Session 6: Intellectuals in Cultural Life Panel

Session 6: Intellectuals in Cultural Life Panel
Joint Session with “Intellectuals – Knowledge, Power, Ideas”

Rachael Evans, Julia Moszkowicz, Clare Johnson, Angela Partington, Gary Peters, Sue Tate

The primary issue is the role of the intellectual within the aesthetic domain, particularly as it relates to the problematical relationship between theory and practice, thinking and doing, reception and production…etc. Within the notorious anti-intellectualism of the artworld and the art institution the intellectual has been treated with a suspicion that has resulted in an often desperate effort by ‘thinkers’ to convince creative practitioners of the relevance of their intellectual labour by providing them with the analytical, critical and contextual tools that, it is claimed, are necessary for self-reflexive practice. Regardless of the merits of this, the dominant role model for the intellectual within the aesthetic domain, it obscures the more complex (and more fruitful) relationship between the intellectual and cultural production within a reconfigured knowledge economy: one that we aim to open-up during the session. The following headlines are intended to flag up some of the ideas we wish to explore.

1. The role of the intellectual is itself a creative one. Deleuze describes philosophy as a ‘creative act’, engaged exclusively in the creation of concepts. As such it can take on an exemplary rather than secondary or complementary role within the domain of cultural production. The intellectual can say ‘do what I do’ not ‘do what I say’, this fundamamentally changes the relationship between the thinker and the doer.

2. A recognition of the above  in the increasing challenge of established assumptions regarding the assumed incompatibility between commerce/the knowledge economy and social inclusion/participation in creative practices: ie., convergencies between academic research and marketing and the post WW2 history of consumer culture as drivien by creative collaborations between diverse groups

3. The re-conception of intellectual labour as a ‘post-critical’ embodied task, where the knowledge economy is thought in terms of affect, emotion and pleasure rather than the established hegemony of subversion and dialectical negation. This, in turn, requires a reconsideration of the political potential of the intelligentsia within contemporary cultural practice

4. A consideration of the impact of intellectuals on the nature of cultural practice through direct collaboration or through the indirect popularisation of  intellectual movements (eg. existentialism and surrealism) in popular genres (eg. film noir and neo-noir)–the interpenetration of the intellectual and the popular.