Page 44 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE CENTRE 33

research topics: the enterprise was framed, first, by a ‘general theory’ seminar
and, later, by a regular series of ‘work-in-progress’ sessions. At a certain point
the ‘general theory’ seminar became too large and unwieldly for our purposes.
The size of the seminar became inhibiting for new members, and it depended too
much on prior knowledge, privileged access to the discourse and a false search
for abstraction at a rarified level. A major innovation was introduced at this
point, which largely set the framework of Centre practice up to the present. Work
was divided between different research groups, each organized around a
particular theme or field. These groupings first arose as a drawing together, in
each area, of individual thesis topics. They were designed to constitute a
common framework of reading, discussion and research in which individual and
group concerns could be more properly integrated. But this ‘collectivization’
made possible a more sustained engagement with existing fields and regions of
research and their characteristic problematics. This necessary specialization, in
‘regional’ studies, was combined with an annual review, in which each research
group presented to the Centre as a whole some aspect of its work during the
year. On the occasion of these annual presentations—a regular feature now of the
Centre’s year—the cross-cutting themes in common between groups could be
identified, the differences of the appropriation of common approaches to each
distinct field of inquiry marked and debated. This division into specialized and
general work led to an immense leap in intellectual productivity. It made it
possible, for example, to develop particular issues of our journal, and more
recently of our book series, around particular themes, based on, even if
not exclusive to, the specialized work of the different research groups. From
these groups developed projects on which individual group members worked,
which then retrospectively rephrased their particular research and thesis topics,
giving them a more integral relation to the collective interests of their grouping,
as well as a degree of collective support. The inauguration of our taught MA was
the first attempt to give an abbreviated introduction to, and account of, Cultural
Studies as a field, in a relatively integrated way: but MA students are also
attached to research groups for their specialist studies, thereby attempting to
integrate the MA level of work with the organic process of building up Cultural
Studies as a whole in the Centre, whatever the mode or level of attachment of
each individual student. In this sense, despite the greater degrees of
specialization entailed, concrete attempts have been made in the ways we
organize ourselves and our work to ensure that, through our individual and
collective practices, a more general practice—developing Cultural Studies as a
field—is also thereby sustained.
The difficulties and constraints on such experiments in practice are numerous.
Still, research students get what financial support they do, are admitted to study
and must deliver the goods to be judged on a wholly individual basis.
Hierarchies of knowledge, differences in age, experience and intellectual
formation, genuine differences in theoretical orientation or emphasis have been
determinate conditions working against its realization. 106 The intellectual