In Defense of the Corrupt Intellectual

It proposes a paradoxical argument; its collection of statements undermines the dialectical model they are based on.

Here, the context is not meant as a social, economic, or political explanation, as it is usually understood. Rather, it refers to the coordinates through which actual public discourse is produced. In this sense, the context functions as a system of references that anchors statements and gives it its own depth. It is therefore the order—one can call it institutional in the widest sense—that organizes the information that the statement depends on for its material. This act of organization also invariably puts an accent on the statement when it is produced. This accent or mark, when analyzed, communicates valuable information about that statement, from a genealogy of the origins of the statement, to a premonition of what that statement is supposed to achieve.

All socioeconomic systems are constantly involved in producing or even searching for discursive fields where their constitutive elements and subjects, regardless of their specificities, are held to an absolute measure. Composed of limits and ends, these discursive fields are also collections of general statements that define the public discourse and dominant paradigms at any historical moment. In order to question these assigned meanings, to even register the assumptions that they are founded upon, it is necessary to engage the discursive formation that allowed these statements to be made in the first place. Developing the protocols of this engagement would constitute a full-fledged theoretical project, one that I will hopefully have the opportunity to discuss more fully elsewhere. It suffices here to point out that this is an engagement that does not necessarily have to be an affirmation.