What is the role of the Public Intellectual?

Donald Horne: critics and negotiators

The general idea of ‘public intellectual life’ is more useful than the particular idea of’ the public intellectual’. ‘Public intellectual life’ is a public manifestation of what I called in The Public Culture ‘the critics’ culture’ of a liberal-democratic state. (It is made possible by the belief in a questioning approach to exist­ence as a central force in society.) However only parts of this critical activity emerge into the public culture; it is these parts that might be thought of as its ‘public intellectual life’. They provide a kind of public acclimatisation society for new ideas. All kinds of people may play a part in working up these ideas down there in the subterranean passages of the critics’ culture and others may take over the business of negotiating them into the public sphere. Many of these ‘negotiators’ are paid public performers in the news and entertainment industries. However some of the ‘critics’

The two books reviewed here, although very different in many ways, do have one thing in common – they have something to do with a secret, which the readers, and the protagonists, all come to know.

Sophie Masson has written a number of books about the Seyrac family, in which she draws on her own French heritage. In this, the fourth, changes come to the family as Maman works to finish her book and Papa is full of plans to open a restaurant with the children’s uncle and aunt who are to emigrate from France. Florence, the eldest of the children, discovers that all is not always as it seems and that people’s appearances can be deceptive. It comes as something of a revelation too, that she might be like Polichinelle and not always as clever as she thinks she is, as she is forced to acknowledge that Andy, the unwanted member of her working group at school, writes better than she does.

Greg Dening was trained for the Catholic priesthood. He became an outstanding historian of the Pacific, although perhaps better described as an anthropologist-historian, in company with Clifford Geertz, Marshall Sahlins, Nathalie Zemon Davis, and his colleague Rhys Isaac, to whom this book is warmly dedicated. Yet echoes of his initial calling linger in his work, certainly as evidenced in this collection of essays.

Dening is a proselytiser for a history which is recovered through the imagination, rather than a reliance on the surviving, selective texts which almost entirely empty the past of its meaning and are themselves continually transformed by the process of reading and interpretation. He says we cannot describe the past independently of our knowing it, any more than we can the present, and this kind of knowledge is the realm of the imagination. ‘Histories are fictions,’ he boldly asserts, ‘something made of the past – but fictions whose forms are metonymies of the present’. The American philosopher, Richard Rorty, is regularly invoked to illuminate his point. Human solidarity, Rorty writes,

is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers … This process of coming to see others as being ‘one of us’ rather than as ‘them’ is a matter of detailed description of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography …

As the one hundred and sixteen years of their control of the Exhibition Building ends, its Trustees have prepared this splendid account of their stewardship. From diverse perspectives David Dunstan, who teaches public history at Monash University, and fifteen associates, demonstrate how deeply the building has entered into the everyday lives of Victorians. Dunstan begins by noting that:

Two hundred years of European culture have not seen many places in this continent invested with anything like the meaning given by Aboriginal people to their sacred sites. But this building, could be one of them … if we gather together a mixed-age group and ask people about their recollections, then the images and memories surface in animated conversation: examinations; shows – the Motor Show; the Home Show; RAAF trainees during the Second World War; the Motor Registration Branch; The Royale Ballroom … the Aquarium.