The Anti-Intellect or, Why Theorywankers Piss Me Off You meet them at loft parties in Brooklyn, or outside the Film Forum. They are young and most likely English or Film majors. They are universally apolitical. They are, or rather fancy themselves, the heirs of Bohemia and the Left Bank, and yet they are slavish in their devotion to the ideas of the past. Meet the Intellectual, who's forte is not the exploration of the mind, but the mastery of syntax. I should begin by pointing out that many of these self-styled Intellectuals are my friends, and I, for the most part, like them. They are decent people who happen to feel that a conversation is much deeper when it employs words like "meta", "post-structuralism" and "binaries". This doesn't make them bad people, exactly but, after years of enduring their tortured self-involved discourses on how my love of apple pie is a gastronomic dialectic between knee-jerk patriotism and oppressed self-oppression, I feel like I must speak out in defense of knowledge, wisdom and intellectual curiosity, the latter of which is the true enemy of the Intellectual. It is not the Intellectuals fault that they are self-absorbed, unoriginal and convoluted in their ability to reason. They are the children of post-structuralists like Lacan, Derrida and Foucault (pictured above). Post-Structuralism, for those who hate "isms", is essentially a reaction to Structuralism, which posited binary relations as the keys to understanding meaning (ie: good is good only in relation to bad). Post-structuralism set the stage for my Intellectual friends by arguing that meaning is always shifting and mutable, which is not necessarily a wrong idea in itself, but given to an undergraduate literature or film major who dives in to say, Derrida's On Grammatology, without ever having read Plato, and the meaning of the post-structuralist writer becomes convoluted (irony! ha!) and you have a bunch of theory-wankers sitting around thinking they're brilliant when they're not really saying anything at all. The problem with the Intellectual is that they are true Platonists without holding themselves up to the mental rigors and standards of a philosopher. They have made the fatal mistake of trying to apply an a priori system of logic to the real world. Their discussions, which sound deep when filled with an arsenal of carefully learned terms, are mere tautologies, often self-evident ones at that; which is to say nicely, their just engaging in mental masturbation. It wouldn't be so bad, if they were simply misguided, but the Intellectual (and the Intellectual is always in italics, you see), has no real interest in knowledge, wisdom or learning. They use the symbols of the intellect, but know none of its meaning. They have no use for such things at all. Their primary goal is simply to assert themselves as superior, and do so by adopting an arcane knowledge of specific vocabulary, and though they speak it pidgin, since the outsider is not in on the code, nobody is the wiser. These are the same folks who learn the most obscure bands, films and books joylessly, memorizing details not out of a love or passion for the work, but out of a desire to use this knowledge to gain the upper-hand in any debate. "Oh, you haven't seen The Three Thistlebrock Sisters Project?", says The Intellectual. "Well you really need to see it. Then you'll understand what I'm talking about." It's this tactic that The Intellectual employs time and time again, and his or her victim has no recourse but to feel as if they are simply not cultured enough. A true Intellectual would never do any of those things. He would constantly ask questions and often admit to not knowing. She would be curious about what others thought and also about how much she really knows. He would realize that if you can not paraphrase an idea in your own words then you truly do not know it. Relying on the language of the past does not make you a leading light of your age, but a dim fading candle to be blown out by the winds of the past. The Intellectual is the modern day Anti-Stratfordian, believing that no idea can really be useful unless it is gussied up in noble foppery. Just at the Anti-Stratfordian believes it is impossible that Shakespeare was commoner, the Intellectual refuses to believe that any idea that has not been codified is worthwhile. Like all true aesthetes, their code of view is expressed not in ideas, but in their clothes, the things they own and the places they love. They are suburban kids making poverty into a pose, not only denying their own perfectly mulched and fertilized sod heritage, but making a mockery out of the lower classes they appropriate, gentrify and oppress. They call themselves artists but create nothing. Their art, such that it is, seeks out the original and criticizes it, generalizes it and make sit the object of their scorn through the tired "lens" of irony. How many young saplings have the Intellectuals crushed in their effort to turn the Earth into an intellectual mega-mall parking lot? There must be a better way. For the Intellectual it may be too late, but do not let their pretension and insecurity stymie the rest of our minds. They have made their secret club; let the rest of us have open and lively talks, filled with passion and not pretense, dynamic differences and not dogma and new ideas, rather than the garbled echo of minds past. Let us view fellow men and women not as significations of our own psyche, but rather as living beings of heart and mind and work towards a community of open doors where past and present mingle to make future. I have no use for the dry pages of dust which have shackled my Intellectual friends. I seek the living word. Note: This blog has been updated since it was first posted

posted by Japhy at 7/26/2003 09:05:00 AM || #