On not being a public intellectual
Posted on | December 12, 2007 |
What might appear as an in-joke on the previous post is alluding to one of the sessions at the Sustaining Cultural Research day last week in Adelaide. Unfortunately due to a series of conspiring factors there was quite a bit of repetition in the advice and the preoccupations of the speakers on the day, with the media training workshop feeling a little bit like an encounter with a Channel Seven footy commentator, and the speaker from the ABC managing to avoid talking about how he got his job or what he actually does in favour of defending television as showbusiness. This last point is something cultural studies graduates don’t really need to be told - but what we could all still benefit from finding out is whether a postgraduate qualification actually assists in working outside the university industry. Tell us more Jeremy, if you’re out there!
Having expected some of this emphasis on communicating to the media, I thought it was important in the final session to present something that viewed theory and university affiliation in a positive way. This feeling was bolstered when I heard the metaphor used by the PR consultant in the media training session. The saying went something like: “When academics see a flower, they want to know where it was grown, what seeds were used, and the weather conditions while it was growing to get a real understanding of it. Journalists - they just want the flower.” So, okay, that’s the difference. But do academics risk losing the skills and conviction of their own profession in the increasing demands to present their ideas in soundbites for journalists? What happens when all cultural institutions - from public broadcasters to art galleries, libraries to universities - start taking on the same role of entertaining customers/ consumers?
My talk - which the rest of this post draws on - tried to offer some other possibilities for public intellectual practice and examples of work that has a different form of impact than that currently encouraged by assessment exercises. This is because to me it is still necessary for scholarship to develop at a pace that can at times resist some of the institutionalised temporalities of mainstream politics, the news cycle, even the academy itself. I explained this (drawing on Jean’s current obsession) in terms of the scale of one’s intellectual practice: whether your work is really aimed at ‘The Public’ (i.e. you want to lead Jeff McMullen or Tracy Grimshaw or Fran Kelly in debate) or whether it is perhaps better suited to the formation of what Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have termed a ‘counter-public’: ‘an indefinitely accessible world conscious of its subordinate relation’ … ‘that constitutes itself in many ways other than through the official publics of opinion culture and the state’.
Lauren Berlant is a bit of a hero of mine. And for me, a big part of intellectual life has been to hold on to heroes whose style you want to work towards emulating over time. But time is key: I think we need to be cautious of demands for younger scholars to make their research public when they are still developing the skills and expertise to do this (a well-known incident at QUT this year shows that universities aren’t necessarily well set up to provide support or protection for you when something goes wrong). Clearly there are issues of knowing when to go public – if at all. Public intellectual practice is a particular skill that requires a certain entrepreneurial impulse, but that is above all dependent on confidence. These are things that can be distinctly lacking if you’re at the start of a PhD, somewhere in the middle, or even a long time after.
In the book I wrote based on my PhD, Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices, I spent a lot of time reading and working out the quite different styles of intervention adopted by cultural studies scholars throughout history and the way they formulated a ‘voice’ appropriate for the political objective they were seeking. I tried to isolate the signature mode of public intellectual practice for five scholars – Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, Larry Grossberg, Andrew Ross and Meaghan Morris – to show the variety of different styles of academic engagement cultural studies encompasses. Part of my aim in describing these tactics was to make them available for ongoing use. That’s because sometimes I think ‘the way forward’ for intellectual practice is to stop, take a look around and see how far we’ve come – there are a range of already existing models established for us that as a discipline we can draw on.
Bearing in mind that role models can be flawed, I find it useful to find other public intellectuals whose work you might use as a model because you think it is right, not because you are going to be rewarded for it in sound-bite or CV boosting opportunities. This is to take the priorities of other public intellectuals to heart and test them out in new context - to try them on for size as an experiment.
An example from my own current work is to draw on the labour activism of Andrew Ross, whose No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade and the Rights of Garment Workers garnered further attention for the anti-sweatshop movements that took place on US campuses throughout the 1990s. More recently, Ross’s Low Pay, High Profile and Fast Boat to China put a human face to the growing entertainment, service and information economies of the West, describing the lives of those working for huge multinational companies and whose voices risk going unheard.
As a form of public intellectual practice, Ross’s work:
-Draws on his skills as scholar to provide research in the service of activist claims,
-Uses the resources of the university to involve students in campaigns and hold public events,
-Uses his contacts in publishing to produce an outcome that will spread ideas beyond the university.
To me, this blurs any easy distinction between ‘in’ and ‘outside’ the academy and the politics such a formulation implies.
At the moment I am adapting some of Ross’s ideas in my postdoctoral study of technology habits among workers in information jobs across Brisbane. The project aims to develop policies that will ensure realistic work hours can be maintained against the dotcom era glamorisation of long hours culture and the compulsive tendencies of new media devices.
A second example I have used recently is from Judith Halberstam’s writing on queer subcultures, where she describes the importance of developing an archive for vulnerable communities. Halberstam sees the possibility for alliances between what she calls the minority academic and the minority subcultural producer:
… academics can play a big role in the construction of queer archives and queer memory, and, furthermore, queer academics can, and some should, participate in the ongoing project of recording and interpreting queer culture and circulating a sense of its multiplicity and sophistication.
As I am seeing with my graduate students, this archiving function seems an increasingly useful way to see the mutually constituitive roles of academic and other subcultures, and to understand the traffic between them. Testing some of these ideas in an article this year, I wrote “Normal Homes” at a time of upheaval for indigenous communities in an effort to mark a shared sense of outrage at that event within a history of earlier solidarities between marginalised groups in a changing Brisbane. For me, this kind of writing can help to challenge stereotypes about place and build counter-histories to show that official records are always partial.
Publishing my piece in M/C Journal, which uses online and open access, was another way to attempt a form of public intellectual practice. In the rush to produce ‘outcomes’ based research, I think this is one way we can also maintain ‘outreach’ to an interested readership.
So they are just two examples aimed at providing a more varied register for discussing public intellectual practice. While the APD project tries to address issues of some national significance (work/life balance, technology roll out, changing relations to work and home), the “Normal Homes” paper is a one-off, local contribution of a kind that I intend to continue wherever I may be in future.
Notions of ‘the intellectual’ - public, organic, specific – have a long history in cultural studies theory, but somehow seem to come across as quite grandiose in an Australian context. Maybe it is cultural cringe that often leads me to search for heroes elsewhere? In any case, I will finish by quoting from someone who has been a bit of a hero for lots of people in cultural studies, and who some of you might be interested to know is turning 60 this week. In We Gotta Get Out Of This Place Larry Grossberg wrote:
Cultural studies refuses to let political pressures erase the necessity of theoretical work. Yet it is always frustrated by its apparent inability to actually effect change. Still, it has to resist the temptation to measure itself against other more direct forms of activism (which are available to us as people anyway). In its effort to realize the possible political role of the intellectual, cultural studies has to avoid the temptation to demand of its own discourse what it does not, and cannot, demand of other discourses: that it have a direct, immediate and visible impact. Culture does not work that way, but it does work; it does make a difference.
“We Gotta Get Out of This Place” certainly summed up the feelings of a lot of my friends during the past 11 years of John Howard’s government. Events of the last few weeks may reiterate how slowly change seemed to come; but when it did, it was emphatic. I was writing about this on my blog last week, and I’m conscious that some of you might have expected me to have said that blogging is the way forward given that in many ways it is my most public form of intellectual practice. Instead, what I have tried to highlight here is that we all do and should respond differently to the affordances and constraints of our times; the many different levels of public engagement we’ve heard about today are the range of conversations necessary to make wider change occur.
I’m looking forward to hearing about yours.
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12 Responses to “On not being a public intellectual”
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December 12th, 2007 @ 11:16 pm
Speaking of courage, did you read Maria Tamarkin’s piece in The Australian today follows on from her tirade against the conformity of academia at the Sustaining Cultural Research media potlatch.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22907998-25192,00.html
December 13th, 2007 @ 11:26 am
I’m not sure your opening paragraph is entirely fair, Mel, or perhaps I’m mistaking your tone. In any case, on the evidence I saw on the day, I think that some CS ECRs actually could stand to be told more, and more often, about the nature of “the media” (e.g. that it’s not a monolithic, uniformly persecutory entity for a start).
Both the PR speaker and Jeremy both had information and tips that I think that lots of PGs and ECRs might very profitably heed - mainly around recognising what journalists do, what their priorities and operational constraints are, and that entertainment is a value that they have no choice but to take into account, even when they’re doing serious stuff. And I think Jeremy probably departed from his prepared script on the day because he felt that he had to say something by way of response to some pretty unfair characterisations of his profession.
It’s all too easy for us to (ahem) “circle the wagons” and complain (in a pretty self-regarding way) about the media and its treatment of us or stuff we care about if there aren’t any opportunities for dialogue. I think this was such an opportunity that we on the academic side might have used better. (The continuing use of Andrew Bolt, by many speakers and interlocutors, as a kind of “master-sign” for “the media” on the day was disappointing, unnecessarily defensive, and shows what barriers there are among CS folks to thinking of “the media” as anything other than a threat)
When one considers what’s happening in newsrooms around the country, there’s actually an opportunity at the moment for ECRs and PGs to reach out in some sort of solidarity to a casualising, overtaxed bunch of information workers who we actually share quite a lot of positive attributes with (I know that your work is in part about thinking along these lines, Mel). Moreover, I think we could actually learn something from good journos about communicative clarity, community engagement and, yes, the courage involved in making arguments and calls in public as they’re developing, without necessarily having the various safety nets that academic research still provides. I’m not talking about not being critical of the media - I often am - but this needs to be nuanced, and at least allow the possibility of a more productive engagement or collaboration with them.
Perhaps contra Kiley above (though I’m not sure if I’m misjudging her tone, too) I actually think Maria’s talk was part of a final session that, as a whole, was a good end to the day - she’s right to point out that public intellectual practice requires courage, and right to be bewildered about how often it, as opposed to defensiveness, seems to be in short supply among people who, in the end, still have a lot privileges and protections.
December 13th, 2007 @ 12:06 pm
Yes my tone is completely unfair in the first paragraph, but only because I was trying to keep it brief in a long post: it’s not meant to be judgmental.
I thought it was unfair for the PR presenter to be put in that position in the first place - to speak for so long, and to an audience that cannot realistically act on many of her incitements. The ’series of conspiring factors’ included the fact that she only had a day to prepare. And it was a feeling of empathy for that situation (exactly the pressures you mention) that made me stay until the end. If I remember rightly you left after 20 minutes! It went for another hour after that
And I agree that Jeremy’s corrective was important - when we talked afterwards I teased him about leaving out some of those details, and he got lots of interest when he did reveal the show he worked for. Because he asked about my blog, I thought there might be a chance he’d show up here some time… we’ll see.
December 13th, 2007 @ 12:41 pm
I only left the session because I had to confer about VERY important stuff with Barry. (Hint: The stuff was coffee)
December 13th, 2007 @ 12:54 pm
Jason’s got a point, certainly a lot of academics could stand to hone their media skillz, and i can’t think of anything more unnerving than trying to teach a roomful of cultural studies researchers about the media.
Reading Maria’s article, I can’t help but think of a friend who was outraged that her mum was supportive and unruffled when she came out - she needed the fight and anger of the dominant coming-out discourse to define herself against. Maria seems to need anger and rage to define her writing against. It’s a weird nostalgia for a university experience like Berkley in the 60’s.
Being young is about never letting moderate and well-balanced views get a leg up on honesty or truth.
fuck that.
December 13th, 2007 @ 1:04 pm
I’ll confess that the PR session left me with an urge to watch the “Game On” episode from Season Four of “The West Wing”. That was the one where the staff spend a week looking for the twelve-word sound bite that would win the televised debate. The Pres goes on to say something like “Twelve words are great, but what about the twelve after that? And the 100 after that?” The ep finished with the CJ character saying “It’s alright, the President has given us permission to be complicated.”
Yes, sound bites can be important, but you can’t always reduce things to 12 words, and that seems to me the best way to get a reputation for superficiality.
December 13th, 2007 @ 8:08 pm
I reckon so much of the value of what Maria says lies in its capacity to prompt and provoke thought - not just reactions, but reflections and speculations, on what we all might think intellectual work, or going public, or courage, or whatever might be. Reflections like those that are going on here. And I think that so much academic work doesn’t do this: I don’t know - has it ever done this? Is it ultimately circumscribed by the institutional setting in its current form? Is this why some academics need/want to slip between speaking-places, like Mel suggest? But anyway, I think it’s that real capacity to say ‘i think this and this is why’ loudly, clearly, and without regard for what people will think of YOU (but with strong regard for the fact that what you say can make them think) that I like about Maria and her work. It’s not about her ego, it’s about her ideas and the big wide world that she is trying (like all of us) to make sense of.
December 14th, 2007 @ 10:31 am
I don’t know that i want the majority of academic work to be courageous in the terms that Maria’s defining it. I like nuanced, intelligent, deep work. If i want passionate, outraged, unbalanced invective then i’ll read Piers Akerman.
December 14th, 2007 @ 11:07 am
Fuck that courage.
December 14th, 2007 @ 2:17 pm
Do we want our public intellectuals to be balanced? How can balance provoke thought or inspire debate? Isn’t passion a good thing?
December 14th, 2007 @ 8:05 pm
Isn’t passion a good thing?
not always. it’s a neutral thing, which is my point. Piers has a lot of passion. as did other, Godwinesque, persons.
i don’t mean balance in the simplistic, journalistic way, i mean nuanced, multiperspectival balance.
December 14th, 2007 @ 8:29 pm
Sorry about the spaminator eating some comments here, causing some delays. Not sure if it’s the email addresses or the increase in traffic - but please keep being passionate! If more coherently so, Graham? What is your position exactly?