부산대학교 도서관

The figure of the public intellectual and the act of public pedagogy are fairly central to varieties of critical pedagogy. Public intellectuals have historically been those who speak truth to power and challenge dominant ways of thinking, and critical pedagogy argues that academics have to take up this call, leaving the ivory towers and entering the public sphere. Critical pedagogues are not alone in their concern about the retreat of intellectuals or academics from public life, yet to what extent are these notions of the public intellectual tied to a pre-digital age, and how might the digital age undermine these notions? In this paper, we argue that the digital has facilitated the death of the traditional public intellectual as the means of intellectual production have been dispersed throughout society. Turning to Paolo Virno's writing on potential and history, we examine the pedagogy of the public intellectual and present a new configuration of learning and studying that emphasizes the infinite potentiality of history and the present. Whereas most scholarship defines learning as the actualization of potential, we show that potential is never fully actualized. Such a configuration introduces the need to historically saturate political acts with meaning, which we argue is the new task of public intellectuals in the postdigital age. In order to do this, however, academics who wish to contribute to social movements must embed themselves and operate within social movements, joining the leadership of organic intellectuals and professional revolutionaries, and even viewing their own critical work not as the production of new knowledge but rather the amplification of existing knowledges generated through these struggles, shifting the educational register from epistemology to ontology, and the educational mode of operation from teaching to collective studying.