For the past few years there has been much ado about the decline of the public intellectual as a force in society. Populist heroes or at least demagogues have taken their place claiming a mandate from society as their authority rather than wisdom or scholarship. Closer examination shows that the history of intellectuals in general and public intellectuals in particular isn't very inspiring. Frances Stonor Suanders writes:

Last week came an announcement from the University of London's Birkbeck College that it intends to establish a centre for public intellectuals. Its international director is to be Professor Slavoj Zizek...

'Political issues are too serious to be left only to politicians,' says Zizek. 'We need intellectuals - not to make decisions, but to make clear what the issues are about.'

Trust for politicians being at an all-time low, it is tempting to believe him. But what exactly is a public intellectual? Unfortunately, Birkbeck doesn't tell us. There's some woolly stuff about the centre putting itself at the 'forefront of current intellectual debate', about making 'public intervention on issues of current importance'. The centre's inaugural project will be a series of lectures honouring the life and work of Jacques Derrida.

There's an interlude of Derrida derision and then some history:

Draped in the mantle of Emile Zola, whose open letter in defence of Dreyfus, 'J'accuse', had rocked the French establishment, Sartre argued a generation later that the intellectual had no right to the privilege of distance or detachment in moments of political extremity. He had to forgo those soft self-probings in the ivory tower and 'take hold of his era firmly', working with society to change it. The private life of the mind had to give way to a more public engagement with the struggles taking place in the real world.

In the 1930s, the real world was worrying itself through a prolonged political and economic crisis that threw the intelligentsia into a state of tension sometimes verging on panic. Congregating to the creed of intellectual activism, in the spring of 1935 a group of French intellectuals organised the International Writers' Congress for the Defence of Culture, perhaps the largest and most ambitious mobilisation of its kind.

The principal organisers of the congress - Malraux, Gide, playwright Jean-Richard Bloch and Louis Aragon, grand inquisitor of the French left - were all communists or philo-communists. They had been to the Soviet Union, had seen how the Comintern organised such assemblies. They returned full of admiration for the Soviets' ability to mobilise intellectuals. Stalin, at this time, was peddling the international image of the Soviet Union as a cultural utopia. It was a brilliant, and entirely cynical, foreign- policy manoeuvre whose primary pur pose was to drum up and recruit docile but influential allies.

The Paris congress replicated the Soviet model. There were party hacks everywhere, whispering backstage, horsetrading with delegates, forcibly removing hecklers. Aldous Huxley was indignant and complained of five days of 'endless communist demagogy'. On his return to England, he wrote that he had hoped for 'serious, technical discussions ... but, in fact, the thing simply turned out to be a series of public meetings organised by the French communist writers for their own glorification and the Russians as a piece of Soviet propaganda. Amusing to observe, as a rather discreditable episode in the Comedie Humaine'...

In an age of extremes, the middle ground disappears. The fatal compromise made by intellectuals in the Thirties was to abandon the search for an alternative, a 'neither/nor', and to sign up instead to the Manichaean 'either/or'. As a result, good intentions and real moral courage (of the kind that took many writers and artists into the trenches of the Spanish Civil War) were sacrificed to an impossible bargain. After the congress, Brecht summed it up in words of acid irony: 'We have just saved culture. It took a total of four days, during which we decided that it's better to sacrifice everything than to let culture be destroyed. If necessary we are ready to sacrifice 10 or 20 million people to this end.'

We should keep this history in mind when we hear present day academics hurling charges of anti-intellectualism about with wild abandon. I much prefer non-authoritarian intellectuals who are proud of being criticized and gleefully toss bombs, at least stink bombs, into every staid gathering. Consider Hitchens' views:

Now, to "consider the alternatives" might be a definition of the critical mind or the alive intelligence. That's what the alive intelligence and the critical mind exist to do: to consider, tease out and find alternatives. It's a very striking fact about the current degeneration of language, that that very term, those very words are used in order to prevent, to negate, consideration of alternatives. So, be aware. Fight it every day, when you read gunk in the paper, when you hear it from your professors, from your teachers, from your pundits. Develop that kind of resistance.

The word "intellectual" is of uncertain provenance, but there's no question when it became a word in public use. It was a term of abuse used by those who thought that Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was guilty in 1898 to describe those who thought that he was probably innocent. It was a word used particularly by those who said that whether Captain Dreyfus was innocent or not, that wasn't really the point. The point was, would France remain an orderly, Christian, organic, loyal society? Compared to that, the guilt or innocence of Captain Dreyfus was irrelevant. They weren't saying he was necessarily guilty, they were saying, "Those who say he is innocent are not our friends. These are people who are rootless, who have no faith, who are unsound, in effect." I don't think it should ever probably lose that connotation. And fortunately, like a lot of other words that were originally insults--I could stipulate "Impressionist," which was originally a term of abuse, or "suffragette" or "Tory," as well as a number of other such terms--there was a tendency to adopt them in reaction to the abuse and to boast of them, and say, "Well, all right, you call me a suffragette, I'll be a suffragette. As a matter of fact, I'll be an Impressionist."

I think it would be a very sad thing if the word "intellectual" lost its sense that there was something basically malcontent, unsound and untrustworthy about the person who was claiming the high honor of the title. In politics, the public is the agora, not the academy. The public element is the struggle for opinion. It's certainly not the party system or any other form whereby loyalty can be claimed of you or you can be conscripted.

I would propose for the moment two tasks for the public intellectual, and these, again, would involve a confrontation with our slipshod use of language. The first, I think, in direct opposition to Professor Carter, is to replace the rubbishy and discredited notions of faith with scrutiny, by looking for a new language that can bring us up to the point where we can discuss shattering new discoveries about, first, the cosmos, in the work of Stephen Hawking, and the discoveries of the Hubble telescope--the external world--and, second, no less shattering, the discovery about our human, internal nature that has begun to be revealed to us by the unraveling of the chains of DNA.

The term intellectual is, or should be, an insult. Intellectuals - if they are in fact neither/nor critical minds, alive with intelligence, considering, teasing out and finding alternatives - should relish the abuse. When they cease to be bad boys and join a club they cease to be useful or admirable, they become dupes and tools - useful idiots as they are called today - for whatever organization is promoting itself at the time. For most of the twentieth century it was the communists who made use of the idiots. Today it seems that an odd couple coalition of Islamists and ex-communists are making use of them though there are several other coalitions too. They are all anti-American and often anti-semitic as well, which would be fine if they were also anti every other identifiable grouping in the honorable neither/nor tradition, but they aren't. They aren't critical minds, live intelligences, they are just the other side and seem as if they have once again "decided that it's better to sacrifice everything than to let culture be destroyed. If necessary we are ready to sacrifice 10 or 20 million people to this end."

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Chinese governments struggle to govern Chinese intellectuals. [via Arts & Letters Daily] As a vernacular phrase, "public intellectual" is less than four years old in China. Normally the use of such a term, which smacks of free expression and......[read more]
Tracked: February 7, 2005 09:52 PM