Public Intellectual | Intellectual Publics and Telling the Truth After Truth

• In Event: 51.023 - Rethinking the Intellectual for the 21st Century

Abstract

This paper explores truth-telling of public intellectuals as academic and studied people who engage and share within public arenas and forums and that of intellectual publics who take up intellectual projects of telling the truth and thus reposition authorship and authority. Drawing upon parrhesia as dangerous truth (Foucault, 2001; Huckaby, 2008), this paper explores parrhesia as an ethical, pedagogical, and risky practice. I turn to scholarly-public-aesthetic experiences, particularly new media and film, to explicate the activity and consequences of truth-telling from within a post-truth era where the concept of truth is tested, reconfigured, and dismissed. Also considered are the strategies and tactics of parrhesia put to use to recast lies into fact, put forth alternative facts, shift news into fake news, turn witnesses into crisis actors, and the like. By “after” I refer not to a time subsequent to an ending. Instead the term is taken up much like Hall, Massey and Rustin (2015) do in After Neoliberalism to explore truth post-truth within a condition that (1) transitions from a previous, prevailing notion, (2) seems likely to continue and difficult to disrupt, (3) realizes reverberations in the existence|extinction of human and non-human life, and (4) anticipates actions as harbingers of an after-after. Despite the dangers of parrhesiazesthai, I argue that the silent or compliant alternatives are more dangerous in this time when truth is regularly contested for political, hegemonic, and economic gain. I propose that what’s needed now are public intellectuals actively engaged in and among intellectual publics not as bearers of the truth but deliberative members in collaborative inquiry.

Author

• M. Francyne Huckaby, Texas Christian University