Authors

Alexandra Smith¹;  ¹ The University of Edinburgh, UK

Discussion

According to Zygmunt Bauman, the term "the new intellectual" was coined at the beginning of the twentieth century with the view to recapture and reassert the function of the values rooted in the Enlightenment in the production and dissemination of knowledge in the global context. It was widely applied to journalists, writers, artists, and public figures who felt that “it was their moral responsibility . . . to interfere directly with the political processes through influencing the minds of the nation and moulding the actions of its political leaders. While “the typically modern view of the world is one of essentially ordered totality,” Bauman affirms, “the typically post-modern view of the world is . . . one of unlimited number of models of order.” (Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-modernity and Intellectuals. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987, 1.)  Tatyana Tolstaya's wide use of social media and various Youtube channels for self-promotion in the 2000s-2020s suggests that she reinvents the values of the unofficial culture of the 1970s, including realism and pragmatism, and attacks utopian trends of the Thaw period.