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

[Paul Nightingale]

Terrance juxtaposes Foucault and Pynchon on intellectuals and knowledge.


> 
> 
> 
> 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.


In "Truth and Power" Foucault has been asked to describe the role of the
intellectual. For Gramsci, the organic intellectual acted on behalf of
the proletariat; I suppose Orwell would be a kind of organic
intellectual, although he certainly had no time for party discipline.
The opposite, for Gramsci, was the traditional intellectual, whose job
it was to support and promote the interests of capitalism: Snow did
nothing to challenge the elitist education system that fed him so well
(and his mystification of knowledge is certainly priest-like). Foucault
doesn't repeat his interviewers' use of the term 'organic': he doesn't
want to speak of the intellectual as a leftist if that means association
with the Party.

And then:
> 
> 
> 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 ...

In the Luddite essay Pynchon moves swiftly, dismissively, from the
conventional stereotype of the Luddite as a "counter-revolutionary" to a
Thompson-esque, 'history-from-below' account of working-class resistance
that brings in the Pynchonian "Badass". P. does what Thompson did, and
rescues the Luddite/Badass from "the condescension of history". Starting
with Snow's lecture, P. discusses intellectual cultures or specialisms,
which is not quite what Foucault is talking about. Magazines on the
shelf = the (possible) demystification of knowledge. No one can hide
behind their expertise and use it as a weapon against the ignorant (be
the ignorant fellow academics or just the general public).

Gramsci saw the intellectual as an advocate: by informing the
proletariat they produced revolutionary class consciousness. Orwell
might still hope to 'tell it as it is'; he wrote for a public sphere
that could still be transformed by dissident writing. There is a market
for dissent, it still sells, but can it still hope to transform society?
And what, in that formulation, does 'transform' mean?

Orwell's take on 'transforming the way people think' is not the same as
P.'s. Perhaps, in a world with too much information, circa 2003, all you
do is remind people that it's possible to draw different conclusions;
and then, slightly irritated, they carry on as before. As Foucault
observes, it's no longer a question of simply telling people what they
don't know; his concern isn't the demystification of knowledge, but the
way in which knowledge has been made banal by its ready availability. P.
seems to agree when he writes: "We are all supposed to keep tranquil and
allow it [exploitation by the power elite] to go on, even though,
because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to
fool any of the people any of the time." (And cf. Foucault's comment
elsewhere that "power can only be exercised over free subjects".)

So P.'s task (eg in the 1984 Foreword) isn't just to 'tell it as it is'
(important though that be). The intellectual's job nowadays is to find
ways to make people think differently and make connections they hadn't
considered previously. In the Luddite essay he deconstructs the facile
distinction Snow has made between 'two cultures'; in the Foreword he
asks us to think about how we 'know' whether or not Orwell was a
prophet.