A: al-muṯaqqaffūn. – F: intellectuels. – G: Intellektuelle. – R: intelligenty. – S: intelectuales. – C: zhīshi fènzǐ 知识分子
Prior to all reduction of intellectual praxis to the activity of “scribes” as the chosen representatives of the “intellectualitas”, the latter term generally means “the ability to grasp something” (Georges). It denotes the ability to orient oneself in the world generally, to develop a concept of the social and natural world together with all other members of society, to make use of this as knowledge and to pass it on to subsequent generations. This general function of orientation through understanding and knowing can be acquired and monopolised as a symbolic monopoly of interpretation, a “clerus” which presides over special cultural techniques – the written word, a canon of texts, an institutionalised hierarchy of knowledge and rituals which regulate belonging and upward mobility. Mastering these bodies of transmitted knowledge and controlling access to them are linked to the function of the ideological reproduction of the symbolic order (or symbolic order of values) and justifies the exclusion of the “simple” as the “uneducated” from the organisation of ideal socialisation. Vis-à-vis the “naturalness” of this secular order of things, Antonio Gramsci emphasises: ‘All men are I […], but not all men in society have the function of I’ (PN, Notebook 12, § 1, 1500). One goal of emancipation consists in achieving a new balance between physical and intellectual labour that would overcome one of the social divisions of labour embedded most deeply in the layers of social organisation, such that all can enjoy their full intellectual competence and participate in a shared understanding of the world.
1. Analysing the concept historically, a group can be singled out as ‘I’ among the Middle Age clerics, ‘who think and teach their thoughts as an occupation’ (Le Goff 1993, 7), characterised by scholars who possessed a level of ability to manoeuvre vis-à-vis the revealed truth administered by the church apparatus or even, as in the case of the Averroists, who separated truth and philosophy in order to philosophise, no longer ‘secundum veritatem’, but rather ‘secundum philosophum’, consequently securing an independent space for philosophical truth to manoeuvre (see Müller 1947, 6). Where feudal society fixes groups in the social hierarchy, a certain independence is lent to those who, as protagonists of modernity, are convinced they are dwarves sitting on the shoulders of giants, as the famous formulation of Bernhard v. Chartres states, with which they measure cultural progress in relation to antiquity (see Le Goff 1993, 20).
In the 19th cent., various expressions are used side by side: the educated, the spiritual, literati, ideologues, intellectual labourers, intelligentsia. The first explicit usage of the expression I is found in Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (see Julliard/Winock 1996; Rademacher 1993, 129). He underscored the productive function of I by categorising them as ‘industrialists of theory’ (145 et sq.) alongside wage-earners, manufacturers, and bankers in the ‘industrial class’.
The modern term – “les intellectuels” – emerges towards the end of the 19th cent. in the Dreyfus affair, itself a lesson in cultural hegemony. The initially individual concern of several literati, seeking to express their indignation at a judicial error whose victim is the French-Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus, takes on the dimensions of a social movement. Where the traditional institutions fail – politics, the judiciary, the army and the church – a movement crystallises, presenting itself in the name of “justice” and “truth” and antagonistically occupying the field of exposition of the highest ideological values. Emile Zola, a leading representative of the naturalist novel, hurls his ‘J’accuse’ against the nationalists and militarists on his own behalf. “Les intellectuels”, initially deployed by the opponents of the “dreyfusards” as an insult, is fashioned into an honourary title by all those who raise their voices against injustice of every kind. That the “I” to be understood under this label cannot be ascribed to a specific occupational group can be deduced from the Manifesto of the I circulated in 1898, which demanded an appeal to the trial. Here, cooks, printers, business travellers and skilled labourers appear alongside literati and professors (Bering 1978, 38). They are bound together as organisers of an alternative collective will which challenges the dominant power bloc. The hopelessness of the discussions in the labour movement concerning the “class character” of I is the symptom of a reductionist conception of the social totality and its ideological reproduction, which knows only “capitalists” and “workers”. Although Marx and Engels had delineated a non-reductionist understanding in the German Ideology, it was only Gramsci who would achieve a paradigm shift in the conception of I. He understood them not primarily as an occupational group in terms of the circulation of capital or according to their self-understanding as great intellectual heroes, but rather under the aspect of their organising function in the ensemble of social relations and the division of labour. There is no ‘organisation without I’ (PN, Notebook 11, § 12, 1385) – as true for the Catholic Church as it is for the Communist Party or an entrepreneurs’ association.
2. Marx and Engels generally use the term ‘ideologue’ or ‘ideological castes’, thereby illustrating that the function and significance of the corresponding activities emerge out of the structure of the mode of production. From the producing segments of the bourgeoisie ideologues receive the means for and tasks of intellectual production. The ideologues conceptualise the bourgeois worldview and organise an active consensus in the form of a multiplicity of novel superstructures. This forms the terrain upon which class struggles are conducted.
The term ideologue casts a critical light on the bourgeoisie and the religious-illusionary character of its convictions, yet also tends to give the impression that it is analytically sufficient merely to make a denunciation of intellectual praxis while being critical towards ideology. Nonetheless, a moment of I’s social-organisational productivity becomes evident in the ability of the bourgeoisie to assimilate ‘the old ideological castes’ (Theories of Surplus Value, MECW 30/197) and transform them ‘into its functionaries’ (197), which will also inform the Gramscian conception of I. The expansive force of the bourgeoisie is explained by its ability to ‘profane’ the intellectual functions tied to the feudal world and to relate in a ‘severely critical’ manner towards the old state machinery (30) – aspects which are relevant to a class which seeks to become hegemonically dominant. It is not only a matter of conceptualising new thoughts, but rather of their “socialisation” and assertion, up to and including the ability to influence a new common sense. Marx and Engels’s critical perspective on ideology, revoking the credibility of the biased notion that ideas were motivating people, reveals its limitation where its fruitful insights can no longer be pursued and the concrete “how” of the organisation of ideological domination is not attended to.
Alongside the critical perspective on ideology, the question of the class-theoretical determination of I emerges in the writings of Marx closely connected to his assessment of revolutionary theory. To integrate I into the bourgeoisie dominates largely because the activity proclaimed to be human “nature” requires social relations in which it is above all the “bourgeois” who expands his horizons of possibility and action potence. Following the criterion of ownership over the means of production, the I belong more to the petit bourgeoisie or the working class. In terms of the process of production in its totality, I can also be viewed as an organ of the collective labourer. Even if their labour power directly serves the valorisation of capital and they produce surplus value, this does not necessarily say anything about whether they will “betray” the bourgeoisie and become critics of bourgeois society. Where the question of the I’s class belonging sets the agenda, the problem of the bourgeois I switching classes becomes central in the revolutionary perspective. Changing classes initially occurs as a polarisation of the ruling class, which seeks to pursue its politics further by means of the classes of the people through its I. The I are thus not only passive and fickle defectors, but rather organisers of a social bloc. Marx preferred a political-cultural explanation for those ‘who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole’, citing the fact that, due to intensifying class struggles, a process of dissolution emerges within the ruling class (Manifesto, MECW 6/494). The behaviour of the bourgeois I plays a significant role because with their loss, the bourgeoisie’s capability to decapitate the subaltern classes is also weakened. ‘The more a dominant class is able to absorb the best people from the dominated classes, the more solid and dangerous its rule’ (C III, 736).
2.1 With the rise of the German working class beginning in the 1880s, Engels’s thought is dominated by a critical perspective on the people ‘who consider their modicum of education absolutely essential if the worker is not to emancipate himself but rather be liberated by them. In their eyes, the emancipation of the working class is attainable only through your eddicated mediocrity; how could the poor, helpless, uneddicated workers hope to achieve it on their own account?’ (to Bernstein, 13 September 1882, MECW 46/325 [MEW 35/360 et sq.]). The ironic view towards the ‘eddicated mediocrity [jebildeten Spießbürger]’, who brings the workers their knowledge, correctly shines a critical light on the educationism of the teacher who neglects his self-education; this experience gives expression to the fact that the liberation of the worker can only be the work of the workers themselves, but also becomes a point of departure for an attitude which is directed head-on against “the I” and the “Spießbürger” under them as the dominant figure. This attitude can be found both “below” and “above”, as much among the “left communist” groups of 1920s Germany (cf. Bering 1978, 155 et sq.) as in the executive staff of the Communist state party, which took up the emancipation of the workers as its sole responsibility.
Karl Kautsky’s formulation of the problem draws on a thread of Marx’s theory to specify a class-theoretical perspective. Kautsky’s analysis becomes reductionist at the point where a certain individual behaviour is “derived” from or even predicted by an economic category – class. Since under the explosive development of the forces of production, “education”, according to Kautsky, is becoming ‘a special trade’ conducted by a ‘special class’ (1892/1910, 36 et sq.), the growing demand for technicians, doctors, teachers, etc. devalues the monopoly of the “educated”: ‘They have ceased to be the leaders of the capitalist class and have become their bailiffs instead. Place-hunting takes more and more of their energies. Their first care is not the development of their intellect, but the sale of it’ (40). To the extent that the ‘condition of the proletariat’ becomes ‘more and more that of the whole population’ (35), the “educated” increasingly become ‘educated workers’; they constitute an “intellectual” or ‘ “educated” proletariat’ (40) and in this way demonstrate to the wage-labourers that there is no individual way out of their class condition. ‘To the individual proletarian the prospect has vanished of ever being able, by his own efforts, to pull himself out of the quagmire into which the present system of production has pushed him. The individual proletarian can accomplish his own redemption only with the redemption of his whole class’ (42). When Kautsky draws the conclusion of an inevitable proletarianisation of the “educated” from the enormous expansion of the higher education system that forms the basis for meeting the rising demand for technical intelligentsia, his manner of speaking takes for granted that which first of all should have been a topic of a politics that would not have merely been fixed in the ‘party form’ (Vacca 1985, 105): That the ‘conquest’ of the I by social democracy seems to be already secured by the fact that the latter understood itself as the ‘empirical site of consciousness of the historical necessity of socialism’ (ibid.). With his gaze fixed on the inherent necessity of class position, from which he hopes for revolutionary effects, Kautsky has no sense at all for new types of intellectuality that arise with the growing scientification of production. It is as if the admiration for an old variety of I is still hidden in the analysis of education as a trade, one which encourages a subaltern form of zeal for education within social democracy.
2.2 With Lenin, in the context of the split of the Russian social democrats into a ‘majority’ and a ‘minority’, into a ‘revolutionary’ wing and an ‘opportunist’ wing (1904, CW 7/204), the term I takes on a polemical edge. For example, he states that the Mensheviks have a ‘leaning towards the mentality of the bourgeois intellectual, who is only prepared to “accept organisational relations platonically” ’ and exhibits a ‘tendency towards autonomism as against centralism’ (205). Martov, a leading representative of the “minority”, is said to exhibit ‘the instability and wishy-washiness of the intellectual’, and ‘feeble whining of I who happened to find themselves in the minority’ (324), designations with which Lenin relates to ‘the brilliant social and psychological characterisation’ of the I by Kautsky (322). In doing so, Lenin specifies that he uses ‘the words intellectual and intelligentsia to translate the German Literat and Literatentum, which include not only writers but in general all educated people, the members of the liberal professions, the brain workers […] as distinct from manual workers’ (322, fn.). Where the usual “Literat” is characterised by the inability to accept ‘being a part subordinate to a whole’ (Kautsky, cit. in Lenin, 323), Wilhelm Liebknecht and Marx are put forward as ‘an ideal example of the kind of intellectual the socialist movement needs’, whose chief characteristic is that their ‘party discipline […] was exemplary’ (Kautsky, cit. in Lenin, 323 et sq.). With this rather moralising critique, Lenin is not able to arrive at a theoretical insight into the activities and contradictions of the I in movements of emancipation. A lack of respect is a vital quality of the I and this is especially true for the scientists and scholars among them. It was precisely the disciplining of the I in the organisations of the workers’ movement and the practice of accrediting platitudes that produced the paradoxical figure of the “independent Marxist”, who steps in to counter the ‘administrative intervention into scientific processes’ for the ruthless development of critical scholarship (Haug 1977/1985, 64).
Even though polemical verbiage dominates in this constellation of infighting over the correct party line, it would be false to pin Lenin down to that, as Dietz Bering does, prefacing his study with the following sentence characterising that dispute: ‘A tight hold must always be kept on the intelligentsia’ (CW 8/415). Lenin also sees that the I, tied as they are to the bourgeoisie, can become a force in the struggle against Tsarist autocracy or – as in the case of the Dreyfus affair – ‘against clerical and military reactionaries’ (1919, CW 30/219). This is because they express ‘the essential interests of the bourgeois class as a whole’ and provide the petit bourgeoisie and the peasants with ‘knowledge, programme, guidance, and organisation’ (1905, CW 9/215). Lenin’s apprehension – that the I who are involved in workers’ organisations were likely to hinder a decisive revolutionary politics – is influenced by his experience in exile: isolated from the concrete struggles, they lack a realistic assessment of the relations of power, something that can lead to ‘instinctive anarchism’ (CW 7/454). Thus critique and education within the party becomes necessary.
The successful revolution of 1917 allows Lenin to fully understand that a moralising evaluation of the I leads to nothing. He emphasises that the label of the I as bourgeois or petit bourgeois should not at all be understood as a term of abuse, but should rather be seen as a ‘class characterisation’ (CW 29/230). He explicitly rejects the use of ‘incitement’ against the I. This is particularly clear in the question of the ‘bourgeois experts’ who must be won over to the cause of the workers. ‘As they see the working class promoting organised and advanced sections, which not only value culture but also help to convey it to the people, they are changing their attitude towards us’ (180). The experts are not ‘the servitors of the exploiters’, but ‘cultural workers’ who ‘in a proletarian society […] would serve us’ (180 et sq.). Lenin’s argument that the I should only be characterised as petit bourgeoisie analytically, without discrediting them as such, does not prevail in the context of the need, which asserted itself again and again, within the socialist movement for polemical terminology. By underscoring the aspect of conviction, Lenin relativised resentment against ‘the’ I, already undergirded with class-reductive assumptions, and thus created a point of departure which tends to treat the problem as a question of alliances and in this way to overcome mistrust toward the “wishy-washy” and trouble-stirring I.
3. The ‘Formation of Italian I groups’ is in the list of Gramsci’s ‘Main topics’ which opens the first of his Prison Notebooks from 1929 (Prison Notebooks, 99). On 19 March 1927, Gramsci named four subjects in a letter to Tanja Schucht, firstly an examination of the ‘formation of the public spirit in Italy during the past century’, and thus a study of “Italian I” (Letters from Prison I, 83) that paradigmatically represent an aberration: They are ‘a caste and not a part of the people equipped with organic functions’ (Prison Notebooks, PN. 21, § 5, 2044). The subject becomes significant in his reformulation of the concept of hegemony, where the rhetoric of the ‘leading role of the working class’ is held up to the mirror of the influence that it has actually had upon society.
3.1 Gramsci no longer conceives of the I in relation to class theory and the logic of the circulation of capital. He focuses on the activity of the I in the organisation of the dominant culture and their work in opposing to the emancipatory movements of the classes and groups held in a “subaltern” position. To this end, he draws on the concrete relationship between “manual” and “mental” work to provide him with analytical instruments. These, however, signify biases rather than essences, assigned according to class limitations. As manual labour contains moments of intellectuality, so intellectual work contains moments of physicality. Those who work also think and have a conception of the world; but at the same time they are also dispossessed and dominated culturally. The ‘trained gorilla’, as Frederick W. Taylor describes the worker under Fordism, is a ‘metaphor’ used ‘to display a boundary in a particular direction’ (Prison Notebooks, PN 12, § 1, 1499 et sq.). Gramsci shifts his attention away from activity towards the socially formative function. The I take over certain functions of the bourgeoisie, comparable to the clergymen tasked, as the I-category ‘organically’ tied to the landed aristocracy, with integrating the subaltern groups into the feudal regime and organising their consent. The capitalist entrepreneur must have specific intellectual abilities, he must be an ‘organiser of human masses […], an organiser of the “trust” of those who invest in his business, of those who buy his goods’ (1497). In order to carry out this work, the bourgeoisie ensures the formation of a corresponding category of I. Like other groups determined by material production, ‘one or more strata of I are created organically’, and appointed to produce ‘the most advantageous conditions for the expansion of their own class’ (ibid.). As it is not enough just ‘to make individually “original” discoveries’, but rather ‘to spread truths critically’ (PN 11, § 12, 1377), the I only prove themselves in their organisational function when they act not merely as specialists in a particular branch of knowledge, but as the ‘organiser[s] of a new culture’ (PN 12, § 1, 1497), of a new ‘intellectual and moral order’ (PN 11, § 12, 1377).
The relationship between the I and the world of production is “mediated” through the entire social fabric, through the complex of superstructures in which they serve as “functionaries” (PN 12, § 1, 1501 et sq.). It is characteristic of his position that Gramsci uses this to expand the concept of the I. The I have an organisational function not only in culture, but in both sectors of the ruling class, civil society and the political class. In civil society the I of the dominant groups contribute to the universalisation of their corporate interests, thus furthering their hegemony by attempting to win over the subaltern groups consensually. The I who work within the anti-hegemonic organisations of emancipation movements of the “subaltern” have a correspondingly inverse effect. Among the political class (that is, the parties, parliament, government, police, courts – the state itself) the I have an organising and unifying role. When the traditional ‘caste prejudices’ (1502) are removed from the I as the “bourgeois” intellectual heroes, their intellectual activities and functions open up as a complex social field: now the ‘most modest “administrators” and popularisers of the already available […] intellectual wealth’ move into the picture alongside the ‘founders of the various sciences, philosophy, art, etc.’ that stand on the ‘highest rank’. If Gramsci here uses military metaphors to describe this field – ‘subaltern officers, higher officers, general staff’ (1503), it is because the I retain an essential function in the ‘trench warfare’ of both civil society and the political class. There is an analogue in this to Walter Benjamin, who, in opposition to a cultish worship of the work of art in literary history, insisted the discipline study the ‘geological structure of the book-alps, rather than confining itself to a view of the peaks’ (SelWr, 225). Similarly, ‘troop service ranks’ first appear in Gramsci below those I ‘whose real significance is greater than is normally thought’ (PN 12, § 1, 1503). It is, however, not ‘ “very respectable” to seek out one’s opponents among the dumbest and the most mediocre’ (PN 11, § 15, 1402), as in Nikolai Bukharin’s instruction book on historical materialism, which treats the ‘greatest I exceedingly briefly’ (§ 22, 1417). Hence the eminent significance of an ‘Anti-Croce, which in the modern cultural climate could be as significant as Anti-Dühring had been for the pre-World War I generation’ (PN 10.I, § 11, 1248).
3.2 With this new way of looking at the problem, the distinction between “traditional” and “organic” I, which Marx had already indicated, becomes central. The ‘assimilation and “ideological” conquest of the traditional I’ becomes all the more successful for the ascendant group ‘the more it trains its own organic I simultaneously’ (N. 12, § 1, 1500). If the Church was able to exercise its ‘monopoly in cultural leadership’ over the course of centuries (1507), it was because, on the one hand, the ‘clergy’ acted as the I category ‘organically bound to the landowning aristocracy’ and at once on equal legal footing with them (1498). On the other hand, it was due to the fact that, with the Church, they commanded a ‘transnationally’ organised apparatus and, with Latin, a linguistic medium that ensured a space in which their own action could resonate. To the extent that the Church-maintained ‘hierarchy of the I’ served to perpetuate the ‘community of believers’, they also possess an organic character: thus the relationship of the I/laymen comes into view as the strategic point of deployment of every hegemonic construction. Such a construction will be all the more fragile in efforts to spread a new kind of common sense, to lift ever wider layers of society intellectually, that is, to give personality to the ‘amorphous masses’, by forming ‘I elites of a new type’ ‘who emerge directly from the masses and nevertheless remain in contact with them and become their “supporting pillars” ’ (N. 11, § 12, 1390). The I’s “organic” character consequently determines whether the ‘transition from knowledge to understanding, to feeling, and vice versa’ is functional, or whether it will be cut short by either “pedantry” and “philistinism” [Spießbürgertum] or by ‘blind passion’ and ‘sectarianism’ (§ 67, 1490). From this point of view a relation between I and laymen appears as ‘traditional’, one which strives to leave to ‘the “laymen” in their primitive philosophy of common sense’ instead of erecting a ‘moral-intellectual bloc which makes massive intellectual progress possible and not only one of sparse intellectual groups’ (§ 12, 1383 et sq.). The difficulty of remaining in contact with the “laymen” or coming into contact with them at all leads Gramsci to his thesis on the cosmopolitan character of the Italian I who hindered a popular-national unity movement in Italy. Against this backdrop, Julien Benda’s well-known pamphlet against the ‘treason’ of the I reveals itself to be an apology for the traditional I who devotes themselves to the ‘pursuit of eternal things and values’ (1927/2006, 30). Although Jacques Julliard and Michel Winock identify ‘commitment’ as the criterion which qualifies scholars, writers and artists as I (1996, 12), they nevertheless follow Benda in this question when they adhere to his demarcation between ‘service to ideas’ and service to ‘parties’: The ‘sad 20th century, accompanied by the double adventure of fascism and above all Communism, is a long bracket within a historical tradition the unworthy son of which […] is Sartre’ (13).
3.3 Gramsci rightly suspects that Paul Nizan’s polemic against ‘modern philosophy’ (The Watchdogs, 1932), which appeared as he was working on his notebook on I and which he only knew from indirect sources, was written ‘in support of a philosophy of praxis’ (PN 10.II, § 50, 1343). Nizan calls for philosophers to be ranked ‘differently than according to the rank of their intelligence’, in order to emphasise that philosophies can serve ‘liberation and oppression’ (1932/1969). ‘It is not “thought” but what people really think that unites humans or makes them different’ (PN 7, § 35, 186). If Nizan, who joined the CP in 1927 and left it in 1939 in protest against the Hitler-Stalin Pact, takes up an ‘open party’, it is no longer as the ‘voice of the intellect’, but as ‘one voice among many’, and as a ‘philosopher’, who links his work ‘the trivial demands of the concrete people’, and therefore acts as a ‘technician of these demands’ by expressing the ‘gradually awakening revolt of the people’ (1932/1971, 198 et sq.). He not only supplies his friend Sartre with the keyword for the latter’s concept of commitment, but also directs our attention to the axis of the I as a people, no longer to the ‘people’ designated as such by ‘our fathers with a mixture of confidentiality, arrogance and hope’, but rather to the ‘proletariat’. However, it remains unclear what exactly the ‘annexation’ between ‘the philosophy of Marx and Lenin’ Nizan calls for actually looks like (194). The ‘philosophy of the deed (praxis, development), but not the “pure” deed, but rather precisely the “impure” deed’ (PN 11, § 64, 1479), which Gramsci develops with the question of the socially formative function of the I and their translation into the hegemony-theoretical problematic and the creation of a new stratum of I, remains unelaborated in Nizan. Even though he seeks to begin by dispelling the identification of the I with the conventional image of the scholar, the philosopher or the artist, he does not bring this problematic onto the terrain of the ‘modern world’, a world that requires a technical education closely connected to industrial work, and thus fails to turn it into something that can become a ‘basis of the new type of I’ (PN 12, § 3, 1531). Gramsci attributes the success of the journal Ordine Nuovo (1919–1920) to precisely this merit: that he no longer appeared as a ‘mere orator’ but as a ‘constructor, organiser, “long-term persuader” who educates the specialists into “leaders” (specialists + politicians)’ (1532).
4. Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo despises people ‘whose brains aren’t capable of filling their stomachs’ (GA 5, 213; GW, 1259). Indeed, the wise minds can be ‘utilised very foolishly, both by the powerful and by their owners themselves’. In antagonistic societies, in which the ‘good life of the few […] is produced from the bad life of the many’, the ‘wise minds’ must be deployed in order ‘to overturn the most foolish of institutions’ – something which only works as long as they take ‘filling their stomachs’, which they expect from the currently dominant class, to be their main occupation (18, 70; 12, 436). The notes toward the novel Tui pervade Brecht’s work as those on Lorianism run through Gramsci’s: the Brechtian ‘Tellekt-uell-in’ (17, 68; 12, 598) – the ‘I of this time of markets and commodities’, who rents out his intellect (153; 611) – is no more an isolated case than Gramsci’s Lorian, who is characterised by ‘ethical weakness and permissiveness in the area of scientific-cultural activity’ (PN 28, 2223). If the main doctrine at the Tui-school is summarised in the line ‘consciousness determines being’ (Brecht, GA 17, 27; GW 12, 611), then the breadbasket in this school, being pulled higher in the case of answers deemed wrong as they legitimate the dominant relations poorly because transparently, illustrates that there is not much to the notion of a determining role of consciousness. In his American exile, Brecht notes: ‘the great comedy of them believing to direct and being directed, the quixotism of consciousness, which alleges to determine social being – that was presumably only valid for Europe’. The ‘sale of opinions’ does not need to be revealed when it occurs ‘naked’ (AJ, 18.4.1942).
Brecht sees the expression of a ‘strong fighting instinct’ in the ‘utter distrust’ with which the proletariat views the I, whose ‘historical usefulness’ is especially of interest to him (1929/30, GA 21, 339; GW 20, 52). The proletariat needs the I ‘1. To undermine bourgeois ideology. […] 2. To study the forces which “move the world”. […] 3. To develop pure theory’. The second answer is made more precise: ‘Primarily in non-revolutionary situations, a revolutionary intelligentsia can preserve the revolution’ (1935; 22, 150; 20, 54). The function the I were to fulfil was ‘leadership’ – an ‘essential function’, in which one can hardly decide ‘whether these individuals such as Marx, Lenin etc. had their function ascribed to them by the proletariat or themselves assigned to the proletariat a function’ (21, 338 et sq.; 20, 52). It can only be exercised, of course, when this dialectic is not immobilised through conditions of dominance and subordination. Even the I’s ‘commonly emerging view’ ‘that it is necessary to disappear into the proletariat is counter-revolutionary’, for only ‘evolutionists believe in an overthrow of the social order through “participation” ’ (339; 53). The question of which class the I belong to is not a question of sociological categorisation for Brecht. Rather, it is translated in terms of praxis and philosophy: The role of the I in the revolution can only be an ‘intellectual role’ in the activation of a ‘dynamic, politically speaking, liquidating intellect’ (340; 53).
Gramsci’s shifting of the I concept to the aspect of its social function is also crucial in Brecht’s understanding of the matter. The Tui, the knowledge worker, the intervening thinker, the “philosopher” – all these terms describe “thinking”. Not, however, as a function tied to specific occupations, but as a ‘behaviour’ (GW 20, 166), a socialising act that can be aimed towards the reproduction of the dominant conditions, but can also aim towards intervention from an emancipatory perspective. There is ‘nothing blameworthy’ in the fact that fascism treats thinking as a behaviour, similar to a ‘criminal act’, that can be punished accordingly (167). Brecht emphasises the ‘practical side’ of the concept of philosophy; even ‘specific modes of action and ways of behaving’ were always popularly called ‘philosophical’ (127). According to Brecht, professional philosophers must be observed in handfuls, when they criticise other philosophers: ‘One watches artisans at work. Hegel describes Kant thusly, and Schopenhauer describes Hegel purely as one who assumes a behaviour, operates, acts. […] In this way the interests become clear, and with the interests the philosophies’ (142). “Truth” is something produced, and accordingly there is a ‘mode of production of truth’ (GA 22, 96). Whoever fights for the truth ‘not only fights against untruth but also against certain human beings who spread it’ (81).
The ‘commodity character of knowledge itself’ is certainly a subject that occupied Brecht. Beyond that, however, his underlying interest in class plays a role (Ruoff 1980, 76). This is not simply attributed to an already constituted and fixed interest beyond concrete action. It is formulated as the result of a process. As one of the aims of Gramsci’s critique of objectivism is to develop a consciousness for the active side of thinking, Brecht also urges: ‘When you conclude the necessity of a series of facts, do not forget that you yourself are one of these facts, and determine the necessity as exactly as possible, as in order to be a necessity it requires very specific action’. (GW 20, 69; cf. Haug 1996, 52 et sq.) Thought is an act, capable of dissolving the cement of the dominant relations just as much as it can fortify them. The ‘idle ingenuity’ (Horkheimer 1937/2002, 206) that behaves as if occupied while idling at work also has a social function.
5. For Karl Mannheim, who, in opposition to the illusion of “thought-in-itself”, seeks to bring the ‘wealth of forms in which men really think’ into view (1929/1969, 4), the situation of the modern I is symbolised by the fact that they are no longer ‘a member of a caste or rank’, no longer a ‘clergy’ (11). What matters is to recognise the ‘framework which, in a real division of labour’ integrates ‘the character of the work of every individual’ (27), such as the ‘social character of knowing and experiencing’ which define a ‘social nexus’ and produce a ‘consensus’ in an internally divided society (20), something which in Mannheim, of course, hardly goes beyond particular groups. Gramsci develops a position from the standpoint of the “organicity” of the I and their connection to a class or group with a view to broadening not least the subaltern groups’ ability to act. In Mannheim this appears as a deficient form which, particularly in the form of ‘party functionaries’, lacks ‘receptivity and elasticity’ (34), a form characterising an “intelligence” that just wants to escape the dead ends of ‘situationally-bound thinking’ (44). It is obvious that this conception was compatible with the fiction of an “unbound”, autonomous thought that hardly reflected its social determinants, and that “autonomy” nevertheless belonged to the contextual preconditions of scientific action even at the point where it was ‘brought into line’ (cf Haug et al. 1989).
Against Mannheim, Max Horkheimer emphasises that critical theory is ‘neither “deeply rooted” like totalitarian propaganda nor “detached” like the liberalist intelligentsia’ (1937/2002; 223 et sq.). Only critical thinking, he claims, can become a progressive element and qualify the I as an “organ” of those whose emancipation is the I’s responsibility. His critique is ‘aggressive […] not only against the conscious defenders of the status quo but also against distracting, conformist, or utopian tendencies within his own household’ (216). Under the conditions of fascism and exile, ‘truth has sought refuge among small groups of admirable men. But these have been decimated by terrorism and have little time for refining theory’ (237 et sq.), so that the ‘transmission of the critical theory in its strictest possible form’ appears more urgent than the ‘idea of a transformed society’, in order to work towards ‘a state of affairs in which there will be no exploitation or oppression’ (241). Accordingly, when Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Germany and resumed teaching in Frankfurt, it was with the goal of being able to contribute to the development of a new type of critical I under the conditions of the Fordist welfare compromise. In this new type of I, the philosophical tradition, with its claim to reason and cognition of the whole, was to be linked with knowledge of the advanced methods of social science. These I would be disposed toward non-conformism in their attitude, they would not make themselves into instruments of recognised social legitimacy and would position themselves in critical opposition to the generally dominant spirit of administration and control; they would be in their own way bound to the concepts of truth and rationality, in order to pursue analysis and critique, without censuring thought, up to the point of a radical critique of society (cf. Demirović 1999).
6. It is no coincidence that Jean-Paul Sartre, who shaped the figure of the engaged I more than any other writer after 1945, garnered Theodor W. Adorno’s critique (cf. Jehle 2004). If ‘the possibility of what is better’ can only be maintained in ‘unalleviated consciousness of negativity’, then ‘inviolable isolation’ is now ‘the only way of showing some measure of solidarity’ (Minima Moralia, aph. 5, 25). This distanced attitude probably leads him to suspect committed literature of ‘intellectual regression’ (Commitment, 1974, 84). The motive was scepticism toward a praxis proclaimed by I that would use the relationship between the I and the people as an excuse to censor thought and theory. Even in Adorno the I must desire something, because otherwise there will be nothing for them to recognise; but the task of the I is the recognition and the maintenance of the claim to reason: tasks which push one toward reality and not toward the hasty partisanship of individual interests. – But even for Sartre the I’s characteristic conflict between ‘particularising ideology and universalizing knowledge’ is not annulled by ‘joining a mass party’ (1965/1976, 258); he can only ‘serve the people’ as a ‘singular universal’ (259) who makes efforts toward ‘universalization’, without ever being able to overcome his ‘situation’ as a ‘member of the middle class’ (260).
6.1 The Germans in Paris – this is the defining experience to which Sartre attempts to answer. ‘Each of those authors […] took stock of his responsibility as a writer. The Occupation taught us ours’ (1945/1988, 252). That writers, like scholars and scientists, have ‘no way of escaping’ is not a tragedy but an opportunity: to overcome ‘sterile impartiality’, in which ‘pure science’ and ‘l’art pour l’art’ meet and convince themselves that they remain outside of time (249). By developing a category of ‘specialists in practical knowledge’ out of the modern bourgeoisie – ‘scientists, engineers, doctors, lawyers, jurists, academics and so on’ (1965/1995, 233). – They give the latter ‘the means to self-reproduction and expansion’ (234). The ‘philosophers’ in the 18th cent. sense of the term, who are inextricably tied to those specialists, ‘can thus be seen as organic I, in the sense that Gramsci gave to the word. They were born into the bourgeois class, and they took upon themselves the task of expressing the objective spirit of this class’ (236) – specifically, a rational view of the world in which the individual, free from the pressures of feudal society, ‘a solid and indivisible particle, the vehicle of human nature, resides like a pea in a can of peas’ (1945/1988, 256). This ‘golden age’ is gone (1965/1976, 236 et sq.). The I, as they have emerged since the Dreyfus affair, result from the contradiction of being both specialists in practical knowledge and a ‘servitors of hegemony’ at the same time, ‘agents of ideological particularism’ (238) who stand in opposition to the bourgeois claim to be the ‘universal class’. Should the I refuse to be a ‘subaltern agent for bourgeois hegemony’, he will become a ‘monster, that is to say an intellectual; someone who attends to what concerns him […] and whom others refer to as a man who interferes in what does not concern him’ (244). He will be turned into a ‘technician of the universal who realizes that in his own field, universality does not exist ready-made; but perpetually remains to be achieved’ (249).
6.2 Sartre distinguishes between the ‘true’ I and the ‘false’ I (252), who defend particularist ideology. The latter’s reformism cause the former to ‘become revolutionary’ (257); as a result he cannot conceive of I who are not ‘left-wing’ (1968/1973, 157). Thus the category takes on a normative emphasis which it does not have in Gramsci: The true I are those who, ‘uneasily aware of their essentially monstrous character’ (253), are torn between the universality of their essence and the particularity of their class affiliation. The ‘nature of his contradiction [-…] obliges him to commit himself’ (254). What causes them to flout the bourgeois security of the ‘false’ I remains unclear. In contrast to Gramsci, who sees the I through the lens of their organising function rather than their class affiliation, Sartre argues that an ‘organic I of the proletariat will remain a contradiction in terms’ ‘[u]ntil the day of the revolution’ (257). ‘Both in his capacity as one who can never be assimilated, and remains excluded even during violent action, and as a divided consciousness, that can never be healed’ (262). This contradictory situation is itself a condition of their action: without a ‘mandate’ the I is ‘suspect to the working class, a traitor to the dominant class, a fugitive from his own class who can yet never wholly escape it’ (264).
6.3 Michel Foucault took a path diametrically opposed to that of Sartre. Science and scientific truth represent specific forms of exclusion resulting from knowledge and power that have contributed to the formation and development of capitalism. The appeal to the universal as such is therefore no more emancipatory than the appeal to a universal I. In Foucault’s view, the historical character of the struggle has changed. The I no longer find their work in ‘the unitary theoretical instance that claims to be able to filter them, organize them into a hierarchy, organize them in the name of a true body of knowledge’, but in concrete conditions of work and living: in sexuality, in the place of residence, in the mental asylum, in prison. Thus the question is one of a ‘local critique’ that participates peripherally in the ‘insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ (insurrection des ‘savoirs assujetis’) (1976/2003, 7–10). The I might acquire knowledge about specific problems that are often different from those of the proletariat and the masses. And even this new category of the ‘specific I’ (Dits et Ecrits, vol. 3, 205) would still encounter the same opponents as the proletariat: multinational corporations, the apparatus of the courts and the police, real estate speculation. The specific I would be distinguished from the universal I, who set the justice and equality of an ideal law against a juridical understanding of power which corresponds to the abuses of power and the arrogance of wealth. In contrast, the specific I would no longer be determined by their relation to the sacralising effect of the written word. Instead, they would be determined by their genealogical task to connect learned knowledge with local memories (1976/2003, 8). Foucault, however, does not want to renounce the universalising moment of struggle. For he sees the possibility that the I created a network between themselves and various sites, became mutually politicised and succeeded in creating a new, globalised strategy. According to Foucault the question is one of changing the political, economic and institutional system of truth production, of unshackling the truth from previous forms of hegemony and thereby fighting against the forms of power that close off knowledge from below, the subjugated knowledge of the masses (Dits et Ecrits, vol. 3, 216–18). He repeatedly emphasises that it is not a matter of raising consciousness, because the masses and workers have long possessed consciousness and knowledge; rather it is a question of giving their consciousness and their knowledge the opportunity to spread.
6.4 Foucault criticised the project of the universal I through that of the specific I from an anti-authoritarian standpoint, although without having joined in the postmodern claims about the death of the I more generally. He critically includes in his analysis various occupations in the humanities such as economy, psychiatry and medicine, along with the technicians of engineering and leadership. He does not expand on the dialectic of the specific and universal I, of local critique and universal demands, although the distinction between him and Sartre lies less in the critique of universality, which he in the final count adheres to, than in his reservations toward isolated position of the I as a ‘singular universal’ and the plea for cooperative networks of local critique.
Bourdieu likewise critiques the existentialist aspect of Sartre’s view that the I express themselves in relation to all problems of their time solely by virtue of their intellect. He also has reservations, however, about Foucault’s notion that the I should limit their intervention to specialised knowledge. Bourdieu fears that this will stimulate resentment toward the social sciences under the guise of a ‘critique of the texts’ of old and pure philosophy and encourage an irrational nihilism (1989, 68 et sq.). Like Foucault, Bourdieu orients himself in opposition to the prophetic I who treat their own experiences and interests as universal and act as guardians over others. He explains this process of intellectual generalisation thusly: the I tend to falsely imagine themselves in solidarity with those who are dominated as they misjudge their own class position as that of a dominated faction of the dominating class, simulating themselves into a false class affiliation (1991, 63). In this regard he rejects Gramsci’s concept of the organic I as a mythic concept, as the I thereby make themselves into fellow travellers of lower I categories who anoint themselves spokesmen for the proletariat. That being said, his own excellent engagement in the globalisation critique of the “movement of movements” can be perfectly described with this concept.
For Bourdieu, it is decisive that the I understand themselves as a universal body that has an overriding interest beyond all national differences. That interest being to fight for their autonomy, their power, to evaluate their production in accordance with their own criteria. The defence of the universal, in his view, is only possible through a defence of the defenders of the universal, and, accordingly, of the economic and social conditions of their autonomy.
Bourdieu’s considerations lean toward sociologism: they waver between the assignment of the I to the dominant class, without understanding their organicity, and the claim that a pure social alliance of the I, bound to the universality of reason, would be thinkable or desirable – this while the I for him consist quite conventionally of scholars and scientists, artists and writers. What is desirable, however, and what, despite many differences, the various efforts toward a critical-material theory of the I centre on, is the demand for the social conditions which make rational thought possible (51; 2002, 33). This is only possible if the conditions of the production of the universal are no longer a privilege but a universal quality themselves: the universal, not as an idea and a norm, but as humanity made concrete and objectively realised – as Gramsci expressed it (PN 11, § 17, 1412) – a culturally unified species.
Alex Demirović, Peter Jehle
Translated by Loren Balhorn
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