Page 42 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE CENTRE 31

fallen into the habit of constantly questioning our own starting-points. If this has
appeared, at times, a form of theoretical self-indulgence, we would simply point
to the elegant studies and the sophisticated theorizing in our own areas of work
which have elaborated their protocols, done their field work, questioned their
respondents, read their documents, produced their accounts and results—and all
on the unexamined premise that the world, for all practical purposes, is
‘masculine’. Faced by this blinding obviousness, who now would have the
courage to insist that we ought simply to have just done more ‘good empirical
research’?
The issue of ‘theoreticism’ is not an irrelevant one, certainly. 103 We are aware
of the many turning-points where we have fallen into an imitative dependency,
or where we have allowed theoretical debates to obscure the absolutely necessary
test of concrete work and exemplification. In the last five years the Centre has
struggled both to make its own critique of ‘theoreticist’ positions (including its
own) and to reshape its work to give it a substantially greater concrete and
historical basis. Though we would not claim success in every department, we
feel far more confident than we did five years ago about getting the theoretical
and concrete aspects of our work into a better and more productive balance. This
struggle—for the best kind of theoretically informed concrete practice—
continues: it is one of our highest, most self-conscious priorities. We have
attempted to monitor and to transform our organization of intellectual work in
the light of it. We believe our future work will show the positive effects of
struggling with ourselves in this way for a ‘best practice’. It is the only way we
know of developing a real intellectual practice which does not merely reproduce
The Obvious. This has given the Centre a built-in and unchallenged subscription
to the ‘necessary complexity’ of the field. It has also required us to think hard
about the actual conditions for the production of knowledge, and to think about
our own strategies in ways which—to use Gramscean terms—are necessarily
‘organizational and connective’. Gramsci argued:

It has to be established that every research has its own specific method and
constructs its own specific science, and that the method has been
developed and elaborated together with the developments and elaborations
of this specific research and science, and forms with them a single whole.
To think that one can advance the progress of a work of scientific research
by applying to it a standard method chosen because it has given good
results in another field to which it was naturally suited is a strange delusion
which has little to do with science. There do however exist certain general
criteria which could be held to constitute the critical consciousness of
every man [and woman] of science, whatever his [or her] specialization.
Thus one can say someone is not a scientist if he displays a lack of
sureness in his particular criteria, if he does not have a full understanding of
the concepts he is using, if he has scant information and understanding of
the previous state of the problems he is dealing with, if he is not very