1991 Articles

Decentering Europe: The Contemporary Crisis in Culture, A Memorial Lecture for James Snead

West, Cornel

What I want to argue is that when we talk about contemporary crisis in culture, the one way of beginning to come to terms with this is having to historicize and pluralize and contextualize the postmodernism debate. How does that relate to the vocation of the intellectual, given the challenge of the technical intelligentsia, given the challenge of the middlebrow journalist? What kind of role and function can the humanistic intellectual have in advanced capitalist society, given his or her placement within the
academic’s life of the professional managerial class of this particular society?