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Authors: Susan Sontag

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(AN INTERLUDE)
 
 
WALL: Thus have I, Wall, my part discharged so;
And being done, thus Wall away doth go.
—
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, Act V, Scene 1
 
 
THlSBE: It’s not here anymore.
PYRAMUS: It separated us. We yearned for each other. We grew apart.
THISBE: I was always thinking about it.
PYRAMUS: I thought you were thinking about me.
THISBE: Ninny! (
Gives him a kiss
.) How often have I reassured you.
But I’m talking about what I didn’t say. With every sentence I uttered, there was another, unspoken half sentence, “And the wall …” Example: I’m going to the Paris Bar.
PYRAMUS: “And the wall …”
THISBE: Example: What’s playing at the Arsenal tonight?
PYRAMUS: “And the wall …”
THISBE: Example: It’s terrible for the Turks in Kreuzberg.
PYRAMUS: “And the wall …”
THISBE: Exactly.
PYRAMUS: It was a tragedy. Will it be a comedy now?
THISBE: We won’t become normal, will we?
PYRAMUS: Does this mean we can do whatever we want?
THISBE: I’m starting to feel a little nostalgic. Oh, the human heart is a fickle thing.
PYRAMUS: Thisbe!
THISBE: Not about you, beloved! You know I’ll always be yours. I mean; you’ll be mine. But of course that’s the same, isn’t it? No, I’m thinking about … you know. I miss it a little.
PYRAMUS: Thisbe!
THISBE: Just a little. (
Sees
PYRAMUS
frowning
.) Smile, darling. Oh, you people are so serious!
PYRAMUS: I’ve suffered.
THISBE: So have I, in my way. Not like you, of course. But it wasn’t always easy here, either.
PYRAMUS: Let’s not quarrel.
THISBE:
We
quarrel? Never! (
Sound of wall-peckers
) Listen! What an amazing sound!
PYRAMUS: I wish I’d brought my tape recorder. It’s a Sony.
THISBE: I’m glad you can buy whatever you want now. I didn’t realize you were so poor.
PYRAMUS: It was awful. But, you know, it was good for my character.
THISBE: You see? Even you can feel regret. An American artist warned me last year, You’ll miss this wall. (
She spies some wall-peckers spraying their hoard of pieces of the wall with paint.
) They’re improving it.
PYRAMUS: Let’s not be nostalgic.
THISBE: But you agree there’s something to be said for it. It made us different.
PYRAMUS: We’ll still be different.
THISBE: I don’t know. So many cars. So much trash. The beggars. Pedestrians don’t wait at corners for the green light. Cars parked on the sidewalk.
Enter the
SPIRIT OF NEW YORK.
SPIRIT: O city, I recognize you. Your leather bars, your festivals of independent films, your teeming dark-skinned foreigners, your
real-estate predators, your Art Deco shops, your racism, your Mediterranean restaurants, your littered streets, your rude mechanicals—
THISBE: No! Begone! This is the Berkeley of Central Europe.
SPIRIT: Central Europe: a dream. Your Berkeley: an interlude. This will be the New York of Europe—it was ever meant to be so. Only postponed for a mere sixty years. SPIRIT OF NEW YORK
vanishes.
THISBE: Well, I suppose it won’t be too bad. Since New York isn’t America, this city still won’t be—
PYRAMUS: Sure, sure, provided it stays shabby as well as full of unwelcome foreigners. (
Sighs
.) Let’s not be too hopeful.
THISBE: Oh, let’s be hopeful. We’ll be rich. It’s only money. PYRAMUS: And power. I’m going to like that.
THISBE: We’re not getting anything we don’t deserve. We’re together. We’re free.
PYRAMUS: Everything is going too fast. And costing too much.
THISBE: No one can make us do what we don’t want as long as we’re together.
PYRAMUS: I’m having a hard time thinking of those less fortunate than we are. But sometimes we’ll remember, won’t we.
THISBE: I want to forget these old stories.
PYRAMUS: History is homesickness.
THISBE: Cheer up, darling. The world is divided into Old and New. And we’ll always be on the good side. From now on.
PYRAMUS: Goethe said—
THISBE: Oh, not Goethe.
PYRAMUS: You’re right.
THISBE: In Walter Benjamin’s last—
PYRAMUS: Not Benjamin, either!
THISBE: Right. (
They fall silent for a while
.) Let’s stroll.
They see a procession of vendors, including some Russian soldiers, coming across an empty field.
PYRAMUS: And to think
that
was no-man’s-land.
THISBE: What are they selling?
PYRAMUS: Everything. Everything is for sale.
THISBE: Do say it’s better. Please!
PYRAMUS: Of course it’s better. We don’t have to die.
THISBE: Then let’s go on celebrating. Have some champagne. Have a River Cola.
They drink.
PYRAMUS: Freedom at last.
THISBE: But don’t toss your can on the ground.
PYRAMUS: What do you take me for?
THISBE: Sorry. It’s just that—I’m sorry. Yes, freedom.
 
Curtain.
 
[1991]
I
N MAY 1997
the French literary magazine
La Règle du Jeu,
edited by Philippe Sollers, conducted “an international survey about intellectuals and their role.” I was the sole American on the list of respondents to whom they sent the following six questions:
1. What does the word intellectual mean to you today? Do you see yourself as an intellectual or do you reject this term?
 
2. Who are the intellectual figures who have inspired you in a profound way and still have influence over your thoughts?
3. What is the role of intellectuals at the end of the XXth century? Is their mission completed or do you think that they still have an important task in the world?
 
4. Much has been said about the mistakes of intellectuals, their blindness and their irresponsibility. What do you think about these accusations? Do you agree or would you challenge the criticism?
 
5. What, in your view, are the major obstacles for intellectuals in your country—the indifference of the media, the chaos of opinions, political repression, or what?
 
6. What do you consider the most urgent tasks, the most dangerous prejudices, the most important causes, the biggest perils, and the greatest intellectual joys of today?
This provoked nine answers to some of the questions asked and (I thought) implied.
WHAT THE WORD
intellectual means to me today is, first of all, conferences and roundtable discussions and symposia in magazines about the role of intellectuals in which well-known intellectuals have agreed to pronounce on the inadequacy, credulity, disgrace, treason, irrelevance, obsolescence, and imminent or already perfected disappearance of the caste to which, as their participation in these events testifies, they belong.
WHETHER I SEE
myself as one (I try to do as little seeing of myself as possible) is beside the point. I answer if so called.
BEING A CITIZEN
of a country whose political and ethical culture promotes and reinforces distrust, fear, and contempt for intellectuals (reread Tocqueville), the country which has the most developed anti-intellectual tradition on the planet, I incline to a less jaded view of the role of intellectuals than my colleagues in Europe. No, their “mission” (as your question has it) is not completed.
Of course, it’s speaking much too well of intellectuals to expect the majority to have a taste for protesting against injustice, defending victims, challenging the reigning authoritarian pieties. Most intellectuals are as conformist—as willing, say, to support the prosecution of unjust wars—as most other people exercising educated professions. The number
of people who have given intellectuals a good name, as troublemakers, voices of conscience, has always been small. Intellectuals responsibly taking sides, and putting themselves on the line for what they believe in (as opposed to signing petitions), are a good deal less common than intellectuals taking public positions either in conscious bad faith or in shameless ignorance of what they are pronouncing on: for every André Gide or George Orwell or Norberto Bobbio or Andrei Sakharov or Adam Michnik, ten of Romain Rolland or Ilya Ehrenburg or Jean Baudrillard or Peter Handke, et cetera, et cetera.
But could it be otherwise?
ALTHOUGH INTELLECTUALS COME
in all flavors, including the nationalist and the religious, I confess to being partial to the secular, cosmopolitan, anti-tribal variety. The “deracinated intellectual” seems to me an exemplary formula.
By intellectual I mean the “free” intellectual, someone who, beyond his or her professional or technical or artistic expertise, is committed to exercising (and thereby, implicitly, defending) the life of the mind as such.
A specialist may also be an intellectual. But an intellectual is never just a specialist. One is an intellectual because one has (or should have) certain standards of probity and responsibility in discourse. That is the one indispensable contribution of intellectuals: the notion of discourse that is not merely instrumental, conformist.
HOW MANY TIMES
has one heard in the last decades that intellectuals are obsolete, or that so-and-so is “the last intellectual”?
THERE ARE TWO TASKS
for intellectuals, today as yesterday. One task, educational, is to promote dialogue, support the right
of a multiplicity of voices to be heard, strengthen skepticism about received opinion. This means standing up to those whose idea of education and culture is the imprinting of ideas (“ideals”) such as the love of the nation or tribe.
The other task is adversarial. There has been a daunting shift of moral attitudes in the last two decades in advanced capitalist countries. Its hallmark is the discrediting of all idealisms, of altruism itself; of high standards of all kinds, cultural as well as moral. The ideology of Thatcherism is gaining everywhere, and the mass media, whose function is to promote consumption, disseminate the narratives and ideas of value and disvalue by which people everywhere understand themselves. Intellectuals have the Sisyphean task of continuing to embody (and defend) a standard of mental life, and of discourse, other than the nihilistic one promoted by the mass media. By nihilism I mean not only the relativism, the privatization of interest, which is ascendant among the educated classes everywhere, but also the more recent, and more pernicious, nihilism embodied in the ideology of so-called cultural democracy; the hatred of excellence, achievement as “elitist,” exclusionary.
THE MORAL DUTY
of the intellectual will always be complex because there is more than one “highest” value, and there are concrete circumstances in which not all that is unconditionally good can be honored—in which, indeed, two of these values may prove incompatible.
For instance, understanding the truth does not always facilitate the struggle for justice. And in order to bring about justice, it may seem right to suppress the truth.
One hopes not to have to choose. But when a choice (between truth and justice) is necessary—as, alas, it sometimes is—it seems to me that an intellectual ought to decide for the truth.
This is not, by and large, what intellectuals, the best-intentioned intellectuals, have done. Invariably, when intellectuals subscribe to causes, it is the truth, in all its complexity, which gets short shrift.
A GOOD RULE BEFORE
one goes marching or signing anything:
Whatever your tug of sympathy, you have no right to a public opinion unless you’ve been there, experienced firsthand and on the ground and for some considerable time the country, war, injustice, whatever, you are talking about.
In the absence of such firsthand knowledge and experience: silence.
ON THE SUBJECT
of the presumption—it’s worse than naïveté—of so many intellectuals who take public positions and endorse collective actions that concern countries they know virtually nothing about, nobody said it better than one of the most compromised intellectuals of the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht (who surely knew whereof he spoke):
When it comes to marching many do not know
That their enemy is marching at their head.
The voice which gives them their orders
Is the enemy’s voice and
The man who speaks of the enemy
Is the enemy himself.
[1997]

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