Writers as Public Intellectuals

Literature, Celebrity, Democracy

Odile Heynders

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137467645
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Crítica literaria europea

This book demonstrates how authors performing the role of a public intellectual discuss ideas and opinions regarding society while using literary strategies and devices in and beyond the text. Their assumed persona thereby reads the world as a book - interpreting it and offering alternative scenarios for understanding it.

1
Transformations of the Public Intellectual

In order to provide a theoretical framework for the individual case studies presented in this book, this chapter offers a discussion of the concept of public intellectual and the contexts in which it has been used.

I am speaking like an intellectual, but the intellectual, to my mind, is more in touch with humanity than is the confident scientist, who patronizes the past, over-simplifies the present, and envisages a future where his leadership will be accepted. (E.M. Forster, 1972 [1946], p. 58)¹

Big thinker

On 27 April 2014 The New York Times published an article on Thomas Piketty’s magnum opus Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) characterising the author as a celebrity intellectual whose stardom reflects the fashions and feelings of the moment.² The French economist Piketty, who graduated from the London School of Economics, worked at MIT and later became director of the French National Centre of Scientific Research in Paris, wrote in Capital an extensive study on the inequality of wealth and income. Clearly referring to Marx’s Das Kapital from 1867, Piketty brings together historical narratives and big data from 20 countries in a readable book, the main thesis of which concerns the unequal accumulation and distribution of capital in our age, generating discontent and undermining democratic culture. The economist writes well, apart from being an academic, he also is a columnist for the newspaper Liberation and occasionally for Le Monde.

Piketty, according to The New York Times, is filling a void; he has written his book at the right time, capturing the Zeitgeist and personifying it in the right way. He is one of the two or three authors per decade who are receiving the intellectual rock star status, not (only) because of a grand idea or encouraging new argument,but rather because of their thesis and style of writing as well as their publicly performing the role of an intellectual. Piketty is fashionable, just like other public intellectuals were at the time: the ‘curmudgeonly’ Christopher Lash or the ‘flamboyant philosopher-king’ Allan Bloom.

Piketty’s fame in the Unites States was immediately noted in Europe. Liberation published a piece with the headline ‘Piketty, Superstar aux States’ and remarked that the book sold better than Game of Thrones, although the author still preferred his modest Parisian bureau over an American university chair.³ Die Welt⁴ wrote about his success overseas, after which the article shifted to an in-depth analysis of the ideas on capitalist structures and the differences in various European countries. The prestigious Dutch publisher De Bezige Bij bought the rights for the translation of Capital in the Twenty-First Century for an exceptional amount of money,⁵ after which television programmes, newspapers and weekly journals covered the book in critical articles.⁶

Big thinkers are intellectuals as superstars, triggering an audience that in our media-overloaded era is not so easily seduced. As a big thinker, Piketty knows how to achieve and maintain the attention of his readers, combining economy with cultural history, and theory with narrative. He brings us back to the belle époque described in the novels of Honoré de Balzac and Jane Austen in which the aristocracy, the bourgeois and the proletariat had their own fixed positions, his message being that in the twenty-first century we have not left behind this system of social inequality.

Piketty’s urgent and provocative study contradicts the observation of The New York Times that the Internet and social media favour bite-size thought over grand theses and sharp insights over the belles-lettristic narratives, underlining that this is more the age of idea-savvy journalists rather than of scholars and intellectuals. It is this contradiction that will be investigated in this book, by exploring the hypothesis that the position of intellectuals today has changed, and that strategies of celebrity behaviour and the subsequent responses of the public are transforming the traditions and modes of intellectual thinking and writing. There still are intellectuals today, but as public speakers and writers they are operating on various platforms using multiple rhetorical strategies. Writing and thinking have become part of a wide-ranging public performance, often characterised by theatricality.

Piketty, ‘the new Marx’ and at the same time posing as the charming Frenchman, had his big event in the sold out Amsterdam pop temple Paradiso on Wednesday 5 November 2014, after having informed Dutch parliamentarians of his book earlier that day, something that marks a relevant activity of the public intellectual: to inform politicians who have no time at all for a further reflection on all the complex subjects they have to discuss and form a serious and persuasive opinion about. One of Piketty’s statements that evening was that he believes in the power of books, that books can contribute to a better future.⁷ Evidently, the audience thought so too, since many of them could be observed with the thick Capital in their hands.

Characterisations of the public intellectual

The public intellectual intervenes in the public debate and proclaims a controversial and committed and sometimes compromised stance from a sideline position. He⁸ has critical knowledge and ideas, stimulates discussion and offers alternative scenarios in regard to topics of political, social and ethical nature, thus addressing non-specialist audiences on matters of general concern. Public intellectual intervention can take many different forms ranging from speeches and lectures to books, articles, manifestos, documentaries, television programmes and blogs and tweets on the Internet. Today’s public intellectual operates in a media-saturated society and has to be visible in order to communicate to a broad public.

The terms ‘intellectual’ and ‘public intellectual’ have a long history, fuelled by theorists from different disciplines. The specific term ‘intellectual’ was coined after the Dreyfus affair in France at the end of the nineteenth century, and was used to point at a collection of novelists, artists, journalists, university professors and other cultural figures who felt it their moral responsibility and collective right to interfere with the political process. The Dreyfusards organised themselves in a group and put their signatures to a petition to mark their independent critical position underscoring the innocence of the Jewish military officer Alfred Dreyfus, who was sentenced to life imprisonment because of alleged treason. Although the term ‘intellectual’ as such was not used before the nineteenth century, theorists have emphasised that many writers since the Renaissance have been in the position of the intellectual, expressing a similar independent and critical view on political, social and ethical issues in the public sphere (Melzer et al., 2003; Lacroix and Nicolaïdis, 2010).

As is argued in this book, the recent addition of the term ‘public’ to intellectual, interchanging with ‘celebrity’ or ‘media’, points to the activities of translation, mediation and the popularisation of ideas, aimed at a wider outreach and communication. Significantly, the public intellectual sometimes makes compromises with regard to the intellectual content of ideas in order to address a larger audience. The public intellectual addresses an audience beyond intellectual peers, whereas the intellectual mainly interacts with other intellectuals (Baert and Shipman, 2013). ‘Public’ originally was an American, instead of a European addition, as we can read in Posner’s Public Intellectuals, A Study of Decline (2004 [2001]) analysing public intellectuals as they appeared in the media in the United States in the period between 1995 and 2000. Posner emphasises that the terms mark the fact that the intellectual makes a serious contribution to the improvement of public communication. There is a strong need for that since the universities in the twentieth century have specialised too much and academics have become university specialists only and have lost interest in a general audience and public debate. Posner and others (Debray, 1981; Jacoby, 1987; Bauman, 1989 [1987]; Furedi, 2006) thus point to the decline of an academic intellectual impact in late modern societies. It is the assumption of this book, however, that public intellectuals today have a different position since they address the public, or fragmented counter-publics, while at the same time they have become part, and often consciously play to be a part, of the audiences themselves. The position from which the intellectual could present a general, independent, rational overview has definitely changed in our media society into a position from within the audience, which implies the managing of strategies of visibility, participation, critiquing and the bringing in of new ideas. The alleged decline of public intellectual intervention has more to do with a transformation of rhetorical strategies rather than with a lack of insight, courage or influence. Furthermore, we have to be aware of the ‘knowledge transfer’ that is becoming more and more of a default strategy of academics. European governments have made it an explicit agenda for public funding that writers and academics bring their work out of the academy and make it accessible and relevant to wider audiences. Before further elaborating on this, I will briefly take a route along definitions and characterisations in order to make clear in which sense the terms public intellectual are used here.

From the outset, the thinking about intellectuals was based on dichotomies. Almost all theorists place one type of intellectual in opposition to another. In 1927, the French critic Julien Benda was the first to offer, in The Treason of the Intellectuals (2009 [1927]), quite a pessimistic perspective on the intellectual as ‘clerk’ rather than a ‘traditional thinker’. The clerk was reacting out of impulses and passion, while the traditional thinker – the intellectual as such – was considered to be capable of making a rational analysis based on universal Enlightenment values.⁹ Benda argued that emotional response had become the ground of politics and disturbed a more contemplative critique, the result of which was nationalism and xenophobia.

We observe how in Benda’s exposé a dichotomy is constructed, which is repeated in various discussions on public intellectuals at the end of the twentieth century. Michel Foucault (1980 [1972]) discusses general and specialist intellectuals, Antonio Gramsci (1971) introduces the traditional and organic intellectual, Zygmunt Bauman (1989 [1987]) categorises the legislator and interpreter. The change of accents in regard to these dichotomies is related to the alternation of cultural paradigms. Bauman for instance, distinguishes between intellectuals as ‘legislators’ representative for modernity, and as ‘interpreters’ representative for the era of post-modernity. The legislator – akin to Benda’s traditional thinker – makes authoritative statements, underlining moral power and universal knowledge as the structural elements in a society, whereas the interpreter emphasises the different positions and perspectives, thus facilitating communication between diverse participants in a society.

No objective measurements can prove that someone is an intellectual, since the intentional meaning of being an intellectual is ‘to rise above the partial preoccupation of one’s own profession or artistic genre and engage with global issues of truth, judgement and taste of the time’ (Bauman, 1989 [1987], p. 2). Yet, the intention of having something to say to an audience, of teaching it something, is only part of the story and does not instantaneously legitimise the intellectual position. As is argued in this book, we also have to consider and qualify the medium and style of writing, the visibility of the intellectual persona, the specific issue discussed, and the addressed public or the participants in the debate accepting (or not) the intellectual’s authority. More than before, the current public intellectual is functioning in a media context that can amplify or devaluate his position. The intellectual can become a ‘collision point’, as Paul Berman (2010) correctly observed in his book on Swiss intellectual Tariq Ramadan, implying that various audiences could project their own ideas upon the intellectual. The public intellectual thus becomes a sort of empty vessel for publics to inhabit with their own ideas. Ideas lead to responses, and these again to other reactions, while serious points can become more controversial once the discussion is taking place and the media coverage on the Internet is getting faster and wider, and in a way is spinning out of control. Rumours and insinuations can turn polemics into nasty debates resulting in sceptical judgements and spectacle, in which intellectual assumption and rational arguments seem to have disappeared completely.

Rousseau, Diderot and Heinrich Heine can be considered as historical forerunners of public intellectuals. Thomas and Heinrich Mann, George Orwell, Czeslaw Milosz, Václav Havel, Simone de Beauvoir, and Hannah Arendt are twentieth-century ones. And today’s public intellectuals are for example Timothy Garton Ash, Martin Amis, Jens Christian Grøndahl and Zadie Smith. But not only canonised writers, historians and philosophers are intellectuals; filmmakers (Werner Herzog, Heddy Honigmann, Bruno Ulmer), visual artists (Donald Rodney, Marlene Dumas), and journalists or television makers (Henryk Broder, Sabrina Guzzanti) can be considered public intellectuals as well, influencing the public debate with critical statements and provocative ideas expressed in cultural practices providing imaginary scenarios. And although public intellectuals might earlier have had their roots in the humanities, many of them today derive from the natural or technical sciences. An evolutionary theorist such as Richard Dawkins is a public intellectual, as is astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, just as are economist Milton Friedman making television documentaries, and Dutch scientist Robert Dijkgraaf doing ‘academic’ public lectures on television. Today’s public intellectuals often appear on various platforms, accentuating that the public sphere is a space of differentiated discourses. They have their own circles and national habitat within Europe as well as elsewhere on the globe; in the United States, in Latin America and India, and even in China, where dissident writers as public intellectuals are making use of the Internet or Weibo (the Chinese Facebook/Twitter hybrid), critiquing the political authoritarian regime and pleading for an alternative social order.¹⁰ Traditions of thinking and writing are rooted in local and cultural contexts but often cross boundaries and attain global relevance.

Not everyone likes to identify as a public intellectual. Historian Stefan Collini argues in his outstanding Absent Minds, Intellectuals in Britain (2009 [2006]) that the denial of the existence of real intellectuals has always been a prominent aspect of national self-definition in Britain. The word intellectual evoked pretentiousness, arrogance and hubris. By presenting a careful historical analysis of the main debates in the past two centuries, however, Collini demonstrates that there definitely does exist an intellectual tradition in Britain. He distinguishes three senses of the noun intellectual as it is used in the United Kingdom: the sociological sense, in which intellectuals are considered as those whose occupations are involved with ideas and not with practical issues; the subjective sense, having to do with an individual’s attitude towards ideas, reflectiveness and truth-seeking; and the cultural sense, focusing on those individuals regarded as having an acknowledged intellectual position (Collini, 2009, pp. 46–7). Intellectuals with cultural authority have acquired a certain standing that provides them with the opportunity to address a wider public than that at which their occupational activity is aimed. A fourth, political sense, is not as clear in Britain as it is in France. In France les intellectuels are recognised by their attempt to constantly intervene in the political sphere. An example in this respect is the appeal by the French ‘new philosopher’ Bernard-Henri Lévy to free Libya from the Ghadaffi regime in the spring of 2011.

The cultural sense is the most relevant in the context of this book (as it was in Collini’s), since the main focus will be on the public intellectual with a certain artistic prestige and writing career, who tries to convince an audience beyond his main readers or followers, and in doing so deliberately uses various media platforms, styles and genres. An example, to be discussed in the following chapter, is German literary author, H.M. Enzensberger, who has written poetry, novels and documentaries as well as the critical essay Brussels, The Gentle Monster or the Disenfranchisement of Europe (2011), and who is taken seriously as an authority on issues regarding the European Union. Enzensberger thus addresses people beyond his literary audience. His case confirms that there is no intellectual without his ‘own’ public, but also that an intellectual moulds himself on the basis of his idea or perception of the public. The interaction between the audience and the intellectual is fundamental when discussing the transformation of the public intellectual in the late modern public sphere.

We can draw a line of argument from Benda to Collini, based on the configuration of the intellectual as someone having cultural authority. The intellectual has knowledge and prestige, and addresses an audience while cultivating a position of detachment, that increases his awareness of the things going on. We have to go to Italy, again in the 1920s, to see the development of another line of argument, starting (once more) from the idea that there are two dichotomous categories of intellectuals, the traditional and the organic. This idea was introduced by the philologist Antonio Gramsci, who, during the 11 years of his imprisonment under Mussolini’s fascist regime, wrote in Prison Notebooks (1926–37) that all men are intellectuals though not all of them have the function of intellectuals in society (Gramsci, 1971). He distingui...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Transformations of the Public Intellectual
• 2 Conscientious Chronicler, H.M. Enzensberger (1929)
• 3 Eastern European Voices, Slavenka Drakulić (1949) and Dubravka Ugresić (1949)
• 4 Public Man as Actor, Bernard-Henri Lévy (1948)
• 5 A Protean Public Figure, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (1969)
• 6 Public Intellectuals from Brussels, David van Reybrouck (1971) and Geert van Istendael (1947)
• 7 Responsible Satire, Hamed Abdel-Samad (1972)
• 8 Popular Fiction, Elif Shafak (1971)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index