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December 13, 2004
A friend from Brisbane sent me a copy of Luke Slattery's, "Dumb is the new daggy" from the Weekend Australian of November 27-28 2004. I no longer buy the Weekend Australian, and I gave up reading Slattery's ignorant and ill-informed jibes at postmodernism many a long year ago.
You all know the cultural conservative line. It is so familar. The university is a community of scholars seeking truth for its own sake. The values of this community are knowledge for knowledge sake, art for art's sake, education for its own sake etc. This ethos of the scholars and thinkers, who have retreated to the liberal university, has all been instrumentalised and laid to waste by the deregulated market. Postmodernism has taken over the liberal academy in Australia, especially the humanities' disciplines. It's enfeebled legacy is a paralysis of reason, as it is unable to understand the qualitative difference between reasoned hypothesis and hogwash.
Derrida always comes in for a bashing from these cultural conservatives. For them, Derrida stands for the corrosion in the Enlightenment faith in truth, rationality and reasoned discourse, and he represents a deity in the new secular religion with its own priesthood, acolytes and orthodox beliefs.
And so on and so on. It's all so very familar if you can bother to read the dreary Higher Education Supplement in The Australian.
It is best to ignore the chatter of this kind of junk commentary, given its unwillingness to actually engage with the texts of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault, and its penchant for tilting at cultural windmalls. What Slattery and The Australian express is the dumbing down of critical commentary in Australia and the devaluing of knowledge.
Ironically, Slattery makes these kind of remarks whilst reviewing Frank Furedi's 'Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?' Earlier tracts in this kind of conservative critique include Allan Bloom's, 'The Closing of the American Mind' Russell Jacoby's 'The End of Utopia and The Last Intellectuals' and Richard Posner's, 'Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline.'
However, there is little irony or self-reflection with Slattery as he gives no indication that he himself is an example, and an expression, of the process of cultural dumbing down.
Furedi's argument is about the decline of the critical universal intellectual, the thinker giving way to the expert, politics yielding to technocracy, and culture and education lapsing into forms of social therapy. In Australia it has been interpreted in terms of anti-intellectualism and the growing philistinism.
From Furedi's cultural conservative perspective capitalism and postmodernism only seem like enemies. They actually work together to promote the idea that knowledge is a mere instrument to other ends. However, it is not the market alone which has caused the dumbing down of culture. It is the lefty movement against elitism, which promotes the greater participation of the masses in education and culture without the maintenance of standards. So cultural populism creates a hollowed-out culture.
Slattery then uses the work of A.C.Grayling to highlight the difference between intellectuals and academics:
'Grayling argues that surprisingly few university academics in the English-speaking world are intellectuals "in the sense of having wide interests of the mind and deep commitments in moral and political terms, often together with a vocation for deploying these in debate about matters of public concern". A university academic is a specialist in a narrow field who publishes, usually in jargon, technical research in journals of interest only to other specialists.'
Slattery supports this distinction. It reflects the way that public intellectuals were becoming somewhat invisible because, in some ways, they had become academics, professors locked in the university. That was Russell Jacoby's argument. He added that the professors disparaged popular work as kind of journalistic --meaning that it is readable and superficial. In contrast, the academics were profund and original.
On this reading as one become more and more public one becomes less and less intellectual.This academic discourse operates in terms of the bad "popularizer" and the good "deeply theorized".
Slattery contests this reading of the decline of the public intellectuals by supporting Grayling's argument that the contemporary public intellectuals:
"....inhabit journalism, the media, publishing, non-government organisations; they are writers or artists, commentators or independent entrepreneurs in forms of business related to the media and arts. While many of these intellectuals contribute substantially to the shaping of cultural life, their academic contemporaries pass their time obscurely multiplying footnotes to unreadable, unread and soon forgotten papers."
Slattery then uses this argument to make one of his own about the current Australian situation.
He says that:
"The mainstream media in Britain and Australia has for some time been taking up the cudgels on behalf of intelligent cultural and social criticism....[They are] part of the rollback of creeping philistinism."
So Slattery and The Australian take the mantle of public intellectual for themselves. They-- as a serious metropolitan paper and cultural leader-- represent the smarting-up of our culture in opposition to the lefty, postmodern academics. Slattery defines himself as part of the cultural counter punch to the fashionable nonsense of the lefty postmodernists. He sees himself as the A.C. Grayling sort of public intellectual sort: a public, popularising, intellectual who explains complex and difficult argument in simple language for the educated Australians who read the serious metropolitan papers.
Neat huh?
Alas, Slattery's popularizing of what postmodernism is, or the texts of Derrida, avoids all the complexity, and evades the difficult arguments.
Nor does Slattery mention the disciplinary public intellectuals, such as the public economists, who apply the ideas from their own discipline to a general topic when they act as quote-suppliers for the televison or newspaper. They bring their disciplinary insights and their skills to bear on the public issue and add something original to the public debate. That, in other words, social scientists and humanists can indeed grapple with the issues and the problems of the real world
Slattery also misses another kind of public intellectual---the critical ones of the small magazines or the new bloggers who continue to sustain the critical spirit of the Enlightenment; and continue to deploy critique in the spirit of democracy, and see themselves as citizens.
This oversight is crucial since bloggers are joining others to create a public space within which such tricky matters as genetic engineering, genetic enhancement, the ideal of human perfection to be achieved through manipulation of the very stuff of life can be articulated publicly and debated critically. On this account the public intellectual works to puncture the myth-makers of our era, whether it's those who promise that utopia is just around the corner because of the free market, genetic enginneering, the managerial therapeutic state, political correctness or economic growth from Australia's integration with US economy. Name your own myth making issue.
The important thing here is the internet not the left right issue. The internet gives rise to the kind of "free-floating" intellectual that had long been rumored to be on his or her last legs. This is a group who are shaped by ideas that have come out of the academy but they not limited to that. The bloggers, the newly forming online magazines and Webdiary are giving birth to a lively new form of public intellectualism that is not academic in tone. Nor is this writing the op-ed journalism of the serious metropolitan paper. The pieces that constitute Webdiary are quite different to the op.ed.
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Is is that public intellectuals are hidden within multiple fields and contributing to society, or has society found a way to prevent the intellectual from contributing to society?