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

by Corey Robin on October 13, 2015

This Thursday night, the Society for U.S. Intellectual History is convening its annual conference in Washington, DC. I’ll be delivering the keynote address, which I’m really excited about. I’ll be talking about public intellectuals, a topic I’ve explored here before, as have many others on this blog. The full conference schedule is here; my talk is scheduled for Friday, October 16, at 2 pm, in the Hamilton Ballroom of the Hamilton Crowne Plaza Hotel. If you’re in DC, stop by and say hello. The title of my talk is: “Publics That Don’t Exist and the Intellectuals Who Write For Them.” Here’s a preview:

The problem with our public intellectuals today—and here I’m going to address the work of two exemplary though quite different public intellectuals: Cass Sunstein and Ta-Nehisi Coates—has little to do with their style. It has little to do with their professional location, whether they write from academia or for the little magazines. It has little to do with the suburbs, bohemia, or tenure. The problem with our public intellectuals today is that they are writing for readers who already exist, as they exist.

{ 58 comments }

1

Peter Dorman 10.13.15 at 4:38 am

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?

2

agressivePacifist 10.13.15 at 5:33 am

By what criteria does one determine an “intellectual”?

3

tony lynch 10.13.15 at 5:41 am

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

4

Meredith 10.13.15 at 6:35 am

Does it matter less who writers (may be imagined to) write for and more who actually reads them? I doubt very much that Coates writes for me, but I read him and learn. (I pay almost no attention to Cass Sunstein, one way or t’other.)

5

Tabasco 10.13.15 at 6:36 am

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

6

Martin Bento 10.13.15 at 6:53 am

So is the idea that they should not be writing for a public that already exists, but should create one in their writing? A public that already exists is one with priors you are reinforcing. A public you create with your writing is one that has its priors changed by your writing, and is therefore, in a sense, formed by it. I hope that’s what you mean, as that is at least interesting. Hell of a lot to claim though.

7

Stephen 10.13.15 at 7:40 am

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?

8

jackrousseau 10.13.15 at 8:53 am

I’m guessing the point is that public intellectuals are writing for a pre-existing audience and catering to the thoughts of that audience as if they were eternally fixed, i.e, today’s public intellectuals aren’t seeking, as they once did, to challenge and change their audiences, let alone create whole new audiences out of a metaphorical vacuum.

9

Paul Montgomery 10.13.15 at 9:14 am

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

10

bob mcmanus 10.13.15 at 9:17 am

Well, I suppose we can wait, eagerly for myself, for Robin to post or link to the complete speech, but I thought it was fairly clear, and as explained in 6, 7, and 8. John McWhorter calls Coates a “priest,” or preacher delivering a sermon, maybe challenging his audience just enough so that they feel they have gotten some Sunday morning moral exercise and are glad to belong to his particular congregation and not to the heretics across town or heathens in the hinterlands.

Sunstein speaks to the wonkish policy apparatchiks, providing cover and disguises for true motivations. But that is so common it is almost a definition of modern politics. It is interesting to compare Coates and Sunstein, and think about what Coates is overcoating for his fans.

11

bob mcmanus 10.13.15 at 9:47 am

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”

12

novakant 10.13.15 at 9:54 am

13

JPL 10.13.15 at 10:16 am

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.

14

Josh Jasper 10.13.15 at 11:32 am

Anyone who’s ever spent a good amount of time reading Coates knows that he most assuredly is not writing for an audience. He’s writing for himself. He’s on record saying this multiple times.

15

PointyShinyBurning 10.13.15 at 12:57 pm

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

16

casmilus 10.13.15 at 1:08 pm

Readers as yet unborn do not presently exist. Perhaps an aim would be to write for future generations.

17

T 10.13.15 at 1:54 pm

“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…

18

Anarcissie 10.13.15 at 2:31 pm

To me, the last sentence means ‘the public intellectuals of today are not creating new audiences, nor are they changing the minds of those audiences which have already been created’ (presumably by some previous attractive and provocative public intellectualizing which no longer takes place). That part is clear. My problem is that I don’t know who ‘public intellectuals’ are. At one time, only a few people could speak or write and be published. Now, a great multitude can do these things, some of whom are very clever people yet do not hold highly-credentialed positions. So it is hard to know just what a public intellectual is. If it is someone credentialed and supported by declining institutions like the established older media, it is hardly surprising that their offerings are neither attractive nor inspiring.

19

Ronan(rf) 10.13.15 at 3:14 pm

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

20

Ronan(rf) 10.13.15 at 3:25 pm

I think I’ve misspelled a number of words there, which i hope doesn’t undermine my argument

21

T 10.13.15 at 3:27 pm

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.

22

Ed 10.13.15 at 3:30 pm

“preaching to the converted” – indeed. But isn’t this because society is polarized – between a racist, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic right – and those who oppose them? how can there be “compromise” with the right? Each of their pillars is binary – they want only to “conserve” the ingrained privilege of Straight Christian White Men. There are not “shades of gray” between egalitarianism and privileged class hierarchies. What you have is the right denying these core principles while at the same time shouting them from the rooftops ( See Trump, Donald).

23

Peter Dorman 10.13.15 at 3:44 pm

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.

24

LFC 10.13.15 at 3:59 pm

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

In roughly twenty words, about, oh, 80 percent of (‘Western’, at least) philosophy since the C17 and close to 100 percent of social science (broadly construed) since the C19 are thrown into the dustbin of history, and only certain postmodernists and various of their hangers-on are left standing. Nice work for one comment, Ronan. ;)

25

Ed 10.13.15 at 4:53 pm

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.

26

Consumatopia 10.13.15 at 5:11 pm

That one paragraph is actually all CR wrote. He’s waiting for us to construct the rest of his speech from that preview and his previous writings. Hurry up, he has to give the finished speech three days from now!

27

LFC 10.13.15 at 5:28 pm

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.

28

agressivePacifist 10.13.15 at 5:35 pm

Just to be clear: no one here can tell me what characteristics are necessary for the “intellectual” label?

29

Shelley 10.13.15 at 5:36 pm

I nominate Stephen Colbert and Sherman Alexie as public intellectuals.

30

Dave 10.13.15 at 6:24 pm

Ed@19
Coates either makes it very personal ( Letters to my Son ) or historical ( Systemic racism in the past )

Don’t think that’s exactly right – you should go back and read what he’s written about police shootings or his latest article about mass incarceration.

31

Dave 10.13.15 at 6:25 pm

– meant Ed@25…

32

Stephen 10.13.15 at 6:59 pm

Ed@22: you say “society is polarized – between a racist, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic right – and those who oppose them”. I am not a US citizen and would not want to declare how far that may be true of the USA, at present. But do you suppose that such things have always been true in the US? Or true of societies outside the US, now or in the past?

Again, you say “There are not “shades of gray” between egalitarianism and privileged class hierarchies”. Some obvious queries. Have not some privileged class hierarchies had a steeper gradient of privilege than others: if you accept that in some cases the gradient has been very shallow, are you not moving into a shade of grey?

Or are you saying that only an absolutely egalitarian society is acceptable?

And would you not agree that attempts to remove privileged class hierarchies result not in egalitarianism, but in the forcible imposition of an alternative hierarchy?

33

max 10.13.15 at 7:19 pm

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.’]

34

Art Deco 10.13.15 at 7:35 pm

“preaching to the converted” – indeed. But isn’t this because society is polarized – between a racist, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic right – and those who oppose them? how can there be “compromise” with the right? Each of their pillars is binary – they want only to “conserve” the ingrained privilege of Straight Christian White Men.

I think this remark of “Ed”s was intended to be ironic…. Right?

35

Art Deco 10.13.15 at 7:44 pm

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.

36

Art Deco 10.13.15 at 7:46 pm

if you accept that in some cases the gradient has been very shallow, are you not moving into a shade of grey? Or are you saying that only an absolutely egalitarian society is acceptable?

He’s saying ‘screw you’. It’s just unclear who the you is.

37

bob mcmanus 10.13.15 at 8:16 pm

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.”

38

Donald Johnson 10.13.15 at 8:40 pm

Coates is radical by American standards and I don’t think he is insincere or posturing–however, his liberal bougeois readers like myself are maybe another story. I read him, agree with most of what he says, am surprised to learn some specific terrible things I didn’t know before, refer to him in blog comments and occasionally in real life, and that’s about it. That’s not his fault. I suppose someone should be organizing real responses, but if that’s not Coates’s forte, then it’s up to someone else to step up.

Not me.

39

bob mcmanus 10.13.15 at 8:41 pm

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.”

40

mdc 10.13.15 at 8:43 pm

As a principle of critical discipline, one should avoid blaming a writer for his or her admirers or patrons.

41

Dave 10.13.15 at 8:44 pm

barf x5

42

Bruce Wilder 10.13.15 at 9:26 pm

bob mcmanus @ 39

I’m not sure I’m following.

Being able to drill down is what separates learning a discourse as a lexicon of jargon and assorted social cues and taboos from an effort to understand the world.

Public intellectuals take on the role of gently reminding us that we are not engaged in critically understanding the world when all we can do is respond autonomically to stimulus, and spit back the vocabulary in the context of a socially (politically?) scripted narrative.

Or, they instruct us in the narrative scripts and vocabulary, so that our autonomic performances are smoother.

43

LFC 10.13.15 at 9:40 pm

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.

44

bob mcmanus 10.13.15 at 10:10 pm

42: Have to think on this, but written too much already today

43: The bullet points in 37 are more descriptive than prescriptive, and Dean doesn’t necessarily write like that herself.

I’ll leave with Mackenzie Wark’s Reading List …for his current Critical Media Theory class

45

tony lynch 10.13.15 at 11:20 pm

@29 agressivePACIFIST

Your question has been answered. Some definitions are ostensive.

46

agressivePacifist 10.14.15 at 12:14 am

@29

I’m not sure it has (as much as people attempt to define it at all, they all seem to say some variant of “person who changes minds” which, if that’s a correct summation, is far too broad) and saying “some definitions are ostensive” doesn’t mean that “intellectual” is one such example.

47

agressivePacifist 10.14.15 at 12:19 am

Edit above:

Should be: @46

48

Saurs 10.14.15 at 4:55 am

So, more bog-standard, hand-wringing contrarianism that surmises Coates’ writing is not even fit for academia (having previously argued that Kristoff isn’t plebeian enough and has alienated his public). Interesting twist on a bad old classic.

49

Josh Jasper 10.14.15 at 10:58 am

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.

50

Raisuli 10.14.15 at 5:35 pm

What’s going on here? I feel like there’s some kind of previously-established “Coates sucks, we can agree on that much” consensus underlying some of the comments in the thread. Did I miss a previous thread somewhere?

51

Dean C. Rowan 10.14.15 at 6:16 pm

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?

52

Art Deco 10.14.15 at 7:06 pm

ut Coates writes to please, entertain, and inform.

Oh yeah, he’s a cross between P.G. Woodhouse and Loren Eiseley.

53

Dean C. Rowan 10.14.15 at 7:16 pm

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.

54

bad Jim 10.15.15 at 2:12 am

« Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. »

55

Dean C. Rowan 10.15.15 at 2:56 am

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.

56

bad Jim 10.15.15 at 6:16 am

A story I’ve heard is that one of the performers hired to play Beethoven’s middle quartets threw down the score and stamped on it, to which the composer responded, “It’s meant for future listeners”. Something like that. The middle quartets by now sound rather reasonable; the late quartets remain disturbing.

57

JPL 10.15.15 at 7:39 am

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!

58

Dean C. Rowan 10.15.15 at 3:23 pm

JPL @58
Oh, yeah, that is some fine s**t. A revision, then, of Corey’s thesis: the problem with our public intellectuals today is their almost wholesale abandonment of the turntable. Rock on.

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