File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1996/96-05-28.011, message 20


Date: Tue, 16 Apr 1996 15:04:26 -0400 (EDT)
From: Amardeep Singh <asingh-AT-emerald.tufts.edu>
Subject: Re: Organic intellectual


M.Srinivisan is accessible on alt.culture.us.indian at least, and many 
others I think. I don't think I should forward any of the actual messages 
to the list right now; it might not be appropriate, and anyway, the posts 
won't really be useful outside of their context.

An "organic intellectual" in my understanding is simply an individual who 
decides to start speaking to people about their sense of self, someone 
who functions as a locus of organization in a discourse. The reason for 
"organic" is that the individual  isn't motivated/trained to act in any 
institutional/academic context. For Gramsci this was a way out of the 
inevitable elitism of marxist intellectualism, where five tenured profs.  
would sit around and plot Revolution... (it also anticipates Foucault's 
critiques of both 'discipline' and 'institution')

I call Meera Srinivasan an organic intellectual because  she's attacking 
head-on many problems (and exploiting some of the benefits) of internet 
discourse, without claiming any institutional backing, and without 
retreating to a position of safe remove (as I am- it's a little too 
nasty for me). If she employed either of these tactics, it wouldn't be 
an equal playing-field: she wouldn't qualify as being entirely a part of 
the 'body' of the discoursive field (the 'masses') she would be 
atttempting to lead.  

-Deep Singh


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