Culture/Metaculture

Francis Mulhern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134852215
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Culture/Metaculture is a stimulating introduction to the meanings of 'culture' in contemporary Western society. This essential survey examines:

* culture as an antidote to 'mass' modernity, in the work of Thomas Mann, Julien Benda, José Ortega y Gasset, Karl Mannheim and F. R. Leavis
* changing views of the term in the work of Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, T. S. Eliot and Richard Hoggart
* post-war theories of 'popular' culture and the rise of Cultural Studies, paying particular attention to the key figures of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall
* theories of 'metaculture', or the ways in which culture, however defined, speaks of itself.

Francis Mulhern's interdisciplinary approach allows him to draw out the fascinating links between key political issues and the changing definitions of culture. The result is an unrivalled introduction to a concept at the heart of contemporary critical thought.

PART I
KULTURKRITIK

1
AGAINST MASS CIVILIZATION

Between the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and the conclusion of the Second World War in 1945, Europe underwent one of the most convulsive general transformations in its history. The killing factories of the Great War did not run on blood and money alone: they devoured constitutions, social orders, traditions – whole ways of life. After thirty years of armed conflict in and among the societies of the continent, fought amid economic disorder and feverish cultural agitation, little remained of Europe’s long nineteenth century. In the middle years of this long, complex sequence, it seemed evident that something was nearing its end. The struggles to interpret and perhaps affect that outcome form the cultural history of the time.

An adequate account would emphasize the incongruous experience of inter-war capitalism, which saw brilliant developments in the repertoire of production – the new world of automobiles, radio and cinema – but also chaos in finance and trade; the impotence of liberal parliaments in the face of domestic and international disorder; the challenge of organized labour and, above all, its revolutionary communist left; and the march of fascism (Hobsbawm 1994). In most interpretations, then and later, these political manifestations illustrated the ultimate terms of choice. But in another perspective, they were no more than variant instances of a single, fundamentally coherent and probably irresistible historical tendency. For one kind of intellectual, the practitioner of Kulturkritik, the historic stake was the future of culture in the epoch of modernity, whose culminating feature, now manifest, was the rise of the masses, the distinctive life-form of civilization. Five classic statements define this high-minded rally against the new times. Five distinguished writers – one German, one French, one Hungarian, one Spanish, one English – embody its prophetic style: Thomas Mann, Julien Benda, Karl Mannhein, José Ortega y Gasset and F.R. Leavis. Together, they substantiate the underlying unity of Kulturkritik.

THE UNPOLITICAL THOMAS MANN

Thomas Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, or ‘reflections of an unpolitical man’, was written during the First World War, and appeared in its last weeks.¹ Mann is of course best known for his novels, and for his leading part in the intellectual resistance to fascism. In the Reflections, however, he expressed himself as a German patriot concerned to explain, as if in an ‘uninhibited ... private letter’, why his country must not submit to France and Britain ([1918] 1983a: 7). Mann’s wartime nationalism is not, here and now, the chief interest of his essay (though his casual racism is memorable, and, as we will see, the theme of national–racial identity cannot be marginalized as an unfortunate period extravagance). What is important is that he saw in Germany’s war against the western allies the last stand of a traditionalist order against the subversive spiritual forces of modernity,² or in the terms that were already classic in German idiom, of ‘culture’ against ‘civilization’.

The opposition between German Kultur and French civilization marked every aspect of the two societies. For all its avowedly personal, essayistic character, Mann’s discourse was regular to the point of schematism:

Germany	France (and Britain)
culture/Kultur	civilization
art (= poetry, music)	literature (= prose)
protestantism	universalism
burgher	bourgeois
national feeling	humanitarianism
pessimism	progressivism
life	society
irony	radicalism
reverence	enlightenment
inwardness	reason
people	‘class and mass’
aristocracy	democracy
ethics	politics

Mann’s text set these binaries in an abstract, quasi-musical play of elaboration and variation, with the aim of showing the moral cohesion of each of the two national sets, and the irreducible opposition between them. Thus, he maintained, Kultur was intrinsically national, whereas civilization on the French model was not a development of a national culture but the liquidation of it. Civilization is ‘what all nations have in common’. Indeed it could not even claim so much, for the nation, not some programmatic ‘humanity’, was the true ‘bearer of the general, of the human quality’ (Mann 1983a: 179). It would be misconceived to challenge French radicalism, with its commitment to systematic programmes of social change, in the name of a political alternative – ‘as if the political attitude were not always one and the same: the democratic one’ (p. 15). Politics as such was the end of personal inwardness, being ‘participation in the state, zeal and passion for the state’. Democracy was ‘the state for novels’, or ‘literature’, which, as ‘linguistically articulated intellect’, was the antithesis of Kultur (p. 218). Democracy was ‘finis musicae, ... the end of music’ (pp. 23, 200).

France, then, did not merely represent a contrasting, and now hostile, national culture: rather it most fully represented the historical tendencies that would extinguish national feeling and Kultur as modes of existence. Across the battle lines were ranged the forms of an alien future. Defeat would mean ‘conversion’ to civilization, the spiritual triumph not merely of the military victors but of their internal collaborators, Germany’s ‘literary men’, with their corrosive, ‘nihilistic’ enthusiasm for progress and democracy. (Mann’s prototypical ‘literary man’ was his own brother, Heinrich, at the time the more influential novelist of the two.) However, it might be that German irony could moderate the radical probabilities of the future. Irony, in Mann’s definition, was ‘the self-betrayal of the intellect in favour of life’ – in other words, the opposite of the ‘radical’ belief in consistency at all costs. ‘Is truth an argument’, he asked, ‘when life is at stake?’ (pp. 13, 49) And in that spirit, turning to reflect on the prospect of universal suffrage, he suggested that such a reform need not entail capitulation to ‘democracy’, that life might yet outwit radical intellect. An ideal suffrage, answering to tradition, would be ‘aristocratic, ingeniously graduated’. If general voting rights must be conceded, it was only because ‘in a sphere in which it is impossible to give each his own, nothing else remains but to give everyone the same’ (p. 194). Yet, the democratic effects of the reform, an egalitarian pretence fostering ‘the tumult of party campaigns’, might be tempered by another innovation that seemed progressive but need not be: ‘the freest opportunity for education’ would promote the formation of an aristocracy of merit such as Nietzsche had urged. And the governing value of this education would be ‘reverence’ for the national character with its ‘inward’ sensibility, not ‘French’ enlightenment but German traditionalism (p. 187). Forming a type quite opposed to ‘civilization’s literary man’ driven by the itch to reason and reform, the authentically German intellectual would embody the ‘suprapolitical, powerfully ethical moment’ of Kultur, would be that paradoxical representative figure, the 'unpolitical man'.³

JULIEN BENDA, CLERC

The critic and philosopher Julien Benda appeared to confirm Mann’s comparative geography of mind. He militantly opposed all forms of romanticism in art and philosophy, deploring the loss of the eighteenth century’s classical ethos. He abominated any appeal to patriotic affinity in intellectual affairs – this was ‘essentially a German invention’ (Benda [1928] 1969). Indeed he went further, rejecting humanitarian and internationalist programmes as mock-universal particularisms of the same kind. His formative public experience had been the controversy over the trial and imprisonment of a Jewish army officer on false charges of espionage, the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s, which pitted universal against nationalist values in a mythic civil war of France’s intelligentsia. Kultur was the epitome of everything he fought against. ‘Irony’ is not a word that will occur to any reader in connection with his writing, which on the contrary was ‘radical’ and ‘dogmatic’ in its assertion of objective, perennial values. He was, in a single, sufficient word, ‘French’.

For Benda, the crisis of modernity was that of the ethics of intellectual life. Betrayal – treachery or treason – was the charge that he laid against the intellectuals of the new century in his famous polemic of 1928, La Trahison des clercs. He might more pointedly have chosen ‘heresy’ as the term of indictment, for in setting aside the modern noun intellectuel in favour of the anachronistic clerc, or man in holy orders, he committed a whole social category to an imprescriptible code of belief and conduct, whose model was medieval priesthood.⁴ Benda's clercs formed 'a corporation whose only religion is that of justice and of truth’ (Benda [1928] 1969: 57, translation amended). For most of 2,000 years, intellect and learning had served ‘the ideal’, renouncing all individual or group self-assertion (p. 37) – the contrasting ‘realism’ of ordinary existence. Where intellectuals entered public controversy, it was as Emile Zola had intervened in the Dreyfus affair crying J’Accuse!, to defend ‘eternal’, ‘disinterested or metaphysical’ values against worldly degradation. Increasingly over the past century, however, their conduct had deteriorated. No longer aloof from social ‘passions’, they not only responded to their temptations but sought even to inflame them. The language of eternity now ‘divinized’ the basest desires of everyday life.

‘Passion’, Benda’s word, had also been Mann’s, and for all their differences of intellectual genealogy and affinity, the object of his criticism was the same. Mann would not have seconded Benda’s indiscriminate equation of race, nation and class as objects of love or loathing, but he had already traced the threat to Kultur to the phenomenon that Benda now identified as the enemy of intellectual virtue. Modernity was ‘essentially the age of politics’, and the specific treachery of the modern clerc was to have adapted to it, not restraining but ‘perfecting’ that ‘passion’, in ‘the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds’ (Benda [1928] 1969: 27). The favouring conditions of this modern development were economic and constitutional. The relative easing of material conditions encouraged fuller exploration of social possibilities, with material gain itself now established as a key index of human value. With the weakening of aristocratic prerogatives came a new style of political rule, in which popular sentiment exerted an unprecedented force. These tendencies came together in the commercial press, and conspired to fashion a new intellectual ethos whose epitome was ‘the cheap daily political newspaper’. The clercs, sustained at one time by ‘enlightened patronage’, now depended on the market in print; they wrote not for ‘peers’ but for ‘the masses’, ‘the crowds’: thus it was that ‘no one writes with impunity in a democracy’ (pp. 9–10, 112). The cumulative effect of these developments, Benda charged, was the overthrow of the humanly proper order of social authority. Plato, in Antiquity, had assumed the primacy of morality over politics. For Machiavelli, on the cusp of early modernity, these were separate realms. The clercs of the twentieth century made philosophy out of circumstance, rewriting virtue as expediency, morality as a gloss on political interest. Benda’s personal political choices, when he felt obliged to make them, were liberal; and he was later to conclude that democracy was the only political principle that was compatible with the values of the true clerc (Benda 1975: 81). But the logic of his general position was ascetic and reclusive: in a world governed by the ‘realistic’ urges of majorities, authority resided anywhere except in the timeless truth of the mind, the ideal zone that was his equivalent of the homeland of Kulturkritik.

KARL MANNHEIM’S INTELLECTUALS

Karl Mannheim shared Benda’s conviction that the crux of modern culture lay in the disordering of a consensual role for intellectuals, specifically in their relationship with politics. The themes of intellectual fanaticism and cynicism that drove Benda’s polemic returned in the sociological argument of his Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim 1936). Again like Benda, and also like his adoptive compatriot Thomas Mann, Mannheim saw the crisis as historical, as the upshot of the disintegration of a traditional society characterized by hierarchy and limited mobility, and sustaining forms of political and cultural authority that owed nothing to the goodwill of voters or markets. However, in a perspective like Mannheim’s, both men were vulnerable to charges of dogmatism: Benda for his adherence to ‘static’ ideals, which were, as his own medievalizing idiom attested, abstracted relics of the feudal order, with its ‘closed and thoroughly organized stratum of intellectuals’ (1936: 10), Mann for his traditionalist commitment to an essentially ‘German’ collective sensibility. Historically relativistic in a way that was anathema to Benda, and rationalistic in a style quite foreign to Mann, Mannheim affirmed the possibility of a progressive political–cultural outcome. His specific purpose was to elucidate the conditions and objects of a public role for intellectuals that would be coherent, principled and practical, with benign social potential. Writing from Weimar Germany, where he had gone after the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution of 1919, and from a disciplinary base in the sociology of knowledge, of which he was a leading practitioner, Mannheim proposed a distinctive strategic function for intellectuals as such, in a ‘scientific politics’.

Intensifying class consciousness was the hallmark of the present, Mannheim believed, and political culture was more and more fully organized according to the priorities of mutually antagonistic ‘party schools’. Against these partisan schemes of social value, he set the possibility of a ‘forum’ that would ‘safeguard ... the perspective of and the interest in the whole’ (p. 144). In Mannheim’s reasoning, this appeal to an overarching general interest – ‘the whole’ as a possible and desirable intellectual allegiance – did not presuppose a ‘static’ realm of objective truths beyond history (as it did for Benda) and did not imply only a preference for social compromise. The principle of his sociology was that all knowledge, and especially political knowledge, was ‘interest-bound’, and that the major social classes – workers and bourgeoisie alike – ‘have their outlooks and activities directly and exclusively determined by their specific social situations’ (p. 140). But in the case of the intelligentsia, the effects of this determinism were paradoxical. As a stratum, intellectuals were mixed in class provenance and situation. Their only social common denominator was education, the site on which all the rival interests and ideologies of society confronted one another. The education system (specifically, universities and specialized institutions of higher learning) was an everyday constituent assembly of the mind, so to say, in which competing social knowledges might enter a process of ‘dynamic mediation’ and ‘synthesis’, for the common good. And in this lay the appropriate political function of the intelligentsia, the possibility of fulfilling ‘their mission as the predestined advocate of the intellectual interests of the whole’, and thus resolving the cultural crisis of modernity (p. 140).

This prophetic idiom of ‘mission’ and ‘destiny’, which sounds odd in a would-be scientific discourse, suggests an activist version of Benda: a clerisy indeed, but in this case positively committed to public affairs. However, the flow of Mannheim’s reasoning was disturbed by a cross-current of pessimism. Claiming to deduce the politics of the intelligentsia from the objective tendencies of the modern social order, and, above all, the logic of its education system, he nevertheless conceded that its implementation ‘in an epoch like our own’ was ‘scarcely ... possible’. The missionaries would probably be destined for altogether more desperate duties, as ‘watchmen in what otherwise would be a pitch-black night’ (p. 143). This is the understandable rhetoric of a liberal in the later days of the Weimar Republic, but its logic is that of a wider discursive context. Mannheim’s sociology was relativist, seeing ‘ideas’ as translations of ‘interests’ – fundamentally, class interests – whose power of cultural determination was, for most cases, unqualified. At the same time, he canvassed a politics whose defining value was an attainable reconciliation of interests, a ‘predestined’ discovery, not merely of a structured totality of relationships but of a deep wholeness. The educational practice of intellectuals furnished the warrant and the means of this mission. Yet Mannheim emphasized that intellectuals were neither a class nor a supra-class stratum. They formed a mixed-class entity united only by educational values. And in nominating them as a potentially decisive political agency, he was entrusting the work of ‘synthesis’ to a possibility that his general theory appeared to discount in principle: an idea whose motivating social interest was itself an idea. In this basic respect, Mannheim’s sociological reasoning ran parallel with Benda’s philosophical dualism of ideal’ and ‘real’ values, and was bound by direct discursive affiliation to Mann’s Kulturkritik – on the one hand a driven world of material interests and their validating ideologies, civilization sightless in the dark or blinded by artificial lights; on the other, Kultur, the essential, now homeless values of the human spirit.

Mannheim’s greater confidence in a habitable future only testified the more strongly to his kinship with Benda and Mann. In his vision of a specifically intellectual politics of the whole, he reanimated, for the twentieth century, the figure of a medieval clerisy, which was the ground of Benda's thought.⁵ The proposed ascent from the party schools to the forum of mediation was not so much a form of engagement in ordinary political space as an attempt to supervene over it, from a higher plane of social judgement. The activist intellectual mediator was a version, now improbably powerful, of the unpolitical man.

ORTEGA’S ARISTOCRATIC VISION

José Ortega y Gasset offered a characteristically more truculent summary of the contemporary peril. In the phrase that his book of 1930 made famous, it was ‘the revolt of the masses’. Ortega was prepared to concede that the historical prospect remained undecided: ‘in itself it contai...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I KULTURKRITIK
• PART II CULTURAL STUDIES
• PART III METACULTURE AND SOCIETY
• NOTES
• GLOSSARY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY