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Abstract
This essay examines how the increasing dependence of the academy, specifically communication studies, on corporate and federal funding is creating a sector of embedded intellectuals. Using the theoretical lens of what is loosely called “autonomism,” I argue that the concept of General Intellect forces us to reconsider traditional notions of intellectual work. The significance of communication, as both a growing academic field and infrastructure for this General Intellect, puts the discipline in the spotlight. After summarizing Gramscian and Foucauldian conceptions of the engaged intellectual, I sketch out a figure of the intellectual adequate to these conditions, what I call the machinic intellectual.
Acknowledgements
He wishes to thank Stevphen Shukaitis, John Sloop, and the two reviewers for their insightful feedback. Portions of this argument have appeared in Constituent Imagination, Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber (Eds) (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007).
Notes
1. Message posted by Jeremy S. Packer from the Dept. of Communications at Penn State University ([cultstud-l] NCA and “Homeland security?” 7 June 2005). The listserv bears no formal relationship to NCA, nor is it specifically communications-oriented.
2. From the NCA website: http://www.natcom.org/nca/Template2.asp?bid=484 (accessed 20 November 2007).
3. From the NCA website: http://www.natcom.org/nca/Template2.asp?bid=3380 (accessed 20 November 2007).
4. Without access to the various discussions and meetings that resulted in Burgoon's selection, the rank and file member cannot reasonably know any contentiousness in the process. For instance, on Communication, Research, and Theory Network (CRTNET), the official NCA listserv, there was zero discussion about the selection. The lack of public response to her talk does not necessarily indicate a uniformity of support. We can only speculate on what we are left with—the simple empirical result that NCA selected a researcher who even by the narrowest definition could be considered an embedded intellectual.
5. Ronald W. Greene and Darren Hicks, “Lost Convictions,” Cultural Studies 19 (2005): 100–26.
6. Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
7. Armand Mattelart, Mapping World Communication, trans. Susan Emanuel and James Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). For a broader analysis of State funding of humanities and social sciences, see Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War (New York: New Press, 1999); Christopher Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire (New York: The New Press, 1998); Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown (New York: William Morrow, 1987). John Armitage highlights the militarization of the university in “Beyond Hypermodern Militarized Knowledge Factories,” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 27 (2005): 1–21.
8. As late as 1973, the explicit study of psyops as communication was in effect, evidenced by the collection “Art and Science of Psychological Operations.” This pamphlet (a two volume, 1100 page hardbound set) contains analysis by Pentagon psyops specialists, advertisers, political scientists and sociologists, theater professors, and filmmakers. See Art and Science of Psychological Operations, United States Army Pamphlet, 1973.
9. According to Eyal Weizman, these two blur in the example of Israeli Defense Forces reading French philosophy as “operational theory.” “The Art of War,” Frieze 99 (March 2006), http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_art_of_war/ (accessed 20 November 2007).
10. See Henry Giroux and Kostas Myrsiades, ed., Beyond the Corporate University (Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); Jennifer Washburn, University, Inc. (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Marc Bousquet, Tony Scott, Leo Parascondola, ed., Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004); Robert Ovetz, “Turning Resistance into Rebellion,” Capital and Class 58 (1996): 113–52.
11. John Pruett and Nick Schwellenbach, “The Rise of the Network Universities” Conference Presentation, Education, Participation and Globalization, Prague, 20–22 May 2004, http://www.utwatch.org/archives/the%20rise%20of%20network%20universities.pdf (accessed 20 November 2007).
12. The term is taken from “Empire's Embedded Intellectuals,” a speech given by Hatem Bazian in early 2005. In his brief account, he refers mainly to explicit academic supporters of US imperialism (like Samuel Huntington, Bernard Lewis, and Alan Dershowitz). As far as I can tell, he has not written or elaborated on the concept. As I retool and extend it, it involves the very condition of being in the academic institution, regardless of one's direct ideological support. For a report on Bazian's speech, see http://brownlikeme.blogspot.com/2005/04/empires-embedded-intellectuals.html (accessed 20 November 2007).
13. Within North American communications studies, an autonomist approach can be found in the work of, among others, Ronald Greene, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Sarah Sharma, Mark Cote, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Ron Day, Enda Brophy, Stephen Kline, and Greig de Peuter. The media and communications work of Leopoldina Fortunati, Tiziana Terranova, Franco Berardi, and Paolo Virno inform this approach from Italy. Critical management studies (with a strong autonomist accent in the UK) has begun to overlap with critical organizational communication studies in the US (see the work of Patty Sotirin, Bryan C. Taylor, and David Corlone). Brophy and Cote call this work the “autonomist school of communication” (quoted in Richard Day, Gramsci is Dead (London: Pluto. 2005), 144), while Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter name it “transversal media studies” (“Games of Empire,” Conference Proceedings: Genealogies of Biopolitics, October 2005).
14. Analyzing the University through autonomism and the General Intellect is not new. See Marc Bousquet and Tiziana Terranova, “Recomposing the University,” Mute 28 (2004): 72–81; Dyer-Witheford, “Cognitive Capitalism and the Contested Campus,” in Engineering Culture, ed. Databrowser (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia Press, 2005). My article narrows this analysis to communication studies, especially regarding figures of engaged intellectuals.
15. The ivory tower itself has a mythic function, erasing the university's immersion in historical processes, according to some analysts. See Bousquet and Terranova; Maribel Isabel Casas-Cortes and Sebastian Cobarrubias, “Drifting Through the Knowledge Machine,” in Constituent Imagination, ed. Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007).
16. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 84.
17. Tania Lewis, “Embodied Experts,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 15:2 (2001): 233–47.
18. As Gustavo E. Fischman and Peter McLaren put it, “the Jacobin impulse to lead and organize merely switched tactical directions: instead of presuming the collective will would find its spark in the intellectual, the goal was to go to the quotidian, to understand the proletariat,” in “Rethinking Critical Pedagogy and the Gramscian and Freirean Legacies,” Cultural Studies < = > Critical Methodologies 5 (2005): 425–46.
19. Antonio Gramsci, “The Intellectuals,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 3–23.
20. Day, Gramsci is Dead, 74–75.
21. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985), 85, 169.
22. Day, 74–5.
23. Ernesto Laclau, “Immanence of Social Struggles,” in Empire's New Clothes, ed. Paul Passavant and Jodi Dean (New York: Routledge, 2004), 21–30.
24. Laclau, 29.
25. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 109–33.
26. Foucault, 126.
27. Foucault, 126.
28. Barry Smart, “The Politics of Truth and the Problem of Hegemony,” in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. D. C. Hoy (Oxford: B. Blackwell), 165.
29. Smart, 167.
30. Foucault, 130–31.
31. Foucault, 132.
32. Foucault (with Gilles Deleuze), “Intellectuals and Power,” in Language, Counter-memory, Practice, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 205–17.
33. Tony Bennett, Outside Literature (London: Routledge, 1990); Tony Bennett, “Intellectuals, Culture, Policy: The Technical, the Practical and the Critical,” Pavis Papers in Social and Cultural Research, no. 2 (Pavis Centre for Social and Cultural Research, The Open University, 2000): 2–26.
34. Tony Bennett, “Putting Policy into Cultural Studies,” in Cultural Studies, ed. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 23–37.
35. Bennett, “Intellectuals, Culture, Policy,” 9.
36. Tony Bennett, “Useful Culture,” Cultural Studies, 6 (1992): 22.
37. Bennett, “Intellectuals, Culture, Policy,” 13.
38. For the Weberian inflection of the SI, see Charles Thorpe, “Violence and the Scientific Vocation,” Theory Culture Society 21 (2004): 59–84. Foucault's discussion with Deleuze on intellectuals moves significantly beyond the SI's professional or institutional status.
39. For some overviews of this claim about Mass Intellectuality, see Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press): 133–47; Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor,” Boundary 26:2 (1999): 89–100; Franco Bifo Berardi, “Info-Labour and Precarisation,” Generation On-Line, 2003, http://www.generation-online.org/t/tinfolabour.htm (accessed 20 November 2007); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
40. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 293.
41. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Bristol, UK: Falling Wall Press, 1972); Alisa Del Re, “Women and Welfare?” in Radical Thought in Italy, ed. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, trans. Ed Emery (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 99–113; Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004), 11–19.
42. Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 103.
43. Cited in Nicholas Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 220.
44. Many have criticized these analyses by claiming that a notion like “cognitariat” universalizes a small component of the labor force (Western information economy workers) and autonomists have responded to these arguments. The GI is a tendency, not an already actualized present, much like when Marx was writing about the centrality of the industrial working-class, it too was only a tendency (as agricultural production still comprised the majority of labor). See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). For a critique of immaterial labor from autonomist perspectives, see the February 2007 special issue of ephemera, http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/7-1/7-1ephemera-feb07.pdf (accessed 20 November 2007).
45. Virno, especially 63–67.
46. Virno, 33–35.
47. Virno, 108.
48. Virno, 64.
49. One might call the GI a materialization of what John Dewey called “social intelligence” (in Brouwer and Squires, “Public Intellectuals, Public Life, and the University,” 208–9). General Intellect can also contribute to recent media studies discussions over “collective intelligence” (see my “Affective Convergence in Reality Television: A Case Study in Divergence Culture,” in Flow TV: Essays on a Convergent Medium, ed. Michael Kackman, Marnie Binfield, Matthew Thomas Payne, Allison Perlman, and Bryan Sebok (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
50. See for instance Ulrich Beck, Risk Society, trans. from the German by Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1992 [originally publ. 1986]); Jack Bratich, Jeremy Packer, and Cameron McCarthy, ed., Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003); and Randy Martin, The Financialisation of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).
51. Jane Juffer, “Dirty Diapers and the New Organic Intellectual,” Cultural Studies 17 (2003): 168–92.
52. Jodi Dean, “The Networked Empire,” in Empire's New Clothes, ed. Paul Passavant and Jodi Dean (New York: Routledge, 2004), 265–88. She acknowledges Paul Passavant as the originator of the term.
53. Chris Carlsonn, “The Shape of Truth to Come,” in Resisting the Virtual Life, ed. James Brook and Iain Boal (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995), 242; cited in Dyer-Witheford, 228.
54. For further analysis of how cultural studies ought to take seriously the creative component of the digital information economy, see Terry Flew, “Creativity, Cultural Studies, and Services Industries,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1, issue 2 (June 2004): 176–93.
55. Maurizio Lazzarato, “General Intellect,” Immaterial Labour (London: Red Notes, 1994), 1–14; cited in Dyer-Witheford, 224.
56. Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” 135.
57. See Mark Andrejevic, iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2007).
58. Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 37 (2004): 188–206.
59. Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 68.
60. Virno, 70–1.
61. Franco Bifo Berardi, “What is the Meaning of Autonomy Today?” Republicart (09/2003), http://www.republicart.net/disc/realpublicspaces/berardi01_en.htm (accessed 20 November 2007).
62. For a persuasive account of how intellectuals can position themselves as pedagogues amidst this crisis of higher education, see Henry Giroux, “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1 (2004): 59–79. In the same issue, academic intellectuals’ roles in the current war context are debated by Robert Jensen, “September 11 and the Failure of American Intellectuals,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1 (2004): 80–88 and Thomas Palaima, “The Texas Professoriate and Public Political Discourse Before and After 9/11,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1 (2004): 89–99.
63. Dyer-Witheford, 233.
64. Bousquet and Terranova, 72–81.
65. While Foucault posits it against the Universal, the binary is more precisely General/Specific (and Universal/Particular).
66. See Steven Johnson, Emergence (New York: Touchstone, 2001).
67. Dyer-Witheford, 91–3.
68. Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 127.
69. “Relay” comes out of the famous discussion about intellectuals between Foucault and Deleuze. Just as famous is Gayatri Spivak's critique of their eurocentrism in abdicating the contextual need to speak for others (“Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988)). Her critique rightfully would also define the conditions under which a machinic intellectual can emerge (it is, after all, situated). It is just as important to lay out the conditions under which representation (as a leadership project) is desirable.
70. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 122. Guattari's solo work is cited throughout here.
71. Felix Guattari, “I am an Idea-Thief,” in Chaosophy (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1995).
72. Felix Guattari, “I am an Idea-Thief,” 130.
73. Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
74. Bifo, “What is the Meaning of Autonomy Today?.”
75. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Struggle, Event, Media,” trans. Aileen Derieg, 2005, http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/03/08/1253213&mode=nested&tid=22%0D%0D (accessed 20 November 2007).
76. Felix Guattari, Molecular Revolution (Middlesex, UK: Penguin. 1984), 289.
77. C. Wright Mills, who coined the term “public intellectual,” himself was no solitary thinker, as Jonathan Sterne argues in “C. Wright Mills, the Bureau for Applied Social Research, and the Meaning of Critical Scholarship,” Cultural Studies < = > Critical Methodologies 5 (2005): 65–94.
78. Briefly, the “participative management” of post-Fordist capitalism cannot be reduced to a dystopic totality of control. Self-regulation, responsibilization, and immanent control protocols are ambivalent, as they mean capital “partially relinquishes its claim to act as the mediator and co-ordinator of production” (Dyer-Witheford, 224). It is in this break with mediation that labor power can directly produce its own value (auto-valorization) and subtract itself from the capitalist system of value. Exodus, exit, or desertion are names given to this subjective potential (whose threat has haunted capital from its inception but is now reaching a peak in the cycles of struggles). For more on these processes, see Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 3–66; Paolo Virno, “Between Disobedience and Exodus,” Interactivist (2004), http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/10/05/2334256&mode=nested&tid=9 (accessed 20 November 2007); Sandro Mezzadra, “The Right to Escape,” Ephemera 4:3 (August, 2004), http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/4–3/4–3index.htm (accessed 20 November 2007); Paolo Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution,” in Radical Thought in Italy, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 189–212; Eric Alliez and Antonio Negri, “Peace and War,” Theory Culture Society 20 (2003): 109–18.
79. Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters,” in Cultural Studies, ed. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 295–337.
80. Felix Guattari, “Regimes, Pathways, Subjects,” in Soft Subversions (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1996), 113.
81. For recent work on affect and desire see Patricia Clough and Jean Halley, ed., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) and Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
82. Dyer-Witheford, 234.
83. Dyer-Witheford, 227.
84. Bousquet and Terranova, 6–7.
85. Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, 129.
86. JK Gibson Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 200.
87. Dyer-Witheford, 238.
88. Sasha Costanza-Chock, “Autonomist Tools and Communications Democracy,” Background Paper, Necessary Knowledge for a Democratic Public Sphere (2005), 9, http://www.ssrc.org/programs/media/publications/costanza-chock.7.final.doc (accessed 20 November 2007).
89. See Shukaitis and Graeber, ed., Constituent Imagination (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007), which collects much of this recent militant research.
90. For a description of and contact information for most of these collectives, see “Teach Yourself Institutions” (various authors), Mute (07/12/2004), http://www.metamute.org/?q=en/Teach-Yourself-Institutions (accessed 20 November 2007).
91. The English-language journals ephemera, The Commoner, and Fibreculture are all involved in studying and experimenting with alternative forms of organizing, especially among the creative industries and media laborers.
92. Giroux, “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals.”
93. Michael Hardt, “The Withering of Civil Society,” Social Text 45 (1995): 27–44. See also Bennett, “Intellectuals, Culture, Policy.”
94. Giroux, “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” 65.
95. Tania Lewis, “Embodied Experts,” 236.
96. A number of commentators have noted how the rightwing in the US has, over the course of those same 40 years, made a concerted effort to create counterinstitutions as well as spheres of influence on existing liberal institutions: Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas? (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment (New York: Random House, 1986); Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion (New York: Guilford, 1995); David Franke and Richard Viguerie, America's Right Turn (Los Angeles: Bonus Books, 2004).
97. Day, Gramsci is Dead, 84.
98. For a survey of the most significant criticisms of these elements of the newest social movements, as well as a convincing counterargument about communications democracy, see Kirsty Best, “Rethinking the Globalization Movement,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2, issue 3 (September 2005): 214–37.
99. Day, 8.
100. Day, 57.
101. Eddie Yuen, “Introduction,” in The Battle of Seattle, ed. Eddie Yeun, George Katsificas, and Daniel Burton Rose (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2002), 3–20; David Graeber, “The New Anarchists,” in A Movement of Movements, ed. Tom Mertes (London: Verso Books), 202–15.
102. John Holloway, “Moving-against-and-Beyond or Interstitial Revolution,” paper presented at World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, 2005, http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/03/02/1549227&mode=thread&tid=9 (accessed 20 November 2007).
103. For Pierre Clastres, the war machine in “primitive” societies warded off the accumulation of power into domination, a.k.a. the State form. See Societies Against the State (New York: Zone Books, 1987).
104. Meaghan Morris and John Frow, “Cultural Studies,” in The Handbook of Qualitative Researc, 2nd ed., ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000), 330.
105. Stephen Dunne, Eleni Karamali, and Stevphen Shukaitis, “Inscribing Organized Resistance,” Ephemera 5, issue 4: 566.
106. Jonathan Sterne, “Academic Pro Bono,” Cultural Studies < = > Critical Methodologies 4, issue 2 (2004): 219–22.
107. Sasha Costanza-Chock, “Autonomist Tools and Communications Democracy,” 10.
108. Among them: Jennifer Pybus (immaterial labor, social networking, and affect), Sascha Meinrath (community empowerment and participatory media infrastructures), Tamara Vukov (social activism and digital media/visual culture), John Anderson (independent/interventionist media systems), Andrew O’ Baoill (organizational structures in participatory media), Kirsty Robertson (art, protest, and new technologies), Victor Pickard (progressive communications policies), Roberta Buiani (viral politics and tactical media), Ted M. Coopman (emergent self-organizing resistance networks), and Amoshaun Toft (new communication models and social movements).
109. Day, Gramsci is Dead.