This blog post delves deeply into how the role traditionally performed by intellectuals is being reinterpreted within a digital environment where the power of collective intelligence is rapidly expanding, and whether its value still holds meaning today.
The Dreyfus Affair, which occurred in France in the early 20th century, shed new light on the group of intellectuals and became an opportunity to highlight the ideal of the critical intellectual resisting oppressive power. Even in the Middle Ages, when knowledge was accumulated primarily through theology and monastic priests existed as expert intellectuals wielding power, critical intellectuals like Abelard existed. During the Enlightenment, intellectuals were sometimes defined as individuals possessing the ability to broadly encompass all fields, even if they did not delve deeply into any specific one. For example, the 18th-century Encyclopedists produced knowledge based on a modern classification system, opening the horizon of a literate culture era where individuals consumed knowledge through visual media. In this process, intellectual power gradually centralized around competition to control the standards of knowledge.
The Dreyfus Affair sparked debate about the modern intellectual. Mannheim argued that intellectuals could not be regarded as a single class due to significant differences within the group based on origin, profession, wealth, and political and social status. He contended that intellectuals should seek the best path by dynamically synthesizing diverse class interests in society based on universality.
Gramsci, however, pointed out that the concept of an intellectual independent of class was nothing but a myth. He proposed the organic intellectual as an alternative—one organically linked to class interests and representing them in a partisan manner. The task for the liberation of the alienated classes possesses historical universality, and the intellectual takes on the role of instilling revolutionary self-consciousness in the alienated classes and organizing them. Sartre maintained a tension between Mannheim’s and Gramsci’s concepts of the intellectual.
Intellectuals belonging to the bourgeoisie must recognize the contradiction between the partisan interests demanded by the ruling class and the universal knowledge intellectuals should pursue, and strive for the liberation of the alienated class based on this universality. However, such intellectuals can never become organic intellectuals. Ultimately, the enlightening role of awakening class consciousness is assigned to existing intellectuals, enabling experts emerging from the alienated class to grow into organic intellectuals.
Today, the development of the internet has opened virtual spaces, creating new postmodern knowledge cultures and social spaces, while the concept of knowledge itself is changing. Diverse digitized information has been serially recombined into hypertext forms. Within structures resembling mazes or root systems—having no fixed beginning or end—the meaning of the text possesses infinite plurality depending on which path the reader chooses. Consequently, the authority of the author as the knowledge producer weakens, and knowledge power becomes decentralized.
The emergence of hypertext and the new reader reactivates characteristics inherent in collective, empathetic oral cultures within knowledge culture. Particularly, the process in virtual spaces where information and knowledge are shared, debated, and then either disappear or proliferate acts as a mechanism for producing new knowledge, giving rise to collective intelligence. Collective intelligence recovers knowledge power from elite groups and opens possibilities for a new democracy. However, this potential is realized only when participation and collaboration based on public autonomy are presupposed. Without participation and collaboration, conformism emerges, and collective intelligence risks degenerating into mob mentality.
With the emergence of collective intelligence in the hypertext era, the traditional image of the intellectual also requires re-examination. It is particularly worth revisiting theorists who emerged after the French Revolution of ’68. Foucault, for instance, noted the persistence of power structures that prohibit and block public knowledge and discourse, even in an era where the intellectual as spokesperson for the masses is unnecessary, and the existence of the classical intellectual who acts as an agent of that power. He defined these as universal intellectuals and proposed the special intellectual as a new model to replace them. The special intellectuals Foucault speaks of are not those who champion grand worldviews, but individuals possessing specialized knowledge in specific fields. They engage politically in concrete issues within their respective domains and struggle within everyday spaces. According to Foucault, genuine discourse can only be found within the relationship between knowledge and micropower.
Meanwhile, attempts continued to integrate a modernist perspective into postmodern explorations of the intellectual figure. According to Bourdieu, intellectuals belong to the ruling class from the standpoint of total social capital, yet they possess the attributes of cultural producers where cultural capital outweighs economic capital, and they are entities dominated by the bourgeoisie according to market mechanisms. In this sense, intellectuals belong to the subaltern faction. Therefore, these cultural producers only fall within the category of intellectuals when they possess symbolic authority over their specific domains, resist powers threatening intellectual autonomy, and engage in struggles to disseminate universal values throughout society.
Bourdieu conceptualizes a historical, and thus temporary, universality in this process. Intellectuals simultaneously perform two roles: historicizing the particularities that power presents as universal through political activity, and universalizing the conditions for accessing universal values—such as science, philosophy, literature, and law—across society as a whole.
