The Intellectual Function and its Fields: Organizational and Connecting Activities, Degrees of Organicity, Hegemonic Agenda Extensions

This paper offers a reconsideration of the “intellectual function”, showing the potential of its connotation in an extended sense, applying it to multiple social fields and subfields. Organizational and connecting functions of cultural intermediation and entrepreneurship, set in continuums and varying combinations between strictly cognitive and material work, are those Gramsci had considered necessary to reach a “concrete approximation of the reality” of the roles and strategies proper to those who (organically) act in relation to a trend or group which seeks to be hegemonic – and do so, either by leading and complying with new conformities, or by behaving according to social space portions that produced them and professional trajectories that mark them. If the methodological fallacy of seeking the nature of intellectuality through degree differences between cognitive and material labor should be avoided, conversely, all activities of those who provide connections of various kinds, within civil society, between profane/public/popular instances and identities, and those of experts/leaders/producers, are to be included; activities that tend both to encompass instances and values that already socially widespread (common sense and conformity) and to thicken the links between different groups, individuals, ideas, institutions. Agents who carry out such activities in a minute, occasional and inaccurate way should also be included, in order to track both their positions taking and strategies within their own recognized and elected fields as specific/autonomous, as well as their position in the broader power and economic fields. All those ranging from the “creators” of the various sciences, philosophy, art, politics, literature, to provincial teachers and journalists, to the “humblest administrators and disseminators”, can thus be included in the object of study. The distinctive feature of the intellectual, in short, is to be sought in the relations system in which intellectual activity, or the “grouping that personifies it,” is placed.