On the line

When a community loses the ability to talk among itself, it falls apart. If you can’t make yourself understood to people with different perspectives, much less understand what they are saying, then you are not likely to feel invested in the society (whether it’s the art world or the country that collects your taxes). It is not news that we are living through a period in which individuals are retreating from the democratic pluralism that a shared discourse makes possible into echo chambers, tribes, cults.

This fragmentation has prepared the ground for what Brian Dillon, in his recent piece on the conspiracy theories surrounding “Cultural Marxism,” called the “ill-motivated individuals engaged in wide-ranging lies” who have come to dominate the cultural landscape in the United States and elsewhere.1 We live in an age of charlatans, who insist that the “ordinary person” cannot intervene in power, because its operations are much too complex for them to comprehend. So they must instead trust in the strong man, the disruptor, the seer.

The breakup of the public sphere is often blamed on new technologies ranging from social media to artificial intelligence. There is clearly truth to this (and we are only beginning to come to terms with the effects), but jeremiads about tech billionaires destroying our brains and the possibility of democratic society should not distract everyone else from their own responsibility for the situation. 

Because it was nearly forty years ago that Russell Jacoby identified the demise of the “non-academic intellectual” as a problem for public discourse in the United States. He meant by this the increasingly endangered species of thinker or commentator who does not belong to an institution, and is not under pressure to represent the interests of a particular system or a special interest. What used to be called a “public intellectual,” unaffiliated and independent. 

The issue, as Jacoby identified it, was that intellectual debate had become so thoroughly specialized as to be inaccessible to the majority. This had resulted in the proliferation of jargons that sounded barbaric to anyone without extensive training in the field. So that it was no longer possible for an intellectually curious doctor, for example, to spend her Sunday afternoon brushing up on foreign policy (or for that matter, contemporary art) by reading a journal on the topic. It seems natural that the public should come to resent their exclusion from debates shaping their own futures, and perhaps inevitable that this exclusion should come to be seen as coordinated and ultimately conspiratorial. 

Indeed, A. W. Singham argued in 1983 that intellectuals who do not attempt to explain their ideas to nonspecialists “are involved in the task of obscuring reality because we earn our living by being obscure.”2Not only is it cowardly to hide behind language that none but a few are able to penetrate, he insists, but it also serves to obscure rather than reveal the truth. If it’s difficult to imagine someone like Susan Sontag now appearing regularly on the television, then it might be that the “public intellectual” has been replaced by those social media theorists whose to-camera monologues are designed to meet the expectations of a niche audience. This does not seem adequate to the need.

So, what is to be done? Well, it could be argued that independent publications such as these continue to give space to those “non-academic intellectuals,” and through its mode of distribution (direct to your inbox!) resist the algorithmic logics that serve to insulate one way of thinking from any other. In his 1993 Reith lectures, Edward Said identified those “non-academic intellectuals” as possessing “a kind of consciousness that is skeptical, engaged, unremittingly devoted to rational investigation and moral judgment; and this puts the individual on record and on the line.”3

They are “amateur” not in the sense that they do not take money for their work, but because the love of truth (and other unfashionable universals, such as justice) must always take precedence over professional advancement. They are “independent” because they follow their principles over any special cause or interest (the former serving to determine the latter). In the context of art criticism, this might be as simple as writing what you believe to be true, regardless of how it will be received, in language that might be accessible to nonspecialist readers. We hope to give a platform, however small, to writers prepared to take that risk.