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TANGLING_WITH_JACOBY

                                             September 16, 2021

                                                    THE_LAST_INTELLECTUALS

Listening to John Tangney in conversation with Russell                   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKiU8X_Uoo0
Jacoby of "The Last Intellectuals" fame from 2019,
there's one central thing I'm struck by:

He's done no follow up work in the last 30 years.

His claim to fame is a book decrying the contemporary
intellectual scene as of the mid-1980s, and he's read
various criticisms of it, and you can tell he's done a
number of interviews over the years-- some of the
questions Tangney asks are clearly familiar to him: and
yet, he hasn't made any effort whatsoever to keep up with
the present day scene.

    Have things gotten better, worse, stayed the same,
    or just gotten different?

    Is there something we should do to improve
    the situation?

    Who is the best of the bunch of the current
    public intellectuals?  Who is the worst?

Getting even a hint of an answer to any question like
that out of Jacoby is worse than pulling teeth.

Russell Jacoby comments:

    "I've been criticized for missing the next generation.
    The new generation.  You know, people who write for
    'N+1', 'Jacobin', you know there are a number of new
    magazines out there.  Okay, maybe they're right.
    Maybe it's happening.  I'm willing to reserve
    judgment.  I'm not damning the new voices.  I don't
    see it in the same way as the previous generations,
    but perhaps the nature of it has changed."

It's nice of him to "reserve judgement", but what I'd *like*
to see him do *exercise* some judgement, but to do that he
he'd have to some work to keep up.

How can he have listened to these criticisms and just
shrugged them off as "not my problem"?

Is there any reason we shouldn't just regard his high
opinion of the old guard as the typical glorification of
the past one expects from the old?

Here Russell Jacoby strikes up one of his old themes again:

    "We've got an English Department and they write
    monographs for each other, and they're very
    pleased with their Critical Theory-- but what's
    the impact?"

Okay, but you might wonder, what is Jacoby's "impact"?
Do you *get anything* out of paying attention to Jacoby?
What's the point of any of this?


The worst thing about Russell Jacoby is he makes me
worry that I might not any better than he is at this
game.  The endless hedging ("I don't want to
oversimplify, but--"); the constant admissions that he
doesn't really know anything; but he's just got this
sense* or *feeling* or something; the constant pose of
being a Cultural Critic-- raising questions without
even pointing the way towards an answer.

I'd like to do better than this (and maybe I
would, if I was getting paid).

                                 WHAT_PRICE_INTELLECTUALS

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