Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (review)

reviews 135 Notes 'For an in-depth explanation of this notion, see the first chapter of Mialloux's Rhetorical Power (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989). 'Editor's note: Since this review was written, Espada has published a new, award-winning collection of poetry, Rebellion Is a Circle of a Lover's Hands (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Books, 1990). "'Dancing to the Music of an 'Other' Voice: Martín Espada," Trumpetsfrom the Islands of their Eviction. 69-89. "Espada, "Documentaries and Declamadores: Puerto Rican Poetry in the United States," in A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry. Marie Harris and Kathleen Agüero, eds., (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 263. '"Documentaries and Declamadores," 258-9. LINDA FROST Intellectuals: Aesthetics. Politics, Academics. Edited by Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1990. 376 pp. $39.50 (cloth). $14.95 (paper). The status of intellectuals in contemporary society continues to generate heated debates. Intellectuals, a collection of essays edited by Bruce Robbins, is one of the more recent interventions in this cultural struggle. The book's subtitle, Aesthetics, Politics, Academics. immediately recalls an earlier collection: in 1977 Verso assembled a series of articles under the heading Aesthetics and Politics. These essays, originally published inside Germany between 1930 and 1960, are more familiarly known as the Brecht-Lukács debates, and they still stand as a landmark encounter between intellectuals in the twentieth century. By recalling this earlier intellectual skirmish, Robbins's text signals its political affiliations and situates itself historically. The contributors to the Brecht-Lukács debates, though vigorously polemical at times, all worked within the general framework of Western Marxism. Though neither exclusively nor primarily Marxist, this new volume still occupies a position far to the left of other recent cultural polemics (Bloom, Hirsch, etc.). Historically, Intellectuals takes its place as an authentically postmodern response to the earlier collection. It would seem that during the time span separating the two, the relationship between aesthetics and politics has shifted. No longer confining their critical weapons to the more traditional aesthetic realms (literature, painting, music, etc.), the newer intellectuals, in the process of straining against recently imposed academic boundaries, turn self-reflexive, often taking themselves as objects of study. Stanley Aronowitz's "On Intellectuals" demonstrates the productiveness of this self-conscious stance. This essay, certainly one of the text's high points, deserves extended analysis because it foregrounds some of the central themes that recur throughout the collection. Taking the relationship between intellectuals and other sections of a given society as his topic, Aronowitz explores contemporary theories regarding the possible emergence of intellectuals as a new class. He suggests that this debate is partly the result of a relative decline in international proletarian movements during the last two decades: "The debate about intellectuals cannot be separated from these contexts. Its contemporary history emerges from the void left by a working class whose conditions of political strength have largely been surpassed, except in countries of the semiperiphery where working-class struggles in a new form appear as democratic as well as class movements" (7). In short, claims for the emergence of a new social agent must be seen in light of the diminished political and ideological power of another. Aronowitz then embarks on a brilliant, if all too brief, discussion of the historically variable political status of intellectuals. Within this analysis, he outlines two central theories of 136 the minnesota review intellectuals' relationship to a given society. The intellectual may either serve as "the voice of contending class antagonists" (i.e., in a representative function); or, the intellectual "moves toward self-representation and becomes a contending social force" (13). On the one hand, Aronowitz is concerned with analyzing the problematic results of various mass movements that have been principally led by intellectuals functioning in the representative mode. The central reference point here is the Soviet Union and the rise to power of certain political intellectuals (and their subsequent suppression of oppositional groups) in the wake of the Russian Revolution. The bulk of the essay, however, focuses on the new role for intellectuals that has arisen in the twentieth century. Due to the increasing technological advances in modern society, and the ever...