Russell Jacoby: The Last Intellectuals

Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals (1987) runs the argument that post-war America down to the late 1980's saw a notable decline in intellectual life, the near-total extinction of the figure of the public intellectual. "The disappearance of general intellectuals into professions" diagnosed in the book is, however, no one-dimensional decline and fall - it reflects a much wider fracturing of the public domain, though it also follows an institutional logic of its own; unique to the story for Jacoby is a loss of political and intellectual nerve on the part of a whole generation of writers, thinkers and scholars located in and around cities and university campuses.

The argument may call for an update in view of 25 years of further developments - firstly in light of the growth of technology as an agent of radical social change - though equally in light of the by now almost totally residual presence within universities of the New Left - that generation of politically motivated students-cum-professors who, according to Jacoby, had by the late 80's taken decisive steps to accommodate themselves to routinised hyper-specialist academic life. Perhaps the thesis of The Last Intellectuals also calls for some adjustment to Australian conditions - though as it happens surprisingly little, since it was precisely from the late 80's that extensive technical, financial and administrative constraints were imposed on educational institutions by Australian governments - a rationalisation of the nation's universities that, coupled with rapid expansion, has since had so many irrational, demoralising effects analogous to those detailed by Jacoby - not least among them a decline in the public meaning of critical rationality itself.

From the point of view of 2010, Jacoby's 25 year-old book would seem to give pointers to an Australian future that is now a past - a past that many will agree has been far from salutary but that will only cease to show itself in the deceptive guise of unquestionable present necessities if younger generations of students, writers, thinkers and scholars turn squarely to face it. (CS)

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Academic freedom itself was fragile, its principles often ignored. Nor were violations confined to meddling trustees and outside investigators. The threat emerged, perhaps increasingly, from within; academic careers undermined academic freedom. This may be a paradox, but it recalls an inner contradiction of academic freedom - the institution neutralises the freedom it guarantees.

The New Left sprang into life around and against universities; its revulsion seemed visceral. Yet New Left intellectuals became professors who neither looked backward nor sideways; they kept their eyes on professional journals, monographs, and conferences. Perhaps because their lives had unfolded almost entirely on campuses they were unable or unwilling to challenge academic imperatives.

In several areas the accomplishments of the New Left intellectuals are irrevocable. Yet [their sizeable contribution to scholarship] is extraordinary for another reason; it is largely technical, unreadable and - except by specialists - unread. While New Left intellectuals obtain secure positions in central institutions, the deepest irony marks their achievement. Their scholarship looks more and more like the work it sought to subvert. A great surprise of the last twenty-five years is both the appearance of New Left professors and their virtual disappearance. In the end it was not the New Left intellectuals who invaded the universities but the reverse: the academic idiom, concepts, and concerns occupied, and finally preoccupied, young left intellectuals.

"Professors Woods, Perry and Hocking are moderately talented and enterprising young men with whom philosophy is merely a means for getting on in the world," declared Professor E.B.Holt of several younger teachers in his department. "I do not respect them; I will not cooperate with them; and I am happy to be in a position now to wipe out the stigma of being even nominally one of their colleagues." With this statement Holt in 1918 resigned from Harvard University and moved to an island off the Maine coast. . .

The latest research invention, footnote citation "indexes", encourages deferential and toothless scholarship. The Social Science Citation Index, a massive volume appearing three times a year, draws from thousands of journals the footnote references to particular articles and books. By looking up a specific author, say C. Wright Mills or Daniel Bell, one finds a list of the journal articles where Mills or Bell has been cited. In principle this allows a researcher to find material where Mills or Bell, or related matters, are discussed - or at least footnoted. However, this index is increasingly touted as a scientific method for identifying scholars who have impact in their field; it is also being used as a guide for promotion and awards. Presumably the more references to a professor, the greater the stature. Many citations to an individual's work indicates he or she is important; conversely few or no references implies someone is unknown and irrelevant. "If citation indexing becomes a basis for promotion and tenure, for grants and fellowships," comments Jon Wiener, "the implications for one's own footnotes are clear. In the marketplace of ideas, the footnote is the unit of currency. . . One should definitely footnote friends. . . and do what is possible to see that they footnote you in return. . . " Like any quantitative study of reputation, the index is circular. It measures not the quality of work but clout and connections. If used to evaluate careers, however, the lessons for the striving professor are clear: cast a wide net, establish as many relations as possible, do not isolate yourself from the mainstream. It pays not simply to footnote but to design research to mesh smoothly with the contributions of others; they refer to you as you refer to them. Everyone prospers from the saccharine scholarship.

The study of professions is itself an occupation; but inquiries into academic professionalisation [often] fail to guage [an] essential cultural dimension. It is frequently missed or understated: professionalisation leads to privatisation or depoliticisation, a withdrawal of intellectual energy from a larger domain to a narrower discipline. Leftists who entered the university hardly invented the process, but they accepted, even accelerated it. Marxism itself has not been immune; in recent years it has become a professional "field" plowed by specialists.

"The monastic cell has become a professional lecture hall; an endless mass of 'authorities' have taken the place of Aristotle," wrote John Dewey in one of his earliest essays. "Jahresberichte, monographs, journals without end occupy the void. . . .If the older Scholastic spent his laborious time in erasing the writing from old manuscripts. . . the new Scholastic . . . criticises the criticisms with which some other Scholastic has criticised other criticisms. . . "

Philosophy has proved almost immune to reform. Of course, the self-examination of every discipline proceeds at its own speed. Philosophic self-scrutiny, however, may well be the weakest, because American philosophy has promoted a technical expertese that repels critical thinking; its fetish of logic and language has barred all but a few who might rethink philosophy, an endeavour sometimes pursued by colleagues in political science, sociology, or history.

What is The Great Stage?

"A review of the reviewers might at long last yield an idea or two about art and writing. For wouldn't such a meta-review make clear one or two authentic feelings of distress about Art's pitiful condition in this an-aesthetic era of artistic over-production? The poetry, novels, essays and anthologies themselves have nothing to say. They refer, if they refer to anything, to a lost time in which these forms of literary art had form, when Time itself had time and made a present of it to Art, which can manifestly not arise in a world that no longer believes in Eternity, when no one with the ability to write could have faith that the future would grant him readers that are any different from those he sees around him: those infernal writer-readers who are all just about to drop the pose of readerly attention and begin to shout into the latest digitised megaphone of egotism. You seek in vain amid the literature of today for world-views. You look up from your book and find tvs and billboards and inadvertently come across the closest you can get to Weltanschauungen nowadays: Anschauungen, which is to say – rapaciously multiplying percepts."

- or so I thought three years ago.

The Great Stage is turning out to be something more than than the open-ended exercise in criticism it was originally intended as. Still, for the sake of partial self-definition, here's a draft of the answer to the question "What is the Great Stage?" that dates from the early days.

"The Great Stage is a response to a three-fold critical malaise:

1. Print media in Australia is visibly faltering. At present the only dynamic aspect of Australian newspaper culture would seem to be the interaction between the business models of the supermarket managers in command and the tabloid-cum-glossy fare they judge can be sold to the largest number of readers. Under such conditions, the public function of revieweing and criticism is becoming harder to sustain as the culture pages of major broadsheets fill up with monster-sized pictures, interview-pieces, endless food and wine tips and the diary-like musings of celebrity columnists. The 800-word book review – already of limited use for the purposes of the critic – is itself coming to seem a luxury; for a long time it has formed part of the penumbra of a life-style journalism with most of the qualities of advertising (even if it appears above the line separating paid publicity from what claims the reader's attention on other grounds).

2. Universities have ceased to offer critics meaningful points of intellectual contact, much less places of refuge. Our educational institutions were once one of two indispensable reference points of critical activity: in the person of the critic, the relatively heady world of academic scholarship remained connected with the everyday reality of the theatre, the studio and the writer’s corner. By contrast, today universities’ very intellectual function is under threat as "serious scholarship is replaced by an entrepreneurial striving for research money and media attention." (Harry Redner) In short, criticism and academic life until recently belonged together as part of the same cultural manifold – both offered something to the artist, because both sought to give shape to free intellectual perspectives. In an era like our own when university education is subject to the equally sterile logic of bureaucratic control and free market economics, that ceases to be the case in a radical sense. Free critical activity and routinised academic life have come to mutually exclude each other; the social sciences and humanities in particular have increasingly become the haunt of radical academic conformists who dish up their sensibilities for the book market, shuffle their specialities between journals and conferences, deliver up their mechanical models of mind and society to a passively assenting public or join the ranks of administrative power-brokers and let fly with that disgraceful mixture of bombast and blandness with which our universities are expected to procedurally justify themselves.

3. The net poses a range of very different problems, though as the social domain freest of political constraints it remains the obvious place to launch a venture in general criticism. Yet the dilemmas of specialisation which present an obstacle to general criticism in the world-beyond-the-net are often reproduced online at a higher level of complexity; the generalism required to interpret art in relation to the social and cultural problematics of our day is even less likely to emerge in a virtual world where every fragment of an idea generates its own authoritative-looking pronouncements within its own teeming online enclosure. And that’s not even getting started on the raft of further problems the web generates for the critic. Foremost among them is the problem of.taking critical responsibility: in a medium where too many writers let fly with their opinions from behind a veil of anonymity, criticism either fails to develop or degenerates into self-important snark; where speech acts take on the quality of sound-bites for quasi-technical reasons – where the sheer volume of speech determines the speaker’s visibility – two essential aspects of criticism, analysis and interpretation, fall away and a third, evaluation, is radically abbreviated. . . So if yours truly is going to get a spot of criticism going, he might have to take evasive action against all sorts of things – against the purveyors of cheap ironies – against the army of sub-commentators for whom being online means first and foremost giving up on self-control - against all who spare themselves the labour of the concept, in order to be ready with the snappiest instantaneous assessments of everything the world of art and writing have to offer." 

Truly,

CS