Session 6: Intellectuals in Cultural Life Panel

Session 6: Intellectuals in Cultural Life Panel
Joint Session with “The Idea of Education”

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

Introduction (Gary Peters)

We should begin by clarifying the context from which the following contributions are drawn. All of the members of the panel teach within an academic institution, within a Faculty devoted primarily to creative practice. As regards the intellectual this immediately raises three questions:

These differences impact on the relationship intellectuals and academics have had with creative practices and cultural life as can be witnessed historically in the often productive cross-fertilisation of ideas and practices between intellectuals and artists (e.g., the Salon)  as distinct from the more circumspect and suspicious dealings between academics and artists. Artists are often accused of being ‘anti-intellectual’, they are not, they are ‘anti-academic’, not least because they baulk at the idea of being taught and they doubt that art is a form of knowledge.

Listening to Lyotard’s claim that we have witnessed the ‘death’ of the intellectual with the collapse of the ‘grand narratives’ that sustained their conceptual productivity, the massive  expansion of university education and the subsequent rise to prominence of the academic raises important questions regarding the possible roles of the latter within the world of cultural practice. To date, the academic world has been characterised by a critical Weltanshauung that is primarily intent upon putting the negative to work, a desire all too often at odds with the affirmative nature of cultural practice––the academic as critic. The importation of theoretical knowledges into the domain of practice, legitimated in the name of an (ideal) ‘reflective practitioner’ has continued to cast the academic in the role of outsider or alien within the cultural realm to the extent that these privileged knowledges continue to serve the analytical, critical and contextual rather than what might be called the synthetical (or synthesising) thrust of practice. Each of the papers to follow are intended to open-up a discussion of possible new ways to view the role of the academic within the field of cultural practice one that, I will suggest, brings it closer to the traditional role of the intellectual….another provocation!

Clare Johnson

This paper will explore the idea of the intellectual as an embodied practitioner/thinker through notions of contact, impression and affect. It will explore post-critical understandings of intellectual activity as non-binary (Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of ‘beside’, 2003) and characterised by the simultaneous experience of bodily sensation, emotion and thought in the formation of knowledge (encapsulated by Tracy Emin’s idea of ‘thinking with the body’). I will argue that the recognition of this model of the intellectual is not a move away from politics so much as a challenge to the limitations of notions of political activity premised on resistance and consciousness. To be interested in contact and impression is not to abandon critique. Instead intellectual work can be understood as a performative encounter which both ‘impresses’ and ‘presses upon’ as one surface on another (Ahmed, 2004). In contrast to the discursive construction of Emin as anti-intellectual, perpetuated during the 1990s by readings of yBa work as ‘untheoretical’ or a backlash against 1980s deconstructive, ‘theoretically-informed’ art, I want to position Emin as an intellectual in the sense of an embodied thinker who invites us to share in the emotional economy of her work . Furthermore, when read through notions of impression and contact, the affective and emotional economy of her work becomes political currency. Hence the idea of the intellectual is connected to the political in a post-critical moment. I will argue that the ‘touch’ of her work does not separate affect and emotion from consciousness and resistance.

Sue Tate

Since feminism is both a methodological approach and a political project, the feminist intellectual working in the aesthetic domain will, by definition, use theory to engage proactively with the production of artistic practice, working to open discursive spaces for its reception. Feminist theory in the 70s and 80s, confronting deeply entrenched patriarchal meaning structures, of necessity privileged subversion and negation but in changed cultural circumstances questions have been raised about these strategies.  Taking on hegemonic status they might have de-limiting rather than enabling effects, especially on younger women artists who have changed needs and an uncertain relationship with the older generation of practitioners and theorists.  However feminism, as Griselda Pollock has pointed out, is “a critical practice not a doxa; a dynamic and self-critical response and intervention” and, from the 90s, feminist intellectuals have engaged in a self reflexive re-evaluation.

For over 30years Pauline Boty, and other women Pop artists, have been denied discursive visibility within a feminist ‘grid of specification’ (to borrow a term from Foucault) predicated on the complicit/subversive binary which disallowed an engagement with the affective, especially the very real pleasures that women experience in the context of mass culture. My ‘intellectual activity’, challenging the hegemony of that binary and doing the donkey work of primary research, has helped to make Boty’s practice accessible to and demonstrably influential on, younger women artists. This paper will explore a contrapuntal, cross generational negotiation of the relationship between theory and contemporary artistic production.

Clearly the ‘affective turn’ in theory is to be welcomed as a potent development in the feminist project, challenging the occlusion of female subjectivity and embodied experience.  However, the paper will draw attention to the dangers of a de-politicised ‘post-criticality’ that risks erecting a new binary privileging the affective at the expense of cognitive critique, dismissing the ongoing need for the subversion  and ‘dialectical negation’ of oppressive meaning structures yet to be dislodged.

Angela Partington

The recognition of ‘user-generated content’ as a valuable resource in industrial research and development, and the acquisition of small ‘amateur’ websites as a new form marketing has reinvigorated old arguments about the ‘democratisation’ of art through technological change, and about the future roles of professional cultural intermediaries and ‘gatekeepers’ who have in the past often appeared to be ‘obstacles to creativity’.

The development of ‘viral marketing’ is evidence both of the elusive/unpredictable nature of consumer behaviour (which has created a long-term crisis in the advertising industry), and of the dependence of professional cultural producers on popular/everyday creative practices. Industrial ‘research’ revolves around the attempt to understand consumers’ ‘creativity’ – it enables production to be consumption-led.
This paper will ask if these developments, and the apparent convergence between academic and commercial research which they suggest, can be seen as evidence of a re-invigoration of intellectual critique.

Julia Moszkowicz

This paper will address notions of ‘will’ and how they relate to constitutions of the intellectual (as possessive of philosophical subjectivity) as active and determined towards a progressive agenda for others. The work of the intellectual – by this account – is disposed towards the social and the Historical in terms of the as-yet to-be (with hope?)

I will briefly touch on the ideas of design historian, Reyner Banham, who had a deep suspicion of Adult Education, the Academy and their ‘progressive’ agendas; typically despising  hieratic instances of expert-intellectual culture (and yet choosing to enter the Institution). He states, for example, that: ‘the rise of the working classes to political power has rested upon someone equipping them with the right kind of responses to social and political situations …’ . His negative opinion of this approach seems to stem from his own strong sense of where he ‘came from’, which – he suggests – gave him reflex responses to certain cultural scenarios.

This disposition-intuition, might serve as another way of thinking ‘the experiential gap’; the idea that intellectual will is – of necessity – asserted in a designated space of action, wherein it operates with aspects of experience which pre-empt the moment of intellectual activity itself. In this regard the only show of intellectual will and mastery would be the decision not to act. To this end, I am interested to discuss what happens to cherished constitutions of the philosophical subject and intellectual work; that is, what is to become of the intellectual and his/her field of potential intellectees?