In Antonio Gramsci’s, “The Formation of the Intellectuals,” Gramsci identifies that each social group has its own particular specialized category of intellectuals and the two main forms are: organic and traditional. Gramsci’s concept recognizes social function and hierarchy with regards to skill and implication of those skills to influence society in a way that can be measured quantitatively, thus placing individuals into different categories of functional human beings. What makes an intellectual is their social function. As Gramsci states, “All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals. Thus because it can happen that everyone at some time fries a couple of eggs or sews up a tear in a jacket we do not necessarily say that everyone is a cook or a tailor.” (1004). What distinguishes an intellectual and non intellectuals is the social function of the professional category of the intellectuals.

Organic intellectuals are entrepreneurs who are specialists in organizers of a new culture, organizers of masses of men, organizer of the “confidence” of investors in his business, and of the customers for his product. The elite among the organic individuals are entrusted to organize the general system of relationships in order to expand their own class. They have the potential to be anti-hegemonic. Gramsci states, “it can be observed that the “organic” intellectuals which every new class creates alongside itself and elaborates in the course of its development, are for the most part “specialisations” of partial aspects of the primitive activity of the new social type which the new class has brought to prominence” (1002). Organic intellectuals are those that can move and inspire a crowd and influence people to take up their cause. One example of an organic intellectual is Eminem. He has millions of fans, he’s a top selling recording artist and he has broken through the barrier of his social class, being a Caucasian in the hip-hop scene whose majority of artists and the community are predominately African American, gaining fame, fortune, and a wide variety of people as followers. He has risen and became a leader who uses his poetic vernacular to seduce fans of the hip-hop community, a person who represents the working class, who grew out of the struggle and become something for himself.

Traditional intellectuals are regard themselves as autonomous independent of the dominant social group, and endowed with a character of their own. They are the formation of noblesse de robe, they are a stratum of administrators, scholars, scientists, theorists, non-ecclesiastical philosophers, artists, and men of letters. These traditional intellectuals believe they are independent when in fact, they do contribute to the ruling group in society, as Gramsci states, “There is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded: homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens (1004). Traditional intellectuals are the teachers, scientists, doctors, priests, and anyone under an umbrella of a dominant group (board of education, church, etc.).

Educational institutes build and create these intellectuals. These institutes promote high culture in all fields of science and technology. The more extensive the area covered by education, the more complex the cultural world. Education defines how industrialized a country is. Gramsci compares it to industrial technology, the more a country can produce with its machines, and the production of machines to produce more, makes the country best equipped and most complex. Similarly, the preparation of intellectuals and schools dedicating to the preparation, allows quality intellectuals to emerge. Because of the wide spectrum of education across the country, it allows countries to produce and pick high quality intellectuals of various branches.

These intellectuals are the “functionaries” of superstructures. Gramsci states that two major superstructural levels need to be fixed, the first is “civil society,” and the other is an ensemble of organisms called “private”, “political society” or the “state”. Hegemony is executed throughout society and direct domination is executed through the state and juridical government. Gramsci states that the intellectuals are the dominant group’s “deputies.” Direct domination is run by coercion and force and it operates within groups who do not consent. Hegemony is run by consent and it operates within the great masses of the population. One example of a hegemony is Trump. He uses his wealth, power, and loud voice to exert his hegemonic attributes. He uses his masculinity and image to constantly exert himself in front of media. He is constantly building up himself and putting others down. In recent news, Eminem has released an anti-Trump video, “The Storm.” In the video, Eminem criticized Trump and his policies, his actions as a leader of the country by using his vernacular folklore to speak to the hearts and the souls of the people— to help them realize the truth of the hegemony that Trump has been leading. Eminem called out Trump’s racism, his distractions from agendas he should be paying mind to, and his childish-like behavior. Towards the end of the video, he calls out the civil society, saying that if they support Trump, they will be ousted by him– to make a choice. These intellectuals are the perfect example of Gramsci’s explanation of intellectuals and how they function in society.

Here’s the thing. An ideology may exist, regardless of pragmatic engagement upon the platform of a part of the world. And ideology does not need to inconspicuously convert external pedestrians into subjects to validate an ideology. In general, an ideology may manifest, and remain in the cognitive-imagination household, just wandering the streets in secrecy.

Before I go any further, it’s important to understand a key lenses. Althusser’s funneled definition of ideology is the “Representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” (p.1350), where he gives the example of a three-way hierarchy relationship of God-Priest/Despots-Laity (Proletariat) (51). God’s words recorded/transcribed in “stone” and scripture, appears to validate for example, a moral maxim of “Thou shalt not kill”, which is uttered by priest, and propagated to the church masses. However, the paradox is the objectiveness of a pre-existing monotheistic “God”, but none the less, the human faith lynch-pins thy relationship between God-priest/despot-laity subjects, for right or wrong.

Now let’s say that an individual, one day is listening to his professor from his desk, and gradually zones-out (daydreams) midway thru his lecture. He gets the thinking about collegiately dropping out, he recalls many modern-day entrepreneurs or artist, performing the act in a sort of bricolage composition. Maybe he’s doodling in his book, or finally returns late into the discourse of lecture. But soon the class will end, and it’s off he goes through the hallway. He has another class, but he can’t stop internally justifying his ideology: finding “myself”; unless he detaches from the college, where he assumes the answer doesn’t lie in the intra-semester-by-semester process. In truth, he hasn’t run the practical issues, like consent from his guardians (if any); who will support his growing rebellious ideology; or if he should finish college first, and to take time to explore after.

The point is, the genesis of ideology will soon come into fruition, and whether he acts or engages in it’s material existence (52), or not, doesn’t diminish the fact that consciously & subconscious, it’s there. And if stubbornly, you’re holding on to Althusser’s unintended stipulation: that the individual must act upon ideology, otherwise it’s “wicked” (53), fails to zoom-in psycho-physiologically, since that primordial bubbling in his cortex: has already indirectly influenced his behavior through the hallway, especially on future lectures where he’ll selectively engage, or daydream away, again consciously or subconsciously.

Furthermore, the great indirect influence upon his body, will: reverberate through his diction-usage, to what he digest in media like YouTube, or the literature in Barnes & Nobles. So in fact, in pursuit of understanding himself, he has already engaged in material existence. Thus, at a certain degree, but not accepting the “textbook” lenses of Althusser’s unintended stipulations, he does engage and actually he has already interpellated (56) individuals to subjects, just not external people.

Consider Pessoa’s “The Book of Disquiet”, where found in the intro, the editor uses a text in the book to express Pessoa’s idea of “self”:

Each of us is several, is many in a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways. (text 396)

Later, the editor quotes the main character de Campos: “Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!” So, returning to my brief allegory of the college student, and interpellating individual to subject: linguistically speaking the prefix in-dividiual—of the “colony” of species in his being—they may have well responded to his internal hail (56), thus never needing: the external pedestrians, schoolmates, or friends.

In his essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin comments on technology’s effect on art and how it alienates and dissolves meaning from the works and those involved with it. Discussing a critical history of the reproduction of art and the invention of film, the critic shows us how technology has changed our relationship to art similarly to how capitalism has changed the relationship between the worker and his product.

One of Benjamin’s most significant ideas from the piece is that of cult value versus exhibition value in art. Cult value, which he describes to be the significance of the art to a culture or religion, is gained through keeping artistic works from being seen, bringing it out only to serve the purposes of said culture or religion. Technological reproduction, through copies, pictures on the internet, or simply the ability to hop on a plane and visit the art heightens exhibition value (the ability to view the work of art), and diminishes the “aura” of the work, created by its special tie to its origin culture.

This is an especially Marxist argument, because it shows how an institution such as artistry, seen as one of the most disinterested areas in which to work, is subjected to capitalist ideals. Marx, in Capital, Volume I, discusses the value of commodities and the connection between that value and the time it took to produce them. He also examines how value through price does not do justice to a product’s value as a whole (i.e. use value, the narrative behind how a product was created etc.) With a capitalist society’s ability to produce a large number of products in a small amount of time, the value of said products drops, especially their qualitative value. The same happens when art is able to be seen by a great variety of people; art loses that special quality found in something that is rare or scarce.

Film, a different kind of art because it can only be produced by technology (whereas a painting can exist without it), is also discussed by Benjamin. While film is also subjected to the idea of mass reproduction and the loss of “aura” that other works of art are, the writer takes his argument further by stating that “The stage actor identifies himself with a role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity. His performance is by no means a unified whole, but is assembled from many individual performances”(Benjamin 1061). Like the laborer Marx describes who cannot take ownership over his work because he has only a small part in creating the product, a film actor cannot take ownership over their performance because the film is not a direct representation of what he does. He will perform for the camera, and he will say all of his lines, but the end result is a series of videos and close ups edited together. Five minutes of a movie could be a compilation of a month of these different takes and shots, and is likely to have no correspondence to the actor’s experience of acting.

Despite these arguments through which I have made Benjamin’s attitude towards technological reproduction seem very negative, it is important to note that Benjamin’s application of the ideals of capitalism to a product (his being art), is not entirely pessimistic. The critic’s idea of value is fluid, and he sees the usefulness in being able to reproduce art for the entire world to see, rather than just in its exclusivity for a certain “cult”. Film’s ability to be slowed and played over again allows us to notice details we would normally miss in a play only seen once or irreproducible human interaction. Film allows us to see “what happens during the split second when a person actually takes a step”(Benjamin 1066). The wonderful qualities of reproduction are not lost on Benjamin, and show us that the value found in scarcity is not necessarily diminished in reproduction, but transformed.