Page 10 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

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historical phase in the Centre. This article therefore forms a second,
‘introductory’ piece to the volume.
In each section we have retained the different problematics which underpinned
our work in these areas at different stages. There has been no attempt to update
them in the search for a definitive or ‘correct’ position. We wanted to stress the
necessarily open, provisional nature of work in a novel and emergent area like
Cultural Studies. We also wished to underscore the diversity of approaches, the
sense of developing from position to position, which has characterized our
approach throughout. We have tried, at each stage, to be as rigorous as we could
be, within our limits, but we have not presumed to offer a final truth in any of
these fields. Orthodoxy here is, in our view, the enemy of a truly ‘open’ science.
A larger issue is signalled here. Intellectual and academic advances in areas
cognate to our own have sometimes been marked in recent years by an acute
sectarianism, sustained by what has often seemed a false search for scientific
correctness. Though we have learned a great deal from, and been instructed by,
these advances, we have tried to develop them within a different intellectual
practice.
We have, accordingly, consciously adopted the strategy of allowing our stops
and starts, our moments of progress, marking time and retreats, our shifts of
direction and ‘new beginnings’ to show through as they actually occurred at the
time. Readers must not, therefore, expect to find here a consistent theoretical
position, unfolding from the beginning to its appointed conclusion: nor even a
unified set of findings. This is definitively not the reader in Cultural Studies in
general—which is a larger, more ambitious task, remaining to be undertaken. We
hope, of course, when such a text (or texts) come to be prepared, that the work of
clarification to which the papers in this volume bear witness will be found helpful
and instructive. On a less ambitious plane, we hope those now working in
Cultural Studies will find here something instructive, both substantively in the
areas covered and, more generally, in terms of the necessary perils and costs
which attend an intellectual project and intervention of this order. When such a
definitive work comes to be written, we feel certain that it will draw fruitfully on
wider experiences than we can recapitulate here and will require the mobilization
of intellectual strengths and resources well beyond the capacity of the
Birmingham Centre. We know it will reflect pertinent differences and variations
rather than that spurious unity with which Cultural Studies has sometimes been
charged.
The volume as a whole was edited, on behalf of the Centre, by an Editorial
Group consisting of Steve Baron, Michael Denning, Stuart Hall, Dorothy
Hobson, Andy Lowe and Paul Willis. The Ethnography section was edited by
Dorothy Hobson and Paul Willis; the Media section by Stuart Hall; the Language
section by Andy Lowe; and the English Studies section by Michael Denning.
Steve Baron and Andy Lowe were responsible for the editorial work on Richard
Johnson’s article. An outline for the Introduction was provided by Stuart Hall
and Andrew Lowe and extensively discussed by the Editorial Group. The main