Knowledge in the Age of the Withered Civil Sphere: The Blogger as Intellectual?

Brown University Graduate Student Conference

Intellectuals and the Academy in Public Life
Sam Han
shan@gc.cuny.edu
The Graduate Center, CUNY

In a 2005 interview for the New York Times Magazine,1 the late-Jean Baudrillard, in a

manner unique to him, claims:

There are no more French intellectuals. What you [the interviewer] call French
intellectuals have been destroyed by the media. They talk on television, they talk
to the press and they are no longer talking among themselves.

This type of statement is not unfamiliar to those of us who follow Baudrillard’s work.

Best known for his theory of “simulations and simulacra” – largely mediated to

Americans quite scandalously as the denial of the occurrence of the Persian Gulf War,

Baudrillard, in his playful response, brings our attention to a crucial point in the

discussion of intellectuals in contemporary society. Intellectuals, French ones at least, no

longer exist because media – television and the press – have subsumed them.

Baudrillard presents us here with the deep irony of the irrevocably

technomediated nature of the intellectual in public life. The very media technologies –

print and television – that have given rise to the intellectual’s very publicity dissolves her

completely in the simulacra of media. Moreover, he diagnoses our world of simulations

as a sad state of affairs for intellectuals by suggesting that because of such media, there is

no dialogue or communication between intellectuals. The lamentation implied in

Baudrillard’s comments (holding off for a second an evaluation of their “truth-value”)

mourns the lack or historical dissolution of a space of critical reason, defined as a space

of communication between intellectuals and only among intellectuals. We can infer from
1
Deborah Solomon, "Continental Drift." New York Times Magazine 2005.

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Baudillard that if intellectuals did speak to one another, there would be some sort of

public good being produced.

This type of faith in intellectual reason is a symptom of the trajectory of various

theoretical interventions regarding intellectuals throughout modernity. In its evolution

from premodern, traditional societies to Western modernity, the intellectual was the

embodiment of knowledge – a man (and only a man) of letters. Prior to that, in traditional

times, the literati were quite literally those who were literate. Thus, the “intellectual

class” was limited to clergy. As Marx and Gramsci after him remind us, ideology is

hegemonic constitutively due to its bourgeois roots. Thus the production of dominant

ideas, though accepted by many was made by few. Foucault argued much the same,

though in his own terms – namely with regard to the relation of knowledge with power.

In a theological topology, the intellectuals were up high, a bit closer to God than the

plebeians. They guarded their pulpits. Or perhaps, their pulpits were guarded by the rigid

boundaries of legitimized intellectual activity – the cloistered halls of the monastery.

We can track historically several theoretical attempts at rectifying such inequality

in intellectual activity. The most famous, or maybe the most well-known, is found in the

work of Jurgen Habermas, who has espoused the notion of “communicative rationality.”

Influenced by Wittgenstein among others, Habermas has argued for the resurgence of the

“ideal-speech situation,” by which there would be more or less open public

communication among strangers and influence social life and most importantly the State.

Importantly, these strangers would achieve a collective rationality, transcending the social

locations of any individual participant of the critical discourse. In this way, the public

sphere would be a crucial arm of civil society or the civil sphere, the proverbial Third

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Estate mediating the state and the populus.2 Importantly, it would influence the state, but

would not be of it. It is crucial to for us to dwell on this point. The public sphere is

theorized as a crucial part of civil society, which provides a mediating function. For

Habermas, against this ideal of the public sphere, political life today is nothing but

conformity and uniform public opinion. He is nostalgic for the salons of earlier Europe,

where citizens would engage in philosophical and literary debates and be encouraged to

do so. Thus, for Habermas, media technologies dull the potential for critical reason and

effectively depoliticize populations. This type of humanistic nostalgia is shared by media

scholar Neil Postman, who argued that people were “amusing themselves to death” by

watching television.

Today, new media technologies, most importantly the Internet and the ever-

expanding blogosphere, have catalyzed an extension and rearticulation of such discourse

within and outside of the academe espousing a new hope for a growing democratization

of intellectual practice. Due to its decentralized, network structure, the Internet is seen as

a new moment of “user-generated content” spurred on by the open-source model, most

popularly exemplified by YouTube and Wikipedia. To take stock of the shift, the “new”

Internet has been dubbed the Web 2.0. This past year (2006), Time Magazine awarded its

“Person of the Year” to “You.” The author of the cover article for that issue, Lev

Grossman, writes:

The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small
contributions of millions of people and making them matter . . . [I]t's really a
revolution.

America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but
those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are
running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its
2
See Michael Hardt, "The Withering of Civil Society." Social Text.45 (1995): 27-44.

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 regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux.
We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting
started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get
backhauled into the global intellectual economy.3

Grossman identifies key trends in the Web 2.0 for what he calls the global intellectual

economy. Who could blame him? Empirically, so it seems, he is on solid ground. Some

statistics show that 75,000 blogs are created daily. (To invoke Baudrillard again, these

numbers are staggering, undoubtedly too real for our minds to compute.) How many

blogs is that a second? In a minute? In an hour? To us, this is simply unreal, or as he

would say, hyperreal. It is beyond the limits of calculability of human reason.

The revolution that has Grossman so excited is that of a collective intellectual

productivity. Anytime someone uses the R-word (revolution), it is perhaps up to us, as

opposed to the author, to ask what exactly that revolution is supposed to entail. A

revolution of what? What is doing the overthrowing and who is getting overthrown?

Though he does not go into the details of what technological or social transformation

occurred to suggest such a thing, Grossman, I infer, is referring to the change in Internet

practices from information-reception to information-production.

In the 1990s, when the Internet took off economically as wells culturally, all the

rage was about how much knowledge humans could extract from the Internet. Let us

remember the Internet once portrayed as the “Information Superhighway.” This translated

even to the name of an Internet Service Provider, now long out of business –“Prodigy.”

This was, however, very much a broadcast model, in which communication was uni-

directional. A central node transmitted to various receptors. Theodor Adorno and Max

Horkheimer critiqued such a model, citing its fascistic tendencies; they dubbed this

3
Lev Grossman, "Time's Person of the Year: You." Time Magazine Dec 13 2006.

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famously “the culture industry.” Within the context of the culture industry – radio,

television and cinema – there was, indeed, very little participation, if at all. Using the

language of cybernetics, there was no feedback mechanism.

As the author suggests, in this new era of the Web 2.0 and the “You” generation,

the Internet would be a space of radical inclusion, a veritable collaboration of ideas on a

global scale. Now, the average Joe or Jane can contribute to this “explosion of

productivity and innovation.” In effect, they would no longer be relegated to the bottoms

of the intellectual totem poles but situated well within its horizontal structure – a node in

the network. If anything, such a pronouncement is a pop-version of a grand theory of

society. We cannot take it at face-value, as simply a description of the state of affairs. To

borrow a concept from Fredric Jameson, within the political unconscious of such a theory

is a trace of the liberal hope that claims, “All could be intellectuals!” We see evidence of

this in the UN’s continual push for policies to narrow the digital divide still so prevalent

in the global North and global South, working with figures in computer sciences like

Nicholas Negroponte of MIT to develop the $100 laptop. Hence, it is unsurprising that

the information technologies revolution has resulted in social theory’s attempt to evaluate

the potential of information technology to produce “an international public sphere.”4

This portrait of the blogosphere is a new formation of the old politics of the public

sphere. Today, it is the politics of, what I refer to as, the global knowledge society. It is

fascinating because it not only encompasses Habermasians (as expected), but also figures

from the private sector – Bill Gates and George Soros being the most obvious examples.
4
As one may expect, there have been several attempts by neo-Habermasians to claim the Internet and other
information technologies for the creation of “publics” and “counterpublics,” see Nancy Fraser and Michael
Warner. Though he is not often considered a by the book Habermasian, Craig Calhoun, in my opinion, has
succinctly captured the spirit of the theorists of the public sphere. See his “Information Technology and the
International Public Sphere.” Paper presented at the International Sociological Association, Brisbane,
Australia.(2002).

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These figures from the private sector, at venues such as the World Economic Forum and

the Open Society, make similar forays into the democratization of intellectual activity,

pointing to the Internet as the bearer of such potential. Now, I’m not suggesting that this

type of rhetoric coming from Soros-type market liberals is the hot thing that we should all

flock to. I’m simply suggesting that we are witnessing a convergence of ideas, one that

promises a new world order based on global collective intellectual production. And one

that I believe is extremely limited and inaccurate in its theorizing of new media

technologies.

These new sets of technomediated practices force us to rethink what exactly it is

to be an intellectual and by extension, as I’ve tried to posit, in what kind of society he or

she exists. Considering what many view as the “democratizing” potential of the Web 2.0

as well as the structuring of the World Wide Web itself, specifically hyperlinks, is the

blogosphere then, the latest crystallization of the communicative hope, where true

democratic dialogue rests where the remnants of the bourgeois intellectual can at long last

be jettisoned fully? Does this then entail the death of the intellectual – as a member of

“the new class”? And lastly, is the Web 2.0 symptomatic of a global knowledge society?

Knowledge to Information

It is not by coincidence that the concepts of knowledge and democracy have been paired

in the new politics of knowledge society. In its Enlightenment formulation, knowledge

always has a partner – freedom.5 The Kantian dare is of course a clear example such a

pairing. A sense of freedom or emancipation underpins Kant’s dare; that is to say to “dare

5
Charles Lemert, “Death, Justice and Freedom: Does Global Knowledge Change the Rules? Or, Freedom’s
Family Romance.” “Is freedom the daughter or knowledge?” Seminar at Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut,
Essen, Germany—April 10-12, 2006.

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to know” is an invitation to, a call for, and even an interpellation into Enlightenment

ethics. This definition of Enlightenment assumes that knowledge is power and thus

daring to attain knowledge “entails a pure practical reason of synthetic a priories.”6

Thus, knowledge – in the most modern sense as reasoned (practical and formal)

knowledge – necessarily has freedom as its loss object, one it cannot stop grieving in

melancholic fashion. The relationship between freedom and knowledge has been long

and tenuous since Kant’s initial call. Freedom has attempted to abandon this type of

knowledge several times – notably during the revolutions of the late-18th century and of

course at the end of the 20th when ideology, once and for all, was challenged. Yet, in the

wake of such attempts by knowledge to ditch freedom, there has always been, in the

liberal West, a penchant for freedom, so much so that it is exported in the form of

neoliberal reforms all across the globalized world, to give just one example. But,

freedom, as is the case with power, is never what it is extolled to be by its proprietors.

And many today argue that freedom is the freedom to partake in the global market.

American foreign policy, to use a crude but illustrative example, does not deny my claim.

One may explain such a form of obsessive neurosis as simply the difficult and

arduous burning out of the liberal dream of the West. Though to grieve the de-coupling of

knowledge and freedom may require such a compensatory supplement, it may also be

(and I am more convinced of this than anything else) that knowledge has transformed not

simply because of clear failures it has had in coming through its promises of freedom and

equality under the umbrella of humanity, but because of the convergence of media

technologies and humans. In the rhetoric of the end of ideology, of history and everything

else, knowledge was seen as, for the first time in the mainstream at least, contestable,
6
Ibid., 5.

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unfixed and as Jean-Francois Lyotard (most famously) described, incredulous.

Knowledge no longer remains in the grand narrative that ends in a gripping climax of

ultimate emancipation not simply because of the “world revolutions of the 1960s” that

Immanuel Wallerstein cites, but also because of the concurrent technological evolutions.

We must take stock of the transformations that media technologies have initiated in the

realms of knowledge but also, and perhaps more importantly, in the Enlightenment-

oriented ontology of the human.

I would like to propose that knowledge is now supplanted by information. This

process of the informationalization of knowledge has two features distinct from

knowledge. First, information comes in discrete forms, a process that French philosopher

Bernard Stiegler refers to as “grammatization.” (This is of course an extension of

Derrida’s grammatology.) Information is unlike knowledge in that it is not a totalizing

system. Nor is it “a piece of information” that can be incorporated and digested into a

system of knowledge. Second, information is necessarily destabilizing. Simply,

information is an introduction of difference to the system. It is, by definition, a virtual, a

not yet actual, dissonance, what systems theory describes as entropy. As Gregory Bateson

famously put it, it is a difference that makes a difference.

Informational Ideas and Mediators

What does the transformation of knowledge to information mean for ideas and their

bearers – the so-called intellectuals? To explore such questions, I will turn to some

research that has come out of the British Economic and Social Research Council’s “The

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Dynamics of Transformative Ideas in Contemporary Public Discourse” project,

specifically the works of Tom Osborne and Jakob Arnoldi.

Jakob Arnoldi presents a theory of “informational ideas” by looking at the British

think tank Demos, which has close ties to Blair’s “Third Way” politics. Using the

contemporary think tank as a symptom of the state of information, Arnoldi concludes that

informational ideas are distinct from discourse in the following ways: (1) they are

brokered (for example, by think tanks and the like) (2) they are circulated to political

parties and mass media alike (3) they are branded and marketed (4) they are affective,

intended to elicit “pleasant sensations.”7 Whereas discourse relied on statements as

bearers of meanings to ultimately function as the conditions of possibility to legitimize

for certain social practices and/or formations such as institutions, in contrast,

informational ideas are “imparters” and “marketers.”8 Thus, successful communication in

this informational milieu is not based on the transmission of coded meaning, as the

theories of discourse and structuralist semiotics since Saussure have suggested. In fact,

today, more than ever, alphabetic language is being replaced in significance by the binary

meta-language of zeroes and ones.

The social implications of such a shift according to Arnoldi are on the level of

affect and desire. For instance, what is the “meaning” (semiotically speaking of course)

of the Coca Cola brand? It may mean several things. For some it connotes, “freshness,”

“cosmopolitanism,” “youth” and “America.” For others it means “big bad capitalist

bastards.” Ultimately, its meaning is open-ended. Therefore, the signified or the referent

is contingent and dynamic. Though it may seem like the embodiment of American

7
Jakob Arnoldi, "Informational Ideas." Thesis Eleven (Forthcoming, 2007). 5-7.
8
Arnoldi, 8.

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corporate ubiquity for us in the United States, it, I assure you, sometimes means progress

and modernity for others living the global South. The “meaning” of such a symbol, the

brand, is dependent on the flows of desire and affect. I am not suggesting that semiotics

has lost its cogency. That is far from the case. What I am saying is that semiotics has been

supplemented with what Patricia T. Clough deems “the political economy of affect.”9 As

Arnoldi says, “it is affective, rather than descriptive.”10 It does not draw out rational

thought. Informational ideas draw out the inherent difficulty of describing

communication today as Habermas attempted to in his famous two-volume study. It is not

the linguistically oriented transmission of meaning but a semantically open-ended, in-

process negotiation. Quite simply, it is not the closed-system of language or discourse.

Due to their circulatory nature, informational ideas operate in a metastable system that

“invite[s] others to partake in the negotiation of their meanings whereby ideas are kept in

circulation.”11 This metastability, the ability for a system to function in a non-equilibrium

state for periods of time, is facilitated by the Internet and other new media technologies.

Thus, Thomas Osborne argues that intellectuals have been replaced by mediators,

who mediate ideas rather than produce them. Osborne, inline with arguments made by

Hardt and Negri among many others, posits that intellectuals, as members of “high

intelligentsia” are no longer, and should no longer, be the focus of a social theory of

intellectuals. What should take the place of such a focus of study should be the flattening

of intellectual activity and the resulting proliferation of knowledge-workers, who work in

what Mark Poster refers to as the “mode of information” as a move from the industrial

mode of production at the turn of the 20th century. The growth of the service industry as

9
Clough et al. “Notes towards a theory of affect-itself.” Ephemera Journal (Forthcoming).
10
Arnoldi., 13.
11
Ibid., 17.

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well as “knowledge-work” is one example of this turn to a mode of production without

material commodities. Scott Lash has recently called this type of capitalism

“metaphysical.”12 Indeed, these workers are not intellectuals in the traditional sense. They

are neither public orators nor simply temporary, low-grade intellectuals. This is a function

of the democratization of ideas-work, which I’ve outlined earlier. Ideas-work is no longer

strictly owned by the traditional white-collar industries. Thus, we are able to open up the

definition of intellectuals to encompass far more than the old definition of intellectual as

the producer of ideas. In fact, as Arnoldi and Osborne suggest, they are not producing

anything.

As Osborne explains, intellectuals-as-mediators are enablers, fixers, catalysts and

brokers of ideas.13 Within these various functional modalities, there exists a common

feature, which is movement. “The mediator is simply the one who gets things moving.”14

Mediation, in this sense, is not a go-between between two stable, extant entities; that is to

say, mediation is not a passive intermediary. The mediator is creative, not ex nihilo in

terms of inspiration. In other words, the mediator-intellectual does not shout “Eureka!” in

the moment of discovery but as creates a buzz of innovation. Indeed, invention and

creativity in this informational milieu is about the process of information transfer,

transmission or, as Gilbert Simondon would say, transduction.

Notes towards Virtual Environments

I believe that today’s blogosphere, as well as the process of digitalization has much to do

with this shift that I have just outlined. Against the politics of the global knowledge

12
Scott Lash, “Metaphysical Capitalism.” Unpublished manuscript.
13
Thomas Osborne, “On mediators,” 19.
14
Ibid.

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society, I wish to suggest that looking into the blogosphere reveals what Arnoldi and

Osborne argue, namely the informationalization of knowledge and mediatization of the

intellectual. Furthermore, to reiterate Stiegler’s point, new media technologies, most

especially blogs, “grammatize” and destabilize knowledge. These processes combine to

have a profound effect on how we should theorize intellectuals today by challenging the

uniqueness of human reason and the ability for it to dominate technologies for its own

purposes. Thus, the blogosphere, as a symptom of intellectual activity in the

postmodernity, are pushing us towards a view of new media technologies that orient us

not only towards artificial intelligence but to artificial life, what Manuel De Landa refers

to as “synthetic reason.”15

Today, what the term “blogosphere” signifies is rather ambiguous. On one hand, it

is seen as a reformulated, high-tech version of the Habermasian public sphere or an

electronically mediated civil society. In other words, when newscasters refer to the

response from “the blogosphere,” they are in effect reproducing precisely the projection

that is etymologically encapsulated by the term. Blogs are seen as a sphere, a contained

community. On the other hand, and this is the definition I have been trying to maintain, it

is seen as a network made up of loose virtual connections, an immanent complexity of

potential connectivities that actualize when in relation to certain events. This is especially

evident when we see the implications of viewing the blogosphere not as mediation

between two “intelligent minds” but as a “virtual environment.”16 A key characteristic of

virtual environments, a term generally associated with research in Artificial Life, is its

metastability, the ability to operate in a state far-from-equilibrium. The organic body, for
15
Manuel De Landa, “Virtual Environments and the Emergence of Synthetic Reason.” in Flame Wars: The
Discourse of Cyberculture. Edited by Mark Dery. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.
16
Manuel De Landa, “Virtual Environments and the Emergence of Synthetic Reason.” in Flame Wars: The
Discourse of Cyberculture. Edited by Mark Dery. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.

12
example, is a closed, autopoietic system that relies on mechanisms of homeostasis or

equilibrium. The body relies on negative feedback (fever for instance) to indicate that it is

in distress and positive feedback (the immune system’s white blood cells) to return it to

homeostasis. A blog, and the blogosphere in general for that matter, is not such a system

precisely due to the nonlinear dynamics of blogging practices; it is a, what Gilbert

Simondon refers to as, metastability.

Most crucial to the blog is of course the “feedback” mechanism that is structurally

built into the blog itself – the ability to of post comments. It is absolutely necessary to

note at this point that the comments hold a somewhat deferential position to the

“original” post, of which it is commentary. One would not be wrong to argue that because

of this structural hierarchy, the blog is a closed system. This is a point that I certainly

could not argue against (convincingly, at least). However, we must look at what exactly is

the content of the blog. The content of any given blog post are usually laden with

hyperlinks to other blogs or other websites. For those of us who blog, imagining this is

not require much imagination. Bloggers of various kinds, from on-the-ground news

bloggers, who report on political events armed with digital camera and notebook

computer, to the famous mommy bloggers, who detail the trials and tribulation of

motherhood, post links to other websites and other blogs as well images and videos. This

is no longer exemplary of the Habermasian “communicative rationality” but quite another

thing altogether. Simply put, it is a new informational milieu. The blogger in this process

is not that of “the intellectual,” the man of letters who imparts his learned knowledge

onto his audience but that of the mediator, who moves information. Considering both the

structure and dynamics of blogs alongside the blogging practices of bloggers not only

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necessitates a return to a view of blogs in relation to other blogs, but also, and more

importantly, to reconsider the sanctity of human reason and human thought. Hence, an

understanding of the blogosphere and new media technologies, more generally, as virtual

environments pushes us beyond the definition of intellectual activity as solely the

ideation of human thought to the notion of technogenesis, what Mark Hansen describes

as, “the very transductive dialectic – between the living and technics – that constitutes the

being of the human.”17

17
Mark Hansen, “Media Theory.” p. 305.

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 References

Arnoldi, J. (2007). "Informational Ideas." Thesis Eleven.(Forthcoming).

De Landa, Manuel. “Virtual Environments and the Emergence of Synthetic Reason.” in

Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Edited by Mark Dery. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1994.

Clough, Patricia Ticineto, G. G., Rachel Schiff, Aaron Weeks, and Craig Willse (2006).
"Notes Towards a Theory of Affect-Itself." Ephemera. (Forthcoming).

Hansen, M. B. N. (2005). "Media Theory." Theory, Culture and Society 23(2-3): 297-306.

Hardt, Michael. "The Withering of Civil Society." Social Text.45 (1995): 27-44.

Osborne, T. (2004). "On mediators: intellectuals and the ideas trade in the
knowledge society." Economy and Society 33(4): 430-447.

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