Culture is a stimulating and enjoyable read. I found it a good refresher course in the kind of cultural studies I learned at my Marxist-tinged university; but Terry Eagleton does much more than recapitulate his scholarship. He skewers our assumptions about the power of culture, and argues that culture today is overwhelmed by capitalism.
Eagleton is a master of pithy analogy, using reams of comparisons to distinguish between culture and civilisation, barbarity, nature and so on: “It is true that the music of Justin Bieber reaches a great many ordinary people, but so does chicken pox,” Eagleton writes. He is not just witty but driven by a strong ethical sense. The book epitomises what intellectual enquiry exists for, his many examples elucidating his argument against moral relativism.
The first chapters explore in some depth how culture relates to civilisation, suggesting that culture is a capacious concept that in many ways is related to the “social unconscious”. The latter chapters explore romantic nationalism in relation to culture, coming up to the present through colonialism and industrial capitalism. Eagleton locates his analysis within English nationalism, but tangentially, by working through the ideas of writers from Ireland (Swift, Burke and Wilde) and the German-speaking world (Herder, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud). The only English figures given more than passing mention are radicals such as William Blake and William Morris.
He discusses what culture has been in different historical contexts. “Culture can be a model of how to live, a form of self-fashioning or self-realisation, the fruit of a coterie or the life-form of a whole people, a critique of the present or an image of the future,” he writes. When allowed to flourish, culture is the social unconscious – an idea that overcomes the dichotomy between Matthew Arnold’s idea of “Culture” as “the best that has been thought and said in the world” and “culture” as a whole way of life.
Sometimes Eagleton makes definitive statements that betray the limitations of his intellectual framework. He states that culture cannot flourish in the grip of material scarcity, but does not engage with the ecological frames of traditional peoples for whom culture might be an essential condition of material survival. He offers a reasoned criticism of the post-modernist championing of “diversity”, but frames diversity as a matter of quantity and variety, whereas a more ecological view would approach diversity as beneficial symbiosis.
In his conclusion he suggests that we make hubristic claims for culture, which seems unduly provocative to those of us keen to demonstrate its impacts.
However, he makes sense when explaining how capitalism has incorporated culture for its own materialistic ends and absorbed the means for its own critique. This resonates with his earlier negativity about “diversity”, underlining how neoliberalism has appropriated “inclusiveness” and “tolerance”, stealing a march on the left. Capitalism “relegates whole swathes of its citizenry to the scrap heap, but is exquisitely sensitive about not offending their beliefs”. Commodity capitalism neutralises hierarchy and morality to such an extent that we lose the very notion of value.
He points out that cultural studies is rather exclusive, that it deals with gender, transgression and difference when it should deal with poverty, justice and socialism. However, in possible contradiction, he concludes that the central questions confronting us now are not ones that culture can deal with, but are more mundane and material – to do with war, hunger and environmental disaster. Because he emphasises culture as literary rather than material, as expression more than design, he may not see the ways that culture is potentially a vital force in tackling those mundane challenges. Culture now must be the very best that we can imagine and make, not just think and say, if we want a continuity of civilisation.
This book is not very illuminating about the institutions and economies of our sector, except in its critique of the impact of capitalism. But it will provide theoretical grist to anyone interested in defining what culture is.
Bridget McKenzie is the founding director of Flow Associates
Eagleton is a master of pithy analogy, using reams of comparisons to distinguish between culture and civilisation, barbarity, nature and so on: “It is true that the music of Justin Bieber reaches a great many ordinary people, but so does chicken pox,” Eagleton writes. He is not just witty but driven by a strong ethical sense. The book epitomises what intellectual enquiry exists for, his many examples elucidating his argument against moral relativism.
The first chapters explore in some depth how culture relates to civilisation, suggesting that culture is a capacious concept that in many ways is related to the “social unconscious”. The latter chapters explore romantic nationalism in relation to culture, coming up to the present through colonialism and industrial capitalism. Eagleton locates his analysis within English nationalism, but tangentially, by working through the ideas of writers from Ireland (Swift, Burke and Wilde) and the German-speaking world (Herder, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud). The only English figures given more than passing mention are radicals such as William Blake and William Morris.
He discusses what culture has been in different historical contexts. “Culture can be a model of how to live, a form of self-fashioning or self-realisation, the fruit of a coterie or the life-form of a whole people, a critique of the present or an image of the future,” he writes. When allowed to flourish, culture is the social unconscious – an idea that overcomes the dichotomy between Matthew Arnold’s idea of “Culture” as “the best that has been thought and said in the world” and “culture” as a whole way of life.
Sometimes Eagleton makes definitive statements that betray the limitations of his intellectual framework. He states that culture cannot flourish in the grip of material scarcity, but does not engage with the ecological frames of traditional peoples for whom culture might be an essential condition of material survival. He offers a reasoned criticism of the post-modernist championing of “diversity”, but frames diversity as a matter of quantity and variety, whereas a more ecological view would approach diversity as beneficial symbiosis.
In his conclusion he suggests that we make hubristic claims for culture, which seems unduly provocative to those of us keen to demonstrate its impacts.
However, he makes sense when explaining how capitalism has incorporated culture for its own materialistic ends and absorbed the means for its own critique. This resonates with his earlier negativity about “diversity”, underlining how neoliberalism has appropriated “inclusiveness” and “tolerance”, stealing a march on the left. Capitalism “relegates whole swathes of its citizenry to the scrap heap, but is exquisitely sensitive about not offending their beliefs”. Commodity capitalism neutralises hierarchy and morality to such an extent that we lose the very notion of value.
He points out that cultural studies is rather exclusive, that it deals with gender, transgression and difference when it should deal with poverty, justice and socialism. However, in possible contradiction, he concludes that the central questions confronting us now are not ones that culture can deal with, but are more mundane and material – to do with war, hunger and environmental disaster. Because he emphasises culture as literary rather than material, as expression more than design, he may not see the ways that culture is potentially a vital force in tackling those mundane challenges. Culture now must be the very best that we can imagine and make, not just think and say, if we want a continuity of civilisation.
This book is not very illuminating about the institutions and economies of our sector, except in its critique of the impact of capitalism. But it will provide theoretical grist to anyone interested in defining what culture is.
Bridget McKenzie is the founding director of Flow Associates
