The saying that texts are never finished, merely abandoned, is old but not toothless. It can bite, as I had cause to reflect in ‘abandoning’ Culture/Metaculture, some three years ago, not wholly reconciled.footnote¹ I am particularly grateful, then, for the critical responses it has attracted, and in the first place to Stefan Collini for ‘Culture Talk’.footnote² Collini is an intellectual historian deeply versed in the politically assorted series of thinkers often dubbed ‘the Culture and Society tradition’—in his own terms, the ‘public moralists’ of nineteenth-and-twentieth-century Britain.footnote³ At the same time, he is probably still better known as a writer in that tradition, committed to the practice of ‘the higher journalism’, a non-specialist discourse engaging the general interests of a mixed readership.footnote⁴ This is the ground from which he approaches Metaculture. His discussion is generous beyond ordinary expectation, and at times unnerving in its empathetic reach. But above all, it sets out some fundamental objections, to which I wish to respond now, in an attempt to clarify and develop the sense of a position beyond metaculture.

‘Metaculture’ names a modern discursive formation in which ‘culture’, however understood, speaks of its own generality and historical conditions of existence. Its inherent strategic impulse—failing which it would be no more than descriptive anthropology—is to mobilize ‘culture’ as a principle against the prevailing generality of ‘politics’ in the disputed plane of social authority. What speaks in metacultural discourse is the cultural principle itself, as it strives to dissolve the political as locus of general arbitration in social relations. Kulturkritik and Cultural Studies, typically contrasting in social attachment yet sharing this discursive template, have been strong versions of this metacultural will to authority. For the Left, such logic is either inimical or self-defeating. The alternative begins with the theoretical recognition that cultural and political practice are structurally distinct, yielding mutually irreducible norms of judgement. Discrepancy is the necessary term of their relationship—and not a sign of blockage but a condition of practical possibility. Here, in a few sentences, are the core theses of Metaculture. As stated there, they have drawn criticism on both historical and theoretical grounds—and also fostered certain misunderstandings, for which I have to accept some responsibility. Collini’s historical charge concerns my unorthodox deployment of the Germanic category of Kulturkritik.footnote⁵

Kulturkritik as it figures in Metaculture is my own ‘construction’, Collini warns, and a tendentious one. It is chronologically more limited than the historic genre whose common name it has been, reaching back no further than 1918, and geographically far wider, extending beyond the German-language zone to assemble ‘a heterogeneous crew’ of intellectuals from Spain, England and France—Mann, Mannheim and the later Freud, but also Ortega, Leavis and even Benda. Thus, designedly or not, ‘European inter-war cultural pessimism’ becomes ‘the defining moment’ of an actually diverse ‘tradition’, and ‘the appeal to “culture” has to be socially elitist, culturally alarmist and politically conservative’—intrinsically, an intellectual trope of the right.footnote⁶ I wear my heart on my sleeve, it seems.

Of course, ‘Kulturkritik’ is a construction, just like ‘absolutism’, say, or ‘modernism’. Construction and reconstruction are the process of all thought, as it labours to know reality. The pertinent critical question concerns the nature of the construction and its claim to rational plausibility. Generically viewed, Metaculture is an essay in the historical morphology of discourse. Its critical point of entry is form: the recurrence of certain relations among concepts (culture, politics, authority), a certain array of topoi (modernity as disintegration, for example), a certain ethos of address (the prophetic intellectual and kindred personae). The purpose of the analysis is to demonstrate the unity of its historical material at that specified level, to show that this ‘heterogeneous crew’, for all their acknowledged differences of national and disciplinary sensibility, political leaning and intellectual personality, acted within a shared discursive order and subserved its governing logic. Collini is on the whole gratifyingly clear about the ‘structural or formal’ priorities of the analysis, even declaring himself persuaded by the account of the relations between Kulturkritik and Cultural Studies. But here, momentarily, he responds as if to another kind of work.

A more spacious, more richly historical book would range more widely. It would register other national varieties from the same period—Huizinga’s The Shadow of the Future and the Russian Vekhi, for example—and might probe the significance of a thinker such as Croce, whose thought has some formal affinity with Kulturkritik, but perhaps no more substantial association. Even if not venturing beyond the borders of Europe, it would at least acknowledge the presence of Kulturkritik, in derived or parallel forms, in other continents. A more strongly comparative study would not merely record the manifest inter-national variations in the discourse, but would attempt to make historical sense of them. Thus, Leavis differed most clearly from his European counterparts in the priority he accorded to the economic over the political dimension of modernity. Conjunctural and more enduring conditions alike contributed to this distribution. Mann wrote in the last days of Wilhelmine Germany, Mannheim in the later years of Weimar. Ortega’s manifesto coincided with the birth of republican Spain. Benda’s formative public engagement was as a Dreyfusard; decades later, he joined the mobilization against the Croix de Feu. In Britain, on the other hand, with a constitutional matrix long settled and largely exempt from political controversy, there was nothing to distract attention from the latest novelties in a continuing process of economic transformation: Fordism and the culture industry, not the new politics of labour, are the privileged omens in Leavis’s symptomatology.

In this way, the variegated Kulturkritik of the 1920s observed the geographical pattern set by Hobsbawm’s ‘dual revolution’, but with effects that cannot be appraised by a simple reckoning of similarities versus differences. Readers of Scrutiny were as much aware of Martin Turnell’s ‘French’ critique of democracy as of Leavis’s better-known extension of the ‘English’ critique of industrialism. Collini is a little too taken with Benda’s rationalism and cosmopolitanism—which reached its limits at the Franco-German border.footnote⁷ His glassy abstractions are perhaps not in the English manner, but his tendency, which Collini admits, to ‘treat France as the national home of the universal’ has a strict counterpart in Leavis’s imaginary England. The favouring condition of these bewitching identifications was in both cases political. Leavis’s national humanism, his fluent elision of Englishness and ‘life’ tout court, depended for its intuitive plausibility on the inherited reality of a world empire; Benda’s universalism was rooted in the abstract codes of the Third Republic. For Mann, in contrast, the universal was a spurious, alien—‘Roman’—value: in this sense, he had no equivalent vision of Germany. Writing as subject of a failed Empire, bracing himself for the advent of a civic equality he thought second-best, he spoke for a cherished particularism, an introverted Sonderweg of the spirit. Thus, his nationalism was, in context and propensity, a true negative of the others. Three images of cultural distinction, marked and contrasted, or even opposed, in national terms, all claiming moral precedence over the modern political order, each one a sublimation of given political conditions.

So far at least, then, consideration of the national diversity of Kulturkritik yields evidence for, not against, its discursive unity. The cases of Mannheim and Ortega, whose national identifications were complicated by the circumstances of exile and education respectively, might prove less amenable in this respect. More important, as clearly contrasted liberals of the left and right, they forestall any claim that Kulturkritik was uniformly ‘conservative’ or ‘reactionary’. That is not the claim of Metaculture, nor do the arguments of the book presuppose it—fortunately, since the alternative would have been shipwreck. Kulturkritik was and remains politically changeable, in its simpler forms and still more in its alloyed varieties. Benda, when he felt himself ‘permitted’ to intervene, did so on the side of the left, not even straining at a manifesto with the word ‘revolutionary’ in its banner. Mann soon endorsed the Weimar constitution, and later put his eminence at the service of intellectual anti-fascism. Ortega responded differently, quitting Spain for Argentina at the outbreak of the Civil War. Scrutiny’s collaborators included a socialist like L. C. Knights and a clerico-rightist like Turnell, as well as their elusively liberal chief editor—Leavis, who in the tricky currents of the nineteen-thirties held the journal to the left, only later turning visibly rightwards. Discursive hybrids call for a particular effort of discrimination. A Room of One’s Own is rendered incoherent by the internalized pressure of Bloomsbury’s presumptuous, rentier version of Kulturkritik, but to say this is not to disallow Woolf’s left-wing sympathies or cancel the feminism of her book (or, as I neglected to add, of the distinct and later Three Guineas). Other hybrids are simpler. Richard Hoggart has substantiated the possibility of a stable, enduring Kulturkritik of the Left, social-democratic conviction adapting Leavisian diagnostics to assert the value of diffusion as progress, the quickening of popular life by culture broadly cast. Collini feels much closer to that work than I do (and has a correspondingly much lower opinion of Raymond Williams, whose cultural politics are fundamentally distinct).footnote⁸ But the suggestion—to which the logic of his charge commits him—that my general categories cannot properly accommodate it, even as historical possibility, is unconvincing. As Metaculture puts it, in terms that mark a political distance but hardly suppress the historical distinction: ‘In Richard Hoggart, the British labour movement found its own Matthew Arnold.’