Thursday, September 13, 2007

Last Intellectuals Lonelyhearts Club Band

Twenty years ago this fall, the intellectual and cultural historian Russell Jacoby lit a lamp in broad daylight, rushed into the marketplace, and shouted, "The Public Intellectual Is Dead!"

Like the madman in Nietzsche's "Gay Science" (who cries incessantly, "I seek God!"), Jacoby's 1987 book "The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe" asked, "Where are the younger intellectuals?" And like the madman, Jacoby was greeted with scornful laughter. Not from conservative intellectuals (who, as Jacoby pointed out, continued to write for a general audience, which might explain the 1980s), but from postmodernist professors who felt no nostalgia for the sort of universalist, utopian thinker and writer who'd loomed large in midcentury America. Utopian thinking is proto-totalitarian! We were well-rid of ideology-mongering "New York, Jewish, and Other Intellectuals," as one of Jacoby's chapters described the likes of Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, C. Wright Mills, and Dwight Macdonald.

As for Jacoby's accusation that intellectuals no longer criticized the status quo in a manner accessible to the educated public, it was "glib, superficial, and oracular," as one reviewer put it. After all, there were still plenty of journals and other periodicals for smartypants -- like October, Cineaste, and the Voice Literary Supplement -- right? And what about the "tenured radicals" we'd all heard so much about from conservatives?

Remember, though, how Nietzsche's so-called madman -- whom we ought to regard as a public intellectual, really -- responds to the jibes of his sophisticated peers. "Whither is God?" he cries. "I will tell you. We have killed him -- you and I." As Scott McLemee points out in a fine essay in the current issue of Bookforum, Jacoby's polemic wasn't romanticizing the intellectual scene of the 1950s. Instead, he was accusing his contemporaries and peers -- ex-utopians and activists who'd come of age in the '50s and '60s -- of having allowed themselves to be absorbed comfortably into the rapidly expanding postwar academy. It was very tough to be an independent thinker, and to survive as a freelance intellectual, in the '50s, according to Jacoby. But in the '80s it was even tougher to think and write like an intellectual should, because the putative heirs of the "last intellectuals" were almost entirely preoccupied (a term Jacoby uses as though it's synonymous with "possessed") by "the academic idiom, concepts, and concerns."

Tenured radicals were, after all, professional academics, and professionalization takes its toll: Jacoby accused his former comrades of having withdrawn their "intellectual energy from a larger domain to a narrower discipline." Never mind how subversive their ideas supposedly were: No one could understand them! The fact that the post-last intellectuals had all moved to the suburbs didn't help. As for October, Cineaste, and the Voice Literary Supplement, in his preface to the 2000 edition of "Last Intellectuals," Jacoby merely names these periodicals, refusing to dignify them with insults.

At the end of Nietzsche's parable, the madman gives up on trying to persuade his contemporaries, saying: "I have come too early, my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men." What of Jacoby's juniors, then? Did we get the memo? When "Last Intellectuals" appeared, were we busily breaking free of academe and doing intellectual work in the public square?

Jacoby didn't think so: "Younger intellectuals, whose lives have unfolded almost entirely on campuses, direct themselves to professional colleagues but are inaccessible and unknown to others," he scolded. Alas, he lamented, there were few American critics or thinkers under the age of 45 writing with vigor and clarity. If anything at all interesting was happening in the late '80s, according to Jacoby, it was in the pages of "little, little magazines" -- which those of us who were in our 20s then called zines. But even zines "seem to have lost their zeal and direction," Jacoby couldn't resist adding; unlike, say, Partisan Review, which addressed itself not only to aesthetics but to the burning political and philosophical questions of the day, most zines stuck to fiction and poetry.

Twenty years later, Scott McLemee -- who was in his 20s in 1987, and who describes himself elsewhere as "a perpetual student who does a lot of independent reading but isn't seen in public, let alone at any university, all that often" -- doesn't disagree that "the material conditions sustaining the possibility of an unattached intelligentsia" didn't exist when "The Last Intellectuals" was published. And in the '90s, he says, things got even worse: "Academic professionalization... went into overdrive," sucking young thinkers ever deeper into the "institutional machinery." Shades of Herbert Marcuse's "one-dimensional society," in which criticism and activism isn't outlawed, but instead becomes obsolete because the critics and activists are too well-integrated, too happy!

However, McLemee is not devoid of hope. He concludes:

Under the circumstances, any notion of a public-intellectual sphere functioning apart from institutional machinery seems preposterous.

Unless, of course, that machinery accidentally re-creates some of the constitutive elements of the old cultural order: a body of surplus intellectuals who are not very well integrated into the system. Who have (for example) full access to the range of questions and ideas debated within scholarly networks but cannot find full-time employment in academic institutions -- the products, but also the victims, of a system of higher education that is ever more dependent on a parttime labor force....

Such people, finding themselves excluded, might in time start wanting to "exclude the excluders." Then the tenor of intellectual discourse might change, and public life with it; and a space for discussion might appear in which it would be possible to move in more than one dimension.

Adjunct professors, over-educated bloggers, and freelance book reviewers unite! La lutte continua!

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 01:12 PM

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