What Divides?

The ‘Academic–Activist Divide’ and the Equality of Intelligence

Abstract

The academic–activist divide does not merely consist of a division between those working within the academy to transform society and those pursuing the same ends through direct action, community organisation, or other forms of political organisation. Rather, at base the academic-activist divide is constituted by ideas around who can think and speak, what counts as thought and speech, and through the assumption that there are supposedly ‘legitimate’ spaces from which thought and speech issue. Thinking through and beyond the academic–activist divide requires questioning the relation between thought and action and challenging their containment within a social order. In what follows, I seek to move beyond the academic-activist divide by drawing on the work of Karl Marx and Jacques Rancière. Far from an inward exercise in political or social theory, the arguments made here have immediate consequences for questions of political organisation in the present moment.