File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-01-21.060, message 52


Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 14:03:01 +1000 (EST)
From: Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan-AT-qut.edu.au>
Subject: M-I: The dilemmas of the traditional intellectual in the world of


Comrades, 

I wrote this last piece while exiled in the archives.  It is a response to
the Australian Broadcasting Authority's  (ABC) 1996 Boyer lectures - The
View From The Bridge.  They were given by a far right winger Pierre Ryckmans
who writes under the name of Simon Leys.  He is noted for his anti-communism
witha special focus on China.  At one level he was chosen to reconcile the
ABC to the new conservative government here.  But his talks still raise the
problem of the high culture and the role of traditional intellectuals.  I
hope this is of interest and could someone stick it in the papers archive,
please?

regards

Gary



The 1996 Boyer Lectures: Responding to Ryckmans  

Gary MacLennan
School Of Media & Journalism
QUT



						Of human kind,
	My great offence in aiding them, in teaching 
	The babe to speak, and rousing torpid mind
	To take the grasp of itself - of this I'll talk;
	Meaning to mortal men no blame, but only
	The true recital of mine own deserts.
	For, soothly, having eyes to see they saw not,
	And hearing heard not; but like dreamy phantoms,
	A random life they led from year to year,
	All blindly floundering on.


1. Introduction

Pierre Ryckmans' recent Boyer lectures were remarkable for their display of
learning.  Reading through View From The Bridge one is repeatedly impressed
by the ease and confidence with which Ryckmans cites a remarkable range of
authors.  This series of lectures is to be welcomed indeed because it gave
us all here in Australia an opportunity to observe a 'traditional
intellectual' at work.  

The term is Gramsci's and he draws an important distinction between
traditional and organic intellectuals.  The latter are those specialists who
are closely identified with a particular social formation.  While the former
are those intellectuals who arose under the previous social system, as such
they can often assume an air of independence and autonomy. (Gramsci, 1978: 7)

Typically, by contrast with the organic intellectual, Ryckmans is anxious to
demonstrate the uselessness of what he knows.  Teaching as I do at QUT,
which repeatedly boasts about being a "university for the real world", i.e.
in Gramscian terms a mass producer of organic intellectuals, I have to
confess that I was charmed by Ryckmans' insistence on the basic uselessness
of his knowledge.

But charm alas is very much like love in that it is teasing and pleasing
when first got knew and by lecture 4 the allures of Ryckmans' displays of
his learning had begun to fade somewhat. Thus, when discussing reading, he
contemplates the popularity of Robert Hughes' "Barcelona".  The problem here
is that although Hughes' book is "remarkable for its intelligence, scholarly
information and wit", it was also a best seller. For Ryckmans the solution
is that the book was published during the Olympic Games and as a consequence
the "moron(s)"  who follow the "moronic" games bought the book, presumably
by mistake. 

I suspect we are expected to be amused here, to laugh even perhaps.
Certainly I think we, like the intellectual equivalents of Holy Willie, are
supposed to give thanks that we are not like the 'morons' who watch the
Olympic Games, and to be grateful that we sensitive souls are
		

			For gifts an' grace
	A burning and a shining light
			To a' this place.

But it is not my intention in this essay to complain of Ryckmans lofty
patrician snobbery.  Rather I wish to meet him on his terms and to debate
the issues which he raises. I would characterise these as the politics of
literacy and culture. 

My point will be that Ryckmans is a mandarin and a very good one at that.
But he lives in a world where the mandarin and the philistine exist in a
relationship of apparent mutual hostility but in reality theirs is a
duplicitous partnership of mutual support and need. The mandarin requires
the ignorant spite of the philistine to nourish his sense of superiority,
while the philistine  craves the spectacle of the refinement of the mandarin
to sustain his feelings of envy and resentment. 

In other words I believe that for all his complaints about philistinism that
Ryckmans and his kind are basically content to live in a world where culture
is divided between the High and the Low. Moreover I am convinced that by and
large the very same traditional intellectuals have done all in their power
to prevent the development of those social conditions which would heal the
cultural divide.

2. Dead Poets and live intellectuals

A key moment in Ryckmans' talks comes when he discusses Peter Weir's film
Dead Poets Society.  The particular scene which arouses Ryckmans'
condemnation is the one where the charismatic teacher instructs the class to
tear out the introduction to their poetry anthology.  This is a moment of
liberation and revolt within the film.  Poetry is freed from the dead hand
of criticism.  One might have expected that Ryckmans with his own freely
expressed dislike of literary critics would have welcomed the purging of the
critical excrescence which had defiled the temple of poetry.  But no our
good scholar is reminded of the Cultural Revolution and finds himself on the
side of those students who resisted the command to tear out the introduction
and even of the headmaster who sacks the teacher.

Here Ryckmans indulges in a significant misreading of Weir's text.  For him
the teacher become as it were a latter day Red Guard and the excesses of the
Maoists are linked to Stalin and Hitler in a general condemnation of
totalitarianism which is ever prone to destroy books.  But in the film it is
vital that we understand that the books are not destroyed. They are in fact
liberated. The class are able to enjoy the poetry without being instructed
how to do so by the introduction.

Why does Ryckmans insist that the books are destroyed?  The answer is that
he cannot conceive of the creative moment within revolutionary ferment.  It
is true that revolutions destroy but they also create the conditions for the
birth of the new and it is precisely the new that the traditional
intellectual fears.

An exact historical parallel with Ryckman's response to Dead Poets' society
can be found in Matthew Arnold's reaction to the Hyde Park riots of 1866.
Arnold was terrified by the spectacle of a mass mobilisation of the working
class.  He was deeply frightened by the violence that followed a police
attack on the demonstration.  However as Raymond Williams pointed out Arnold
did not go into the park to assist the workers in their struggle for
democracy, rather he blamed the victims of state oppression for that
oppression and retreated into his study to write Culture and Anarchy.
(Williams, 1979: 125) Just as Ryckmans is spooked by a filmic representation
of pages being ripped from a book, Arnold was it seems deeply upset by the
spectacle of a half mile of railings being torn up.

What is at work here in the traditional intellectuals' fear of the new.  Why
did Ryckmans react so strongly to Weir's film? The answers to these
questions must be complex ones but I would like to suggest that the
traditional intellectual fears the new at least partly because he is unsure
of the maintenance of his privileged position with the new social formation.  

But of course the traditional intellectual does not tell himself that he has
opted for a maintenance of his privileges. No, he tells himself that he is
on the side of civilisation and against the new barbarism. Even if this
entails as in Ryckmans case admiring the characters in the film who
represent power and authority i.e. the principal and his nest of snitches or
at a more serious level writing as Ryckmans did in 1978 for a journal such
as Quadrant which had been founded and subsidised through CIA funds.
(Coleman, 1980: 100-1)

The point I wish to emphasise here is that the traditional intellectual
choses.  Under the banner of culture, decency, refinement and civility he
opts for the status quo, for power and privilege and against the
revolutionary new. Then he writes often with great style and fluency
inviting us to admire the bravery of his choice. Moreover because he has
decided for the old rather than the new, for the powerful against the
oppressed, by a happy coincidence he generally has little difficulty in
getting his views published.  

3. Culture and barbarism: the return of the repressed Marxist

I am aware that I have used harsh words against the 1996 Boyer lecturer and
it is perhaps well that I reiterate that Ryckmans views on culture are in
many ways extremely valuable. Undoubtedly he writes from a sincere
conviction of the necessity of art.  There can be no quarrel with this.  But
he also writes as a mandarin, as someone who sees himself as a member of the
minority who guard the sacred cultural fame, as someone who wishes to smite
the Philistine majority hip and thigh.  

Thus he relates a story of a venerable Professor being assailed by a young
academic at a conference in one of Australia's leading universities.  The
professor was speaking on the subject of Chinese painting and his young
opponent proclaimed that

	to attach such an exclusive value and importance to what China's feudal
oppressors had deemed to be superior art, merely reflected the speaker's
narrow bourgeois elitism, whereas the true art of China, which was produced
by the broad working masses, was being systematically ignored or dismissed
by the academic mandarins...(Ryckmans, 1996, Boyer Lecture 1)

Ryckmans understandably was greatly offended by the performance of the brash
young academic and his band of supporters and he compares it to baboons
chucking their own shit at their enemies. 

The story as he retells it to us is structured around a set of dualities
which obviously have defined Ryckmans' attitude to culture if not indeed to
life in general.  Thus we have the contrast between the young and the old,
passion and erudition, the refined and the aggressive.

Again I have considerable sympathy with Ryckmans' viewpoint in this case.
But he ignores what I believe is the very real problem facing us and which
in his own brutally crude and incorrect way the "spokesman for the baboons"
was attempting to address.  Namely how do we raise the cultural level of the
people?  

For people like Ryckmans one suspects that this is a non-problem i.e. it is
impossible to do anything about the 'morons' who watch the Olympic Games.
All that is left for us to do is to indulge our sense of refined patrician
despair about the sorry state of the modern world.

The reason for Ryckmans' dilemma when he writes about culture is that he is
unwilling to consider culture in context.  Specifically he refuses to
acknowledge the links between the cultural level of the people and the
uneven distribution of wealth and power within our society.  Instead he
reifies culture and reveres it in the abstract.  

For Ryckmans culture is the absent transcendent. Indeed culture here becomes
in Raymond Williams' phrase the "god that dare not speak its name".  This is
also why Ryckmans needs to insist in lecture 5 on the "inspirational" nature
of poetry and why he attacks the literary critic with such venom.  The
latter is insufficiently reverent, it would seem, and must be whipped and
driven from the temple.

A much more honest and, yes, "subtle and supple" way to look at culture can
be found in Benjamin's seventh thesis on the philosophy of history. There he
writes

	For without exception the cultural treasures which he (the historical
materialist) surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without
horror.  They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds
and talent who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their
contemporaries.  There is no document of civilisation which is not at the
same time a document of barbarism. (Benjamin, 1977: 258)

4. Addressing the cultural divide

A recent holiday in Ireland enabled me to catch up on the British tabloid
press.  The result of this experience has been to bring home to me in a very
strong way the need to address once more in a positive way the fact that the
great majority of the British population has emerged from compulsory
education without any real grounding in the best of what is said and written
in our culture. The problem is of course not confined to Britain. We here in
Australia have no reason at all to be complacent. 

But what is to be done?  It is beyond the scope of this review to answer
this question.  I merely wish to insist that we do not like Ryckmans and his
fellow mandarins side step the issue in the name of the inevitability of the
uneven distribution of culture. 

The much reviled Mao Tse Tung may have been the ultimate source of the
actions of the 'baboon' that Ryckmans tells us about, but it is worth
recalling that Mao as a revolutionary, who was anxious to bring about the
new world of socialism, was concerned with the cultural divide.  He
advocated the doctrine of "revolutionary utilitarianism" where art was "to
serve the people".  There is no denying however that this notion was put to
dreadful use in the Cultural Revolution when those who had a link to the
classical culture where brutally terrorised.

But the abuse of Mao's original thoughts should not blind us to the original
intent.  As he himself puts it 

	Whatever makes for the greater good of the majority of the people may be
considered superior.  Your work of art may be like "Yang Ch'un Pai Hsieh"
that only aristocrats can enjoy while the masses may still be singing " Hsia
Li Pa Jen." If you do not raise the cultural level of the masses and if,
instead, you do nothing but blame them for the backwardness, then you are
indulging in futile criticism. (emphasis added)(Mao Tse Tung, 1950: 25)

What is most important to grasp here is that unlike with say the Bakhtinian
levelling down through the parodic orgies of the carnival the intent in
Marxist aesthetics is not to destroy art like "Yang Ch'un Pai Hsieh", i.e.
the high culture, but to produce the social conditions where it has a mass
audience.

Probably the most eloquent expression of this vision was given by Trotsky in
his Literature and Revolution.  This was written partly to refute the
doctrine of 'proletarian culture', which was to resurface with disastrous
effects during the Cultural Revolution.  Against those who argued for the
destruction of the high culture and its replacement by the writings of the
working class Trotsky argued

	It is fundamentally wrong to oppose proletarian to bourgeois culture and
art.  Proletarian culture and art will never exist.  The proletarian regime
is temporary and transitory.  Our revolution derives its historic
significance and moral greatness from the fact that it lays the foundations
for a classless society and for the first truly universal culture. (Trotsky
in Deutscher,1970: 188)

Moreover Trotsky's idea of that universal culture for all its unfashionable
Prometheanism is an inspiring one. Thus he writes

	Man will grow incomparably stronger, wiser, subtler; his body will become
more harmonious; his movements more rhythmical; his voice more musical. The
forms of his existence will acquire a dynamic theatrical quality. The
average man will rise to the stature of Aristotle, Goethe, Marx.  And above
these heights new peaks will rise. (in Deutscher, 1970: 197)


5. Conclusion

What gives the 1996 Boyer lectures their particular interest I believe is
that they are situated at the end of the Cold War and at the beginning of
the realisation of the cost of the victory within that war for the whole
world.  For daily the news from Russia paints in very stark terms what the
"free world", i.e. the USA, won when it succeeded in bringing down the "evil
empire".  The victory parade of speculators and profit makers, gangsters and
their molls  has now become all too visible.  One has to go back to the
triumphant return of Thiers into Paris over the dead bodies of the
communards to find a similar carnival of the lowest elements of humanity. 

But Ryckmans and his fellow traditional intellectuals despite all their high
cultural sensitivities played a crucial role in the victory of the USA.
Havel, Voytila, Solzhenitsyn and many others, and here in Australia Manne,
Santamaria, Coleman and Ryckmans himself have all been on the side of the
victors in the Cold War.  Now they stand washing their hands and saying 

	That is not it at all,
	That is not what I meant, at all.

Nevertheless I must confess that I was deeply moved by the 1996 Boyer
lectures with their passionate affirmation of the necessity of art.  Also
like Ryckmans I am disturbed by many aspects of modernity. I too feel that
our educational system has failed the young.  Where I part from him however
is that I am convinced that something can be done about it and that
something is to set about once more the long task of the creation of a truly
egalitarian world where humanity as a species will flourish.

	





References

Benjamin, W., Illuminations, London: Fontana, 1977
Coleman, P., The Heart Of James McAuley: Life and Work of the Australian
Poet, Sydney: Wildcat Press, 1980
Deutscher, I., The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky: 1921-1929, Oxford: Oxford Uni
Press, 1970
Gramsci, A., Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1978
Mao Tse Tung, Problems of Art & Literature, New York: International Publishers
Williams, R., Politics and Letters: Interviews With New Left Review, London:
Verso, 1979



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