In this week’s session of Radical Sunday School, we took time to reexamine the myth that being an intellectual and being involved with universities are one and the same. We started our session with a brainstorm, letting anyone speak up about what being an “intellectual” meant, in their own experience. Right off the bat, someone burst out “elitism”, which certainly made us chuckle, but then the conversation started to roll a bit. We talked about how intellectuals usually worked within the written word, reading and writing books and articles and essays. We heard that intellectuals tended to form groups all engaging in the same kind of conversation with each other over time – the word “tradition” and “canon” were common here. One participant pointed out how intellectuals often serve ideological projects. Many of us discussed whether an intellectual needed to have a university degree, or to teach. Are all scientists intellectuals? Are all intellectuals scientists (the answer seemed to be no on both counts). Lastly, we spoke a little bit about public intellectuals, and how those connect to the broader idea of intellectualism.
After our brainstorm, I started my little lecture, reminding everyone that I’m politically opposed to hearing too much of my own voice, and that they should speak up whenever they have a thought. To begin analyzing the relationship between universities and intellectuals, I brought up the Marxian concept of primitive accumulation. While I’m certainly no expert on the topic, my understanding is that primitive accumulation the process that divided society into a capitalist class and a working class. As the story goes, at the tail end of feudalism, the ruling classes of society began to violently gather up resources from their communities and environments whichused to be owned in common. These resources, now held in a small number of hands, provided this new capitalist class with the economic and political power they now enjoy.
Primitive accumulation is closely related to other kinds of privatization, standardization, and capitalization that we see in other aspects of society. I discussed how play, the kind of unstructured, spontaneous activity humans engage in everywhere, was standardized into sport, where formal rules, professional equipment, and competition became hallmarks. Exercise, once enjoyed by anyone in a supportive community, was similarly locked into closed gymnasiums, accessible now only with subscription. The most famous example of primitive accumulation in the English-speaking world is the enclosure of the commons. While for millennia, the peoples of what is now England would farm communally on public lands called “commons”, beginning in the late Middle Ages, gentry who were “given” land by the king would “enclose” their parcels of land, blocking them from use by the peasantry who supported themselves on the commons (i.e. “commoners”). Now that these peasants had no land to farm on, they’d need to sell their labor as farmers in order to live.
We discussed more examples of similar “enclosure” people had seen in their lives. We touched a little bit on what has been called “digital enclosure” when someone brought up the example of YouTube: just a few years ago, there were hundreds of independent, amateur creators making all sorts of amateur videos, but it seems that more and more, the space has become professionalized, with larger, better-funded channels squeezing out attentional space and access to add revenue. I continued along with my lecture, arguing that universities have enacted the same kind of social enclosure on intellectualism. Where there once was plenty of open, public space for people to engage in ideas together, the rise of the university in the 20th century has increasingly become the only game in town (at least in terms of public legitimacy) for people who like to think.
I pulled out some passages which spoke about Scottish weavers in the 1700s who were famous for reading as they worked, and then forming book clubs after their shifts were done, to dismiss the stereotype that, until the rise of mass education and university attendance, no one had the time or energy to engage with ideas. Just like there was football long before FIFA, people of the world have been making time to learn and share knowledge long before classrooms and masters’ theses came around. I brought up as well that plenty of the famous philosophers we know from the Western tradition (like Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and Plato, to name just a few) had no association to the university. They were independent intellectuals, who made their money by selling their writings to an educated public. This isn’t to say that all of this was unproblematic, of course. The “educated public” they wrote to were almost entirely male, exclusively in Europe, and implicit in all the awful things we associate with this. The only point to make here, however, is that they weren’t specialists writing to get into prestigious journals.
Next, I talked about how this proud tradition of an “intellectual commons”, as we might call it, hit a major obstacle in the early years of the Cold War, when a Western focus on technocratic solutions to political problems drove mass investment in the university system. A whole generation of intellectuals who once lived in cheap, rundown apartments in urban bohemias like New York’s Greenwich Village were faced with a choice: they could either keep living paycheck to paycheck by publishing in newspapers and literary journals, hoping to make an impact, or they could take a cushy teaching job in a college town, teaching a few courses, making good money, and earning the respect of a growing middle class who believed in “better living through higher education”. You can guess what they chose.
I wanted to highlight then that the shift from intellectualism outside the ivory to inside had a number of effects on the work being done. Firstly, radical thought couldn’t survive: a threadbare revolutionary scraping by in a city can write about and, more importantly do revolutionary activism. The same isn’t true of a professor who gets their money from a wealthy, well-connected university. Their career and reputation rely on not rocking the boat too much. As a result, while you can find hundreds of Marxist economists and feminist sociologists writing for specialized journals, few will be storming the barricades any time soon. The second major change was towards specialized jargon. In the hyper-competitive world of professional academia, a researcher needs to differentiate their product from all others, and so the best thing one can do is spend as much time in a niche subsubsubfield as possible. Soon, you’ll be the world expert on traditional inland basket-weaving practices in 14th century Anatolian refugee communities! A final effect I brought up was how in this period, we came to believe that “intellectual” was the same thing as “academic”. Returning back to our brainstorm at the beginning of our session, I asked everyone to consider whether thinking of these two things as the same was still a good view of the world.
After a short break, I wanted to open up the discussion a bit for envisioning new futures. David Graeber wrote an essay called “Anarchism, academia, and the avant-garde” where he wondered about the relationship between academic competition and majoritarian decision-making processes. Anarchists are usually focused on taking action in the here and now, and the need to bring together a large group of people for actions leads them to focus on less on “winning an argument”, but finding a way to synthesize everyone’s ideas to come to a conclusion. I wanted to know how we might be able to imagine an intellectualism outside the pressures of academic competition. Our conversation spread out quite broadly.
First, we had some reservations about whether complex language in academic works was always a bad thing. Certainly sometimes it was meant in order to impress other academics (the term “obscurantist” came up), but aren’t some ideas just complicated enough that we need complicated language to discuss them? Another person responded that while there are certainly some times when complex language is needed (for example, to get away from the simple terms we usually use, which might have ideological baggage), the question usually comes down to the ends of this language: are we showing off, or does this new language lead to real-world change?
Discussions of change brought us back to discussions we had in the first session of Radical Sunday School, and the way that education resembles a religious conversion. What is wanted from an education isn’t just that you’ve memorized facts, but that you’ve come to see and interact with the world in a different way. From here, the concept of embodied knowledge came up. While universities insist on a very specific way to know the world, through writing and reading, a very important kind of knowledge is ignored. In this way, the Western epistemologies which inform university education really limit our learning. Outside of the West, more emphasis is often placed on the ways we live in interaction with our communities and environments, and a more expansive definition of intellectual might need to include this perspective.
A final anecdote came from me, relating the story a friend had told me, of a very talented French mathematics student he met when she came to visit his PhD program. This young woman was 21, but had already published dozens of papers in respected journals, and all the best PhD programs in her field (including my friend’s) were vying for her affections. In many ways, she was already “winning” at academia, and she hadn’t even completed her bachelor’s degree. Unfortunately, as my friend told me, this came at a cost: this woman was “miserable to be around”. She would spend every conversation boasting about how accomplished she was, complaining that she wasn’t getting enough attention from the PhD programs she really wanted to be in, etc. When my friend asked her about her hobbies, she seemed confused by the question: “I study mathematics, and I exercise at the gym,” she apparently replied, “you know, a healthy balance”. My friend was shocked to discover later on that this student also had taken a number of courses in art history and philosophy, but none of it had seemed to rub off on her personality or behavior. “She just sees it as a game to win,” my friend told me, frustrated. Luckily this is just one shocking example, and most academics aren’t like this. At the same time, I reminded my friend, he was only meeting this woman because his program had sought her out as a colleague…
Trying to end on a more hopeful note, I was very encouraged by the kinds of conversations we got into during our session this week, and I hope we can keeping learning together in coming sessions. As I said to a few people after class had ended, I would love to see us keep imagining new kinds of intellectualism, beyond the narrow model the university shows us. Perhaps we can run skillshares, learn from each other about radical movements around the world, and really build up Radical Sunday School as an intellectual resource where everyone is free to learn, teach, and be together. Maybe we can emulate those Scottish weavers, reading while we work, or the Zapatistas, “questioning while we walk”.