“The intellectual in a time of crisis”—now there’s an intriguingly unobtrusive phrase. Without a verb, without even a question, and perhaps most significantly without specifying any particular relation of the intellectual to the time of crisis. (The responsibility, the problem, the experience of the intellectual in a time of crisis? No—and its choosing not to tell us is telling.) That elision is marked only by the larger phrase’s rhetorical asymmetry, its depositing “the intellectual,” a single noun, on its one side, and “a time of crisis,” a pair of them, on its other, a fulcrum “in” between. And yet its syntax is hierarchical too, a series of hypostatic, prepositional nestings—the intellectual in a time of crisis—making, in turn, for a kind of vertical symmetry that’s itself asymmetric with the phrase’s horizontal asymmetry.

Does it begin to look stranger yet?

Who’s an intellectual anyway? I suppose whoever’s listening. Really, the phrase constructs its own audience, just as “the rabbi in a time of crisis” presupposes the rabbi, “the judge in a time of crisis” presupposes the judge to whom it is addressed. Except that it’s relatively clear, before they’re addressed, who is a rabbi, who is a judge, because rabbis and judges have external criteria of identification. The intellectual? The intellectual is, I think, interpellated by the phrase “the intellectual in a time of crisis,” which hails the intellectual by making itself legible to the intellectual as well as vice versa. The intellectual therefore inheres more on a level with the phrase than internally to it, and so assumes, within the discursive reality of the text, a cast of permanence, even of eternity. It is “the” intellectual, after all.

(Not so, however, the [a?] crisis; the crisis exists contingently not only in the text but even further inside time—it is bounded and defined by time as much as it is, apparently, diffuse in space, suggesting it’s only in time that it can be mediated. In other words, the intellectual is ultimately transcendental, the crisis historical.)

The phrase interpellates the intellectual, yet not by way of phatic address. Rather, it does so by at once assuming and querying the intellectual’s responsivity to the crisis. That underdetermined responsivity is in fact a necessary condition of the intellectual’s interpellation, is made a part of the intellectual’s identity. And yet how can the intellectual ever respond to the crisis? The two exist on different dimensions: the intellectual at the level of the text and outside time, the crisis within the text and bounded by time.[1] It is the asymmetric circuitry of the phrase that both makes the intellectual and cuts the intellectual off from the transitional object through which it is made. It is, I think, just this sort of asymmetry in the poetics of language that makes the intellectual speak and that makes the intellectual’s speech by nature inefficacious. Which of course constitutes another asymmetry—a crisis, even. Which, therefore, makes the intellectual speak again.

A quick (unscientific) search of the Stanford library catalog yields more than 15,000 books and 500,000 articles published in this century with titles that include the word “crisis.” Yet the crisis of our time (or one of them) is apparently so acute as to provide universities a reason to do less research with fewer scholars. To recognize a crisis is both to cede and to seize the fantasy of control, and to do so in a manner that entails a hidden incoherence, or at least in a manner that becomes incoherent once we recognize it as such: it’s to believe both that circumstances are beyond our control and that we can and should respond to those circumstances in some masterly way. That’s consonant with what broadly seems to me the contemporary humanities’ operating principle. But the humanities are not so different from the world in which they are comfortably uncomfortable, a world that can make this sort of incoherence seem the only way to survive.

What would it mean to be an intellectual who is not living, working, intellecting in and by means of a time of crisis? I don’t know, except to wonder whether by asking this question—and by answering it, “I don’t know”—we might begin to create the conditions of its answerability. Perhaps we can hail ourselves anew in a language of and for our ignorance.[2] Perhaps that’s how, with little accomplishment and even less notice, we might one day find that the crisis has already begun to pass.

Notes

[1] Though the surface-level syntax might seem to locate the intellectual “in” time too, I don’t think this is how the sentence operates structurally. It is not “the intellectual” who is “in a time of crisis” but everyone else, including us. This leaves “the intellectual” to float free of any syntactic relation.

[2] In so suggesting, I don’t mean to promote any sort of cynical agnotology. This is not a “knowing” ignorance—that would only constitute an inversion of crisis thinking and so would reify the same logical predicates. So then what am I promoting? In all honestly, I don’t know. (That at least would be a place to start.)