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USA 1990

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Coffee adventures ☕️💪🏻#coffee #Chemex #pennstate #saintscoffee #intelligensia (at Penn State)

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So grateful to have had my morning coffee at one of my most favorite coffee haunts... Intelligensia on Abbott Kinney Venice. Lucky me #intelligensia #coffee #venicebeach #socal #lovemylife #owl #mural #art #graffiti

#socal #mural #art #intelligensia #owl #coffee #lovemylife #venicebeach #graffiti

The intelligentsia were people who thought and still lived in a public arena, and who tried to create a public sphere. There were figures like Denis Diderot, who did not end up in any of the universities but who wrote — virtually in poverty for much of his life — who read and was creative, who walked the streets of Paris intoxicated by the life of the people, who played chess and was involved in the discussions in the cafes, acting as a ferment, challenging authority everywhere along his way and going to prison for a period of time because the clergy didn’t like what he was doing when he was putting together the Encyclopedia. These were the raw and women who created the intellectual ferment that gave rise to the pamphlets and the literature that finally did so much to nourish the great French Revolution of 1789 to 1795. There, the so-called “intellectuals” and theorists not only engaged in thinking but also engaged on writing, engaged in confrontations with the system instead of shying away from them. They had to be engaged or else, in fact, they couldn’t have functioned intellectually. They would have dried up — they would have literally socially dehydrated if there was not that ferment of ideas that involved the people at large, gradually percolating down to them (or, at least, the middle-brow people) and finally reaching all sectors of the French population. These ideas even intellectually subverted the court itself; the nobility began to lose its sense of identity because of the challenges this intelligentsia made, putting everything up against the bar of reason.

“Intelligensia and The New Intellectuals,” Bookchin

#murray bookchin #bookchin #intelligensia

Excerpt from Murray Bookchin’s 1990 speech “Intelligensia and The New Intellectuals”

"Coherence literally is a process of thinking out and giving reason to whatever our ideals may be or to whatever reality we are trying to create. It means giving a rational understanding to the reality in which we live — which doesn’t mean that this reality is rational but that we understand how it came about and where it is going. We are now living in a period of incoherence. There is an ideology in the universities which stresses incoherence in the name of pluralism. It’s called postmodernism. It denies the existence of rationality, it denies the existence of history, it denies the existence of ideals, and has essentially put a text under our noses and asked us to analyze it. If that is what intellectuality is all about, then it is a tremendous failure. If intellectuality is to mean drawing on great traditions, restating and reinterpreting them in order to make them relevant in a new context so that we can go beyond, say, the 1930s and even beyond the 1960s and 70s — if it is meant to do that, then we are not producing intellectuals . . . We are producing intellectuals who are being absorbed by the academy, who are finding their public arena in the classroom and who are operating according to a syllabus. These intellectuals are on the academic market, no less commodities in this respect than junk food or the rubbish that you see in department stores or shopping malls. Russell Jacoby made a mistake using the phrase the “last intellectuals” because intellectuals exist today in the sense that they are professors, which is not to say that all professors are bad — I was one myself. I was captured by the university system and left it as rapidly as I could, but that isn’t the point. What I am talking about is basically a new 'social contract,' if I may use that word, in which people who are supposed to think are tamed into nothing but people who teach skills."

#intelligensia #intellectuals #new intellectuals #bookchin #murray bookchin #goddard college #libertarian socialism #communalism