"Eco sees the intellectual as an organizer of culture, someone who can run a magazine or a museum. An administrator, in fact. I think this is a melancholy situation for an intellectual"
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Tabucchi is taking a scalpel to a very contemporary temptation: to confuse cultural power with cultural paperwork. By paraphrasing Umberto Eco's notion of the intellectual as an "organizer of culture" - the person who can "run a magazine or a museum" - he isn't really arguing with the competence involved. He's arguing with the job description. The jab lands because "organizer" sounds noble until he supplies the blunt synonym: "An administrator, in fact". That last phrase collapses the romance of the public intellectual into a role defined by budgets, branding, committees, and gatekeeping. The melancholy isn't personal; it's structural.
The intent is to defend an older, riskier idea of the intellectual: not a manager of cultural institutions but a disturber of cultural comfort. Tabucchi's subtext is that when intellectual life gets professionalized into stewardship, it becomes legible to power and therefore easier to domesticate. A museum director can host dissent as a program; a magazine editor can package critique as a lifestyle. The intellectual, reimagined as a cultural executive, is rewarded for continuity, not disruption.
Context matters here: late 20th-century Europe, where the figure of the engaged writer ran up against expanding cultural industries, media ecosystems, and the bureaucratization of public life. Eco, famously omnivorous and institution-savvy, embodied a new model: the scholar-celebrity who moves easily between academy, mass media, and cultural administration. Tabucchi, more suspicious and more melancholic by temperament, hears in that agility a concession: the intellectual as curator of what already exists, rather than an agent who makes existing arrangements feel intolerable.
The intent is to defend an older, riskier idea of the intellectual: not a manager of cultural institutions but a disturber of cultural comfort. Tabucchi's subtext is that when intellectual life gets professionalized into stewardship, it becomes legible to power and therefore easier to domesticate. A museum director can host dissent as a program; a magazine editor can package critique as a lifestyle. The intellectual, reimagined as a cultural executive, is rewarded for continuity, not disruption.
Context matters here: late 20th-century Europe, where the figure of the engaged writer ran up against expanding cultural industries, media ecosystems, and the bureaucratization of public life. Eco, famously omnivorous and institution-savvy, embodied a new model: the scholar-celebrity who moves easily between academy, mass media, and cultural administration. Tabucchi, more suspicious and more melancholic by temperament, hears in that agility a concession: the intellectual as curator of what already exists, rather than an agent who makes existing arrangements feel intolerable.
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