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The Ubiquity of Culture
*Jeffrey J. Williams <16.1bios.html#williams.bio> *
/ Carnegie Mellon University/
jwill@andrew.cmu.edu
© <#copyright> 2005 Jeffrey J. Williams.
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Review essay:
Francis Mulhern, Culture/Metaculture (London: Routledge, 2000) and
Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
1. If you are building a house, the first thing you do is probably
not to plant flowers. You dig the basement, pour the foundation,
frame the building, raise and shingle the roof, put up the siding,
and so forth. Then, if you have time and money left, you might put
in a flower bed. The flowers might give you pleasure when you see
them, but they are not usually considered essential to the house;
they do not keep you dry in rain, warm in winter, or fill your
stomach.
2. The traditional idea of culture as high art conceives of culture
as something like the flower bed. While we might appreciate and
value artifacts we deem beautiful, they are not essential to our
primary physical needs. In a no-nonsense, colloquial view, culture
is ornamental, secondary to if not a frivolous distraction from
the real business of life. In classical aesthetics, culture is
defined precisely by its uselessness and detachment from ordinary
life. In psychology, Maslow's model of a "pyramid of needs" places
culture in the upper reaches of the pyramid, possible only after
the broad base of material needs are taken care of, which are
primary to psychological well-being. In the classical Marxist
view, culture forms part of the superstructure, tertiary to the
economic base, which determines human life.[1 <#foot1>]
Accordingly, studies of culture, like literary or art criticism,
have traditionally been considered refined pursuits, like
gardening or horticulture, but not of primary importance to
society, like politics, economics, or business.
3. Culture of course has another familiar sense: rather than the
flowers of human experience, it encompasses a broad range of human
experiences and products. Though abnegating its special status,
this sense likewise plays off the agricultural root of culture,
expanding the bed from a narrow plot to the various fields of
human manufacture. Over the past few decades, this latter sense
seems to have taken precedence in colloquial usage, in politics,
and in criticism. We speak of proclivities within a society, such
as "sports culture," "car culture," "hiphop culture," or "mall
culture." In political discourse, culture describes the tenor of
society, such as "the culture of complaint," "the culture of
civility," or "the culture of fear," and societies are defined by
their cultures, such as the "culture of Islam," "the culture of
democracy," or "the culture of imperialism," which generate their
politics. In criticism and theory, culture, whether indicating
race, class, nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, abledness,
locality, or taste, determines human identity, which in turn
designates political interest. In short, "culture" has shifted
from ornament to essence, from secondary effect to primary cause,
and from a matter of disinterested taste to a matter of political
interest. Consequently, pursuits that study culture, like literary
or cultural criticism, have claimed greater political importance
to society.
4. The reconception of culture does not dispel the idea of the house
of society and the garden of culture, but reconfigures the process
of construction. The question of a house presupposes the prior
determination of culture, and a flower bed is not an afterthought
but part and parcel of that culture; one's culture determines
whether one would own a plot of land and want a house rather than
an apartment or a tent, and whether one would want a manicured
lawn and attendant shrubbery. Culture draws the house plans before
one pours any cement; it is the material that generates the world
with such possible human activities and with businesses that
produce cement, lumber, and potted plants.
5. Nearly fifty years ago, Raymond Williams charged criticism to
understand the conjunction of "culture and society." Now it seems
that culture /is/ society, interchangeable as a synonym for social
interests, groups, and bases. Williams also charged us to examine
culture in its ordinary as well as extraordinary forms, and it
seems that the field of literary criticism has followed this
mandate, undergoing what Anthony Easthope described as a paradigm
shift, the objects of study expanding from high literature to all
culture. However, if there is a paradigm of contemporary
criticism, it designates not only an expansion of the object of
study but a conceptual inversion of base and superstructure,
culture shifting from a subsidiary (if special) role to primary
ground. Even a social theorist like Pierre Bourdieu, who
persistently foregrounded the essential significance of class,
conceived of class less as a matter of material means than of
taste, disposition, and other cultural cues. In the trademark
phrase from his classic work Distinction, it is "cultural capital"
that generates class position. Culture has become the base from
which other realms of human activity--psychological, political,
economic--follow.
6. The reign of culture has had its share of dissent. Marxists have
attacked the rush toward identity politics as a fracturing of any
unified political program as well as a fall away from the ground
of class, and liberals like Richard Rorty have upbraided left
intellectuals for their absorption in cultural politics at the
expense of bread and butter economic issues like health care and
labor rights.[2 <#foot2>] In criticism, it appears that the field
has absorbed Williams's lesson and moved, as Easthope succinctly
put it, from literary into cultural studies, but not everyone has
been satisfied with getting what they might once have wished for.
7. Terry Eagleton and Francis Mulhern, probably the two most
prominent inheritors of Williams's mantle, have tried to correct
the excesses of the reign of culture. Their books, Mulhern's
Culture/Metaculture (2000) and Eagleton's The Idea of Culture
(2000), take a middle road, acknowledging the significance of
culture but quelling what they see as its present overinflation. I
deal with them at length here because the books have been
influential, published to considerable attention, including a long
running debate in New Left Review; they continue the legacy of
Williams, and before him of Leavis, as standard-bearers of British
cultural criticism; they represent the residual bearing of the New
Left; and they each hold positions as leading Marxist literary
intellectuals in Britain (Mulhern has been a New Left Review
mainstay and chief surveyor of modern British criticism, notably
in The Moment of "Scrutiny" (1979), and Eagleton was Williams's
prize student and is the most prolific and prominent expositor of
Marxist literary theory). The corrective stance of both books is
their strength and their weakness: the strength that they disabuse
some of the overwrought or misguided claims of current criticism,
the weakness that they do not propose a major new vision of the
study of culture. Both end, in fact, with calls for modesty.
8. Culture/Metaculture and The Idea of Culture overlap in broad
outline. They are both short, concentrated books, Mulhern's in
Routledge's revived "Critical Idiom" series and Eagleton's in the
new "Blackwell Manifestos," rather than elaborate treatises or
extended histories, reinforcing the sense of immediacy of calls
for reform. They both sketch versions of cultural studies, take to
task its current misdirection, particularly its absorption in
questions of subjectivity and identity, and argue for a
restoration of its political legacy. But they are very different
in manner and style, characteristic of their authors. Mulhern, in
a quickly drawn but assured survey, focuses on intellectual and
institutional history, and his corrective is genealogical,
attempting to supplant the British-centered genealogy with a
broader, modern European one. Eagleton, in a ranging, topical
examination, spins out a kind of history of ideas, and his
corrective is definitional, more targeted against the errors of
various forms of culturalism (like multiculturalism) as well as of
contemporary theory overall (postmodernism, anti-foundationalism,
and relativism), than a reconstruction.
9. Each book represents the distinctive roles Mulhern and Eagleton
have fashioned as men of letters. Mulhern takes the role of
serious don, earnestly laying out intellectual currents, as one
would expect from the author of The Moment of "Scrutiny" or the
editor of Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism (1992). Eagleton
takes a more puckish role, eschewing a dispassionate stance and
disabusing contemporary criticism, often with dismissive barbs and
witty turns of phrase. In his early incarnations, like Marxism and
Literary Criticism (1976), Literary Theory: An Introduction
(1983), and The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), Eagleton
marshalled lively (if opinionated) critical histories, but in his
later incarnations, like The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), he
tends more toward the broadside. Consequently, Eagleton's book is
the more entertaining to read, but Mulhern's leaves more of an
argument to digest.
10. Mulhern's argument turns on an unexpected but forceful
reconstruction of the origins of cultural studies. He recasts its
starting point from the Birmingham Centre to the longer and wider
net of modernist Kulturkritik. The first half of the book surveys
a group of modernist European writers who criticized modern
society, including a range of writers such as Thomas Mann, Julian
Benda, Karl Mannheim, Ortega y Gasset, Freud, Virginia Woolf,
Orwell, T.S. Eliot, and Leavis, leading up to the inaugural moment
of British cultural studies. What these writers have in common,
and what Mulhern recoups, is their critical stance toward modern
life under capitalism. What they also have in common, but what
Mulhern discards, is their elitist remove from common culture and
politics.
11. Mulhern fuses this tradition with British cultural studies. Why
his account is unexpected is because cultural studies typically
casts itself in opposition to Kulturkritik, whereas Mulhern argues
that they both participate in the same "metacultural" discursive
formation. Kulturkritik privileges an elitist minority culture,
that draws upon a high tradition and sets itself against popular
culture; cultural studies retains the same coordinates, but
inverts Kulturkritik's values, privileging the popular and
abnegating tradition, arguing not for a minority culture but for
the worth of minority cultures. Both also claim the political
authority of the cultural; the mistake is that they overestimate
that authority. In Mulhern's narrative, Raymond Williams is a
bridge figure, asserting the politics of culture but dispatching
the paternalism of Kulturkritik (67).
12. The second half of Culture/Metaculture reprises the standard
genealogy of British cultural studies, from Hoggart and Williams
through Stuart Hall up to contemporary identity critics (mostly
unnamed). Though Williams is cast as the legendary founder, Hall
is the hero of the book ("The possibilities of Cultural Studies
are nowhere so richly illustrated as in the work of Stuart Hall"
[131]), praised in particular for turning attention to Empire and
for proposing a "non-reductionist theory of culture and social
formations" (101). Mulhern inventories Hall's achievements: his
struggles in and against sociology; his assimilating structuralism
to a revised Marxism; and his directing attention toward media in
the 1970s, the politics of the welfare state in the 80s, and
ethnicity in the 90s.
13. Despite these achievements, cultural studies has experienced a
fall, drifting to banality, unreflective populism, and relativism
(137ff.). Mulhern's most vehement castigation is that "politics is
everywhere in Cultural Studies. The word appears on nearly every
page," but without teeth, "predominantly phatic in accent" (150).
Cultural studies finally "subsumes the political under the
cultural" (151), where it again joins Kulturkritik, which likewise
"reasoned politics out of moral existence, as a false pretender of
authority" (151). Thus it only offers a "'magical solution' to the
poverty of politics in bourgeois society" (168). This is a severe
diagnosis, but Mulhern's prescription is relatively mild. He
argues that cultural studies suffers from immodesty in placing
excessive value on the political efficacy of cultural fields such
as identity, an immodesty it "learnt willy-nilly from its
authoritarian forebear, Kulturkritik" (174), and so recommends a
dose of "modesty."
14. The strength of Mulhern's genealogical revision is to deepen the
understanding of British cultural studies to modern European
intellectual history and to discern its normally unnoticed ties to
the terms of Kulturkritik. This is where Mulhern is most original
and persuasive, demonstrating that cultural studies inherited
rather than invented the problematic of culture, an insight
usually forgotten in most histories of cultural studies, which
start with Hoggart or Birmingham. The weakness of Mulhern's
genealogy, however, is its partiality. It foregrounds only one
family tree, of the European high modernist tradition, and that
tree includes some distant relations while excluding some more
expected branches. The spectrum from Mann to Orwell is a disparate
amalgam, and it underplays, for instance, Adorno and others from
the Frankfurt School. Lastly, it gives an exemption to Hall, who
could precisely be seen as the pivotal figure for the turn away
from Marxism to poststructuralism and the preoccupation with
identity.[3 <#foot3>]
15. In a review in New Left Review, Stefan Collini elaborates the
first two limitations, and in a rebuttal Mulhern answers that he
was not claiming a unity but doing a "historical morphology of
discourse" (87) which might be extended back to Romanticism, and
that Adorno and Marcuse represent a competing Marxist Kulturkritik
(92-93).[4 <#foot4>] The problem, however, is that Mulhern does
claim to represent a "discursive formation," which implies a
comprehensive frame, even if not entirely unified. It seems odd to
leave out the Frankfurt branch, who obviously participate in the
same tradition of Kulturkritik, sharing the same disdain for
popular culture and privileging of high culture. That they
represent the Marxist line of Kulturkritik is in fact usually
taken as their legacy for cultural studies, and many accounts
induct them into the discursive formation of cultural studies. But
Mulhern's narrative of the fall of contemporary cultural studies
mandates their exclusion; Mulhern sidesteps Frankfurt Kulturkritik
because of the unity of the narrative he wants to tell that
culminates in the political hubris of contemporary cultural
studies.[5 <#foot5>]
16. Perhaps this shows the stakes of any such genealogy. Genealogies
purport a historical validity, but their primary function is
polemical, to legitimate or delegitimate the heirs. Genealogies
are not for the sake of the ancestors, who cannot benefit from
them, but for the heirs; they are not veridic but pragmatic.
Mulhern's polemic is to avoid the errors of the hubristic uncles
(and one aunt) of Kulturkritik and to emulate the better uncles,
like Hoggart and Williams, of the Marxist lineage of British
cultural studies. However, one way that Mulhern himself carries
out the inheritance of Kulturkritik is in his resort to modesty.
Modesty, after all, is a moral imperative, not a political one,
nor to my knowledge a Marxist one. Mulhern thus claims a moral
authority over cultural criticism--in his term "metaculture"--and
becomes an heir of Kulturkritik, or for that matter, of Leavis.
17. Mulhern's own project does not escape the metacultural
problematic, especially in its focus on a "discursive formation."
Though rhetorically buttressed with the materialist-sounding
"formation," his history is almost entirely set within the realm
of cultural discourse, and its political intervention occurs
there. The field of reference of Culture/Metaculture is not the
material base of society but literary and critical history. Such a
history has some explanatory value and might hold a certain
autonomy from larger social formations, but it is not the kind of
history that traces the material institutions of criticism, such
as the changes in publishing, the position of men and women of
letters, the massive growth of the university, and the migration
of those from the non-European world during decolonization, that
formed contemporary cultural studies during the post-World War II
epoch. It is not the kind of institutional history that he
marshals in The Moment of "Scrutiny" for the interregnum between
the great wars. In dwelling on a "morphology" of cultural
criticism, Mulhern can only make a further metacultural claim, the
check of modesty; he intervenes in the culture of criticism moreso
than discerning the social history that conjoins with the culture
of criticism.
18. Mulhern does advert to institutional history, but only as a dark
spectre. While the primary plot of Culture/Metaculture is the
familiar one of the dissolution of the class politics of Marxism
to the localized politics of identity, there is a subplot, and its
villain, impeding the proper marriage of culture and society, is
institutionalization. Mulhern declares that institutionalization
"is among the darker themes of the collective autobiography"
(133). Its henchman is academic professionalism; while
"Kulturkritik was . . . amateur . . . Cultural Studies, likewise
but oppositely committed, has evolved into a profession" (133) and
"an organized academic pursuit, from the later 1960s onwards"
(92). This I find the most nettlesome argument of
Culture/Metaculture. It undermines the case Mulhern has built for
the continuous plot between Kulturkritik and contemporary
criticism, supplanting it with a plot that privileges Kulturkritik
and that relies on a kind of spiritual fall from a pure,
disinterested state to a corrupt, interested state. It contradicts
the account of the heroic origin of cultural studies in Raymond
Williams and others, who were academics, the account of the
initial formation of the Birmingham Centre, which was after all a
moment of institutionalization, and the account of Hall as a model
figure through the 70s to the 90s. Overall, it is historically
fuzzy in yoking institutionalization, which is by no means a
distinctively contemporary phenomenon, with the post-60s rise of
identity politics.
19. Why does Mulhern, otherwise so careful, do this? He is drawn to
two myths, that of the amateur man of letters or intellectual and
that of a pre-institutional eden. The myth of the amateur is a
commonplace, regularly wheeled out in TLS and other conservative
venues that bemoan "the death of the intellectual," but the
amateur was neither free nor independent; rather, it was a
category enabled by the surplus of capitalist accumulation, which
granted privileged training and leisure to pursue activities like
criticism. The elitism of Kulturkritik was consonant precisely
with the class position of the "amateurs" who propounded it, and
their elitism was not only cultural but a disdain for democratic
institutions. Surely this is nothing to be nostalgic about; rather
than apologizing for being academic-professionals, I think it
better to be gainfully employed in public institutions, without
the disadvantages of a ruling class background.[6 <#foot6>]
20. Moreoever, the era of the putative amateur does not represent a
pre-institutional Eden, as any reader of George Gissing's New Grub
Street will realize, but exhibits a different mode of
institutionalization, in the modern period centered on journalism,
publishing, and other literary institutions. The institution of
the university, particularly under the welfare state, might easily
be seen as a more rather than less democratic channel--perhaps of
liberal rather than radical redistribution, but a redistribution
nonetheless. It is doubtful that Raymond Williams or Terry
Eagleton would have become prominent critics had they not been
scholarship boys in the post-World War II university, and the
opening of the profession of criticism to such critics could
easily be seen as enjoining rather than impeding Left criticism.
Rather than a draconian fall, one could instead view cultural
studies' academic purchase as a victory in what was called during
the 60s a struggle for institutions, which created the conditions
to pursue the kind of work done by Hall and those at Birmingham,
and presumably by Mulhern himself. This is not to hold up the
largely academic location of contemporary criticism as an
unalloyed good, but neither is it a dark theme.
21. Eagleton's The Idea of Culture is less concerned with the
genealogy or institutional history of cultural studies and more
concerned with its present practices. Though he does touch on
Kulturkritik (in fact citing Mulhern) and particularly on Eliot's
and Leavis' notions of culture, his focus is on its extant use,
and his revision is not to reconstruct a better history but to
redeem a better concept. His basic argument is fairly simple--that
we should hold the idea of "culture as radical protest" over
competing ideas, such as "culture as civility, culture as
identity, and culture as commercialism" (129)--and his
recuperation relatively modest, returning to Raymond Williams's
"notion of a common culture," based on socialist politics (119).
22. Eagleton's more complicated move is to recuperate what "common"
means. While it represented a radical democratic impetus against
high culture in Williams's formulation, in contemporary cultural
theory the notion of a "common culture" has taken retrograde
associations: it speaks for hegemonic culture, eclipsing other
ethnicities, sexualities, and so on; it assumes an essential core;
and it projects a universal human condition, which elides
particularities of various social groups. Eagleton, with some
nuance, negotiates a middle position between the extremities of
dominant and minority, essential and different, and universal and
particular. His synthesis is the commonality of our bodies ("A
common culture can be fashioned only because our bodies are of
broadly the same kind," 111) and our "natural needs," which "are
critical of political well-being" (99). Lest this seem a blatant
essentialism, he allows that "of course human bodies differ, in
their history, gender, ethnicity" (111). But, adapting current
theories of the body which undergird identity studies, he asserts
that "they do not differ in those capacities--language, labour,
sexuality--which enable them to enter into potentially universal
relationship with one another" (111).
23. In a sense, one could call this a pragmatic essentialism, similar
to what the feminist critic Diana Fuss calls "essentially
speaking," whereby one uses such concepts provisionally,
acknowledging their limits, to achieve social goals. Eagleton
spells this out in a 1990 interview: "I think that back in the
seventies we used to suffer from a certain fetishism of method . .
. . I would now want to say that, at the level of method,
pluralism should reign, because what truly defeats eclecticism is
not a consistency of method but a consistency of political goal"
(76). Correspondingly, in The Idea of Culture Eagleton argues that
the pluralism of identities does not achieve radical political
change, but "To establish genuine cultural pluralism [first]
requires concerted socialist action" (122). In other words,
identity studies have it backwards, and socialist politics are
prior to identity politics. Eagleton still resolutely avows the
priority of the base.
24. While this argument for recuperating a common culture frames The
Idea of Culture, the bulk of the book turns its energy toward
disabusing various forms of contemporary criticism. That is, it is
not a survey of cultural studies in the manner of Literary Theory
or The Ideology of the Aesthetic, nor a reconstructive analysis
like Mulhern's, but in large part an invective. Like Mulhern,
Eagleton takes to task the over-emphasis on culture, particularly
on categories like identity and its diluted sense of politics;
pulling no punches, he claims that "Identity politics is one of
the most uselessly amorphous of all political categories" (86).
Thus he proposes, again like Mulhern, a check on culture's
"assum[ing] a new political importance," and calls for more
modesty: "it has grown at the same time immodest and overweening.
It is time, while acknowledging its significance, to put it back
in its place" (131). Unlike Mulhern, there is barely any
consideration of the Birmingham project (in a hundred pages, there
is only one mention--a favorable quote--of Stuart Hall). Also
unlike Mulhern, Eagleton names a number of villains, and his real
target often seems a wide-ranging band of those who espouse
postmodernism (a number of sentences begin with phrases like "for
the postmodernist"), cosmopolitanism, relativism, and
anti-foundationalism rather than what ordinarily would be
considered cultural studies. What most motivates him, it seems, is
taking other critics down a peg.
25. While he claimed at one time that "deconstruction is the death
drive at the level of theory" (Walter Benjamin 136), now he seems
to have reached a truce and absorbed some of its tenor (for
instance, "cultures . . . are porous, fuzzy-edged, indeterminate"
[96]). He instead turns his turrets toward pragmatists and
postmodernists like Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty. Eagleton's
strength has always been his unabashed, if sometimes unnuanced,
polemical flair. The weakness is not only that such polemics cut
with a broad sword, but that many of the critics he takes aim at
have little to do with the study of culture. Fish, for instance,
has only addressed cultural studies to dismiss it. In Professional
Correctness Fish argues, like Mulhern and Eagleton, that
contemporary critics wrongly conflate culture and politics, but
unlike them, he finds the error to stem from Raymond Williams's
original joining of literature and society in The Country and the
City (45-46). Pace Williams, Fish wants to restore literature as a
specialized field; he does not deny history or politics, but
argues that they belong to a different realm and literary critics
should stick to literature. While Fish held considerable influence
during the heyday of theory, he has become a sort of literary
reactionary (he remarks that many will consider his a retrograde
view), and he has little influence on contemporary critics, at
least in the U.S. Fish has been a favorite target of
Eagleton's--elsewhere he calls him "a brash, noisy entrepeneur of
intellect" (2003, 171)--but he has become an anachronistic enemy,
like the Germans in movies, whom Eagleton reflexively invokes,
almost with nostalgia for the battles of high theory and the time
when the generation of theorists, like Fish and Eagleton, ruled
the field.
26. Rorty presents a different case. While Fish adverts to a version
of the pragmatist argument that theory, like principle, does not
govern practice and has "no consequences," a substantial part of
Rorty's work has been historical. Against the ahistoricism of
analytic philosophy, Rorty has recuperated the history of
pragmatism, from William James and John Dewey to Cornel West. Part
of his criticism of philosophy has been its focus on arid,
technical issues, making itself irrelevant to political life.
Indeed, much of Rorty's recent writing has dwelt on social issues,
deliberately following the example of Dewey, who was prominent in
early twentieth century educational reforms and democratic
politics in the U.S. Rorty himself has castigated the American
"cultural left," as I mentioned earlier, for its narrowly academic
address and its failing to take up basic social issues, like the
minimum wage and universal healthcare.[7 <#foot7>] This might
represent a unionist or liberal position, on the model of the New
Deal welfare state in the U.S., but Eagleton collapses it to a
difference between Right conservatism and Left radicalism. It is
actually one between social democracy and Marxism. Also, as I have
suggested, Eagleton broaches a pragmatist position in his eschewal
of method for the sake of political goals. He is closer to Rorty
than he acknowledges, or, more to the point, productively sorts
through.
27. In the midst of villains, the one unalloyed hero of The Idea of
Culture is Raymond Williams, and Eagleton obviously follows
Williams's keyword model. There is in fact a certain poignancy to
Eagleton's updating the project of his teacher. But it also
reveals something of the way that Eagleton has fashioned himself
as a critic and the particular bias of his work. He has followed
the Williams of Marxism and Literature in his theoretical surveys,
of The Country and the City in his literary criticism, and even of
The Border Country in a novel and a few plays, but not of
Communication, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, or
Resources of Hope. While he has never departed from a Marxist
credo (as some in his generation have), he has remained largely in
the domain of literature, with forays to the history of ideas, but
avoided cultural studies, despite its carrying out a significant
line of contemporary Marxist criticism. This is especially
striking in comparison to Williams's other prize student, Stuart
Hall, or for that matter Arnold or Eliot. It indicates an odd
blindness in Eagleton's work, all the more striking given that he
is probably the most deft (if polemical) and popular surveyor of
criticism. There is a way in which Eagleton has always resided in
the moment of literary theory--first coming to prominence with
Criticism and Ideology (1976), stamping the field with his
bestselling Literary Theory, and for the past decade targeting
postmodernism in The Idea of Culture as well as The Illusions of
Postmodernism and After Theory (2004). His terrain of struggle has
not been our common, ordinary culture, but the texts and concepts
of the history of criticism and their latter-day permutations.
28. There is finally a certain intractability to the debate over
culture. One dimension of its intractability stems from the term
itself. "Culture" has become an impossibly capacious term that
refers to a panoply of practices, products, and people. Like the
air, culture is ubiquitous. The term "culture" has also become
ubiquitous in critical practice, and no longer holds any precise
meaning or force, or rather it suffers from an oversaturation of
meaning that makes it amorphous. While the word, as Williams noted
in Keywords, has one of the more complicated histories of usage in
English, when Williams resucitated it, it had a distinctive
polemical force against its elite usage, militating against the
classed designation of "culture." In turn, Williams's revision
enabled the study of objects normally excluded from literary
criticism, disrupting the accepted paradigm of Cambridge English.
Now, though it is sometimes used to invoke the rhetoric of
disruption, it has become normal practice.
29. Eagleton and Mulhern respond to this dilemma to a degree, taking
to task the expansion of the term and calling for the restoration
of a more measured, former sense. But this tack represents a minor
modification, tweaking rather than shifting the paradigm. As is
the case with most restorations, it changes the name of the king
rather than the conceptual model. And, like most restorations, it
is unlikely to change the minds of those who have allegiance to
the houses of identity. At best, it represents a weak solution to
the dilemma, leaving the debate much the same.
30. Another dimension of its intractability is that "culture" is
residually embedded in the framework of base and superstructure.
The debate thus tends to fall out along the lines of an either/or
choice, between the traditional Marxist account of the priority of
the economic and the view of culture as having priority in
determining human experience. Part of the problem is that this
framework suggests a two-dimensional, spatial model, like a
drawing of an iceberg, whereby the Marxist holds that the economic
constitutes 90% of the iceberg supporting the 10% cap of culture
floating above, and the culturalist holds that culture comprises
most of the ice. The relation of the two tends to be configured as
a zero-sum equation (base + superstructure = society), as a
measurement of relative displacement in physics (society - base =
superstructure). To put it another way, the framework tends toward
subsumption, one conceived as encompassing the other, rather than
each being contiguous and not able to be subsumed, so a full
description would necessitate "both/and."
31. Eagleton and Mulhern try to restore a more austere notion of
politics and economic determinacy. Although they show nuance in
acknowledging culture as more important than merely
superstructural, their condemnation of its paucity of political
force rests on the residual construal of base and superstructure
or of politics and culture. In his afterthoughts in New Left
Review, Mulhern emphasizes that he is not dismissing the politics
of culture but claiming that there is a "discrepancy" between
culture and politics, and they are not reducible to each other
("Beyond" 100-4). Of course, but he still finds culture coming up
short, and does not explain the discrepant value of culture.
32. The third dimension of the intractability of the debate about
culture is that most arguments about its politics remain in the
cultural field, as Bourdieu would call it, of literary criticism.
They are arguments primarily over critical history. In other
words, most arguments declaiming the paucity or mistaken politics
of culture are culturalist arguments. Despite pronouncements of
interdisciplinarity, most culture critics do not turn to political
theory, political economy, or economics. Those in the literary
field might draw on cousin humanistic fields of history or
cultural anthropology, but not on harder social sciences. This
might not be from bad faith but from professional standards, since
one risks a naive amateurism tilling in fields without training.
Or it might be from habit, that we tend to gravitate toward the
discourses we are familiar with.
33. Eagleton and Mulhern, despite disclaimers, reflect the paradox of
criticizing culturalism culturally--Mulhern reconstructing and
revising the history of literary criticism, and Eagleton directing
his polemic against the usual critical suspects. There of course
might be better and worse ways to do this, but it is finally an
internecine battle or an internal correction of the field rather
than one that draws the field in a new direction or looks outside
that field. Despite their taking to task the paucity of politics
in cultural studies, neither Eagleton nor Mulhern themselves bring
the disciplines of politics--political philosophy, political
economy--into the debate.
34. To my mind, the best solution to these dilemmas is Nancy Fraser's
work on redistribution and recognition, first proposed in her
influential 1995 New Left Review article, "From Redistribution to
Recognition?" and expanded in her 2003 book (with Axel Honneth),
Redistribution or Recognition?. The virtue of Fraser's explanation
is that it shifts the debate from the tired one of cultural
studies, recasting the frame to a dualist approach, and working
through political philosophy. Though Fraser's article appeared in
New Left Review and drew considerable attention (including a 1999
volume of responses by Rorty, Judith Butler, Seyla Benhabib, and
others, Adding Insult to Injury), neither Eagleton nor Mulhern
cite it. This is a glaring omission, but symptommatic of the
gravitational pull of the literary field that they inhabit.
35. Fraser shifts the debate from the terrain of literary-cultural
studies and the question of the correct ratio of culture to the
terrain of political philosophy and the question of social
justice. This is fundamentally a pragmatist move: the debate about
culture turns on whether a particular view of the economic and
culture is a correct representation of the world.[8 <#foot8>] For
Fraser, the interest is not to draw a true picture of reality but
what best serves the goal of social justice. The enemy is
subordination, and one might experience subordination both
culturally, in the form of status, and economically, in the form
of class.
36. Fraser distinguishes two lines of political philosophy, one
aligning with Marxism that centers on class and economic
distribution, the other from Weber and a certain line of Hegelian
thinking about consciousness that centers on status and cultural
recognition. Fraser starts from the belief that inequality derives
from injuries of status as well as of resources. Identity politics
thus are not irrelevant in the struggle to redress inequality;
culture is not just "an antidote to politics" (17), as Eagleton
asserts, but crucial to what Fraser elsewhere calls a "politics of
needs."[9 <#foot9>] Another way to put this is that needs are not
just bodily, as researchers on childhood development tell us, but
of consciousness. The goal is not to adduce the equation of
economy and culture, but to adduce whether social needs are served
justly and the consequences people suffer from both
maldistribution and misrecognition.
37. Fraser foregoes entrenched either/or dichotomies. As she reasons,
Most such theorists assume a reductive
economistic-cum-legalistic view of status, supposing that a
just distribution of resources and rights is sufficient to
preclude misrecognition. In fact, however, as we saw, not all
misrecognition is a by-product of maldistribution, nor of
maldistribution plus legal discrimination. Witness the case of
the African-American Wall Street banker who cannot get a taxi
to pick him up. To handle such cases, a theory of justice must
reach beyond the distribution of rights and goods to examine
institutionalized patterns of cultural value; it must ask
whether such patterns impede parity of participation in social
life. (Redistribution 34)
Conversely, against a "culturalist view of distribution" that
suppos[es] that all economic inequalities are rooted in a
cultural order that privileges some kinds of labor over
others, [so] changing that cultural order is sufficient to
preclude maldistribution. In fact, however, as we saw, not all
maldistribution is a by-product of misrecognition. Witness the
case of the skilled white male industrial worker who becomes
unemployed due to a factory closing resulting from a
speculative corporate merger. In that case, the injustice of
maldistribution has little to do with misrecognition. It is
rather a consequence of imperatives intrinsic to an order of
specialized economic relations whose /raison d'être/ is the
accumulation of profits. To handle such cases, a theory of
justice must reach beyond cultural value patterns to examine
the structure of capitalism. It must ask whether economic
mechanisms that are relatively decoupled from structures of
prestige and that operate in a relatively autonomous way
impede parity of participation in social life. (34-35)
The strength of Fraser's approach is that she tries to account for
both without devaluing one or the other. She opts for a dual
rather than singular solution. A well-known nettle in physics is
how to explain the behavior of light: sometimes it behaves like
particles that caroom and ricochet, sometimes it behaves like
waves that oscillate in a more uniform motion. Fraser presents a
kind of wave-particle theory of society, whereby social
interaction behaves like the wave motion of culture, sometimes
like the material particle of class. If one takes this dualist
perspective, then one need not make a choice, and in fact the
choice is a false one. Again, such a dualism is not a description
of reality, but, pragmatically, a perspective:
Here redistribution and recognition do not correspond to two
substantive societal domains, economy and culture. Rather,
they constitute two analytical perspectives that can be
assumed with respect to any domain" . . . Unlike
poststructuralist anti-dualism, perspectival dualism permits
us to distinguish distribution from recognition--and thus to
analyze the relations between them. Unlike economism and
culturalism, however, it avoids reducing either one of those
categories to the other and . . . allows us to theorize the
complex connections between two orders of subordination,
grasping at once their conceptual irreducibility, empirical
divergence, and practical entwinement. (63-64)
38. With Fraser, we should dispense with the debate over the correct
ratio of culture, or the true picture of politics and culture.
Rather, we should focus on what best serves the goal of justice
and acting against injustice, whether it goes by the name of
culture or class.
/ English Department
Carnegie Mellon University
jwill@andrew.cmu.edu /
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. To be sure, even Marx, in the introduction to the
Grundrisse, notes the asymmetry of culture and society (110), or
what Louis Althusser came to call the "semi-autonomy of art."
2 <#ref2>. Through the 1990s a good many Marxists, like Ellen
Meiksins Wood, have excoriated the dissolution of identity
politics, while others, like Ernesto Laclau, have tried to forge a
"neo-Marxism." In different registers, Aijaz Ahmad, notably in
After Theory (1993), and Arif Dirlik have diagnosed the mistaken
turn of postcolonial criticism away from class.
3 <#ref3>. Hall's "Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies"
provides a telling counterpoint to Mulhern's genealogy, as Hall
inducts a capacious range of structural and poststructural sources
into the lineage of cultural studies.
4 <#ref4>. See Collini, "Culture Talk" and Mulhern, "Beyond
Metaculture," which are lucid clarifications of the arguments. New
Left Review has run several sequels to the initial review,
exceeding even the replication of Hollywood sequels.
5 <#ref5>. One other elision, especially apparent to American
eyes, is that Mulhern's account never deals with the U.S. lineage
of cultural criticism, which has a varied but lively history, from
early twentieth-century figures like Thorstein Veblen, whose
classic Theory of the Leisure Class provides a still-trenchant
exposition of the cultural manifestations of class in "conspicuous
consumption," to mid-twentieth century figures like Lionel
Trilling, for whom culture was central (one of his books was
called Beyond Culture), to contemporary figures like Michael
Denning, Hazel Carby, Andrew Ross, and Lawrence Grossberg, who
were trained in Britain but have promoted versions of cultural
studies, often mixed with American Studies. It is a peculiarity of
most accounts of cultural studies that they do not trace the
interplay of European and U.S. versions, especially after World
War II, when they share the same historical formation. Most
accounts of British cultural studies are provincial in this
regard, focusing entirely on the British tradition; this has led
some recent American critics to declare, "it no longer makes sense
to treat our work as a footnote to the Birmingham tradition"
(Jenkins, McPherson, and Shattuc 5).
6 <#ref6>. For fuller elaboration of the "romance of the
intellectual," see my essay "The Romance of the Intellectual and
the Question of Profession." The tension between professionalism
and anti-professionalism is a familiar tension in modern literary
studies. As Eagleton notes of "the contradictory nature of the
Scrutiny project," "for if it was concerned on the one hand to
sustain an 'amateur' liberal humanism, claiming an authoritative
title to judge all sectors of social life, it was on the other
hand engaged in an internecine struggle to 'professionalize' a
disreputably amateur literary academy, establishing criticism as a
rigorously analytical discourse beyond the reach of both common
reader and common-room wit" (Function of Criticism 74).
7 <#ref7>. This is not to defend Rorty--indeed, he has also made
strange calls for patriotism--but I do not think one can simply
dismiss his politics.
8 <#ref8>. This is a philosophical move most familiar in Rorty,
who diagnosed philosophy's metaphysical tendency to construct "a
mirror to nature." Fraser has been a key feminist interlocutor of
Rorty's, as well as of Habermas, alongside her largely Left
affiliations.
9 <#ref9>. See especially her analysis of U.S. welfare and women
in the closing chapters of Unruly Practices.
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