Page 214 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Cultural criticism and cultural policy

CULTURAL STUDIES AND CULTURAL CRITICISM

However we define cultural studies, whether as the study of all
texts, or only of popular texts, it is clear that it opted for a very
different subject matter from that originally identified by cultur-
alist literary criticism. But in some important manifestations it has
retained the notion of criticism, if not exactly that of literature.
But what exactly is criticism? The classic nineteenth-century state-
ment of the case is Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Function of Criticism
at the Present Time’, first published in his Essays in Criticism in
1865. Here he had defined it as ‘a disinterested endeavour to learn
and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world’ (Arnold,
1980, p. 265). Here, as elsewhere in his work, disinterestedness
had meant ‘steadily refusing to lend [oneself] to any... ulterior,
political, practical considerations about ideas’ (p. 248). But this
disinterested criticism certainly had its own social purpose: ‘to
learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the
world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas’. It
was by ‘communicating fresh knowledge, and letting his own
judgement pass along with it’, Arnold wrote, ‘that the critic will
generally do most good to his readers’ (p. 264).
Arnold’s notion that criticism should evaluate and pass on its
evaluations, so as to do good to its readers, remained powerfully
influential in literary studies, through to the Leavises and beyond.
However, there are important objections to this notion of criticism.
Most obviously, it attributes an entirely false ‘objectivity’ to
the notion of value itself, as if Arnold’s ‘the best’, the ‘fresh’ and
the ‘true’ were simple matters of fact. These and the other dist-
inctions that define the different versions of the humanist literary
canon—for example, between more or less authentic and more
or less inspired texts—are judgements of value, rather than
statements of fact. But insofar as literary studies understands itself
as the study of ‘great’ literature, or cultural studies as the study
of ‘really’ popular culture, then such value judgements enter
into the definition of the subject matter and take on the quasi-
objectivity of pseudo-facts. In the specific case of literary studies,
moreover, the focus normally falls not simply on valued writing,
but on how to value or ‘appreciate’ it. Given that the texts chosen

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