From legislators to interpreters......

And here is a wonderful supplement to my previous post regarding the changing contexts of academic labour:

"Zygmunt Bauman’s discussion of the rise and decline of the “legislator intellectual” is of crucial importance here. Bauman connects the value of “culture” to the role of intellectuals in legitimating the power of the early modern and modern nation state. The value of culture, the notion that to be fully human meant to be cultured or cultivated, was tied to the way in which the emergence of the modern state involved the replacement of traditional forms of solidarity with centralized social control. It was in this context of the rise of the nation state that Bauman locates the legislator intellectual. Intellectuals, as guardians of “culture,” played a crucial role in legitimizing these new forms of social control and political-cultural identity. Bauman writes: “The intellectual ideology of culture was launched as a militant, uncompromising and self-confident manifesto of universally binding principles of social organization and individual conduct.” The legislator intellectual played a role in defining and asserting the superiority of the national culture, and thereby in legitimizing the power of the nation state. Bauman argues, however, that this role of the legislator intellectual has declined as national culture has been replaced by the market as the central ordering principle of modern societies. “More and more,” he argues, “the culture of consumer society was subordinated to the function of producing and reproducing skilful and eager consumers, rather than obedient and willing subjects to the state.” In consumerism, normative regulation through the nation state is replaced with seduction through the market and the commodity spectacle.
In this context, intellectuals are no longer looked to as “legislators” of cultural values. Instead, they become “interpreters”: “from the perspective of the present-day intellectuals, culture does not appear as something to be ‘made’ or ‘remade’ as an object for practice; it is indeed a reality in its own right and beyond control, an object for study, something to be mastered only cognitively, as a meaning, and not practically, as a task.” The task of creating culture has shifted from intellectuals to the media and other purveyors of mass entertainment and mass consumption. This context provides little rationale for the maintenance of the university apart from the market as a source of high-cultural values.
However, Bauman’s analysis of the importance of the rise of consumer society needs to be supplemented with an account of the relationship of intellectuals to global politics....."

The ‘nostalgia to be God’

Pierre Bourdieu (on Heidegger):

"Placed in an uncomfortable situation in the dominant class, as an illegitimate bourgeois, stripped of his bourgeois rights and of the possibility of even claiming them…the intellectual can only define himself in opposition to the rest of the social world, categorised as ‘dirty bastards’, that is, as 'bourgeois', but in Flaubert’s rather than Marx’s sense, meaning all those who feel at ease with themselves and secure in their rights because they have the luck and the misfortune not to think. If we agree to recognise in the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘intellectual’ the existential realisation of what will later become, in Sartre’s philosophically euphemised system, the en-soi (self-sufficient being) and the pour-soi (self conscious being), we will better understand the ‘nostalgia to be God’, that is, the reconciliation of the bourgeois and the intellectual ('living like a bourgeois and thinking like a demigod’, as Flaubert said), of thoughtless power and powerless thought."



"In The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger ( 1991 ), Pierre Bourdieu...describes [Heidegger's philosophy as registering] a distinct configuration of revolutionary conservative thought, an ideological matrix or system of common mental schemata that engenders the National Socialist vision of the world. No single ideologue mobilizes all of these schemata, which, for this reason, neither fulfill the same functions nor have equal importance in the different systems in which they are inserted. But each thinker is able to "produce, from the particular combination of the common schemata which he mobilizes, a discourse that is perfectly irreducible to the others, although it is only a transformed form of all the others". Bourdieu understands Heidegger's philosophy as one such discourse. This allows him to draw parallels between Heidegger's work and the less formalized discourses of other revolutionary conservative thinkers like Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jnger. Such an approach to Heidegger embodies a "dual refusal, rejecting not only any claim of the philosophical text to absolute autonomy. . . but also any direct reduction of the text to the most general conditions of its production".

"History's stamp: Wyndham Lewis's The Revenge for Love and the Heidegger controversy"
Comparative Literature, Winter 1999 by Brett Neilson