What is an Intellectual? An author? A writer? A reader?

[Terrance]

He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only
now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had
taken the decisive step. The consequences of every act are included in
the act itself. He wrote: 

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death. 

Now that he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to
stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his right hand were
inkstained. 





It seems to me that this figure of the "specific" intellectual; has
emerged since the Second World War. Perhaps it was the atomic scientist
(in a word, or rather a name, Oppenheimer) who acted as the point of
transition between the universal and the specific intellectual. It's
because he had a direct and localized relation to scientific knowledge
and institutions that atomic scientist could make his intervention; but
since the nuclear threat affected the whole human race and the fate of
the world, his discourse could at the same time be the discourse of the
universal. Under the rubric of this protest, which concerned the entire
world, the atomic expert brought into play his specific position in the
order of knowledge. ANd for the first time, In think, the intellectual
was hounded by political powers, no longer on account of a general
discourse which he conducted, but because of the knowledge at his
disposal; it was at this level that he constituted a political threat. I
am speaking here only of Western intellectuals. What happened in the
Soviet Union is analogous with this on a number of point, but different
on many others ... What we call today "the intellectual" (I mean the the
intellectual in the political , not the sociological sense of the word;
in other words, the person who utilizes his knowledge , his competence,
and his relation to truth in the field of political struggles) was, I
think, an offspring of the jurist, or at any rate of the man who invoked
the universality of a just law, if necessary against the legal
professions themselves (Voltaire, in France, is the prototype for such
intellectuals). The "universal" intellectual derives from the jurist or
notable, and fins his fullest manifestation in the writer, the bearer of
values and significations in which all can recognize themselves. The
"specific" intellectual derives from quite another figure, not the
jurist or notable, but the savant or expert. 


Today nobody could get away with making such a distinction. Since 1959,
we have come to live among flows of data more vast than anything the
world
has seen. Demystification is the order of our day, all the cats are
jumping out of
all the bags and even beginning to mingle. We immediately suspect ego
insecurity in people who may still try to hide behind the jargon of a
specialty or
pretend to some data base forever "beyond" the reach of a layman.
Anybody            with the time, literacy, and access fee can get
together with just about any piece
of specialized knowledge s/he may need. So, to that extent, the
two-cultures
quarrel can no longer be sustained. As a visit to any local library or
magazine
rack will easily confirm, there are now so many more than two cultures
that the
problem has really become how to find the time to read anything outside
one's
own specialty.
What has persisted, after a long quarter century, is the element of
human
character. C. P. Snow, with the reflexes of a novelist after all, sought
to identify
not only two kinds of education but also two kinds of personality.
Fragmentary
echoes of old disputes, of unforgotten offense taken in the course of a
long-ago
high-table chitchat, may have helped form the subtext for Snow's
immoderate,
and thus celebrated, assertion, "If we forget the scientific culture,
then the rest of
intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the
Industrial
Revolution." Such "intellectuals," for the most part "literary," were
supposed by
Lord Snow, to be "natural Luddites."
   Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it's hard to imagine anybody these
days
wanting to be called a literary intellectual, though it doesn't sound so
bad if you
broaden the labeling to, say, "people who read and think." 




http://pum12.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/vol6/hall.html