How To Become An Intellectual : The Essential DIY

We live in a culture of DIY (‘Do-it-yourself’) where books abound instructing you on how to do-for-yourself medicine, plumbing, novel-writing, book-reading, and house-selling. And this, I believe, is just the way things should be for I am always suspicious of people who claim, on the one hand, to have stumbled over a 'universal' truth but declare, on the other, that this truth must always be kept sacramentally cloaked in some stylized vocabulary. The standard term, of course, with which we refer to such people are the Intellectuals, and since they are here to stay, whether we love them or hate them, you might wish to read a DIY for Intellectuals in case you want to become one yourself in the future (or are forced by circumstances to sell yourself as one).


RULE 1 : Know Thy Word : This is one of the foundational stones of the Intellectual edifice : in order to be recognized as an Intellectual, you will have to possess a repertoire of terms, concepts, and ideas to pepper your writings with. In particular, you will have to pick up a significant number of those abstract nouns which you will routinely find interspersed throughout the texts of most Intellectuals. With time, you shall also learn how to translate, with supreme facility, everyday English into Intellectualese with a series of one-to-one mappings, mental transformations which will yield beautiful, ponderous, sonorous, and prosaic Intellectual English. Here are three examples to clarify the matter.

Non-Intellectual wife says to husband : ‘I just don’t understand you!’
Intellectual wife says to husband : ‘Meaning is a never-ending series of differences, is always absent and is interminably deferred.’

Non-Intellectual husband says to wife : ‘I am sick of your constant nagging.’
Intellectual husband says to wife : ‘Marriage is a social discourse into which domination is subtly inscribed, thereby silencing my voice which cannot be heard.’

Non-Intellectual wife says to husband : ‘All the buildings in our city look the same these days.’
Intellectual wife says to husband : ‘The homogenizing effects of globalization have flattened out all heterogeneities on the cultural landscape.’

As you can see, the experiences that the non-Intellectual and the Intellectual are both seeking to analyse, understand, or explain are in one sense very mundane ones, but the Intellectual commands a set of incantatory terms which can be combined, associated, or disassociated in different ways in different contexts.

RULE 2 : Know Thy Time : However, it would be very erroneous on your part to assume that this is all there is to becoming an Intellectual. Indeed, if it was simply a matter of learning how to perform a set of translatory transformations from every day English to Intellectualese, I could make an Intellectual out of a City banker in less than 6 hours. In addition to mastering these transpositions, you must have a keen sense of what is happening in the world and in the neighbourhood around you, be ready to think things over carefully and patiently, and pen down your thoughts somewhere in some form. In this connection, there are two types of Intellectuals, and you are quite free to choose which sort you want to become.

Type 1 : This type publishes a regular series of Tracts for the Times, that is, such an Intellectual is always contemporary. She is forever on the dot, analyzing and dissecting events as they happen, and therefore producing a stream of short books every six months. For this, she is sometimes castigated as being shallow, reckless, and opinionated, but with hindsight she might also be praised, twenty years down the line, as a very clairvoyant thinker. And if she herself wishes to enter this messy debate, she is always free to plead : ‘I have arrived too early for my time. People will understand me only when I am dead. Sigh.’
Type 2 : Intellectuals of this type are the long-suffering tortoises who will wait, watch, and move one step at a time after a lot of mind-numbing cogitation. They will look for the Big Picture, the Hidden Structure, the Grand Theory, and the Deep Reading behind the phenomena that everyone else is surrounded by. They are skilled in unearthing conspiracy theories, in informing people that things are not quite what they seem to be, and that their present misery is not in any way built into the structure of things. They normally produce books that run into 500 pages, quite clearly not meant for the consumption of the people for whom they are allegedly being written, and are the sweet fruit of a life-time spent in pondering the imponderables of life.

RULE 3 : Know Thy Enemy : Even this is not enough, for you must know in addition how to make the right career-move. Transposed into Intellectualese, this means that you must possess a knack for choosing the right side to fight on. As a general rule, never, ever try to intellectualise in defence of the group that is winning right now, for if you do you shall at once become a tainted Intellectual. Here is one example. You may believe, for all sorts of reasons, that the Americn Republican Party is infinitely superior to Stalin’s communist party. Fair enough, but if you want to become an Intellectual, just keep your opinions to yourself and keep your mouth shut, and as long as the Republicans are in power, do not venture to write anything supportive of them. Instead, hunt down some group that is on the losing side (or being ‘hegemonically silenced’), say the Greens in America. Write a massive three-volume history of the Green movement, tracing its origins to Caesar’s angry refusal to land in Britain in 53 BC when he realized that an entire stretch of land had been denuded for his army quarters, and depicting the current president of the Green party as Caesar’s spiritual descendant. This masterpiece, titled ‘After Green : Conservative Conversions’, will launch you at once into the vertiginous heights of intellectual fame, and will establish you as a defender of the rights of the downtrodden, the under-privileged, and the marginalized.

RULE 4 : Know Thy Market : In addition to mastering the above rules, you must also be a very good salesperson, and must be constantly aware of what market lies there outside your studying room. And even this is not enough, for you must also learn from your friends in the business schools how to create a market for yourself. These days, one of the most fertile areas in this context is Nationalism : pick up a certain stretch of land, go back into its past in some dusty archive, and try to show why the diverse and disconnected people living there today actually belong to the same ‘nation’. Before publishing your ground-breaking thesis, however, you must get the timing right : if you produce it too early, you will be damned as a reactionary, but if too late, you are just that --- too late.

RULE 5 : Know Thy Children : Having grasped these points, you are now ready for some advice concerning your Intellectual children. When you write, always keep something hanging in the air, some edges around your words, some gaps in the midst of your sentences, some whispers between your pages, and all of this is in order to give your readers the feeling ‘something is amiss’. This deliberate ambiguity will help you to reach out to a wide readership, and some of your readers may soon develop a micro-industry trying to interpret what you were ‘really’ trying to say. It may so happen that some of these Intellectual children of yours will publish views that are actually quite different from what you had intended to say. Never mind, just sit back and relax, everyone likes to be given a chance to intellectualise, even if in the shadow of a Great Master. You must also be ready to accept, however, that (at least) one of these children of yours will murder you (metaphorically, that is), and by renouncing all affiliations with your school, branch out into a completely new direction, and pretend that she has never heard of you, seen you, or met you.

RULE 6 : Know Thy Popularizers : Carrying on the former rule, suppose, however, that you do not actually commit the heinous crime of eating your Intellectual Parent for breakfast (metaphorically, that is, once again). In that case, you would like to ensure that the sacrosanct message that has been handed down to you remains uncorrupt and is transmitted inviolate to the next generation. You must then find a suitable vantage-point in the Intellectual world, and dutifully scan therefrom the barren landscape for anyone who might be trying to popularise this consecrated message without first being inducted into your holy community with the appropriate rites. As soon as you find some cheap journalist, news reader or novelist peddling your Intellectual ware to a wider public, you must assume at once a grave prophetic tone of apocalyptic judgement over the heathen public who persist in worshipping the false demons instead of bowing down to your Intellectual Parent, the one True God of whom you are the one True Messenger.

RULE 7 : Know Thy Lemon : When the fox could not reach the sweet grapes, he consoled himself with the thought that they were actually sour and that he was better off by not eating them. The reverse adage applies in Intellectualese and it is the one that can be labeled Sweet Lemons. In the Intellectual world, you will have to learn, whether you like it or not, to view the world through the spectacles of your words, your texts, your essays, and your books. Very soon, you will realize that you have stopped looking at the world, and are spending too much time juggling your words. The living world, that is, has collapsed into your lifeless words. Not to worry, however; just remember the Sweet Lemons advice, and all will be happy. What you will get from Intellectuals is a series of lemons, some yellow, some green, being passed around the dinner table, but unless you want to get kicked out from their charmed circle you must somehow convince yourself that these lemons are really sweet. (Trust me on this one, really.)