Jorge Castillo, Payaso/ The Clown (Oil on canvas: 188 x 147 cm, 1957)
“The scholar is the delegated intellect.
In the right state, he is, Man Thinking.
In the degenerate state, he tends to become a mere thinker,
or, still worse,
the parrot of other men’s thinking.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar
“Intellectuals against academics” is indeed an unusual rhapsody. It contains notes and aphorisms, a biographical narrative and an interview, a series of paintings, as well as gossip, and a full essay, even a class paper with its necessary ironic comments on the judgments of an arrogant professor, and last but not least a regular academic paper which nevertheless was brutally attacked by departmental heads when presented as a PhD defense. It is a deliberately unfinished and miscellaneous collection of analysis, statements, paintings, critiques, jokes, and expressions. They are born in a Spanish&Portuguese Department, and these departments, needless to say, are traditional fortresses of banality, authoritarianism and ignorance in the American academic system. Our contributions represent something more than a rejection of the hermeneutical narrowness of Hispanism. They represent a radical and critical position towards an intellectually voided academic life -- or rather academic death. The main purpose of the literary experiments advanced in this packet as a departing point of a wider intellectual project is to break the power of prejudice and stupidity, and to disrupt the bureaucratic surveillance of an academic professionalism reduced to the reproduction of obsolete jargon in the sacred name of an empty science.
The original title to this collection of writings was “Intellectuals and Academics.” Its approach was subtle, signaling differences between thinking and teaching, between critical analysis and a departmentally surveyed production of knowledge, and last but not least between literature and creative writing. We sent it to a scholarly Hispanist web page for publication. The answer we received was somehow predictable, and exemplary: “We regret to inform you that… we have decided not to publish “Intellectuals and Academics.” After careful reading and consideration, the editorial team agreed that the volume you submitted offers a perspective which is sometimes suggestive but is, all in all, too narrow, as it mainly portrays one specific university department. Another concern are the ad hominem attacks included.” Questioning the limits of human rights and academic jargon in an age of mass deceit and mass destruction, the refusal of scholasticism in an era of ritualistic deconstruction and academic “letrados,” and the critique of the institutional demolition of free, autonomous and socially responsible intellectualism, together with the censorship of bibliographies and restrictive fields may be “sometimes suggestive,” but it is after all just a local problem. For the rest, to challenge the trivialization and commercialization of literature, to object to the lack of an authentic humanistic perspective in the human sciences, to question the perverse departmental marriage of a poor if not absent literary criticism with literary mediocrity as starting point of a creative writing program, and to oppose professionalism as an alibi to repress any relevant intellectual, existential, and spontaneous confrontation of the dilemmas of a world wide civilizational crisis is an “ad hominem attack.”
We should bear in mind that the reflection on the organizational and institutional mediations of routine reproduction of “normal” knowledge, and the systematic critique of intellectually empty jargon and the procedures of its administration are the necessary conditions for any critical analysis of textual, and non-textual realities. Such an approach does not engage the abstract “objective” discourses of professional postintellectuals, but rather our entire existence.
Eduardo Subirats
New York, December 24, 2009