John Michael is teaches in the department of English at the University of Rochester. He is the author of Emerson and Skepticism: The Cipher of the World.

ANXIOUS INTELLECTS

Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment ValuesBy JOHN MICHAEL

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2000 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-2460-7

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………..ixIntroduction: Fundamental Confusion…………………………………………………………11 Publicity: Black Intellectuals as Inorganic Representatives………………………………….232 Pedagogy: Enlightened Instruction as Oppressive Discipline…………………………………..443 Community: Pragmatism as a Profession of Anxiety……………………………………………644 Culture: Western Traditions and Intellectual Treason………………………………………..895 The Critic: Cultural Studies and Adorno’s Ghost…………………………………………….1116 The Scientist: Disembodied Intellect and Popular Utopias…………………………………….1317 The Professional: Science Wars and Interdisciplinary Studies…………………………………148Conclusion: Tattered Maps………………………………………………………………….169Notes……………………………………………………………………………………177Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..203Index……………………………………………………………………………………213

Chapter One

Publicity: Black Intellectuals as Inorganic Representatives

A group of African American professors who also write for a popular audience has received more sympathetic press than most academic intellectuals in the aftermath of the culture wars. Both in and beyond the university, these “black public intellectuals” have attracted notice as representatives of the “black community.” They are the most recent and the most seductive avatar of a specter that has long haunted leftist intellectuals (though conservatives have their own versions): the specter of the organic intellectual. Intellectuals with progressive aspirations have long sought remedy for the schizophrenia of their status as cross-cultural aliens, elites attempting to work in the interests of “the people,” in a particularly populist construction of Gramsci’s notion of the organic intellectual. The desire to be organic intellectuals, as Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson, and others have suggested, most often motivates the enterprise of cultural studies today. That desire, however, is much older than cultural studies and much more widely pervasive among leftist thinkers. As a promised solution to the seemingly intractable problem of presuming to speak for another in the interests of liberation, empowerment, and democracy, the desire to be an organic intellectual may be an indispensable component of any thought that imagines itself to be progressive. For this reason, intellectuals in the West have periodically sought heroic organic models for the work they do. An examination of the small, not necessarily representative group of African American academics who have been presented in the media as candidates for the position of exemplary organic intellectual will suggest both the promises and the problems of the organic intellectual as a model for critical work.

That the organic links between identity and intellectual insight or identity and political orientation are never given but always to be forged, that in fact neither linkages nor identities are ever organic at all, would not seem to require much reflection or defense these days. Yet black intellectuals as diverse as Adolph Reed, Toni Morrison, and Michael Eric Dyson have recently felt it necessary to address the issue of their relationship to other black Americans because the desire for organic intellectuals still persists and tends to attach itself to these “authentic” voices from the African American “community.” The desire to discover organic intellectuals plays out in representations of these figures (and sometimes in their self-representation) in ways that may help us to see the real conditions in which public intellectuals labor. The condition of black intellectuals today is peculiar, but it is not unique. They offer a particular perspective on the problematics of representation and power that inevitably attend the intellectual’s inorganic relationship to those for and to whom he or she speaks.

In 1995 public intellectuals, long thought to be a vanishing species in the United States, suddenly appeared to repopulate the public sphere. Robert S. Boynton, in a cover story in the Atlantic Monthly, proclaimed that the intellectual had reappeared:

Nearly a decade after an influential book declared the public intellectual extinct, an impressive group of African-American writers and thinkers have emerged to revive and revitalize that role. They are bringing moral imagination and critical intelligence to bear on the definingly American matter of race-and reaching beyond race to voice what one [of them] calls “the commonality of American concern.”

Russell Jacoby’s pessimism had been unwarranted. Public intellectuals were back “in Black,” as Michael Hanchard, writing in the Nation, put it.

Boynton attempted the bizarre and, I think, symptomatic project of linking the black intellectuals to the New York intellectuals of the fifties dubbed (and fetishized) by Russell Jacoby as The Last Intellectuals. Both Hanchard and Adolph Reed, writing in the Village Voice, criticized Boynton for paying scant attention to the long tradition of African American intellectual work that offers a more appropriate frame of reference. Reed in particular focused on the symptomatic status of the “black public intellectual,” of whose celebrity in mainstream American culture he is deeply suspicious:

In the last few months, the notion [of the black public intellectual] has gained greater currency. It has been addressed in successive articles by Michael Alan Brub in The New Yorker and Robert Boynton in The Atlantic, while Leon Wieseltier’s right-for-the-wrong-reasons attack on Cornel West in The New Republic has spawned commentary by James Ledbetter and Ellen Willis in The Voice. Although these white writers obviously didn’t invent the black public intellectual identity, they have certainly anointed it as a specific, notable status in upper-middlebrow American culture.

That status, not wholly invented but certainly constructed in article after article in mainstream middlebrow publications around this time, is the notable status of black writers as models of organic intellectual activity.

Adolph Reed identifies a certain “racial vindicationism” that has exerted a distorting pressure in work by and about African American intellectuals, one manifestation of which has been a tendency to identify those intellectuals as organic representatives of a putative black community. This alone makes them notably different from the New York intellectuals with whom they are often compared and whose mantle as public intellectuals they have, according to some especially breathless commentators, assumed. Those largely Jewish modernists were never seen-nor did they ever claim-to be organically tied to any group or identity. Rather, their most cherished self-representation and public image was, as Bruce Robbins has shown, the ideal of the “luftmensch,” or free-floating intellectual: independent of, and untied to, any concept of community. The African American intellectual, by contrast, appears on the public stage-as he usually has in the United States-tethered to a burden of representationality. More recently additional weight has been added in the form of an injunction for organic linkage to, and identity with, the “community” these intellectuals are supposed to represent. Thus a Gramscian ideal rather than a Mannheimian myth furnishes the peculiar problematic-or at least the special problem-that the African American intellectual faces. Yet it may well be that this problem, while it is especially evident among black intellectuals today, is not finally special to them but the general burden any intellectual who seeks to speak to and for any “community” confronts.

Thus Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cornel West, bell hooks, Patricia Williams, Toni Morrison, Michael Eric Dyson, Stanley Crouch, Shelby Steele, and Michele Wallace-to name only a few-have been anointed authentic spokespeople for, and on behalf of, an organic community whose identity these writers both help form and must reflect. As the heterogeneity of this list suggests, the only criteria of selection here may be, as Reed witheringly suggests, “black people who write social commentary and are known to white elite institutions” (“Drums,” 31). That these diverse black intellectuals must strive “to express the will of the racial collectivity,” as Reed reminds us, means that they have assumed the conventional task assigned by the dominant culture to the African American intellectuals it elevates to prominence. To say this, however, is not to exhaust this phenomenon’s significance, nor is it necessarily to describe what they are doing. That there should be so much attention paid to black intellectuals in the dominant popular and academic culture at this time suggests not only the depth of paranoia and the urgency of desire directed by the dominant culture toward the African American “community” but also the persistence of a longing among intellectuals both “white” and black for a more organic relationship to an audience beyond the academy that they might imagine addressing. The ways in which these desires get elicited and complicated in the present turbulent intellectual and social climate require analysis.

Race, intellectuals, and American community: identity politics and its discontents

The problem of community in U.S. society is one that presses especially hard on African American intellectuals. This is in part because black intellectuals are increasingly visible in U.S. culture and also because the African American “community” is widely assumed to be in crisis. Yet despite declining standards of living for most African Americans (and for Americans generally), the situation of black intellectuals seems never to have been better. As Gerald Early has remarked, “for the first time in African-American history there is a powerful, thoroughly credentialed and completely professionalized black intellectual class.” They are, as Early describes them, “the putative leaders of a generation of other African Americans like themselves, highly literate, college-educated, fortysomething offspring of the civil rights movement and integration-Stanley Crouch, Shelby Steele, Bell Hooks [sic], Patricia Williams, Michael Eric Dyson, Michele Wallace, Stephen Carter, Glenn Loury.” These black intellectuals play a large role in the dominant culture’s imagination as representatives of, and interpreters for, a race that still occupies a special and especially vexed place in the nation’s imaginary. In addition, many progressive intellectuals have looked to these writers as organic intellectuals speaking as and for the African American community.

For this reason, the publication of The Future of the Race, a joint effort by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West, two leading public intellectuals, was an important event. Reissuing W. E. B. DuBois’s influential polemic “The Talented Tenth,” each of these writers struggles with the question of intellectual responsibility and intellectual agency in communities where-from their perspective-the limits and borders are far from clear and the space of belonging is always divided and conflictual. Here issues involving divisions along shifting and blurred distinctions of gender and class as well as race and xenophobia manifest themselves with particular force. Appeals to organic commitments or communities as grounds for the intellectual’s work become especially problematic. Yet while they may be problematic as grounds for action, at the present moment the identity politics associated with issues of race in the United States may also be inescapable as conditions for thought.

Certainly, as Gerald Early has suggested, the ruminations of Gates and West on the questions raised by DuBois in “The Talented Tenth” are thin and seem both self-involved and self-serving. Yet they are symptomatic of a problem of stratification and leadership that, while it bears a particular historical and structural weight for African American intellectuals, is also a problem for all intellectuals who seek to speak for a community and champion egalitarian or democratic ideals. The problem involves the distance and difference between the character and status of intellectuals and the communities they purport to represent. This ensures that whatever the relationship between intellectuals and community may be, it can never be simply organic.

There is nothing new about this problem. What is general and what is specific in the situation of black intellectuals today both appear in Adolph Reed’s examination of DuBois’s complex and ambivalent thinking about elites and their relationship to, and responsibilities for, the broader community. Of DuBois’s view of society as expressed at midcareer in his 1940 autobiographical memoir Dusk of Dawn, Reed writes:

He proposed a pyramidal view of the status and hierarchy of the black community, in which “the poor, ignorant, sick and antisocial form a vast foundation” and whose “highest members, although few in number, reach above the average not only of the Negroes but of the whites, and may justly be compared to the better-class white culture.” He expressed a need for caution, however, in assessing this stratum’s actual social historical role, noting, for example, the group’s propensities to “conspicuous consumption” and frivolousness. He observed that upper-class blacks felt isolated and alone as a result of segregation. They were often unable or unwilling to share in middle-class white society on the terms in which it was offered, and at the same time they tended to recoil from the vulgarity of their own lower classes. (Reed, Du Bois, 65)

Certainly the alienation of middle-class blacks and their intellectuals is intensified by the racism-some of it internalized-of the dominant white society, but it is similar to the alienation of critical distance that intellectuals tend to feel not only toward the groups or practices they criticize but also toward the communities they attempt to champion. This is the less attractive but inevitable seamy side of the utopianism or transcendence that in some measure, as Konrad and Szelenyi and many others have argued, structures all critical thought.

Moreover, the very ideal of a community to be represented is often a production of intellectuals rather than a given fact of their situation. We tend to use, without reflection, terms like “African-American community” in close conjunction with other terms like “organic intellectual,” but it takes little historical or critical reflection to realize that such terms, while valuable in analyzing stratified and divided societies, are highly problematic. Both Gates and West, in their essays on DuBois, bemoan the increasing cultural and material distance between middle-class and poor black Americans. This phenomenon, as Reed points out, had already attracted the attention of DuBois, who, writing in The Crisis in 1921, remarked that “the outstanding fact about the Negro group in America, which has but lately gained notice, is that it is flying apart into opposition [sic] economic classes.” DuBois continues:

This was to be expected. But most people, including myself, long assumed that the American Negro, forced into social unity by color caste, would achieve economic unity as a result, and rise as a mass of laborers led by intelligent planning to a higher unity with the laboring classes of the world.

This has not happened. On the contrary, and quite logically, the American Negro is today developing a distinct bourgeoisie bound to and aping American acquisitive society and developing an employing and a laboring class. This division is only in embryo, but it can be sensed. (quoted in Reed, Du Bois, 68-69)

This analysis and criticism of the black bourgeoisie, taken up and expanded by E. Franklin Frazier and Harold Cruse, is the subtext or pretext of the predicament of the African American intellectual, like all intellectuals a product of the middle classes, to which Gates, West, and so many other black academics and writers today refer.

These problems are not uniquely African American problems. “White” Americans evoke identity politics, too, and dream of organic communities as well. Thus the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, for example, fears the “disintegration of the national community, apartheid, Balkanization, tribalization,” in the United States if intellectuals and educators lulled by the siren song of multiculturalism forget that home is a place where the “American synthesis has an inevitable Anglo-Saxon coloration.” Certainly, when Schlesinger goes on to claim that the “republic embodies ideals that transcend ethnic, religious, and political lines,” he seems to claim the moral high ground. Nonetheless, the inevitability of the Anglo-Saxon coloration he imagines as a neutral fact of national history bespeaks a certain unwillingness to abide by the transcendent ideals of the republic that the historian evokes. In the interests of fairness and as a historian, Schlesinger would have to admit that there are other ways of narrating the nation’s identity given the determinate heterogeneity of its compositeness that he himself acknowledges. Such a narration might decompose and complicate without obviating the urgent importance of the identity categories and groups-always racial and gendered and inflected by class-that divide and define our sense of communal, if not common, identity.

(Continues…)

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