Anxious Academics

Anxious Intellects: Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment Values. By John Michael. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press. 2000. x, 218 pp. Cloth, $54.95; paper, $18.95.

Academic Instincts. By Marjorie Garber. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press. 2001. xi, 187 pp. $19.95.

Academic intellectuals are ardently confused about their social roles in advanced capitalist societies, and few critics analyze and exemplify that confusion as well as John Michael. At the outset of his energetic, querulous new book, Michael makes it clear that the past decade's debates over public intellectuals have mostly been beside the point, since college professors are always already public:

[T]he appeals academics sometimes make to other academics to become "public" intellectuals are . . . largely irrelevant. At the very least, as teachers and scholars, cultural intellectuals already function as public intellectuals in an important segment of the public sphere. The negative and sensationalized attention that cultural intellectuals in the university have recently received—distorted as it may be—indicates that the critical work we do still maintains a degree of ideological potency. (3)

One could of course argue that an important part of the "negative and sensationalized attention" Michael refers to was in fact a loosely organized smear campaign, and that it would not have been quite so successful if the work of "cultural intellectuals in the university" had been more explicitly oriented to the nonacademic public; but only forty pages later, it turns out that such an argument would also be largely irrelevant, because in fact the work of cultural intellectuals is itself largely irrelevant:

[T]he critics of the academy (and those who celebrate its subversive potential) both exaggerate. If the liberal arts were really so immediately important to personal success and political domination . . . then the humanities in general and literary studies in particular would not be the bedraggled institutional stepchildren of the contemporary multiversity that they are rapidly becoming. (44)

Glorioski, that's why we're a mess: we function as public intellectuals in an important segment of the public sphere, and we are "bedraggled institutional stepchildren" in universities whose public funding declines each year. Our importance, apparently, is matched only by our impotence.

Michael thus neatly summarizes the two leading academic-left schools of thought on the subject of the academic left—and if they don't quite add up to a logically consistent self-critique, that failure is part of Michael's point, even or especially where he's not sure he's making the point himself. The explicit aim of Anxious Intellects, he says, "is not (and cannot be) to resolve either the confusion or the conflicts I explore here but to clarify their terms. The confusions remain fundamental" (2). The most important of those confusions, Michael argues with much success, lies in the conundrum that "enlightened or progressive politics must remain democratic in principle even though they cannot in practice be grounded in the popular" (6). Intellectuals who speak in the name of democracy, in other words, cannot not be elitist in practice, and "if we on the Left are looking for practical grounds for progressive politics, then we must forget populism and the peculiar idea of the organic intellectual with which it is often associated" (5) without lapsing back into vanguardism. To this fundamental confusion Michael adds some ancillary confusions of his own, some of which are quite incisive, and some of which take the form of simple self-contradiction.

Michael's chapter on cultural studies is exemplary. Taking aim at those uncritical forms of cultural studies that amount either to (a) affirmative affirmations of the affirmative character of culture or (b) high-grade wishful thinking about the modes of political "resistance" made available by the movie Die Hard, Michael sensibly alleges that the notion of the "intellectual as fan" mystifies every kind of intellectual work: "some intellectual function of critical distancing and analytical decoding is required to understand any aspect of culture, including the culture of fans" (124). In his reading of John Fiske's...