Three studies for the portrait of an Intellectual

Break the pen, spill the ink, burn the paper
lock your lips, be silent, shhh...
say, 'I saw nothing' even if you did
or else have your eyes gouged out
keep humming eulogies, be silent
it is the season of burying the truth...

Bashir Manzar

First Study: The Laissez faire intellectual.

On a Thursday afternoon I made my way up to a fifth floor of London School of Economics building to hear what was to be the final lecture for an Empire course.  Professor Dominic Lievan was to talk to us about "Globalization and Empire".  His language, inherently gendered and Eurocentric; he argues that the British Empire did not penetrate into the life's of its subjects to the extent Power (American Empire!) today (via cultural Hegemony) does, he words, 'For the Indian women under the Raj the biggest fear was her mother in law, followed by her father in law…the British Raj was not a present source of power…'

Claiming the virtues of American Cultural Hegemony, apologizing for its short-comings but dreaming for an 'end of history' because being from Kensington this 'suits me' – take note: hypocritical democracy, Neo-Liberal Globalization, 'western' cultural and economic 'sense' of superiority, suit our Laissez a faire intellectual.  The alternatives he says do not exist or are much worse (citing: 'Wahhabism') and so let us accept what we have faults and all.  It will be no surprise that the reading set for this lecture was, Francis Funkayama's irritant but sophisticated thesis "The End of History and the Last Man'.  (Those who are not 'man' are either fortunate to be able to partake in the historical dialectic or are written out of history altogether).  So here then we have a brief sketch of our Laissez faire intellectual. Let us note that for 'him' history is seen as created for us, already placed and one in which the future is not to be created but accepted. 

Words, spoken with adulterated backing of authorative prefix's and institutions – Professor of Moral Philosophy, Government Department London School of Economics - determine, enable or curtain acts.  They act to form - from the outside - my being.  These are powerful actional discourses that form our existential bearing; they condition the filter by which we experience.  Prisoners, those fathers and sons, are humiliated and rendered servile, because of their human desire to exist, in prisons all across Iraq - I hear it and am able to see it but I am informed there is no better alternative and besides of what interest is it to me here in Kensington! sella la vie! Says our Laissez a faire Professor along with many of his neighbors.  Our Laissez a faire intellectual either fails to see/feel the power of his/her own words (in which case we must question the very institutions that baptized him or her) or if she does she is implicit in the exercise of the very power she makes legitimate by her conservatism. 

Second study: The Humanist Intellectual.

The late great Edward Said, another student of Empire and in particular Imperialism, had an alternative ideal of the intellectual (one that escalated and determined his work and life) as speaking 'truth to power'.  He writes, “The intellectual’s role generally is to uncover and elucidate the contest, to challenge and defeat both an imposed silence and the normalized quiet of unseen power, wherever and whenever possible”. 

The Humanist Intellectual sets himself in the academy and from here wishes to 'speak truth to power'.  She/he poses, sincerely, to champion the marginal.  Crucially, they fight a war in language and with merger resources take on to correct, at every step, our Laissez a Faire intellectual and the power they legitimate...

There are problems with this.  To speak truth to power is to speak nonetheless to power.  It is to implore it and react to it.  The intellectual is thereby situated vis-a-vis his role as intellectual to analysis, process, and predicate the Action and movement of Power.  Vinously located behind it, with bravado and often heroism our intellectual sets himself to speak truth to an unashamedly bashful power.  The intellectual has a vertical relation to power and we know who is documenting and who is doing.  And who is allowed to speak.  Our intellectual is constraint by the mutations and movements of power.  "quote from New York times".  Tightened muscles are preparing to react to power and then hoping for a reaction from power - 'but if I show him he will see and change', so believes our intellectual.  What structures the pose of our intellectual is precisely his belief in 'words', 'humanity' and 'rationality' of those who hold power.  There is another intellectual to be drawn, to find her we need to go much deeper into our allegorical cave, to that spot where wrapped muscles, in darkness, position themselves to act.

 

Third study:  The Liberationist Intellectual

The liberationist intellectual is by her bearing a Utopianist.  S/he speaks from 'nowhere' into the present - they don't speak to power, but write/speak rather into an un-cared for abyss.  It is not her desire to speak the truth but to imperatively inform and physiologically energize the present towards its own creative self-emergence.   
The Liberationist is not concerned with class or historical ascendance.  S/he is not the Gramscian "organic Intellectual'.  Alignment is an opportunistic fortune.  S/he is positioned and moved by a basic ethics as old as the sun.  Radiating from within for the chance to love, denied at every opportunity to embrace souls - she sets about to discover the malady and creatively implores towards its cure - I would suggest that Emerson, Nietzsche, Philip Guston, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Simone De Beauvoiur, Audre Loude, Fanon, Neruda, Adida Parveen and to an extent the great Edward Said among countless others camp here.   

Let me draw clearly, it is not 'the abolition of class' that is sort nor the egalitarianism built on trampled beings but the psychic possibility of love. 
And because 'organizational reality' (that interplay of essential power structures which shape, form, and represent our bearings) prohibits what it itself proclaims the liberationalist intellectuals have to erase while simultaneously creating.  Love is an anguish-manifested peace in the heart of our intellectual’s soul. 

The liberationist intellectual dances within the crust of time enticing marooned muscles to flex.  Fanon, is no archetype but worth a listen, listen:

"The body of history does not determine a single one of my actions". (This is not an empirical statement but a performative strategy- to energize.) 

Listen again:

'It is through the effort to recapture the self and to scrutinize the self, it is through the lasting tension of their freedom that (wo)men will be able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world.

Superiority?  Inferiority?

Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?'

Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask

But let me also leave you with Nietzsche:

"Culture demands of her/him, not only inward experience...but finally and above all an act, that is to say a struggle on behalf of culture and hostility towards those influences, habits, laws, institutions in which she/he fails to recognize his/her goal'

Qalandar Bux Memon

London, April 2006.