rethinking intellectual labour

This paper works with the understanding that the role of the intellectual – as encountered in the academic field - is frequently configured in terms of conflict and resolution. The Marxist academic, for example, has traditionally been invested with a dialectical relationship to the world, speaking on behalf of a marginal underclass and in opposition to a dominant order. Conceived as operating within this antagonistic relation to the capitalist system, the role of the critic has been one of critique or hegemonic subversion.

I would now like to discuss this idea of conflict and antagonism, in a way that hesitates before it moves towards any kind of closure. I want to stay with it – the uneasiness - before it moves clearly away from Marxist critique and settles on a neo-Marxist state of indeterminancy (Barthes, Culler). I would like to capture some of the discomfort of the academic subject, who is in the early stages of working to satisfy a disposition towards narrative solutions. For this reason, the paper presented here is caught up in the ‘problem’ of problem-solving itself and asks whether the aspiration to settle our differences is a necessary condition of our intellectual engagements? I would like to ask: am I always moving towards closure? Also, what happens if I stay in the same place; is getting ‘stuck’ always a sign of inadequate research or thinking?

In order to discuss these questions, I will draw briefly on the work of a post war British critic called Reyner Banham, whose contribution to architectural history is sometimes understood as inconsistent and contradictory (Crowley and Aynsley). He is remembered, for example, for his contribution to Modernist discourse - for his critique of Le Courbusier’s machine aesthetic and re-visitation of Expressionist phrases within the Modern architectural movement. He is also remembered for his enthusiastic engagement with the vernacular architecture of Los Angeles and playfulness with baby boomer speech. Indeed, it is in this very mix of iconographies - drawn from post war consumer culture and pre-war aesthetic tradition - that lies at the very heart of his contested image. His eclecticism seems to beg the question: can an academic ‘dig’ a new scene and yet retain a sense of intellectual integrity? In other words, can an academic be permitted to live with conflict and contradiction?


Conflict and Resolution

I will begin by briefly considering two tenets of Marxist critique that lie at the heart of this model of conflict-resolution. The first is the notion of critical distance whereby the work of the intellectual subject is invested with a sense of objectivity. Much like an aesthete’s understanding of an aesthetic experience (Fry), critical distance identifies the space between that occupied by the viewing subject and that occupied by the unthinking ‘Other’: be it an object or a person. Critical distance, in this regard, describes a non-place - somehow situated (in thought) beyond the reach of ‘ordinary’ collective consciousness. One could think of critical distance as a ‘positive’ take on alienation, whereby the (bourgeois) intellectual is understood as alienated from ‘the masses’ as well as the products of their labour. This leads to an encouragement to view the intellectual enterprise in terms of an informed outsider: such as the ‘disinterested’ art critic, for example.

The Frankfurt School is characteristic of this conflict-closure model. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno speaks on behalf of those individuals who are subservient to the ‘absolute powers of capitalism’ (120), seeing his intellectual role as one of overcoming capitalist ideology with Marxist critique, and acting on behalf of those who have ‘already been suppressed by the control of individual consciousness’ (121). The distance, he suggests, between himself and these unfortunate ‘Others’ is one marked by imagination - the capacity for thinking beyond the immediate or obvious. His job is to encourage reflection: a movement from passive to active.

The second central motif in this model of dialectical closure then, is one of linear movement. Indeed the notion of a political movement, for example, has a strong sense of direction and moral purpose; in particular, towards the intellectual ‘movement’ of ‘the masses’ from A to B. One might argue that Marxist critique can be viewed in terms of a classic narrative – usually taking the form of literature or speech – which takes the topic of social progress as its fundamental ‘story-telling’ element (Lyotard). The structure and content of its Grand Narrative captures the movement of History, arranging events into logical sequence. In this way, the intellectual movement of ‘the masses’ is confined to - or contained within – a repetitive and conventional plot structure, one that aspires to work towards an idealized political goal (such as imaginative emancipation, for example).

In this way the Frankfurt School encapsulates a type of intellectual journey that takes place within an overarching progressive narrative structure, one that resolves as quickly as it configures.


The Atavism of Reyner Banham

I will now argue that the work of Reyner Banham offers a significant contribution to the wider problematization of this conflict-resolution model; in particular, the way the model fails to address the ‘untidy’ experience of being ‘academic’. Banham’s capacity for self-contradiction and critical ambivalence did not make him ineffectual as a critic or person. Indeed, one might argue that the unsteady nature of his academic profile or position was beneficial to his practice, enabling him to move across a range of critical discourses and social practices. His life and work suggest that a conflict-conflict model might offer a closer approximation of the day-to-day world of intellectual practice and, furthermore, to the wider vagaries of post war consumer culture itself.

I will call this model of intellectual practice - Critical Atavism. This borrows from the title of his most famous article: ‘The Atavism of the Short-Distance Mini-Cyclist’ (1964), where he describes the capacity of cultural artifacts to ‘take you back where you came in’ (84). Banham speaks to this atavistic impulse – of something re-emerging after a period of absence - in terms of an awakening: of being thrown back to a familiar-but-different way of thinking and living. For this reason atavism is seen in a positive light, enabling the social subject to face the confluence of past into present.

It is worth noting, furthermore, that he avoids using the word anachronistic, which would encourage us to view this sequential disturbance in negative terms: as disruptive of the flow of personal ‘development’. Rather, he welcomes the opportunity to contemplate his own cultural and intellectual movement from A to B and back again.

As someone who championed Popular Culture in terms of the ‘expendability’ and ‘obsolescence’ of its product cycle, his own preference for riding a bike through the streets of London and wearing a cloth cap seemed strangely at odds with his literary rhetoric. Banham embraces this perceived ‘conflict’ of interest, however, in terms of life’s atavistic impulses. It was the return of his Norfolk past, ‘the naïve stuff’, a coming home … In ‘The Atavism of the Short-Distance Mini-Cyclist’, he clearly speaks about living with, and in, such contradiction. Speaking of the Independent Group’s involvement in the Pop Art movement he says that:

‘We are very much at home with this material … we are in our own culture, sub-culture, or whatever you like to call it … [not] a working class a la Hoggart … [but a] working class culture in the sense an anthropologist would normally describe and understand it; the way that working class people live, the kind of cultural standards they hold, enjoy and respond to.’ (84)

He continues:

‘We dig pop, which is acceptance culture, capitalistic, and yet in our formal politics, if I may use the phrase, most of us belong to the other side.’

Atavism, in this respect, is a way of describing an experience of being thrown back on oneself: of being thrown off-guard by the reappearance of a characteristic from a past life, which has returned after a long period of absence. For Banham, this sudden unsettling of one’s current position spoke eloquently of two things: firstly, that any experience of self-continuity within the immediate setting is uncertain, and secondly, that any sense of intellectual development is particularly at risk if one inhabits a radically altered scene from one’s past.

Banham argues that the place where you come into the world – geographically, economically, historically – shapes your disposition towards contemporary life, in a way that sometimes gets marginalized by the trajectory of your intellectual path (Bourdieu). For this reason, Banham was highly critical of the Adult Education Movement in Britain, questioning why it encouraged the working classes to evacuate one space for another. He says:

‘The rise of the working classes to political power has rested upon someone equipping them with the right kind of responses to social and political situations, manipulative responses’ (86)

What makes him angry is that the academic trajectory is designated ‘enlightened state of being’, with the origins of the working class subject being left standing.

For Banham, it seems that our original stories can be used, atavistically. He advises that the place ‘where you came in’ (84), gives you a critical reflex that might seem at odds with your stated critical position: and could be useful for this very reason. Indeed, it makes you aware that academic traditions are in competition with other cultural forces and, in a sense, they are also in competition with one’s ‘self’.

When Banham applauds Pop for recognising Art is competing for people’s time and interest, he understands that people’s attention is subject to the vagaries of the world. He recognizes that living day-to-day necessarily puts the academic subject into tension: his critical distance and aspiration towards progression are subject to local conditions. The academic subject is, he reminds us, an idealized form, one that is changed by everything from the unevenness of the marketplace to the tensions encapsulated within our own intellectual development.


Post War Marxisms

I hope to have shown that the conflict and contradictions in Banham’s approach – his discussion of atavism - indicates a kind of conceptual ambivalence that might enable us to re-think the role of the intellectual. In particular he offers an encouragement to place less emphasis on the intellectual as an orderly ‘academic’ (as someone engaged in clearly defined intellectual ‘work’) and place more emphasis on being an intellectual in practice (as someone who is caught up in, and engages with, ‘a whole way of life’) (Williams, Banham): even if this is a life held in tension.

This notion of ‘a whole way of life’ could immediately connect these ideas to the work of cultural historian Raymond Williams, who also wanted to put lived experience back on the critical agenda. However, I would like to posit other contexts in which these ideas make sense – unsettling this Post War Cultural Studies trajectory (towards narrative solutions) in favour of approaches that embrace the vagaries on intellectual embodiment.

Howard Caygill’s work is useful here, for he unsettles this common understanding of the intellectual as a coherent subject who peacefully legislates in a condition of freedom. Indeed, Caygill reminds us that academics operate within a ‘metaphysical realm’, which is marked by thought and critical reflection but also by war and factionalism. He states that:

‘The laws and categories of experience issue not from an act of self legislation, but from a decision to call a truce in a condition of violence’ (p.27)

Howard Caygill thus challenges this notion of an idealized intellectual subject in a way that foregrounds antagonism. He also foregrounds the idea of subjective transition in a way that challenges this idea of the intellectual as a stable subject. In his discussion of the early writings of Walter Benjamin, he discusses the idea of a subject in movement – but not into the academic distance or in a straight line. He speaks of the social subject who is open to the spatial and temporal transitivity of the city, for example, and whose sense of continuity can be swiftly disrupted by changes in architecture or light, that is to say, by highly localized conditions.

Howard Caygill advocates an intellectual practice of ‘speculative philosophy’, one that allows for such flexibility of movement one’s disposition towards the world, and all that this entails. He says:

‘this experience of transitivity is ambiguous: it is not only the condition for the experience of joy, but also for poverty’ (122)

For me, this speculative philosophy resembles Banham’s erratic forays through the post war British scene: with his own kind of kinetic, atavistic philosophy of the subject.


CONCLUSION

I began by asking: am I always moving towards closure?

I hope to have shown that I am always in movement.

I also asked, what happens if I stay in the same place; is getting ‘stuck’ always a sign of inadequate research or thinking?

I hope to have shown that it depends on the model of the academic subject. Banham’s atavism and Caygill’s speculative philosophy suggest that the life of an intellectual doesn’t have to be understood in terms of a goal-oriented trajectory.

Finally, I asked can an intellectual ‘dig’ a new scene and yet retain a sense of intellectual integrity?

Banham put his reputation at risk and his integrity in doubt for liking the ‘wrong’ things. Only wider acceptance of the model of the intellectual in movement and transitivity will challenge the moral superiority of the coherent and continuous academic subject.

Being stuck in contradiction is not being stuck. Or dumb. Or stupid. Is facing up to the lack of resolution …