It's Not Just Rhetoric

Often times I feel a bit sad that we in the field of rhetoric and argumentation suffer from having a public intellectual who is from our field. I know it’s a bit selfish and somewhat narrow-minded to think this way – after all, every public intellectual is an intellectual engaged in the idea of public controversy or debate on some level – but it’s the attention to those subjects as such that I long for.

Well today I was relieved to learn I’m not alone. Here’s an article about anthropology’s struggle with the same thing.

Anthropology has been a field engaged in unraveling itself ever since the post-structuralist turn. This article made a lot of interesting claims that perhaps could bring attention back to that field.

Meanwhile I await the emergence of the rhetorician/argument theorist who will start our own public intellectual practice.

Another Aspect of Neoliberal

Stanley Fish actually had a good blog post the other day. Go figure.

Usually I disagree with him, but his analysis was very good. Covers an aspect of neoliberalism that I don’t often complain about, although I’m quite good at complaining about neoliberalism.

Just like the neoconservatives, the neoliberals see things in two-dimensional, flat, uncreative, unimaginative, over-simplistic, anti-materialist and naive terms.

But I don’t have the time right now to tell you how I really feel about them.

Kids Today

Outstanding article in the Washington Post this week about the crappy reading selections that undergraduates make. So timely as on Thursday I was suggesting a couple of good Spring Break books and one of my students was making a terribly confused face – he looked downright revolted. I asked him what was wrong and he replied, “Why would you read on Spring Break?” It was delivered in a tone that should be reserved for claims about having seen Bigfoot, a Yeti or the Loch Ness Monster.

However, for an interesting antidote to that venom, try one of the best blogs you aren’t reading, Future Majority, for their take on the issue. I think it’s interesting if we live in a world where undergraduates are not reading literature that is socially redeeming, but in the classroom the value structure that allows for such a literary hierarchy is being undermined by the professors in favor of social connections. Perhaps it’s spurious.

Should pragmatism be a higher value of the University? I think the divide between pragmatism and intellectualism is faulty and needs collapse. I don’t think there is any disagreement here among most people. The question is what kind of collapse? The speed? What percentage of each? A return to Aristotle might be the best move here – the idea of phronesis – which captures the best elements of both as it is currently theorized. Which makes rhetoric the most important, even though least popular, major at the University.

Why is economics so popular? Because it is a rhetoric. It allows for understanding, explanation and manipulation. And it provides criteria to deal with materiality and recalcitrance. The only thing it lacks is awareness of itself as such.

Good Old Zizek

Chatting on Skype with one of my Slovenian friends the other night revealed that he had just attended a lecture by Zizek earlier in the evening. I was very jealous. Video and/or audio might be on the way. He’s incredibly crazy/engaging depending on your point of view.

In the best traditions of synchronicity, I found later on that night a great article in the Financial Times where Zizek is interviewed. Enjoy!

It’s some sort of odd lunch/interview column, but it does give some of his more interesting ideas, although the journalist is clearly trying to paint him as an oddball. The best part is the section about “how theory works” – perhaps the most misunderstood idea among people at the present moment. The phrase, “Well that’s just a theory” should never be uttered.

Conservative intellectuals

Yesterday in my office two students and I were having a discussion that culminated in an unanswerable question for us. Where are the conservative intellectuals?  this was the subject of today’s Politico as well.

The 1940s – 1960s were full of such figures. These public intellectuals went to bat for conservative ideas in smart ways and persuasive ones to boot. They were giants. People like William F. Buckley, Jr., George F. Will, Norman Podhoretz, Sydney Hook, and Leo Strauss.

But no figure even close to any of these people (except for George Will who has all but dissapeared) that exists as a voice of conservatism today even comes close of licking the boots of this list.

Who do the conservatives have instead? Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and a number of other two-dimensional figures.

The conservative movement in the United States has replaced the public intellectual with the political celebrity.

It’s really a shame that I am forced to conclude that the conservative public intellectual is extinct.
Why and how did this happen?

At first glance it is quite obvious: The right in the United States has shifted toward a religious base and not an intellectual one.  When religion is the centerpiece, there’s little space for intellectualizing.  Often times, intellectual work is seen as the doubt of the non-believer or the act of the willfully evil. There’s not much to think about when higher beings are involved.

The religious capitalization of the Republican party has sent the intellectuals who might have defended conservative ideas into the realm of moderates, or perhaps the realm of non-existence. There’s no real reason to practice intellectual activity on the right; it just isn’t rewarded. It’s more rewarded to keep attention with cheap tricks.

This isn’t to say that Coulter, Limbaugh, et. al. don’t have important concerns worth discussion. Unfortunately, they offer the concerns as being beyond discussion – there’s no place for dissent in the realm of absolute correctness.

I’m also not saying that the left is free of these issues. Just look at that loser Al Franken. But in the past when the left had celebrity in its intellectuals it was at least somewhat legit. Herbert Marcuse was a towering intellect and wrote in a way that his books still command respect and attention from the reading public as well as academics. Phillip Rav and Stan Greenberg produced and wrote in journals that they hoped would enlighten the general working-class public to the point of revolution. Limbaugh and Coulter however will command only morbid curiosity for their books in a generation. They will be as interesting to the future as anti-masturbation books from the Victorian age are for us.

Where are the conservative intellectuals? Have you spotted one recently? These ideas deserve representation, but not by people who could just as easily be rejects from reality television programs.