Issue 163—“Intellectuals”

Is it possible that we might know something of the world, share what we know, decide together what’s best, and work toward a world that is free, fair, and might endure? If I were to describe the project that’s consumed my life, I might put it something like that. It’s why I’m drawn to the work of those oriented toward something similar, other travelers passing in the shadows of the fiefdoms of knowledge-as-power who might have their eye on such a horizon.

It doesn’t take long to realize that the administration of knowledge and communication, ranging from the sciences to the arts, is not arranged around such a perspective. Intellectual functions are subordinated to the reproduction or extension of existing relations of exploitation, domination, and control. The common task of knowing the world (as Alexander Bogdanov phrased it*) is subordinated to power’s demand that knowledge serve the ruling of the world.

Those who do their best to work for the common task of knowing the world, in and against power’s subordination of knowledge, I call “general intellects.” General, as in aiming beyond what the division of intellectual labor allots to us as workflow. Intellects, in the broadest sense of trying to weave together perceptions of the world, their affective resonance with lived experience, and concepts that exceed the particular and might work as connective tissue with the lives of others. Anyone can be a general intellect, a node in the creation of general intelligence. It’s just a matter of having a little surplus time to contribute as a gift to the common task.

The general intellect might be a starter-concept for thinking about what could take the place of the public intellectual—a figure connected to a certain moment in the parallel histories of modernity, capitalism, media, and the university, particularly in the Cold War era. He (so often “he”) brought critique and moral authority to bear on the big-picture issues of the day. Public intellectuals usually had credentials: They went to the right universities, were picked up by the right book publishers, circulated in the right journals, went to the right cocktail parties. They became a special class of talking head, converting the residual prestige of the world of the book into a sort of ballast of gravitas for the modern ship of state.

It seems a bit churlish to say this so soon after the death of Jürgen Habermas, but there never really was a public sphere (Öffentlichkeit). There never existed a free space in which to rationally debate and resolve issues of universal concern. And maybe it’s not such a bad thing to be living in the ruins of its simulation. Those who were never counted as free and rational actors entitled to partake in its soirées might not miss it much anyhow.

In proposing a common task rather than a universal discourse, I want to stress the differences among our forms of labor and experience, and how formative those differences are—as a strength and not a problem, as Audre Lorde insisted. Differences don’t always need to be antagonistic or hierarchical. Without pitting one thing against another, how might the project of a common task, rather than the presumption of a universal discourse, call for a particular kind of editorial practice?

In editing this issue of e-flux journal, I was looking for something like an aesthetic of juxtaposition. I put this issue together as, for want of a better term, an intellectual artist. It’s not grounded in a specific discipline, political outlook, or stylistic preference. Instead, I aimed to put together pieces for their contrasts, shadings, facets, where the gaps between what I commissioned would say as much as the texts themselves. A picture emerges that feels like the shape and texture of the times, and from points of view that are oriented toward the ongoingness of intellectual labor, variously conceived and practiced.

We’re living through an era in which “intelligence” is being redefined against our will by a new kind of power. What were once public archives have been appropriated by intelligence-mining machines flooding the market with simulated intelligence as a massive operation that de-skills entire populations. At the same time, the remnants of public education and general-interest media are being bludgeoned and eviscerated. The common task of knowing the world is getting farther and farther out of reach.

To my surprise, almost everyone I reached out to agreed to contribute. I hope you read them all and learn as much as I did about why decolonial movements are often led by intellectuals; why strategies of secrecy rather than publicness define key intellectual histories; why hospitality, anonymity, and collective knowledge production might be better tactics than intellectual celebrity; why the affective dimension matters; and how to avoid the closed loop of intellectual self-reference.

Lastly, let me thank everyone whose less visible labor made this issue possible: the editors, copy editors, web managers, and translators, not to mention all of the people around our named contributors who help us have some surplus time and ability to write. It takes all kinds of labor to even propose the common task of knowing the world.

—McKenzie Wark
 

Denise Ferreira da Silva—Speculating on an Unasked Question
For decades the public intellectual was called to serve as moral consciousness, to speak truth to power, to fight on ideological fronts, or in a more sophisticated rendering of the role, to act as an agent of truth. This figure, the only one for whom such preoccupations make sense on their own terms, played in the ethical corner of the post-Enlightenment political field. In that field, discourse was the favorite toy, and the best playground was not those spaces where mere academics typically shine (the lecture hall or the classroom), but what is now called legacy media.  

Tithi Bhattacharya—The Public Intellectual in History
Intellectuals, or at least highly educated people, were often at the helm of decolonization struggles in Asia and Africa. Many were educated in the West, where they encountered the hypocrisies of empire firsthand. Their student years in European cities exposed them to how ideals such as equality, the universal franchise, and liberty—none of which had any place in the colony—were flaunted as the guiding political philosophies of metropolitan governments.

Bogna Konior—In Darkness and Secrecy: On Conspiratorial Intellectualism
Community and conspiracy each have their strengths. Each nurtures a different kind of intellectual. What sort of intellectual belongs to communities? As Edward Said writes, “The intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public.” We can imagine such an intellectual as a visible messenger, ambassador, or translator of community interests. A conspiratorial intellectual works otherwise. She has already lost something—a country, a safe space, an open field of debate—and operates in hostile territory.

McKenzie Wark—A Toast to Femmunism
The figure of the intellectual stands in opposition to the “man of action,” of praxis. It’s a figure that has its leftist incarnations too. There’s maybe something masculinist in this figure. The intellectual is positioned as too feminine. Soft hands, dressed for the salon or the café. The communist man of action was supposed to scorn all that. The communist woman of action: his ascetic double. For the action people, the intellectual fellow traveler was a useful tool, but not an equal.

Amber Musser—The Algorithm and the Intellectual
The dangers of the visual are also about what is at stake in keeping the account anonymous. I read this choice as a deliberate decision to sidestep the traditional pressures of fame that might accompany being called an “intellectual,” especially for the problematic extraction of emotional and cognitive labor that happens frequently with Black femmes. And here’s the rub: For those who have traditionally been excluded from the category of the intellectual, inclusion might not even be desirable at all. 

Verónica Gago—A Fragment, a Message in a Bottle, a Toolbox
Collective writing produces a machine capable of giving space to struggles for land, water, wages, and housing, as well as to struggles against racism and sexual abuse. The writing builds a structural narrative, with poetry and slogans, dates and names. A new sensoria, to return to that word, mixing the barricade with the dance floor, community kitchens with worker-occupied factories, and experimenting with alternative forms of care in opposition to the heteronormative nuclear family.

Dominic Pettman—Civilization and Its Incontinence: On the Closed Effluvial Loop of Intellectual Labor
This intellectual is a perfectly self-sufficient being, akin to the reunited halves of the original humans, in Plato’s Symposium, who now exist once more, enamored with their own solipsistic completion. Or perhaps this analogy is too benign. Perhaps the caricature is closer to a one-person “human centipede”—self-suctioned by the mucus membranes of the great thinkers of the past.

Matt Seybold—The Useful Narcissist
Russell Jacoby is usually credited with coining the term “public intellectual” in a book, The Last Intellectuals (1987), which lamented their disappearance. “Useful idiot” entered the American vernacular as a translation from Balkan newspapers in the immediate postwar period. According to Google Ngram, “useful idiot” quadrupled in frequency during this period, while the appearance of “public intellectual” in the Google “American English” corpus increased by more than sevenfold.

Daria Serenko—The Angel of History Goes to the Front
Descending to the memorial’s glass bottom, each of us becomes an angel of history. We look on as millions of people, trying to survive, step into the icy maelstrom in 1940 and 2022. Some succeed, fortunately. Along with them, we climb back up in a weary procession toward the heavenly rectangle of a light that promises nothing, so that one day we may write our own history, the history of the losers.

Luce deLire—Critique Is Over, Morality Is Dead, and Surreal Utopias Are Where It’s At, or: How to Bubble the Burst
The twentieth-century intellectual used morality to counter political power. In the twenty-first century, morality has become a lubricant for hybrid warfare. What looked like hyper-morality from afar turns out to be post-moralism: the depletion of morality as a political tool. Surrender is not an option of course. We must state our position wherever that has impact. Yet the twenty-first-century intellectual must not be reduced to an instrument of international warfare. 

*See, for example, Alexander Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience, trans. David Rowley (Brill, 2016), 160. As Anton Vidokle pointed out to me, the “common task of knowing the world” is more associated with the cosmist philosopher Nikolai Fedorov. I’m more drawn to Bogdanov’s materialist repurposing of the concept and have stressed it in my adaptation of Bogdanov.