Page 30 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

CULTURALISM

The central motif in culturalist theory is that of a necessary antithesis
between culture and utilitarian civilization. In Culture and Society,
Williams traces the history of the concept, “culture”, as it developed
in British intellectual life from Edmund Burke (1729–97) to George
Orwell (1903–50). During the nineteenth century, Williams argues,
the concept increasingly emerged as “an abstraction and an absolute”,
merging two distinct responses: “first, the recognition of the practical
separation of certain moral and intellectual activities from the driven
impetus of the new kind of society; second, the emphasis of these
activities, as a court of human appeal, to be set over the process of
practical social judgement and yet to offer itself as a mitigating and
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rallying alternative”. The antithesis between culture and civilization,
as also that between the authenticity of natural, lived “experience”
and the mechanistic imperatives of industrialization, clearly attest to
the pain and the trauma of the very first industrial revolution, that
which occurred in Britain itself.
This is a tradition which, from Burke through to T.S.Eliot (1885–
1965), clearly embraced, in one important register, a radically
conservative reaction against capitalist modernity. But in another,
and equally important register, it embraces also a radically progressive
aspiration to go beyond that modernity: the obvious instances here
include William Blake (1757–1827), Shelley (1792–1822), William
Morris (1834–96), Orwell of course, but also Williams, whose
intellectual career is properly intelligible only as a late continuation
of this Anglo-culturalist tradition. Whatever the register, however,
culturalism remains irretrievably adversarial in its relations both to
capitalist industrialization and to utilitarian intellectual culture. This
is a tradition which underpins much of English romantic poetry, but
also much of what we often describe as the 19th century English
realist novel. It is a tradition which, in the work of Matthew Arnold
(1822–88), decisively opted for state sponsorship of education as the
mechanism by which culture could be preserved and extended, and
as the centre of resistance to the driving imperatives of an increasingly
mechanical and materialist civilization. In the late 19th century, and
even more so in the 20th, this culturalist discourse finally became
institutionalized within the academic discipline we now know as
“English”.

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