Situating Public Intellectuals

Abstract

The concept of the public intellectual has always been a somewhat contested term. This article serves as both an introduction to the debates around what it constitutes and an entry point into how the new media environment is producing a different configuration of the public intellectual. Through key thinkers who have addressed the idea of the public intellectual internationally and those who have focused on the Australian context, this essay positions the arguments made by the authors in this special issue. Via a short case-study of TED, the conference and online idea-spreading phenomenon, it argues that the contemporary moment is producing and privileging a different constellation of experts as celebrities that match the exigencies of online attention economy. A shifted conception of the public intellectual is beginning to take shape that is differently constituted, used and situated, and this article helps to define the parameters for further discussion of these transformations.

The Art of Fran Lebowitz’s Public Persona

“…There is a lingering question about how media culture and “the new formation of entertainment outweighs the ideas” (Marshall and Atherton, “Situating Public Intellectuals” 77). Yet “Celebrity is a construct – a vehicle for the movement of ideas” (Marshall, “Personifying agency” 369); that is undeniable.…”

The power of the personal: situating Aboriginal memoir in the Indigenous public sphere and as a mode of public intellectual intervention

“…The public intellectual assumes many roles, variously cast as heroic defender of universal values, organic educator, organiser and activist (Gramsci, 1973); media celebrity (Debray, 1981); knowledge worker (Gouldner, 1979); cultural producer (Coser, 1965); technical expert (Foucault, 1977) and interpreter and negotiator (Baumann, 1987). More recently in response to the fluid networks and associations enabled by globalised communicative technologies, public intellectualism is no longer seen as an activity of thinking and meaning-making conducted by a single-bounded entity independent of the structures of power it critiques but rather has been re-theorised as a part of a collective effort (Bourdieu, 1991), a series of public engagements undertaken by various social actors (Eyal and Buchholz, 2010) and a function whose authority and visibility are shaped by media technologies (Marshall and Atherton, 2015).…”