Intellectuals, in 1977, had no political influence in any country in the world- unless right-wing economists count as such. Yet, in that year, Michel Foucault, in a series of interviews, propounded the following re. 'the political role of the intellectual'.
For a long time the 'left' intellectual spoke and was acknowledged to have the right of speaking in the capacity of master of truth and justice.
This was never the case even in Communist countries. Some leftist writers or film makers or celebrities had some influence at different times and places. But this was also true of crazy right wing nutters or folksy centrist shitheads.
He was heard, or purported to make himself heard, as the representative of the universal.
No. Some leftists claimed to speak for the poor but there were actual poor people who could speak for themselves.
To be an intellectual meant to be, a little, the consciousness / conscience of everyone.
I suppose Sartre was wierdly popular. 50,000 turned out for his funeral in 1980. Nothing like it had happened since the death of Victor Hugo. But Sartre was an academic who became a writer rather than an intellectual.
I think we encounter here an idea transposed from Marxism, from a faded Marxism indeed: just as the proletariat, through the necessity of its historical position, is the bearer of the universal (but its immediate, unreflected bearer, scarcely conscious of itself as such),
nobody believed that shite. Sartre & Foucault were retarded cunts who converted to an ideology based wholly upon an economic theory which they were incapable of understanding.
so the intellectual, by his moral, theoretical and political chOice, aspires to be the bearer of this universality in its consciOUS, elaborated form.
I suppose you could say this of Milton Friedman who said inflation was always and everywhere a purely monetary phenomenon. There was a 'free market' universalism and the beginnings of a 'Human Rights' universalism but there was no Leftist universalism. Nobody thought a Communist 'dictatorship of the proletariat' could be established in Western Democracies. Even the notion of 'convergence' to a mixed economy was in question because the Public Sector in more and more countries was loss making.
The intellectual is supposed to be the· clear, individual figure of a universality of which the proletariat is the obscure, collective form.
Mao was dead. The gang of 4 had been arrested the previous year. China was 77 percent agricultural. Meanwhile the industrial proletariat had begun to decline as a proportion of the working population after peaking in France at about 40 percent in the early Seventies. To be fair, it was not obvious that deindustrialization would succeed stagflation or that women and the service sector would rise and rise.
For some time now, the intellectual has no longer been called upon to play this role.
Nobody ever gave a shit about intellectuals. Sartre, for some reason, was cool but what won in '68 was Gaullism. Cohn Bendit redirected his energies towards paedophilia.
A new mode of 'connection between theory and practice' has been established.
That happened a couple of thousand years ago. Doctors listened to lectures on theory and then learnt on the job through practice.
Intellectuals have become accustomed to working not in the character of the 'universal', the 'exemplary', the 'just-and-true for all', but in specific sectors, at precise points where they are situated either by their professional conditions of work or their conditions of life (housing, the hospital, the asylum, the laboratory, the university, familial and sexual relations).
Foucault was mentally ill. What worked on crazy people turned out NOT to be culture dependent. Oddly, Foucault's own psychiatrist- despite being French- wasn't shit. He had helped develop lithium salts as a treatment. Maoists forced him out of the profession but he then turned to literature and got elected to the French Academy.
Through this they have undoubtedly gained a much more concrete awareness of struggles. They have also there· by encountered problems which are specific, 'nonuniversal', often different from those of the proletariat and the masses. And yet, I believe that they have really come closer to the proletariat,
Foucault liked a bit of rough trade
for two reasons: because it has been a matter of real, material, everyday struggles, and because they often came up, even though in a different form, against the same adversary as the proletariat, the peasants and the masses, namely the multinational corporations, the judicial and police apparatuses, property speculators etc.
Also grown-ups. They don't want us kids to have any fun.
This is what I would call the 'specific' intellectual as opposed to the 'universal' intellectual.
Foucault was a specific intellectual who was constantly harassed by the pigs coz he liked skateboarding while playing his guitar. Property speculators hired Ninja assassins to try to bump him off. Fortunately, his best pal was the Karate kid.
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