0 From the Organic Through the Specific to the Accidental: Cultural Studies and the (Potential) Proliferation of Contemporary Categories of the Academic as Public Intellectual

In this presentation in which I explore the idea of the academic as public intellectual, I want to set myself up as something of a provocateur and as your self-designated provocateur, the last thing I want to do is define “public intellectual ” or provide a definitive answer to the question, “what constitutes the public intellectual? ” I’d rather put out some points and raise some questions that further complicate the question and, hopefully, generates some discussion. So, I’ll make 6 quick points and provide a decidedly inconclusive conclusion. In my very brief remarks I’ll concentrate on academics and our relationship to the term “public intellectual, ” and use cultural studies as a loose framework for my remarks. The fact that I have chosen to explore this question of academics as intellectuals is being implies that I am assuming that we, well established or budding academics, have something to do with it; that we might be or ought to be, public intellectuals. So I want to start by saying we ought not to take such suppositions for granted. There are academics who hold that being a public intellectual is not part of their job description. Some of them are adamant about pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake and quite resistant to calls for them to play the role of public intellectual. In terms of our topic, in their extreme form, such academics are what we might cal