The Academic Plague
Academicism and intellectualism are not the same. After all, Greenberg swiftly recognized that the seemingly primitive Pollock possessed intelligence that was lacking in the most educated academics. The distinction is critical, but the terms are often conflated.
From the Enlightenment until the baby boom, academicism was a dirty word. And it didn't merely mean ivory towerism or class separatism, but a mode of pseudo-thought. It meant that the academic’s intellectual work was lazy — incomplete, insufficient and not up to speed with the possibilities of the present. It didn’t go far enough beyond monumentalizing history or expressing smug antiquarianism (Nietzsche). Academic thought wasn’t able to access the type of intellect demanded by modern society. Instead it wore a cloak of intellectualism that had been inherited by previous, original intellects, incapable of moving beyond them.
Today, academicism is a plague of retrogression the extent to which academicism is conflated with intellectualism. Academicism isn't even inherently intelligent. It’s possible and highly desirable to be anti-academic, without being anti-intellectual. Truly, the so-called anti-intellectual sentiment buried in the uninitiated plebes and normies is itself an intellectual suspicion that academic small-mindedness has flooded the intellect with jargon, decorum, and thought policing. Most people alive today are still only half-awake in their understanding of this distinction, oscillating between blind reverence or secret disdain for the experts. It could be awoken, or left to slumber on its eternal nightmare of the human soul.
Isn’t there another way?! The intellect is still a recent discovery. Like a refractive glass marble in the mud, it stands through and beyond academicism, radiating a more comprehensive and multifaceted vantage point. It stands amidst the change of aesthetic life as an aesthetic itself and not merely sensuously submits to the intelligence of enigmatic, living processes. Nor does it bracket anything out for the sake of so-called objectivity. It can consider contrary ideologies without succumbing to ad hominem attacks. At the moment the intellectual is a free-floating and abstract character, exiled from the ideological barbaric tribes of our time. And like a Zarathustrian hermit, he’s quite fine with that!
Gabriel Cornelius von Max, Monkeys as Judges of Art, 1889. From: commons.wikimedia.org.
Academicism is the aestheticization of institutions, naturally extending to anti-institution tendencies, institutional critique and vain reform, and the recent tendency to create new institutions from scratch with a ‘better’ moral compass. Intellectualism sees institutions as trash islands damming up the river of life where cesspools fester, and wonders why humans don't instead amplify or store the energy of the river for the greater expanse of life. The academic is content to sniff the trash. Trash humping is an academic exercise.
The distinction made between knowing and understanding by Alexander Lowen in Fear of Life might be helpful in clarifying a very critical difference between academicism and intellectualism:
The two antithetical ways of processing information are understanding and knowing. Day-old chicks from a hatchery “know” what food to eat. But knowing is not the right word here. They receive information from their organs of sight, smell, and taste that is unconsciously processed to guide their actions. I call this understanding. Knowing denotes that the information is processed conscious. The second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary quotes Coleridge as saying that understanding is “the power of dealing with the impressions of sense and composing them into wholes.” This is what chicks do when they pick up and eat some things while leaving others. They understand what is good for them and what isn't. Infants have the same ability. Of course, this understanding is limited to those sense impressions the meaning of which their minds have learned through the evolutionary history of the species.
Understanding means “what stands under.” Under a child — or even a chick, for that matter — are millions of years of evolutionary history that have informed the body-mind what it means to be a child or a chick. Understanding is diffused in the tissues of the body, which sense and respond intelligently to the natural environment. Seifritz, who spent many years studying the slime mold, comments about protoplasm, “I cannot say that protoplasm is intelligent, but it does the intelligent thing.” Interestingly, Jaynes also derives understanding from what stands under. In the hierarchy of power in the bicameral kingdoms, man stands under his god. Interpreting a carving on a stele dating about 1750 B.C., Jaynes says, “Hammurabi listens intently as he stands just below him (“under-stands”). Since the gods, according to Jaynes, are a function of the right hemisphere, which is concerned with wholes, we can relate understanding to that hemisphere, in contrast to knowledge, which would be a function of the analytic power of the left hemisphere. Knowledge belongs to the second stage of life, the “uniquely human stage.” The dictionary defines it as the acquaintance with facts, truths, and principles derived from study and investigation. It concerns the conscious acquisition of information. It involves the use of language and other symbols. If understanding is related to the feeling processes of the body, knowledge is related to the thinking processes of the mind. Broadly speaking, understanding is a sensing from below, from the body, whereas knowing is seeing from above, from the mind or head. … Knowing is a function of the ego, which, as it develops, will eventually take an objective and superior position with regard to the body. It would be very nice if our knowledge grew as our understanding deepened, but unfortunately this rarely happens. Very often what we think we know contradicts our understanding, and in the conflict between the two we tend to rely heavily upon knowledge and deny our understanding. [1]
Academic knowledge lords over its object of critique, manipulating it from without by its own standards, whatever those petty standards may be. Intellectualism stands under its object of critique, transforming it from within. The distinction has real effects in art criticism. For example, Baudelaire was a pivotal, dialectical critic because he stood under society as one of its synthesizing parts. Contemporary academic art thinking often stands above it. On top of it. As if to smother it. This puts each in a conflict, each seeking to use the other to various ends. The immanent dialectical critique of the intellectual is well-placed historically to use the academic. Future intellectuals may feel free to appropriate the academic and their research for their own ends. But they are ends which are of course society’s at large, filtered into and refracted through the glass minds of individual intellects.
Other maxims:
Intellect is living thought, capable of change. Academicism is dead thought, distributing dead information.
Intellect is perspectivist and kaleidoscopic. Academicism is myopically expert.
The intellect senses academic style as another contingent material polluting the river of life; it may find something salvageable there, but might not.
Academicism is politesse and decorum. Intellectualism is political and aesthetic.
Academics are social materials that intellectuals are free to appropriate. //
The intellect?
[1] Lowen, Alexander. Fear of Life. New York: Collier Books, Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1980.