Intellectuals in the Society of Spectacle

This book reveals the sense in which our postmodern societies are characterized by the obscene absence of the intellectual. The modern intellectual--who had once been associated with humanism and enlightenment―has in our day been replaced by media stars, talking heads, and technical experts. At issue is the ongoing crisis of democracy, under the aegis of the société du spectacle and its vast networks of politically-induced idiocy, industrially-produced biocide, and militarily-provoked genocide. Spectacle fills the resulting moral and intellectual vacuum with electronic technologies of control, punishment, and destruction. This postmodern tyranny reduces intelligence to mechanistic, positivist, and grammatological models of inquiry, while increasing the segmentation, fragmentation, and dissolution of human existence. The apotheosis of the spectacle explains the intellectual void that lies at the heart of our postmodern decadence; it also accounts for the need to recuperate the humanist values of enlightenment promoted by the modern intellectual tradition. Preface: An Obscene Absence 5 Contents 7 Chapter 1: Besieged Existence 9 The Involution of Intelligence 9 Verkeerte Wereld 12 Night on Bald Mountain 14 Besieged Intellectual 16 The Great Desertion 22 Chronicle of an Abdication 24 Theatrum Mundi 28 The Last Intellectual 31 Intellectuals and Enlightenment 32 Let Newton Be! and All Was Light! 34 Spectacle 36 The End of Discourses; The Triumph of Linguistics 42 Anti-humanist Humanities 45 Forms of Light 50 One Spring Day 52 Voided Void 56 Koyaanisqatsi 57 Works Cited 57 Chapter 2: Humanism in an Age of Anti-humanism 58 Willed Amnesia 58 The Evangelical Denial of the Natural Sciences 59 The Postmodern Rejection of the Human Sciences 62 Haven’t You Heard? Man Is Dead! 67 Bildung and the Self-formation of Humanity 69 The Shameless Sham of Evangelical Humanism 72 The Rise of Evangelicalism and the Fall of Puritanism 73 Benjamin Franklin: The Businessman as Mediator 77 Emerson: Enthusiasm and Self-reliance 79 Thoreau: Primitivism and Civil Disobedience 82 Evangelical Imperialism 86 The Deceptions of Techno-scientific Humanism 88 Pragmatic Acquiescence 95 The Recuperation of Human Memory 104 A Dangerous Meeting of the Extremes 114 Works Cited 116 Chapter 3: Intellectuals & Exiles 119 Knowledge; Autonomy 119 Unbounded Exile 130 No to Non-Being 138 Consciousness Under Siege 141 Works Cited 144 Chapter 4: Tyranny of Idiocy 145 The Privatized Man 145 The Paranoid Style 146 Voluntary Servitude 148 Propaganda, Surveillance and Spectacle 152 Culture of Fragment 154 Destruction of Democracy 157 Works Cited 159 Index 161