Contemporary culture has eliminated the concept and public figure of the intellectual. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled by hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their stupor.
Zer0 Books has a website.
(ZB publish Owen Hatherley's Militant Modernism and Nina Power's One-Dimensional Woman.)
3 comments:
There are plenty of intellectuals about in the media - it's just that most of them don't happen to Marxists. The list of authors at Zer0 seems to lean towards Marxist/socialist writers unless I'm mistaken. Nothing wrong with that of course, but if most of the Zer0 authors have similar opinions on intellectual topics then it does rather dilute the pro-intellectual quote.
Perhaps the quote really means:
Contemporary culture has eliminated the concept and public figure of the Marxist intellectual. A cretinous anti-Marxism presides, cheerled by neoliberal hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored consumers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their stupor and read The Communist Manifesto.
Zer0 Books knows that another kind of discourse - intellectual without being academic
As an aside, what's wrong with being academic?
Not all Zer0 authors are Marxists by any means. David Stubbs isn't, as far as I'm aware, Tariq Goddard certainly isn't, and many of the forthcoming authors (Graham Harman, Adam Kotsko) wouldn't call themselves that either I don't think. There's nothing wrong with being 'academic' per se, though academic work is sometimes rather boringly written and often published in obscure places.
I think the point about academic texts is that, whether well or poorly written, they are not normally intended to provoke the reader to action. Because that's not the rhetoric of academic texts, and this is the form in which we commonly see intellectuals present arguments, the implication is that such arguments need never be acted on - I don't think most academics think that, it's simply an implication of the form. So in adopting a different form Zer0 Books uses a different rhetoric, one which to me aims at energising, empowering the reader: if you are persuaded by the arguments, do something about it! This was what I loved about the manifesto, which I thought was terrific (as are the books I've seen from the press).
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