James Chandler
1. Specific Intellectuals
Twenty years ago, for its thirtieth anniversary issue, I compared the early history of Critical Inquiry to that of the humanities-centers movement. I noted that both had their take-off in the 1970s and that each involved a distinctive way addressing certain contemporary issues with disciplines in the humanities and human sciences. I invoked Michel Foucault’s mid-1977 discussion of how, over the course of his own lifetime, a major shift had taken place in the role of intellectuals in modern society, how the figure of the universal intellectual had been superseded by that of the specific intellectual. The universal intellectual emerged in the course of eighteenth-century political struggles in Europe. This figure was “the man of justice, the man of law”—Foucault’s language is relentlessly masculinist—who “counterposes to power, despotism, and the arrogance of wealth the universality of justice and the equity of an ideal law.” Such efforts were made in behalf of a concept of right that, Foucault says, “can and must be applied universally.” The specific intellectual is a figure is of much more recent emergence, roughly “since the Second World War.”[1]
Where the universal intellectual “derived from the jurist or notable,” the specific intellectual derives “from the savant or expert” (“TP,” p. 128). For specific intellectuals, what Foucault calls the mode of connection between theory and practice is worked out not by way of “the just-and-true-for-all” but rather within “specific sectors, at the pressure points where their own condition of life and work situate them” (“TP,” p. 126). Further, the universal intellectual “finds his fullest manifestation in the writer” (“TP,” p. 128). The specific individual may write, of course, but writing is a different sort of affair in this case. The specific intellectual is not “the bearer of values and significations in which all can recognise themselves” but the holder of specialized knowledge acquired in “specific sectors” of disciplinary practice (“TP,” p. 128). Foucault goes so far as to claim that “the whole relentless theorization of writing in the 1960s was doubtless only a swansong” (“TP,” p. 127). For him, the fact that this theorization took its bearing in specific disciplines, and “needed scientific credentials founded in linguistics, semiology, and psychoanalysis,” was only so much further proof “that the activity of the writer was no longer at the focus of things” (“TP,” p. 127).
Yet even as writing, taken to be “the sacralizing mark of the intellectual,” has disappeared,” Foucault explains, “it has become possible on this account to develop lateral connections across different forms of knowledge” (“TP,” p. 127). This recent shift carries decided implications for the university: It explains two developments in particular: not only why, “even as the writer tends to disappear as a figurehead, the university and the academic emerge, if not as principal elements, at least as ‘exchangers,’ privileged points of intersection,” but also why “universities and education” had already by the mid-1970s become “politically ultrasensitive.” In respect to what he calls the “crisis of the universities” in that moment, Foucault nonetheless advises that it “should not be interpreted as a loss of power, but on the contrary as a multiplication and reinforcement of their power-effects as centres of a polymorphous ensemble of intellectuals who…relate themselves to the academic system” (“TP,” p. 127).
My thought in 2004 was that Foucault’s account of the academic order of things in the mid-seventies captured something important about how, in these circumstances, newly forming humanities centers became sites of exchange and points of intersection. By way of parallel, I suggested that the founding of Critical Inquiry at Chicago in that period might also be understood to answer to the situation Foucault sketches. CI was conceived neither as a public journal in which writers engage readerships in the fashion of universal intellectuals—not, say, as a “review of books”—nor, pointedly, as a journal that took its cue from the “relentless theorization of writing” on the Continent in the previous decades. Indeed, CI did not at the outset appear to be terribly invested in Continental theory at all, though this changed over the years. It was founded as a scholarly journal, but it did not restrict itself to any of the relevant scholarly disciplines that it relied on. In introducing the first issue, founding editor Sheldon Sacks explicitly eschewed terms like “interdisciplinary” and “comparative” but still made it abundantly clear how the mission of CI embraced multiple disciplinary perspectives even as it maintained its status as an academic rather than a public enterprise: “The literary critic who has no interest in E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, the music critic who found Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Poetic Closure irrelevant, the art critic who would simply be bored by Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism or Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism were not our potential readers, nor were meant to be.” The journal has from the start been pitched to a readership of “savants,” in Foucault’s terms, expert in at least one discipline but open to reading in others.
It is even truer now than it was in 2004 that CI has made good on its mission to be a venue of exchange and intersection among the disciplines, even as it has extended the number and scope of the disciplines it has engaged. Founded largely in an English department, led largely by editors with that affiliation, it has nonetheless steadily broadened its editorial staff into a host of other fields, and its published offerings have broadened accordingly. In this broadening, moreover, it has continued to reestablish the ever-altering balance between a respect for what disciplines have to offer and an effort to develop modes of presentation that can move across them. In its pursuit of this mission, the journal has clearly aspired to make itself a desirable place—the desirable place—for individual scholars to publish work across disciplines in a variety of formats: articles, essays, occasional pieces, and, more recently, book reviews and blog posts. But a second dimension of CI’s developing practice over the decades brings it perhaps closer to the humanities-center movement, a succession of more ambitious initiatives that tend to be project-based, collaborative, and reflective about our ongoing disciplinary arrangements.
Tom Mitchell organized an early cluster of these cross-disciplinary conferences and special issues: On Narrative and The Politics of Interpretation are two that come to mind. But later years saw many others, among them Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s timely special issue on “Race,” Writing, and Difference, Hilary Chute and Patrick Jagoda’s volume on Comics & Media, and a series of major projects by the late Lauren Berlant, including Intimacy, On the Case, and, with Sianne Ngai, Comedy Has Issues. An especially wide range of disciplinary perspectives were mobilized for Around 1948 (a special issue address to the post-War situation targeted by Foucault), which began its life as a conference at the Franke Institute for the Humanities organized by Deborah Nelson, Lisa Wedeen, and James Sparrow. For the reasons I have sketched, The Franke Institute and Critical Inquiry have made for excellent mutual collaboration. I myself have been involved in a trilogy of such projects at CI, all connected to major conferences at Chicago—Questions of Evidence (with Arnold Davidson and Harry Harootunian), Arts of Transmission (with Davidson and Adrian Johns), and The Fate of Disciplines (with Davidson). The second and third of these emerged from conferences organized through the Franke Institute. The third, which doubled as annual international conference of CHCI (Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes), was in fact designed to engage the agenda laid out at the end of my thirtieth-anniversary reflections on “critical disciplinarity,” addressing head-on the kinds of issues Foucault raised in his commentary on universal and specific intellectuals. I’m sure I speak for many colleagues involved in these many projects and special publications over fifty years, that CI was been the best of possible venues for them and its editors the best of partners.
2. Oppenheimer
Back in 1977, when Foucault explained the eclipse of the universal intellectual by the specific intellectual, he had names in view. The prototype of the universal intellectual turns out to be Voltaire. (Sartre, according to Foucault, was the last of them.) As for the specific intellectual, Foucault pointed to J. Robert Oppenheimer, a name now very much back in circulation after the release of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster biopic this summer. To be more precise, however, Oppenheimer figures in Foucault’s account as a pivotal figure, one who could become “the point of transition” between universal and specific intellectuals because of two important circumstances (“TP,” p. 127). On the one hand, Oppenheimer was positioned make his public intervention on the issue of nuclear-weapons proliferation after the war “because he had a direct and localized relation to scientific knowledge and institutions” (“TP,” p. 128). On the other, “since the nuclear threat affected the whole human race and the fate of the world, his discourse could at the same time be the discourse of the universal” (“TP,” p. 128). The upshot, for Foucault, is a development he takes to be historically unprecedented for “Western intellectuals”: “For the first time the intellectual was hounded by political powers, no longer on account of a general discourse which he conducted, but because of the knowledge at his disposal” (“TP,” p. 128). In Nolan’s Oppenheimer, this hounding, with Lewis Strauss (played brilliantly by Robert Downey, Jr.) as its driver, becomes the retrospective frame of reference for the narration of remarkable career.
Nolan’s film is not, of course, the first popular account of that career. It was adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), and that book itself frequently cites testimony from an earlier film treatment, Jon Else’s 1982 competent documentary, The Day after Trinity. Interestingly, all three of these works emphasize two important aspects of Oppenheimer’s career not discussed by Foucault. One is that Oppenheimer was himself very much a creature of the modern university system before being recruited to the Manhattan Project. By the early 1930s, not yet thirty himself, he had already had academic affiliations with Harvard, Cambridge, Gottingen, Leiden, Caltech, Berkeley, and The Swiss Federal Institution of Technology in Zurich. His teaching, especially at Berkeley, shaped a small generation of academic physicists in a relatively short time.
The second emphasis present in all these works, but overlooked by Foucault, is that Oppenheimer was a polymath of such prodigious capacity that all sorts of disciplinary paths lay open to him in his precocious early years. He commanded five languages beyond English and read deeply in French, German, and Sanskrit. He had serious investments in poetry. Oppenheimer’s scholarly commitments beyond physics are certainly suggested in Nolan’s film, but they are even more fully elaborated in the Bird-Sherwin biography, which goes so far as to speculate that Oppenheimer recovered from a serious psychological crisis in 1926 by reading Proust’s seven-volume À la recherche du temps perdus in the original French while on vacation in Corsica. Else’s documentary, for its part, registers Oppenheimer’s prodigious intellectual versatility not least in extensive commentary by his intimate friend Francis Fergusson, himself a distinguished literary critic (though no relation, of course, to the distinguished literary critic who just stepped down as CI’s editor). Another literary colleague and friend of Oppenheimer, Berkeley French scholar Haakon Chevalier, who figures prominently in Nolan’s film, attests in Else’s documentary that Oppenheimer read all three volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital in German on a train trip from California to New York City.
The best short piece I’ve read about Oppenheimer is Freeman Dyson’s chapter in The Scientist as Rebel (2006), “Oppenheimer as Scientist, Administrator, and Poet.” In science, Dyson thinks Oppenheimer’s most important work was a 1938 article detailing the formation of black holes, a topic in which Oppenheimer lost interest, Dyson speculates, because the Blitzkrieg and the invitation to lead the Manhattan Project came so quickly on its heels. In poetry, Dyson shows Oppenheimer to be a talented parodist of T. S. Eliot, and in “Crossing,” his 1928 publication in the Harvard Review, a creditable craftsman of neoromantic verses in his own right. In administration, perhaps most surprisingly, Dyson emphasizes Oppenheimer’s competencies less by pointing to the Manhattan Project than by noting his command of academic matters far afield of physics–this by way an anecdote Dyson had been told by a colleague at Princeton’s Institute for Advance Study to whom Oppenheimer offered advice about a raft of British applications submitted in 1948:
Ummm . . . indigenous American music—Roy Harris is the person for him. . . . Roy was at Stanford last year but he’s just moved to the Peabody Teachers College of Nashville. . . . Symbolic logic, that’s Harvard, Princeton, Chicago or Berkeley. Ha! your field, 18th-century English Lit. Yale is an obvious choice [Oppenheimer had already commented on “Tinker and Pottle” as authorities in that field at Yale], but don’t rule out Bate at Harvard. He’s a youngster but a person to be reckoned with.[2]
Dyson’s informant reports that he spent an hour like this listening to Oppenheimer commenting on some sixty applications across disciplines. Dyson also tells of a dinner party where Oppenheimer began reading metaphysical poetry to a prominent strategist of the Cold War, announcing that “we’ve got to see that George Kennan reads George Herbert.”[3]
In light of Foucault’s account of the twentieth-century university as a site of exchange and intersection among disciplines, it is strange that he does nothing to link Oppenheimer’s remarkable breadth of knowledge to the pivotal role he plays in the story of modern intellectuals—he does not even comment on Oppenheimer’s wide range of disciplinary pursuits. Nor does he speculate, as do the authors of American Prometheus, how such pursuits might have positioned Oppenheimer to think differently about physics and its place in the world—differently from, say, a notoriously specialized mind like that of a distinguished contemporary like British physicist Paul Dirac. To this point, Bird and Merwin relate an exchange between the two scientists in Gottingen in which Dirac, after being read Dante aloud in Italian by Oppenheimer, is supposed to have responded: “Why do you waste time on such trash?”[4]
Might we be in a better position to consider such questions now than Foucault was a half-century ago? Needless to say, the Science-Humanities debate has been with us at least since modern science began to assume its still recognizable disciplinary identity around 1800—a development about which Foucault himself wrote extensively. The famous novel Mary Shelley subtitled The Modern Prometheus was very much an early contribution to this debate. Yet these past fifty have witnessed major new developments in how this debate is framed. Consider the emergence of “science studies,” a field whose relation to the history of science was the subject of a brilliant Shakespearean allegory by Lorraine Daston in The Fate of Disciplines. Such developments have been accompanied by increasingly ambitious crossings from the humanities to the more distant natural science disciplines. These crossings have been undertaken not least, more and more, in the pages of Critical Inquiry. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History: Four Theses” is just one of its recent influential publications in this register. Some of the debates about Oppenheimer provoked by Nolan’s film are likely to turn on questions about if and how the scientist’s serious engagement with the humanities mattered to the shape of his major work and fateful decisions he took, early and late in his life. I hope that Critical Inquiry will be at the forefront of venues that host them.
A final point I wish to make about Foucault’s commentary on Oppenheimer in relation to Nolan’s film concerns the question of the medium. Foucault might initially seem to have a laser-like focus on this question, insisting, as he does, that “writing” will no longer serve the modern intellectual as it had done since the eighteenth-century. Yet having made this declaration, he does not consider alternatives to writing as a medium but points instead to specific intellectuals’ new mode of connecting theory and practice. Indeed, Foucault shows no interest in the concept of the medium as such, though by the 1970s it was already enjoying serious conceptual elaboration. Different questions might occur to us today, after the emergence of media studies and new genres of screen practice such as the video essay. Should Else’s documentary about Oppenheimer, released just five years after Foucault’s comments, be taken as an “intellectual” intervention in debates about nuclear weaponry? Should Nolan’s film? What would be the criteria for such judgments?
These questions could be posed about Nolan’s Oppenheimer in a little symposium that might include physicists, film scholars, political scientists, and historians. Other questions would surely follow. What should we make of the film’s representation of both the research benefits and the security risks implicit in open scientific exchange (as opposed to what in the film is called “compartmentalization”? How accurate is the film’s representation of quantum physics? How much does that question matter? Should we take Nolan’s particularly frantic scrambling of narrative sequences, or his mismatching of soundtrack and image track (the repeated thunder in the soundtrack long before the post-Trinity celebration at Los Alamos in which we actually see stomping feet that produce it) as an effort to mimic the dislocations of quantum mechanics? Should such an effect be understood to extend the film’s implicit homology between quantum physics and modernist works by Picasso, Stravinsky, and T. S. Eliot it shows Oppenheimer engaging? Does the melodramatic villainy of Downey’s Strauss, shown ruthlessly sacrificing Oppenheimer’s reputation to serve his own personal ambition, function as Nolan’s tactical compensation for the ethical quandaries attendant on the Manhattan Project and its aftermath? Why does Nolan not emphasize, as Else’s documentary does, the instrumentalist momentum that led Oppenheimer and his team at Los Alamos to carry on to its horrendous conclusion, months after V-E Day, a project launched to defeat Nazi Germany? How does the film represent the dissenting “Chicago Petition” in this debate about the use of the bomb? Is that representation accurate? Why does the film dwell on various scientists’ differing approaches to the spectacle of the Trinity test? How does that matter to the film’s own many spectacular effects? And what about the representation of “writing” in the film, including the Sanskrit text that plays a role in a curious early sex scene between Oppenheimer and Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh)?
In my little fantasy of this collaborative project, then, it would begin as a conference organized at the Franke Institute for the Humanities, with its proceedings published in a special issue of Critical Inquiry. For all I know, however, Bill Brown, Heather Keenleyside, and Richard Neer already have such a project in the works. No, on second thought, I’m sure they are dreaming up a far more interesting collaboration between Critical Inquiry and The Franke Institute, and I wish them all the best with it.
James Chandler is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English and interim chair of the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is Doing Criticism: Across Literary and Screen Arts (2022). He serves on the advisory board of CI, has published many essays and reviews in its pages, and has edited several of the journal’s special issues.
[1] Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, trans. Colin Gordon et al., ed. Gordon (New York, 1980), pp. 126, 127; hereafter abbreviated “TP.”
[2] Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel (New York, 2006), p. 233.
[3] Ibid., p. 233.
[4] Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), p. 62.
In the Moment 