Intellectuals in Crisis: Ivory Tower, Urgency and Public Engagement

On Absence and Silence

From the onset of the crisis, a number of articles about intellectuals were published in Greek newspapers, followed by numerous comments and posts throughout the media: “Where have the intellectuals gone? Have they disappeared? Why do they remain silent? Shouldn’t they step up and speak for  ….?”

Insofar as these anxieties about intellectuals have been articulated since 1989 – in relation to the postmodern challenge, the critique of grand narratives [globalization] and the rise of identity politics -- the difficulty in identifying agents of universality is perhaps explicable in terms of the intellectuals’ rootedness in a given historical context, marked in this instance by a specifically Greek particularity.

Along with the articles in newspapers, during the last five years there were many new releases of books about intellectuals, some written by Greek authors and some translated from foreign works. The widely acknowledged absence of intellectuals was mainly attributed to their reluctance to participate in “agenda setting” – that is, the dictation of terms and issues of public debate set by privately owned media (Bakounakis 2010). Since 2010 many things have changed. One is the launching of many new radio stations, e-journals, blogs and e-magazines. This expanded public domain offered opportunities to participants to engage in dialogue and debate, influence the agenda of discussions, and guide public attention towards the issues of the day. 

Of special interest to the scholar of social sciences is the initiation of public discussions about two defining turning points in Greek history: the era of Metapolitesfi, that is, the regime change after the fall of military junta (1967-1974); and the particularities of Greek modernity, traced in the 19^th century, after the revolution of 1821 and the creation of the Greek state. Let it suffice here to note that, to a great extent, the dominant and authoritative/influential approaches to Greek modernity and the 19^th century were produced by a number of young social scientists who, equipped with significant scientific and cultural capital, returned from the universities of Europe and United States to Greece during the 1980s and 1990s. Their dynamic presence made a visible mark on the public sphere, which was created soon after the restoration of democracy. In this sense, it might not be a coincidence that the two historical periods occupying the interest of public debate during the crisis are closely interconnected, since Greek modernity was the principal subject of research of Metapolitefsi’s intellectuals. So, we may assume that the post-Metapolitefsi era became the mirror onto which the 19^th century Ottoman Empire, the 1821 revolution and the formation of the Greek state are reflected, framed, interpreted and understood. And we might perhaps proceed to investigate whether the crisis-era provides the mirror onto which both, the era of Metapolitefsi and the 1821 revolution as a founding event, are nowadays interconnected, reframed and reinterpreted.

The Third Party: From Either-or to Neither-nor

During the autumn semester, at Panteion University, in a postgraduate course under my supervision, our scholarly pursuits and discussions were affected by developments in the broader intellectual and social milieu. This was due, among other factors, to the specific course content focusing on various approaches to the Greek path to modernity in late 20^th century historiography. While discussing the public debate over the above-mentioned turning points in Greek history, the class came up with some remarks – speculations about the form rather than the content of the public debate.

For example, in its very beginning the public discourse about the era of Metapolitefsi, the debate over its meaning and present relevance, is characterized by a polarization of interpretations and of contending claims of truth. At some point of the ongoing heated controversy, a third party, that is, new participants intervened in the field of discussion, suggesting a different frame of interpretation. This intevention questions the polarities around which the controversy is structured: by historicing the past, we could move beyond the pattern of essentialized polarized interpretations and avoid the either-or logic, the idealization or the demonization of Metapolitefsi -- that was the suggestion (Gazi 2014).

The same pattern of polarization can also be found in the debate over Greek modernity and the nature of the 1821 revolution.

The debate provided not only a context for the interpretation of the nature of Greek modernity and identity but also answers to the question of who is to blame for the present crisis and what should be done. The polarization was structured along an opposition between two camps. The one camp offers a story about the heroic attemps made by the carriers of a reformist, western-oriented culture to modernize Greece and recounts the reactions against it. The adversary camp appears as the spokesman of the subaltern groups, the heroic victims of the modernization process, and exalts the nation’s or the people’s resistant character. The crisis era reignited the old and familiar debate over the “two faces of Greece” and the socio-political and cultural struggle between two opposing camps of Greek intellectuals: the spokesmen of Hellenism -- that is, high, elite culture; and the spokesmen of Romiosini -- that is, unofficial, low and popular culture.

Despite the fact that their point of departure is different, the above polarized perspectives on the past seem to have an affinity and share a common narrative pattern. According to both perspectives, Greek history is the story of lost battles, missed opportunities, foiled plans, failed revolutions and reforms, frustrated dreams and hopes.

Although there is another perspective, a historized, relational approach of the 1821 revolution and the formation of Greek society, available in some scholarly works written some years ago (Hering 2004; Dertillis 2004), there seems no room for these insights to be incorporated/accomodated in the public polarized media disussions. So it appears that the public debate is so structured that some voices are more likely to be heard, to be effective and leave a significant mark on social memory and historical consciounsness.

The voice of the third party is very unlikely be heard. Ιts arguments are rather too nuanced to be accommodated in a straightforward yes-no answer; it does not seek an answer to a socio-political problem, but rather the clarification and the understanding of a historical-sociological problem. Ιts style of reasoning has rather destabilizing effects on polemical exchanges and it weakens the oppositional terms, that is, the black and white identity thinking, which is promoted and reproduced by participants in the conflict. However, the third party is not disinterested, uncommitted or disengaged; we should not consider it as a kind of neutral interlocutor, the holder of a middle position, who intervenes in the debate to renconcile the conflicting camps, to resolve the conflict and synthesize their contradictions into a harmonious whole.

The third party is rather engaged with a different mode of approaching the history of the present. The main features of this perpective could be defined negatively:

• It does not eliminate the ambiguities of history, the ambivalent nature of modernity in general, or the ambivalences of Greek modernity in particular.
• It does not limit its cognitive interest within the immediate present, the digital now.
• Its mode of reasoning is not polemical.
• Its tempo is not imposed by the fast cultures of politics, business and media.

A positive definition of this perspective would be minimal: if it has a purpose, it is rather modest and self-limiting; its primary aim is not to shape public opinion and master the future but rather to cultivate the faculty of judgement.

Engaged to High Speed

Either imported from the media and the field of politics into academia or exported from academia to the public field, heated controversies and polemics embrace, produce, reproduce and disseminate the dominant cultural trend, the fast culture, the culture  of high speed. Think fast is the motto of experts on management, business and communications studies and courses which advertise the skills of the effective leaders who will shape the future.

Seen within this context, the paradox which seems to accompany the movement for public engagement and the call to social sciences to step out  of the Ivory Tower could, to some extent, be explained. Although the findings of social sciences are rapidly being disseminated to an increasingly wider audience, the desired goal, that is, the enhancement of social and historical self- awareness, seems far from being achieved.

Engaged to high speed are also the managerial imperatives of the so called Engaged university. Under the provocative title “Disinterested, Disengaged, Useless”, Gregory McLennan’s (2008) article offers a short, critical appraisal of the current Engagement talk and the concomitant “managerial ideologies of institutional commitement”, while questioning its progressiveness: “University leaders and heads of department seem to swell up with self-satisfaction as they report how their institution or unit has kickstarted an Engagement ‘initiative’ or delivered on an Engagement ‘project’ that takes academics out of their cocooned study and into the real world. This demonstrates, apparently, that we are taking our ‘responsibilities to society’ very seriously indeed” [195].

The main issue here is not so much the rejection of the “present relevance” maxim or the engagement project per se.  What is under question is to whom one has to be relevant and who “it is exactly that we are engaging with, and to what end” [196]. McLennan suggests that one possible response to the current difficult situation could be inspired by the liberal idea of university -- the intrinsic value of knowledge for its own sake. Although the ideal of liberal education has been criticized for its elitism, that is, as a “lofty ethic” only “available to a small minority”, the author believes that the time has come for this ideal to be real for all and, thus, become progressive: “in conditions of substantial, if not perhaps mass, higher education, the retension of that traditional image becomes a progressive move, because ‘higher’ understanding, apropos of nothing, is (envisageably) available to all” [199].

Dick Pels in Unhastening Science approaches the problem of involment and detachment with a different set of questions and concerns. The dinstictive character of social sciences, that is, what makes them differ from the managerial and enterpreneurial ethos, from the domain of politics as well as the media and journalist field, is a decelerating tempo, a distinct temporality –neither fast, nor slow – yet marked by the “absence of haste”; this modality of timing secures and preserves the “critical decelaration of thought and action” -- this is the key argument of the study [Pels 2003, 45]. Pels’ study provokes us not only to be critical but also self-reflexive; that is, his arguments enable us to take stock of the present, to reflect on our own every day lives and experiences and to consider which one of the various time and spatial frames of thinking and writing is reproduced via our agency and through our own practices. He  eschews polemics in favour of slow conversations.

For a fuller elaboration of this argument please see Eleni's Academia page.

Eleni Andriakaina,  Athens - March 2015

References

• Bakounakis, Nicos. “Οι ‘Άχρηστοι’ Διανοούμενοι” [The ‘Useless’ Intellectuals]”, Το Βήμα [To Vima], 19-03-2010.
• Dertilis, George. History of the Greek State (1830-1920), I-II, Hestia, Athens 2004.
• Gazi, Effi. “Να Ιστορικοποιήσουμε τη Μεταπολίτευση [Historicizing Metapolitefsi]”- METAPOLITEFSI (Strikes Back), Chronos 15 (July 2014)
• Hering, Gunnar. Τα Πολιτικά Κόμματα στην Ελλάδα , 1821-1936 [Political Parties in Greece], Α ́- Β’, ΜΙΕΤ, Athens 2004.
• McLennan, Gregor. “Disinterested, disengaged, useless: Conservative or progressive idea of the University”, in Globalization, Societies and Education, 6, 2 (2008), 195-200.
• Pels, Dick. Unhastening Science. Autonomy and Reflexivity in the Social Theory of Knowledge, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool 2003