Cambridge sociologist Patrick Baert writes in this 2015 book:
* There is fourthly the authenticity bias. We are referring to those studies of intellectuals that assume that intellectuals have a clear sense of their identity and values, with these self-notions guiding their work and the choices they make. Again, the authenticity bias is integral to a particular genre of intellectual biography that attributes particular significance to the author’s self-description as a guide for understanding the various intellectual moves that he or she made.
The very same bias is present in Gross’ notion of the intellectual self-concept. According to this notion, intellectuals tell stories about themselves to themselves and to others, and those stories, which tend to be typological, shape their creative output.15 In what follows we dissent from this view. We do not think it is fruitful to conceive of intellectuals as pursuing authentic projects that correspond to their views about their identity and values.16 Whether within the academy or outside it, intellectuals operate within competitive arenas, struggling over symbolic and institutional recognition and scarce financial resources. It makes a lot of sense, therefore, to recognize the extent to which their interventions – whether through books, articles or speeches – are an integral part of this power struggle rather than an expression of some deeper self. By emphasizing how intellectual production and the struggles over scarce resources are intertwined, we take it as essential to establish a critical distance vis-à-vis the way in which most intellectuals portray themselves to their audience. Indeed, as Bourdieu pointed out, as one of the components of what he coined the ‘scholastic fallacy’,17 intellectuals have a tendency to depict their own intellectual trajectory as untainted by these material, symbolic
and institutional constraints. For instance, there are remarkably few intellectual autobiographies that acknowledge the full extent to which considerations of this kind interfered with the intellectual choices that were made. This is because autobiographies too – just like other intellectual products – position their authors, their allies and opponents.
* While there is some currency in the general idea that an individual’s formative years have a considerable effect later on, it still does not do proper justice to the complexity of his or her trajectory. Indeed, it is rare for intellectuals to stick to a single self-concept or coherent project throughout their lives; they sometimes reinvent themselves, articulating new outlooks and taking on new positions. Gross’ own biography of Rorty underlines our case: while he elaborates on how from an early stage onwards Rorty saw himself as a progressive pragmatist, Gross’ own analysis shows how Rorty presented himself quite differently while establishing his academic career in philosophy. Positioning theory is able to capture shifts of this kind. Of course, Bourdieu and Gross are right in so far as intellectuals’ orientations remain relatively stable – they do not change their stance constantly – but we hope, with positioning theory, to provide a more convincing explanation.
* Following Wittgenstein, speech-act theorists pay attention to how words, rather than representing or mirroring the external world, accomplish things. By the early 1960s, Austin, for instance, was intrigued by ‘performative
utterances’; these are utterances which are neither true nor false, but which nevertheless do something.19 Promises, compliments or threats are examples of such utterances. At the time, Austin’s interest in performativity put clear blue water between his philosophy and that of the logical positivist tradition: the latter took propositions as depicting the external realm (and therefore either true or false), whereas Austin was keen to explore their performative aspects.
Through the second half of the twentieth century, fewer and fewer philosophers thought it fruitful to conceive of language as copying the external world. Many philosophers and theorists, belonging to otherwise different intellectual orientations, became committed to the idea that language is an act which, like any act, does something.
* When accounting for the intellectual realm, a performative perspective explores what intellectual interventions do and achieve rather than what they represent. This might be prima facie counterintuitive. Indeed, we tend to think of intellectual tracts as somehow representational: we see them as reflecting on the world (or reflecting on the representations of others) rather than acting on it. In contrast to other interventions – say, policy briefings, music performances or military actions – intellectual interventions seem to have a more passive ring to them. The tendency to conceive of intellectual interventions as such tends to be greater when intellectuals seem to operate in a semi-autonomous realm, more or less separate from, say, the world of politics or economics. So we tend to think of a journal article in a highly specialized academic journal as representing something, whether through words, models or equations. We tend not to see it as something active, partly because it does not seem to have a visible, immediate impact on the external world.
The basic intuition underlying our theoretical perspective is that even this esoteric journal article does something. The article might not have obvious direct repercussions for the broader world, but it nevertheless does a wide range of things, for the author, for the authors cited, for the discipline, and so forth. The key notion that captures this activity is ‘positioning’. This indicates the process by which certain features are attributed to an individual or a group or some other entity. Initially introduced in the context of military strategies,
marketing experts have used the concept of position to indicate how the right kind of representation of a product, company or brand can fill a previously untapped niche in the market.
* Our starting position rests on a simple idea: intellectual interventions, whether through writing or speaking, always involve positioning. By intellectual intervention we are referring to any contribution to the intellectual realm, whether it is in the form of a book, an article, a blog, a speech or indeed part of any of these (say, a passage or a sentence). The basic intuition underlying our theory is that any such intervention locates the author(s) or speaker(s) within the intellectual field or within a broader socio-political or artistic arena while also situating other intellectuals, possibly depicting them as allies in a similar venture, predecessors of a similar orientation or alternatively as intellectual opponents. According to this perspective, then, any
intellectual move brings about two types of effects. The first type is the positioning itself…
* second type of effect: within a given context, certain types of positioning might help to diffuse the ideas and enhance the agent’s career and material prospects. Other types of positioning might have adverse effects, limiting the further dissemination of the ideas proposed or halting the author’s professional progress…There are also plenty of examples of how positioning can help bring about symbolic and institutional recognition, sometimes belatedly, as in the case of Hayek who was ignored for several decades during the Keynesian aftermath of the
Second World War, but achieved success later on. He inspired a revival of monetarist policy and collected numerous honours, including most notably the Nobel Prize, the Order of the Companions of Honour and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
* Another example of the positioning of institutions and concepts, from a very different political vantage point, would be Carl Schmitt’s attack on liberal democracy for promoting a neutral state that resolves differences, thereby allegedly failing to do justice to what he thought to be the natural enmity between people. Positioning may take place subtly. For instance, intellectuals’ publishers, journal outlets and their choice of references might give subtle hints about what type of intellectual they are and where their allegiances lie. Sometimes, however, positioning is achieved overtly, and indeed intellectuals often use, just as we are doing now, the
introduction or concluding part of their text or speech to situate their intellectual intervention and themselves in relation to others.
* Equally explicit is the use of labels, which can act like brands. Intellectuals often use labels to flag their own position. These labels tend to capture the core idea in a succinct fashion. This is obviously the case for Sartre’s ‘existentialism’ and his notion of the ‘engaged intellectual’ but also for, say, the ‘reflexive turn’ in anthropology, the ‘strong programme in cultural sociology’ or the ‘new historicism’ in literary studies. Of course, intellectuals use labels not just to refer to themselves but also to others, sometimes with the aim of criticizing or ridiculing their work. Take, for instance, ‘humanism’: whereas in the mid-1940s in France it had clearly positive connotations (used to full effect by Sartre, as we have seen), over the next couple of
decades it gradually became a negative reference point, often used to denigrate any assumption of a coherent or transparent self.30 Said’s notion of ‘orientalism’ (and the related accusation of ‘essentializing’) provides another potent example: initially introduced in the specific context of literature, it caught on, spread to various disciplines and has invariably been used to denigrate allegedly flawed attempts to generalize about other cultures. The introduction of a label can facilitate the dissemination of ideas, but the clarity of its meaning and its distinctiveness might be undermined once others start subscribing to the same label. The term ‘existentialism’, which was initially used by journalists and then adopted by Sartre, was also used to refer to the ideas of a variety of other intellectuals (including Heidegger, Jaspers, Camus and de Beauvoir) and, eventually, to a broader culture of malaise or angst. After it had become so nebulous, Sartre himself abandoned the label. In a similar fashion Charles Peirce’s ‘pragmatism’ demonstrates the precariousness of labels. Once William James, F. C. S. Schiller and literary figures started to adopt the term he had coined, Peirce switched to ‘pragmaticism’ to distinguish his intellectual orientation.31 Likewise, Hayek adopted the term ‘catallaxy’ to
refer to the spontaneous order produced by market interactions, after his earlier terms like ‘free market’ and ‘liberal economics’ had been adopted by the Chicago School, which had very different underlying philosophy and methods.
Positioning can take two ideal-typical forms: an intellectual intervention may involve what we call ‘intellectual positioning’ or ‘politico-ethical positioning’. Intellectual positioning locates the agent primarily within the intellectual realm. It might identify a specific intellectual orientation, defend that stance and elaborate on its significance. Claims about the importance often come down to claims about the originality or intellectual power of the intellectual orientation. Intellectual positioning can situate the agent and work within a broader tradition, linking it to important figures in the field, including possibly a mentor. ‘Politico-ethical positioning’, on the other hand, refers to a broader political or ethical stance which surpasses the narrow confines of the intellectual sphere.
* Intellectuals often locate themselves in relation to a sacred realm, in opposition to the profane world of the market, party politics and everyday life… in the modern university system, for instance, academics also often invoke a sacred realm when appealing to higher academic values such as intellectual autonomy, truth and excellence.
* An intellectual intervention in itself does not involve a particular positioning; positioning only takes effect because of the agents operating within a particular context. There are three aspects of this relational logic. Firstly, the effects of an intervention in terms of positioning depend on the individuals who bring it about, on their already established status and positioning within the intellectual field…
Secondly, the effects of intellectual interventions depend on those of the other individuals at play within the same field. Shifts in the positioning of other individuals affect our positioning and self-positioning. In particular, the position of an intellectual intervention might be undermined or reassessed because of an effective countermove or more subtly by the fact that a significant number of intellectuals have now moved onto different topics or issues. We have seen, for instance, how, in the mid-1940s, intellectuals became increasingly convinced of the writer’s political responsibility and how this made Gide’s notion of art for art’s sake untenable. Further, once similar ideas were used in defence of collaborationist intellectuals, this notion and the people associated with it were conceived as pernicious. Another example from our discussion concerns a later period, when a new generation of intellectuals, born after the First World War, treated Sartre as increasingly insignificant and turned to different authors or proposed different interpretations of the same authors. Foucault, for instance,
found inspiration in Nietzsche46 and Lévi-Strauss relied on Durkheim and Saussure. Once even Sartre’s previous allies, such as Merleau-Ponty, moved on to different intellectual traditions, his philosophical programme started looking outdated.
Thirdly, the actual effects in terms of positioning depend very much on the specific intellectual or socio-political context in which the intellectual intervention takes place, on the historically rooted sensitivities.
…by arguing in Elements of Law and Leviathan that the sovereign is the sole judge to assess a threat, Hobbes positioned himself in line with Charles I in the context of the ship-money crisis, defending not only the king’s
right to tax people in a military context but also his right (and not the public’s or their representatives’) to judge whether the Dutch were a sufficient threat to the crown to warrant increased military expenses.
Given the significance of context, it follows that, through time, the same types of intellectual interventions might bring about different positioning even when the same people are involved. It also follows, crucially, that the same intellectual intervention might generate different positioning when transposed to different contexts. For instance, authors’ self-presentation within the local field that is familiar to them might acquire different meanings and connotations in a different context. Therefore, even when intellectuals are involved in carefully constructed or calculated positioning and self-positioning, not all effects of their intellectual interventions are within their control. Indeed, intellectual interventions can amount to very different forms of positioning and self-positioning once they reach different audiences.
One extreme scenario is when intellectual interventions (and the intellectuals behind those interventions) are posthumously reassessed by others in pursuit of their own intellectual agenda. As Gary Taylor pointed out, what appear to us now to be iconic literary figures or key intellectual interventions were not necessarily considered as such at the time; it was sometimes only at a later stage that those intellectuals and interventions were identified as important.48 Those who have been crucial in this process of ‘remembering’ often had their own agenda, positioning themselves in the competitive intellectual or political arena at the time.
* at the end of the war, Sartre used the alleged non-engagement of previous novelists as a foil to earmark his
own intellectual agenda.
* Analytic philosophy provides another interesting case, especially because it is supposedly unconcerned with past
philosophers. For all their disdain towards the history of philosophy, earlier British analytic philosophers showed a remarkable interest in this sub-discipline: they repeatedly positioned their own intellectual agenda in opposition to what they saw as the dangers of foreign strands of thought, thereby coining the term ‘Continental philosophy’.
Revealing a certain amount of smug patriotism, Russell, Ayer and several others depicted the alleged muddled thinking of Hegel and Heidegger as causally related to the emergence of totalitarian regimes, linking their own preoccupation with precision, logic and science to more responsible and liberal forms of government. Even subsequent British-based philosophers such as Berlin55 or Popper, who did not, strictly speaking, operate within the framework of analytic philosophy, made their case for piecemeal liberal democracy by depicting several German philosophies as pernicious, either because they allegedly promoted a problematic notion of liberty or because
they proposed closed, utopian schemes that were immune from empirical refutation.
* It is rare for a single intellectual intervention to bring about the desired effect. In most cases several interventions – often repeating the same position – are necessary to get a message across. However, even repeated sole interventions would not be sufficient because one’s positioning depends on so many other agents. Firstly, positioning depends on broader intellectual networks. The networks of an intellectual comprise a large number of agents, who engage with him or her and confirm his or her positioning, even if they disagree or are overtly
hostile. The status and recognition of intellectuals is dependent partly on where they are acknowledged (in which journals or book series), and who precisely acknowledges them (what is their positioning and status).
* Secondly, positioning is likely to be more effective when accomplished in teams.61 Teams are narrower than networks: teams of intellectuals actively cooperate in positioning themselves, for instance, by grouping around a school or research programme, often using a label which makes their work and agenda immediately recognizable.
* Teams are effective but they come at a cost: with the exception of the intellectual leaders, members of teams find it more difficult to position themselves as having an independent voice or as innovative. Ultimately the writings of the leaders will be remembered while the other works gradually fade away, unless other team members break away and actively reposition themselves as dissenting from the team leader. Team membership is, however, crucial because positioning rarely goes uncontested. An intellectual might be able to position him- or herself for a certain period of time, but eventually rival intellectuals will mount a challenge, portraying him or her as outdated, insignificant, pernicious, erroneous, or as misrepresenting his or her self-proclaimed position. Even individuals who carefully position themselves may end up being pigeonholed differently by others and having to extricate from labels attributed to them.
* Teams capture the cooperative side of intellectual life, but what we call ‘individualization’ is equally intrinsic to the realm of intellectuals. By intellectual individualization, we refer to the process by which
intellectuals distinguish themselves from others, making themselves look different from them and possibly unique. Individualization is achieved through careful self-positioning and positioning, differentiating oneself from others. It may involve conflict because the act of differentiating tends to take place through criticisms of others. This is not to say that individualization and teamwork are necessarily mutually exclusive: intellectuals might collaborate with other team members to emphasize their distinct stance and to elaborate on how this stance differs from that of others.
* Almost every formal presentation of new intellectual work begins with a ‘position statement’ identifying the
work on which it builds, the work that complements and supports it, and the work by other authors that it contradicts or supersedes.
