LangeMemo39

It is only with great difficultly that I approach this question. When I find myself in times of trouble, my favorite social theorists come to me, speaking words of wisdom. So I’ll begin there. I seem to remember that Foucault, speaking of Sartre, said somewhere that “the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer needed him to gain knowledge: they //know// perfectly well without illusion; they know far better than he and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves.” The task of the intellectual, then, is to undermine the discursive roadblocks which prevented the immense majority from speaking. In contrast, for Marx and Engels, intellectuals are nothing less than historically necessary class-traitors, “bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement [of capitalism] as a whole.” Bourdieu, has perhaps the most abstract and contradictory advice. The task of the intellectual is to “invent new forms of collective political work capable of taking note of necessities, especially economic ones,” but not to "provide answers to all questions about the social movement and its future . . . [but to] help to define the function of meetings." Thus, the double bind of the intellectual in the early 20th century. It is not entirely clear, at least at the moment that activists, and the working class in general, have any need for us. One of the reasons I abandoned my original social scientific orientation focusing on class was that I found, by talking to the janitors at Brandeis, that there is very little about the class system that they don’t understand, they no longer need bourgeois ideologists to explain the historical movement of capital; in fact, they have lived it. Likewise, Steve Breyman once remarked in policy studies that one learns STS as an activist working on issues of science, technology, and the environment without reading the literature. It is, then, altogether unclear if activists need intellectuals. Policy makers, on the other hand, crave scholarly books, reports, and other literati output, mostly I think, to legitimate themselves. So, for example, I could imagine my book influencing policy makers, but only to the extent that it can serve a legitimation function, i.e. it’s difficult to be both a class traitor and a court intellectual. I am then left with one humble political impact that I can imagine my text having: confidence. It is possible that the existence of my text, while not showing the way to activists, will give them increased confidence in their ability to reshape the global social water system in a more democratic and socialist direction. I have in mind something like the encyclopedia, which did nothing to direct the French revolution, although possibly, the existence of texts like it, comprehensive and complied without the assistance of the monarchy, church, and aristocracy, contributed to the confidence of bourgeois revolutionaries that they were ready to rule society.