Whither away the American intellectual?
The American public intellectual didn’t so much disappear as was transformed, or was perhaps transmogrified, under an increasingly puissant regime of Capital in its post-industrial iteration, where emphasis shifted from production to consumption.
Consequence: the expanding hegemony of consumerism gradually eroded the public intellectual’s function to such an extent that it could more efficiently and more cost-effectively be given over to “creatives” — the sort of neo-Boho folks Richard Florida so publicly gushes over, those who keep at-risk neighborhoods from going completely crackward and who make a virtue of myopia. Under such a profitable arrangement intellectualism’s ethos came to represent not so much a community of thinkers dedicated to pushing the polity in a particular direction as a cadre of hirelings crafting slogans to drive the consumer to market. What allows these debased intellectuals to coexist with their thoroughgoing reification is the frisson of “‘Wow!” attending popular items of consumption, which comes from jiggering the economies of function and form to best effect, but which also signals at each stage of the process an alienated creativity.
Despite it’s vexed relationship to various art and literary markets the Bohemia of decades past became, then, the agent of its own undoing, because this relationship, along with the defiant, contemptuous gestures it frequently engendered, became the codes of rebellion that, once alembicated through the nimble minds of Madison Avenue “creatives,” stood as the very message to brings future intellects into the consumerist fold, where self-expression is soothingly indexed to a plethora of established “lifestyle” mediations, thus making way for the Hipster ascendancy. In the brisk movement of a curdled dialectic Bohemia became its impossibility; thus any intellectual renascence today will only have us longing for its earlier inception.