Institutional practice, not doctrine, produces organic intellectuals.

Evidence

I tried on many occasions, and other people in British Cultural Studies and at the Centre especially have tried, to describe what it is we thought we were doing with the kind of intellectual work we set in place in the Centre. I have to confess that, though I’ve read many, more elaborated and sophisticated, accounts, Gramsci’s account still seems to me to come closest to expressing what it is I think we were trying to do. Admittedly, there’s a problem about his phrase “the production of organic intellectuals.” But there 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 previously what 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 it appears to align intellectuals with an emerging historic movement and we couldn’t tell then, and can hardly tell now, where that emerging historical movement 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.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 244

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illuminates ‘organic intellectual’ as actual institutional aspiration with the key difficulty that the aligning historic movement may be absent.
• QUESTION: What happens to the organic-intellectual ideal when no organic point of reference exists - Hall’s own ‘simulation’ answer is suggestive.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox Hall names - organic intellectuals without an organic movement, willed into being in advance of any conjuncture - is dense and paradigm-level.