What Can Latinas/os Learn from Cornel West? The Latino Postcolonial Intellectual in the Age of the Exhaustion of Public Spheres

If you can't have both reason and force, always chose reason and leave force to the enemy. In many battles force provides victory, but a war is only won thanks to reason. The powerful will never draw reason from force, while we can always draw strength from our reason.

—Old Antonio, in Subcomandante Marcos, “The Fourth World War Has Begun”

Because the exile sees things both in terms of what has been left behind and what is actually here and now, there is a double perspective that never sees things in isolation. Every scene or situation in the new country necessarily draws on its counterpart in the old country. Intellectually this means that an idea or experience is always counterposed with another, therefore making them both appear in some new and unpredictable light: from that juxtaposition one gets a better, perhaps even more universal idea of how to think, say, about a human rights issue in one situation by comparison with another.

—Edward Said, “Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals”

It is part of morality not to be at home in one's home.

—Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

The production of culture is always ahead of the criticism of culture, and the transformation of this criticism into culture itself is even more delayed. Hegel expressed this nonsynchronicity between the production of culture and the reflection on that production when he noted, at the end of the preface to the Philosophy of Right (1967 [1821], 13): “When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk.” The contemporary cultural scene is certainly ahead of the intellectual scene, where cultural criticism is allegedly produced. And the transformation of cultural critique into cultural capital has furthered delayed reflection on what culture is being produced and consumed. While writers, musicians, artists, and journalists produce criticism, novels, music, art, or journalism for postnational, global, postcolonial public spheres, intellectuals in the United States, England, and continental Europe bemoan the disappearance of their profession and guild. Whether we take our cue from Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals (2000 [1987]), the tirades against “master thinkers” in Richard A. Posner's Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (2001), or Mark Lilla's The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (2001), the suggestion is that we are confronting the demise of a once noble, vibrant, important, and influential public office. While for Jacoby the induction of independent intellectuals into the university led them to turn in their critical pens for the safety of tenure, for Posner professionalization and specialization have increased the intellectual's duties and functions, without the concomitant creation of a mechanism for “quality control.” Lilla's book, a nicely packaged collection of long reviews from the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, focuses so obsessively on a narrow group of early twentieth-century European intellectuals that its argument cannot be taken as an attempt to access the status of intellectuals generally, although it bills itself as a reflection on the hazards of letting the passions of the mind be ruled by the power of the passions and the passion for power. Yet what is significant about these well-annotated and carefully researched books is what is absent from them. This absence is all the more glaring because one of the key terms, not to say catchwords, in the newspeak of the public spheres in the informatized economies is “globalization,” which is used to describe everything, including culture. The narratives of decay, decline, and obsolescence, of which the works by Jacoby, Posner, and Lilla are such illustrative examples, are unacceptable because their scholarship is both...