Geography’s new public intellectuals?
Noel Castree
School of Environment and Development, ManchesterUniversity, Manchester, M13 9PL;
In what sense is it appropriate … that the professor should be a ‘public’ figure? Robin Barrow (2004: 223)
What is a public intellectual? Does geography have any? And does it matter? These questions are all pertinent to the three books under review here. In A brief history of neoliberalism (by David Harvey), The endgame of globalization (by Neil Smith) and Afflicted powers (by Retort, a quartet of Bay Area ‘antagonists to capital and empire’ that includes Michael Watts) there is, I suggest, a deliberate attempt being made by the authors to position themselves as public intellectuals. Not that any of them would feel comfortable using the term as a self-descriptor: to lay claim to the signifier‘public intellectual’ runs the risk of sounding unsufferably pompous while opening oneself to unfavourable comparison with the ‘real’ public intellectuals of yesteryear like George Orwell or Jean-Paul Sartre. What’s more, even geographers (never mind the wider ‘public’) would find the idea that they now have several ‘PIs’ in their number absurd: for surely the discipline remains far too marginal to produce figures with the self-confidence and the intellectual capital to intervene authoritatively in wider public debates (Ward, 2006). Yet in these three books, I want to argue, we see some of human geography’s most influential left-wing voices addressing themselves to a far wider audience than the academic oneso familiar with their many previous writings. Neither pompous nor absurd, this trio of attempts to engage a broader readership is important, but not for the parochial reason that the books under review might both alter and heighten public perceptions of what academic geography is about. As I will explain, A brief history of neoliberalism, The endgame of globalization and Afflicted powers are ‘public’ interventions in a very specific sense (part of this relates to the distinctively American context of their production). Understanding this specificity allows us to grasp how they might ‘matter’, both in their own right and as precedents for future attempts by geographers to apply years of academic training to issues of broad public concern.
No longer based at JohnsHopkinsUniversity, Harvey has lately made New York his home (he is a Distinguished Professor in the Graduate Centre at CUNY). His book, like its predecessorThe new imperialism (2003), is published by Oxford University Press. It does rather more than is suggested by the rather plain, innocuous title. As Harvey states in the introduction, “ …what is generally missing – and this is the gap this book aims to fill – is the political-economic story of where neoliberalism came from and how it proliferated so comprehensively on the world stage. Critical engagement with that story suggests, furthermore, a framework for identifying and constructing alternative political and economic arrangements” (p. 4). Unsurprisingly, this is not an apolitical or atheoretical ‘history’. Rather, it’s a Marxian history (and, importantly, geography) in which the rise of neoliberal policies are situated in the post-1973 crisis of capital accumulation and interpreted as a political project to restore the power of economic elites at the expense of both workers and civil society more generally. After five marvellously readable chapters of analysis that focus on the origins and widespread acceptance of neoliberal mantras, the final two (‘Neoliberalism on trial’ and ‘Freedom’s prospect’) consider both the forces that could be activated to dismantle neoliberal hegemony and the sort of alternatives that are conceivable and feasible.
Neil Smith, one ofHarvey’s most distinguished graduate students, is also based in the CUNY Graduate Centre. In The endgame of globalization(published by Routledge) he offers an account of the contradictory logic behind the United States’ recent overseas ventures. Strung-out between a desire to spread ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ worldwide, and a fierce determination to protect its own national interests, Smith interprets Bush Jnr.’s foreign policy as the potential ‘endgame’ of America’s most recent attempt to impose its vision of global economics and politics. I say most recent attempt because Smith interpets the ‘war on terror’ as the “third moment of US imperial assertion” (p. ix), following on the heels of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt’s twentieth century global forays. The endgame of globalization is thus a book about continuities: Bush’s neoconservatism, Clinton’s neoliberalism and the worldviews of previous Democratic and Republican administrations are not, Smith shows, as different as they appear when it comes to US foreign policy. Though Smith does not deny the empirical specificity of the present conjuncture, his aim is to show how the logic behind almost a century of American military and economic dominance is both replaying itself andpossibly culminating in a final, ‘hegemonic fix’. Given that this fix involves the US waging war (in the name of peace, freedom and stability) in Afghanistan and Iraq – against the wishes of many worldwide, as well as at home – it is by no means certain to succeed. As Smith concludes, “In retrospect it may be that September 11th comes to stand not as the beginning of a new phase of American Empire but as its denouement …” (p. 209). The key question is whether America’s possible loss of global hegemony will involve yet more bloodshed and a larger conflagration in the years to come.
America’s current overseas ventures are also a central focus of Afflicted powers: capital and spectacle in a new age of war by Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts. The authors all have formal academic training but only some of them tenured university posts (Watts, the only geographer in Retort, has long been Chancellor’s Professor of Geography and Development Studies at UC Berkeley). Their book, published by Verso, “is deliberately polemical, in the tradition … of the pamphleteering characteristic of the Left in its heyday” (p. xi). It builds on a broadsheet (Neither their war nor their peace) produced for distribution at anti-war demonstrations in the spring of 2003. The main title, borrowed from book 1 of Milton’s Paradise Lost, has a double meaning. It denotes both the “affliction of the previously invulnerable” (p. 5) – namely, “the American empire” (ibid.) – and the weakness of what, borrowing loosely fromEmpire(Hardt and Negri, 2000), Retort call the multitude. For that multitude – prior to and during the anti-war demonstrations – “was born … out of … the experience of defeat” (p. 4-5) wherein the USA (and Britain) pursued ‘free market globalisation’ and a ‘war on terror’ despite massive opposition from a global citizenry. What is more, that defeat has been two-sided. The potential power of the anti-war protesters has also been afflicted by the rise of revolutionary Islam: al-Quaida is the most extreme response to, and alibi for, the United States’ bloody attempt to, as Smith would have it, paradoxically spread democracy and secure its own geopolitical and geoeconomic interests. ‘The Left’ (a term Retort deliberately drape in scare-quotes) must thus confront both a continued but unstable US hegemony and a dispersed constituency of jihadists for whom the means (indiscriminate violence) justify the ends (the defeat of ‘infidels’ and the return of righteousness). This explains why Afflicted powers smacks of both “stubborn expectancy and [an] unbudgeable sense of doom” (p. 9): inspired by both the anti-war and anti-capitalism movements, it also looks “both enemies – empire and jihad – square in the face, and underestimate[s] … the power and resilience of neither” (p. 6). The book, which is written with passion and poetry, deploys three venerable concepts to make sense of the current global face-off: namely capitalism (“an indispensable term of analysis … because it [i.e. capitalism] has a preponderant, invasive influence”, p. 10), primitive accumulation (“sheer forced dispossession”, p. 11) and, after Debord, spectacle (“the subjection of social life to the rule of appearances”, 2004: 9). This last concept is especially important, because in a world saturated with “images, instructions, slogans, logos, false promises, virtual realities [and] miniature happiness motifs” (ibid. 8), the Left needs “sightlines in a new, nightmarish, terrain ...”.Afflicted powers, Retort declares,“is an effort to provide some” (2005, p. 15). A recent New Left Review essay (Retort, 2004) provides an excellent summary of the book’s major theses.
What do these three books have in common? Firstly, they are all about America’s current geopolitical and geoeconomic manoeuvrings: each of them identifies key reasons why an ailing hegemon has adopted the high-risk overseas policies it has. This is most obviously so in the case of Smith and Retort, but Harvey’s story about neoliberalism strongly accents America’s role in establishing the political economic regime that has prevailed globally since the early 1970s.[1] Secondly, all three books are analyses of ‘live’ political economic issues. Though both Harvey and Smith offer a history of our conjuncture, like Retort their books are most certainly intended as diagnoses of a presently sick world.The patient here is the bulk of global humanity (not any one class or strata within it), which is currently wedged between the extremes of a notionally laissezfairecapitalism, the selfish geopolitical actions of major Western states and an atavistic, incendiary theology most starkly embodied in al-Quaida. Thirdly, though all three books make it plain that we are living through a moment of danger (Boal et al. [2005: xii]talk hyperbolically about“the new 1914 which confronts us”), they also try to identify leverage-points for progressive global change. Without offering any blueprints for a future world order, each book does discuss ways forward for those enamoured neither withcapitalist imperialism nor religious fundamentalism. In the fourth place, though the fact is not heavily advertised in their pages, all three books are distinctively Marxian in outlook. Though Marxism, in all its baroque permutations, is often deemed to be passé both in academia and the wider society, in this trio of texts we see venerable Marxian formulations (like primitive accumulation and imperialism) being deployed with élan.
In the fifth place, though I dissent from the view that all forms of Marxian thought are exorbitant ‘meta-narratives’, Harvey, Smith and Boal et al. are deliberately presenting their readers with grand analyses. They offer ‘big stories’ both in the sense that they’re analysing global affairs and in the sense that they present an encompassing frameworkfor doing so that is deployed without apologies even though it is inevitably partial. Finally, it seems to me that the authors of these three books see themselves as speaking truth to power – even though they acknowledge that power already knows the truth and tries very hard to prevent its disclosure to the majority of us. While speaking for ‘truth’ and against ‘deception’ might seem terribly old-fashioned (or plain naïve), in these books it seems wholly appropriate given two facts of present-day Anglo-American life. The first is the way the mass media has furnished precious few tools for the citizenry to comprehend criticallythe causes and propriety of a ‘war on terror’ undertaken in the citizenry’s name. The second is the threat to free speech and assembly posed by a raft of new laws promulgated by the Bush and Blair administrations since the fin-de-millennium.
Having summarised the arguments of the three books and made some brief observations about their family resemblances, I want, in the rest of this essay, to address the three questions posed at the outset. In other words, rather than take the conventional review essay tack (i.e. explicate and evaluate the three book’s arguments in some detail), I want, instead, to examine form more than content. In my view, A brief history of neoliberalism, The endgame of globalization and Afflicted powers are unconventional interventions – unconventional, that is, for authors socialised into the discipline of post-1945 Anglophone geography. Each book, in my view (and most obviously in the case of Afflicted powers), has not been written with the authors’ academic peers as the principal or target audience.[2]Instead, they seem to be aimed at a broader constituency of readers (e.g. activists, politically literate members of the public etc.). This is unusual. During its history as a university discipline geography has produced few figures with the ambition, opportunity and credibility to make ‘big statements’ about our world for the benefit of a non-university audience.
What are the grounds for my claim that these are not conventionally ‘academic’ books? First, in almost 700 pages (combined) there are few, if any, attempts to relate the arguments made to existing academic debates within the social sciences. When we write as academics, we tend to self-consciously link our insights to those of our professional allies and detractors; not so here. Secondly, there’s the prose. All three books are highly accessible by normal academic standards. Harvey writes in plain English; Smith’s prose is littered with well chosen metaphors; and Boal et al. declaim the terror of both empire and religious extremism in jargon-free, passionate language. Thirdly, there’s the light use of academic references in the bodies of the texts. Though Harvey, Smith and Retort have read a tremendous amount of previous research in order to construct their own accounts, their books are not littered with footnotes, book titles, or publication dates. The pages are ‘clean’ and generally unforbidding (and in Afflicted powers the occasional photograph breaks-up the text). Fourthly, all the books are written in an essayistic style. They can be read as sophisticated stories about our global present. They offer readers compelling narratives rather than the normal esoterica served-up by highly educated social scientists. Finally, despite the already-mentioned Marxist cast of the arguments, this is largely implicit throughout the three texts. It’s as if, knowing that Marxism still has a bad name within and beyond the academy,[3]Harvey, Smith and Retort chose strategically to make little of their obvious analytical indebtedness to it.
All of the above apply most obviously to Afflicted powers which, as I’ve already noted, is advertised as a piece of “political writing” (2005, p. 7). Indeed, Retort trace a lineage to Rosa Luxemburg’s great Juniusbrochure. However, even though Harvey’s and Smith’s books are less self-consciously polemical, they too are clearly addressed to a wider Left-wing audience. I have made this argument in relation to Harvey’s previous book,The new imperialism (Castree, 2006a), and it’s worth recalling that in recent his ‘greatest hits’ collection (Spaces of capital) Harvey talked of his thirty-year attempt to “change ways of thought in the discipline of geography …, in cognate areas … andamong the public at large” (2001: vii, emphasis added). Smith has been less forthcoming about his intended audiences, but reading between the lines I’d suggest he now sees himself as having the profile to reach well beyond geography and even critical social science more generally. In this regard, it’s arguably telling that playwrite and essayist Tariq Ali – a distinguished and well-known critic whose ire has not diminished since ‘68 and all that’ – is one of Smith’s dust-jacket endorsers. Harvey’s endorsements are from more conventionally academic sources (Leo Panitch and Erik Swyngedouw), though Retort’s surpass Ali in terms of kudos and sign-value: they are provided by no lesser figures thanNoam Chomsky and the recently Nobelled playwrite Harold Pinter.[4]
In light of the above, can we say that Harvey, Smith and Retort are assuming the role of ‘public intellectuals’ in these three books? If the answer to that question depends upon the authors themselves actively claiming the PI label – something Slavoj Zizek (2005) has recently done for himself – then we must conclude ‘no’. If, however, an author might reasonably be considered a public intellectual by others regardless of their self-characterisation, then the answer is ‘yes, possibly’. Byron once said of longeurs that while the British do not have the word, they have the thing in some profusion.[5] So too, perhaps, with Harvey, Smith and Retort as public intellectuals. What, though,is a public intellectual? This question has been asked many times over the years, though rarely by and for geographers (for reasons mentioned earlier). There is a voluminous literature on the subject and a multitude of definitions (which overlap with collateral terms like ‘movement intellectuals’, ‘oppositional intellectuals’ and ‘specific intellectuals’). Bruce Robbins’ (1993: xxv) wise observation of over a decade ago remains correct, I think: “the intellectual”, he argued, “[i]s a character in search of a narrative”. For Stefan Collini (2002: 207), “the writing on intellectuals is truly awful to behold”. He continues: “the intellectual is someone who ‘tells the truth’; the intellectual is the ‘voice of the voiceless’, the intellectual is in ‘permanent opposition to the status quo’; the intellectual is [an] … ‘exile’ … One might as well say that the intellectual should live in Basingstoke” (p. 212). Robbins and Collini are both right that there is no one ‘proper’ definition of the public intellectual nor are there a special class of people with exclusive rights to the title. It also remains the case that for some the term ‘public intellectual’ has negative connotations (going back to the ‘Dreyfus affair’, when the term intellectual was code for free-floating, disloyal, non-patriotic Jews).