relations campaigns, and related phenomena of the familiar intellectual class. Resistance would also demand something more than merely adding to the already swollen chorus singing the praises of the liberatory power of the global commons gestured toward in various iterations of the internet. While the explosive growth of the digital commons has already had an enormous, well nigh unclassifiable impact on all manner of social and political relations, and is likely to transform utterly our received notions of intellectual engagement and political agency in the future, it currently remains a tool of a certain (albeit increasingly broad) class formation - as likely to open up the possibility of new forms of surveillance, tyranny, and coercion as to provide a platform for the overturning of a destructive social order on a global scale. For all of its growth across a spectrum of social strata in recent years, billions of people still labor outside of it, far removed from its radical possibilities; and even among those who do have access, the question of where, how, and if they engage with its artifacts remains a complicated and open one.

<15> At the same time, I am also not issuing yet another misguided call for popularizing (in the sense of simplifying or watering down) intellectual discourse - by which is meant, one assumes, a certain problem of style as the chief obstacle to mass appeal and a closer link between theoretical disquisitions and their deployment in the realm of actual lived experience. If there could be a potential answer to the corrosive force of the commodified intellectual's descent into an isolated position of political reconciliation, it would have to be neither purely technological (Read my latest post online! Give laptops to the poorest among us!) nor purely discursive (For the love of God, quit talking about hegemony and interpellation and just say what you mean!). Instead, it may need to begin with a social transformation as much as anything, occurring on the level of immediate interactions between individuals of radically different ideological persuasions, wherein the true stakes of intellectual life are more contestable and more nakedly displayed.

<16> At the moment, nearly everything about the social circulation of intellectual discourses is structured in such a way as to avoid anything so unseemly as direct confrontation with those who hold opposing ideological viewpoints. The self-regulating ecosystems of various intellectual communities are but one factor in the always uneasy and uneven pursuit of some form of ideological homeostasis. This tendency exists in spite of our adoration for the manifesto and the polemic, for "problematizing" and "interrogating," for seeking out and championing various aspects of culture and subjectivity as sites of endless play, resistance, freedom, and possibility. This is not to say that there is no substantive ideological diversity within intellectual circles - that it patently false - but it is to suggest that we often share our most impassioned critiques and develop our most profound senses of intellectual identity and activity at some remove from those whom we feel pose the greatest challenge to the intellectual values we hold dear. Many of us readily admit that we have great difficulty describing to our own families, friends, and acquaintances (not to mention strangers or other individuals in positions of power or influence) what it is that we do and why we believe that it matters. As a result, we have determined that it often doesn't make sense to try, since we have come to expect that they either won't understand what we do or won't much care. But if it's transformation we're after, the professional inclinations and institutional mechanisms by which we seek out and engage with likeminded people much more often than our ideological others could themselves be seen as part of the problem. If intellectually formed opinions and ideas matter as much as we believe they do, and mean more to us than their immediate use-value for our own careers or disciplines, then reifying those modes of intellectual activity is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. Day to day, we may feel that our ideas and our informed opinions matter most to our peers, colleagues, and sympathetic kindred spirits, but if our deeper commitments truly are to principles of equity, justice, anti-racism, human rights, and more, rather than to our individual lives as professional laborers within an intellectual class, then this needs to be more concretely reflected in our critical practices and our modes of intellectual engagement.

<17> In an age when professional specialization can often dictate far too much of the scope of social life, something as seemingly banal as this could in fact be more transformative than any of our more traditional modes of intellectual declaration and activism. Its impact, if any, would be modest, inscrutable, accretive; it would produce no manifestos, draw no ideological line in the sand. And yet this is no concession to gradualism or the politics of compromise. It is, rather, a more honest engagement with the absolute necessity of seeing the intellectual position as a process of winning real hearts and minds, and not as part of some academic parlor game in which we have already determined where and how and for whom our intellectual activities are undertaken. This is not intellectualism as ministry work, but rather a defense of intellectual life that moves beyond any sentimental notions of the intellectual class as a vanguard or as a contemporary version of classical scholarly monasticism. Put simply, if the ideology of anti-intellectualism evident in the current conjuncture gathers much of its rhetorical force by casting itself as a populist position, it is precisely a renewed connection between intellectual life and populism that is required. The subtext of Wald's project and others like it is that we should challenge anti-intellectualism on its own claims to populist sentiment rather than confining ourselves to current modes of intellectual discourse, not because this is the true mission of intellectual labor (there is no preordained purpose to intellectualism tout court) or because it is just another call for the marriage of theory and action (which, in any case, had always been a false dichotomy), but because the value of intellectualism and its chief practices - critical inquiry, dedication to legitimate factually-based research, thoughtful engagement with the complex tangle of ideas and value systems, and subtle and substantive analysis of human society and culture - is in danger of losing whatever authority or persuasive force it may have among those who would not characterize themselves as intellectual in any limited sense. This is a loss that should be unacceptable to everyone.

 

Authoritarianism and Authority

<18> On some level, what we've been saying should sound at least slightly absurd. After all, we intellectuals never signed on to our professions and disciplines because we wanted to become apostles or door-to-door salesmen for intellectualism itself (most of us didn't, anyway). In all likelihood, we embarked on our individual paths of intellectual discovery because we were drawn to the grand questions of philosophy, the imaginative power of the written word, the love of the lived experience of human history, and more. Why should we try to apply our methodologies to a more broadly drawn social function? If we can offer better arguments in favor of limited audiences as fine and desirable things, or if we can offer guarantees to ourselves that we'll remain steadfast in our individual political commitments, perhaps we can dismiss the anxieties that drive this essay and have done with such lofty talk. But what we maintain fidelity to, insofar as we are intellectuals in Wald's sense of the term, is the inherent value that committed study and some measure of authoritative knowledge employed critically can provide to our disciplines, our work, and our lives. And if this is the case, it's worth clarifying another of the foundational concepts that drives intellectual labor even as it often goes unremarked as an essential component of social and political life itself: that is, the notion of authority.

<19> Authority in all its social and cultural forms is a subject that mattered greatly to the leftist figures that occupy center stage in Wald's cultural analyses. Furthermore, it is a subject that should matter greatly to everyone in our era of globalization, particularly with regards to recognizing and understanding the radical difference between two distinctly different incarnations of the concept of authority. There is, of course, the idea of authoritativeness (which is, in one sense, the underlying raison d'être of all intellectual activity, whatever uses its products may be put to afterward) and then there is the problem of authoritarianism, which grows best in the dim light of ignorance and simplistic Manichean ideology. In addition to developing a deeper engagement with dissemination and working to cultivate a far broader audience (while not sacrificing fundamental institutional and professional duties for intellectualism), and in addition to working actively to fend off the attractions of individual deradicalization, it is also incumbent on the intellectual to seek out opportunities to reestablish the concept of legitimate authority as such. By this I mean much more than just his individual authority regarding particular subject matters and areas of disciplinary or professional expertise, but also the promotion and enactment of the value of legitimate authority itself. In an era characterized by class divisions, corporate greed, political corruption, and campaigns of deception and misinformation, it is not too much to say that the very fate of public life in this new century depends on a sustained effort by all parties (intellectuals and otherwise) to disaggregate these distinct and often contradictory versions of the concept of authority.

<20> In this respect, Pierre Bourdieu's characterization of the subject of authority is an important touchstone. As Bourdieu argues, the intellectual world must engage in "a permanent critique of all the abuses of power or authority committed in the name of intellectual authority," which would include, of course, "a relentless critique of the use of intellectual authority as a political weapon within the intellectual field" (19). This is especially crucial given that all too often, those who occupy positions of political 'authority' - really only a misnamed attribute for those in positions of power - are more likely to use their resources and influence (granted to them by virtue of their positions in authority, of course) to acquire ever greater concentrations of power rather than concern themselves with promoting and acting on authoritative knowledge that would better serve the commonweal. The real crisis is that such authority-figures do not even feel the need in many cases to validate or explain their actions in the name of intellectual authority, when blind and unquestioning consent will do - a form of power initially bestowed upon them by the citizenry through the already-coercive monopolies of power they hold as "authorities" as such.

<21> Bourdieu finds one possibility for resistance to such authoritarian systems in a particular kind of collectivist ethos: "To the production of these reactionary think tanks, which support and broadcast the views of experts appointed by the powerful," he argues, "we must oppose the productions of critical networks that bring together 'specific intellectuals' (in Foucault's sense of the term) into a veritable collective intellectual capable of defining by itself the topics and ends of its reflection and action - in short, an autonomous collective intellectual." The fundamental assertion here is important:

This collective intellectual can and must, in the first place, fulfill negative functions: it must work to produce and disseminate instruments of defense against symbolic domination that relies increasingly on the authority of science (real or faked). Buttressed by the specific competency and authority of the collective thus formed, it can submit dominant discourse to a merciless logical critique aimed not only at its lexicon […] but also at its mode of reasoning and in particular at the use of metaphors…. (20)

<22> Much of this should seem reasonable to many intellectuals, insofar as such categories of experience as 'symbolic domination' and 'dominant discourse' are among the chief targets of intellectual critique. But the question remains: exactly which individuals in society are being hailed here? Who is to be included under the rubric of this collectivity? If the mode of reasoning that undergirds authoritarian action is backed not by intellectual authority or right but simply by brute force, then Bourdieu's call should be interpreted to include the widest possible collectivity, for the critique of oppressive systems of authoritarian force to which so many across the globe are subject cannot and should not be confined to any existing intellectual class.

<23> If there is a pressing task for conscientious intellectuals who do not wish to see themselves as members of an elite class, nor as the inheritors of the logic of vanguardism, it is still the case that it falls to intellectuals in all fields and disciplines to begin to effect the aforementioned transformations in creative and committed ways. But for the legitimate forms of authoritativeness to begin to succeed where only authoritarianism had before, no "merciless critique" will dismantle the dominant discourses of corrupt authority unless it is part of a complex mass movement of which the intellectual plays an important, albeit only partial, role.

<24> In The Cultural Front, which shares with Wald's text a central place in intellectual engagements with U. S. leftist cultural history, Michael Denning provides an instructive distinction between commercial forms of success and what he calls 'cultural success,' in which certain ideological viewpoints become established as a kind of common sense that takes root in a given social order by reclaiming a wide array of cultural symbols so as to redefine the nature of the contested ideological ground on which they are established (159). What Denning describes here is more than just the historical impact of a certain intellectual class in the era of the Popular Front. As with Wald's attention to dissemination and the vocational dimensions of intellectualism, what is too often ignored by intellectuals of that era as well as ours is that any insight or argument developed as part of the contemporary intellectual's devotion to his work will always be of limited use if it is not linked up with some clear sense of purpose beyond the intellectual circles from which it initially issues.

<25> To use Denning's language, then, a contemporary commitment to the profound value of public intellectualism would need to achieve forms of cultural success beyond the professional enclaves from which that intellectual work emerges. The specific means by which this is accomplished, however, are anything but clear. But it isn't going to happen in the pages of Dissent or at the next gathering of the Radical Caucus - or rather, not only there. The intellectual must begin to rethink his preferred modes of political and social engagement on the largest and smallest of levels; he needs to look beyond the familiar and clearly demarcated social and cultural spheres that effectively keep his or her ideas at the margins. For the intellectual who believes in the social and political value of the project of intellectual labor itself (beyond its immediate professional or market values), and who values the legitimate rather than the coercive and false forms of authority, the very phrase "public intellectual" should seem redundant. And yet we only need to look at ourselves and our current practices to discover that it is not yet redundant; the intellectual is not yet public. We have too often made the choice to place a premium on the professional and disciplinary dimensions of intellectual life, at the expense of so much else. Intellectualism that cares little for its populist possibilities, or that gives scant attention to the problems of dissemination and authority and their relationship to political reconciliation, is, in the end, meaningless. The committed position espoused by Wald and other advocates of a populist dimension to intellectualism demands a multifaceted response in the age of globalization, wars on "terror," and the full flowering of organized irresponsibility.

Works Cited

Bourdieu, Pierre. Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2. Trans. Loïc Wacquant. London: Verso, 2003.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front. London: Verso, 1997.

Mills, C. Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. 1951. New York: Oxford UP, 2002.

Rahv, Philip. "American Intellectuals in the Postwar Situation." In Essays on Literature & Politics 1932-1972. Ed. Arabel J. Porter and Andrew J. Dvosin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978. 328-334.

Wald, Alan M. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

 

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