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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.