I suppose that, on
the cusp of my early retirement, my subconscious is telling me it might just be
a good moment to assess my career as an academic and so-called intellectual. At
any rate, I had a dream – a full-on, deep, proper dream – in which I discussed
with various shimmery interlocutors the writing of An Intellectual History of South Africa. In the dream at least,
nothing of this kind had been attempted before. The dream got fragmented with
my usual phantasmagoria (which I am reliably informed not even the good Dr Jung
could explain), and half-waking episodes in which my brain mulled over possibilities,
like olive pips accidentally being blended into a smoothie.
All in all I had a
very bad night – but in this manner, of course, all profound ideas are born.
Until the morning –
of course – when a bit of Googling naturally revealed that about 700 people had
already thought about this very area, and had even written at length about it.
Still ... no one seems, on the face of it, to have done what my dream community
was cooking up.
For example, high in
the Google pile is a collection of articles edited by Peter Vale, Lawrence Hamilton
and Estelle Prinsloo, Intellectual
Traditions in South Africa: Ideas, individuals, institutions. This is
organised by themes rather than personages – the development and implications
of intellectual ideas such as Marxism, feminism, Black Consciousness, some
religious traditions, and so on. [See Henk van Rinsum’s review.] This is well and good, but not quite my thing ...
Most cited by Google
is a recent book by Michael Onyebuchi Eze,
Intellectual History in Contemporary South
Africa. This is not a history of intellectuals so much as a tract in
defence of the concept of Ubuntu; it seems to have been widely praised but what
I could read of it online is so badly written I quickly abandoned it – and in
any case it, too, isn’t anything like what my dream-merchants were proposing.
Through all this
certain questions (olive pips) were revolving in my mind. What is an ‘intellectual’
anyway? Is there a difference between an ‘academic’ and an ‘intellectual’, or –
in the common term – a ‘public intellectual’? Is lecturing several hundred students every
week not public enough? Does a public intellectual have to be within a
university in some capacity, or even be university-educated? If I am an
intellectual at all – which is debateable – does my blog make me ‘public’? How
public is public?
Such questions arise
because I don’t think that university – for all the intellectual pleasures it
has brought me over three decades – is the be-all and end-all of intellect, let
alone intelligence. I want to believe that intellectuals can and do occur
outside of universities, in the manner of, say, Samuel Johnson or Mahatma Gandhi
– not to mention Xhosa praise-poet SEK Mqhayi. These were all men who published and performed
widely, and had inestimable effects on broader society – precisely what one
supposes a public intellectual is meant to do.
These questions also
arise partly because I’ve become rather disillusioned with a certain disconnect
between academic production and the broader public. We (at least those of us in
the humanities) pump out articles for a select range of institutionally-approved
academic journals; as universities have expanded the journals have become ever
more specialised and ever more competitive. The editor of a prestigious
American journal explained to us the other day their ferocious and multilayered
processes of submission, vetting, reading, editing and re-editing. For every
article accepted for ultimate publication, nine or more are rejected, and it
can take two years or more for the thing to appear, by which time you have
either forgotten what you wrote, or have changed your mind about it, or have
developed so far in the meantime you now think it’s naive and embarrassing tosh. Between six and twelve editors and readers
might have gutted and commented on your piece before it finally appears –
which, according to some surveys, is twice the average number of readers an
academic article will get anyway. Not terribly public.
Meanwhile, back in
your Department, you are likely becoming increasingly estranged from your
colleagues as you dig yourself a specialised niche of expertise, writing stuff
in which they are not particularly interested or which they even cannot
comprehend. And if you step beyond your
expertise? Your dilettantism is likely to be spurned as just that – a shallow intrusive
paddling in areas you clearly know nothing about. Furthermore, while
publication of a specialised, peer-reviewed article or book earns your
university a substantial government subsidy (of which the writer sees little to
nothing directly), any effort to spread research into more popular or so-called
‘creative’ formats gets no subsidy or institutional support at all. The
disjunct is reflected in the current pressure for academics to add to their research,
so-called ‘community engagement’ – which frequently means running well-meaning
but sporadic, necessarily non-academic activities for disadvantaged sectors of
society, for which one may frankly be poorly equipped.
(I don’t mean to be
all negative about this: personally I’ve had a fabulous time of it. I’ve never
had to teach or write about topics I’m not enthusiastic about; there is also
great collegiality; the peer-review system, when well-conducted, is educative and
clarifying for all concerned and helps advance best-thinking practice; and
there are wonderful community projects emanating from my own and other
universities.)
But the disjunct is
there, and it affects the presence and impact of the so-called public
intellectual. Such an animal is defined by Richard Posner, in his excellent
book Public Intellectuals, as one who
writes “for a broader than merely academic or specialist audience, on ‘public
affairs’ – on political matters in
the broadest sense of that word.” This
is potentially to exclude many disciplines, especially the hard sciences, and even
economics, psychology and the like. But such definitions, as Posner notes, are
ever murky and arguable. Posner subtitles his 2001 book A Study of Decline: in his view, the contemporary public
intellectual is virtually toothless – and in large part he blames the
universities, a) for having become a more or less monopolistic repository of
intellect, while b) getting so specialised that few academics can become the
authoritative generalists that an effective public intellectual needs to be. “Having
slipped his moorings, the cautious academic specialist throws caution to the
winds. He is on holiday from the academic grind and all too often displays the
irresponsibility of the holiday-goer.” He (or, less often, she) is thus exposed
to derision and perceived irrelevance.
In our local
context, some related points are made by Jonathan Jansen, former Vice
Chancellor of Free State university and widely published in popular media – a prominent
public intellectual in his own right. In various places – including William Gumede’s
collection of essays entitled The Poverty
of Ideas – Jansen has argued that increased university managerialism, egregious state interventions,
manipulation of funding, and various forms of covert censorship have served to
diminish the intellectual’s authority, autonomy and freedom to speak either
within or outside university parameters. Jansen is not the only one to paint a
grim picture: witness such gloomy article titles as “The slow death of the
intellect” in the Mail & Guardian and “South African democracy and the
retreat of intellectuals".
Chris Thurman (former
student of ours, now professor at Wits and himself a public commentator of
growing repute) fielded a sharp intervention in 2013. He points out, among other things, that in
the internet age the definition of ‘public’ has shifted, and perhaps the role
of public intellectual, defined as an ‘active citizen’, has inevitably become
less the haughty legislator of previous centuries than something more interpretative
and communal. He also notes that what is lacking is
not so much intelligent public commentary, but a debilitating lack of political
will in the circles of governance to hear, absorb and implement the ideas of
those who have considered them most deeply – indeed, the refusal to read
anything, even to be antipathetic to intellectualism of any kind. When key government
ministers evidently regard universities as hotbeds of inconvenient dissent rather
than as resources for intelligent responses to present and future problems, and
therefore for years incrementally cut funding, who can be surprised that our
education sector is such a disaster zone? Nevertheless, Thurman is more
sanguine about the future of the public intellectual than either Richard Posner
or Jonathan Jensen, perhaps hoping (as we all do) that he himself will, despite
everything, be taken seriously.
But back to my
dream... A number of names surfaced in that muddled mental night-walk, people
ranging from Sol Plaatje and Jan Smuts to Achille Mbembe and Mamphele
Ramphele... Perhaps what the dreamers had in mind (or my mind had in dream) was
a study of intellectual affect via a series of individual portraits – something
along the lines of Paul Johnson’s book Intellectuals
(1988). Not with his tone, though: Johnson sets out to demonstrate that public
intellectuals are in decline not because they have been displaced from academic
rigour but because they are frauds. In his portrayal they are posturers so governed by egotism,
deceit and private moral turpitude that they deserve to be ignored – and Johnson
has evidently gone out of his way to find a gallery of drunks, bigots, wife-beaters
and liars who will prove his case.
No one’s perfect, but
I think South Africa can offer better. Through all the tragic thickets of racial,
gender and economic imbalances of the last two centuries, public-minded writers
and thinkers, from John Philip to Steve Biko, have sprung vociferously to life
in defence of right living and clear informed argument. More than ever in our
history, perhaps, is the public intellectual needed to deliberately brave
controversy, puncture the pretensions of the idiots, and provide dispassionate
balance to the distortions of the ambitious.
Meanwhile, a massive parallel task looms: to educate the broader public
into taking such thinking more seriously than violence, cheap rhetoric, and
politically-correct grandstanding.
I don’t feel
equipped to write up my own dream, but somebody out there ...?
*******
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