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.
As with today’s social media, legacy media also had to respond to questions of whether its reporting or opining might do harm to the social body. With the participation of academics and intellectuals, legacy media has worked hard to assert its positive impact on the education of a public—a task which, at least in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, was largely that of cultivating a People, or what Hegel would call the “ethical substance” of the ethical form of the state.1 In hindsight, it seems that there is nothing more straightforwardly Modern than this linking of education and intellect. If the intellectual’s political function was/is ethical-symbolic, and if legacy media’s task in the liberal capitalist formation was the education of a public, there could not be a more fortunate match.
But was it? Was it that the intellectuals’ function, their task, resulted from legacy media hailing some so inclined to perform the “educational” role? Or was it just a case that the very assembling of the national state required ideological mediators (something the colonial context lacked, as Fanon argued) to perform the political-symbolic work of cultivating a collective consciousness (ethical whole), whether as traditional or organic intellectuals, in Gramsci’s terms? I would wager that a combination of both has been more likely the case.
Reflecting on this process can contribute to addressing the unasked question to which this text responds nonetheless. That is because this question has a lot to do with how social media hails us. An economical way to describe it is that it does so through the mobilization of the mass’s affect as a profit-generating strategy. Social media fosters discontent for the sake of retaining and augmenting engagement. Getting straight to the point: it is a question of how intellect (discursive, analytical, conceptual, and so on) and affect (emotional, corporeal, intuitive, and so on) are treated in liberal discourse.
Though at first it seems a straightforward dichotomy, which I could either smoothly resolve or, more elegantly, move to expose and stay with the aporia, my point here is not to counter or to support a case for the inseparability of intellect and affect. Why? For one thing, insofar as the liberal political architecture is concerned, state capital has had no qualms about mobilizing both affect and intellect when needed
Of the many characteristics that nation and race have shared throughout their post-Enlightenment trajectory, their aesthetic—that is, affective—mobilizing capacity may have been the most consistent. Meanwhile, liberal and left-critical intellectuals have also engaged in the critique of racist and nationalist discourses and attitudes by employing their most powerful weapon: the (discursive) tools of truth—with, as it turned out, much less success than anticipated.
Given this predicament, and since I have taken up the challenge of considering what was not asked, the only way through is to try and have my cake and eat it too. I must take this intellect/affect dichotomy as inescapable, to recall that the form (hierarchical difference) of this pair is constituted in the same program that yields the possibility for the intellectual as a political figure. (I am, yes, referring to the Kantian program; no, do not worry, I am not about to veer into a philosophical digression!)
At the same time, I do also refuse to treat it as a hierarchical form (intellect/affect) and instead I take the terms as operational tools, that is, the digital form (intellect, affect), each referring to a possible part in facilitating the mobilization of a public. To repeat, each refers to a kind of operation, which aims to mobilize others discursively and affectively.
Let me bring this to a close by returning to Gayatri Spivak’s classic essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and her injunction against Deleuze and Foucault, as intellectuals who are incapable of articulating a theory of interests.2 Without a direct question, I framed this text as if it were a reflection on the role of Gramsci’s organic intellectuals in the current media landscape. I say that because it appears that discursive mobilization (a radical analysis of the global political conjuncture) would require, as Spivak states, an attention to “the relations between desire, power, and subjectivity,” which would refract (and make available for consideration) the investments delimiting one’s subject position.3
My reading here is that transparency, which Spivak attributes to Deleuze and Foucault, indexes those thinkers’ affective investment in Western capitalist societies, which accounts for how their discursive (critical) interventions remained oblivious to (and obviating of) their own (interests) implication in it. As it so happens, this is why the choice, which the Kantian program has instituted in modern philosophy, between discursive (intellectual) and affective (emotional) mobilization presents itself.
Spivak’s phrase, however, does not quite grasp the form that political speech takes in social media. For one thing, reflection (social media thrives on folks only wanting to hear/read what they already know and agree with) seems to have replaced desire (which signals the attracting force of the other). This affective mobilization also indicates the absence of a formal or social (like the very idea of the public) index (which signals relation) onto which the intellectual would grab as she moves on to perform an ideological critique (separating truth from lie) or a (post-)structural critique (which exposes the conditions, distinct from the appearances).
Furthermore, as Fanon said of the colonial context, rather than ideological mediation (the task of both traditional and revolutionary/organic intellectuals), the threat or use of lethal violence seems to be the favored mode of management of dissent and of dealing with those deemed other (usually through criminalization).
What then? If I had time, I would make the case for the collapsing of such pairs, affective and discursive, intellectual and emotional, ideological and structural, refraction and reflection (mirror), I and Other. Instead, I will close by saying this: The work that the affective seems to perform in the political domain has to do with particles of discourse, such as how these dichotomies (read as a compound of the form of hierarchical difference) play in our critical thinking. And they do so because our critical thinking is made from the same elementary stuff (of thinking) as these dichotomies are. Whatever political task a figure such as the intellectual might perform these days, it will be of little impact if it does not include a treatment of the latter, which are, of course, its own condition of possibility, to stay in the script.
Charles Taylor, “Ethical Substance,” in Hegel (Cambridge University Press, 1975).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Macmillan Education, 1988).
Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
