After a decade of market imitation, is it possible to be a radical intellectual? Lynne Segal comments
Have you had yours yet? One astonished academic after another has sent me copies of letters asking them to consider a little school teaching on the side. It is unclear if the private company soliciting us imagines, correctly, that the wages of many academics are so meagre that extra work is needed to feed mortgages and families or that they assume, incorrectly, that we have time on our hands.
These are strange times, as Stan Cohen noted recently, for those who ever took seriously the role of the intellectual. Yet this was a gripping topic in the immediate wake of Sixties radicalism. A cohort of students and academics pondered the place of intellectuals in contesting discrimination and inequality. In his latest book, States of Denial, Cohen remains resolutely rooted in the legacy of this past, paradigmatic in the diffusion of radical sociology in the 1970s.
This was a decade when “new criminologists” like him were at the forefront of a politicised academy, rethinking Marxism and joining struggles for social change. These were driven by the growth of new social movements: grassroots trade union radicalism accompanied the rise of feminist, gay, anti-war and anti-racist politics.
Long gone from the cutting edge of university life, the radical sociologist was replaced by the post-structuralist literary scholar.
Stuart Hall remains one of the few trail-blazers from that time still able to inspire a broader public.
Past intellectual vanguards such as the Conference of Socialist Economists persist to this day, but have lost their influence. The radical thinking of recent years is different. Its concern is with language, sexuality, the stories we can tell about ourselves.
For its critics, these new directions renounce the importance of preserving some kind of common discourse and response to corporate structures of global dominance and inequality. For its advocates, they suggest new ways of thinking about ourselves, and therefore new ways of challenging conventional frameworks that repress and constrain us. Yet whatever our theoretical framework, it is not primarily the exposition or rejection of universal aims that determine the role intellectuals play in revitalising cultural life.
Over the past decade it is true that fewer alliances have been forged between students or academics and the remains of the new social movements. Nor have the universities been seedbeds of anti-globalisation protests.
But then scholarly work, institutionally, has always tended towards conceptual conformity. It is specific conjunctions, rather than the precision of our theories, that promote greater interchange between academic life and the wider world. It was HIV/Aids and increased homophobia that added passion to gay and lesbian politics, promoting the advent of queer theorising in the 1990s. It is the existence of significant cultural networks, and our desire to sustain them, that is crucial to the impact of intellectual work.
After a decade and more of student hardship and bureaucratic prescriptions in higher education, neither staff nor students share much of that radical spirit that once nourished collective desires. Yet our governing elite now wants us to devote more time to “community building” (around family life, neighbourhood and church) to counter the decline of collectivity, which its own incessant imposition of managerialism and market imitation have furthered.
Now that so many of us spend ever-longer hours in the workplace, it’s a good time to rethink the role of intellectuals. We could begin by fostering more collectivity through encouraging as much controversy as we possibly can from resisting the auditing of every move we make to the questioning of overly instrumental notions of learning at the expense of critical thought. Then indeed we might have something to offer in the schoolrooms.
Lynne Segal is Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at Birkbeck College, London University