Publics That Don’t Exist and the Intellectuals Who Write For Them

OK, I’ll bite. Is there a typo in the last sentence of the preview? Like, is it better to write for readers who don’t exist, or who somehow don’t exist as they exist?

By whether or not they can understand Corey’s last sentence.

After reading that last sentence about existence, I am having an existential crisis about my comprehension skills.

An idea that was strikingly original two centuries ago. Wordsworth, in an essay supplementary to the preface of his 1815 volume of poems, quoted Coleridge’s saying that “every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed”. Isn’t that what is meant here?

Ah, but is there a public who is interested in this intellectual speech?

I might connect the decline of the “public intellectual” to Postmodern theories of the Avant-Garde and vanguardism. It’s just so hard to get alienated enough when you got twitter.

Trying to strike a balance between the insights of Renato Poggioli and the claims of Clement Greenberg, Rosenberg suggested that from the mid-1960s onward progressive culture ceased to fulfill its former adversarial role. Since then it has been flanked by what he called “avant-garde ghosts” to the one side, and a changing mass culture on the other, both of which it interacts with to varying degrees. This has seen culture become, in his words, “a profession one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing it”

I expect Corey will come in to clarify here, and I think Stephen (@7) is on the right track. The “as” in the last sentence is ambiguous (= “in the way that” vs. = “while” vs. = “since, because”), and this is perhaps what is throwing people off. “The problem with our public intellectuals today is that they are writing for readers who already exist, …”, as opposed to not yet existing. This seems to imply that a writer that solves this problem will do so by “creating the taste”, or creating the public within which their works will resonate, together with new standards by which contributions to the public debate are assessed. (I mean ‘public’ and ‘debate’ in the sense in which Arendt considered democracy to be constituted by the effective channels of public debate in a community.) As it is now, we have to deal with a corporate media in which, e.g., the mouthings of the candidates at a Republican “debate” are considered a sensible contribution to the public debate. Whatever came out of the mouth of these people was not a serious contribution to any debate at all. The public within which an effective debate about the real problems that concern and divide citizens does not exist, since such debate as we have is not inclusive. There has to be some way in which those who are engaged in a deeper way with the long- running intellectual traditions and who feel they are making progress have an impact on the wider, more “popular” discourse that influences policy making and so forth. (E.g., I always urge students to check out the NYRB; almost always they’ve never heard of it, and most times don’t bother to take me up on it.)

Well, that’s I suppose a possible interpretation. If there is a misprint, as Peter Dorman says above, then it must be something else, which it probably is.

Coates completely changed my mind on the issue of direct reparations for racist policy, if that’s worth anything.

“The problem with our public intellectuals today is that they are writing for readers who already exist, as they exist.”
Clear as a bell.
And if Corey admired today’s public intellectuals well then: The strength of our public intellectuals today is that they are writing for readers who don’t already exist, as they will not exist.
See, not so hard. It’s obvious…

I agree with bob that Coates has settled into a position of benign self comfort. There is no longer (if ever there was) a desire to challenge his, or his congregations, priors.
This idea of the public intellectual as truth teller or vagabond savant also strikes me as archaic and (I would guess) ahistorical. Public intellectualism is little more than dressed up snake oil selling, in group ideologising and chicaranery. We are all slaves of our priors and prejudices and in group commitments . I have no reason to believe the quest for truth or enlightenment exists in any meaningful way outside of the lab, and even then When you remove the intellect from that environment they revert to the primordialism of the disgruntled drunk, hanging on to the Lampost for dear life, ranting about whatever pops into their peripheral vision

Of course, Corey’s thesis is completely contradicted by the existence of geo, the most important public intellectual that appears regularly in this blog.
https://crookedtimber.org/2015/09/10/george-scialabba-is-retiring-from-harvard/
If geo says the last sentence of Corey’s post isn’t incoherent, I’ll reassess.

On the ambiguity of the final sentence, I subscribe to the clear writing school: ambiguity is a shortcoming unless it’s intended (and has a valid reason). (The parenthetical qualifier is inserted with nefarious administrative ambiguity in mind.) Like some of you, I teach writing as well as read it, and I’m rather relentless in my advocacy of specificity and clarity in the work I evaluate.

As for what seems to be the consensus interpretation of CR’s complaint, it would help to know what it is about the current state of the readership which should be altered by public intellectuals. I’m not implying that all is well, just that there are many possible grounds for grousing. It would take no more than a sentence, maybe less, to signal what CR’s concern is.

Unless he’s arguing that, no matter who the readers are or what their qualities, the purpose of a PI should be to change them into something else, and the current crop of PI’s aren’t doing this. Then the critique is that marketing has displaced disturbing as a driving force. On this count I’m reminded of a wonderful statement by Keith Jarrett when he was asked by an interviewer whether his music could be classified as New Age. Jarrett said, “The problem with New Age music is that, if there weren’t a market for it, it wouldn’t exist.” Ah, but when was the golden age? When did writers, musicians and other cultural creators not primarily appeal to the audience at hand?

This is always a question of balance. Appealing to the audience that exists is a discipline, and a certain amount of discipline is helpful in shaping the challenge to this audience. I think of Jarrett’s statement as saying that there’s no such balance in New Age; maybe this is CR’s idea too.

ronan @19:
have no reason to believe the quest for truth or enlightenment exists in any meaningful way outside of the lab

This is 100% as far as what is allowed to be published. Because any search for truth will result in the American right being called on the carpet for being racist, misogynist, homophobic and xenophobic – and this is not allowed because of “civility”.

Coates either makes it very personal ( Letters to my Son ) or historical ( Systemic racism in the past ) – but either way does not call out the entire mediasphere for allowing the rightwing’s racism to be ignored. ( I don’t blame him ).

Sunstein is just defending the rich from the pitchforks. Which always pays well.

Consumatopia
Hurry up, he has to give the finished speech three days from now!

The collective’s assignment is to finish writing it by tonight and then to send it to Brooklyn by carrier pigeon. That way it should be in CR’s hands by the time he boards the train or plane for DC.

I nominate Stephen Colbert and Sherman Alexie as public intellectuals.

– meant Ed@25…

Bob McManus @ 11:It’s just so hard to get alienated enough when you got twitter.

I thought the point of Twitter WAS alienation? Is it not alienating enough for you, Bob?

max
[‘Maybe that’s why they need the new CEO.’]

The problem with our public intellectuals today is that they are writing for readers who already exist, as they exist.

Actually, Coates is writing so that his employer can display a bit of plumage. Having a mascot who does not actually produce copy would expose the whole game. Luckily, Coates can produce copy, even if the content is inane.

A critic of The Atlantic once offered that it was in the news business a notorious snob shop whose idea of ‘diversity’ was hiring Megan McArdle because her degree was from Penn and not Harvard, Yale, or Oxford. Coates produces copy, but his value to the institution was conceived of something as different from the value Marc Ambinder was meant to produce, or Ross Douthat.

The regrettable aspect of the whole transaction is that Coates might have been earning a living in a serious trade rather than an ironic trade. What contains this problem is that there are only so many slots in the economy for this sort of thing.

I sorta disagree about Coates and advocacy. Coates has anecdotes about learning “narrative journalism” from an early mentor.

I won’t say it is new, but I do think it had become more scientific and rationalized. Basically personal narratives and narrative journalism are used to pre-condition the audience, to “soften it up” and establish and strengthen affiliations and affinities without allowing an opening for disputation or disagreement (“I’m just telling my story”), and then when an argument or a policy proposal is broached, disagreement feels like disloyalty or a lack of empathy.

Apologies for length, from Jodi Dean Blog Theory:

“key features of mobile, SMS, and online communication:

1 Thoughts are combined and points are made in ways that are additive rather than supportive; differently put, people string syntactic elements together with “and” rather than with subordinate clauses.

2 The elements of thoughts and ideas are aggregative rather than analytical (a contemporary example might be the slogans, clichés, and memes that catch on and stand-in for ideas and feelings that remain unexplored).

3 Ideas and points are frequently repeated.

4 Traditions are conserved (because little to nothing is written down, remembering is difficult; hence, not only do points need to be repeated but they need to be attributed to tradition).

5 Ideas are understood in terms of their connection with actual experience, with the lifeworld, rather than abstractly or within a more general analytic field (if I don’t know anyone who has been the victim of homophobic violence, then homophobic violence must not be a problem).

6 Knowledge and ideas appear agonistically, polarized, as part of everyday struggle.

7 Ideas are treated in terms of empathy and its lack: that is to say, in an immediate and participatory rather than a distanced fashion.”

This morning I read what I think is a brilliant example of a new kind of intellectualism, from Natasha Myers in Sherry Turkle Simulation and Its Discontents on protein folding and embodied science

(…compelled to provide washing instructions [cold instead of hot] to the students so they know what to do if they get bloodstains on their clothes:)

(Begin example)

This is, of course, a lesson that the women, who make up about
half the class, likely understood quite well, although they were reticent
to admit it publicly. Faced with an awkward silence from his
students, Brady began to search for hooks that would elicit recogni-
tion and produce an embodied understanding of the effects of heat
on protein folding. When the hooks work, the effect can be visceral.
I experienced this when contemplating my own scars, imagining
how collagen fibers form at the site of fresh wounds. In that
moment my attention was drawn to my knee, and my memory of
watching a doctor stitch it up after a childhood accident. Shifting
between scales, I could remember the sting of the stitches, and
simultaneously visualize and feel minute collagen threads rapidly
extending and coiling up around each other, closing the wound
and binding the tissues tight. Effective models, like analogies, can
produce what philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers calls “lures,”
that is, abstractions that “vectorize concrete experience.”

barf x5

From Jodi Dean, Blog Theory, as quoted by b. mcmanus:
“Thoughts are combined and points are made in ways that are additive rather than supportive; differently put, people string syntactic elements together with “and” rather than with subordinate clauses.”

Here’s a sentence from a blog post of March 2014:

Aspects of modernization theory had antecedents in classical social theory, notably Weber and Marx, even if the debt to the latter, at least, was not one that U.S. modernization theorists of the 1950s and ’60s were generally eager to acknowledge.

Note the “even if [etc.]”. Sounds like a subordinate clause to me. Perhaps I need to brush up on what a subordinate clause is. Who knows. Actually I don’t really give a f***, on most days at least.

@29 agressivePACIFIST

Your question has been answered. Some definitions are ostensive.

Edit above:

Should be: @46

Well, Saurs , Coates is a Black man writing directly about black issues, and was just given a MacArthur grant. His writing has to suck, he has to be losing his touch, or his audience has to be fawning sheep wanting a liberal feel-good read.

The post’s headline refers to “the public,” but the excerpt refers to “readers.” Is this important? The public is not necessarily the audience for whom any writer writes. Let’s assume Charles Dickens was a species of public intellectual. (No?) He certainly wrote for readers who already exist, as they exist. In this respect, I’d say Coates writes more like Dickens (and although I haven’t read either widely, I’d say in other respects, too) than Sunstein does. From the get-go, Sunstein has written like a legal scholar. The sheer monumental volume of his output is more like Dickens’ than Coates’, but Coates writes to please, entertain, and inform. Sunstein, not so much. He writes to attract citations to bolster his academic credit and credibility. But what would have been the problem with Dickens writing for his audience?

That’d be Wodehouse, yes? Don’t know Eiseley the writer, but I love the records he made with his brothers in the ’60s and ’70s.

Again, if asked to force a comparison, I’d say Coates is more like Joyce/Daedalus than Sunstein. He certainly seems, like Joyce, more interested in language and how or why it’s used than Sunstein, who really is an academic technocrat, if one on steroids.

Dean Rowan @54
“Don’t know Eiseley the writer, but I love the records he made with his brothers in the ’60s and ’70s.”

Then I know you’d love to listen to this song here right now!