Page 16 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

THE RISE OF CULTURAL THEORY

between the commodified culture industries and state and church
endowed institutions of cultural regulation.
The Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci contrasted the
“traditional” intellectuals, such as philosophers, priests, scholars and
scientists, with “organic” intellectuals, such as engineers, economists
and, as we should add today, TVjournalists, script writers and
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advertising consultants. The contrast is well taken, but only so long
as we appreciate that these traditional intellectuals are not very
traditional at all, though they may well often imagine themselves as
such. The modern higher education system provides both the central
training ground and continuing employment for both types of
intellectual. And despite the customary rhetoric of the older at least
of the universities, this system is itself an essentially recent social
invention: of the 76 universities in England and Wales, 33 date only
from 1992, and only three from before 1832. The expansion thus
indicated is not simply quantitative but qualitative; it is overwhelmingly
recent; and it reflects the social growth and professionalization of
both types of intelligentsia. Cultural theory is not, then, the preserve
of some near-archaic, traditional cultural élite, but rather the discursive
articulation of a set of characteristically contemporary social
contradictions, which continue to structure the lived experiences of
characteristically contemporary kinds of intellectual. And, in a society
as thoroughly encultured as is ours, such theories become, by turn,
the property not only of specialist groups of intellectuals, but also of
the collective lives of whole communities. They are, then, matters of
no small consequence.

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