The Intellectual Field

A person can spend his/her life studying something arboreal and still not see the forest, nor the trees. I’ve known many such “experts.” Usually they are more concerned with the lingo of the bosque, and not the forest ecosystem… its health… its threats. Talking the talk isn’t the same as walking the talk.

Gladwell is a master of the obvious, so him dismissing another pundit/observer for any reason is pretty high comedy. The NYC-insider “slam” of “especially one in Brooklyn” is not just parochial, but tiresome in its irrelevance.

“As much as 70% of public intellectual labor is performed by adjuncts…”

Well, one will have opinions, whether experts judge them to have an adequate basis in fact or not. For every pundit or pontificator given to fatuous pronouncements on anything considered relevant at a given moment, there’s usually a beady-eyed specialist sitting atop his hoard of professional expertise like Fafnir atop his mountain of gold. One of the reasons I gave up reading the New York Review of Books years ago was the ever-increasing amount of space given to academic specialists attempting to gut one another with the intellectual equivalent of butter-knives. (It’s much better now, of course, and I’ve come back to the fold.)

Sartre was often provocative even when he wasn’t right. And in philosophy, that counts for more than is usually conceded, even if in politics it sometimes makes one the object of a just derision.

…if you haven’t become something of an expert in your field after many years of covering it, you’re doing journalism wrong.

In the same way that if you haven’t become “something of an expert” on television after years of watching it, you’re watching it wrong. But I take your point. On the other hand, it’s clearly possible to become a journalist while doing it wrong. In some venues, it’s a prerequisite.

qb:
Exhibit A – David Brooks

While accepting Goldhammer’s basic point, I’d note that Alain Touraine is a sociologist who studies social movements; although not an expert on such movements in the Arab world, it’s not ridiculous to suppose that Touraine might have some interesting things to say (though I haven’t had a chance to read the Le Monde piece yet).

Gladwell’s schtick is exactly that dismissiveness. His con is that he recycles other people’s ideas, and actually cites out-of-context quotations by those people to criticize them for not getting it exactly right. I suppose he can argue that he’s not contributing to the credit crisis, because he doesn’t give credit, but still I think it is sad that he passes for an intellectual at all.

None is a specialist on (…) on the history of revolutions

Whatever you may think of Badiou’s philosophy, it’s basically all about revolutions and he’s been writing about the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, October, the Cultural Revolution for decades (since May 68 I suppose).

But did the specialists get it any righter than the non-specialists in this instance (academic and non-academic specialists – for example it’s been said that French military intelligence on North Africa/Mahgreb is formidable) ? There’s been plenty of ridicule directed at the economics and FIRE professions for their faliures. So what about ME/North Africa specialists or any of the “hundred” expertises that Goldhammer thinks qualifies the vestee as an authority, how did they fare ?
That’s not a rhetorical question … it’s impossible to stay atop a million specialities.

I know of a corporate VP whose first acts on the job were to mandate a reading list for his direct reports that included both Good to Great and Blink, and to mandate the invisibility of all papers, files, file caddies, briefcases, and snow boots in offices and cubicles. So I guess Gladwell is doing good.

But doesn’t he claim some specific expertise?

to mandate the invisibility of all papers, files, file caddies, briefcases, and snow boots in offices and cubicles

Wouldn’t that just lead to a lot of pointless spending on contrivances for hiding those necessary (but now anathematized) objects? What was the supposed point?

Being paid to read wouldn’t be so bad even if it was Gladwell, though (unless of course he expected everyone to read those books on their own time, or worse, buy them with their own money and *then* read them on their own time, which would be a great way to start off your tenure by pissing off everyone you’re going to work with).

My great fan Henry Farrell strikes again! Well, if I might spring to my own defense here, I guess I’ll just point out that I’ve never claimed to be an expert on social media, revolutions or Egypt—or anything else,for that matter. I’m a journalist, and in the piece I wrote last fall on those topics I did what journalists do–which is talk to people in the field and read as much of the relevant historical and sociological literature as I can. As such, I’m perfectly happy to be proved wrong, or change my conclusions in the face of better evidence. And by the way, I do occasionally travel above 14th Street. In fact, guess where I just was? France! Where I wore a beret, drank cup after cup of espresso at Cafe Flore, and stared moodily into the distance.

Espresso is Italian.
You should have gone for the Calvados, else the French start getting umbrage.

Outsiders have their place.

I’m thinking especially of my own field of expertise, medicine. Most of my colleagues are admirably competent as idviduals, but we tend to be unreflective about our methodology, which really is “medicine” far more centrally than the body of knowledge and treatment decisions generated by that method. Unfortunately, in that lack of reflection, we have, at least in the US, let the profession as a whole get badly out of focus in its overall service of health.

I can’t see us reforming the profession from within. Within the profession, the highest prestige traditionally goes to practitioners who have mastered and stay current with either interventional techniques, or at least highly specialized subsets of medical knowledge, involved in high stakes interventions. Even reactions to this within the profession, such as Evidence-Based Medicine, still focus on interventions, where the methodology relies on quantitative methods, and ignores nosology and diagnosis, which are fundamental, but where our methods are not quantitative.

Within the profession, we’re turned the wrong way to be able to see what’s wrong with the overall direction of medicine. We’re good at what we do, we’re just not doing the right things (sort of like the US military!). It’s going to take customer dissatisfaction to provoke the needed reflection within the profession, as it did the last time we had a bout of reform a century ago. Well, it would take dissatisfaction plus a belief that we could do better. That last part is blocked for now by the persistent illusion that US medicine is the best in the world.

if I might…I guess I’ll just point out…I’ve never claimed to be an expert…read as much…as I can…As such, I’m perfectly happy to be proved wrong, or change my conclusions

Blink, you fail.

Actually just a bit more about Goldhammer: googling the names of the intellectuals involved (I must confess with the exception of Badiou, I hadn’t heard of them) with the possible exception of Elisabeth Roudinesco, the reason why these guys were picked to comment about this particular topic are very obvious. All of them have written about Islamic fundamentalism, revolution, ‘worker’s revolts’ etc. They weren’t just picked out of the ‘phonebook of intellectuals’ at random, as Goldhammer seems to imply.

piglet – agreed, book reviews are there to say how good or bad books are, publicly. The grotesque debasement of the literary currency that arises from the near-non-existence of forthrightly negative book reviews is a shameful thing, and impoverishes us all.

Here’s an example of the ructions that occurred when a philosopher wrote a bad review of a bad book. In the process, the review unavoidably supported the conclusion that the book’s author was a hack who had no entitlement the position of seniority and prestige he had attained. That’s a feature, not a bug – the kind of salutory effect an honest and proportionately scathing book review has. More of it is needed.

But the occurrence was such an outlier (rather than falling on, say, an 8th or 9th decile of badness) that it prompted a great fluster of endless speculation about ulterior motives, animus etc., despite the fact that no-one at all disagreed with it in any way. Which is if anything more corrupt than police, politicians, doctors or oligopolists’ (or journalists’) mutual backscratching and ranks-closing.

@chris,
The company paid for all the books, and of course reading was on their own time. Some of the managers may have been big readers, I don’t know. None of the books was especially difficult in any kind of humanities-subject way. The VP himself had an engineering degree. Whether he or his subordinates gave quizzes, I don’t know.

Oh come on Henry. You’re drawing a conclusion about “the current crop of French intellectuals” and Malcolm Gladwell based on the quick impressions of two other bloggers? This is either a cranky argument or a playful one.

As to the particular cases put forth – my first stop to inform myself on revolution in Egypt, or Tunisia, or Libya, or Yemen, or Bahrain, would not be Malcolm Gladwell. Nor would it be four columns in Le Monde. But neither is intended to fulfill that function.

I would like to suggest the the global internet is the Sixth Estate.

As such it is totally different from the Fifth, which is where Malcolm Gladwell as well as six news company recipients of Assange’s wikileaks reside. The Sixth’s methods of narrative, shared thought, modes of commentary show few commonalities with its predecessors.

It has its own boundaries and behaviors that reside within and outside the “ordinary”. Most intriguing … the Sixth is self-aware.

Isn’t it true, going out on a limb and generalizing here, that many French intellectuals have always been, as Goldhammer implies, more willing to make grand, sweeping pronouncements about n’importe quoi than most (though, to be sure, not all) of their Anglo-American counterparts? Glance e.g. at the first few pages of Touraine’s ’05 book A new paradigm for understanding today’s world (Un nouveau paradigme pour comprendre le monde d’aujourd’hui) (on Google books). To that extent I sort of get Goldhammer’s point, even though he overdoes it and even though there was some basis for choosing these particular people to speak on this topic (Touraine, as I noted in a previous comment, has written a lot about social movements).

the Fifth, which is where Malcolm Gladwell as well as six news company recipients of Assange’s wikileaks reside.

Wait, so what’s the 4th estate then?

“the Situationists were onto Sartre as early as 1966”
How were they “onto” him, precisely? Because he approvingly quoted a Malian who stressed one feature of Mali’s economy while not mentioning another? Is the implication that Sartre was oblivious to the role of the industrial working class, or something like that? I always thought the standard accusation was that he was rather too concerned about the mood at Billancourt.

I am unable to tell whether 39 is spam or not. It has that hazy air of almost-relevance that characterises all the best spam comments.

I always had problems with the definition “intellectual” (and the similar one “artist”).
In theory, every man has intellectual (and artistic) capabilities, so every man is an “intellectual”.
If we restrict the term intellectual to those people that have a reasonabily high culture, in the world of today we mean something around 20% of the population of developed countries. This is a big difference with past centuries, when very few people could actually study and have a good culture. As a consequence, the term “intellectual” loses its meaning.
If we further restrict the term to those who are “professional” intellectuals, we change the meaning from referring to one’s culture to referring to one’s job. Thus, the term would include those people whose job is to provide opinions/thoughts regardless to their culture/knowledge. This means only some media guys and an handful of academics famous enough to have a public (hence a sort of media guys them too).
Bottom line, it seems to me that the sort of distaste that I perceive in the post for the role of intellectuals comes from a contradiction between the “people with high culture/knowledge” idea of intelectuals, that IMHO cannot apply to the world of today and was last appropriate in the 19th century, and the “media guy/pundit” idea of intellectual, that is the result of the world of today and is IMHO what we are going to get up to the dissolution of the idea of intellectual, a sort of de-specialization.

@48 Glucksmann is not an ex-Trot but an ex-Maoist, but his renunciation of the left is 34 years ago with the publication of _Les Maitres Penseurs_ (at the same time as Bernard Henri-Levy (“God is dead but my hair is perfect”) published _La Barbarie à Visage Humain_.

On the one hand, I think most people understand what journalists do and don’t have a problem with it. On the other hand most people who have seen something they know about covered in the press have had the experience of feeling the truth was misrepresented. I don’t think this can be attributed simply to the fact that journalists have direct access to sources in the field who are more sophisticated than “most people” are (which is the only sense I can make of a general anathema on bloggers, that they aren’t credentialed journalists and thus no different from “most people”).

Galdwell should know better and refer back to his theory of the ‘tipping point,’ when things begin to change.

In Tunisia and Egypt a tipping point was reach, when there was a sufficiently developed ‘critical mass’ (people thinking and wanting the same), when things begin to change. And that’s when facebook and social networking made a difference, rallying the people in a common cause.

Without that social network the change needed and wanted would have been more difficult to pull off.

Well, I am, as far as I know, the real Arthur Goldhammer. I am not now, nor have I ever been, an anti-intellectual. I don’t care much for Badiou, though I plead guilty to the charge of not being aware of his birthplace or past as a political organizer. I concede that I was also unfair to Alain Touraine, who can claim expertise on social movements, although I stand by my belief that it might be useful, in order to apply that expertise, to have some specific knowledge about social movements in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. I didn’t really expect my blog post to be subjected to such close scrutiny. Had I anticipated the reaction, I would have written it more carefully. I posted it mainly as a protest against the media’s neglect of any number of scholars in France who could have been called upon to provide more specific knowledge of recent events, as Olivier Roy did (at the behest, originally, of The Spectator, not Le Monde). The article by Foucault, whose title I misremembered, is in fact about the rise of the “specific intellectual” over the “general intellectual.” Foucault didn’t say that the general intellectual was useless or (as I mistakenly implied) “dead.” He did say, however, that the specific intellectual might in the future prove more useful to progressive social movements than the general intellectual, who offered mainly prestigious blessing (like his own, regrettably, of the Iranian revolution) without useful guidance. As for my alleged unfairness to Le Monde, I will say only that I commend them for sparing us the commentary of Bernard Henri-Lévy.

The comment about bloggers in Brooklyn in their pajamas, I should point out, was meant to be a joke . David Remnick was egging me on, and I was engaging in a bit of self-parody which, as some have noted above, I’m prone to. (I am about to move to Brooklyn; I write in my pajamas; I blog, etc, etc). But I guess the joke was lost on some in the audience and came across as obnoxious, and I’m sorry about that. (Clearly my editors should keep me in Brooklyn, in my pajamas). Have I changed my mind on social media and revolution? Well, my “position” on Egypt isn’t really a position; it was just a one-paragraph expression of my frustration at how, at a time when people were risking their lives in the streets, some of the digital faithful seemed to be spending just a little bit too much time agonizing over whether the activists did or didn’t use Facebook and Twitter. I think that was a fair observation, and I don’t see that it contradicts my New Yorker piece. If I were writing that New Yorker piece today, would I write it differently? I’m not sure. I still don’t understand how the new digital communication tools affect the “hard” part of successful social organizing—putting together committed, disciplined, strategically sophisticated operations. I interviewed John Lewis not long ago, and asked him how he thought the civil rights movement, with the benefit of hindsight, could have been more effective. And his response was that they should have spent more time developing the principles of non-violence—which I found interesting. They didn’t lack for communication or organizing tools, in his mind. They lacked for ideological sophistication. On the other hand, I have been as dumbstruck as everyone else by what is happening in the Middle East. So I’d probably hold off writing that piece today, at least until I thought we all had a better understanding of how this wave of unrest might differ from pre-digital revolutions. I hope that makes sense. By the way, I appreciate how much more temperate your tone was this time around, Henry. It makes it easier to have a conversation. When you first wrote about my social media piece, a few months back, I felt like I’d been sent to the headmaster’s office for a caning.

#60 Really? I’m not being smart arse here, I’m genuinely surprised. I knew he read French and Hebrew and had some knowledge of native American languages but I didn’t know he read Arabic. He’s certainly never mentioned it, so far as I know. Oh well you live and learn.

Thanks for responding, Malcolm.

“Well, Louis Proyect had a savage go at him”

No clue about that. If you have a reference, let me know.

“these people didn’t have telephones”

Who, GDR citizens? Of course they had telephones. Otherwise what would the Stasi have been eavesdropping on?

Re: Badiou and what he has said about the Middle East and whether he has any expertise on it. In fact, as somebody who would consider herself an avid student of politics the Middle East (and FWIW teaches it in academia), I was pleased to see that the entirety of his commentaries since the beginning of the year has been precisely this: “that we [read the “West”] should hold our tongues about teaching them [read the “East”] what we think we know about democracy and how they should do it or how they should recognise it.” It is a call for humility, and you don’t need expert regional knowledge to make it.

I also agree with Kaveh that Middle East academics have been making fairly correct predictions, and funnily enough the most radical of these academic/activists As’ad AbuKhalil (angryarab) has been spot-on at every turn in his assessment of the various movements.

Re telephones in East Germany, the Stasi could tap and tape those with phones but phones were distinctly luxury items. It’s easy to forget how poor and in what crappy shape the East was in and to forget how many billions of marks the West spent fixing things. I was in Halle a/d Saale ten years after the fall and they just finally fixed the center city, which was a bomb crater.

Ha!

@piglet

No clue about that. If you have a reference, let me know.

Here’s the category listing at his blog. There’s a review of Collapse in there (2nd article) though most of the stuff’s about the New Yorker controversy. Which, I’ve just noticed from a comment on the review, was also covered here at CT.

To paraphrase the Duke in “True Grit,” I call that tough talk for a man who lives in a country where Tom Friedman is considered an intellectual.

sorry for the typo Gladwell, am getting cataracts.

@77: Certainly Tom Friedman is considered an intellectual… by Tom Friedman. If you want to claim anyone other than Tom Friedman considers him an intellectual, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask for citations. Most other people seem to consider him a buffoon.

@81:” Most other people seem to consider him a buffoon?” That’s a VERY strong statement concerning someone whose signature appears twice a week in the NY Times op-ed page.

Thanks weaver 75. This is what I mean: writers like Diamond throw around bold theories about everything, based on “evidence” that is often merely anecdotal and sometimes flat out wrong. And they are not held accountable.
In the case of the revenge controversy, which I wasn’t aware of, it is telling that such a story gains traction in the US of all places. The US legal system still embraces revenge as a guiding principle while much of the world has explicitly rejected it.

Malcolm Gladwell’s response above is admirably reasonable and civil, so I don’t want to bash much…but the pair of blog posts first cited reminded me of another (real!) French intellectual, the much-missed Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu wrote a lot about various forms of “cultural capital,” and he used the term “specific capital,” by “autonomous” producers, to designate the particular sort of cultural production that was a product of scholar-to-scholar, peer-reviewed-type intellectual laboring–as opposed to what he termed “heteronomous” cultural production, i.e., popular writing, journalism, etc., that was basically market-oriented, by producers who generally didn’t have any deep, market-divorced knowledge of, well, anything much. You know, the folks who are on TV a lot.

And he cites an interesting study somebody did querying which French intellectuals, writers, etc., supported/collaborated with the Nazis during the ’30s and ’40s, and which didn’t–and (guess what) it was almost entirely the heteronomous folks–those lacking “specific capital.”

A bit heavy, I know, in this context, but that passage of his has always struck me as a touchstone (and I’m not an academic)–and it says a lot about who, almost by definition, gets on TV (and who doesn’t), and what, almost by definition, they’ll say once they’re on (which, often, is pretty much whatever is required).

weaver @ 75-

Thanks so much for the link to that CT thread on Diamond. I’d completely forgotten about it. But what a lot of great comments by Adam Henne, Doctor Slack (are either of them still around?), Keith Ellis, Kaveh, and others. I bitch about this place all the time but it’s really astonishing the quality of conversations that happen here, and for how long they’ve been sustained. This site is like my favorite thing on the Internet. Seriously.

Another thing, the intellectuals of former days were often novelists or artists and unlike those who disfigure the media today, didn’t have doctorates in Area Studies, Public Policy, or Political Science, but were humanistically educated.

No wonder the NYT is going bankrupt.

Harold @91:

I think you are on to something, but I wonder if the novelists or artists were necessarily humanistically educated. Émile Zola is often regarded as the first major intellectual, but I don’t think he was particularly well educated. It has never been common for novelists and artists to have doctorates, even in the humanities.

Authors and playwrights have maintained some of their standing, but theaters don’t have the same influence as they had a century ago, something that is undoubtedly related to the invention and popularity of moving pictures. Perhaps filmmakers like Michael Moore are among the more important public intellectuals today?