Page 217 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

essentially uncritical celebration for negative critique. Criticism,
he wrote, ‘was only ever significant when it engaged with more
than literary issues—when . . . the “literary” was ...fore-
grounded as the medium of vital concerns deeply rooted in the
general intellectual, cultural and political life of an epoch’ (p. 107).
Hence his concluding aspiration to ‘recall criticism to its tradi-
tional role’ (p. 123), in effect to reinvent a non-academic
counter-public sphere. ‘Modern criticism was born of a struggle
against the absolutist state’, Eagleton insisted: ‘unless its future
is now defined as a struggle against the bourgeois state, it might
have no future at all’ (p. 124). This is an argument for a more
generally cultural, rather than specialist literary criticism, but for
a criticism nonetheless, and a critical, or negative, criticism at that.
It would be neither disinterested nor merely celebratory of the
‘best’ (nor was eighteenth-century criticism), but in some
respects it would indeed be Arnoldian. Clearly, Eagleton’s version
of criticism did aspire to use critical commentary on contemp-
orary culture to change people’s minds. The rhetoric was, of
course, extreme and interested, but the logic not so different from
that of Arnold. This idea recurs elsewhere, most obviously in
Frankfurt School critical theory, but also in the kind of compar-
ative literary studies pursued by Said or Jameson. When Said
insisted that the proper business of intellectuals is ‘to speak the
truth to power’, for example, he places the stress above all on their
critical function (Said, 1994, p. 71). And even if Jameson main-
tains that ‘cognitive mapping’ is really class consciousness, it
might just as plausibly be understood as critique.
Such criticism differs from Arnold and Leavis in at least two
crucial aspects: it is concerned with culture in general, rather than
merely with the ‘best’ that has been known, thought, said, written,
filmed or recorded; and it combines hostile as well as celebratory
moments into something very close to what Jameson had meant
by a double hermeneutic. Thus reformed, criticism is neither
Kulturkritik nor ‘Cultural Studies’, in Mulhern’s sense, but rather
something closer to Williams, and it seems to us an essential
aspect, a necessary moment, in any cultural studies worth the
name. But it has been by no means unchallenged. The most
important counter-argument, written from well within the ‘true’

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