Susan Sontag’s death this week has intitiated some discussion about the public intellectual, which is an issue I have thought about on several occasions on this long road to the Ph.D. Do nonacademics care about what we have to say, and should we care whether they care?
Mel writes that “[t]he news of Susan Sontag’s death from cancer this morning marks the end of the era of the “public intellectual.” I agree that Sontag was one of the few unaffiliated critical thinkers/writers that made it into more mainstream venues while keeping the respect of academics, but I am not sure this country has been in any sort of intellectual era, public or otherwise, in the last several decades. In fact, many would argue just the opposite, I think. Many people, when told of Sontag’s death, will surely respond: “Who?” She serves more as an exception than an example, and as Mel intimates, her death will cause fewer waves here than Derrida’s did in France.
Academic in Exile and Julie have separately reflected (through anecdotal accounts of lovers, no less) on the difference in sophistication between europeans and americans, and it seems as though americans harbor a profound indifference to anything “intellectual.” This ignorance about political events, in particular, came home to me when, in teaching a comp class in 2000, I casually mentioned “Seattle” in reference to the WTO protests that took place there the previous year. 20 students looked at me as if I were speaking in code. “Do you know what I’m talking about?” I asked. Heads shake? “WTO?” Nothing. “Globalization”. Nothing. How many people read the newspaper? None. What about nightly news? About half. For those of you who have seen Bowling for Columbine, those are our newscasts here in Detroit. Pretty light in the information department. The same attitude prevails towards anything outside of sports and celebrity news.
Part of the problem is the media, where little, if any, attention gets paid to intellectual, literary, or theoretical issues. Political discourse in this country is also so polarized with the likes of Anne Coulter and Al Franken that people rarely discuss or get balanced information about issues.
What’s going to happen with this glut of new ph.d grads who will not get jobs? Or the lapsed academics, who, seeing the futility of competing for a job in the academy, quietly leave to do other things? The public intellectual is now a blogger, self-published and free for the world to see. Not a well paying job, to be sure, with no benefits or salary or tenure, but this is where much of the thinking, discussing and debating is going on, for better or worse. Now everyone can be a public intellectual, for whatever it’s worth.
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