Intellectuals and Democracy: The Three Figures of Knowledge and Power: Brian C.J. Singer (an Associate Professor in Sociology at Glendon College, York University) wants to take a brief look at what he considers a fairly conventional understanding of what intellectuals are, or ought to be. Quote: >Turn to Edward Said's short book, Representations of the Intellectual (Said, 1996). Without entering into the details of the argument, Said claims that the intellectual is someone who "speaks truth to power." Now the first and most obvious thing to note about this definition is the separation between truth and power that it supposes. There are truth-tellers, i.e., intellectuals, on one side and there are power-holders on the other. The truth-tellers do not have power and the power-holders' primary concern is not with the truth; they may even be positively mendacious. This disjunction of power and truth, or power and knowledge (to nod to the Foucaultian formula), is the central claim of this paper. And no doubt this claim speaks to how intellectuals or would-be intellectuals represent themselves, and represent the duality of their condition. They see themselves as being at a distance from power and, oftentimes, from society itself (Said has much to say about their exiled or marginal condition). Thus they represent themselves as having little influence, and even as having difficulty getting their voices heard. However, this disjunction also speaks to the one "advantage" of the intellectual condition. For the distance from power is compensated by a proximity to truth. Indeed, the one appears to act as surety for the other, the separation from the powers-that-be (or powers-that-would-be), and from their narrow interests and partisan intrigues, appearing as a necessary condition for the intellectual's privileged relation to knowledge. It is this privileged relation, this epistemological advantage, that constitutes the very definition of the intellectual mission: to speak the truth even when most would prefer not to listen because it is tainted by power relations.<
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posted by johannes,
Monday, December 06, 2004
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