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corresponding improbability that many of them will ever join the
technical labor force, the small or uncertain support for the revolt
among the technical intelligentsia. Nevertheless, it is an hypothesis which
offers some hope that the critical intellectuals can transcend the limits
(however imprecisely or loosely drawn) of their own situation to make
contact with a group of very considerable political potential.
It
is,
further, an hypothesis which is lent some plausibility by the events of
May in France, during which the technical labor force often participated
in a direct onslaught on authority, and during which it not only
formulated demands and projects for "auto-gestion" but proceeded
in
the rush of events to put these into effect. Finally, the trend to
unionization in the technical labor force in the United States (in the
public sector, to begin with) may point in the same ultimate direction.
v.
The New Political Avant-Garde
One of the ways the intellectual avant-garde affects the technical
intelligentsia is through the medium of art, and art is,
if
only implicitly,
a critique of experience. The turning upon itself of modern culture
in
the forms of the new visual art, the utilization of the detritus of daily
experience to mock that experience, constitutes a mode of social criticism.
Pop art, it is true, does not go beyond the surface of the visual and
tactile experience of an industrial (and a commercialized) culture.
Dwelling on the surface, it allows its consumers to mock the elements of
their daily life, without abandoning it. Indeed, the consumption of art in
the organized market for leisure serves at times to encapsulate the
social criticism of the avant-garde. However, the recent engagement of
writers, artists and theater people in contemporary issues suggests that
this sort of containment may have begun to reach its limits.
In an atmosphere in which the intellectually dominant group insists
on the contradictions inherent in daily experience, the technical intel–
ligentsia will find it difficult to remain unconscious of those contradic–
tions. The technical intelligentsia have until now avoided contradictions
by accepting large rewards for their expertise. As expertise becomes in–
creasingly difficult to distinguish from ordinary service on the one hand,
and merges on the other with the change of the social environment, the
technical intelligentsia's psychic security may be jeopardized. Rendering
of labor services casts it back into spiritual proletarianization; a challenge
to the social control exercised by elites, who use the technical intel–
ligentsia's labor power, pushes it forward to social criticism and revolu–
tionary politics. That these are matters, for the moment, of primarily
spiritual import does not diminish their ultimate political significance. A
