Celebrity and Betrayal: The High Intellectuals of Postmodern Culture

72 the minnesota review Paul A. Bove Celebrity and Betrayal: The High Intellectuals of Postmodern Culture Regis Debray has awakened to a nightmare: the social and political condition of postmodern intellectuals is betrayal. Teachers, Writers, Celebrities dispels all traces of aura from intellectual life and production by analyzing the social reality of the Western intelligentsia and its relation to mass media and the system of commodity distribution.1 Although Debray's focus is contemporary France, his "zoology" of the "intellectual animal" illuminates the situation of the intellectual in all postmodern Western societies. Before Debray, Gramsci and Althusser had both presented the inevitable complicity of traditional intellectuals with the ruling class in maintaining hegemony and manning the ideological state apparatuses such as the church, schools, and the universities. Yet in so doing both Gramsci and Althusser reserved for the intellectual a leading role in the process of cultural and economic change. Gramsci, realizing the depth and power of cultural control of the nation by the forces oppressing the people against their own self interest, called for the workers to develop their own intellectuals to represent them, to theorize and organize their position, and to educate them critically to loosen the hold of cultural illusion on their will and consciousness.2 In other words, Gramsci called for his own reproduction— scholar, critic, politician, organizer— as the intellectual exemplar for his time and named this reproduction the "organic" intellectual. For Gramsci, the organic intellectuals of the working class could assume their leading role only with the aid of a traditional humanistic education in the classics. Indeed, Gramsci's insistence that education in the humane classics alone suitably prepares the intellectual to understand the cultural-historical situation might be seen either as an historically and politically appropriate response to the amnesic, decadent education which government "reform" promotes or as a nostalgic, idealistic limit on Gramsci's "philosophy of praxis," but in either case, Gramsci's own inscription within the discourse of a classical tradition— even if only to go beyond it in a new proletarian hegemony— suggests geneologically the cultural priority he ascribed to the intellectual in revolutionary practice. Most important criticism of Gramsci's conception of the intellectual focuses upon his distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals and his démystification of the apolitical, ahistorical illusions of the former.3Also, his highly innovative suggestions about the workers' need to develop their own organic in- 73 bove tellectuals which have such far-reaching theoretical and revolutionary implications have been the subject of great interest. But what is, perhaps, most obvious in Gramsci has not been much mentioned, namely, the very way in which his novel revisions of intellectual theory, despite and because of their transumptions and reversals, actually preserve the "aura," the leading role of the intelligentsia. As many scholars have shown, intellectuals are a product of bourgeois society; they are a replacement for the Church as a form of legitimation and are sustained economically by the surplus of industrial production.4 While the distinctions between intellectual functions at different cultural-historical moments should not be forgotten, useful critical consideration should be given to the powerfully entrenched ideology and position of intellectuals even in some of the most subtle revolutionary theory. To what extent does the persistence of this leading intellectual role limit such theory and practice, and to what extent is it itself historically justifiable in our contemporary , postmodern world? A brief look at Althusser might begin to expose the nature and importance of the problem I am suggesting. Althusser, while insisting that ideology is ahistorical, a permanent and inescapable feature of social reality, reserves for the Spinozist or Marxist intellectual the honorable task of acquiring scientific knowledge of the devices of ideological recognition which always already constitute individuals as subjects. Since ideology is inescapable, the intellectual pursuing such scientific knowledge is for Althusser, always in a heroic aporia: Now it is this knowledge that we have to reach, if you will, while speaking in ideology, and from within ideology we have to outline a discourse which tries to break with ideology, in order to dare to be the beginning of a scientific (i.e. subject-less) discourse on ideology.5 It might...