| > but instead [the potential intellectuals] are drawn to the easy honeypot of modern middlebrow culture because it is too nerdy, too attractive, too omnipresent, to ever leave. What a strange conclusion. Ignoring auteur theory (the idea that you might bring artistic or intellectual value to an otherwise bland commercial work) entirely, all the author’s hypothesised potential intellectuals are simply making too much money doing Marvel movies…? And finding this intellectually and artistically stimulating enough…? I don’t think that really tracks at all. It’s very hard to imagine Camus pieing off fighting for the French resistance or Hemingway staying home from the Spanish Civil War because they were satiated by their Funko Pop collections. I think, generally, people who want to make meaningful contributions to a field are more driven than that, and there are tonnes of excellent critics and theorists - ‘intellectuals’ - working, unmurdered, in the arts today. They are less visible culturally partially because, with the decline of print media, they are not as profitable for media orgs as they previously were. I do think that our puritanical cultural view of productivity-as-maximally-virtuous has created a lot of guilt in the middle classes about whether they spend their leisure time ‘intellectually enough’, which - though seductive in a masochistic way - is a completely absurd frame once broken down. I wonder if the author might not be projecting their own anxieties, in this sense, onto their imagined peers. |
Camus/Hemingway were 'intellectual' in the sense that they sort to engage with the wider world, to explore and to understand and to improve it. 'Productivity' culture gurus are usually not 'intellectual' in that sense at all - and they are often caricatured as having a narrow focus in their work, reductive worldviews, social difficulties, and little compassion for other people. I'd argue that productivity culture is actually tied to nerd culture (both are rooted in the huge rewards that big tech has paid for insect-like specialization) and therefore just as anti-intellectual. People are 'guilted' into learning to code, side hustles, day trading, open-source software, streaming, extra-curriculars, making an app, creating content, etc - not studying political economy, becoming a journalist, joining a political organization.