Thinking in Public with Rhetoric

Late in his career, Michel Foucault described himself as "show[ing] people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people—that's the role of an intellectual" (1988, 10). Being widely recognized as a public intellectual, Foucault fulfilled the rhetorical function of his role—changing people's minds—partly by connecting his political activity in nonacademic settings with the research he did as an academic scholar and theorist. In the same interview, after emphasizing that "all of us are living and thinking subjects," Foucault went on to lament the gap between social history and the history of ideas. "Social historians are supposed to describe how people act without thinking, and historians of ideas are supposed to describe how people think without acting" (14). In declaring that a historian of thought attempts to bridge this gap, Foucault states his goal as a specific academic intellectual, as the Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France.¹

Academic intellectuals speak and write primarily for the professional disciplinary communities with which they identify. In contrast, public intellectuals not only rhetorically engage audiences beyond the academy but are recognized as doing so by both academics and nonacademics. As the example of Foucault demonstrates, academic intellectuals can become public intellectuals. Some of these hybrids build on their disciplinary expertise in making their public interventions (e.g., the literary cultural critic Edward Said), while others tend to separate their principal disciplinary work from their sociopolitical criticism in the larger public sphere (e.g., the linguist Noam Chomsky).

The preceding paragraph illustrates one way the terms academic intellectuals and public intellectuals get deployed within discussions inside and outside the university.² I find these definitions useful for understanding the similarities and differences among persons thinking publicly in various cultural sites. Before fine-tuning that usefulness for rhetoricians, I should note that such definitions need to be justified on two different counts, descriptive adequacy and evaluative utility. Descriptive: Is my account a persuasive one? Do the definitions asserted cover the most significant usages of the terms? Do they usefully parse the different kinds of public thinking today? Evaluative: Even if the definitions are descriptively adequate—even if many people do in fact use the terms this way—should we continue doing so? Are there other definitions that provide better evaluative criteria for judging the quality and significance of intellectual work?

Stanley Fish, for example, defines a public intellectual as "someone to whom the public regularly looks for illumination on any number of (indeed all) issues." Since "the public does not look to academics for this general wisdom," academic intellectuals are "not candidates for the role of public intellectual." Fish is quick to admit that academics do appear in various public forums outside the academy; however, he argues, these are not public intellectuals but rather "'rent for a day' intellectuals or 'cameo' intellectuals—persons brought in either because they are considered authorities on a particular issue (the media equivalent of an expert witness) or because they hold a position on that same issue that can be theatrically opposed to the position of another well-credentialed professor" (1995, 118–19). Fish's definitions here seem rather limited for understanding who does or should count as an academic and public intellectual. Nevertheless, as often with his provocations, Fish's account does foreground some salient rhetorical aspects of contemporary thinking in the public sphere.

Fish characterizes the media-staged appearances of academics as part of "the Nightline view of the world, a universe populated by people wearing glasses saying differently extreme things about every subject under the sun." Though he means it as a putdown, this depiction does capture something of the radically changed rhetorical scene in which intellectuals work in public today. In his critical attitude, however, the rhetorical pragmatist Fish can't be suggesting there was a time when public intellectuals somehow performed their function...