INTELLECTUALS & THE DIVISION OF LABOR--SARTRE ET AL

[Ralph Dumain]

Thanks, Doug, for your response.  Your retrospective evaluation confirms the
impression you gave in your web essay on the future of the intellectuals.
I'm not going to try to strong-arm you into more of a response than you are
prepared to give, but I did not see any confirmation or disconfirmation of
my suspicions concerning Sartre.  I am quite prepared to discover that I am
wrong about him.  I deliberately worded my suspicions in the most
provocative manner in the hopes of eliciting a definitive response.

At 03:30 PM 7/1/97 -0500, kellner@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu wrote:
>As for Sartre's Maoism, it was but intellectual fashion, to be
>ultra-revolutionary, gauchiste, plus gauchiste que gauchiste, etc that
>appears quaint and amusing today--though not really Stalinist, Sartre's
>Maoism was always anti-party, anti-state, anti-bureaucracy and not that
>different from James' Trotskyism in relation to the role of workers...

Other than pretentiousness and getting caught up in the spirit of the time,
I wondered if there was not something else, characteristic of many
intellectuals regardless of Sartre.  Though I have never seen any analysis
of such a tendency in print, half-educated lout that I am, some time ago I
discerned a two-stage process in the history of bourgeois thought.  The
first stage is the triumphant, self-confident march of REASON, where
rationality is identified with the existing or a rising order, and the
intellectual has utmost confidence in himself as the arbiter of reason.  The
second, decadent stage comes when the intellectual recognizes that brute
force and not reason rules the world, and then he does an about-face,
mortifying his intellect, and masochistically denigrating the very capacity
that he has made his business to build up.  This is a peculiarly
intellectual anti-intellectualism.  (Actually, I just discovered that Adorno
was very alert to the dynamics of this second stage, though I don't know
that he explicitly links these two phases as I do.)  Existentialism is one
outstanding example of this stage of decline, which is where Sartre enters
the picture, following the arch-criminal Heidegger.  (Postmodernism is
another example).  This is what James called "self-centered despair", and he
was never any part of this.  There is no self-mortification involved in
calling for the abolition of the intellectual class; the conditions of
possibility for such is a matter for a future discussion.  Anyway, I was
concerned to know whether Sartre could be seen as fitting this pattern that
troubles me so.

>In retrospect, Marcuse's skepticism to Sartre's ultraMaoism appears
>correct from hindsite, but I think this skepticism is typical of the
>Frankfurt School which was one of the first to question the classical
>Marxian doctrine of the revolutionary nature of the proletariat in state
>and monopoly capitalism--a position that James and Dunayevskya 
>and other neo-Trotskyists always opposed....

Given the ambiguous syntax of this phrasing, I just want to check your
meaning here.  I take you to assert:

James and Dunayevskaya (Johnson-Forest) opposed the skepticism of the
Frankfurters,

NOT:

They opposed the classical Marxian doctrine of the proletariat's
revolutionary nature....

If I've got you right, then you are correct, sir.  James was influenced by
REASON AND REVOLUTION in 1941, but in the 1960s James once expressed the
desire to debate Marcuse, deeming him a damnable reactionary for his doubts
about the working class.

>So, yes, my 1974 review of Sartre appears naive from historical
>perspective which is why in my more recent article on intellectuals I took
>Sartre as representative of a classical conception of the bourgeois albeit
>radical intellectual which needed to be rethought and transcended. In
>fact, I never really endorsed Sartre's Maoism, I just thought it was an
>interesting step in his itinery and indeed still think it is, though it
>now appears as a quaint curiousity...

I'd hate to be held accountable now for what I thought in 1974.  But I do
think the issue is more than one of quaint curiosity, since there are
reasons which seemed plausible at the time for which we were suckered into
thinking the way we did, reasons which could surface, albeit in different
form, time and time again, and do more mischief.

>Enough for now,
>Doug Kellner

As you wish.  Thanks again.

Since this is still the Frankfurt School list, as Phil Donahue would say,
I'm still game to learn of more relevant references on intellectuals in the
division of labor, beyond the several references to Adorno already given.