The Vanishing of the Public Intellectual
The Markaz Review is an excellent online arts and culture journal focused on the greater Middle East and its diasporas. The editors at the review asked me to nominate someone as an important public intellectual working today. Instead I wrote this piece, on the vanishing of the pubic intellectual.
As a general observation, one could say that the public intellectual in the Western context was on a mission to wake the public from its slumber. Think Hannah Arendt, who once wrote that the “people in the countries of the Western world…regarded freedom from politics as one of the basic freedoms.” But “with each such retreat,” she explained, “an almost demonstrable loss to the world takes place.” The public intellectual existed to confront the people with all the questions they would rather forget, or at least not answer.
The public intellectual in the non-Western context has traditionally been on a mission to put the oppressive forces, forces that are stepping on its neck with jack boots, to sleep. In so doing, these public intellectuals often speak not for themselves but for the collective, “I’m in prison because the regime wants to make an example of us,” wrote Alaa Abd El-Fattah from Tora prison in Egypt. “So let us be an example but of our own choosing.”
Between wakefulness and sleep, and between life and death, the situations, and the risks, between the Western and non-Western public intellectuals were almost diametrically opposed.
But then the public intellectual simply vanished from view. To understand this disappearance, we must draw distinctions between public intellectuals, mass intellectuals, media intellectuals, and — dare I say it — social media intellectuals. In fact, there exists a more commonly used term for the final category: social media influencers.
The idea of the intellectual has been usurped by the notion of influencer in the most debased form of capitalist accumulation that one can think of.
Nevertheless, these are the categories that matter today, and they deserve more concrete definitions…
Read the rest here.