As this is, I understand, to be the final instalment of the current exchange between Francis Mulhern and myself in these pages, it may be helpful if I try, very briefly, to summarize the main steps in the argument so far. I do not pretend this is an adequate account of the exchange in its entirety; it concentrates on what seems to me to have been the main locus of dispute between us, at least before the appearance of his most recent contribution.footnote1
The central argument of Culture/Metaculture may again be given in Mulhern’s own words:
‘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.footnote2
On this view, what has been conventionally understood as ‘cultural criticism’—which Mulhern, with polemical intent, re-designates as ‘Kulturkritik’—stands accused of attempting to ‘mediate a symbolic metapolitical resolution of the contradictions of capitalist modernity’. Only something properly describable as ‘politics’ rather than any form of ‘metapolitics’ could achieve a real resolution of these contradictions. Metacultural discourse is an attempt to ‘supplant the authority of politics’; it ‘dissolves the political’.footnote3 The nub of his argument is condensed in this one phrase.
My first response, while warmly appreciative of the book’s merits, raised objections on two fronts, historical and conceptual. I objected that Mulhern’s tightly-defined category of ‘Kulturkritik’ could not, without distortion, embrace the wide range of intellectual figures to whom he wished to apply it. And I argued that Mulhern’s own book, including its exhortation to practise a form of ‘cultural politics’, was itself a continuation of metacultural discourse, not a supersession of it, but that this was, in my view, no bad thing since to write from the perspective of culture does not, as Mulhern would have it, require an appeal to transcendentals: ‘it only requires the presumption that disciplined reflection partly grounded in an extensive intellectual and aesthetic inheritance can furnish a place to stand in attempting to engage critically with the narrow pragmatism (or “specialism”) of any particular political programme.’footnote4
In his reply, ‘Beyond Metaculture’, Mulhern clarified and in some respects extended the argument of his book, particularly in relation to his category of ‘Kulturkritik’ and to the contrast he wishes to draw between the pernicious logic of all metacultural discourse and the legitimate enterprise of ‘cultural politics’. He repeated that culture-as-principle asserts a ‘claim to authority over the social whole’ and thus that the attempt to displace politics was the ‘inherent strategic impulse’ of metacultural discourse. He characterized the role I had briefly sketched for cultural criticism as governed by the logic of ‘the Arnoldian problematic’ and hence vitiated by the incoherence present in all metacultural discourse. He further extended the reach of his category of ‘Kulturkritik’ by proposing that a Marxist version of it was to be found in the work of Adorno and Marcuse. He re-affirmed the contrast with ‘politics’ understood as the re-shaping of social patterns ‘according to judgements based on a socially determinate programme and strategy’.footnote5 (It should be said that since I had not taken issue with the discussion of Cultural Studies in Mulhern’s book, that aspect of the argument, which may be thought its most interesting and original element, has rather fallen from view in our subsequent exchange.)
In ‘Defending Cultural Criticism’, I acknowledged the ways in which Mulhern had clarified and extended his case, but I found this later version more troubling than the original. In an attempt to isolate the issues at stake, I essayed this brief summary of our areas of agreement: