Page 43 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

32 INTRODUCTION

cautious in his assertions, if he does not proceed in a necessary but an
arbitrary and disconnected fashion, if he cannot take account of the gaps
that exist in knowledge acquired, but covers over and contents himself with
purely verbal solutions and connections, instead of stating that one is
dealing with provisional positions which may have to be gone over again
and developed, etc. 104
The emphasis in that passage on the actual forms of an intellectual practice are
crucial. They remind us that intellectual work does not consist only of what has
been studied, of the theories and methods employed or even of the provisional
results obtained. It also has to do with the practice itself—with how it is
performed. The Centre has, alongside the kind of task already outlined, also
attempted in this period to generate a new kind of intellectual practice and to
give it an organizational form. Especially, it has experimented with ways of
involving all its members, staff and students, in the shaping of that practice and
in the decisions and responsibilities for setting that practice to work in a specific
organizational setting. But this, in turn, always requires taking account of the
existing practices, dominant elsewhere, which it has been necessary to challenge,
displace or transform.
Here, one can think of the lonely, isolated, individualized and competitive-
possessive form in which much research in the humanities and social sciences
is conceived and conducted. This is indeed how most of us—including the
youngest recruits to the Centre—have learned to learn to try to produce
knowledge. It has seemed to us largely an obsolete and archaic kind of
‘knowledge production’ (knowledge in the handicraft or artisan mode),
thoroughly out of keeping with modern conditions of intellectual work and the
real division of intellectual labour. This we have tried, in different ways, to
displace. But to set a practice aside is different—and easier—than actually
replacing it with an alternative real practice: the will to go in another direction is
not the same thing as sustaining a changed or transformed practice, in
intellectual matters as in all others. 105 In general, what has been involved here
has been the attempt to make intellectual work more collective in the actual forms
of its practising: to constitute research and groups of projects and studies around
working collectives rather than serial groups of competing intellectuals, carrying
their very own thesis topics like batons in their knapsacks. This has involved
trying to make real the general commitment that each, in his or her own way and
sphere of interest, is, at the same time, responsible for developing the field of
knowledge as a whole; it has involved, too, the more difficult exercise of
genuinely sharing knowledge, of exposing ideas at a critical, primary stage of
their formulation, and the even more arduous task of trying to research and to
write as a collective group.
A particular form of organization of the Centre’s intellectual practices has
been one of the consequences. For some time there were no distinct research
groupings. Individual students were linked with the field through their individual