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Tania Lewis From the Organic to the Celebrity Intellectual Since its inception, the field of cultural studies has been preoccupied with analyzing the role of the intellectual. Emerging postWorld War Two as a response to the dramatic social and cultural transformations that accompanied the shift towards late modernity in the West, cultural studies has produced some of the more powerful and nuanced accounts of the social role and status of contemporary intellectuals. In particular,whathas distinguished cultural studies ' approach to this question has been its interest in validating the culture and knowledges of marginalized groups. A central debate occurring within cultural studies has concerned what John Frow describes as the "division of knowledge" between the specialized "caste of intellectuals" and "its others" (2), thus marking it out as one of the more intellectually self-reflexive fields of knowledge. Concerned with generating a self-reflexive approach to knowledge production and with highlighting the role of power in the relationshipbetween intellectuals and their others, cultural studiesscholars have frequently turned to Antonio Gramsci's model of the organic intellectual. Problematizing the figure of the universalist or free-floating thinker, Gramsci's notion of the organic intellectual works to specify the claims of all intellectuals by identifying them with the interests of particular class formations. While within contemporary cultural studies writings, Gramsci's organic intellectual is just as likely to be grounded in other "identity" formations such as gender or race rather than class, what is radical about this model is that its openly politicized, identity-based approach places into question the claims to neutrality made in the name of universalist models of intellectualism. "All men are intellectuals:" Cultural Studies and the Organic Intellectual In "Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies," given at the seminal 1990 "Cultural Studies Now and in the Future" conference in Illinois, Stuart Hall offers a self-consciously autobiographical journey back through the various theoretical movements that have contributed to the developmentofcultural studies at Birmingham. Tracing cultural studies' troubled relationship with Marxism, he discusses in particular the role that Gramsci's work played in offering cultural studies a critical alternative to traditional Marxist approaches . Overand above his radical rearticulation ofMarxist theory, however, Hall argues that one of Gramsci's major contributions to cultural studies was the way in which his work foregrounded "the 216 the minnesota review need toreflect on our institutional position,and ourintellectual practice " (281). In what has become a much cited section of the article, Hall goes on to highlight the crucial role that Gramsci's notion of the organic intellectual played as an exemplary model for the intellectual work being done at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS): [TJhere is no doubt in my mind that we were trying to find an institutional practice in cultural studies that might produce an organic intellectual. We didn't know previouslywhat that would mean, in the context of Britain in the 1970s, and we weren't sure we would recognize him or her if we managed to produce it. The problem about the concept of an organic intellectual is that itappears to align intellectuals with an emerging historic movement and we couldn't tell then, and can hardly tell now, where that emerging historical moment was to be found. We were organic intellectuals without any organic point of reference; organic intellectuals with a nostalgia or will or hope (to use Gramsci's phrase from another context) that at some point we would be prepared in intellectual work for that kind of relationship , if such a conjuncture ever appeared. More truthfully, we were prepared to imagine or model or simulate such a relationship in its absence: "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." (281) In his review of the Illinois conference, Fredric Jameson argues that, though seldom expressed in the openly Utopian terms that mark Hall's account, "the desire called the organic intellectual is omnipresent here" (24), and I would add that it continues for a number of reasons to represent the implicit model of intellectual practice for many cultural studies theorists. Before I proceed to examine and problematize some of the ways in which the figure of the organic intellectual has been adopted by cultural studies...

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