In the activity described by the rather tired phrase ‘an intellectual exchange’, it is all too often the case that all the protagonists manage to give each other is a piece of their minds. They exchange shots but don’t, in any genuine sense, ‘exchange’ ideas, the participants generally resembling incorrigible Bourbons. Recognizing this risk, I nonetheless want to try to respond to Francis Mulhern’s reply to my reading of his book Culture/Metaculture, encouraged by the belief that our earlier contributions have already gone some way towards escaping this dispiriting pattern. Certainly, Mulhern’s reply is acute, constructive and, to pinch one of his own kind phrases, ‘generous beyond ordinary expectation’.footnote1 Moreover, in clarifying and extending his position, he throws down a fundamental challenge to anyone who, like me, thinks they believe there is a legitimate role for something called ‘cultural criticism’, as opposed to Mulhern’s ‘cultural politics’; so trying to go a little further in identifying where we agree and where we differ may at least provide some grist to others’ mills.
The central argument of Mulhern’s book, in his own careful summary, is as follows:
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.footnote2
In my earlier essay I, while emphasizing the merits of the book as a whole, raised both a historical and a theoretical objection to these claims. In ‘Beyond Metaculture’ Mulhern now responds strongly to these objections, and then elaborates and extends his original argument; but he does so in ways that, for me at least, make it seem less rather than more persuasive. I shall try to address the issues, broadly in the order in which Mulhern raises them, but I shall then go on to touch on what seem to me the even larger underlying questions, ultimately questions about the role, and the limits, of intellectual work in relation to public debate.
In what follows, I do not take myself to be saying anything particularly novel or to be staking out a distinctively personal position. My concern, rather, is that the tightly interlaced grid of concepts through which Mulhern makes his criticisms of what he calls ‘metacultural discourse’ involves a baby-with-the-bathwater outcome: in other words, it appears to eliminate the possibility, or at least deny the legitimacy, of what has conventionally been called ‘cultural criticism’. I am well aware that this term is now used in many senses, especially within American academia, but I believe the traditional sense is also still usable and useful—the sense associated, in Britain, with aspects of the work of figures such as Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, Richard Hoggart, and so on.footnote3 Contemporary versions of cultural criticism, in this sense, still seem to me to have a valuable part to play in public debate, and the effect of Mulhern’s argument—especially in its re-stated form—appears to be to deny any standing to this activity.
Necessarily, this exchange must deploy a number of large and contested abstract categories, and there is always a danger that too much may appear to turn on stipulative definition. When one of us proposes a category of ‘cultural politics’, to which the other responds by insisting on the desirability of continuing to speak of ‘cultural criticism’, it may seem a case of the narcissism of small differences. But within the broad area of our common concerns there is, I believe, a genuine and relatively fundamental disagreement at stake, and such disagreement is bound to be expressed partly through matters of intellectual allegiance and preferred vocabulary.
The term ‘culture’ itself is the most worrying but also the most intractable of these categories, and I have perhaps even more worries than Mulhern about whether it is practicable to treat the various senses as belonging to a single semantic field. In what follows, I shall try to restrict my own invocations of ‘culture’ to what Raymond Williams, in the book both Mulhern and I would recognize as having set the terms for so much modern discussion (for better or, as I would hold about some aspects of it, for worse), called ‘the primary’ meaning, namely, ‘artistic and intellectual activities’.footnote4 I am obviously not denying that there are all sorts of purposes for which it is entirely legitimate to take ‘culture’ in one of its other senses, as Mulhern does in much of his discussion and as I myself do on other occasions. But where the enterprise of ‘cultural criticism’ and its relation to ‘politics’ (another of these deceptively familiar abstractions) is in question, there is at least a certain utility to beginning with this narrower sense of ‘culture’. I shall hereafter do so without using the quotation-marks that signal my recognition that this is only one of the term’s several meanings.