Hope is a waking dream.
– Aristotle
One of the original inspirations for this volume, as the second clause of our title likely gives away, was the 2008 U.S. election, specifically the discourse of hope that surrounded Barack Obama’s campaign. Famously captured and propagated by Shepard Fairey’s poster of a stylized Obama with “HOPE” written underneath, this atmosphere of expectation for positive change was voiced by supporters as an inspiring moment in American and global politics, and derided by its opposition as an empty – and possibly even cynical – campaign slogan. Combined with this sense of “hope,” though, and often supporting it, was a sense of a return to a positive vision of intellectualism. In this narrative, Obama, the Harvard-educated lawyer and published author, the man often seen with books, the “articulate” speaker and debater (with all of the racial overtones of that statement)1, was set against George W. Bush, represented not as the Yale-educated businessman and former governor but as the stumbling and inarticulate “bubba,” an image later so grandly embodied by Sarah Palin (as the uninformed beauty queen, with all the gendered implications of that image). A clear cultural line between the intellectual and the “people’s man” was, it seemed to us, once again being paraded in its stark primary colours, in this case only added to by the racial dynamics of the election. But, through the discourse of “hope,” intellectualism was being tied to the people – that is, to the public – in an enthusiastic way, and this was heralded by many as a positive sign of a new United States to come.2 Nonetheless, in the depths of the so-called Great Recession – with its joblessness, hollowed-out urban centres, and war on several fronts – the suspicion that “hope and change” was just a campaign slogan has been gaining steam. Perhaps the “culture of hope” in our title was to become a dated and ironic clause, pointing to the ways in which intellectual efforts to bring about change in the public sphere can be sold back to the public in the empty, ideological forms of culture, or, at best, emptied of material possibility by the pragmatics of political and economic reality (the latter a common reactionary response to the “ivory tower” of intellectualism).
While the 2008 U.S. election brought this binary vision into focus as we began this volume, the 2010 Canadian election, as we were reading contributions, repeated the formula. The representation of Michael Ignatieff, like Stéphane Dion before him, focussed on his background as an academic and intellectual. More significantly, for both Ignatieff and Obama, this formula was tied to the representation of them as having “foreign,” rather than “national” interest at heart. In Obama’s case this figure was clearly based on a racist logic while, in Ignatieff’s, it was tied to a general appeal to Canadian anti-Americanism. But, in both, there was the implication that the (liberal) intellectual had “global” rather than “local” interests that were, in some way, directed contra the nation. From the image of a possible national salvation through the uniting of the political and the intellectual, with which we started thinking about the volume, we arrived, while composing the volume, at the representation of the intellectual as foreign agent, as Manchurian Candidate. In other words, in relation to the public, the intellectual was always the exotic and threatening other, posing as “one of us” (where that pronoun, so seemingly inclusive, is very much exclusive). The hierarchized binaries continue to propagate from there, and the feeling of hope falters in the face of debt crises, joblessness, and cultural malaise.
But a strange thing happened on the way to the press. Another singular moment (one is even tempted to call it a “singularity”) occurred: the Arab Spring. If both Canadian and U.S. politics, under a certain interpretation, point to a hope-less and at best a-intellectual state, then the Arab Spring could be held up as their mirror image. A series of revolutions, resistances, demonstrations, and regime changes instigated by resistance to the oppression dealt out under (often Western-supported) regimes on the Arab peninsula and Northern Africa, the Arab Spring can easily be seen as an exercise through which the public both intellectually and physically asserted its right to be what Jürgen Habermas has called “the carrier of public opinion” (2). While many of these revolutions are still violently ongoing at the time of this writing, still “the public” and “hope” seem more than empty phrases bracketed by “scare quotes”: they are material facts for which people are willing to die. And the members of these rebellions are using (rather than just being used by) the tools that the marketplace made available, employing a combination of “old” and “new” media technologies in part to publicize their movements, to make heard their thoughts – the expression of their intellects that was denied by their former oppressors.3 In these events, a public is presented that is always intellectual, if by that one means capable of rational thought – and of rational sentiment and emotive thought – as evidenced by the voicing, the publicizing of thoughts of hope and change even when the expression of those thoughts can lead to death.
Hope, however, as the saying goes, is fleeting. As we awaited readers’ reports on the book, the Arab Spring turned to winter, as many began to feel that the military regime maintained too much control in Egypt, and Western televisions were inundated with shaky cell-phone video of slaughters in Syria. But, hope also springs eternal, as Alexander Pope would remind us, and the Occupy movements, starting at Wall Street in New York, hoped to thaw the grip of twenty-first-century robber barons on democratic political structures, while later still students took to the streets in Quebec to fight for the right to accessible education. But that hope falters in the face of its opposition, while tents are cleared and the Quebec government imposes laws against demonstrations, as another spring opens around – or closes upon – us.
Even the strongest hope seems faint, then, and we are left wondering if the promise of hope is itself a feint. As you read this introduction, necessarily in our future, some of the items above will be dated: some will be remembered for a long time to come, others will fade more quickly, even as our readings of them may later seem naive or overly cynical, overwrought or underdeveloped. Such is the risk of topicality. But we present this discussion of what to us are recent events in order to make a larger thematic point about hope as a cultural and political category. These recent – and other, more historical – events present cycles of hope and despair, change and retrenchment, which constitute political or other social moments and processes. All statements of political and even personal hope are necessarily immediately dated, because hope is very much the result of the material conditions of one’s specific historical moment. But, it is also the means by which one projects the endlessly conditional but always immanent future.
Hope, in other words, is a prime mechanism through which the immaterial becomes the material, to borrow the parlance of contributor R. Darren Gobert. Of course, in this regard, hope, being a species of desire, finds its demonic reflection in repression and violence, serving to render other, more sinister kinds of “forward thinking” material. But hope, unlike the exercise of repressive power and unlike the stultifying effects of utopia, revels in its very conditionality. Whereas traditional definitions of hope would see it only as a forward-looking entity, we argue that hope is hope because, while it keeps one foot in the immaterial future, it gains its strength from the foot pushing off of its rootedness in our moment. Hope recognizes itself as the first step, always unfinished but therefore always moving. Hope is thus the Janus face of culture itself, looking forward and backward at the same time, rendering any conditional thoughts on the present into “datedness” the minute they are formed.
How, then, to make sense of the relationship between the public, the intellectual (both the person and the condition), and hope, when all of these terms apply to the radically different situations described above, and when the final term is so very slippery? For, while not negating the profound significance of Obama’s election, we are not suggesting, as some would, that the “hope” of the Obama campaign and the “hope” of the Arab Spring are equivalent, because of the simple fact that the material expression of such a sentiment by a people who are violently repressed will never be the moral equivalent of a campaign slogan in the Global North, however sincere and authentic it may have at first been4 (though one could point to Obama’s election as a singular moment in a civil rights history that experienced – and still experiences – its own violent state repression). Regardless, slogans and images were necessary to all of these moments, and hope and change were their expressions.
From a critical perspective, of course, what fascinates is the troubled nature of all of these terms. Not only do “public” and “intellectual” join together into what many of the present essays see as the complex and often contradictory figure of the public intellectual, but the very terms “public” and “intellectual,” not to mention “hope” and “culture,” each have their own lengthy history of critical study, debate, and definition. In what follows, we want not only to explore aspects of the specific history of the “public intellectual” as it relates to this volume, but also to gesture towards the ways in which all four terms, taken together, constitute both the field that this volume takes as its subject and the methodologies used to study it. To this extent, and despite its primary position in our title, the “public intellectual” per se is not our ultimate concern (though we discuss the history of the term below), so much as the role of public intellectualism in the development and dissemination of culture. In short, we wish to discuss the way in which culture, and specifically the study of it, is the simultaneously material and ephemeral figure through which an always already intellectual public generates – even if under erasure – the simultaneously ephemeral and necessarily material figure of hope.
Closer to home, a more immediate inspiration for this volume was to celebrate research by winners of the John Charles Polanyi Prize, established in 1987 by the Government of Ontario to honour Polanyi’s 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his groundbreaking work on the physics of chemical reactions. All of the over one hundred Prize winners, drawn from the five Nobel areas of Chemistry, Economics, Literature, Medicine, and Physics, owe a profound debt not only to Polanyi’s brilliant scholarly achievement but also to his keen social conscience.5 At least in part a festschrift for Dr Polanyi, this volume takes its cue from his commitment to both research and social action as they epitomize the scholar as citizen. We thus asked contributors to reflect upon the challenging and often-vexed work of intellectualism within the public sphere. Earlier scholarly work usually begins by destabilizing the category “public intellectual,”6 often by questioning its presupposed isolation of an academic “ivory tower” separate from the “real world” of non-academic life. Less often does this work ask the question raised by recent political and cultural developments: when did the “public” become not intellectual? The founding documents of the American and French republics, or of later liberation and suffrage movements, reflect the Enlightenment principle that all individuals are rational beings engaged in producing and maintaining a functioning public life. To separate the “public” from the “intellectual” thus raises several questions: Is there a distinction between rationality and intellectualism? Is one the more perfect form of the other? Does one’s position within the hierarchies and nodes of a stratified public sphere determine one’s response to those questions?
To answer these questions we proceeded by two assertions: the intellectual is part of the public and the public is intellectual, both in its structural formation as a sphere of (inter)action and in its constituent, individual parts. If the public sphere is an intrinsic part of intellectual life, culture becomes the space that connects the two. Accordingly, we approached Literature winners of the Polanyi Prize, whose research constitutes a diversity of methodological and critical approaches to the study of culture and whose academic home is Arts and Humanities, a field that seems more than ever pressured, arguably more than most others, to explain and justify to “the outside world” the kinds of intellectual activity it undertakes. This is not necessarily to mount an apologia for the Arts and Humanities. Many within and outside the academy are happy to challenge the university’s entrenched critical, institutional, and professional positions at a time when increased specialization often isolates the university from social or political relevance. In a country whose academic institutions exist nearly exclusively by public funding (albeit decreasingly), this isolation offers no quarry for the public intellectual, who exists outside of the specialist or professional boundaries that define academic teaching or research. The debate over scholarly vs. public intellectualism is by no means new, as we shall see in the next section, but the current pressures of unprecedented technological, economic, cultural, and environmental change gives the debate a particular urgency. And certainly, one aspect of recognizing the always already intellectual nature of the public is also to recognize the necessity, and the desirability and fruitfulness, of making clear to the world at large these labours’ value as it has always existed (be it through such initiatives as Western University’s “Public Humanities@Western,” McMaster University’s “Public Intellectuals Project,” or the simple act of engaging in academic work in the open, so to speak, in public lectures at libraries or science fiction conventions, conversations on social media, or on buses and street corners. . .). This is not a matter of reviving a notion of (a potentially elitist) public intellectualism, but of mobilizing the resources and spirit of public intellectualism within a public already intellectual, a relationship that has always sustained the academy’s scholarly labours.
This volume, by people who have won provincial awards, then, aims to avoid provincialism. The following chapters ask what influence intellectual life has (ever) exerted in the public sphere. They avoid engaging in partisan, polarizing, and ultimately self-defeating debates about the greater relevance of some fields over others, but rather speak from the Arts and Humanities as a case study for addressing a larger set of issues about the role of the public intellectual in reflecting, analysing, and reimagining social and cultural identity at a time when hope is perhaps our world’s most urgent concern. One of our key assumptions is that one of a country’s greatest natural resource is its intellectual energy: the ability of scholars to anticipate and conjecture about the future, to seek out new areas for thought and new ways of thinking without always knowing where these paths might lead. Polanyi’s work and career exemplify how pure research produces valuable social capital, but must also risk this profit in order to pursue unexpected or unthought discoveries that innovate new modes of knowledge. As citizens of the world, scholars are public intellectuals answerable to society in the present. However, their effectiveness also depends upon the freedom to detach from the present in order to challenge conventional wisdom within a broader history that looks at once backward and forward. The public intellectual also has the responsibility to reflect society otherwise; to predict rather than dictate its outcomes; to remain astute and alert, not prescriptive. Thus we draw upon researchers from the Arts and Humanities as fields driven by critical and cultural speculation and thus by a passionate commitment to express and envision the world differently.
The chapters in this volume explore how cultural materials – from foundational Enlightenment writings to the populist media spectacles of the twenty-first century – frame intellectual debates within the clear and ever-present gaze of the public writ large. For instance, while it is impossible to summarize their importance to subsequent scholarship (including the editors’ own work), the Frankfurt School – and (perhaps more so) the critics who followed them – treated “popular culture” in terms of a public sphere largely emptied of agency.7 Against this trend, this volume demonstrates how all forms of culture constitute not just the media but also the intellectual messages of a society. If we do not posit an inherent split between the public and its intellectuals, neither do we merely praise individuals who seem to bridge this nonexistent gap (though certainly they will be one area of interest). Instead, this volume examines how the public sphere is constitutively intellectual at every level, a kind of fractal pattern of reflexive thought that is both mirrored in and constituted by culture itself. Following Jacques Rancière, the volume will analyse the formal complexity of culture without adopting the notion of a separate, nonpolitical cultural sphere. In this argument, “culture” becomes at once the source, end point, and evolving matrix for the hope generated by an intellectual public life.
Because our contributors meditate in diverse ways on the role of culture in the interplay of our title’s other three terms, we have organized chapters both thematically and historically in order to suggest both synchronic and diachronic dialogues on culture. In hopes of mobilizing what Len M. Findlay calls “daring to know,” with its necessary suspicion of academic intellectualizing (we will return to Findlay below), we have positioned chapters to speak both with and against each other and the arguments taken up in this introduction. The themes of our three sections can be read as a rough chronology of the development of the modern public, its relationship to the intellectual, and their promotion or refusal of hope in the space of culture. But we also organized the sections to debate, resist, and rupture any straightforward chronology or critical expectations about the definition and role of the public intellectual. It is our hope that this equally nonsynchronic approach will illuminate how past cultures can shed light on present and future issues, as well as how current debates can reframe our approaches to older subjects. To this end, each section includes one chapter at a temporal remove from the others, and the thematic concerns of each section overlap, in order to allow for a reader-generated “map” of the book. The opening three chapters in our first section, “Public Readings,” thus explore how texts circulate and educate in the public sphere by focussing on the emergence of the modern intellectual and public in the Romantic period, while a fourth chapter reads this evolution forward to address the role of storytelling in the formation of the public and private histories of the Partition of India in 1947. Turning back to the seventeenth century and then reeling ahead to twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, the four chapters in our second section turn from public “readings” to “Public Performances” of culture in musical, dramatic, and cinematic acts that at once model and refract public concern and debate. Our final section, “Public Matters,” returns to the figure of the public intellectual by turning to contemporary politics and by focussing on the relationship between intellectual acts and the material world. When we speak as intellectuals to our material surroundings in order to answer a market demand for relevance, do we then turn away from the immaterial thoughts and pleasures of culture as a separate sphere? Our final four contributors offer productively divergent answers to this question.
The concept of the public work and influence of the intellectual, as widely deployed as it is, is not easily defined, and goes back a long way in cultural history. We could start with Socrates. Among other of his legacies is Socrates’s famous profession of his own ignorance as his only philosophical certainty, the basis of the “Socratic method,” the dialectical strategy of which was insistently to test and eventually undermine the presumptions and assumptions of his students’ knowledge – what today, after Marx and Engels’s dialectical materialism, itself a revision of Hegel’s dialectic, we might think of as a process of demystifying all ideological positions. Hegel’s method ultimately privileges the Aufhebung or “overcoming” of the negative moment of Socrates’s thought in order to isolate what remained productive within an idea, and so marks the most profoundly idealist mode of intellectual activity. In both Socrates and Hegel, nonetheless, we can see intellectual activity as a certain refinement of thought. Yet locating this work in the public sphere was rather problematic. In his own time (the early nineteenth century) and country (Germany), Hegel enjoyed immense popularity as philosopher and lecturer for much of his career – this despite the monumentally abstract nature of his thought and writing. Socrates was equally prominent within Athenian society. But such prominence also made him a target. In the Apology, Plato’s account of Socrates’s trial speech, the younger philosopher refers to his mentor as a “gadfly” who dissents from state authority. Bucking the status quo, and remaining unrepentant to the end, Socrates was found guilty and punished to death by drinking hemlock.
Socrates had been charged with “corrupting the young, and [...] not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other daimonia that are novel” (24b), but the less “official” offence came before this when the Delphic Oracle announced there was no individual smarter than Socrates. Insisting upon his lack of wisdom made him the paragon of intellectual and academic humility. It also, paradoxically, threatened those less aware of their own ignorance, a shortcoming of insight always anticipated by Socrates’s ignorance. No one likes to be told he’s stupid, but the sting was especially irksome coming from a man who, at least ostensibly, professed to be stupider than anyone else. Socrates’s point was more subtle and noble, of course, but it smacked of being rather patronizing, and so set the stage for public intellectualism as double-edged sword: on one hand, the ideal of or standard against which a state might measure its cultural and political achievement; on the other hand, both gadfly and threat to state legitimacy for reminding the state that the knowledge buttressing its authority always rested on debatable grounds.
Which is what makes rather bogus the official charges against Socrates, the tenor of which resonate to our present day. By holding positions contrary to the status quo, or by questioning the very position of the status quo (Edward Said has been one of our most famous contemporary players of this role), Socrates was said to hold “daemonic” beliefs. In classical thought a “daemon” hovered indeterminately, arbitrarily, and thus suspiciously between the mortal and divine realms – a figure of dubious, misleading, and thus threatening moral quality. Ironically, of course, such an accusatory word, as Socrates’s own philosophical method suggests, points to the abstract or groundless nature of all “official” beliefs taken as absolute truth. Such truth can only be signified by the Good, by which moral compass all human endeavour might be directed and thus reminded of its fallibility. It was this ideal, however, that the state perverted in its second charge against Socrates: corrupting the minds of its youth. Not so carefully veiling the crime of pedophilia lurking within the already debatable practice of pederasty in ancient Greek culture, the charge protects adolescence as a precious but malleable alloy. The young are susceptible to bad outside influence but also receptive to a kind of Althusserian interpellation, a reaction formation incited by the state’s moral outrage (think of the aftermaths of the unsettling representation of adolescent – or earlier – sexuality in the public art of Robert Mapplethorpe). The charge thus implicitly fetishizes (male) youth as an impressionable stage between the absolute ignorance of earliest innocence and the maturity of later experience. This (gendered) sense of intellectual cum moral progression is endemic to classical ethical, aesthetic, and political thought (think of Plato’s or Aristotle’s anxieties about the potentially de-rationalizing and emasculating effects of metaphor) and becomes a potent way for culture to mark its civil and civilizing aspirations. But such imperatives also infantilize and thus discipline citizens as a mass body at once capable and in need of education. “To educe,” of course, means to evolve or develop a latent or potential capacity, but stems from the Latin educere, which means “to lead” and thus, by implication, “to form” and “to conform,” and by negative implication, “to lead away or astray.”
Despite two thousand years between ancient Athens and late capitalism, whose notions of democracy are rather different, we might call Socrates one of the first victims of free speech, a martyrdom that marks the dangerous ideals of intellectuals who speak on behalf of society. As our earlier nod to Habermas indicates, however, modern notions of the “public” can be traced specifically to the eighteenth century and to an explosion of populations, political allegiances, and print cultures that radically altered the formation of social bodies and their modes of disseminating knowledge. This phase of cultural development, influenced by the legacies of early modern global exploration, Renaissance humanism, and a later Enlightenment scientific empiricism, fuelled debates in moral philosophy and political economy about the essentially progressive and benign character of civil society. It also reflects a profound desire to manage a rapidly expanding public sphere. Samuel Johnson, author of the first comprehensive English dictionary, typifies this managerial response. Recapitulating an ancient fear of fiction’s ability to persuade its audience with counterfeit versions of “the truth,” Johnson’s essay “On Fiction” warns against the rise of the novel as speaking more directly (i.e., more realistically and in more quotidian fashion) to its readers (against the supposedly more elevated, abstract, and thus elitist values expressed by poetry). Given that this audience subtended an increasingly literate working class informed by an expanding print culture (pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, as opposed to the “official” authority of books), its supposed susceptibility to political and moral suasion meant that it might be persuaded otherwise against the entrenched values of a ruling elite. Indeed, Johnson invokes the same ancient Greek anxiety about a malleable youth reader and thus about a potentially infantilized, infantalizing – but also infantalizable – readership.
It is no coincidence, then, that Katherine R. Larson’s chapter for this volume traces the (gendered) role of the public intellectual to early modern culture, the development of which extends to Romantic culture, the focus of chapters by James Robert Allard, Angela Esterhammer, and Julia M. Wright. At this historical point the intellectual gets redeployed not only as either spokesperson or gadfly of state knowledge, values, and authority, but also as arbiter of public opinion. With accelerating literacy rates and exploding media for the dissemination of knowledge, the intellectual as rarefied scholar or philosopher gets pressured to speak for an expansive, diverse, and thus unwieldy array of single and collective identities, political, cultural, economic, and otherwise. Or rather, the intellectual begins to emerge as this presence, and intellectualism as a certain mode of cultural and civilizing refinement. The intellectual must adopt some sort of response to her everyday public, often to help this public make greater sense of the increasingly complex matrix from which it emerges and develops, but usually to take some kind of stand either for or against the status quo. The sociopolitical intentions of such efforts were never transparent. As Larson’s chapter demonstrates, Margaret Cavendish deployed the figures and rhetoric of music and musicality to speak in the cultivated and cultivating (and thus often implicitly feminizing) voice of a somewhat latter-day female courtier loyal to the ruling class. But in her desire to “transgress” and thus overthrow “reformist” social trends, she both knew and didn’t know to know her place.
Such an extra-verbal influence persists in Esterhammer’s examination of the performative figures and strategies deployed by British periodical culture. Esterhammer focusses on a crucial, yet overlooked historical moment in the intellectual transformation of the public sphere. The 1820s are wedged between a post-Revolutionary culture that produced Napoleon’s troubled global dreams and a Second British Empire whose intellectual life – and military might – help to discipline global cultural life well into the twentieth century. The rise of periodicals during this time, like our own intermedial culture, triangulates technological, cultural, and political change to produce a social vision at once progressively cosmopolitan and increasingly reactionary. For Wright, the public intellectual’s terrain is equally vexed for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was an English sympathizer with the French Jacobin cause, but whose later career turns towards censoring and thus correcting such “adolescent” or gothic impulses in order to parent more mature English cultural values. Wright makes explicit what are in Larson’s chapter the implicit spectres of colonialism and imperialism haunting the intellectual’s response to increasingly non-Western ideas and influences, which response promulgates what Edward Said calls the orientalising representation and assessment of the East as “other” to Western identity. A similar training of the social will takes place in Allard’s exploration of the emergence of the modern doctor as an arbiter of his field’s professional authority as well as of its progressive desire to heal what ails the bodies and body politic of civil society.
Coleridge is key to this evolution, for in later sociopolitical writings such as Aids to Reflection (1825) and On the Constitution of the Church and the State (1826), he argues for an informed intelligentsia as secular clerisy. Eliding Blumenbach’s idea of the epigenesis of life and Schelling’s idea of a world spirit, Coleridge sees philosophy as a kind of national theology expressing the state’s Bildungstrieb, its “formative urge, impulse, or force” (Constitution 48n). He calls this the “nisus formativus of the body politic, the shaping and informing spirit, which educing, i.e. eliciting, the latent man in all the natives of the soil, trains them up to citizens of the country, free subjects of the realm” (48). Reading Marx back to Coleridge, we can say that Coleridge’s political thought expresses the purest form of ideology – ideology without being ideological. Like “nation” and “progress,” Church and State are psychological concepts that citizens learn to internalize, as if unconsciously, in order to preserve a society’s “permanent” cultural knowledge (Biographia 185). Disseminated through a broader “national education” (Constitution 48), such ideas “powerfully influence a man’s thoughts and actions, without his being distinctly conscious of the same, much more without his being competent to express it in definite words,” which is why “it is the privilege of the few to possess an idea: of the generality of men, it might be more truly affirmed, that they are possessed by it” (12–13). Thus, the task of expressing a nation’s vital interests falls to a “National CLERISY” who oversee the nation’s “continuing and progressive civilization” and who “remain at the fountain heads of the humanities, in cultivating and enlarging the knowledge already possessed” (42, 46, 43). Keeping the national trust as a type of revealed religion, the Cleric is a hierophant who speaks for culture’s civilizing potential as well as for the status quo of its acculturating imperatives, the effects of which became so influential on such Victorian public intellectuals as Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold. Yet this public intellectual speaks above or beyond as well as to or of the public sphere, as in Arnold’s notion of the necessarily disinterested critic.
Two different models emerge later in the nineteenth century, each of which pays a certain price for public involvement. One is the ironic result of Arnold’s disinterestedness: Oscar Wilde’s notion of the critic as artist detached from the affairs of the everyday, a retreat that eventually betrayed Wilde’s other, punishable entries into public life. The other is what is often cited as the first instance of modern public intellectualism. In 1894 Alfred Dreyfus, a French military captain of Alsatian Jewish descent, was convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment. In J’accuse, an open letter to the French president published in the Paris newspaper L’Aurore in 1898, writer Émile Zola focussed public outrage over accusations that the military court had framed Dreyfus, resulting in his subsequent retrial and exoneration in 1907. Expressing the force of public opinion against official state knowledge, Zola’s text evokes intellectual activity as a vanguard or avant-garde force. Zola’s role in the Dreyfus Affair also galvanized the role of the writer as a public intellectual who directly influences and foments political action, an agitation that Wilde sought through less direct, but by no less inflammatory means.
Such transgressions both within and against the public sphere also take place within the context of the emergence of the modern university (at first in nineteenth-century Germany, and later elsewhere) as the result of a desire to organize and professionalize the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge among disciplines. One result of this specialization has been to polarize public and academic intellectual pursuits. As Russell Jacoby argues in The Last Intellectuals (1987), “As professional life thrives, public culture grows poorer and older” (8). Jacoby privileges the public intellectual life that flourished in American from roughly the 1930s to 1960s, associated with bohemian communities in Greenwich Village or San Francisco, and fuelled by intense pre- and post-WWII economic, political, and cultural debate. A similar case might be made for the prominence of the public intellectual in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. In both examples public intellectualism expresses profound social value by shoring up the universality of human thought against tumultuous historical change. We might, like Neil McLaughlin, resist Jacoby’s nostalgia for this golden age, and remember that the work of the intellectual necessarily reflects as much as moulds its own time. “Being a public intellectual is not an occupation” (McLaughlin 115), for she can function in diverse settings, from government, to business, to the arts. “Being a public intellectual is not a profession,” moreover, for “the intellectual is not subject to a licensing procedure, educated by formal credentials, or represented by a professional association.” The authors and coeditors of the present volume might take exception to McLaughlin’s second definition. But such a response itself indicates how academics (which includes everyone in this volume) are increasingly anxious about their relation (or lack thereof) to the “outside world,” especially because our positions come at the expense of state largesse.
The extent to which academics can or should expect this largesse, and what price intellectualism might pay for inevitable change, is the focus of this volume’s chapter by Patrick Deane, head of one of Canada’s research universities. A number of perspectives matter here, but one is the thought that the current academic “crisis” – we might qualify this term by saying that the very nature of academic debate is what fuels this crisis and is thus somehow the academy’s constitutive possibility – is part of a broader evolution in the productive development of a culture’s intellectual life. In taking up the role of the global public intellectual, McLaughlin notes three forces of current transformation: technological, political, and educational-institutional (119). Daniel Coleman similarly reminds us that the simple act of reading, by scholars in their libraries or children on their beds reading Harry Potter novels, constitutes public intellectual activity of the most powerful sort. But Coleman’s further point is that reading, not unlike Socrates’s dialectical method, always opens us to cultural texts and spaces that we have, within a certain exclusionary Western tradition, at once explored, colonized, and written over, but which can be learned from anew – in this case the vexed yet rich history of indigenous Canadian cultures.
Eventually McLauglin puts in simplest terms the ongoing dilemma of public intellectualism: navigating the “tension between specialization and general knowledge” (131). Unlike field specialists, the public intellectual is charged with galvanizing public sentiment and refracting it back to society. He must be erudite, so as to critique and challenge received views, and thus address the risks of oversimplifying the sociopolitical complexities of an increasingly global culture. But she must also be transparent, so as to make sure that a diverse public not trained in specialist vocabularies still gets the point. For Imre Szeman, David Suzuki exemplifies the social activism that public intellectualism, at its best, can mobilize to bridge between “lay person” and “expert.” Yet Suzuki’s activism, deploying media and technology to foment public reaction to such crucial global problems as environmental decline, risks being compromised by the same ideological assumptions it seeks to debunk (Al Gore is similarly caught between the Scylla of a public armed with scientific fact and the Charybdis of one rendered complacent by the comforts of late capitalism).
R. Darren Gobert argues persuasively against this compromise. Taking up Esterhammer’s concern with the power of public performance and Deane’s with attacks against the supposed elitism or irrelevance of intellectual life, Gobert explores how the “immaterial” space of theatre “matters,” a term that recalls Judith Butler’s complex usage. Gobert considers how the play of ideas, the otherwise “frivolous” and “inconsequential” domain of intellectuals stuck in their own minds, can effect shifts in material circumstance (arguably more so) as much as the “useful” empiricism of scientific fact that drives debates and policy about higher education and cultural institutions. Certainly Aristotle knew of this “immaterial” force when he articulated how tragedy effects a powerful communal transformation of negative into productive affect, which catharsis Antonin Artaud and Berthold Brecht read to different, but no less potent political and cultural effect, in the twentieth century. Like Coleman’s account of the simple act of reading, the simple act of seeing and feeling, Gobert reminds us, remains at some level a human endeavour of the most profound intellectual and material consequence.
It is to this more public or popular, and thus supposedly inconsequential, form of cultural expression that three further chapters in this volume address themselves. Both Joel Faflak and Andrea Most turn to a pivotal moment in the cultural history of the previous century – the rise of what Simcha Jacobovici calls “Hollywoodism”8 in 1920s and ’30s American cinema – to address how mainstream Hollywood film, otherwise thought to be hegemonic, innocuous, or stupefying, in fact critically negotiates a fraught and by no means monolithic ideological and political terrain. As one form of public intellectualism, popular film is taken to account in Jason Haslam’s analysis of a return to what Jacobovici might call the primal scene of popular culture, the Holocaust, in Quentin Tarantino’s controversial Inglourious Basterds (2007). Tarantino, like Suzuki, emerges at the triangulation between Antonio Gramsci’s organic intellectual, who foments political action as an integral part of his social sphere; Said’s amateur intellectual, who transgresses the bounds of official or institutional intellectual practice; and the intellectual as celebrity, who wields cultural autonomy and authority but risks compromise by the same technological and ideological demands she seeks to overturn.
Nandi Bhatia takes on literary representations of a different trauma in twentieth-century history – the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan – by returning us to the targets of a vexed intellectual campaign to police the moral boundaries of Western cultural life. Children become witnesses to and purveyors of this life’s all-too-human capacity for traumatizing itself and others (think of the cult of the child that defines Michael Jackson’s persona), precisely at a moment of fragile and vulnerable national infancy haunted by its genealogy, compelled to parent its future, and thus able to snuff out as much as nurture its own hopeful visions. It is eventually to this capacity for culture to function as a mode of (hopeful) intellectual expression and critique that this volume turns its attention. The stakes of this public intellectualism are high, for hope risks being misled by its own hope for a future that has not or might not ever come. As Sara Ahmed argues, there is an “intimacy” and constitutively necessary relationship “between hope and anxiety” (183). For if “[h]ope is a feeling that is present (a pleasure in the mind) but is directed toward an object that is not yet present,” then “[i]n having hope we become anxious, because hope involves wanting something that might or might not happen. Hope is about desiring the ’might,’ which is only ’might’ if it keeps open the possibility of the ’might not’” (183). As Erin Wunker writes, hope is both “necessary and slightly delusional” (13). Put another way, hope resides precisely with the spectres of its own (im)possibility, for the “failure of transcendence constitutes the necessity of a political struggle” (Ahmed 187). The place of hope in the work of culture, as expressed by the public intellectual, comes precisely with reminding society – the public, whether inside or outside the academy – that hope cannot be sentimentalized or simplified as a derivatively utopian concept. Nor can it be the object of an incessant derision or ironization – a fine line that Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert walk each time they take on an increasingly complacently polarized audience in the forum of political satire performing as entertainment.
At this point we can turn to one of the starting points of the reexamination of culture as popular myth in the late structuralism of Roland Barthes. Each in their own way, and when placed together, the terms “public,” “intellectual,” “culture,” and “hope” take on a mythological element. In his analyses of objects, events, and texts, ranging from Einstein’s brain, to wrestling matches, to the cover of Paris Match and beyond, Barthes argues for a vision of culture as a series of interrelated myths, all largely empty of meaning on their own, but which shape and form the public’s vision of itself, all the while bypassing the critical function of the intellect. “Myth,” Barthes writes, “is depoliticized speech.” He continues: “One must naturally understand political in its deeper meaning, as describing the whole of human relations in their world, social structure” (143; emphasis in original). For Barthes, myth takes the specificity of political situations (say, for example, the Western support of repressive regimes in the Arab peninsula) and “makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact” (143). The myth of the “Western values” of freedom and democracy is presented as a fact that necessarily denies the material actions of the West on behalf of nondemocratic, violently repressive governments. In this guise, then, our three terms – public, hope, intellectual – could be read as myth when it comes not only to the specificities of the Obama campaign, but to the formation of Western global hegemony: offering the promise of change and delivering the reality of the same.
In actual revolutionary spaces, however, hope and change through the active exercise of one’s intellect become tangible, real things. “If myth is depoliticized speech,” Barthes writes, then “that which remains political” can never be considered myth (145): “This is why revolutionary language proper cannot be mythical. Revolution [. . .] makes the world; and its language, all of it, is functionally absorbed in this making” (146; emphasis in original). So, our dilemma seems solved. Obama’s hope and change = myth; the hope and change of the Arab Spring = material revolution. While the comparison is unjust and uninformed, the signing of the Magna Carta (1215), after all, while a singular moment, should not be considered the same kind of push for the recognition of rights as the Peasants’ Revolt (1381). We say this comparison is unjust because the moment of an African American being elected as president of the United States is undeniably a hopeful moment, and the similarity in rhetoric – in the cultural representations – offered of and by these disparate moments haunts. And it haunts not just our linguistic registers, but material reality as well. After all, Obama’s presidency gave him the ability to address the Arab world in his speech in Cairo in a way that inspired many, and the Arab Spring led to changes in U.S. policy as directly as their actions led to change at home. In part because of the deeply held myth of freedom, and the political ramifications thereof in the face of revolution, the West as a whole, Canada included, could not continue to support Mubarak’s regime, for instance (even as the West, perhaps, exploited the same to move quickly into Libya, and ignored the same while looking at numerous other states). But the distinction between myth and revolutionary language begins to fade, and it does so in large part because of the global and immediate nature of information exchange at the present moment. Perhaps, here, there is a hope that literally materializes itself out of thin air.
But cynicism haunts us as well, as it haunts all academic endeavours that, however vaguely, remain constrained by the scepticism of the scientific method that we can trace at some level all the way back to Socrates. And, if we are to follow Barthes, we must “become estranged if [we] want[ ] to liberate the myth,” and so be “condemned to live in a theoretical sociality” wherein our “connection with the world is of the order of sarcasm” (157): as academics – institutionalized intellectuals – we must, in other words, like Stan Marsh in the tenth-season finale of South Park, diagnose ourselves as having “the condition known as ’being a cynical asshole’” (“You’re Getting Old”). Hope for social change here, problematically, becomes a function of academic and political cynicism. In this sense, perhaps what the state was really giving Socrates was the chance for a graceful, if dramatic, exit.
And so to test the hypothesis of hope, we turn again to definition. It is difficult, in many ways, even to consider defining the terms “public,” “intellectual,” “culture,” and “hope” separately, for the minute one talks about, for example, the public, one finds oneself invoking the notion of culture, which then, in turn, requires a definition that either relies on or denies the notion of an intellectual quality to that culture. As Michael Warner has recently stated, “Behind the common sense of our everyday life among publics is an astonishingly complex history. The idea of a public is a cultural form, a kind of practical fiction” (8; our emphasis). Publics, cultures, our other terms, and their social effects are inextricably tangled. Take, for example, the incorporation of the study of popular culture into academic institutions. While this move has, since 1963 at least, become more and more (dare we say) popular, debates still occur as to whether this field is a progressive one, aiming to knock down boundaries between the (intellectual) academy and the public (figured often as “the masses”), or if it is simply an academic bowing to capitalist market pressures in what is represented as an ever-increasing demand to put “bums in seats,” as the common academic parlance would have it.
But even at the level of historical definition, the terms become intertwined in this way. To start again with the “public” to indicate this entanglement, the passage from Warner’s study, above, continues by noting that “There are ambiguities, even contradictions in the idea” of a public, and “[a]s it is extended to new contexts and new media, new politics and new rhetorics, its meaning can be seen to change” (8). In his foundational study of the history of the Western public, Habermas takes a similar position, stating that the terminology surrounding the concept of the “public,” as it is used today, is
most commonly associated with [. . .] expressions like “public opinion,” an “outraged” or “informed public,” “publicity,” “publish,” and “publicize.” The subject of this publicity is the public as carrier of public opinion; its function as a critical judge is precisely what makes the public character of proceedings – in court, for instance – meaningful. In the realm of the mass media, of course, publicity has changed its meaning. Originally a function of public opinion, it has become an attribute of whatever attracts public opinion. (2)
But how to distinguish between “mass media” of the connected world and “common[ ] associat[ion]”? To move to one of the other points on the polygon of critical inquiry, if Jean Baudrillard is right about the public sphere being “constituted” as an endless mediation of signifiers through other signifiers, then does the public become an endless reflection of what is said about it by and in “the media,” rather than a dialogic body that reflects on the reality in which it finds itself? Is the function of a “critical judge,” of Barthes’s “mythologist,” simply transformed into South Park’s “cynical asshole,” rendered meaningless – in a pay-for-vote phone call to American Idol, for instance? If Coleridge’s Cleric or Arnold’s critic smack of elitism, neither is there much hope for a democratic citizenry in the image of such a populist intellectual: Philip K. Dick made a living off of presenting just such a world in his futurist dystopias.
Our concern, then, is with the role of these expressions – ultimately with the role, that is, of our last term: culture. We note that this is a volume composed of essays by “humanists”: certainly not necessarily all humanists in the theoretical sense, but scholars who inhabit the space of the humanities in the academy, the space of the study of the ephemera known as cultural products. If there is a place for the “public intellectual,” and for the intellectual hopes of the public, then it is one that is at least mediated through culture: while differing as to its role, both Arnold and Frederic Jameson would agree to at least that. Where they would differ, of course, is on the question of hope. Can hope be captured in culture? Is culture Pandora’s box, in other words, granting expression to all the evils of the world, while clinging to hope as its final true possession? The question comes down to one that roughly frames our volume: is culture to be viewed through an Enlightenment-refracted Romantic lens – does culture reflect, as in M. H. Abrams’s mirror, the hope of a nation, while lighting the way, through its lamp, for a hopeful enlightenment to come (be it spiritual and/or intellectual)? Or is culture instead the glittering disco ball of the late-capitalist, postmodern, and carceral age – does it endlessly reflect the structure of an economically stratified society, turning back onto the public not an enlightened lamp, but Althusser’s policeman’s flashlight, hailing us to our pre-given spot in the ideological matrix of a divided world? Or can it be both and neither at the same time? The green light on Daisy’s dock can close out this series of allusive and illusive definitions of culture: shining forth both the verdant hope and the lifeless glare of Gatsby’s world, the green light perhaps highlights the tenuous division between the fractured mirror and the enlightened lamp.
To bridge this divide, building on Abrams’s metaphor while borrowing from Rodolphe Gasché, we’d like to position culture instead as the tain of the mirror, the dull, unreflective, impermeable surface that is nonetheless necessary to create reflection and (perhaps only the illusion of) depth. The public, the intellectual, and hope are all reflections of and on a material world that is only brought into existence by its cultural tain, through which its reflections are made possible (a state which also makes attacks on culture – such as cuts to public funding for archives, to choose a recent example – into attacks on the public itself, something Orwell showed all too well). In this we return – as so many so often do – to Wilde. Perhaps the critic is the artist, as the public is the intellectual, but both are functions of their medium, which is culture “itself,” something that is ultimately not regulated by any one discourse, but not free of them either. More to the point, as Vivian states in “The Decay of Lying,” “to pass from the art of the time to the time itself is the great mistake that all historians commit” (1091). We read this to say that it is a mistake to think that either culture or history are so easily understood that one can fully contain either in any set of discourses, and surely the figure of the public/intellectual is that of the person who points to the failings of dominant discourses in her attempt to contain or circumscribe specific regimes of signification. And, as does Wilde’s Algernon, we define culture here widely: to limit the study of culture to a select group of canonical works, figures, or tropes is a hopeless endeavour since “more than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read” (Importance 360). Our hopes lie in the culture that has escaped Pandora’s box.
We position these hopes in the plural because it is only too easy to slip into universalizing language due to the mythological elements of the terms we are dealing with. In a recent piece arguing for the necessity of the development of “Indigenous humanities,” Len M. Findlay has pointed precisely to this problem:
The Canadian humanities’ deep complicity with colonialism has now morphed more emphatically into a complicity with, or subjection to, the imperatives of 21st-century capitalism. The situation is far from hopeless. But the audacity of hope associated with Obama must be critically connected to its veracity, as expressed in Kant’s use of the Horatian tag, sapere aude, dare to know. And daring to know means daring to know the limitations of your white enlightenment universals, the provinciality of your Eurocentrism, and the implications of your ignorance of Indigenous languages and knowledge systems.
Daring to know and daring to hope become the necessary tain for each other, and they are tied to a deep suspicion of received intellectual wisdom and its material baggage.
The “public,” “intellectual,” and perhaps especially “hope,” may well be myth: empty vessels that only signify within particular social and cultural matrices (be it Kant’s Enlightenment, the United States in 2008, Canada in 2010, the Arab peninsula in 2011, or the classroom of tomorrow). More importantly, though, they are all necessarily imbricated with each other: despite claims to the isolation of the intellectual, the denial of the possibility of an intellectually engaged public, or the assertion that hope is only and always a utopian fiction used to mollify the masses, each of the public, the intellectual, and their various hopes are necessary for the others’ reflection of/on society. Culture isn’t a simple mimetic reflection of any of them, so much as it is the medium that enables our reflections, the alchemical agent that can make the public and the intellectual, hope and criticism, into mutable forms of each other. Perhaps these reflections, based on a cultural tain that is tied to but never at one with the material world, can intellectually bend, alter, or twist that world towards or away from its various publics’ various hopes.
1 Joe Biden, Obama’s future vice president, was quoted in 2007 as having said of Obama that “you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man,” and quickly had to issue an apology for “any offense” he had caused. See, e.g., Thai and Barrett.
2 As Nicholas D. Kristof wrote at the time in an opinion piece in the New York Times, “The second most remarkable thing about [Obama’s] election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual,” pitting this against the view of Bush as anti-intellectual. See Troy for a brief history of the presidency and public intellectuals, albeit one that is aimed primarily at the “conservative intellectual” market, and thus offering a more positive vision of George W. Bush’s relationship with public intellectuals, even as it derides his father’s anti-intellectual stance.
3 While too much has been made of the “twitter revolution” (as one Egyptian memorably tweeted, “hey frigging american analysts how about we let tunisians, who actually lived what happened decide how relevant twitter and wikileaks w[ ]ere?” [from the twitter feed of Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah, @alaa, posted on 14 January 2011; also linked in York’s article], it is true that, for example, cell-phone videos of the uprisings did make it to news organizations, and became a major source of firsthand information for those outside of such areas as Syria, which banned foreign media. See York for an analysis of the use of social media during the Tunisian Revolution.
4 Although there is an economic outcome to either scenario: just as Egyptians experienced the rather cynically ironic outcome of thinking out loud as a call for democratic reform in a global culture – the loss of vital tourist revenue – Americans are paying the price of not thinking (out loud) enough in the form of a persistence economic crisis plaguing one of the birthplaces of modern democracy and capitalism.
5 Polanyi’s awards include the Royal Medal of the Royal Society of London and some thirty honorary degrees from six countries. Dr Polanyi is a Fellow of the Royal Societies of Canada, London, and Edinburgh, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Pontifical Academy of Rome, and the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is also a member of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada, and a Companion of the Order of Canada, and has served on the Prime Minister of Canada’s Advisory Board on Science and Technology and the Premier’s Council of Ontario. Polanyi has served as Foreign Honorary Advisor to the Institute for Molecular Sciences, Japan; as Honorary Advisor to the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Germany; and on the Board of the Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences, Canada. He is a founding member of both the Committee on Scholarly Freedom of the Royal Society and the Canadian Committee for Scientists and Scholars, a human rights organization of which he is President. Dr Polanyi has been active for forty years in International Pugwash, a global movement of scientists and others with a professional concern about the social impact of science and seeking ways to prevent its misuse. He helped to found the Canadian Pugwash Group in 1960, serving as its first Chairman. Polanyi has written extensively on science policy, the control of armaments, and peacekeeping. He coedited The Dangers of Nuclear War, and participated in the Canada 21 study of a 21st-century defence posture for Canada. He cochaired the Department of Foreign Affairs International Consultative Committee on a Rapid Response Capability for the United Nations.
6 In recent years, the role of the intellectual has been much debated in the media, and several scholarly monographs and essay collections have appeared on the subject. The recent U.S. presidential election, as we noted above, often pivoted around supposed divisions between intellectualism and “down to earth” values, elitism and populism, and so on. Each of these pairings separates the intellectual from the public, a divide that current scholarly works seem to complicate. Some of these take a wide historical and geographic approach (notably Posner, Small, Gattone, Melzer et al.), while others (Bender and Cummings) focus on one nation, one period – often our own – or even one individual. Some laud the intellectual who engages in public commentary, while others cast a more cynical eye on this figure and her or his effect (or lack thereof) on public life. Despite this contrast, however, these volumes tend to assume that the “public intellectual” is part of the public sphere (a rare occurrence) and thus different from the “non-public” intellectual or “non-intellectual public.”
7 Here one thinks most obviously of Adorno and Horkheimer’s famous indictment of American popular culture in “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” first published in 1944 as an essay in Philosophische Fragmente, published in 1947 as Dialektik der Aufklärung, and later translated as Dialectic of Enlightenment.
8 See Faflak’s essay in this volume, Note 13.
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