Politics as Such?

Francis Mulhern is, among his many other gifts, an astute analyst of style, of the little tics that give away an agenda at the level of the unconscious, the defensive retraction or qualification of what an argument appears to be specifying as its first order of affirmation. So the claim to ‘emancipatory change’ made by Cultural Studies—the object of Mulhern’s critique in his Culture/Metaculture and the topic of a series of recent exchanges in this journal—is for him signalled by its preference for versions of the descriptive-imperative phrase no longer.footnote¹ Stuart Hall, who comes as close as anyone discussed in the book (but not quite close enough) to resisting an overvaluation of Cultural Studies, is prone to a ‘thickness of modification’ that does the opposite of what it seems to do: it is a way of ‘not coming to the point’ and is thereby ‘the deceptive figure of theoretical evasion’. He is given to ‘compulsive temporalization of logic, which grants to discursive shifters like now and no longer the status of truth-tests’ and indicates ‘a perspective in which novelty has become a value in itself and even an autonomous cultural force’.

Mulhern also astutely takes the measure of his interlocutor and critic Stefan Collini’s relentlessly well-mannered accumulation of subjunctive and subordinate clauses, recently offered in these pages as the voice of sweet persuasion: the rhetoric of accommodating man in his conviction that no one is immune to the appeal of conversation and good feeling. Collini’s somewhat unconvincing claim that he and Mulhern ‘both seem drawn to a similar tone or writerly stance in discussing these matters, including a taste for certain kinds of intellectual irony’, could not and did not fail to draw Mulhern into an articulation of some of their prominent differences.footnote² Collini is for him the celebrant of ‘voice’, one for whom ‘utterance rather than statement’ is the priority of analysis, the devotee and practitioner of an essayistic style that eschews anything that might be taken for an absolute and who uses biographical foundations to embed all positions in the complex and overdetermined conditions of real life. The model is conversational, ‘favouring shared over contested values’ and assuming the actual or potential existence of a ‘company’ of fellow spirits. For Collini, according to Mulhern, ‘ideas count for less than the voices that circulate them and the sensibilities that vary their texture’.footnote³

Next and predictably comes Collini’s pointedly titled rejoinder which remarks, rather disingenuously, that ‘something about my writing frustrates and irritates Mulhern’, something that leads him to respond in a way that ‘does not advance the argument’.footnote⁴ Collini, modestly declaring himself ‘less confident and less settled about the direction of my thinking than Mulhern seems to have been from a comparatively early age’, then builds towards a resonant defence of conviviality and conversation as critical tactics that may risk ‘apparent lack of focus or of theoretical force’ but which finally do better justice to the rich texture of a world which is for him best reflected in ‘a cluttered, medium-range zone of engagement in which serious public debate takes place’ using ‘all the resources at hand’. The mode is indeed one of conversation, and the enemy is—guess who—theory, acceptable to Collini as a team player on a large roster but not as a referee. Everyone is a player, nobody makes the rules, and the game never ends. This is what Collini calls a ‘practice’, a term that both absorbs and deflects the more confrontational praxis that lurks behind Mulhern’s argument, in its ghosting of the prospect for more decisive interventions than can be contained in merely ongoing conversations.footnote⁵

Collini’s defence of conversation as critical practice (and vice versa) ends a protracted exchange wherein the matter of style came more and more to the forefront, as not only a persistent area of friction but also a big part of the substance of the various disagreements on show. Both Mulhern and Collini are successful and persuasive practising intellectuals. They write books, reviews and high-end journalism for others like themselves. They are also teachers in university classrooms. Their style is their trademark, the personalized profile they project as the bearer of their meanings and intentions and as the substance of what it is that their students might choose to model themselves upon. Style, that is to say, figures as an important tool in their work, and embodies their image in their workplace. This is how it is for intellectuals. Arguments about style have been intense at least since the British reception of Kant and Hegel, and in the aggressive reaction to them adopted by the common-sense philosophers and, thereafter, though to different ends, the ‘ordinary language’ movement. Difficulty of style was famously, for Adorno, a weapon for demystifying a corrupted communications culture based on mass media and on ideology masquerading as common language. Some years ago, a brilliant essay by Terry Eagleton pinpointed Jameson’s style as a purposive, dislocated medium ‘estranging but not parodying its object’ while ‘refusing at once the chimera of a “degree zero” political discourse and the allures of the commodified “art sentence”’.footnote⁶ More recently we have had the journal Philosophy and Literature berating Judith Butler as the high priestess of obscurity by giving her the fourth of their bad writing awards. This had the partial virtue of eliciting a very sensible response from a range of writers showing that there is a long history of debates about bad writing, and that obscurity is often at the heart of short sentences made up of words with few syllables.footnote⁷

All of the previous winners of this absurd award have been theorists (Jameson, Roy Bhaskar, Homi Bhabha), all are of the left. The Mulhern–Collini exchange has a place in this story. Collini is of course much too knowing to accuse Mulhern of an infelicitous style, but his distrust of the final judgement to which much of Mulhern’s argument aspires is palpable throughout. And in refusing the gratifications of conviviality Mulhern is true to a legacy most vividly embodied for English readers in the figure of Althusser in the 1970s and 1980s, an intimidating and uncompromising scientism that threatened to pinpoint ideological affiliations and political lapses with unforgiving clarity. This was for E. P. Thompson one among the poverties of theory, evident in his critique of Althusser’s ‘absurd syllogistic world’ and in his own counterclaim that ‘history knows no regular verbs’. Thompson’s falsely modest embrace of an ‘English idiom’ allowing for, perhaps, ‘too much sensibility mixed up with my thought’ is in a long tradition of British reactions to French rational sense that begins at least with Descartes and takes on definitive form in Edmund Burke’s infamous and formative denunciations of French theory after 1789. Thompson’s case against ‘the project of Grand Theory—to find a total systematized conceptualisation of all history and human occasions’, which he takes to be ‘the original heresy of metaphysics against knowledge’ stands fully in the tradition of Burke, even though it is deployed in the service of more compassionate social and political ends. Like Burke on the British Jacobins, Thompson saw in the Althusserians the storm troops of an ‘ideological police action’ and thus mistook a fight within the left for a diagnosis of systemic political power: neither the Jacobins in the 1790s nor the Althusserians in the 1970s ever had any real prospect of policing Britain, and to accuse them of such was effectively to carry forward the work of the right-wing scaremongers.footnote⁸

In revisiting this history, surely familiar to many as it is unrecalled by others, I do not mean to propose a seamless continuum of unacknowledged conflict over the political affiliations and consequences of style, nor to suggest that Collini–Mulhern is a simple rematch of Thompson–Althusser. Collini is much too unruffled an interlocutor to pass for Thompson, who was often a fiery polemicist, and Mulhern, with his appealing sense of humour, could only pass as a very urbane Althusserian. I do however want to make clear that there is a long durational identity to the strife between propositional and conversational languages in the attribution of any kind of politics to the work of intellectuals and teachers. This remains the case in Collini’s carefully worded periphrases and deliberate digressions (the stuff of one kind of conversation), and in Mulhern’s eye for the syntactic back of the net.footnote⁹ Collini’s style suggests an affiliation with the widely circulating company of Habermasian liberals who have argued for dialogic and conversational paradigms as the bearers of achievable consensus and the happy mechanisms of non-statist civil societies: a round-table model of self-governance that can only, in our given world, fulfil itself in small-group situations. When this model proposes to describe the whole, it is either utopian (as it often is for Habermas himself) or visibly ideological—a way of limiting discussion to a few qualified and polite persons. It is a talk shop, with unspoken limits on who gets to talk. This brings me to my title, which is a citation of one of Francis Mulhern’s most persistent stylistic habits, an intensifying noun phrase that recurs at critical points in his argument and marks the limit of Cultural Studies and the crossover into something more respectable and desirable: politics as such.

‘It is politics as such that is fundamentally in question here’, we are told. The same ‘politics as such’ is what Leavis was crucially alienated from and what is denied by Kulturkritik (I will come back to this term). Along with politics as such comes ‘political reason itself’ and ‘political reason proper’.footnote¹⁰ These are the things Mulhern finds threatened or denied by Cultural Studies, in its shadow life as the modern agent of Kulturkritik. Both are guilty of a ‘metacultural will to authority’, which aims to ‘dissolve the political as locus of general arbitration in social relations’ and to ‘mobilize “culture” as a principle’ in its place.footnote¹¹ One cannot but sympathize with Mulhern’s case against the shoddy assumption that to celebrate the agency of popular or other culture as politically transformative in and of itself (one kind of Cultural Studies) is indeed to ascribe far too much power to a mere discipline in the circumscribed world of university teaching. (There is of course another kind which tends to the reverse position: that all popular culture is ideologically corrupt.) Mulhern is out to nail the assumption that culture is the most densely saturated vehicle of politics, that it matters more than any other form of politics, and that those who teach and study culture may therefore be the high priests of a brave new world. Here he is very much in line with, for example, Terry Eagleton in his recent After Theory, which berates a specifically American Cultural Studies for its narcissistic shrinkage of politics to identity politics, and praxis to the college classroom; as if to intone the name of Toni Morrison were to disseminate revolution.