Anxious Intellects: Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment Values - Softcover

Michael, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822324962 ISBN 13: 9780822324966

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

Intellectuals occupy a paradoxical position in contemporary American culture as they struggle both to maintain their critical independence and to connect to the larger society. In Anxious Intellects John Michael discusses how critics from the right and the left have conceived of the intellectual's role in a pluralized society, weighing intellectual authority against public democracy, universal against particularistic standards, and criticism against the respect of popular movements. Michael asserts that these Enlightenment-born issues, although not "resolvable," are the very grounds from which real intellectual work must proceed.
As part of his investigation of intellectuals' self-conceptions and their roles in society, Michael concentrates on several well-known contemporary African American intellectuals, including Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West. To illuminate public debates over pedagogy and the role of university, he turns to the work of Todd Gitlin, Michael Bérubé, and Allan Bloom. Stanley Fish's pragmatic tome, Doing What Comes Naturally, along with a juxtaposition of Fredric Jameson and Samuel Huntington's work, proves fertile ground for Michael's argument that democratic politics without intellectuals is not possible. In the second half of Anxious Intellects, Michael relies on three popular conceptions of the intellectual-as critic, scientist, and professional-to discuss the work of scholars Constance Penley, Henry Jenkins, the celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking, and others, insisting that ambivalence, anxiety, projection, identification, hybridity, and various forms of psychosocial complexity constitute the real meaning of Enlightenment intellectuality. As a new and refreshing contribution to the recently emergent culture and science wars, Michael's take on contemporary intellectuals and their place in society will enliven and redirect these ongoing debates.

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John Michael is teaches in the department of English at the University of Rochester. He is the author of Emerson and Skepticism: The Cipher of the World.

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""Anxious Intellects" introduces fresh material and a generally new tone into the discussion of the quarrels now familiarly known as the culture wars. Readers will welcome its efforts to disabuse parties on both sides of some of their more comforting fantasies about intellectual labor and to move the debate about intellectuals and politics onto more fruitful terrain."--Ellen Rooney, Brown University

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ANXIOUS INTELLECTS

Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment ValuesBy JOHN MICHAEL

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2000 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-2496-6

Contents

Acknowledgments......................................................................................ixIntroduction: Fundamental Confusion..................................................................11 Publicity: Black Intellectuals as Inorganic Representatives........................................232 Pedagogy: Enlightened Instruction as Oppressive Discipline.........................................443 Community: Pragmatism as a Profession of Anxiety...................................................644 Culture: Western Traditions and Intellectual Treason...............................................895 The Critic: Cultural Studies and Adorno's Ghost....................................................1116 The Scientist: Disembodied Intellect and Popular Utopias...........................................1317 The Professional: Science Wars and Interdisciplinary Studies.......................................148Conclusion: Tattered Maps............................................................................169Notes................................................................................................177Bibliography.........................................................................................203Index................................................................................................213

Chapter One

Publicity: Black Intellectuals as Inorganic Representatives

A group of African American professors who also write for a popular audience has received more sympathetic press than most academic intellectuals in the aftermath of the culture wars. Both in and beyond the university, these "black public intellectuals" have attracted notice as representatives of the "black community." They are the most recent and the most seductive avatar of a specter that has long haunted leftist intellectuals (though conservatives have their own versions): the specter of the organic intellectual. Intellectuals with progressive aspirations have long sought remedy for the schizophrenia of their status as cross-cultural aliens, elites attempting to work in the interests of "the people," in a particularly populist construction of Gramsci's notion of the organic intellectual. The desire to be organic intellectuals, as Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson, and others have suggested, most often motivates the enterprise of cultural studies today. That desire, however, is much older than cultural studies and much more widely pervasive among leftist thinkers. As a promised solution to the seemingly intractable problem of presuming to speak for another in the interests of liberation, empowerment, and democracy, the desire to be an organic intellectual may be an indispensable component of any thought that imagines itself to be progressive. For this reason, intellectuals in the West have periodically sought heroic organic models for the work they do. An examination of the small, not necessarily representative group of African American academics who have been presented in the media as candidates for the position of exemplary organic intellectual will suggest both the promises and the problems of the organic intellectual as a model for critical work.

That the organic links between identity and intellectual insight or identity and political orientation are never given but always to be forged, that in fact neither linkages nor identities are ever organic at all, would not seem to require much reflection or defense these days. Yet black intellectuals as diverse as Adolph Reed, Toni Morrison, and Michael Eric Dyson have recently felt it necessary to address the issue of their relationship to other black Americans because the desire for organic intellectuals still persists and tends to attach itself to these "authentic" voices from the African American "community." The desire to discover organic intellectuals plays out in representations of these figures (and sometimes in their self-representation) in ways that may help us to see the real conditions in which public intellectuals labor. The condition of black intellectuals today is peculiar, but it is not unique. They offer a particular perspective on the problematics of representation and power that inevitably attend the intellectual's inorganic relationship to those for and to whom he or she speaks.

In 1995 public intellectuals, long thought to be a vanishing species in the United States, suddenly appeared to repopulate the public sphere. Robert S. Boynton, in a cover story in the Atlantic Monthly, proclaimed that the intellectual had reappeared:

Nearly a decade after an influential book declared the public intellectual extinct, an impressive group of African-American writers and thinkers have emerged to revive and revitalize that role. They are bringing moral imagination and critical intelligence to bear on the definingly American matter of race-and reaching beyond race to voice what one [of them] calls "the commonality of American concern."

Russell Jacoby's pessimism had been unwarranted. Public intellectuals were back "in Black," as Michael Hanchard, writing in the Nation, put it.

Boynton attempted the bizarre and, I think, symptomatic project of linking the black intellectuals to the New York intellectuals of the fifties dubbed (and fetishized) by Russell Jacoby as The Last Intellectuals. Both Hanchard and Adolph Reed, writing in the Village Voice, criticized Boynton for paying scant attention to the long tradition of African American intellectual work that offers a more appropriate frame of reference. Reed in particular focused on the symptomatic status of the "black public intellectual," of whose celebrity in mainstream American culture he is deeply suspicious:

In the last few months, the notion [of the black public intellectual] has gained greater currency. It has been addressed in successive articles by Michael Alan Brub in The New Yorker and Robert Boynton in The Atlantic, while Leon Wieseltier's right-for-the-wrong-reasons attack on Cornel West in The New Republic has spawned commentary by James Ledbetter and Ellen Willis in The Voice. Although these white writers obviously didn't invent the black public intellectual identity, they have certainly anointed it as a specific, notable status in upper-middlebrow American culture.

That status, not wholly invented but certainly constructed in article after article in mainstream middlebrow publications around this time, is the notable status of black writers as models of organic intellectual activity.

Adolph Reed identifies a certain "racial vindicationism" that has exerted a distorting pressure in work by and about African American intellectuals, one manifestation of which has been a tendency to identify those intellectuals as organic representatives of a putative black community. This alone makes them notably different from the New York intellectuals with whom they are often compared and whose mantle as public intellectuals they have, according to some especially breathless commentators, assumed. Those largely Jewish modernists were never seen-nor did they ever claim-to be organically tied to any group or identity. Rather, their most cherished self-representation and public image was, as Bruce Robbins has shown, the ideal of the "luftmensch," or free-floating intellectual:...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822324962
• ISBN 13: 9780822324966
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 232
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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