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In the German cities he was somewhat struck by the strange formation of the German’s body, deprived of the shapely harmony of beauty, the feeling for which is innate to the Italian breast; the German language also struck unpleasantly on his musical ear. But already he saw the French border before him, and his heart shuddered. The fluttering sounds of the fashionable European language caressed and kissed his hearing. With secret pleasure he caught their slippery rustle, which back in Italy had seemed to him something lofty, purified of all convulsive movements of the kind that accompany the powerful languages of the southern people, who do not know how to keep themselves within bounds. An even greater impression was made on him by a particular sort of woman—ethereal and fluttering. He was struck by this evanescent creature with her barely defined ethereal forms, with her small foot, with her slender airy figure, with the responsive fire in her gazes, and with her ethereal, almost unarticulated speeches. He awaited Paris with impatience, populated it with towers, palaces, created his own image of it, and finally, with trembling heart, he caught sight of the imminent signs of the capital city: glued-up posters, gigantic letters, multiplying post chaises, omnibuses… finally the houses of the faubourg began to fly by.
i just really like the way this is all written
In the movement of trade, the intellect, everywhere, in everything, he saw only a strained effort and striving for newness. One person endeavored with all his might to gain the upper hand over another, if only for one moment. The merchant used all his capital for the decoration of his store alone, in order to entice the crowd with brilliance and magnificence. Book literature resorted to illustrations and typographical luxury in order to attract people’s cooled attention. Stories and novels endeavored to seize the reader with the strangeness of unheard-of passions, the monstrosity of exceptions to human nature. Everything seemed to insolently obtrude itself and offer itself without being invited, like a lewd woman who tries to catch a man on the street; everything tried to stretch its hand higher than the others, like a surrounding crowd of annoying beggars. In scholarship itself, in its inspired lectures, the merit of which he could not help but acknowledge, he now noticed everywhere the desire to show off, to boast, to display oneself; everywhere there were brilliant episodes, but not the solemn, majestic flow of the entire whole. Everywhere there were efforts to raise up facts that had not before been noticed and to give them a huge influence, sometimes to the detriment of the harmony of the whole, in order to keep for oneself the honor of a discovery; finally, almost everywhere there was audacious self-assurance and nowhere the humble consciousness of one’s own ignorance—and he recalled a verse with which the Italian Alfieri, in a caustic spiritual mood, had reproached the French:
[...] The very acts of the clergy, which are often seductive and in other places would engender debauchery, have almost no effect on the Italian people: They know how to separate religion from its hypocritical practitioners and have not been infected by the cold idea of unbelief. [...]
Finally, the whole crowd moved forward, behind the daredevil and the deceased poet; the chain of carriages started to move, which made him very happy, although the movement of the people had knocked off his hat, which he now rushed to pick up. After he picked up his hat, he also raised his eyes and was rooted to the spot: Before him stood an unheard-of beauty. She was wearing a shining Albano costume, in a row with two other beautiful women, who compared with her as the night to the day. This was a miracle in the highest degree. Everything had to turn darker in the presence of this brilliance. Looking at her, it became clear why Italian poets compared beautiful women to the sun. This truly was the sun, complete beauty. Everything that is scattered and gleams separately in the beauties of the world, all this was gathered together here. Glancing at her chest and bosom, it became obvious what was lacking in the chests and bosoms of other beauties. Compared to her thick, gleaming hair, all other hair would seem sparse and dull. Her arms existed in order to turn everyone into an artist—like an artist, he would have looked at them eternally, not daring to breathe. Compared to her legs, the legs of Englishwomen, German women, French women, and the women of all other nations would seem like splinters of wood; only the ancient sculptors had retained the lofty idea of their beauty in their statues. This was complete beauty, created in order to blind all and sundry!
When the street had been cleared of the train, the prince saw that it would be foolish and too late to run after the cart, and moreover he didn’t know which roads it was now rushing along. Nevertheless, he could not give up the idea of seeking her out. That radiant laughter and the open lips with marvelous rows of teeth floated in his imagination. “It is the brilliance of lightning, not a woman,” he kept repeating to himself and at the same time added: “She is a Roman. Such a woman could be born only in Rome. I must see her without fail. I want to see her not in order to love her, no—I wish only to look at her, to look at all of her, to look at her eyes, to look at her arms, at her fingers, at her gleaming hair. I wish not to kiss her, but only to look at her. And what of that? After all, that’s how it must be, it’s in the law of nature; she has no right to hide and carry away her beauty. Complete beauty is given to the world in order for everyone to see it, in order that everyone would preserve the idea of it eternally in their hearts. If she were simply beautiful, and not such supreme perfection, she would have the right to belong to one person, she could be carried off to a desert and hidden from the world. But complete beauty must be seen by everyone. Does an architect build a magnificent temple in a cramped lane? No, he places it on an open square, so that people can look at it from all sides and be amazed at it. Is a lamp lit, said the Divine Teacher, so that one would hide it and put it under a table? No, the lamp is lit in order to stand on the table, so that everyone can see, so that everyone can move by its light. No, I must see her without fail.”41
But here the prince glanced at Rome and stopped: Before him, in a marvelous, shining panorama, the eternal city appeared. The whole bright heap of houses, churches, domes, and sharp spires was powerfully illuminated by the brilliance of the sinking sun. In groups and singly, the houses, roofs, statues, airy terraces, and galleries emerged out from behind one another; over there was the motley mass of bell towers and domes with their delicate tops, playing in the patterned caprice of the lamps; over there a dark palace emerged in its entirety; over there was the flat dome of the Pantheon; over there was the ornamented top of the Antonino column with its capital and the statue of the apostle Paul; over to the right rose the tops of the Capitoline buildings, with horses and statues; even farther to the right, over the brilliant crowd of houses and roofs, the dark breadth of the Colosseum’s bulk rose majestically and austerely; over there was again a playful crowd of walls, terraces, and domes, covered in the blinding brilliance of the sun.47 And over this whole sparkling mass, the tops of the holm oaks from the villas of the Ludovisi and the Medici showed darkly in the distance with their black foliage, and above them in the air the dome-shaped crowns of the Roman stone pines, raised on their slender trunks, stood in a whole flock. And along the whole length of the picture towered the light-blue, transparent hills, as light as air, embraced by a kind of phosphorescent light. Neither word nor brush would be able to convey the marvelous harmony and the combination of all the levels of this picture. The air was so pure and transparent that the tiniest little feature of the distant buildings was clear, and everything seemed so close that you could grab it with your hand. The last petty architectural ornament, the patterned decoration of the cornice—everything was marked out with an incomprehensible purity. At that moment the shot of a cannon and the distant merged shout of the mass of people resounded—the sign that the riderless horses had already run by, marking the end of the Carnival day.48 The sun was sinking lower toward the earth; its brilliance showed a brighter scarlet on the whole architectural mass; the city became more vivid and closer; the stone pines became a darker black; the hills became even bluer and more phosphorescent; the heavenly air, ready to be extinguished, became more solemn and beautiful… My God, what a view! The prince, in its embrace, forgot himself, and the beauty of Annunziata, and the mysterious fate of his people, and everything that exists in the world.
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Akaky Akakievich thought and thought, and decided that he would have to reduce his usual expenses for at least one year: to banish the drinking of tea in the evenings, not to light candles in the evenings, and if he needed to do something, to go to the landlady’s room and work by the light of her little candle; as he walked along the street, to step as lightly and carefully as he could along the cobblestones and flagstones, almost on tiptoe, so as not to wear out his soles too fast; to give his linen to the laundress as rarely as possible, and so as not to wear it out, to take it off as soon as he came home and remain in just a thick cotton robe that was very old and had been spared by time itself. One must speak the truth and say that at first it was rather difficult for him to get used to such limitations, but then it seemed to become a habit and things got better. He even got accustomed to going hungry in the evenings; but to make up for it he was nourished spiritually, bearing in his thoughts the eternal idea of the future overcoat. From that time it was as if his very existence became somehow fuller, as if he had gotten married, as if some other person was present with him, as if he was not alone, but a pleasant female life companion had agreed to follow life’s path along with him—and that companion was none other than the thickly padded overcoat with a strong lining showing no trace of wear.
:'(
So there could be reasons for the decline of the public intellectual, and not all of them self-inflicted. Those who think the problem is that today’s academics write too much “jargon” should look at the business press. Was ever there a language more filled with spurious, made-up words of indeterminate meaning? But rather than engage with the standard stories of the public intellectual, let’s think instead about general intellects. By general intellects, I mean something a bit different to Marx’s formula of the general intellect, although they might be connected. By general intellects, I mean people who are mostly employed as academics, and mostly pretty successful at that, but who try through their work to address more general problems about the state of the world today.
They are, on the one hand, part of the general intellect, in that they are workers who think and speak and write, whose work is commodified and sold. But they are, on the other hand, general intellects, in that they try to find ways to write and think and even act in and against this very system of commodification that has now found ways to incorporate even them. They try to address a general situation, one that many people find themselves in today. And they try to do so intelligently, by applying their training and competence and originality.
It may be a good thing to know and cite leading authorities, but the paradox is that the reason someone like Marx becomes an authority is because of their ability to break with the authorities of their own time and formulate a new problematic within which to think and act. It has to be said that much of this work has tenuous and distant relations to social movements and sites of struggle. There is a tradeoff between intellectual rigor, power and coherence and capacity to engage directly in the issues of the hour. In a more subtle way, there’s a hardening of the division of labor, wherein general intellects lose touch with other kinds of labor, even intellectual labor, or even other kinds of work in the same universities, such as in the sciences, engineering and design.
There is a tension in this philosophical reading of Marx. It wants to hang on to some way of using the category of eternal capital. It does not quite want to admit that if capital is indeed continually mutating and self-modifying, then it has no essence, and “appearances” need to be taken seriously as not mere phenomenal forms but as actual forms in the world. In short: there can be no “Marxism” as a philosophy produced by means of philosophy, which takes the essence of capital as its subject. The modifications in so-called phenomenal forms need to be understood as more than mere phenomena, and that requires a more modest approach to the forms of knowledge it might possess of those modifications.
In short, intellectual work after Marx could only be a collaborative practice of knowledge among different but equal ways of knowing, where philosophy is not the ruling party. Or to put it in a quite different language: the statement “the essence of technology is nothing technological” is fundamentally untrue and a barrier to thought.11 Technology really does need to be understood through the collaboration of specialized forms of knowledge about what it actually is and does. The attempt to make philosophy a ruling “technology of essence” is retrograde: the technology of essence is nothing essential.