I write this as a confession to a heresy I myself have pursued, riding relentlessly across the plains of theory in pursuit of the contemporary cultural Moriscos, hounding out the Leavisites, only now to find myself strapped to a stake of my own making with the flames licking the hem of my cassock. “Culture is ordinary!” I shout across over the pallid faces that stare back—but whose culture? What culture? How can we purge the elitism if the binaries that held it once so firmly in place refuse to budge?
What once sustained the idea of culture, and the oppositions that it lived on—state versus market, high versus low, mass versus elite, debased American versus unsullied European—has long since broken down, but the idea itself lives on. And if this idea had a dominant form, at least in Britain, it was that developed around the quarterly journal Scrutiny, and under the tutelage of F.R. Leavis at Cambridge. To reduce it to its very barest features, what the critics around Scrutiny aimed towards was the building of an idea of “good” culture, and the tool with which this idea was imprinted onto generations of students was practical criticism, a form of close reading that aimed towards the contextless analysis of passages of text, often anonymised and picked apart word by word.
The complement to this was the kind of canon-formation that Leavis and others engaged in. His book, The Great Tradition, reduced the vast multiplicity of English prose just five exemplary post-Shakespearean figures: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and DH Lawrence. These are, for Leavis, the great figures of the English novel (never mind that half of them aren’t English), and what was at stake in this was the definition of a tradition, linked to a strong sense of morality, from which the task of protecting culture could flow.
If a Leavisite’s aim is to defend “good” culture, then a left-Leavisite (think Hoggart, early Williams, early Hall) is one who seeks not to knock down the walls of high culture, not to let the barbarian reduce its carefully constructed pediments to rubble, but to open the gates to all-comers. There is a democratising impulse here. Good culture is not for the elite, but for everyone. Many who have written about their experiences of Leavis do so in religious terms. Adam Phillips in an interview with the Paris Review says that he “treated English literature as a secular religion”, that he was “fanatical”, “zealous”. To stretch the religious metaphor perhaps to breaking point, if the Leavisites were a secular clergy preaching the Good Book(s) to the country’s best and brightest (read: the children of upper middle classes) from their pulpits at Cambridge, then there leftwing progeny were cultural Wesleyans, taking the good word out into the fields and workshops of Britain. Many of them, not least Hoggart, Williams and E.P. Thompson taught in Adult Education; Raphael Samuel spent his career at Ruskin College, the workers’ university.
The move between the two wasn’t merely generational either. Alan Sinfield says that there were four main reasons for the birth of left-Leavisism (or what he calls left-culturalism) in post-War Britain. These are: that it amplified the ideology of post-War Welfare Capitalism, that just as access to healthcare or stable housing had once been the preserve of the wealthy elite and was now, thanks to the functions of the welfare state, being broadened to more people, so too with culture; that, with the rise of scholarships for university study and the broadening of secondary after the 1944 Butler Act, it had a particular appeal to those newly class mobile; that within the left it contributed to a specific repudiation to Stalinism and its crass realist cultural form; and that, with the failure of the revolution in the West and the newly acquired affluence of workers that so worried sociologists and journalists from the 1950s on, it provided a new outlet for leftwing intellectuals.
What is interesting here is the particular relation with the state that this implied. As with the particular form that welfare in Britain took after 1945, the primary opposition here became the debasing influence of commerce on cultural life against the flourishing benevolence of the state and its technocratic managers. If the market lead to a flattening of culture—the term “mass” culture popular at the time says a lot about the assumptions underpinning it—then fully qualified professional cultural workers were needed to properly evaluate what was given money was truly worthy of it. Culture should thus be taken out of the grubby world of commerce and lifted up, protected, by state funding.
As Sinfield says though, this is not a break with the elitism of the Leavisites, merely an extension of it. Popular culture was still maligned, its influence on the working class seen as a deadening one, and a particular tradition of good culture was still promoted, even if now the aim was not to preserve access to it but to encourage all to enjoy.
Even today, it’s hard to avoid this way of thinking when looking at culture. In Britain, many of the institutions that grew to fund cultural production remain. The BBC is still producing more interesting television and radio than its market-driven competitors, the Arts Council still provides grants to artists, galleries, publications, museums and writers. During the Blair years there was even an extension of state largesse after its nadir under Thatcher. The National Lottery was introduced, the funds from which provide millions of pounds every year to cultural and historical causes, and since 2001 the vast majority of museums and galleries in the country have been freely accessible, encouraging millions more to visit. As the Arts Council document Great Art for Everyone claimed, “In 2009/10 76 per cent of the adult population engaged with the arts”, a great feat by anyone’s standards. But drill down through the hype and, as Robert Hewison says, the main consumers of culture in Britain are a tiny few who regularly attend galleries and theatres, the majority of people have only fleeting, if any, contact with the high arts and state-sponsored culture.
As Hewison writes:
For all of the optimistic interpretations placed upon them, the overall findings of the Taking Part survey [a survey of cultural habits and consumptions [and its predecessors show only a marginal shift, if that, in the social patterns of cultural consumption since 1997. It is true that there has been growth in the size of the cultural sector and the importance of the economic role that it plays, but it may be that those whom the administrators of public funding for culture serve are principally themselves, since they have the cultural capital to occupy professional-executive positions, and are members of the class that is the principal beneficiary of publicly funded culture. It may not be that culture is being intentionally treated as a means of exclusion; indeed, it is the openness that it displays – aesthetically and formally promiscuous, socially anti-elitist – that is its most prominent characteristic. Yet this openness may not be as open as it appears.
Culture may be for everyone, but not everyone wants the kind of culture they are given.
There is still a seductive logic to left-culturalism though, and I find myself struggling to shake it. I’m resistant to biographical explanations for this (I would probably shove myself into the bracket, albeit updated, of Sinfield’s class mobile scholarship kid for whom this appeals), and I’d rather look for answers in the broader movements of culture and class. Attendant with Blairite cultural capital was a market-driven managerialism that gives lie to the neat distinction between state=good, market=bad. State and market have never been separate sphere, and its idealist to say the least to think that “good” culture is unsullied by the market. It’s not obvious however how we should conceive or engage with culture, and as someone committed to a form of “good” culture, I’m reluctant to simply give up on it. A shift is obviously required, but I can only grope towards it. But it’s obvious we will need to kill the Leavis in our heads.