Page 291 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

280 NOTES TO PAGES 15–16

and Terry Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology (New Left Books 1976). See the
recent discussion in Williams’s Marxism and Literature and T.Bennett’s Marxism
and Formalism (Metheun 1979).
102 Hall, Clarke, Critcher, Jefferson and Roberts, Policing the Crisis: ‘Mugging’, the
State and Law and Order (Macmillan 1978).
103 In the highly charged sectarian atmosphere which has sometimes disfigured these
debates critical distinctions were frequently lost: for example, on one side the
distinction between the ‘empirical’ moment in an analysis and ‘Empiricism’: on the
other side that between the ‘theoretical’ and ‘Theoreticism’. These have turned out
to be mirror-images of one another. But it has not always proved easy to get
beyond them.
104 From ‘Problems of Marxism’, in Prison Notebooks, pp. 438–9. These final pages,
which reveal the distinct influence of Gramsci’s work and example, very much
reflect the author’s position and should not perhaps be taken— except in general
terms—as representing the Centre.
105 This is a difficult truth to learn but a hard and inescapable material fact: a point
where the built-in ‘idealism’ of even radical intellectual work encounters the
conditions of a real practice. Young researchers, rightly impatient for a change,
have not always found it easy to appreciate the gap which divides the formulation
of new goals from the transformation of a real practice. The result is sometimes
that pessimism/optimism oscillation about which Gramsci was so eloquent and
which led him to insist on ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’.
106 This is not the place or time to enter in detail into a discussion of how these factors
have hampered us or of the crises and ruptures they precipitate from time to time.
But their real effectivity should not be minimized in any full account. They have
been and are divisive—and there are no short-cut resolutions to them. Others who
set out on a similar path should in no way underestimate their cost.
107 The slogan is most frequently invoked by one side to stop the other from doing
something—‘thinking’ or ‘doing’. It reflects the fatal empiricism/ theoreticism split
and, behind that, the social division of labour. The error arises from assuming that,
some time long ago—in the ‘age of innocence’, perhaps—theory and practice were
inextricably united, and it is the ‘bad faith’ of one side or the other which wilfully
divides them. The fact is that in the present social division of labour they are
remorselessly divided and separated, so that their ‘unity’ can only be produced as a
result: it is the result of an effective articulation, about which there can be no prior
guarantees. But here, as elsewhere, teleological thinking has made its mark—not
least of all on the Left. The result is a widespread inability to develop a proper
understanding of the role of intellectuals and the place of intellectual work.
Either Theory is everything—giving intellectuals a vanguard role which they do
not deserve—or Practice is everything—which results in intellectuals denying their
function in an effort to pass themselves off as ‘something else’ (workers, agitators,
urban guerrillas). One of the deep problems for the Centre has been finding and
sustaining a proper, disciplined understanding of the place, possibilities, limits and
conditions of the ‘intellectual function’ in our society (the importance of the
‘intellectual function’, as Gramsci has defined it, is not the same thing as the
importance of intellectuals as a social category!).
108 From Prison Notebooks, p. 334.