Comments on: Foucault on intellectuals

By: Martin Barnard

Martin Barnard — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 08:14:56 +0000

It sounds like democracy was the brainchild of some ‘universal intellectual’, but the way it is propagated today is indeed far from the ‘universal’ thought. Perhaps it is too much under the influence of the ‘specific intellectual’? Although we have ‘universal’ human rights and the like today, on a specific level power that is immediate can be far more influential than power on a more broader, non-specific level. For example, the power a traditional healer (sangoma) have over the individual who comes for ‘advice’ or ‘treatment’, telling him to cure him from HIV he must have sex with a virgin, as opposed to the power the law have over that same individual telling him not to smoke in a public place or not to speed.

“..with the consequence that today, we witness the functioning of ‘specific intellectuals’ who can no longer claim to be writing, speaking or acting on behalf of all humans.”

Did the functioning of ‘specific intellectuals’ not exist before? For example, was the writing of the Bible, which ended in the particular translation or editions as we have it today, under the influence of writers who were ‘universal’ or ‘specific’? Perhaps the utterances of Jesus all those years ago can be believed to have been ‘universal’, but when it came to the penning of those utterances, the writers’ (Foucauldian) ‘intellectuality’, and those after them, definitely leaves a question in my mind. Then from a different angle, the reading of the Bible in an Apartheid era Dutch Reformed church was indeed far more ‘specific’ than ‘universal’.

“…‘Politics is the continuation of war by other means’”

If Politics is the continuation of war by other means, is sex the continuation of aggression? I suppose it all depends on whether one has a ‘universal’ or ‘specific’ way of making love?

By: Corne du Plessis

Corne du Plessis — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:24:20 +0000

A prominant example of a specific intellectual is the writer Sherry Turkle, who you mentioned in previous articles. Her work concerning technology, especially the internet, and the impact it has on identity is a topic not usually covered in the IT field. She has shown that technology has numerous positive, but also negative effects on the user, and can no longer be regarded as neutral, or a mere tool, in relation to human identity construction. It is apparent from examples such as this that spedific intellectuals can really contribute to a specific field in a much more accurate and applicable manner than universal intellectuals.

By: Jakub Siwak

Jakub Siwak — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 11:00:59 +0000

In light of specific intellectuals being disarmed as a result of the pseudo-hysteric approach adopted by Capitalism, and instances of their work being supressed if it is not beneficial to a Capitalist enterprise, I would think that the personna of universal intellectual should be employed by academics, etc. For instance, former president of the World Bank, Schumacher, makes a number of compelling arguments against the corporate sphere with his usage of rhetoric and his adopting of both specific and universal personnas within his work.

By: K Snodgrass

K Snodgrass — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:08:02 +0000

The disappearance of the universal intellectual. A blessing or a tragedy? I’m not sure. What does interest me are the reasons for it happening. I would prefer a treatise on the subject, but due to time restraints related to work pressure (the same sort of context which prepared the way for the specific intellectual instead)the following loose ideas will have to suffice. (1) Abstraction (looking at parts of the whole only), and resultant idealization proved to be successful heuristic strategies in the scientific domain, and the same seems to be the case in the intellectual domain. First break up thinking on issues in smaller pieces, gain insight, and then put it all together again (in very simple terms). (2) The arrogance of some self-proclaimed philosopher kings without clothing. (3) The realisation that we’re all related in many ways, non-mysterious and even “mysterious”, and one person’s insight is just as “valid” as another’s. (4) A suspicion that universal intellectuals have (tended to) over-complicate matters (“Don’t worry, be happy”). (5) “Ubuntu” (in the craddle of humanity). (6)Foucault’s class structure proposal. A fascinating topic for a doctorate.

What I do know, however, is that all the contributions of specific intellectuals will somehow be synthesized in a universal grammar of human understanding, and that the eventual TOE (the elusive “Theory of Everything”) will be so simple from an aesthetic point of view that it will almost be “self-evident” to all humans. Dreaming or crazy? Decide for yourself.

And who will be the synthesizer? Obviously a neo-universal intellectual of sorts.