Session 2: Politics and the Intellectual
Session 2: Politics and the Intellectual
Chair: Tatiana Saburova
Otherness, Autonomy and the Critical Ontology of the Contemporary. A Theory of the Intellectual in the Age of Globalization
Kjetil Jakobsen
Department of Information, Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, Norway
In Absent minds Stefan Collini distinguishes four senses of the word intellectual: “The sociological sense”, defining the intellectual as a socio-professional category, “the subjective sense”, focusing on an individual’s attitude to and degree of interest in ideas, “the cultural sense” involving both a level of achievement in a specific cultural field and the expression of general views, themes or topics to a wider public, and finally “the political sense”, emphasising the political “interventions” of the cultural domain. My paper will argue that these senses are all vague and inconsistent, as is a fifth common sense of the term, that which focuses on the “free intellectual” understood as self-employed and institutionally independent. There is in my opinion no interesting and consistent way, even for a sociological approach, of defining intellectual that does not engage with the word “critical”. This is shown negatively be the fact that “uncritical intellectual” is a contradiction in terms. In many languages the concept of “critique” carries with it the sense of Kantian philosophy, critique being self-reflective critique. That is why avant-garde deconstruction of the art institution is peculiarly intellectual, as is the Bourdieu school’s objectification of “homo academicus” or the critique of science and education in Foucault, Derrida or Latour. A special sense of the Kantian concept is the critical ontology of the contemporary which Foucault in his “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?” essay deems to be the characteristic the modern intellectual. This is in Foucault’s words not a theory or a doctrine and not even a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating. It is rather an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life of a civilization in which the critique of what we are, is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed.
1. Is the critical ontology of the contemporary the true task of intellectuals?
2. Most contemporary reflection on globalization falls short of supplying such ontology. Is that a problem? Why?
Turkish Journalists as Intellectuals
Incilay Cangoz
Facvulty of Communication Sciences, Anadolu University, Eskisehir, Turkey
The history of journalism has been described as civilized and democratic initiation with claims to an exclusive role and status in society in many countries as well as in Turkey. Gradually such “serving public interest” role has been defended by journalists’ occupational ideology. Although the conceptualization of journalism as a professional ideology can be traced throughout the literature on journalism studies, scholars convincingly criticize such an ideology more or less for granted. In this article the ideal-typical values of journalism ideology is investigated in terms of how these values challenged or reproduce established power or social system in the context of history and cultural change. The analysis in this paper shows how journalism in the self-perception of journalists has come to mean much more than its modernist bias of telling people what they need to know, how they live.
A Farewell to the Ivory Tower? The Literary Review Decision and the Changing Self-Perception of American Intellectuals in 1941
Elisabeth Piller
University of Tennessee, Tennessee, USA
The small literary review Decision, published in New York City during 1941 and edited by German émigré author Klaus Mann, provides a unique example of transcultural intellectual cooperation within the United States. A self-proclaimed “review of free culture”, Decision, though published in the English language, was supported and contributed to by a greatly diverse group of well-known and avant-garde European émigrés and American intellectuals. As a transcontinental intellectual endeavor with a clear political commitment, it is reflective of a new dimension of international cooperation in a time of crisis. At the same time it embodies and transcends the inherent juxtaposition of an aesthetic and political dimension in the self-perception of the intellectual.
This paper examines the way in which Decision created a political dialogue between European and American intellectuals by intrinsically aesthetic means. It stands exemplary for the attempt to resolve the antagonism between the political and the aesthetic in order to conceptualize a powerful cultural response to the ideology of European fascism. Decision is utilized as a prism through which to assess the intellectual’s self-conception in regard to aesthetics and politics in a time of specific historical crisis. Its application in this way reveals and clarifies the development of an increasingly politically aware perception of the intellectual’s role in American society during the crucial year 1941. While European and American intellectuals differed in their opinion about their public role and the notion of a “democratic mission” before 1940, the year of Decision’s publication witnessed a change in attitude directed towards an abandonment of the purely aesthetic in favor of the, at least marginally, political. This change is shown to be a consequence of close cultural exchange with European intellectuals, who had become highly politicized over the last decade. Yet, the uneasy balance between adherence to a political and an aesthetic ideal remained apparent and was merely bridged temporarily. The cessation of Decision’s publication, shortly after the United States’ entry in World War II, reveals the limits of cross-cultural cooperation as well as bears witness to the eventual incompatibility of aesthetic ideals with the intellectual’s political mission.
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