Culture and Tactics by Robert F. Carley

Author:Robert F. Carley [Carley, Robert F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Ethnic Studies
ISBN: 9781438476445
Google: P4ezDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2019-10-01T05:14:48+00:00

Intellectuals: How Ideology Is Organizational and Organizations Are Ideological

In the second chapter, I have provided some detail about the role of intellectuals in Gramsci’s notebooks and preprison writings. I want to describe how certain details from Gramsci’s concept of intellectuals make specific contributions to ICT. In short, Gramsci’s contribution to the concept of ideology is unique. It is primarily historical but also organizational or concrete in the sense that, for him, ideologies necessarily emerge in contexts alongside organizations and endure as indispensable to civil and state-based needs. It should be noted that, in both cases, organizations and institutions that are organic to a context are only organic if they create or address a new need (civil society) or a new circumstance (rights and privileges, states, parties, etc.).13

In the case of organic intellectuals, the groups attached to these organizations not only enjoy preeminence but, importantly, they become memorialized or symbolized as great leaders, geniuses, and rebels, that is, figures of great importance. Already, as in the preceding examples (e.g., Kathleen Cleaver), individual contributors are singled out as examples. They play a specific role for predominant ideological frameworks providing continuity between the past and the present even if their role was disruptive during the time that they live. They are “traditional intellectuals.” However, at the national level, (in the context of national ideology) very often traditional intellectuals become memorialized whether their contributions were private or public, for example, as heads of state or fighting for recognition (e.g., rights) of marginalized or oppressed groups. First, these figures embody what has come to be the colloquial understandings of “intellectual” as a uniquely expressive figure; their persistence is linked to a narrative authority like a national ideology. One can think of the Martin Luther King Jr. memorialized by the United States and the historical man in an almost radical contradistinction. One can think of the Gandhi of passive resistance and the Gandhi of the Hind Swaraj again in radical contradistinction. In both cases, the former is symbolized as a simple, two-dimensional ideological representation. Or, the individual is summarized through a catchphrase (Zald 2000a): “nonviolent or passive resistance.” These historical figures, each led complex lives, movements, and organizations, were organic to a context—they were both products of it and produced it (Carley 2019a). Their struggle depended on actual forces and actual responses to those forces in the form of counterforces, alliances, agreements, strategies, and tactics, and so on. Organic to a past moment, the traditional intellectual provides continuity between present-day values through a mythologized or selectively organized past broadcasting of a sensibility of historical continuity and stability, making it difficult to even imagine historical transformation and occluding the organizational and societal basis for change. This figure of the intellectual often represents the co-optation by an external predominant narrative in an attempt to legitimate historical events for the predominant narrative. However, traditional intellectuals (whether oppositional or not) are embedded in historical, social, political, ideological, and organizational contexts. ICT is concerned with how intellectuals are embedded within organizational

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