Page 45 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

34 INTRODUCTION

division of labour, in which the sexual division is so profoundly inscribed, does
not disappear at the whisk of a collective wand. Nevertheless, we would claim,
against other models, to have made some advances. The weaknesses of the
experiment, but also its gains, are plain for all to see, especially where we are
most free to put these ideas into practice: in published work in the journal,
working papers, books and articles. The strengths must speak for themselves.
The weaknesses must not be glossed over. There is a kind of intensity of
concentration, a sureness of grasp, a style of individual cognitive organization
which collective projects find it difficult to reproduce. Collective writing rarely
has the force and concision of a comparable individual piece of work: it tends to
be more loosely organized and to lack a certain intellectual density. We claim,
however, at least to know something of, and to have explored some of the
problems consequent on, trying to develop new forms of collective intellectual
practice. We know something of what this means as a practical condition of
intellectual work. In this sense, we feel we have begun to anticipate some of the
difficulties not of the past but of the future. No attempt should or could be made
here to underestimate the tensions and contradictions produced by this mode of
work. They are objective—in our situation—as well as subjective, and they are
not to be resolved without costs. But they are at least ‘of our time’: they belong
to the present; they are not archaic, or merely inhabited and inherited out of
academic habit.
Of course, the project has offered no guarantees of success. We too operate
within the existing division of intellectual labour, which has a merciless logic
and has imposed itself on the Centre as much as elsewhere. In the face of that
logic the so-called ‘unity’ of theory and practice appears a somewhat empty
slogan. 107 It is really exceedingly difficult both to do serious intellectual work in
an advanced, interdisciplinary area and to write and produce in an immediately
accessible way. This is not an excuse for the retreat into private languages. The
Centre has been criticized more than once for the difficulty and obscurity of its
language—and the criticism is a valid one (even if it is produced with what
sometimes appears to be a sort of triumphal glee). It arises from a too unreflexive
practice. But it is also inscribed in the terrain and the institutions where we work.
It arises, in part, from trying to do good and serious work in a field as yet hardly
mapped out. It arises, in part, from the necessity to bend language and inflect its
meanings and concepts to purposes which cannot be simply culled from the
storehouse of common-sense knowledge. It arises, most acutely, from the
fragmentation of knowledge, its ruthless division into watertight compartments;
from the doxa and orthodoxy of those divisions and the ways in which they are
politically defended, policed and regulated; and from the wider division of
intellectual labour which they reproduce.
In these circumstances we have attempted to work towards a greater unity,
without expecting to conjure it out of thin air or the ‘will to knowledge’. Our aim,
in this respect, could be defined as the struggle to form a more ‘organic’ kind of
intellectual. Gramsci spoke of the distinction between those ‘traditional’