On the occasion of Milan Design Week 2025, KoozArch is proud to partner with the fashion brand MSGM and Berlin-based bookshop, do you read me? to host LESS NOISE. Amidst the frenzy, LESS NOISE carves out a space for reflection, focusing on the potency of publishing, through pivotal projects and intersectional conversations with designers, publishers, authors and editors who are redefining the field. Three conversations — under the titles Breaking Ground, The Laws of Attraction and Publish and Be Damned — will also be available as an audio series. In line with KoozArch’s ambition of making inspirational content accessible, we are delighted to share a series of edited excerpts from selected and critical publications.
An excoriating extract from MIDCAREER WRITING (Sorry Press, 2024) by Federico Sargentone interrogates the status given to the public intellectual, observing that — as exemplified by the unlikely epitome of thug-life, Tupac Shakur — the street is the only position that makes sense.
List of all the tasks I’ve ever performed, and the job roles I’ve ever impersonated (although having never been formally employed once in my life) throughout my career: art critic, music critic, fashion critic, culture critic, art writer, music writer, fashion writer, culture writer, copywriter, ghostwriter, curator, associate curator, assistant curator, curatorial assistant, gallery assistant, gallery intern, museum guide, editor in chief, associate editor, assistant editor, editorial assistant, library guy, bookshop weekend-shift guy, publisher, book editor, lecturer, lectured, brand strategist, strategy consultant, creative consultant, editorial strategist, creative director, editorial director, founder, co-founder, listicle specialist — as you can understand.
Although my personal employment — or non-employment — history tells of the present economic precarity, it is far from being the core of the argument. Employment, or the lack thereof, does not always and necessarily coincide with identification, as it’s often mediated by working relations, bureaucratic structures, and all the external factors that characterise the tasks performed on behalf of, and for, a specific economic entity in the form of “work.” Identification has more to do with the word “practice” rather than “work.” However, in order for anyone to claim to have a practice, they should have work too. THE CONUNDRUM
OF THE WORK IDENTITY RELATION
LIES IN
ITS INHERENT NON-LINEARITY:
put simply, not everyone chooses to spell out their job titles as a way to characterise their persona. It is a non-linear construct because a third factor influences its predictability, and that is money.
Axiom A: you work; you earn money.
Axiom B: you work; you earn status (identity currency).
Axiom C: you work; you earn money and status.
How much money? How much status? What money–status ratio? Those are variables that influence the linearity of the work-identity relation, where personal identification with a specific job title might be driven by both types of currencies you earn out of it; or, simply, it might not.
By identification, I mean transferring to mundane activities such as jobs a whole set of cultural values that not only dignify or glorify the work but also build one’s personality as an extension of said jobs. This is, paradoxically, a quintessential boomer thinking process that millennials have internalised and made a generational common denominator. If baby boomers lived under the preconception of “work makes me free,” obviously opting for money as currency, millennials live under the assumption of “work makes me me,” hence opting for status as their currency of choice.
Through all the subaltern categories, outlined above, I’ve come to impersonate, I’ve always identified as a writer, although without thinking that activity could contribute as my main source of income, or my core business — rest assured, it wasn’t and it is not. Identifying as a writer means, I believe, complying with a methodology of thinking, rather than of doing, to craft ideas that might or might not come to life. Writing today means producing immaterial objects: CONTEXT MORE
THAN
CONTENT. But that shouldn’t grant permission to disqualify our profession. Writing is only for pros, because it’s such a miserable act that it should never assume the pleasant status of a hobby.
As a kid, I never had the dream of producing any form of writing. No one ever gave me pens and notebooks as encouragement gifts. No words were ever written in a journal in my free time. Teachers wouldn’t have me stand up to read my essays in class. I have never read a Harry Potter book in my life. I don’t understand poetry, although I was very good at reading ancient Greek back in high school. I never have, and never will embrace the idea of the writer as a naive wordsmith who carries a paperback and pencil tucked in the pockets of a faded, gross work jacket. Am I a good writer? Is my prose reading fine? Are my tenses coordinated? Questions that have never crossed my mind. And to be honest, if they ever did, I would just not care at all.
How much money? How much status? What money–status ratio? Those are variables that influence the linearity of the work-identity relation, where personal identification with a specific job title might be driven by both types of currencies you earn out of it; or, simply, it might not.
The mythology of the “street-intellectual” has always been obscured by the perfectly put, publicly acclaimed fake-intellectual. The street-intellectual sells ideas and not words. They sell it to companies, brands, institutions, people, and organizations in the form of condensed, modulated, adaptable language that implies the use of words, but without making it the core of the delivery. Words, for the street-intellectual, are just tools that bear no poetic meaning at all, but are just in service of the thesis, the theory, the point. The street-intellectual is a nerd in disguise: someone who’s cynical enough to understand their work is not changing the world, but a dreamer at the same time; someone who can talk to a big-company CEO, as much as to an emerging artist, and make their point with the same degree of confidence and conceptual stance; someone who reads but will keep it off the mouth at a club. Someone like a writer, now.
As a true mid, interpretative, derivative, contemporary writer, I have moulded my humble characterization of the street-intellectual on an image that crossed my Google Chrome tab while looking for something else. The image portrays a corny photomontage starring the face of Marshall McLuhan and the body of Tupac. The setting for this mesmerising visual Frankenstein is a Rolling Stone magazine cover, whose headline copy reads: “I am an intellectual thug…” The image couldn’t be more fake, although very fitting to the predictions of the media analyst, philosopher, and writer. If for McLuhan, “all media work us over completely,” being “so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences,” this image “worked me up” completely too. The original Rolling Stone cover story coincides with the death of rapper Tupac Shakur in 1996 at the age of 25—the result of gunshot wounds he had received six days earlier in a drive-by shooting. In the cover portrait, shot by Danny Clinch, Shakur stands still, looking straight at the camera, with his hands crossed behind his back. Shirtless, his torso reveals the iconic “Thug Life” belly tattoo. For Shakur, who decided to replace the letter “I” with a bullet when he got the tattoo in 1992, these two inked words had a duplicitous meaning: the name of the rap group he would found in late 1993, and an acronym for “THE HATE U GIVE LITTLE INFANTS FUCKS EVERYONE,” a slogan representing the idea that the racism and marginalization experienced by black youth end up negatively affecting society.
MIDCAREER WRITING (Sorry Press, 2024) by Federico Sargentone
This double-layered writing impressed on Tupac’s chest outlines a conceptual framework for the entire lyrical production of the American rapper, in which stratified meanings and different reading keys intertwine one on top of another, making the interpretation of any of his lyrics more complex than their formal delivery. Shakur’s complex, deep, emotionally charged writing made him one of the most influential rappers of all time. In 2003, Shakur’s impact on contemporary society was the topic of a symposium organised by Harvard University under the title “All Eyez on Me: Tupac Shakur and the Search for a Modern Folk Hero.” Among many scholars devoted to furthering the legacy of the rapper into the academic realm, Mark Anthony Neal, currently Professor of African & African American Studies at Duke University, delivered a talk that proposed the reading of Tupac as a politically engaged intellectual, defining him a “thug n**** intellectual.” Throughout the panels hosted at the Harvard symposium, Tupac’s personal book collection was a recurring topic of discussion, as it emerges from Neal’s report debriefing after the event. Included in that collection are books such as J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River, Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick, Eileen Southern’s Music of Black Americans, and the feminist writings of Alice Walker (In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens) and Robin Morgan (Sisterhood is Powerful: Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement). As noted by Neal, “Many of the texts cited above were read before Tupac reached the age of 20.”
TUPAC’S TRINOMIAL
“READER WRITER INTELLECTUAL”
DIALECTIC COUNTERBALANCES
THE HYPOTHESIS THAT
INTELLECTUALS ARE FORMED
THROUGH THE SAME PARADIGM
OF THE SOCIAL CLASSES,
and overthrows the myth that sees intellectuals as a removed, autonomous, and independent social group. In Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, Vladimir Lenin’s infamous declaration that “all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals must be obliterated,” is developed in a new, ingenious way by the Italian philosopher, who distinguishes intellectuals into two functional groups. Traditional intellectuals — literary, scientific, ecclesiastic, and so on — whose position in society derives ultimately from past and present class relations and conceals an attachment to historical class formations, and “organic” intellectuals, who act as the thinking and organising element of a particular fundamental social class. These organic intellectuals are distinguished less by their profession, which may be any job characteristic of their class, and more by their ability to shape and influence the ideas and aspirations of the class they organically belong to.
In calling Tupac Shakur an “intellectual thug,” Mark Anthony Neal distills Gramsci’s idea that the working class, like the bourgeoisie before it, is capable of developing from within its ranks its own organic intellectuals, and that those intellectuals, through their work, represent their class — or, in more modern wording, their community — in society, in public. According to Gramsci, “All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals,” and that, for Gramsci, meant the ideological and political overthrowing of the “Traditional intellectuals” by the hands of the “organic intellectuals.” Thug life!
Antonio Gramsci was arrested by the fascist police in 1926, and condemned to a 20-year-long sentence in prison. At his trial, his prosecutor stated, “For twenty years, we must stop this brain from functioning.” Other than the brutality of fascist ideology, this statement shows evidence of the role of the intellectual in modern society. This new modality breaks away from the Greco-Roman tradition of the intellectual as a divine repository of knowledge, to characterise the intellectual as an instigator, and in this case, a political opposer, someone whose voice must be silenced and removed from the public sphere: the “organic intellectual.” An infamous story published in Vibe magazine in 1994 presents Tupac as a menace to society, projecting into the future Gramsci’s formulation of a new mode of intellectual activity. “The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as a constructor, organiser, ‘permanent persuader’ and not just a simple orator.”
If Gramsci was writing these lines from prison from 1929 to 1935, a letter addressed to the British poet Ezra Pound, dated 1951, sent from the office of philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan, once again repurposes the concept of the organic intellectual. “I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age, every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon. Every man of goodwill is the enemy of society. We prefer to compose human beings into bombs and explode political and social entities. Much more fun.”
In terms of being a writer, McLuhan was one of terrible prose. Often described as enigmatic, difficult, and arcane, his writing style employed tight one-liners combined with almost excruciating digressions in historical and literary theory. For McLuhan, who himself defined his “stuff” as “very difficult,” his books were just the process, rather than the completed product of discovery. However, over-articulated syntax, convoluted observations, and undecipherable jargon didn’t prevent the Canadian philosopher from being widely appreciated by critics as “the high priest of popthink,” “the Dr. Spock of pop culture,” or “the hottest academic property around.” Many others feared him, labeling his theories as dangerous, wrong, and unthinkable. Companies and politicians loved him — General Motors paid him to forecast how cars were a thing of the past, Bell Telephone to have him explain how they were getting the function of the telephone wrong.
A true street-intellectual, McLuhan reshaped society while simultaneously critiquing it. He lived, worked, and thought, on the same surface that was subject to his own interrogations: a true Gramscian intellectual, who chose to identify as a writer for the sole purpose of conveying a message (a massage?). The self-reflexivity of McLuhan’s work is of utmost importance, as it provides the paradigm of what it means to produce critical writing today: the writing, simply, must be embedded within society, play by the same rules of contemporary culture, commerce, art, and intellect, to be an effective tool to critique it in turn. Today’s short attention span, algorithmic dissociation, and image hegemony are all pure excuses for writers that aren’t pro. If McLuhan managed to put his own name in mainstream media headlines, and build a public persona out of philosophy writing in the heavily illiterate, culture-flattened, mass-brainwashed America of the ‘60s, while also critiquing these very dynamics, I think we can do it today too.
STREET-INTELLECTUALS ONLY
Bio
Federico Sargentone is a cultural critic and the co-founder of the strategy & creative consultancy Countersubject. Federico’s cultural criticism explores the dichotomies and tensions that animate the mass-niche divide, decoding stylistic codes and languages informing micro and macro trends alike. His writing is regularly featured in international media and his debut book, “Midcareer Writing,” is available worldwide through Munich-based publisher Sorry Press.
