"There is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded". I like this quote it's hopeful

To all who read the article perhaps this link helps http://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/editions/spn/problems/intellectuals.htm#n5
footnotes included

Gramsci's writings make me think that although we are all intellectual creatures we are also situated creatures which makes for situated intellectuals. So why does he talk about "trained gorilla" given the above quote? is he rejecting Taylor's view or does he see both in society. Wait he can't be if he's saying ALL HUMAN ACTIVITY is participant of intellect.
Thus what he identifies as the problem of "crating a new stratum of intellectuals" is in reality the solution. Supporting each social individual's intellectual activity and "modifying its relationship with the muscular-nervous effort" (why do the translators need to use "muscular-nervous effort" isn't this also know as "movement").

From the intro I also took that history is dependent on who's telling the story and who's telling the story is dependent on how long have they been members of a "storytelling group" and furthermore how long have these storytellers been telling their stories.

Gramsci's revolution on the west is based on criticism of history and how it is constructructed and society and its structure or mode of production, "socio-historical criticism".

Apparently Gramsci and Marx differ in how one views individual action or "intellect" what I also like to sometimes refer to as agency. While Marx seems to rely (excessively according to Gramsci) on economism, (organic) Gramsci finds that ideology (conjuctural) also plays a key role in how individuals relate to the structure and superstructure.
Here I'm going on a big limb.... I wouls almost say that while Marx finds structure and superstructure are in a dialectic relations, Gramsci believes that superstructure and intellectuasl (i.e. all humans) are in a dialectic relation.

Final thought does Gramsci suggest all politicians are demagogues and as such those who from the communist party for example, enter the political scence become demagogues as well or is he saying that they should play demagogue roles or none of the above. Not sure on that one.

I'll end here Gramsci is a pain in the neck, literally, I don't know if it's the way I was sittting or a wind that entered the room but I have a bad pain in my neck.

Through my first quick read of Giroux et al's piece, Bhabha's notion of third space kept coming to mind, for it is here, he contends, that among contradictions and ambivalence cultural identity emerges. This idea of third space or "spaces between" fits well into Giroux et al's argument for a continuously evolving concept of culture. In these spaces of resistance is where one fights the idea that culture "has already been defined" and begin (or continue) processes of transformation (9). In many ways what the authors are labeling "counter-disciplinary" or "proper study of culture" (9).
"Cultures are produced as groups make sense of their social existence in the course of everyday experience" Although this quote really comes from Tony Jefferson and Brian Roberts (see Notes 1) I was relieved to read this for how to define culture is always a struggle for me. I know what it is (I think) but I'm never quite sure how to put it into words.
"The most important aim of counter-disciplinary process is social change"(14). I think the challenge implicit in this quote and clearly stated in the article is moving beyond academia into public space. Furthermore to develop an awareness that like Ladson-Billings writes research needs to be in the public interest, or as the article states "We cannot capitulate to the disciplinary notion that research has as its only audience other experts in the field" (13).
Now for the question, disagreement or in-need-of-further-discussion piece. I can see how "disciplines are historically arbitrary" but I cannot see "interdisciplinary programs" particularly Women's studies, and Black studies, as having "failed"(2). To bring it back to my first point I think that these exist in a third space where it is not about isolation into a separate discipline but the creation of counter-disciplinary voices that unlike the rest maintain focus on historically silenced discourses.
I end with two questions that perhaps don't fit into this discussion but that kept coming to mind as I read the article. How would Delpit's argument of "teaching the culture of power" fit in here? and Does anyone else see a need to talk about agency?

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/routledge/09502386.html
A cultural studies journal, FREE sample

third link
http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/litlinks/critical/
A list of authors that if you click on one will take you to links where you can read about them, join a discussion group online (or just read their discussion - my favorite), read their work online, or other.

second link
http://theory.eserver.org/dir/Cultural_Studies
Has sources for many disciplines, critical studies, critical legal studies, cultural studies, and others

Positivism is a philosophy developed by Auguste Comte in the beginning of the 19th century, which stated that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge. This view is sometimes referred to as scientism. As an approach to the philosophy of science deriving from Enlightenment thinkers like Pierre-Simon Laplace (and many others), positivism was first systematically theorized by Auguste Comte, who saw the scientific method as replacing metaphysics in the history of thought, and who observed the circular dependence of theory and observation in science. Brazil's national motto, Ordem e Progresso ("Order and Progress") was taken from Comte's positivism, also influential in Poland. Positivism is also the most evolved stage of society in anthropological Evolutionism, the point where science and rational explanation for scientific phenomena develops.
The key features of positivism as of the 1950s, as defined in the "received view", are (Hacking, 1981):
A focus on science as a product, a linguistic or numerical set of statements;
A concern with axiomatization, that is, with demonstrating the logical structure and coherence of these statements;
An insistence on at least some of these statements being testable, that is amenable to being verified, confirmed, or falsified by the empirical observation of reality; statements that would, by their nature, be regarded as untestable included the teleological; (Thus positivism rejects much of classical metaphysics.)
The belief that science is markedly cumulative;
The belief that science is predominantly transcultural;
The belief that science rests on specific results that are dissociated from the personality and social position of the investigator;
The belief that science contains theories or research traditions that are largely commensurable;
The belief that science sometimes incorporates new ideas that are discontinuous from old ones;
The belief that science involves the idea of the unity of science, that there is, underlying the various scientific disciplines, basically one science about one real world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism

"The belief that science contains theories or research traditions that are largely commensurable"

Ok so heeeeere's my blog.... It's like cell phones... I resisted but.... I caved in. At least I'm getting credit for it.