I just skimmed P's book on this, but if I got the gist of, his theory is that current public intellectuals are in decline because they operate in an uncompetitive market, protected by tenure and outside their areas of expertise, so they lack even professional controls of peer reviewed journals and the like. Also TV gives them both the opportunity and the encouragement to mouth in a half-baked manner.
>What Posner fails to see is that such works and lives have little or
>no social value in US society because it is so heavily dominated by
>neoliberal capitalist dogma.
Well of course he "fails to see" that,s ince it's his view that NCD is true and wonderful.
In our society, at the moment, all lives and work and
>their valuation are only reducible to their ability to adapt to and be
>absorbed by some production system. That is, to be productive,
>exploitable. In the case of public intellectuals that means the
>ability to write books that sell.
Isn't the the definition of a public intellectual? What's you're alternative definition?
Obviously massive, extremely
>critical and difficult to understand works, or those that require a
>great deal of background to follow are simply not big sellers,
>period.
Right, and this side of communism never will be, what so what's your point?
>While it might be necessary for public intellectuals to be rich or at
>least economically independent, or have a light enough or related job
>that provides time and forum, say in academia, that in itself is still
>not sufficient. The reason is the same. Publishers or media production
>systems are primarily interested in their own profits, whether they
>pay worth a dam or not. So the economic status of their labor
>producers is pretty much irrelevant to them.
I'm losing you here. Intellectual work takes times and requires resources and training. That is why there are so few longshoreman public interllectuals. Publishers have to make money to stay in business. They can carry some books that don't sell, but generally will do so only if those are books of proven worth or have a prestige value. But I am unclear on where you are going.
Posner is certainly higjhly aware of the sociologiacl circumstances of PIs. It's hsi main interest thesedays, political sociology.
Also Posner fails to see that the status of public intellectuals is
>related to a broader class of labor that includes all the humanities
>and arts and is slowly including most of the more abstract and
>theoretical sciences as well.
No, he certainly is aware of that.
None of these fields produce materials
>that are easily packaged, distributed and sold. Some don't produce
>work that is even reproducible in mass. And even if that can be done
>for certain collections of work, say music, well of course only
>certain kinds of music can be easily reproduced and has a mass
>market. Some kinds of work, such as the traditional visual arts depend
>on the uniqueness of their manual skills applied one to one, and are
>essentially unreproducible on a mass scale. Sure you can produce
>posters or prints, but that hardly qualifies as the same activity or
>labor.
Your point?
>
>There is of course the other half, the audience, the so-called
>consumers. Just as the political economy has both constructed and
>severely constricted intellectual labors, it has also constructed its
>consumers. In terms of intellect and sensibility this is essentially
>an artificial and destructive division, since often in these
>fields the highest quality of work depends oddly on decreasing or
>erasing most of the divisions between say performer and audience,
>producer and consumer, artist and viewer, writer and reader.
That is utter nonsense. Nor all intellectual work has to be about making you an expert in an area, able to carry on with the peoplea t the frontiers of thefield. That is impossible given the amount of knowledge and the range of ideas that exists today. It wasn't even raesonable in Leibniz's time--he aws the last person who was an expert in everything. Most of what PIs do is mke accessible to nonexperts ideas that the expertsa re talking about--and nonexperts includes experts in other fields. Thus, I am expert in philosophy and law, but in physics and biology I am not and never will be, and so I read the likes of Michio Kaku and Stephen Jay Gould.
jks
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