ual failure, nor with the quality of our ideas, but with the structure of intel-
lectual communities and their material foundations. Dark Ages of the mind
are not necessarily ushered in by material collapse, but can occur in times of
material abundance; a major cause is overabundance and dispersion of the
material means of intellectual production.
An enormous expansion and decentralization of the academic world has
taken place since 1950. The United States, which began this process somewhat
earlier than other wealthy societies, has more than 3,000 colleges and univer-
sities, and scores of them are in the running to claim intellectual attention.
Similar expansion took place in the decades after 1950 in France, Germany,
Britain, Italy, Japan, and subsequently throughout the world, with similar
decentralizing effects. Education has become a currency controlling opportu-
nities for employment; it now expands autonomously through the interplay
between credential inflation, driven by the competition for more schooling, and
the resulting rise in the credential requirements of jobs. As each level of
education becomes saturated and deflated in value, superordinate markets for
cultural credentials are added beyond them. The relations between the supply
of and demand for education are circular and self-reinforcing; the spiral is
pointed upward with no end in sight (Collins, 1979; Ramirez and Boli-Bennett,
1982; Bourdieu, 1988).
The production of academic intellectuals rides on this wave of credential
inflation. As demand expands for educational certificates, there comes an
increase in the numbers of higher degree holders to train those of the next rank
down, an explosion of Ph.D.’s. And since these scholars struggle for positions
by means of their publishing reputations, the output of scholarship follows the
same inflationary path as the competition for lower academic degrees, a meta-
market driven upward upon the expansion of higher education.
Analogous processes take place in the commercial markets of popular
culture. In this atmosphere of superordinate arenas of cultural production
pyramiding upon one another, the content of modern culture has become
self-reflex and ironic. We see this both in the pop culture, with its themes of
privatized alienation and showy nihilism, and in the successive waves of
ironicization among intellectuals, of which postmodernism is only the latest.
The content of the postmodern message is an ideology of cultural producers
in a highly pyramided market structure, where nothing in sight seems to touch
solid earth.
Our structural condition as intellectuals can be summarized in the phrase:
loss of a center of intersecting conflicts, loss of the small circle of circles at
which our arguments can be focused. It is not a center of agreement that is
lacking; creative intellectual periods never had that. What is lost is a nexus
where disagreements are held in tension, the limited attention space which
historically has been the generator of creative fame.522 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths