Language and Limitations: Toward a New Praxis of Public Intellectualism

Abstract

We first became invested in debates about public intellectualism during the creation of Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion, a digital journal and web forum dedicated to fostering public conversations about everyday rhetoric.1 Frustrated by the systemic iso-lation of scholarly publication and its exclusionary language, we found inspiration in calls for the public intellectual, one who seeks communion with a broader audience with the aim of raising the collective, critical consciousness. We were energized by Edward Said’ s fierce spirit and speech about public intellectualism, especially the particular brand of vitriol he reserved for academics that retreat into the insularity of “special private languages of criticism” (Viswanathan 176). Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion was our effort to resist the temptations and pressures of what Said labeled a “cult of professionalism” (“Response” 373). The fashionable academic stance of being misunderstood held no glory; to choose this way of life is to avoid, as Henry Giroux puts it, “the vocabulary for understanding and questioning how dominant authority worked through and on institutions, social relations, and individuals” (5). The public intellectual strives against this detachment, Said argued, by confronting injustice and the “normalized quiet of unseen power” wherever it may exist, in a vernacular that reaches beyond a circle of specialist peers (“Public”).KeywordsPublic SphereAcademic DiscoursePublic IntellectualismIntellectual InquiryRhetorical TheoryThese 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.