It is difficult to see criticism as anything but an innocent discipline. Its origins seem spontaneous, its existence natural: there is literature, and so—because we wish to understand and appreciate it—there is also criticism. Criticism as a handmaiden to literature—as a shadowing of literature, a ghostly accomplice which, to adopt a phrase from Four Quartets, prevents it everywhere. Yet ‘prevents’ bears upon us here in its common as well as its classical meaning. If the task of criticism is to smooth the troubled passage between text and reader, to elaborate the text so that it may be more easily consumed, how is it to avoid interposing its own ungainly bulk between product and consumer, overshadowing its object in the act of obediently ‘ghosting’ it? It seems that criticism is caught here in an insoluble contradiction. For if its task is to yield us the spontaneous reality of the text, it must permit no particle of its own mass to mingle with what it mediates; such mingling would signal the unspeakable crime of ‘appropriation’. Yet how is it to do this without consigning itself to that mode of natural existence which is the life of a parasite? How is it to avoid that form of self-transparency, that humble conformity to the life of the text, which is mere self-abolition? Bourgeois criticism rarely seems more confident than when it speaks of its own redundancy—when it insists, self-laceratingly, on the partial, intrusive, provisional nature of its own propositions. Subtle and delicate though they may be, such propositions are finally as straw before the inexhaustible godhead of the text itself. Yet it is one thing to parade the superfluity of one’s discourse, and another thing to keep silent. Criticism may be a crippled discourse, but it is too late simply to dismantle itself; there is too much at stake, materially and academically, for that. footnote

The radical self-doubt of criticism is such that it is not even able to say whether it is an ‘amateur’ or ‘professional’ pursuit. It cannot, surely, be professional, for nothing is more natural than reading. It is simply a matter of turning the pages until you get to the end—turning them, naturally, with a peculiar attentiveness, but an attentiveness which, though it can be nurtured and informed, cannot ultimately be taught. Yet it cannot be amateur either, for it is unthinkable that the labour-intensive industry of literary enquiry—schools, university faculties, publishing houses, literary bodies—turns on a mode of cognition more akin to wine-tasting than chemical experiment. When English literary studies were first academically institutionalized in Britain, this dilemma was ‘resolved’ by a judicious blending of the two modes. English literature was a non-subject in a palpable sense: the English gentlemen who occupied the early professorships at the ‘ancient’ universities no more needed a course of specialized training in how to read their own literature than they needed a course of training in how to give orders to their domestic servants. Yet they were, after all, professors of English, and the cavalier frivolity they displayed towards their calling could not go wholly undisguised. The simple solution available to them was to study English literature but to pretend that it was something else—to systematically mistake it for the ‘classics’. No more professionally reputable cloak could have been discovered. One had, naturally, one’s personal opinions about Crabbe as one had about Catullus, but the study of English letters could not conceivably consist in vulgarly airing one’s private predilections in public. Such public airing, as Yeats remarked, belonged to shopkeepers—as it happened, historically, to the son of a shopkeeper, F. R. Leavis. ‘Amateur’ predilections were preserved, but preserved in isolation from the professional business of knowing about literature—a traditional combination of positivism and subjectivism still potent in contemporary criticism.

Such a posture inevitably provoked its reaction. Academically powerful but historically superannuated, the aristocratic and haut-bourgeois ‘pioneers’ of a discipline they palpably disbelieved in were ripe for dislodgement by the ideologies of a social class entering the ancient universities for the first time, able to accomplish the objective tasks set for criticism by contemporary history as their ideologically bankrupt predecessors could not. A petty-bourgeois liberal humanism, academically dispossessed and subordinated yet in intellectual terms increasingly hegemonic, occupied the bastions of reactionary criticism from within as a dissentient bloc. Vehemently radical in its onslaughts on the ‘academic establishment’, the unity of whose aesthetic and ideological assumptions they trenchantly exposed, this petty-bourgeois nonconformist humanism installed itself as the champion of precisely those literary mutations which the ideological moment demanded, and undauntedly rewrote the whole of English literary history in its image. No more militant, courageous and consistent project is to be found in the history of English criticism.

Yet we are not dealing here with a simple clash of ‘class-ideologies’. What is in question, rather, is the contradictory mode of insertion of the Scrutiny ideology into the dominant aesthetic and ideological formations. To designate the movement ‘petty-bourgeois’ is not in the first place to refer to its social origins, for they (though they have a certain relevance) were inevitably diverse; it is rather to denote the contradictions of its ideological universe. Radical and occasionally populist in its formulations, feared and mocked by the ruling academic caste, Scrutiny’s historic function was nevertheless plain: it was to bring about that drastic reconstruction of forms, values, discourses and lineages within the aesthetic region of ideology which, at a point of serious historical crisis, would play its part in revitalizing and reproducing the dominant ideology as a whole. Indeed, it was much more than a question of merely refashioning the aesthetic region of ideology: it was a matter of effectively substituting that region for ideology as such. The ideological vacuum occasioned in English society by the partial collapse of certain traditional sub-formations (notably religion), and the historically determined absence of others (notably a fully-fledged sociology), demanded filling; and it was this task which, in the tradition of Matthew Arnold, Scrutiny attempted. Like Arnold, then, it was at once progressive and reactionary—vigorously alert to the moment of the modern and its new ideological demands, but able to meet them only with pathetically obsolescent and idealist solutions: the ‘organic society’ of eighteenth-century England, the university English school as the spiritual essence of the social formation. It is here, precisely, that one index of the essentially petty-bourgeois character of Scrutiny is evident. For if that puritan, nonconformist tradition was (in the determinate absence of a revolutionary heritage) the only possible force which in its moral combativeness, intellectual seriousness and social realism could ‘progressively’ refashion the structures of a stagnant, socially irrelevant academicism, it was by the same token a subordinate, historically disinherited lineage, driven back onto nostalgic, artisanal images of a pre-capitalist past, embracing the modern (The Waste Land) but also repulsing it (Ulysses) from a traditionalist standpoint. Scrutiny progressively revaluated literary traditions, but did so because it saw such traditions as the privileged repository of human values brutally overridden by the development of contemporary capitalism. It acted, accordingly, as the impotent idealist conscience of a capitalism in the process of definitively transcending its liberal-humanist phase.

The historical marginality and ‘spiritual’ centrality of Scrutiny resolve themselves in a single category: élitism. Here, once more, the petty-bourgeois character of the movement is revealed. For élitism, as Nicos Poulantzas has argued, is a structural trait of the petty bourgeoisie. footnote1 Committed by its nuclear social and economic conditions to a framework of overarching authority, to ‘standards’ and ‘leadership’, the petty bourgeoisie rejects at once the democratic anarchy it discerns below it and the ineffectualness of the actual authority posed above it. This was precisely Scrutiny’s situation. Though empirically decentred, largely excluded from the ruling academic caste, it nevertheless laid claim to be, spiritually, the real élite. On the one hand, Scrutiny was a progressive vanguard thrown into militant conflict with the academic establishment—a conflict for which it mobilized elements of the radical and liberal ideologies of subordinate groups and classes. It effected what Raymond Williams has called, in another context, a ‘negative identification’ with such social forces, footnote2 to the point where at an early stage it even entertained (in speculative, academic fashion, naturally enough) the desirability of ‘some form of economic communism’. footnote3 But the vanguard was also, notionally, the élite, already disseminating standards from its spiritual power-positions within the literary establishment. That confusion of vanguard and élite was the precise effect of Scrutiny’s inherent contradiction, as an ideological force locked in complicity with the very society it spiritually castigated.

It was, indeed, that complicity which notoriously prevented Scrutiny from formulating the theoretical bases of its critique. Scrutiny’s naive sensuous empiricism, epitomized in the act of ‘practical criticism’, was a ‘progressive’ testing of aesthetic categories against the immediacies of lived experience—a dissolution of generalities in the ‘lived’ as ideologically potent as Eliot’s dislocation of articulate meanings into poetic concretion. But it was, on the other hand, the confession of a mere incapacity: the blankness of a critique ideologically prohibited from achieving the potentially more subversive level of theoretical discourse. To combat ideology, Scrutiny pointed to experience—as though that, precisely, were not ideology’s homeland. Yet the philosophy of Scrutiny went beyond sensuous empiricism, and necessarily so. Just as, for Eliot, such empiricism proved ideologically insufficient, demanding its sublation into doctrinal Christianity, so Scrutiny stood in objective need of a metaphysic whose intuitive force was in inverse proportion to its theoretical articulateness. Such a metaphysic was provided by the work of D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence’s idealism did not undercut sensuous empiricism: on the contrary, it lent it nothing less than ontological status. Furnished with this metaphysic, then, Scrutiny was able to lambast the varieties of utilitarian empiricism from the standpoint of an absolute idealism, while at the same time assaulting ‘absolutist’ systems (including, naturally, Marxism) from the viewpoint of a thoroughly English liberal empiricism. The position was invulnerable in direct proportion to its irrationality. Since the metaphysical underpinning slipped by definition through the net of language (so that to demand its demonstration was to reveal oneself in that very act as unregenerate), it was shielded from scrutiny; but it was, by the same token, theoretically sterile. All one could do was point to which phenomena represented ‘life’, and which did not; there was by definition no possibility of real development within the case, self-limiting and self-referential as it was. It could only be a matter of re-stating that case again and again, each time with gathering stridency and abstraction, as the liberal-humanist values of a particular phase of industrial capitalism entered into deeper contradiction with that capitalism’s developed forms. The logical upshot of this contradiction was then a transvaluing of liberal humanism itself, into the banalities of tory reaction.

Who is the major English Marxist critic? Christopher Caudwell, hélas. It is in such pat question and answer that the problem of a Marxist criticism in contemporary Britain is most deftly posed. For though Caudwell is the major forebear—major, at least, in the sheer undaunted ambitiousness of his project—it is equally true that there is little, except negatively, to be learnt from him. Not that we can learn only from the English, or that Caudwell’s limitations were just his own. Insulated from much of Europe, intellectually isolated even within his own society, permeated by Stalinism and idealism, bereft of a ‘theory of superstructures’, Caudwell nonetheless persevered in the historically hopeless task of producing from these unpropitious conditions a fully-fledged Marxist aesthetic. His work bears all the scars of that self-contradictory enterprise: speculative and erratic, studded with random insights, punctuated by hectic forays into and out of alien territories and strewn with hair-raising theoretical vulgarities. If Caudwell lacked a tradition of Marxist aesthetics, it is a measure of that absence that we, coming after him, lack one too.