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Brian Thill

Document Type

Introduction

Abstract

[First paragraph]

Ours is an era of reinvigorated anti-intellectualism. This is a global problem, to be sure, but it's a problem that is particularly acute in the public life of contemporary U.S. culture. As such, we intellectuals - especially those of us developing our intellectual labor from a leftist position - need to think much more about the dissemination of intellectual ideas and practices than many of us have up to this point. While it's common practice for us to examine, say, what Badiou means, or why Sartre matters, we seldom devote comparable attention to the small problem of who is actually reading or benefiting from our analyses of these figures, not to mention the works of these and other thinkers themselves. Nor do the majority of us laboring in academic and other cultural sites of intellectual production invest nearly as much energy in understanding how the larger world of intellectual discourse in general is being employed in the practices of everyday life - if it ever is - by those people considered 'outside' the spheres of any readily identifiable intellectual class. Academic intellectuals in particular move within a professional environment wherein the idea, the argument, and the monograph can often matter as much as anything, and where considerations of mass audience or non-professional effects of intellectual discourse are seldom considered deserving of serious anxiety or attention. As with intellectuals generally, academics have developed their individual areas of expertise within neatly defined professional disciplines that often dictate the scope of intellectual inquiry. And yet at the same time, one of the foundational assumptions of intellectual production (occasionally explicit, but more often implicit) is that the subjects of our critical analysis have a meaningful, even profound, social value beyond their own immediate existence as artifacts of intellectual production.

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