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2/13/2015 The Reith Lectures: Professionals and amateurs: Is there such a thing as an independent, autonomously functioning intellectual? In the fourth of his 1993 Reith Lectures, a series entitled 'Representations of the Intelle…

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SOME YEARS ago the versatile and ingenious French intellectual Regis Debray wrotea penetrating account of French cultural life entitled Teachers, Writers, Celebrities:The Intellectuals of Modern France. Debray himself had once been a seriouslycommitted left-wing activist who had taught at the University of Havana shortly afterthe Cuban Revolution of 1958; some years later, he was given a 30-year prison termby the Bolivian authorities because of his association with Che Guevara. Yet he onlyserved three years of his sentence and after his return to France, Debray became asemi-academic political analyst and, later, an adviser to President Mitterrand.

The Reith Lectures: Professionals and amateurs: Isthere such a thing as an independent, autonomouslyfunctioning intellectual? In the fourth of his 1993Reith Lectures, a series entitled 'Representations ofthe Intellectual', Edward Said considers the modernpressures that challenge ingenuity and will. This isan edited text of last night's Radio 4 broadcastEDWARD SAID

Thursday 15 July 1993

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Debray's thesis is that between 1880 and 1930 Parisian intellectuals were principallyconnected to the Sorbonne; they were secular refugees from both church andBonapartism, where in laboratories, libraries and classrooms the intellectual,protected as a professor, could make important advances in knowledge. After 1930,the Sorbonne slowly lost its authority to new publishing houses like the NouvelleRevue Francaise, where, according to Debray, 'the spiritual family', comprising theintelligentsia and their editors, was given a more hospitable roof over its head. Untilroughly 1960, such writers as Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus, Mauriac, Gide andMalraux were in effect the intelligentsia who had superseded the professoriate,superseded them because of their free-ranging work, their credo of freedom and theirdiscourse that was 'midway between the ecclesiastical solemnity that went before itand the shrillness of the advertising that came after'.

Around 1968, intellectuals largely deserted their publishers' fold;instead they flocked to the mass media - as journalists, talkshowguests and hosts, advisers, managers and so on. Not only didthey now have a huge mass audience, but also their entire life'swork as intellectuals depended on their viewers, on acclaim oroblivion as given by those 'others' who had become a faceless,consuming audience out there. Debray says: 'By extending thereception area, the mass media have reduced the sources ofintellectual legitimacy, surrounding the professionalintelligentsia, the classic source of legitimacy, with widerconcentric circles that are less demanding and therefore moreeasily won over.'

What Debray describes is almost entirely a local Frenchsituation, the result of a struggle between secular, imperial andecclesiastical forces in that society since Napoleon. It is thereforemost unlikely to duplicate the picture he provides for France inother societies. In Britain, for example, the major universitiesbefore the Second World War could hardly be characterised inDebray's terms, since even Oxford and Cambridge dons were notprincipally known in the public domain as intellectuals in theFrench sense; and, although British publishing houses werepowerful and influential between the two world wars, they and

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their authors did not constitute the spiritual family Debrayspeaks about in France. Nevertheless, the general point is a validone: groups of individuals are aligned with institutions andderive power and authority from those institutions. As theinstitutions either rise or fall in ascendancy, so too do theirorganic intellectuals who work inside them.

And yet the question remains as to whether there is or can beanything like an independent, autonomously functioningintellectual.

This is a tremendously important question, I think, and it mustbe looked into with a combination of realism and idealism,certainly not cynicism. A cynic, Oscar Wilde said, is someonewho knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. Toaccuse all intellectuals of being sellouts just because they earntheir living working in a university or for a newspaper is a coarseand, finally, meaningless charge.

During the waning days of the Reagan administration, adisaffected left-wing American intellectual called Russell Jacobypublished a book that generated a great deal of discussion, muchof it approving. It was called The Last Intellectuals, and arguedthe unimpeachable thesis that in the United States 'the non-academic intellectual' had completely disappeared, leaving noone in that place except a bunch of timid and jargon-riddenuniversity dons, to whom no one in the society paid anyattention. Jacoby's model for the intellectual of yore wascomprised of a few names that lived mostly in Greenwich Village(the local equivalent of the Latin Quarter) earlier this centuryand were known by the general name of the New Yorkintellectuals. Most of them were Jewish, left-wing (but anti-

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Communist), and managed to live by their pens. Figures of theearlier generation included men and women such as EdmundWilson, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Dwight MacDonald; theirlater counterparts were Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe(who died only a few weeks ago), Susan Sontag, Daniel Bell,William Barrett, Lionel Trilling. According to Jacoby the likes ofsuch people have been diminished by various post-war social andpolitical forces: the flight to the suburbs (Jacoby's point beingthat the intellectual is an urban creature); the irresponsibilitiesof the Beat Generation, who pioneered the idea of dropping outand fleeing from their appointed station in life; the expansion ofthe university; and the drift to the campus of the formerAmerican left.

The result is that today's intellectual is most likely to be acloseted literature professor, with a secure income and nointerest in dealing with the world outside the classroom. Suchindividuals, Jacoby alleges, write an esoteric and barbaric prosethat is meant mainly for academic advancement and not forsocial change. Meanwhile, the ascendancy of what has beencalled the neo-conservative movement - intellectuals who hadbecome prominent during the Reagan period but who were inmany cases former left-wing, independent intellectuals, such asIrving Kristol and Sidney Hook - brought with it a whole host ofnew journals advancing an openly reactionary, or at leastconservative, social agenda. Jacoby mentions the extreme right-wing quarterly the New Criterion in particular. These new forces,says Jacoby, were and still are much more assiduous at courtingyoung writers, potential intellectual leaders who can take overfrom the older ranks. Whereas the New York Review of Books,one of the most prestigious liberal journals in America, had once

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pioneered daring ideas as expressed by new and radical writers,it had now acquired 'a deplorable record', resembling in itsageing Anglophilia 'Oxford teas rather than New York delis'.

Is what Jacoby says about the reason for the disappearance ofintellectuals true, or can we offer a more accurate diagnosis? Inthe first place I think it is wrong to be invidious about theuniversity, or even about the United States. There was a briefperiod in France shortly after the Second World War when ahandful of prominent independent intellectuals such as Sartre,Camus, Aron and De Beauvoir seemed to represent the classicidea - not necessarily the reality - of intellectuals descended fromtheir great (but alas often mythical) 19th-century prototypes likeRenan and Humboldt. But what Jacoby doesn't talk about is thatintellectual work in the 20th century has been centrallyconcerned not just with public debate and elevated polemic, butalso with criticism and disenchantment, with exposure of falseprophets and debunking of ancient traditions and hallowednames.

Besides, being an intellectual is not at all inconsistent with beingan academic or a pianist, for that matter. The Canadian pianistGlenn Gould was a recording artist on contract to largecorporations for the whole of his performing life: this did notprevent him from being an iconoclastic reinterpreter of andcommentator on classical music with tremendous influence onthe way performance is realised and judged. By the same token,academic intellectuals - historians, for example - have totallyreshaped thought about the writing of history, the stability oftraditions, the role of language in society. One thinks of EricHobsbawm and E P Thompson in England, of Hayden White inAmerica. Their work has had wide diffusion beyond the

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academy, although it mostly was born and nurtured inside it.

The particular threat to the intellectual today, whether in theWest or the non-Western world, is not the academy, nor thesuburbs, nor the appalling commercialism of journalism andpublishing houses. Rather the danger comes from an attitudethat I shall be calling professionalism, that is, thinking of yourwork as an intellectual as something you do for a living, betweenthe hours of nine and five with one eye on the clock, and anothercocked at what is considered to be proper, professionalbehaviour - not rocking the boat, not straying outside theaccepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable andabove all presentable, hence uncontroversial and unpolitical and'objective'.

What are these pressures in the Nineties? And how do they fitthis professionalism? What I want to discuss are four pressuresthat I believe challenge the intellectual's ingenuity and will. Noneof them is unique to only one society. Despite theirpervasiveness, each of them can be countered by what I shall callamateurism, the desire to be moved not by profit or reward butby love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, inmaking connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to betied down to a speciality, in caring for ideas and values despitethe restrictions of a profession.

Specialisation is the first of these pressures. The higher one goesin the education system today the more one is limited to arelatively narrow area of knowledge. Now no one can haveanything against competence as such, but when it involves losingsight of anything outside one's immediate field - say earlyVictorian love poetry - and the sacrifice of one's general culture

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to a set of authorities and canonical ideas, then competence ofthat sort is not worth the price paid for it.

In the study of literature, for example, which is my particularinterest, specialisation has meant an increasing technicalformalism, and less and less of a historical sense of what realexperiences actually went into the making of a work of literature.Specialisation loses you sight of the raw effort of constructingeither art or knowledge; as a result you cannot view knowledgeand art as choices and decisions, commitments and alignments,rather than impersonal theories or methodologies. To be aspecialist in literature too often also means shutting out history,or music, or politics. In the end, as a fully specialised literaryexpert, you become tame and accepting of whatever the so-calledleaders in the field will allow. Specialisation also kills your senseof excitement and discovery, both of which are irreduciblypresent in the intellectual's makeup. In the final analysis, givingup to specialisation is, I have always felt, laziness: doing whatothers tell you is always done because that is your speciality,after all.

If specialisation is a kind of general instrumental pressurepresent in all systems of education everywhere, expertise and thecult of the certified expert are more particular pressures in thepost-war world. To be an expert you have to be certified by theproper authorities; they instruct you in speaking the rightlanguage, citing the right authorities, holding down the rightterritory. This is especially true when sensitive and/or profitableareas of knowledge are at stake. There has been a great deal ofdiscussion recently of something called 'political correctness', aninsidious phrase applied to academic humanists who, it isfrequently said, do not really think independently but rather

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according to norms established by a cabal of leftists; these normsare supposed to be overly sensitive to racism, sexism and thelike, instead of allowing people to debate in what is supposed tobe an 'open' manner.

The truth is that the campaign against political correctness hasbeen conducted by various conservatives and other champions offamily values. Although some of the things they say have somemerit - especially when they pick up on the sheer mindlessness ofunthinking cant - their campaign totally overlooks the amazingconformity and political correctness where, for example,military, national security, foreign and economic policy havebeen concerned. During the immediate post-war years, forexample, so far as the Soviet Union was concerned you wererequired to accept unquestioningly the premises of the Cold War,the total evil of the Soviet Union, and so on. For an even longerperiod of time, roughly from the mid-Forties until the mid-Seventies, the official American idea held that freedom in theThird World meant simply freedom from Communism: itreigned virtually unchallenged; and with it went the notion -endlessly elaborated by legions of sociologists, anthropologists,political scientists and economists - that 'development' was non-ideological, derived from the West and involved economic take-off, modernisation, anti-Communism and a devotion amongsome political leaders to formal alliances with the United States.

For the United States and some of its Western associates, such asBritain and France, these views about defence and security oftenbecame dogma. This resulted in imperial policies, in whichcounter-insurgency and an implacable opposition to nativenationalism (always seen as tending towards Communism andthe Soviet Union) brought immense disasters in the form of

Paris MenswearAutumn/Winter 2015:Studious designlessons from LouisVuitton, Givenchy,Loewe, Thom Browne,Hermes

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2015/01/25/paris-menswear-autumnwinter-2015-studious-design-lessons-from-louis-vuitton-givenchy-loewe-thom-browne-hermes/http://www.independent.co.uk/register/?competitionhttp://blogs.independent.co.uk/2015/01/25/paris-menswear-autumnwinter-2015-studious-design-lessons-from-louis-vuitton-givenchy-loewe-thom-browne-hermes/



costly wars (such as the one in Vietnam), indirect support forinvasions and massacres (like those undertaken by allies of theWest, such as Indonesia, El Salvador and Israel) and clientregimes with grotesquely distorted economies. To disagree withall this meant, in effect, interfering with a controlled market forexpertise tailored to further the national effort.

For 'expertise' in the end has rather little, strictly speaking, to dowith knowledge. Some of the material brought to bear on theVietnam war by Noam Chomsky is far greater in scope andaccuracy than similar writing by certified experts. But whereasChomsky moved beyond the ritually patriotic notions - whichincluded the idea that 'we' were coming to the aid of our allies, orthat 'we' were defending freedom against a Moscow- or Peking-inspired takeover - and took on the real motives that governedUS behaviour, the certified experts, who wanted to be asked backto consult at the State Department or work for the RandCorporation, which was a research company originallyestablished by the Department of Defense, never strayed intothat territory at all. Chomsky has told the story of how when as alinguist he has been invited by mathematicians to speak abouthis theories, he is usually met with respectful interest, despite hisrelative ignorance of mathematical lingo. Yet when he tries torepresent US foreign policy from an adversarial standpoint therecognised experts on foreign policy try to prevent his speaking,on the basis of his lack of certification as a foreign policy expert.There is little refutation offered as arguments; just the statementthat he stands outside acceptable debate or consensus.

The third pressure of professionalism is the inevitable drifttowards power and authority in its adherents, towards therequirements and prerogatives of power, towards being directly


http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/the-reith-lectures-professionals-and-amateurs-is-there-such-a-thing-as-an-independent-autonomously-functioning-intellectual-in-the-fourth-of-his-1993-reith-lectures-a-series-entit… 10/14

employed by it. In the United States, the extent to which theagenda of the national security mentality set priorities inacademic research during the period when the US wascompeting with the Soviet Union for world hegemony is quitestaggering. A similar situation obtained in the Soviet Union, butin the West no one had any illusions about free inquiry there. Weare only just beginning to wake up to what it meant that the USDepartments of State and Defense provided the largest amountof money of any single donor for university research in scienceand technology.

But it was also the case that during the same period universitysocial science and even humanities departments were funded bythe government for the same general agenda. Something like thisoccurs in all societies, of course, but it was noteworthy in theUnited States because some of the anti-guerrilla research carriedout in support of policy in the Third World - South- east Asia,Latin America and the Middle East principal among them - wasapplied directly in covert activities, sabotage and even outrightwar.

Nor has this been all. Centralising powers in American civilsociety, such as the Republican or Democratic parties, industryor special interest lobbies like those created or maintained by thegun-manufacturing, oil, and tobacco corporations, largefoundations like those established by the Rockefellers, the Fordsor the Mellons, all employ academic experts to carry out researchand study programmes that further commercial as well aspolitical agendas. This, of course, is part of what is considerednormal behavior in a free market, and occurs throughout Europeand the Far East as well. There are grants and fellowships to behad from think-tanks, plus sabbatical leaves and publishing



subventions, as well as professional advancement andrecognition.

Everything about the system is above board and, as I have said,is acceptable according to the standards of competition andmarket response that govern behaviour under advancedcapitalism in a liberal and democratic society. But in spending alot of time worrying about the restrictions on thought andintellectual freedom under totalitarian systems of government,we have not been as fastidious in considering the threats to theindividual intellectual of a system that rewards intellectualconformity, as well as willing participation in goals that havebeen set not by science but by the government; accordingly,research and accreditation are controlled in order to get andkeep a larger share of the market.

In other words, the space for individual and subjectiveintellectual representation, for asking questions and challengingthe wisdom of a war or an immense social programme thatawards contracts and endows prizes, has shrunk dramaticallyfrom what it was a hundred years ago, when Joyce's StephenDedalus could say that as an intellectual his duty was not to servepower at all. Now I do not want to suggest as some have - rathersentimentally, I think - that we should recover a time whenuniversities were not so big, and the opportunities they now offerwere not so lavish. To my mind the Western university still offersthe intellectual a quasi-utopian space in which reflection andresearch can go on, albeit under new constraints and pressures.

Therefore, the problem for the intellectual is to try to deal withthe impingements of modern professionalisation as I have beendiscussing them, not by pretending that they are not there or



Suggested Topics : Keyboard Pianists Publishing Research

denying their influence, but by representing a different set ofvalues and prerogatives. These I shall collect under the name ofamateurism, literally, an activity that is fuelled by care andaffection rather than by profit, and selfish, narrow specialisation.

An amateur is what today the intellectual ought to be, someonewho considers that to be a thinking and concerned member of asociety one is entitled to raise moral issues at the heart of eventhe most technical and professionalised activity as it involveone's country, its power, its mode of interacting with its citizensas well as other societies. In addition, the intellectual's spirit asan amateur can enter and transform the merely professionalroutine most of us go through into something much more livelyand radical; instead of doing what one is supposed to do one canask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnectwith a personal project and original thought.

Every intellectual has an audience and a constituency. The issueis whether that audience is there to be satisfied, and hence aclient to be kept happy, or whether it is there to be challenged,and hence stirred into outright opposition, or mobilised intogreater democratic participation in the society. But in eithercase, there is no getting around authority and power, and nogetting around the intellectual's relationship to them. How doesthe intellectual address authority: as a professional supplicant,or as its unrewarded, amateurish conscience?

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