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CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE CENTRE 35

intellectuals who set themselves the task of developing and sophisticating the
existing paradigms of knowledge and those who, in their critical role, aim to
become more ‘organic’ to new and emergent tendencies in society, who seek to
become more integral with those forces, linked to them, capable of reflecting
what Gramsci called the ‘intellectual function’ in its wider, non-specialist and
non-elitist sense. He also designated two tasks for those aiming to become
‘organic’ intellectuals: to challenge modern ideologies ‘in their most refined
form’, and to enter into the task of popular education. Two tasks, not one, both
difficult to realize, especially at the same moment. ‘Given all this,’ he remarked,
‘the question of language in general and of languages in the technical sense must
be put in the forefront of our inquiry.’
The Centre has been faced with this hard truth since its inception. We have
tried, within the available limits and resources, to work both sides of this
difficult road—to address ourselves to central and relevant problems and issues,
even if their original formulation required a specialist language not instantly
available; and also, where and when we could, to undertake the by no means
easy task of translating ourselves into more widely available vocabularies. Those
who have attempted this combination will know that the latter is no more
technical task. It has to do not with summoning up a ‘common experience’,
which in fact does not exist, but with attempting actively to construct, to forge, a
unity of knowledge and practice. This is what Gramsci would have called an
essentially ‘organizational’ task and function: the organizational and connective
function of the ‘organic’ intellectual. Caught between the harsh alternatives just
outlined, the Centre has struggled not to affirm (against the clear evidence) that
it already is, but constantly to become more organic. That requires not the
pretence that no social division of knowledge exists, but a more organized and
effective kind of intervention in that division. There is no social organization
without the intellectual function, in its widest sense, Gramsci argued: no organic
intellectual formation ‘without the theoretical aspect of the theory-practice nexus
being distinguished concretely by the existence of a group of people
—“specialized” in conceptual and philosophical elaboration of ideas’. But also
there is none without ‘an analogous movement on the part of the mass’, who
‘raise themselves to higher levels of culture and…extend…extend their circle of
influence towards the stratum of specialized intellectuals, producing…groups of
more or less importance’. To produce work which is progressively more
‘organic’ in this reciprocal sense has been, throughout, the Centre’s task and
goal. But as Gramsci also noted, ‘the process of creating intellectuals is long,
difficult, full of contradictions, advances, retreats, dispersals and regroupings, in
which the loyalty of the masses is often sorely tried'. 108