Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures

"For most people in the media, or the world of literature, when you mention the phrase ‘academic,’ it’s usually a figure of fun or an insult. I’m not trying, for a minute, to foreclose the fact that there are things we should criticize. There are versions of academia or the direction in which academia is going that trouble me. But I used to think that the plight of academics was to produce knowledge that was out of time, irrelevant, and not directly related to the current and pressing issues of the day. I used to think that the fact that it took so long to write a PhD thesis or an academic book was a profound weakness. And you know what? I’ve completely changed my view. I think there is a value in the slowness of academic knowledge production and the quality of thought that is academic thinking at its best. Also, I think the fact that, in the spaces of the university, esoteric and sometimes very narrow interests can be taken seriously is a very healthy state of affairs. It produces diversity of thinking. It’s profoundly valuable to have a space to think about a broad range of topics, to think against the grain of conventional wisdom, and outside the parameters of what everyone else is so certain about. So the reason I chose Edward Said’s wonderful book, Representations of the Intellectual, is that he argues very forcibly for the value of intellectual life. There’s an attitude in the UK, that if you call yourself an intellectual, or say you are concerned with intellectual things, most people think that’s analogous to something mildly indecent. Said’s book—which was based on his Reith lecture series—is a fantastic portrait of an intellectual life, and intellectuals at work. One of the things he says is that part of an intellectual’s work is the art of representing the world, of stylizing it, of understanding ideas and conveying them to people. That is one of the things that is so brilliant about Said. He then takes a whole range of intellectuals—from Simone de Beauvoir to Jean Paul Sartre to James Baldwin —and talks about them and their craft of representing the world and representing their ideas. One of the things that really struck me is his argument that the true threat to the university is not financialization or commercialization of institutions, but professionalization. This is something that Mary Evans picks up on too, how the professionalization of academia means we are increasingly slaves to specialization. Narrow forms of knowledge have their place—they make things that seem esoteric valuable—but the consequence of that, for both Mary Evans and Edward Said, is a narrowing of the intellectual arteries. We develop specializations that might be ten miles deep, but are only two inches wide. What Said argues for is a kind of intellectual amateurism. He thinks the intellectual today ought to be somebody who can range across interests and connect things. I think that’s really important. It’s not just about developing an expertise in the world of knowledge that is circumscribed and in a silo. Said’s vision of the intellectual is somebody who can be an expert in Jane Austen as well as speak to the geopolitical issues of the day. Yes, he argues that alongside specialization and professionalization comes a kind of timidity and conservatism on the part of intellectuals in universities. What’s great about the book and the figures that he chooses is that all of them actually are public figures. They are publicly intervening. He chastises American intellectuals for being too timid and concerned with the baubles of public recognition. If he were writing about the UK, he’d be making the same argument about the honour system and being elected to the British Academy. Said was himself an exemplar of what he writes here. He was a public intellectual, concerned with the problems and issues of the day. He is speaking to those issues and addressing them and involved in that public conversation. Yes, Chomsky is one of the people that he admires. One aspect of Said’s characterization of the intellectual is that the intellectual is a lonely voice. It’s a voice speaking truth to power, challenging and pushing the parameters of understanding and thought and the shape of received wisdom. I would agree with that. What he also does in the book—which I think is so important and interesting—is that he draws on Antonio Gramsci’s idea of the organic intellectual. Society always produces its own organic intellectuals that are fit to purpose. A marketing executive and researcher is an organic intellectual. The alignments and institutions of society produce their own kinds of organic intellectuals that serve those institutions. Whereas what Said suggests is that the intellectual should be a free intellect, asking difficult questions. He also draws on the sociologist C Wright Mills. In one essay, Mills writes—and Said quotes this—that, ‘The independent artist and intellectual are amongst the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuine living things.’ Intellectuals should be on the side of genuine living things."