The May 2026 issue of e-flux journal, titled 'Intellectuals,' is guest-edited by contemporary media theorist and cultural critic McKenzie Wark. It returns to the figure of the intellectual at a moment when intelligence is being enclosed, simulated, monetised, and returned as the property of platforms, machines, experts, and recognisable voices. The issue asks how thought produced across social life is gathered into authorship, expertise, commentary, and institutional force.
The Common Task of Knowing the World
Wark's concept of the 'common task of knowing the world' highlights the labour hidden beneath every essay, broadcast, lecture, translation, manifesto, archive, and machine output. The intellectual is not the origin of thought but one form through which collective intelligence is condensed, credited, and made available to power. Wark's 'femmunist' provocation challenges the old separation between the man of thought and the man of action, rooted in their shared attachment to mastery, inheritance, command, possession, and direction.
The serious man of thought speaks through polish, restraint, balance, expertise, and moral seriousness, carrying the prestige of the book into newspapers, radio, television, lecture halls, and later the feed, where credentials and access become the right to interpret the world for others. The feed refers to the social media stream of posts, clips, captions, recommendations, and metrics that organises attention.
The Useful Narcissist
Matt Seybold's account of the 'useful narcissist' clarifies this media relation by placing the 'public intellectual' beside the 'useful idiot.' The point is not that intellectuals are simply self-absorbed, but that media systems can make narcissism politically serviceable, turning access, celebrity, and convenience into signs of public reason.
Tithi Bhattacharya, a Marxist feminist historian of empire and social reproduction, moves away from both the liberal image of the independent thinker and the vanguardist image of political consciousness handed down to passive masses. Colonial rule fractured social life across region, class, language, law, education, and labour, while colonial education produced intermediaries trained in languages of liberty denied to the colonised. Journalists, teachers, lawyers, translators, editors, and writers gained force because they worked through newspapers, vernacular debate, political organisations, and translation to link scattered grievances to the empire. Mediation was one condition through which divided social experience acquired a shared language, even as the person carrying that language could appear as its owner.
The Intellectual in Pakistan
In Pakistan, the intellectual took shape less as a neutral public thinker than through the historical tension between progressive cultural politics and the state's efforts to discipline and contain it. The progressive intellectual emerged from writers, journalists, teachers, trade unionists, and activists associated with the Progressive Writers' Movement, where literature and criticism belonged to a struggle over class inequality, imperialism, democracy, and freedom after independence.
Opposed to this was an establishment intellectual formation cultivated through state institutions, official media, cultural bureaucracy, development discourse, and national security, which defined legitimate culture through cohesion, modernisation, and political stability. These formations reflected a conflict over whether intellectual work would remain tied to popular aspirations or be incorporated into state authority and ideological management.
Producing the Public
Denise Ferreira da Silva, philosopher of raciality, coloniality, and the modern state, does not treat the public intellectual as the conscience outside power but as a figure produced inside the ethical scene where power imagines the People and arranges the emotions through which that People recognises itself. In Pakistan, Urdu newspapers, state broadcasting, and private television helped produce the acceptable intellectual whose speech could sound like truth only after passing through national interest, security, moderation, legality, and responsible dissent. Da Silva shows that intellectual and media forms help produce the public they claim to address. In Pakistan, censorship worked in that register, since it not only blocked speech but trained public sense so criticism could be tolerated only when power itself remained unnamed.
The Feed and Public Feeling
Social media does not mark the fall of a rational public into affective disorder, because intellect and affect were already joined inside the ethical scene through which power imagines the People. The feed intensifies this older arrangement by making humiliation, outrage, loyalty, grief, recognition, and proximity available for circulation, so that the intellectual is no longer only the person who explains crisis but one form through which crisis is held together as public feeling. The problem is a media apparatus in which posture, speed, and constant availability allow the intellectual to attach themselves to each conjuncture and receive metrics, invitations, and followers as evidence that his voice has become necessary.
In Pakistan, the feed inherits the controlled television studio and the coded newspaper column rather than escaping them. Munira Cheema, lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex, describes YouTube podcasting as a cautious counterpublic where subjects treated as untouchable on television pass into discussion only through calculated speech. The host weighs which institution must be named indirectly, which case must remain general, which guest can bear exposure, and which clip can circulate without legal danger, family pressure, harassment, or a warning. The platform opens a passage beyond television, but that passage is not freedom from the apparatus. It is a new arrangement of censorship, extraction, and visibility in which careful speech, selective distance, and editorial control shape how collective political labour returns as the continuity of a channel.
Alternative Relations to the Feed
Amber Jamilla Musser, critic of Black visual culture and sensation, offers another relation to the feed through @the.black.gaze, an account that seeks attention without making one intellectual personality its centre. Through image, music, caption, memory, and citation, the feed becomes a field of relation where Black art, scholars, and fragments of Black feminist thought remain attributed rather than absorbed into one name. These efforts to keep collective knowledge from being absorbed into a single name have also produced other apparatuses for its circulation and use.
One example appears in the work of feminist scholar Verónica Gago, whose 8 March strike document demonstrates how political language can function as a collective machine of enunciation, with concepts, slogans, and demands formed through assemblies, disagreements, and shared organising practices. Rather than originating from or belonging to any individual commentator, media platform, or authoritative public figure, this political language is generated collectively and works through its circulation among participants.
The Intellectual in Feed-Form
The issue, therefore, exposes how the intellectual now exists in feed-form, moving across the column, studio, podcast, panel, clip, livestream, and platform archive, where political language becomes searchable, watchable, monetised, and available to surveillance. The paradox is that collective thought must circulate to intervene, while the infrastructures of circulation can detach it from the people, relations, and histories that produced it. The task is not to recover the older public intellectual or romanticise collectivity, but to keep open the problem of how collective knowledge can become politically operative without being surrendered to the apparatuses that extract, personalise, and govern it.
