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Cultural criticism and cultural policy

of cultural studies, is almost certainly Tony Bennett’s Outside Lit-
erature. Starting from very similar premises to those in Williams,
Bennett argued for a wholesale rejection of the notion of criticism.
Philosophical aesthetics had misconstrued literary and artistic
judgement as universal modes of cognition, he observed, rather
than as socially specific applications of the particular rules
of value shared by particular valuing communities. The aesthe-
ticians thereby ‘fetishise the objects of value and deploy a
discourse of disqualification in relation to those subjects who
do not... conform to their edicts’ (Bennett, 1990, p. 160). In
aesthetic discourse, therefore, the relative intolerance character-
istic of all discourses of value effectively ‘becomes absolute’
(p. 165). Hence Bennett’s rejection of all such notions of aesthetic
value, whether Arnoldian, Leavisite, or whatever.
As it happened, however, this ‘whatever’ turned out to be
precisely the kind of neo-Marxist criticism advocated by Eagleton.
Marxism’s central failure in cultural studies, Bennett argued, was
its enduring loyalty to the ‘idealist concerns of bourgeois
aesthetics’ (p. 33). Here it becomes clear that his central objection
was to neither the exclusive stress on high culture nor the
unremitting positivity of Arnold’s hermeneutic, but to the way
criticism aspired to have an effect on its readers. Critics like
Eagleton, Said and Jameson had replicated the original Arnoldian,
and Leavisite, sense of the ‘function of criticism’, Bennett
complained: they tended ‘to re-align criticism with a totalising
conception of social and cultural critique’ (p. 194); and they hoped
to secure a political relevance for it only ‘by going back to being
what it once was—a set of interpretive procedures oriented
towards the transformation of the consciousness of individual
subjects’ (p. 195). To such idealism Bennett sought to counterpose
a thoroughgoing ‘cultural materialism’, though one that derived
from Foucault rather than from Williams. Spurning the vocation
of the ‘universal intellectual’ as critic, he insisted that the role of
the ‘specific intellectual’ now demanded ‘more specific and
localised assessments of the effects of practices of textual
commentary conducted in the light of the institutionally circum-
scribed fields of their social deployment’ (p. 10). In short, rather
than aim directly to transform the consciousnesses of individual

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