Intellectuals, technique and the therapeutic age . Review to Frank Furedi, What Happened to the Intellectuals? The Philistines of the 21st century (Raffaello Cortina, Milan 2007)

- by Roberto Bigini ​
 
 
The new work by Frank Furedi comes out only this year in Italy What happened to the intellectuals? The Philistines of the 21st Century ( Where have all the intellectuals gone?, 2004). Like the previous one. The new conformism. Too much psychology in everyday life ( Therapeutic culture. Cultivating vulnerability in an uncertain age , 2003), this new work maintains an identical amount of novelty and urgency, while enjoying a greater agility and stylistic synthesis in the face of it. Furedi returns to talk about the therapeutic "new conformism", imposed and now rampant, at least in Anglo-Saxon countries, at all levels: from school teaching to family education, from the relationship with art to that with culture in general. But what exactly does this new conformism consist of? In short, in the imprint and trait with which formed and formandi , governed and rulers, intelligentsia and mass meet in the ambiguous middle ground of "flattery" (chapter 5 The culture of flattery). This is the fundamental intonation of the therapeutic approach, and it is an intonation that we will not hesitate to define as "cybernetics" - as the subtitle of the previous Cultivating vulnerability in an uncertain age already suggests - that is to say of pure, paternalistic , “Piloting in style“. Let's see in what sense. The commitment, the effort required by its very nature by the "relationship" and by the comparison, whatever the context of reference (family, school or more generally cultural) has given way in the last twenty years to a paternalistic "condescension To a winking "policy of gratification". Putting the intention of a broader "democratization" and "inclusiveness" of knowledge as a pretext, it is established that "public bodies, including cultural and educational ones, should do everything possible to avoid undertaking initiatives that may make people feel uncomfortable or not comfortable enough. Consequently, schools should ensure that their pupils never experience failure or failure, and that they possess a high level of self-esteem. University teachers are encouraged to give positive marks and provide a climate of support in which no student can feel intimidated or offended "(pp. 154-155). Thus the idea that at the base of social ailments there is an inability to manage emotions, that alleged "emotional illiteracy" that has made the fortune of the so-called " Emotional Intelligence " (Goleman, 1994), we now see progress also in schools the need to satisfy the emotional needs, even before the intellectual ones, of the learners, with the result that "the school is gradually transforming itself into a clinic" (p. 157). The invitation to growth implicit, for example, in the experience of a museum visit is already thought of today from the point of view of medicalization, that is, as a possible threat to the visitor's "emotional" identity. Therefore, Furedi sarcastically predicts, in this sort of permanent "preventive war" against a misunderstood weakness of the subject, the time is not far off when psychological support consultations will be offered to those who expose themselves to the dangers of a Metropolitan Museum . Or directly, since therapeutic knowledge in advance exempts the visitor from the danger of a confrontation, let's say, with the triptych by Francis Bacon, it will be the Metropolitan Museum itself that will help him by “calibrating” its displays downwards. Works of thought and figurative art are then, if not omitted and censored, trivialized and bent to childish entertainment tricks. In Anglo-Saxon countries that process of "disneyfication" of museums is already a reality: "" They were once called museums ", notes a review on the interactivity of San Francisco museums," now they look more like amusement parks "(Winn, 2003)" . Planning and thought content, if not an obstacle, are completely "indifferent to this new group of directors of universities, museums, galleries and entrepreneurs of knowledge". An attempt was made to increase admissions in any other way (cafes, internet points , interactive machines) to the point that the incredible advertising slogan for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London was: “An amazing café with a nice museum around it”. "Today it is never clear", Furedi complains, "whether the museums are masquerading as social welfare centers or whether the neighborhood centers are posing as museums" (pp. 145-146). The little intellectual who was once the visitor to the museum now walks around an interactive playground as a child. The Nietzschana prediction of a man-tourist in the post-history garden, a mere deposit of theatrical masks that he candidly wears and discards, needs no further comment. If for museums and foundations all this happens to the great pride of the so-called "cultural establishment ", a just embarrassment still persists, however, in the field of education, where "the process of transforming the university into a high school" is cautiously subjected to reticence. Thus, after the "disneyfication" of the museum it is the turn of what the American sociologist George Ritzer has called, with a term as horrible and worrying as the thing indicated, "macdonaldization" of the university. Students are encouraged to the passivity of reception typical of the "client" and "consumer", less and less self-determined in a work of personal research and discovery and more and more hetero-directed and dependent, like lower school pupils, by whom " it delivers the service ”- here where language itself warns us: whoever“ delivers ”the school service can no longer be in any way, obviously, a“ teacher ”,“ professor ”or“ teacher ”of anything. It is no coincidence, Furedi remembers ironically, that the "death of professors" was announced, the event for which "a professor is no longer competent in memory networks for the transmission of established knowledge" (Jean-Francois Lyotard). The professorial authority typical of the living word and its important formative role in the teacher-learner dialectic is gradually channeled and dissolved in the automatic process of a “free” consultation of the “information” database via the “web”. The " dumbing down" of knowledge and the "infantilization" of the human, be it teaching or learner, governed or governing body, organizer or visitor therefore go hand in hand (chapter 6 Treating people as children). Here then is the unprecedented "cultural" and "formative" fervor of today (such that it would be impossible, even if we wanted to, to keep up with the rain of conferences, exhibitions and inaugurations of schools and cultural centers) to go hand in hand, paradoxically, with a general brutalization of the public. Unknown European cities compete for the title of "city of culture of the year" with the warmest indifference, while the so-called race for mass acculturation is increasingly celebrating its "one-handed" triumph: everywhere the "number of how many take part in higher education [...] the training process seems to never end, it seems that everyone is always in the middle of some on-the-job training, or taking a break between a training period and the 'other' (p. 21); as for books, the sprawling diffusion of paperback editions and encyclopedic series (in newsstands, supermarkets and even post offices) does not reflect anything else from this excess of satiety, this informative hypertrophy unanchored from any foundation; if other paths are attempted, as the major sociologists now unanimously point out, it is because the book has inexorably lost ground precisely where it should have resisted and triumphed (schools, editorial offices, research centers, universities). Research in libraries, supported today by convenient as well as almost endless " on-line " catalogs risks transforming itself, at every turn, into a "routeless" navigation in the "network". What was born to "support" knowledge risks taking its place, becoming itself the foundation and ominously echoing in our ears the Nietzschean gloss of a «victory of method over science». At school there is a proliferation of notes, morsels of text, cards, "boxes", "reading boxes", in the universities handouts, transparencies, chapters, scraps of manuals. Systematic treatises and works are no longer known simply through study and reading, but through summaries, formulas and pseudo-concepts such as to generate boredom in students, amazement at the fact that ultimately surprisingly trivial thoughts - we think of the teaching of Philosophy in High Schools - have been able to consign their authors to History, and therefore, finally, disaffection. To Furedi, who in an article in the Sunday Times complained about the possibility that entire academic years go by without a single book being read from start to finish, a university manager replied, shocked that "the book" is now only a " extraordinary optional resource " (p. 10), a pseudo-question in the much broader and differentiated context of" information ".

      I open parentheses. The question, on the other hand, which is anything but pseudo, deserves a more detailed question. If, in fact, the administration of "pills" and "homogenized knowledge" to the trainees is redirected to a custom started also in Italy, by now, with the Berlinguer reform (the fragments inside the fragments of the training "modules" and "credits"), it must also be said that the imposition of segmentation closes a precise, historical and much wider "question" - it has been said, cybernetics - that opened at the birth of modern European society, with the nation states. How, then, did fragmentation as a system come about? Why this need, then highlighted by a Nietzsche close to collapse when, in 1888, he observed that it was no longer a question of “knowing” but now only of “schematizing”, Nicht “erkennen”, sondern schematisieren ? It is the very birth of the Modern World - what Heidegger not casually but essentially called the age of the world image , die Zeit des Weltbilde s - that explains it to us. The release of knowledge from the closed medieval monasteries and cathedrals where until then it had been saved (stolen, kept and handed down, like papal power, in the restricted circle of an elite ), involved for the first time in history the danger of its "universal" public exposure ("global" as it is called today) and thus also the rise of a corresponding power, more risky in its being extended and widespread, and which therefore required a more refined and sophisticated management. It was the absolute novelty, compared to the ancient regime , of the possibility of a "public control" by the subjects, now "citizens", over the rulers, the possibility of a "counter-role" (from the French cont-rôle ) of the nascent "Public opinion", with the emergence of newspapers, print media and salons, on power. But precisely the approximation and reduction of knowledge to "information", plural in principle, prepared the postmodern dictatorship of the "fragment" and the "segment". The "pluralism" of "information" increases, the unity of knowledge decreases. Education, culture or cultural heritage, everything is presented and "administered" in the form of a "fragment", but supported by the bulk of a maximum "personalization" and possibility of "individual" choice, the sacral substitute for the "point of view "And the" single "interpretation - each valid as such . It is the Nietzschean disappearance of "facts" (there are only "interpretations") curiously heralded in an era in which knowledge has become - never as today - the battlefield in which the game of "power" is played. A power, we try to give to understand, based on infinite interpretative "segments" and few data, really, "in fact". Truly “existing” would be nothing other than the single “image of the world” reigning from time to time.
So if on the one hand, having to meet the public and its opinion - evidently media, statistics, "general" - knowledge advertised itself by becoming "information" and "public opinion" ("In the last two centuries", Furedi observes, authority of the intellectuals would have drawn nourishment "from the belief that the search for knowledge and truth deserved the approval of society"), on the other hand it offered the rulers a new and more sophisticated lever of power, the possibility of "controlling" the governed acting indirectly on their knowledge, knowingly modeling "information" and "public opinion". The controlled "verbalization" and the apparent "sharing" of power and its levers in a system that is anything but public and manifest, but rather based on "advertising" and "information", is thus at the origin of the decadence of knowledge and the intellectual elite in its very home, the university, where teachers and teachers give way to "journalists", officials and managers of the new "Therapeutic Guard" - a class no longer "academic" but purely, by now, political, " function "of a specific government orientation. Closed parenthesis.
 
Here then is that today, with the imposition of this new guard, it is no longer from "below" that we must rise to the heights of knowledge, but it is from "above" that we will be "rescued" and paternalistically accompanied towards what elite has chosen - of knowledge and of what is -  to keep us gradually "in-formed". In this being oriented in advance of the gaze of the "public" towards the more external and entertaining phenomena (not unlike the prisoners-spectators of shadows in the mythical Platonic cave) the possibility of a true counter-role is clearly nullified and precluded in advance. . Any voice other than the therapeutic one, explains Furedi, is immediately accused of "elitism and snobbery". It is the "dictatorship of public opinion" , as was clear to Heidegger in the 1940s, but a dictatorship of the prisoners themselves (technically, a "totalitarianism") and therefore "cybernetics", controlled. In fact, it is never the "public" to dictate anything (as the prisoners in the Platonic cave are not the directors and projectors of the shadows who "involve" them) but the intelligentsia forged in therapeutic knowledge. Pretending the psychic weakness and the high risk of "emotional trauma" of the "subject" (the so-called PTSD), thus preserving the "self-esteem" of ordinary people from the "intimidation" of the old elite culture, this new knowledge medicalizes culture and institutions by piloting them out of the danger zone in advance. Moreover, such anti-elitism, Furedi points out, rarely focuses on economic power, as in similar anti-elitist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries . The more this happens, in any case, the more disorientation, boredom and a sinister, not at all Socratic, not-knowing take possession of us, feeding a suspected dependence, more than from "others", still genuine in itself, from therapeutic knowledge itself, from this "psychology that meets technique". The more this happens, the more the demand for therapeutic and psychological "supports" only grows. The figure of man corresponding to this less and less autonomous type of knowledge has therefore changed, from the magnetic singularity and presence of ancient scholars and thinkers, philosophers, intellectuals and modern scientists, into the abstract impersonality of the "entrepreneur of knowledge", of the "Expert", the professional, the official, the operator and so on. "In the twentieth century the heroic image of the classical intellectual has given way to a more pragmatic and down-to-earth figure, whose work is of no particular importance [...] Many intellectuals have internalized the pragmatism associated with their activities, and they insist that there is nothing special about them. ' With the disappearance of the object of science - the "being" - apparently revealed and re-revealed in every ravine, science seems to be transformed into pure operability and usability. From a spectator of the world, that is, to its devourer. It is in this indifference and operational fury that the appearance of philosophical consultants is, for example, greeted in Anglo-Saxon countries, where the figure of the philosopher-in-practice can and must appear only in his instrumental declination as a problem solver . At the invitation of a historian from the University of Cambridge, Stefan Collini, "perhaps it is time for someone to write an essay entitled Intellectuals are common people ", we could answer that in so much dangerous flatness and superficial idolatry it becomes even more necessary, if never, the presence of a humanity that is finally and truly ordinary, that is, listening to the extraordinary that is "within and for the ordinary" (paraphrasing the Heidegger of the Letter on "humanism" ). Now, in fact, this purely technical structure that Heidegger himself intended to call "plant", Gestell , becomes all the more necessary the less , Furedi notes, " it is the content of art and ideas that are taken into consideration ". Furedi now laments how much Hegel had together in his time, and for the worse, anticipated and predicted. "Looking", he said in Aesthetics , "at the present of our world condition and its evolved juridical, moral and political relations [...] the sphere in which there is still a free possibility for the autonomy of particular decisions it is limited both in number and in extent ". What a monarch, a judge or a general could already then add to the decisions concerning their offices "does not constitute the main thing or the substantial content , but the content of these decisions as a whole depend less on the individuality of their will than on the fact that it is already established in itself. this or that side, but every single person, on whatever side he turns, belongs to a subsistent social order and does not appear as the autonomous, total and at the same time individually alive figure of this society [...] He acts only as enveloped in it [...] The individual is now no longer the bearer and the exclusive reality of these powers as in the heroic age »or rather right, ethics, war and peace, but an“ accessory ”, epigonal vehicle. Here then is that therapeutic knowledge, in its characteristic indifference to the contents and to the thought that is proper to it, is the most suitable for this configuration of the "system". More Hegelian than Hegel he believes that there is no more room for a rethinking or a reacquisition of tradition starting from what it does not say. Any attempt in this sense is dismissed as the pedantic expression of an outdated intellectual elite . As this cybernetic perspective is consolidated, coming into dialogue with that unexpected debt of yours becomes more difficult every day, the more we ourselves support the nihilistic idea that knowledge and truth would be only "one" figure among many, that everyone has his own, just as each Platonic prisoner has his shadows, and that therefore there is very little left to say to the thought and profession of the intellectual.
 
Re-educated in this way by the "strength" and "journalistic" saccenteria on a misunderstood weakness of being, the person is imprisoned and engineered (chap. 4 Social engineering) within the narrow horizons of infantilism, victimhood, prevention, therapy in absence of disease, of infinite medicalization - or more briefly, it is closed out of the zone of exposure to danger. To conclude, it is not useless to recall a previous study by Furedi Culture of fear. Risk-taking and the morality of low expectation (1998), introduced in Italy, the title of which could be La Cultura della Fear. Being at risk and ethics of low expectations . It is said that the risk calculated in the traditional balance between positive and negative outcomes has been replaced by a scheme dictated by the "precautionary principle" whereby only risk enters the equation. It is not so much the generalized sense of insecurity as the deeply conservative way of understanding and experiencing risk that strikes the Anglo-Hungarian sociologist. The celebration of safety together with the constant warning about risk would in fact lead to an ethic of low expectations , deeply anti-human and imbued with the anti-value of fear . This risk, but in philosophy we prefer to call it danger, Furedi tries to think of it as something that is inevitably part of the world of life, like an "existential". We add, not among the least important. And here's the thing. In fact, if we want to consider the danger, both with therapeutic knowledge and with the culture of fear (they are a single unexpected), inessential and abstractly dangerous for life, then we continue to ignore Nietzsche and place ourselves in the trajectory of his gaze in which man, after Copernicus, "rolls from the center towards the x". If, on the contrary, we think, with Hölderlin, that where "where danger grows, what saves also grows" and thus we place danger in its intimate - philosophical and dialectical - salvific scope, then we return on the journey towards the essence of man, unique among the creatures to be in danger : to get lost and fail or win back and return each time, as Raymond Carver said, to his next, more own occupation. Life, always life.

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(article published in Phronesis Magazine Year V, number 8, 2007)