The semantic field encompassed by the single term ‘culture’ is now so large and so complex, and possessed of such a tangled history, that it may no longer be really practicable to attempt to treat it as a single topic. The very existence of the plural, ‘cultures’, signifies a radically different subject-matter from that designated by what some, often defensively, always self-consciously, call ‘Culture with a capital C’. The adjectival forms throw further fat on the fire: the business of a cultural attaché may have nothing in common with that of a professor of Cultural Studies; ‘cultural criticism’ as practised by a descendant of the Frankfurt School will bear little resemblance to that carried on by a broadsheet theatre-reviewer. Any new book on the topic, even one clearly signalling its affiliation to one established academic discipline or discourse, has thus to pick its way very carefully through a minefield of potential misapprehensions.

‘There are few easier paths into difficulty than the one paved with fixed expectations’.footnote1 Thus Francis Mulhern, warning readers of Culture/Metaculture about what not to expect from it. But the warning could be repeated in a much more affirmative and annunciatory register. This slim, pocket-format volume comes disguised as a contribution to the ‘New Critical Idiom’ series, a collection clearly aimed at the floundering student and offering (in the words of the series blurb) to provide ‘a handy, explanatory guide to the use (and abuse)’ of the main elements in ‘today’s critical terminology’. But there is little, its physical shape apart, that is ‘handy’ about this short book, which is far removed indeed from those warmed-over summaries of other people’s ideas that now flood this particular market. For Culture/Metaculture is an important theoretical statement in its own right; as a result of its publication, Mulhern may well have taken a step towards becoming one of those authors whose ideas will be summarized in the next generation of ‘handy guides’.

The book will no doubt provoke disagreement from more or less all quarters (I have my two pennyworth to throw in presently), but it should be said in plainest terms at the outset that this is in many ways a brilliant work. There has long been a distinctive economy and conceptual neatness about Mulhern’s writing, but here these qualities mutate, as it were, into a more confident version of themselves, producing an impressive analytic power and incisiveness of phrase, especially in the highly condensed closing pages. The book is, then, not exactly a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but rather a kind of stylish heist in which unsuspecting readers are first enticed in by a familiar-looking array of usual suspects (from Mannheim and Leavis on to Williams, Hall and company), and then are systematically stripped of all their accumulated assumptions about ‘culture and society’, before being released into an austere, somewhat impenetrable space of ‘cultural politics’, a bracing but not at all reassuring space where so much of what one might have thought had been done once and for all now appears, in the chill half-light allowed us by Mulhern’s unforgiving analysis, to need doing all over again. In fact, there is a slightly Beckettian feel about the ending: try again, fail again, fail better. Or, adapting another idiom close to home for Mulhern: strenuousness of the intellect, stoicism of the will.

It is correspondingly difficult to summarize the contents of this dense, challenging little book. Mulhern’s central argument is that although the tradition which he calls ‘Kulturkritik’ (of which more in a moment) and the movement or discipline now called ‘Cultural Studies’ may appear to be almost diametrically opposed in their aims and political affiliations, they in fact exhibit a fundamental continuity at the level of form. They each appeal to a (very different) notion of ‘culture’ to ‘mediate a symbolic metapolitical resolution of the contradictions of capitalist modernity’. ‘Kulturkritik’ attempts to ‘spiritualize’ the notion as ‘the higher truth of humanity or the nation’; Cultural Studies attempts to ‘politicize’ it as ‘the unregarded democracy of everyday life’. These kinds of explicit appeal to ‘culture’ Mulhern christens ‘metacultural discourse’, that is, ‘discourse in which culture addresses its own generality and conditions of existence’. But metacultural discourse, he urges, should not deceive itself that it can somehow supplant the authority of politics, and in place of such hubristic practices, he recommends a more modestly framed conception of ‘cultural politics’.

In practical terms, the first part of the book contains brief discussions of Mann, Benda, Ortega, Leavis and Mannheim, of Freud, Woolf and Orwell, of Eliot and Hoggart, and then a much longer account of Raymond Williams. The second part takes up Williams (again) and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, deals at some length with Stuart Hall, and then touches on the work of several recent practitioners of Cultural Studies. The brief concluding section states his own alternative position. It should just be recorded that quite a few of the paragraphs in this book have done more than one tour of duty before. Thus, much the greater part of the chapters on Hoggart and Williams is reproduced verbatim from the essay ‘A Welfare Culture? Hoggart and Williams in the Fifties’, which first appeared in Radical Philosophy in 1996 and was then republished in his collection The Present Lasts a Long Time: Essays in Cultural Politics (1999). Similarly, his account of Benda, Mannheim and company borrows from other essays reprinted in that volume, the earliest of which was first published as far back as 1981, while Leavis has, of course, been at the heart of Mulhern’s critical concerns from the very outset of his career. It is in the more extended account of Cultural Studies, and especially in the argument about the hidden continuity of form between that discipline and the Kulturkritik tradition, that the novelty of the book is chiefly to be found.

Mulhern says several times (in slightly differing terms) that the defining aim of Cultural Studies has been ‘to de-mystify the presumptive authority of Kulturkritik’, that as a movement (which in some ways it is better described as than as a ‘discipline’) its informing aspiration has been to contest the status of the kind of ‘culture’ laid claim to by the older trad­ition. He emphasizes that ‘popular creativity’ is ‘the very principle of Cultural Studies’, and points to the pitfalls of treating some selection of such activities as a locus of value. He is properly severe on the posturing of ‘the intellectual as fan’ and devastating on the ‘street pastoral’ of certain theorists’ invocation of an implausibly unmediated set of ‘spontaneous’ popular tastes. Following other critics, he dissects the desire in Cultural Studies to ‘be politics’, to constantly assert that what one is doing is, somehow, political, indeed more ‘political’ than conventional politics. And he approvingly cites Todd Gitlin’s call for a ‘harder-headed, less wishful cultural studies, free of the burden of imagining itself to be a political practice’. Mulhern writes (as some other critics, including myself, clearly do not) from a position that is in some ways inside contemporary Cultural Studies—one which, as always, gives his crit­ique more purchase and more force. But although deeply familiar with this literature, he maintains a certain theoretical distance from its populist enthusiasms, and his own idiom is inflected by the austerer tones derived from the European high Marxist tradition of Gramsci, Lukács and Adorno.

It is clear that the two figures who most engage Mulhern’s intellectual energies in this book are Williams and Hall; no other writers mentioned in the book are discussed at anything like the same length nor, despite occasional polite remarks elsewhere, with the same respect, a respect which expresses itself in the form of that highest tribute, extended and responsible criticism. The section on Hall is particularly impressive, involving a neat exercise in practical criticism (if Mulhern will forgive the term) on Hall’s style, especially the function of its characteristic ‘thickness of modification’. These tics, Mulhern acutely observes, give the appearance of exactness without the reality. ‘Emphasis, in cases such as these, is the opposite of what it purports to be: it is a way of not coming to the point. It is the deceptive figure of theoretical evasion.’ His analysis here is theoretically as well as stylistically sharp, indicating, for example, the loss of explanatory power in Hall’s tendency to treat ‘the conjunctural’ and ‘the concrete’ as equivalents. (I have to say that the picture of Hall which emerges from Mulhern’s analysis, though it is no part of the latter’s intention so to represent him, seems to me that of an exceptionally alert and responsive social critic who cannot quite bring himself to acknowledge that his most fruitful perceptions are constantly escaping, and thereby drawing attention to, the limits of his inherited materialist idiom.)