From the Organic through the Specific to the Accidental: Cultural Studies and the (Potential) Proliferation of Contemporary Categories of the Academic as Public Intellectual

Abstract

Academics are traditionally thought of as rather different from activists and while some of them are sometimes thought of as intellectuals, the idea of the academic as public intellectual is not universally embraced. This brief essay addresses the idea of the academic as potential or de facto public intellectual. The primary intention in the essay is to open up the topic and point to a few permutations and possibilities rather than to define and delineate. No attempt will be made, therefore, to define the notion of the public intellectual, nor to provide a definitive answer to the question, “What constitutes the public intellectual?” As Edward Said observed in Representation of the Intellectual, “[i]n the outpouring of studies about intellectuals there has been far too much defining of the intellectual” (13). Rather, the idea is to raise questions that further complicate the issue of the academic as public intellectual, suggest types of academic public intellectual, and, hopefully, provoke some reflection. Six points will be made on the topic and the essay will end with a decidedly inconclusive conclu-sion. The focus will be on academics and their relationship to the term “public intellectual,” and cultural studies will be employed as a loose framework for the arguments.KeywordsCultural StudyPublic SpherePublic IntellectualTraditional IntellectualIntellectual WorkThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.