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cf: http://codepoetics.com/poetix/node/58 "Earlier on, I'd been talking about "being (an) intellectual" as being somewhat like "being (a) homosexual" - an analogy that has to break down somewhere, but which captures a particular tension that interests me: that between "extrinsically defined" and "intrinsically motivated" identification. The basic idea is that while both "intellectual" and "homosexual" are socially-created categories (hence "extrinsically defined"), you can't account for the existence of either intellectuals or homosexuals purely in terms of the power of "society" to call them into being in order to fill out arbitrary categorical distinctions. If no-one had the particular "structure of feeling" that characterises the intrinsic motivation of the intellectual, there would be no intellectuals. Such structures of feeling are aetiologically obscure, and there is no obvious mapping from large-scale social distinctions (notably class) to whatever it is that differentiates intellectuals or homosexuals from others around them." Dominic