Criticism and Politics by Robbins Bruce;

Author:Robbins, Bruce;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

One prime site of ambivalence is the concept of the organic intellectual. As applied to academics, who might not otherwise seem to deserve the honor of being called intellectuals at all, Gramsci’s term has suggested that in this instance the honor is in fact deserved. It’s deserved because of the academic’s bonds with a constituency outside the academy. Such a constituency would have to be one of a multiethnic, multigender, and nonheteronormative collection of constituencies that (like the working class for Gramsci) are supposed to be in the process of overcoming entrenched hostility and fighting their way upward or inward. Because they are embattled, they could theoretically be helped in their struggle by the cultural work of those who emerged from or attached themselves to those constituencies. The suggestion is by no means self-evident. In “Romancing the Organic Intellectual,” Aimee Carrillo Rowe hesitates to affirm it, and the reason she gives is the confusion that comes of inhabiting multiple identities. She describes herself as a “middle-class Chicana; indigenous-identified Xicana; queer, single mother, living in a multigenerational home; teacher, student, scholar; post-structuralist U.S. third world feminist.”10 Her relation to the concept of the organic intellectual has therefore been a “romance,” but a “vexed” romance.”11

While Gramsci productively signals the ideological force our “connection” to home communities exerts over knowledge production, his account doesn’t provide an intersectional lens to untangle how multiple, cross-cutting connectivities become vexed through our labor as intellectuals. On the one hand, academics who seek to hold themselves accountable to colonized and marginalized groups often find themselves . . . inhabiting “alien (if not hostile) territory.” Not only do our radical (be)longings become vexed vis-à-vis the academy, but the production of our labor as intellectuals may also alienate us from home communities: rising class status, assimilation, and institutionalization often strain those ties. The organic intellectual is forged not only through belonging to a social class but also through the thick-hot-molten force—the push-pull, in-out, here-there dance—of a radical in-betweenness that arises through our affective ties to multiple and often contradictory sites of power.12

A similar set of reservations leads Hortense Spillers, writing in response to invocations of the organic intellectual by Cornel West, to break up with “organicity” once and for all.13 In a classic essay, Spillers sets herself the task of comparing the situation of African Americans in the mid-90s with their situation in the mid-60s, when Harold Cruse was writing his Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. What has happened since then? She begins: “Although African American intellectuals as a class have gained greater access to organs of public opinion and dissemination . . .” There follows a sequence of more “although” clauses (“although we can boast today a considerably larger black middle and upper-middle class”). The sequence goes on; and by allowing it to go on, Spillers almost seems to be indulging the idea that there has in fact been significant progress since the 60s. But her list of middle-class Black achievements since the 60s, inside the academy and out,

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