Charles Brown wrote:
>What's the rough definition of an intellectual on this thread ?
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[WS:] As Joanna observed, there is no consensus, but her own definition misses the mark as well. I think the reason for that the term was coined in a specific historic context in which it denoted a well defined and relatively homogenous social class - people who earn a living by selling their mental labour power. In a specific historical context (cf. 19th century Eastern Europe) this was a highly distinctive characteristics -because the great majority of society did little or no mental work for a living - the peasantry were just a notch above animals of burden, providing brute physical labor, while landed gentry were mainly parasitic philistines. The merchant class was tiny and in that context, people who sold mental labour power for a living clearly stood out as a distinctive social group or class.
However, in the context of a modern society where most jobs, from waitresses to software engineers have a significant mental (or emotional) labor component - this distinction lost its meaning. Almost everyone, save a few most menial jobs, is an intellectual to some degree - he/she is literate, has some non-trivial knowledge of the world outside one immediate surrounds that come from the interpretation of archived material, and routinely applies that knowledge in his or her occupation. All that was an exception rather than a rule in the 19th century, especially in Eastern Europe, where I believe the term "intellectual" originated.
To sum it up, the term intellectual has outlived the social context in which it was created, and it is pretty meaningless today.
Ravi: I think that your concept of "pomo windbag" as someone "smarter than me" while clearly tongue in cheek, does considerable injustice to human intelligence. In my book, intelligence is the ability to apply multiple skills - analytical, verbal, emotional, psychomotor, aesthetic, etc. The distinctive feature of pomo, by contrast, is one dimensional logorrhea, almost compulsive blabber or, as they aptly termed it in the literary circles of the old world - grapho-mania.
Wojtek