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#360 – Public Intellectuals For What?

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

on making more efficient the inefficient pursuit of ideas.

All men are intellectuals, . . . but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.” – Antonio Gramsci

The publicity around Louis Menand’s new book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University*, is generating lots of contemplation of public intellectualism.

Horace blogs about re-imagining the teacher as public intellectual. Ferule & Fescue add that part of this intellectual activity involves offering students “ways to be in the world”:

But more generally, and maybe more importantly, by being public intellectuals in the classroom, we’re modeling for our students what it means to be engaged by literature or history or art, and why those subjects might continue to matter and have relevance for them even once they’re out of school. I think often about a comment a reader left on my blog, a couple of years ago, after I’d written about three former students who had collectively asked me out to lunch. I was trying to figure out whether they were looking for me to be a friend, or were thinking about grad school, or what–and my reader remarked that many smart young people are just looking for ways to be in the world, and that we often model that for them in ways we’re not aware of.

I have Menand’s book on my list to read, as I imagine many others do too, but in the meantime, since all of this conversation is occurring on blogs and websites, I return to questions that have arisen on HASTAC before: what role digital technologies in public intellectual life if we broaden it to include more than just a “marketplace of ideas”? Why does Menand equate public culture with the marketplace — and how are we both replicating these assumptions, and also offering alternatives to them, in the digital humanities?

The question of the marketplace leads to the vexing issue of “efficiency,” an ideal that Menand embraces, but which I argue we should probe more carefully. In excerpts published in Harvard Magazine, Menand borrows from William Bowen and Neil Rudenstine’s study, In Pursuit of the Ph.D., to explain why graduate students in the humanities take so much longer than other graduate or professional students to complete their degrees (often up to 10 years), Menand writes that Bowen and Rudenstine:

suggested that one reason for this might be that the paradigms for scholarship in the humanities have become less clear. People are uncertain just what research in the humanities is supposed to constitute, and graduate students therefore spend an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with a novel theoretical twist on canonical texts or an unusual contextualization. Inquiry in the humanities has become quite eclectic without becoming contentious. This makes it a challenge for entering scholars to know where to make their mark.

Menand righteously criticizes the trick played on graduate students in higher education: the labor systems of universities exploit the old ideals of specialization to earn a Ph.D. in order to maintain a cheap labor pool of instructors; and even those who finish the degree then find themselves in an extremely difficult job market. Perhaps, he asks, if we abandon the dissertation for one peer-reviewed article and shorten the time to degree, this could improve the situation by making graduate school more efficient.

All well and good. But why does Menand obsessively focus on efficiency? Why a “marketplace of ideas” instead of some other form of public culture? Why are ideas — and the social institutions in which they are created — necessarily best operated on a market model?

I agree with Menand that, “there should be a lot more Ph.D.s.” I would also be willing to entertain the notion that Ph.D.s “should be much easier to get.” But I disagree about the rationale for this reform. Menand argues that it would lead to greater “efficiency” (this is a book titled The Marketplace of Ideas, after all). But this does not really address the deeper longings that drive people to seek graduate education.

Perhaps efficiency is the whole problem here. Menand bemoans that, “People are uncertain just what research in the humanities is supposed to constitute.” But maybe that’s exactly what those students are looking for when they emulate their professors. To return to Ferule & Fescue’s post, they are doing more than “just looking for ways to be in the world.” For, perhaps what professors as public intellectuals (at least in the humanities) “model” for students is not so much “ways to be in the world” as ways to not be so certain how to be in the world? And maybe the world could use more of that uncertainty.

If we started to imagine models of public culture and public intellectualism (and teaching and graduate education and economic dynamics) that were not equated with a mere marketplace of ideas, could this lostness regain its value, its purpose? Shouldn’t markets serve public culture (and private longings) rather than vice-versa?

*I hope the (unintended) irony of linking to the Amazon.com page for Menand’s book has become apparent by the end of this post. It makes me think about the potential non-consumer dimensions of Amazon’s vast storehouse of book titles and reviews — non-consumer value from which Amazon, of course, seeks to profit (just turn on 1-click order!).

Posted in Civic Culture, Culture Rover, Digital Culture, Intellectual Culture, Public Culture | 2 Comments »

#346 – Come Gather Round (the Computer) People

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

of digital public intellectuals, civic engagers, and policy wonks.

(1) Michael Bérubé visited our Engaged Humanities Scholar as Public Intellectual research workshop at Northwestern U in mid-October. He was smart and funny, offering a model of the public intellectual as witty and welcoming to others.

(2) He talked about his new project, The Left at War, which examines intra-progressive intellectual debates about the military responses to 9/11. Michael argues that cultural studies–particularly the legacy of Stuart Hall’s more explicit political examinations of the ideological background in which Thatcherism emerged in 1980s Britain–can help us gain a better sense of how to build a progressive multilateralism in the US and the world (imitating Hall’s famous phrase “Marxism without guarantees,” I’d call Michael’s vision “multilateralism without guarantees”). Michael’s point was to use Stuart Hall’s more political analysis rather than his more famous subcultural studies work in order to critique both the liberal hawk pro-war position, which was easily coopted by the right, and to criticize what Michael calls the “Manichean left,” which assumes that the enemy of my enemy is my friend (even in this case fundamentalist terrorists). Though I want to learn more from the book about how, exactly, cultural studies fits into this new model of progressive internationalism (Ellen Willis figures in the part of the book Michael did not discuss as much during his visit, which can’t be a bad thing!), Michael’s careful effort to think through how ideas and culture relate to the world of politics was captivating.

(3) Michael’s visit, which took place the same weekend as the wonderful conference at U of Iowa called Platforms for Public Scholars, made me think more consciously about the whole concept of the “public intellectual” in our time. I was left thinking about three different models of public intellectual that both overlap and diverge:

(a) The classic public intellectual is the heroic (foolhardy?) book reviewer or essayist with a desk copy, a 1000 to 5000 word limit, and a deadline for publication. This is the typical version of the public intellectual in which the world might become the alcoves at CUNY in the 1930s and 40s and we might become all New York Intellectuals sparring in the generalist, non-specialist public sphere of debate and discussion. The digital comes into play here as book reviews and essays give way to blogs and multimedia formats: can a general, broad, inclusive public sphere of intellectual engagement function in this new space? Can it be more democratic and widely participatory than the exclusivity of intellectual life in the world of New York Intellectuals and other cafe intellectual traditions?
(b) The Platforms for Public Scholars offered a different model of the public intellectual, what we might call the civic intellectual, a figure who works in radically-democratic, service-based collaboration with members of other communities (youth groups, schools, unions, associations, towns, and the like) on products of knowledge exploration and acquisition. The civic intellectual is not necessarily a generalist, but rather knows how to bring specialized training in a scholarly field to bear on a particular project, and also is open to learning from other, non-academic communities. This model most directly challenges older versions of university-centric scholarship, which is so influenced by its monastic origins. And the digital seems to offer one way by which civic intellectualism might flourish, bringing the university and the world beyond the campus gates together in productive and new ways. *But* this is not quite the same thing as (a) the classic public intellectual. And therein lies a tension concerning the public intellectual and the digital. What is gained, what lost, in the differences between these two models? How might they overlap in useful and worthy ways?
(c) Finally, a third kind of public intellectual is the policy wonk. This figure is more closely aligned with government and political parties. He (and often it’s a he, though increasingly less so) tends to think little of culture, and live in a world even more insular than the academic. It’s the institutions of policy wonkery to which Michael Bérubé wants to introduce the tools of cultural studies (though in doing so, he also wants to reshape what culture studies is, moving it away from simplistic pop culture transgression-equals-resistance assumptions to Hall’s more supple explorations of the linkages between culture, ideology, and politics). Unlike the classic public intellectual, the policy wonk is less concerned with maintaining a distance from centers of power. Unlike the civic intellectual, the policy wonk tends to be less concerned with the processes of “democraticizing knowledge” (by and large), and more concerned with actual ends and results through access to power.

(4) So, how might these three kinds of public intellectualism intersect and overlap and diverge? Where does the digital fit? Are there other kinds of public intellectual activity and what should be their relationships to the models above. I think there are great and perhaps even insurmountable differences between the three models above, and I am left thinking about the role of the digital in exacerbating these differences and, also, the potential of the digital to offer tools for reorganizing public intellectual life in new ways. I want to get away from the “digital is democratic, may a 1000 blogs bloom” euphoria. At the same time, I think the digital does offer enormous potential for a sense of quality intellectual engagement and civic belonging beyond both what the book, magazine, newspaper, and cafe could do in days of yore as well as what the campus could do with chalk and chalkboard.

(5) I’m starting to think about how the abstractions above can be applied to particular projects of scholarly inquiry. So as I begin to organize my next research projects, I am pondering how I might move among the three models above while developing a history of folk music festivals, a biography of Paul Goodman, or a history of the 1976 US bicentennial. And I am thinking about how the digital might be applied in this research, and I’m particularly contemplating how one might represent these different sorts of projects in U.S. intellectual and cultural history through digital means.

For instance, how might the participatory and multicultural dimensions of folk music festivals appear digitally? How might not only the analog music of banjos and clogs and slide guitars and accordions, but also the feeling of community and exchange at these festivals, be investigated through digital means? How might Goodman’s multi-genre approaches to public life appear online? How might the reader/viewer/interactor with this material contribute to making meaning out of it? How might I represent the knowledge gleaned from my research so that it can “go viral,” mutate, be used and re-used in new ways?

(7) Thanks again to Michael Bérubé for his enormous energy and generosity of time and spirit during his visit.

X-posted (and revised somewhat) from HASTAC blog.

Posted in Culture Rover, Digital Culture, Folk Culture, Historical Culture, Intellectual Culture, Media Culture, Musical Culture, Public Culture, Seventies Culture | 5 Comments »

#336 – And Now For Something Completely Different

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

michael palin stresses comedy’s changing role.

A lot of contemporary comedy seems self-conscious. It’s almost documentary, like ‘The Office.’ That’s a very funny show, but you’re looking at the human condition under stress. The Pythons made the human condition seem like fun.

- Michael Palin, quoted in “On Comedy’s Flying Trapeze,” by Charles McGrath, New York Times

One can surely find exceptions, but Palin’s comments seem spot on. Comedy was about breaking free ecstatically in the 60s and 70s, whereas contemporary comedy has oddly become the opposite. On “The Office,” “The Daily Show,” and, in deeply ironic mode, “The Colbert Report,” among other programs, comedy has become a call for restraint and common sense.

This isn’t a bad thing. It just is. And it is still funny. But it also has a larger significance.

In the 1960s, laughter marked what John Cleese called, in the New York Times article, “screams of liberation” against the limitations of society. But in a contemporary public culture that sometimes feels as if it has no more limits, less and less structure, and fewer boundaries of civility or standards of decency, comedy is no longer the clarion call for freedom. Goofy satire worthy of Aristophanes no longer does the trick.

In the 60s, the goal was to show that the emperor had no clothes. In the 2000s, when the clothes off various emperors were finally torn off, what we then saw were obscene and indecent abuses of power. And in the last year’s health care debates, we learned that efforts to engage in civic dialogue only resulted in screams of a different sort — not cries of liberation but coordinated efforts at distortion and obstruction.

Comedy becomes a barometer for this situation, but this barometer is a strange one, for it can make the weather as well as measure it. What role comedy will play beyond the Bush years of undisclosed locations, bungled wars, inept governance, and economic meltdown and subterfuge remains to be seen. But it’s not liberation we need anymore. We need something completely different.

So maybe it is good that contemporary comedy seems almost moral, with fish slapping replaced by ironic modes of fingerwagging. The “screams of liberation” have become dire sighs of exasperation. And once those sighs are exhaled at “the human condition under stress,” perhaps we will be able to breathe again with a bit more ease.

Posted in Civic Culture, Comedy Culture, Culture Rover, Public Culture, Sixties Culture, Television Culture | 3 Comments »

#331 – The Public Health

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

struggles over the care of bodies private and public.

What has been most fascinating about the otherwise utterly scary town hall protests by radical right wingers around the U.S. (guns and swastikas anyone?) is that these protests point to a larger struggle going on currently in Obama’s America: the struggle over who will control representations of the American public.

It is odd, but somehow fitting, that this larger contest over representing the public is taking place through an issue that is most of all about the intimate and private dimensions of our lives: the health care of our bodies.

Central to the right wing’s goals when disrupting town hall meetings was not only to shift public debate itself, but also to recast perceptions of who the public was. Whether coordinated or spontaneous or both, these protests rippled through the mass media with a new representation of public opinion: of what “the people” of the republic, the citizens, us in the U.S., were thinking.

Being noisy, putting private bodies and voices into public forums (or what passes for them), was an effective way to re-represent whose political opinions were legitimate and worthy of explicit political representation, in other words of who the public was and what they desired. Right-wing protesters transformed what seems to be, demographically-speaking, a small fringe population into the population writ large: the people were speaking, their protests suggested as they circulated through the media, and this public was saying that they might have to water the tree of liberty with their “natural manure.”

The struggle over the representation of the public is largely a matter of scale and mode of expression: in a mass society, an effective roar by a few citizens can overwhelm quieter but more widely-held opinions. And, if you think about it, what do we think and want, anyway? Privately, I would wager, many Americans have quite complex and intricate attitudes, particularly when it comes to the issue of health care. So the individuals in the American public, and the concept of the public itself, are both very amorphous.

And yet, in a democracy, the public is an essential — perhaps even required — concept. Whether one argues that consent gets manufactured in this public, or that opinions can arise authentically from debate and discussion, in order for democracy to be democratic, it requires a public. This social body has to arise out of private citizens whose opinions, whether freely-formed or manipulatively forged, define what seems normal and right. More importantly, this public’s opinion, its perceived beliefs and values, give ballast to the actions of the state. Without the public, in a sense, there is no democracy — even a questionably democratic one.

So the public and how it gets represented is very important. Maybe this is why the left as well as the right has been spending so much time exploring how it might function now in the age of the blogosphere. Could a new kind of public emerge from online interactions of opinion and information? What sort of public?

The health care debate is becoming a test, in a sense, of the left’s ability to represent the public that supported and elected Obama. The idea (always a distortion) that the left was a small group of “latte-drinking” liberals controlling the larger American public no longer holds in post-Obama America. But then, what sort of public replaces this representation by the right of the left over the last ten or twenty years?

Yesterday, we began to see that new, amorphous public coming into view. Progressives were able to pressure their representatives in the House into making the “public option” (interesting appearance of that word, in this case as a representation of the state) a non-negotiable item for the health care bill that might emerge in Congress. And Internet-savvy activists flooded television and other forms of media to represent the constituents of those House reps — which we might call “the public,” of course, that is demanding the “public option.”

It helps, too, that the mass media itself has had to respond to these changes in the public by representing progressive voices and bodies. A station such as MSNBC is doing this for commercial gain, but commerce, like politics, is rooted in perceptions of who the public is and what they want.

Was it any accident, then, that this dramatic change in perceptions of the public debating — and the public debate over —health care occurred the same week as Netroots Nation? Probably just a coincidence, but a telling one. “Changing the face of progressive politics,” which Netroots Nation declares as its slogan, has everything to do with putting a new face on the public: who is in it and what it desires.

It turns out the health care of individual bodies has everything to do with the care paid to the social body. We live and die by what we think the public is and want it wants.

Posted in Civic Culture, Culture Rover, Mass Culture, Media Culture, Private Culture, Public Culture, Television Culture | 1 Comment »

#329 – Highest Common Denominator

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

envisioning the dream of the commons in mass culture.

An increase in scale does not always entail reductiveness: one effect of the best mass culture is to trace or forge the connections among the unprecedentedly diverse experiences of its unprecedentedly broad audience. When artists find this common ground, the experience, however fleeting, of so enormous a community is visionary and exalting. When they fail, they can retreat into an irony that thrives in the vast range and dense detail of American consumer culture.

- George Scialabba, writing against Dwight Macdonald’s “Masscult and Midcult”

Posted in Arts Culture, Civic Culture, Consumer Culture, Culture Rover, Mass Culture, Popular Culture, Public Culture, Unfamiliar Quotations | 1 Comment »

#317 – My Baby Don’t Care

Monday, June 8th, 2009

when “i don’t care” is caring deeply: tom stoppard’s rock ‘n’ roll & the sixties.

If the genre of rock ‘n’ roll proposed that pop music could be theater, then Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ‘n’ Roll proposes that theater could be rock ‘n’ roll. At least in Charles Newell’s staging at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago this was the case. Featuring rows of stacked amplifier speakers and stage spotlights behind all the scenes, whether they took place in Cambridge, England cottage gardens or Communist-era Czech flats, the set hinted at how rock music suffused the most informal spaces of everyday life with an energy of the theatrical.

As the play conveyed quite well, rock circulated a pulsating dreamworld light that was at once semi-secretive, a glow concealed in the grooves of LPs and hidden within inner sleeves of record covers, and roaringly present, exploding the listener into an alternative universe of drama, comedy, and catharsis. Not unlike its precise opposite — state surveillance — rock was both always there, lurking in the shadows, and front and center, mesmerizing the citizenry.

stoppardrocknroll

Rock ‘n’ Roll, by Tom Stoppard.

“I don’t care,” is the final line of the play. It is spoken by the middle-aged English daughter of a Cambridge Marxist philosopher to her father’s ex-student, a Czech lover of Western rock who stumbles into becoming an anti-Communist dissident. She declares “I don’t care” after she runs off with the student decades after they first met in the months after the 1968 Prague Spring. By play’s end, it’s 1990, the year after the fall of communism, and she says the line moments before she and her new lover witness the Rolling Stones performing in Prague.

In the immediate context of the scene, the line teeters between an admission of failure and a shout of astounding victory.

Most directly, “I don’t care” is about the daughter finally forgiving herself for her own sense of a wasted youth.

But it also sounds like Stoppard himself finally giving up on the conventional Marxist politics that guided key characters in the play, such as the daughter’s father, a stalwart Stalinist and CP member. At the same time, “I don’t care,” also sounds like a suspicion that, even when rock music kept the spirit of dissidence alive in the Eastern Bloc, the Rolling Stones’ performance feels surprisingly like a shallow victory over communism. Thrilling, yes, but anything more than that? Knowing that the fall of communism only presented the new, and deeply troubling, problems of global capitalism in Eastern Europe, we’re not sure.

As the play ends, the spotlights turn up and glare into the audience’s eyes. We’re blinded for a moment. We care deeply, and in a blast of bass, guitar, and drums, are swept up, carefree.

But there’s more.

“I don’t care.” This line is spoken, I think, in the spirit of the Plastic People of the Universe, the Czech rock band who haunt the play along with the ex-Pink Floyd singer and Cambridge, England, recluse Syd Barrett. Like so many counterculturalists, the Plastics just wanted to be free. They sought self-expression and group experimentation and a space for art-making. The Plastics merely wanted to play their music and thought of themselves as apolitical. They “didn’t care.” Yet they became dissidents, co-conspirators with Vaclav Havel, and a cause célèbre in the West, simply for not caring.

Not caring, when you get to thinking about it, actually turns out to be a complex idea. Stating that “I don’t care” is, oddly, a declaration of caring. In negating concern, it winds up communicating concern. Intentionally foregoing control, the speaker of this declaration asserts a strange kind of autonomy. Far from apathy, “I don’t care” comes across in Stoppard’s play as a carefully-wrought carefreeness rather than carelessness. The choice not to choose is to care enough not to care.

Okay, so it all starts to make sense, perhaps, the more stoned one gets. Fine, so be it. That does not make it any less intriguing as a speech act or the staking out of a position. To not care is to ask whether any of one’s past was worth it at all. To throw in the towel. To cease to matter. And yet, to not care is also the encapsulation of what Stoppard notices as the strange politics of the sixties counterculture: the refusal of “I don’t care” is what, in fancier language, the historian Julie Stephens has called, an “anti-disciplinary protest.”

“I don’t care” becomes a kind of paradoxical statement close to the heart of the sensibility that guided the sixties counterculture. If not exactly political, then the declaration “I don’t care” was certainly public.

It was, after all, a declaration of independence — one with all the dangers of living in, and living out, the paradox of caring not to care.

Addendum: “Can theatre and rock music ever mix?”

Image: Goodman Theatre

Posted in Aural Culture, Culture Rover, Marxist Culture, Musical Culture, Political Culture, Popular Culture, Public Culture, Sixties Culture, Theater Culture | No Comments »

#316 – Bodies Upon the Gears

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

standing bodies, dancing bodies, social bodies.

Two extremely different events — the “Tank Man” from the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and a white man getting his groove on at the Sasquatch Music Festival — but they seem oddly connected to me as examples of individuals sparking democratic collective consciousness and action through use of their bodies.

The “Tank Man” is iconic, serious, political, death-defying. The white man is from a banal everyday moment, silly, cultural, life-affirming. But both individuals are brave in their own way, and both point to the multiple levels at which, when it comes to social, political, and cultural change, the exact relationship between the individual and the collective remains so ineffable and mysterious (while also so embodied and bodily!).

(I should say that I post this comparison at the risk of what for some may be a trivialization of the “Tank Man”; but I think it’s worth keeping the links open between moments of politics and of pleasure, of deadly-serious acts of courage and light-heartedly-comic acts of foolish inspiration. Though they are different, they are perhaps not entirely unrelated.)

The Tank Man (set to music and a message from the video maker).

(Note: be sure to watch the video through to its joyous end.)

Posted in Culture Rover, Dance Culture, Political Culture, Public Culture | No Comments »