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标题: Journal: The new intellectuals (学术刊物：新知识分子) [打印本页]
作者: clamstock    时间: 2009-5-13 20:06     标题: Journal: The new intellectuals (学术刊物：新知识分子)

Journal: The new intellectuals  Posted by John Stoehr on Wed, Nov 21, 2007 at 4:57 PM

I'm going to attempt another of those free-wheeling posts in which I try to make some connections among articles, ideas and writers I've been reading lately. What I hope to accomplish is the beginning of a proposal, a modest call for attention, to establish a new conversation about intellectuals, those who think and feel something is not right in world of art, literature and creativity.
A menu of possible assertions:
1. Intellectuals need to talk less with each other and more to everyone else
2. Scientists have taken the traditional place of the public intellectual
3. Intellectuals need to re-establish the self-evident reality of objective truth
4. As newspapers recede, and the traditional hubs of intellectual activity recede with them, a new grassroots movement of intellectuals is needed to take its place.


Act 1: Theoretical bullshit

I'll start with something that I've returned to often (here and here and here, for instance): the disconcerting intellectual phenomenon that asserts that there is no such thing as objective reality, that epistemology is subjective, that facts are conditional.
I suppose I keep writing about it because without an fundamental agreement about what truth is -- and for that matter, what constitutes deception, equivocation, obfuscation, bullshit and outright lies -- how can we as critics, as mere human beings, accomplish much that is constructive, meaningful and significant?
Please don't get me wrong. I lean left, not right. I'm not trying to defend the high walls of Western Civilization. In fact, I argue that intellectuals need to re-establish the self-evident reality of objective truth as someone once ensconced in the Ivory Tower.
During my time at the University of Cincinnati, I became indoctrinated by literary critical theory. I came to believe in the postmodern condition of American culture. I believed in my ability to "read" anything like a "text," even non-semantic things like fashion, architecture and medical procedures. I suspected Enlightenment ideals like Reason and Truth were vestiges of imperial European colonization. Every subject -- whether porn, pulp fiction, romance novels, comic books -- all boiled down cynically to struggles for political and social power.
While I am grateful for postmodernism as a strategy for dismantling, or deconstructing, formerly entrenched ways of thinking, it's no humanist philosophy. There's little concern for people in it; there's little concern for morality in it. While postmodernist readings of, say, advertisements for Marlboro cigarettes (which I smoked) made "logical" sense, I felt that at its heart, postmodernism was a game of rhetoric, an argument over words and their struggle for meaning.
I left class many, many times feeling a kind of existential disorientation, a kind of out-of-body experience caught between a world constructed by language and a language that's always indeterminate. Hence, the world was indeterminate, like an illusion. If the world is indeterminate, possessing no ontological center independent of human consciousness, authoritative truth matters very little. Instead of one truth, there were many truths, with one being just as "good" as the other.
This kind of thinking is not exclusive to universities, or to people interested in and sensitive to intellectual inquiry. This postmodern relativism has trickled down to popular culture as well. Consider the book "Thank You For Smoking," Christopher Buckley's brilliant 1995 parody of Big Tobacco's downfall. The main character, Nick Naylor, is a master of postmodern relativism. No matter how much he was guilty of the sins of spin, by the judgment-free rules of postmodernism (it's a descriptive strategy, not proscriptive), his truth is as valid as any other, even if it's destructive bullshit.
And even if this kind of thinking is becoming passé in academe, which it is, it's influence lingers beyond the hallowed halls. Consider this response to our dearly departed Molly Ivins, who had offered one last cautionary tale about letting the amateur efforts of bloggers be confused with the professional, gritty and pain-in-the-ass tenacity of beat reporters. This reader was responding to Ivins' suggestion that bloggers try their hand at reporting a highway accident, just to see how difficult, challenging and rewarding determining the truth can be.

"If there is no objective truth, but only subjective truth (hence your five-car pile-up analogy) -- then what difference does it make if someone was a reporter or not? I am able to state subjective truth at a moment's notice -- it's always true for me!"


Act 2: The sins of our intellectuals

I don't think that it's overstating the case when I say that this kind of thinking is the result of academics and other intellectuals abandoning objective truth. And this attitude doesn't stop with fiction and the cranky comments of a Molly Ivins fan.
Harry G. Frankfurt, the moral philosopher formerly at Princeton, said the attitude is ubiquitous among a great many writers, artists and intellectuals in his 2005 treatise titled "On Truth," a follow-up to his bestselling book, "On Bullshit." In it, he said that "we live in a time when, strange to say, many quite cultivated individuals consider truth to be unworthy of any particular respect. ... this attitude -- or, indeed, a more extreme version of it -- has become disturbingly widespread even within what might naively have been thought to be a more reliable class of people."
He continued:

"Numerous unabashed skeptics and cynics about the importance of truth ... have been found among best-selling and prize-winning authors, among writers for leading newspapers, and among hitherto respected historians, biographers, memoirists, theorists of literature, novelists -- and even among philosophers ...

And:

"These shameless antagonists of common sense -- members of a certain emblematic subgroup call themselves 'postmodernists' -- rebelliously and self-righteously deny that truth has any genuinely objective reality at all. They therefore go on to deny that truth is worthy of any obligatory deference or respect. ... the postmodernists' view is that in the end the assignment of those entitlements is just up for grabs. It is simply a matter, as they say, of how you look at it."

In other words, it seems the intellectuals have failed us.
How can we talk about issues, debate points of view, engage in any kind of public conversation if there is no agreement on reality independent of human whim, desire, interest, folly, fear and ignorance? The intellectuals are suppose to talk about our country's important issues. Instead, for the past 30 years, they've turned inward, addressed themselves, left the pulpit to the pundits and undermined our ability to talk coherently, objectively and constructively about the things that matter most.
The failure of the intellectuals, some say, has lead to America's cultural and political decline. Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, noted in a widely read speech to graduates at Stanford University in June that such decline has occurred even as our economy has flourished and renewed itself since the '60s.

" ... surely artists and intellectuals are partly to blame. Most American artists, intellectuals, and academics have lost their ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture."

Gioia continued:

"This mutual estrangement has had enormous cultural, social, and political consequences. America needs its artists and intellectuals, and they need to reestablish their rightful place in the general culture. If we could reopen the conversation between our best minds and the broader public, the results would not only transform society but also artistic and intellectual life."

In 1963, the novelist and chemist C.P. Snow wrote a book that provided a vision of just the kind of intellectual transformation that Gioia talks about. It was called "The Two Cultures: A Second Look," a follow-up to his 1959 book "The Two Cultures." In the first book, Snow talked about the division between literary intellectuals and scientists, how each didn't understand the other. In the second book, he envisioned a middle way, a "third culture" that was a consensus in which intellectuals talked with scientists, scientists to intellectuals, feeding the expertise and creativity of each other.
But that never happened.


Act 3: Being replaced by scientists

"The traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost."
Those are the words of John Brockman, author, impresario and book agent for Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, writing on his website, Edge. Note such words as "reactionary," "nonempirical," "the real world gets lost."
In 1996, Alan Sokal did something that illustrated just how far the real world had gotten lost in the hyper-jargon of literary theory. A physicist at New York University, Sokal submitted a paper to Social Text, an academic journal devoted to the discussion of postmodern literary theory. In it, he argued that quantum gravity is a social construction with profound political implications.
In other words, it was utter nonsense. I'm not really sure I've paraphrased the paper well. But it doesn't matter, because the point is that Social Context thought he was serious, lending credence to suspicions that such things as honesty and truth don't matter. As Sokal wrote in an article in Lingua Franca explaining his "experiment":

In the first paragraph I deride "the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook": that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in "eternal"' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the "objective'" procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.

Why did Sokal do this? To make a point:

... What concerns me is the proliferation, not just of nonsense and sloppy thinking per se, but of a particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective realities, or (when challenged) admits their existence but downplays their practical relevance. At its best, a journal like Social Text raises important questions that no scientist should ignore -- questions, for example, about how corporate and government funding influence scientific work. Unfortunately, epistemic relativism does little to further the discussion of these matters.


In short, my concern over the spread of subjectivist thinking is both intellectual and political. Intellectually, the problem with such doctrines is that they are false (when not simply meaningless). There is a real world; its properties are not merely social constructions; facts and evidence do matter. What sane person would contend otherwise? And yet, much contemporary academic theorizing consists precisely of attempts to blur these obvious truths -- the utter absurdity of it all being concealed through obscure and pretentious language.


Social Text's acceptance of my article exemplifies the intellectual arrogance of Theory -- meaning postmodernist literary theory -- carried to its logical extreme. No wonder they didn't bother to consult a physicist. If all is discourse and "text,'' then knowledge of the real world is superfluous; even physics becomes just another branch of Cultural Studies. If, moreover, all is rhetoric and "language games,'" then internal logical consistency is superfluous too: a patina of theoretical sophistication serves equally well. Incomprehensibility becomes a virtue; allusions, metaphors and puns substitute for evidence and logic. My own article is, if anything, an extremely modest example of this well-established genre.

Postmodernism had already been under attack by right-wing jeremiahs like Alan Bloom in "The Closing of the American Mind." What Sokal's experiment showed, however, was that postmodernism is not just a tool for exposing the power structures of the status quo, to be naturally attacked by defenders of that power, but also, at its core, a poor and perhaps even harmful foundation for intellectual inquiry.
While the editors of Social Context, including the luminous scholar Andrew Ross, author of the near-impenetrable tome, "No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture," were busy accepting a hoax as serious scholarship, John Brockman was getting to work communicating with real people about things that really matter.
According to this piece in the London Guardian titled "The new age of ignorance," Brockman has done more than anyone to break down C.P. Snow's divide. But instead of encouraging literary intellectuals to communicate with scientists and then in turn communicate what they find to an engaged, educated reading public, Brockman has devised a "Third Culture" that doesn't need any help thanks.
"'The Third Culture' consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are," he writes on his website, Edge.
He continued:

The role of the intellectual includes communicating. Intellectuals are not just people who know things but people who shape the thoughts of their generation. An intellectual is a synthesizer, a publicist, a communicator. In his 1987 book "The Last Intellectuals," the cultural historian Russell Jacoby bemoaned the passing of a generation of public thinkers and their replacement by bloodless academicians. He was right, but also wrong. The third-culture thinkers are the new public intellectuals.

In short, the scientists don't need the intellectuals anymore.
They're doing it themselves.
The Guardian article also notes that Ian McEwan is one of the few novelists to contribute to the Edge's ongoing debates and that he suggests the project is not so far removed from the "old Enlightenment dream of a unified body of knowledge, when biologists and economists draw on each other's concepts and molecular biologists stray into the poorly defended territory of chemists and physicists."
Why can't literary and aesthetic intellectuals talk like this anymore?


Act 4: The new intellectuals

Brockman, via the Edge and the Edge Reality Club, a kind of scientist's salon, is doing wonders for advancing the national conversation about science and scientific thinking. There are more magazines devoted science than ever more, more hunger for science and more books about science, even some that advance atheism.
But what about the literary and aesthetic intellectuals? What about them? They are around, but their influence seems to be shrinking even more drastically thanks to shrinking exposure given to them by Big Media, especially newspapers.
Book sections have traditionally been the forum for such conversations and we all know where these are going: newspapers in LA, Chicago, Minneapolis, Raleigh and Atlanta have all either sacked their books editors, reduced their book pages, consolidated them or even moved them from their historical place on Sundays.
Newspapers, in short, are not going to cut it. So what to do?
Perhaps an answer can be found in a new grassroots publication in Connecticut. Called the New Haven Review of Books, the publication is the result of numerous writers in that city who believe someone has to pick up where the newspapers have left off.
As Mark Oppenheimer, a former editor of the New Haven Advocate and author of "Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture," writes, these are times that require innovative thinking by innovative people who live just about everywhere, not just in LA and New York.

In an age of shrinking book-review holes in newspapers, we're going to have to find new ways to get the word out about great books. Some of those ways will be local, and small in scale. We may never publish another issue of the New Haven Review (our motto is "Published Annually at Most"), but by just publishing once, we've made a statement in support of literary culture. Wouldn't it be cool if other small- and medium-sized towns -- Austin, Des Moines, Albany, etc. -- decided they wanted local book reviews, too? [italics mine] Maybe such reviews would feature local writers doing the reviewing, the way ours does, or maybe they would feature reviews of books by local authors. Either way, they would be reminders that major urban publications do not have to be the sole instruments for book reviewing.


And that leads us to the second statement that even one issue of a small, local book review makes: there are writers everywhere. Just here in New Haven and the surrounding towns we managed to round up Alice Mattison, Bruce Shapiro, Debby Applegate, Deirdre Bair, Jim Sleeper, Amy Bloom, and a couple dozen other greats. Many of us have never even met one another. We don't have a literary "scene" in this modest city; there is no cocktail-party circuit. But there are writers.


This model won't replace the big-city, big-time book reviews; we still need them. And unless some angel comes along to fund another issue, this may be the last you hear of the New Haven Review of Books. But we're in an age of renewed attention to localism and regionalism, and book reviews -- like farmers' markets, or even local currencies -- can do their part.

Localism and regionalism: Where to find the new literary and aesthetic intellectuals.
作者: clamstock    时间: 2009-5-13 20:06

学术刊物：新知识分子

约翰•斯特尔 著 吴万伟 译


　刊发时间：2008-01-04 11:42:04　光明网-光明观察




　　我想尝试另外一种随心所欲的工作，可以在最近看过的文章、观点和作家间建立联系。我希望达成的目标是在知识分子间建立新型对话机制的谦卑呼吁，这只是建议的开头。他们认识到或者感觉到在艺术、文学和创造性的世界里可能出了一些毛病。  

　　可能建议的菜单：

　　1．知识分子相互之间要少说点，多与其他人交流。

　　2．科学家已经取代公共知识分子的传统地位。

　　3．知识分子需要重新明确客观真理明显的现实性。

　　4．随着报纸的衰落，知识分子活动的传统中心随之消退，需要知识分子的新草根运动取代其位置。  


　　议案一：理论屁话

　　我首先要讨论随后还要再多次谈到的让人忧心的观念（比如这里，这里，这里）：认识论是主观的，事实是有条件的，没有所谓的客观现实性。  

　　我觉得不断写文章谈论真理是因为没有了关于真理是什么的根本共识，那么什么构成欺骗、推诿、模糊、屁话甚至明目张胆地扯谎呢？我们作为批评家，甚至作为人如何能完成建设性的、有意义的、和有价值的东西呢？  

　　不要误会我的意思。我是左派，不是右派。我不是要试图为西方文明的高墙辩护。实际上，我认为知识分子需要重新明确客观真理明显的现实性，这个从前隐藏在象牙塔里的友人。  

　　我在辛辛那提大学上学期间，被灌输了各色文学批评理论。我开始相信美国文化的后现代状态。我相信自己有能力“阅读”任何“文本”，甚至非语义的东西比如时尚、建筑和医疗程序。我怀疑启蒙时代的理想比如理性和真理都是帝国时代欧洲殖民主义的残余。任何一门学科不管是色情文学、低级黄色小说、浪漫故事、喜剧等都可以归结为争夺政治和社会权力的斗争。  

　　尽管我感谢曾经处于支配地位的后现代主义的拆除或者解构策略，但是它决不是人道主义的哲学。因为里面很少有对人的关心，很少有对道德的关心。虽然后现代主义者对万宝路香烟广告（我在抽的烟）的解读可能有“逻辑”上的道理，但是我在内心觉得后现代主义是文字游戏，争论的是文字而不是意义。  

　　许多次从课堂中出来我都感觉到无所适从，漂浮于语言建造的世界和不确定的语言体系之间，有一种灵魂出窍的体验，因此，世界是不确定的，就像一个幻觉。如果世界不确定，没有独立于人类意识的本体论中心，权威性的真理就没有多大的意义。不是有一个真理存在，而是有许多的真理，其中任何一个真理都和其他真理一样“好”。  

　　这种思维方式并不仅限于大学或者对思想探索敏感或感兴趣的人。这种后现代的相对主义已经渗透到大众文化中。想想《谢谢你抽烟》这本书，克里斯托弗·伯克利（Christopher Buckley）在1995年对于“大烟草”（美国三大烟草公司的昵称）垮台的精彩嘲弄。其中的主人公尼克·奈勒（Nick Naylor）是后现代相对主义的大师。不管他对于抽烟的罪恶感到多么内疚，按照不加判断的后现代主义原则（这是描述性的策略，不是规定性的）其真理性和任何其他的真理具有同等的合法性，即便它是破坏性的狗屁理论。  

　　即使这样的思维在学术界成为昨日黄花，确实如此，它的影响仍然回荡在空荡荡的大厅。考虑一下读者对于可爱的、刚刚过世的莫莉·伊文斯（Molly Ivins）的评论。该作家曾经写过一个有警告意味的故事，让博客的外行的努力和路线新闻记者的专业、勇敢、和坚忍不拔混淆起来。伊文斯建议让博客试图报道高速公路车祸，只是要看看确定真相是多么困难、多么有挑战性、多么有收获。对此，读者的评论是：  

　　“如果没有客观真相，只有主观真相（因此有你的五辆车堆在一起的比喻）那么，一个人是记者或者不是记者又有多大差异呢？我可以立刻发表主观的真相，它对于我来说总是真实的。”  


　　

　　议案二：知识分子的罪恶

　　在我看来，说这种思维方式是大学教授和其他知识分子放弃客观真理的恶果决非夸张的言论。这样的态度并不局限于小说或伊文斯爱好者的古怪和愚蠢的评论。  

　　曾在普林斯顿大学工作的道德哲学家哈里·法兰克福（Ha
rry G. Frankfurt）说这种态度在他的畅想书《屁话考》（On Bullshit）（请参阅相关文章《学术中国》“学术周刊”2005年4月B）http://www.xschina.org/show.php?id=3604以及“想说什么说什么”《天益网》2005年8月http://www.tecn.cn/data/detail.php?id=8407）的续篇2005年《论真理》的专著中说在众多的作家，艺术家和知识分子中是无所不在的。他说到“让人奇怪的是，我们生活在这样一个时代，许多受过良好教育的个人认为真理并不值得特别尊重，这样的态度，或者更加极端的版本，已经让人忧虑地泛滥、蔓延到本来被天真地认为更加可靠的群体中。”  

　　他继续说，“人们发现，对真理重要性采取不加掩饰的怀疑和玩世不恭的嘲弄态度的众多人包括出版过畅销书、赢得过大奖的作家，主流大报的专栏作家，受人尊重的历史学家，传记作家，回忆录作家，文学理论家和小说家，甚至哲学家。”  

　　“这些反对常识的无耻者，即自称‘后现代主义者’标志性群体的成员，叛逆性地认为他们否认真理内在的客观现实性是正确的，继而否认真理值得任何有约束性的服从或者尊重。后现代主义者的观点是这些标签的分配终究只是用来待价而沽的。正如他们所说，关键看你怎么看。”  

　　换句话说，知识分子辜负了人们的期望。

　　如果没有关于不受人的冲动、欲望、兴趣、愚蠢、恐惧和无知限制的真理性的一致意见，我们如何讨论问题、辩论观点、从事任何形式的公共对话呢？知识分子应该是谈论我们国家重大问题的人。相反，在过去30年里，他们转向内心，转向他们自身，把布道坛留给专家，破坏了我们连贯、客观、公正、建设性地谈论最关心的事务的能力。  

　　有人说知识分子的失职导致了美国文化和政治的衰落。全国艺术基金会主席达纳·乔欧亚（Dana Gioia）今年6月在斯坦福大学毕业典礼上的著名演讲（请参阅“用复杂的、挑战性的快乐取代轻松的快乐”《学术中国》“学术周刊”2007年7月B http://www.xschina.org/show.php?id=10078）中提到这样的衰落已经出现，甚至在60年代我们的经济繁荣和复兴的时候就已经开始。  

　　“当然，艺术家和知识分子应该承担部分责任。大部分的艺术家，知识分子，和大学教授已经失去了与社会其他人对话的能力。我们变成相互之间交流的精彩专家，对于普通大众而言，我们的声音和形象却消失了。”  

　　乔欧亚继续说“这种相互陌生已经产生巨大的文化、社会、和政治后果。美国需要艺术家和知识分子，他们需要重新确定自己在大众文化中的适当地位。如果我们能重新开始最有头脑的人和广大群众的对话，结果不仅仅是改变社会而且会改变艺术和智慧生活。”  

　　在1963年，小说家和化学家斯诺（C.P. Snow）写了一本书提供了乔欧亚描述的知识分子转型的场景。书名为《两种文化：再回顾》，是1959年的书《两种文化》的续篇。在第一本书中，斯诺谈论了文学界知识分子和科学家的区别，以及相互之间的不理解。在第二本书中，他设想了一个中间道路，可以作为共识的第三种文化，知识分子可以和科学家交谈，科学家可以和知识分子交谈，相互促进各自的专业知识和创造性。  

　　但是这个愿望从来没有实现。


　

　　议案三：被科学家取代

　　“传统的美国知识分子在某种意义上越来越反动，常常自豪地（有悖常理地）对我们时代真正重要的许多智慧成就一无所知。他们的文化排除科学，常常是非实证性的。它用自己的术语，在自己的洗衣店里洗衣服。主要的特征就是对于评论
发表的评论，评论的螺旋式上升蔓延到最后把真正的世界给弄丢了。  

　　那些就是作家和理查德·道金斯（Richard Dawkins）的经纪人和图书代理人约翰·布洛克曼（John Brockman）和在网站Edge上写文章的斯蒂芬·平克（Steven Pinker）的世界。请注意诸如“反动“实证性”和“丢失现实世界”等词汇。  

　　1996年，艾伦·索卡尔（Alan Sokal）做了一些事情显示出，高度专业术语化的文学理论界是多么远地脱离了现实世界。纽约大学的物理学家索卡尔给专门讨论后现代文学理论的学术刊物《社会文本》投稿。在文章中，他指出量子引力是具有深刻政治含义的社会构造。  

　　换句话说，这是纯粹的胡说八道。我不敢肯定我把文章意思说清楚了。但是这没有关系，因为问题的关键是《社会文本》认为他是认真的，这些东西是真实的，真理无关紧要。正如索卡尔在《通用语》（Lingua Franca）上的文章中解释他的“实验”：  

　　在第一段，我嘲笑“长期以来后启蒙霸权对于西方知识分子世界观的强制的教条”：存在一个外在的世界，其中的性质独立于任何个人或者人类作为整体，这些性质被编码在“永久的”物理法则，人类能获得可靠的，虽然不完美的和临时性的这些法则的知识，通过坚持遵守所谓的科学方法所规定的“客观”程序和认识论限制。” 《超越界限:走向量子引力的超形式的解释学》  

　　索卡尔为什么这么做呢？为了说明问题： 　　

　　让我担心的是扩散，不是废话和思维混乱的扩散，而是某种废话和思维混乱的扩散：一种否认客观现实存在，或者受到挑战后，虽然承认真理存在但是尽量弱化它们与现实的相关性。从最好处说，像《社会文本》这样的学术刊物提出了重要的问题，任何一个科学家都不应该忽视的问题。比如公司和政府资金影响科学工作的问题。不幸的是，认识论上的相对主义很少进一步讨论这些问题。  

　　总之，我对于主观思维蔓延的担心既有思想上的考虑又有政治上的担心。从思想上说，这种主张的问题是它是错误的（不仅仅是没有意义的）。确实有一个真实的世界，不仅体现了社会的构造，而且以事实和证据作为存在的根基。任何有理智的人不接受这个还能怎样呢？但是当代学术界的理论恰恰包含了极力要模糊上面这些显而易见的真理的尝试，这些理论的纯粹的荒谬性通过晦涩和矫揉造作的语言给掩盖了。  

　　《社会文本》接受我的文章说明了理论，我说的是后现代文学理论在智慧上的傲慢已经达到了逻辑上的极端。难怪他们懒得去咨询一下物理学家的意见。如果所有的文章都是文本和“话语”，那么现实世界的知识是多余的，甚至物理学也成为文化研究的另一个分支而已。而且，如果所有的文本都是修辞和“语言游戏”的话，内部的逻辑一致性也成为多余的了：理论上的复杂性的光泽同样起到好作用。难以理解成为一种美德，典故、比喻和双关取代了证据和逻辑。我自己的文章，如果有什么的话，就是这个普遍接受的文体的特别谦虚的例子。  

　　后现代主义已经受到右翼先知阿兰·布鲁姆（Alan Bloom）在《美国思想的封闭》中的大肆攻击。但是，索卡尔的实验所显示的是，后现代主义不仅是揭示现状的权力结构，受到权力捍卫者的攻击，而且在它的核心是智慧探索的一个脆弱的甚至是有害的基础。  

　　《社会文本》的编辑，包括著名学者，写出几乎难以逾越的巨著《没有尊重：知识分子和大众文化》的安德鲁·罗斯（Andrew Ross）也在忙着把骗局当作严肃的学术研究成果来接受。而约翰·布洛克曼在和真正的人交流真正重要的东西。按照在伦敦《卫报》上的这篇题为“无知的新时代”的文章中，布洛克曼比任何人都多地打破了斯诺的区分。但是不鼓励文学界知识分子和科学家先进行交流然后再把他们发现的东西传播给认真思考的、受过良好教育的大众，布鲁克曼设计了不需要任何帮助和感谢的“第三文化”。  

　　“第三文化包括实证世界中的科学家和其他思想家，他们通过自己的工作和说明文取代了传统知识分子的位置，传达我们生活中的更深刻的意义，来重新确定我们是谁，我们做什么，他在自己的网站（Edge）上写到：  

　　知识分子的角色包括交流。知识分子不仅仅是有知识的人，他们还影响一代人的思想。知识分子是综合者，宣传者和交流者。在他1987年的书《最后的知识分子》中，文化历史学家拉塞尔·雅格比（Russell Jacoby）哀叹一代公共思想家的消失，取而代之的是没有感情的大学学者。他是对的，也是错的。第三文化思想家是新的公共知识分子。  

　　总之，科学家不再需要知识分子了。他们自己来做。　　

　　《卫报》文章也注意到伊恩·麦克尤恩（Ian McEwan）是少数几个继续为（Edge）正在进行的辩论连续投稿的小说家之一，他认为当生物学家和经济学家相互借用对方的概念，分子生物学家滑入化学家和物理学家防御脆弱的领域时，这个工程并没有太远地脱离“知识一体化的古老的启蒙梦想。”  

　　为什么文学和美学的知识分子不能再谈论这些东西了呢？　　


　　议案四：新知识分子
　　布鲁克曼通过（Edge和科学家的沙龙Edge Reality Club）在创造奇迹，为了推动全国性的科学和科学思考的对话。有比从前更多的杂志专门研究科学，对于科学的渴望更强烈，更多关于科学的书，甚至更高级的无神论。  

　　文学和美学知
识分子怎么办呢？他们怎么办？他们在周围，但是他们的影响力似乎在大幅度地萎缩，主要是因为大媒体尤其是报纸给予他们的曝光率的大幅度缩减。  

　　书刊评论部传统上是这样的对话的论坛，我们都知道它们在什么地方，洛杉矶，芝加哥，明尼阿波利斯，纳罗利，亚特兰大的报纸，他们都有被解雇的书评部编辑，减少篇幅页码，裁减人员，甚至把他们从原来的位置转移到星期日刊上。  

　　也就是说，报纸在削减书评版。所以怎么办呢？

　　或许可以从康涅狄格州新的草根出版物中找到答案。该刊物的名字为《纽黑文书评》（New Haven Review of Books），是该城市的一些作家的产物，他们相信有人必须弥补报纸留下的空缺。  

　　正如《纽黑文拥护者》（the New Haven Advocate）的前任编辑和《敲天堂的门：反文化时代的美国宗教》一书的作者马克·奥本海默（Mark Oppenheimer）写的，现在是要求创新思考的时代，（需要）生活在任何地方的创新者，而不仅仅是洛杉矶或者纽约的人。  

　　在报纸上的书评版萎缩的时代，我们要发现新方法获得伟大著作的信息。其中有些方法是地方性的，在规模上很小。我们或许从来不会再出版一期《纽黑文评论》（我们的格言是“每年最多出版一期”）但是通过出版一次，我们就做出了支持文学文化的声明。如果其他中小型城镇比如奥斯汀，得梅因，奥尔巴尼等也决定它们想创办自己的书评，难道不是很酷的事情吗？（斜体是我自己添加的）或许这种书评像我们做的那样，主要刊登本地作家写的评论，或许刊登对本地作家著作的书评。不管什么方式，它提醒人们主要的城市出版物不一定是书评的唯一工具。  

　　这导致我们看到即使小的，地方性的一期书评也能做出的第二个声明：作家任何地方都有。即使在纽黑文和周边城市我们就搜索了艾利斯·麦迪森（Alice Mattison）,布鲁斯·夏皮罗（Bruce Shapiro）, 德比·艾波盖特（Debby Applegate）, 狄德雷·贝尔（Deirdre Bair）, 吉姆·斯利普（Jim Sleeper）, 阿米·布鲁姆（Amy Bloom）等几十个伟大作家。我们中的许多人甚至从来没有见过面。我们这个谦虚的小城市中没有文学“场景”，没有鸡尾酒会巡游，但是确实有作家。  

　　这个模式不会替代大城市的大书评，我们仍然需要它们。除非有天使过来资助另外一期，这或许成为最后一次听《纽黑文书评》。但是我们处在复兴的关注地方主义和区域主义的时代，书评就像农民的市场甚至地方货币一样发挥自己的作用。  

　　地方主义和地域主义：这是发现新的文学和美学知识分子的地方。 　　

　　译自：“Journal: The new intellectuals”by John Stoehr

　　http://arts.ccpblogs.com/2007/11 ... -new-intellectuals/



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