Letters to Power: Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals

6 Oppositional Politics in the Age of Academia

The troublemaker is precisely the one who tries to force sovereign power to translate itself into actuality. —giorgio agamben Dilemmas of Learned Advocacy Imperial Rome, feudal France, Enlightenment Prussia, and Golden Age Denmark have little in common with one another. Nor do any of these historical periods bear a striking resemblance to our own. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the specific rhetorical situations in which Seneca, Christine, Kant, and Kierkegaard intervened have a secret affinity with the relations of power in which many of today’s learned advocates now find themselves. The disempowerment of the Roman Senate and the concentration of executive power during Nero’s reign parallels the circumvention of shared governance by centralized college administrations; the ducal attempt to privatize and profit from the king’s public authority in late-medieval France compares to the privatization and exploitation of the university’s traditionally public services (knowledge production and dissemination) by powerful corporate sponsors; the acceleration of state censorship in conservative Prussia during the French Revolution accords with the post-9/11 effort to regulate and monitor outspoken scholars by the national security state; and the outburst of populist reason and anti-intellectual sentiment in mid-nineteenth-century Denmark mirrors the incitement of public opinion against progressive academics by today’s right-wing advocacy groups. 6 oppositional politics in the age of academia McCormick_06.indd 142 9/21/11 12:13 PM And how about the rhetorics of withdrawal, exemplarity, obedience, and identification? Are these strategies, like the situations for which they were geared, analogous to those of contemporary academics? Not quite. In fact, the persuasive techniques and resistant practices of Seneca, Christine, Kant, and Kierkegaard are largely antithetical to those of their academic successors— and, as I argued in chapter 1, this is precisely why they are worthy of recuperation . Each is an antidote to one of four basic obstacles to learned advocacy in the age of academia. Seneca’s rhetoric of withdrawal counteracts the politics of desertion implicit in the specialized, disciplinary language of late-modern academics; Christine’s rhetoric of exemplarity challenges their tendency to rely on linear, abstract, and hyperrational forms of argument; Kant’s rhetoric of obedience offsets their Dreyfusard inheritance of overt dissent and radical opposition to public authority; and Kierkegaard’s rhetoric of identification short-circuits the prevailing Marxist standards of vanguard leadership to which many of them continually aspire. Neither obscure eggheads nor rationalist debaters nor radical dissidents nor revolutionary pedagogues, the learned political agents envisioned by this book occupy a zone of indiscernibility between academic professionalism and the tradition of the intellectual. In order to understand the political potential of this liminal position, we must first clarify the dilemmas of learned advocacy from which the rhetorics of withdrawal, exemplarity, obedience, and identification offer an escape. As Seneca well knew, the political abstention of Thrasea Paetus posed a serious threat to imperial control. And as Marxist scholars continue to remind us, desertion remains a viable mode of dissent. “Battles against the Empire might be won through subtraction and defection,” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri insist. “This desertion does not have a place; it is the evacuation of the places of power.”1 Although certainly relevant to public officials like Thrasea, the politics of desertion has little to offer today’s educated elites, many of whom are already struggling to overcome “ivory tower” estrangements from “the real world.” And history is not on their side. From Epicurus to Thoreau, learned practitioners of desertion have done little more than reinforce the classical belief that, whatever else it involves, the life of the mind is fundamentally subtracted from the realm of public affairs, its only outward appearance being a state of absentmindedness or, as Hannah Arendt sharply notes, “an obvious disregard for the surrounding world.”2 Nowhere is this disregard more apparent than in the specialized, professional language of contemporary academics. Like that of Cicero’s philosopher, their discourse “has no equipment of words or phrases that catch the popular fancy.”3 And like that of Plato’s philosopher, it limits their audience to “the oppositional politics 143 McCormick_06.indd 143 9/21/11 12:13 PM very few,” all but completely secluding their principles and their politics from “the general run of men.”4 On this point, critics of American academic culture have a history of outspokenness. “It leads the individual, if he follows it unreservedly , into bypaths still further off...