Page 38 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Literature and society: from culturalism to cultural materialism

the period since the First World War, at least insofar as the general
intellectual culture is concerned, is almost certainly that occupied
by the poet T.S. Eliot. Eliot was born and brought up in the United
States and became English only by an act of conversion, which
came to embrace not only British naturalisation, but also High
Tory politics, High Anglican religion and High Royalist monar-
chism. A deeply learned man, greatly influenced by Hegelian
philosophy, his prose writings include a very serious attempt to
fashion a specifically Christian social theory. For Eliot, as for
Arnold, culture came to be understood in an essentially totalis-
tic and organicist fashion: thus a specifically ‘literary’ culture
evolves, not as the creation of an aggregate of individual writers,
but rather, in characteristically Hegelian fashion, as that of ‘the
mind of Europe... which abandons nothing en route’ (Eliot, 1963,
p. 16). Eliot’s most celebrated discussion of the concept of culture,
in his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, draws on Arnold’s
insistence on the connectedness of the literary and the non-
literary, but expands upon it so as to develop a much more
contemporary, anthropological sense of the term. ‘By “culture”’,
Eliot writes, ‘I mean first of all... the way of life of a particular
people living together in one place. That culture is made visible
in their arts, in their social system, in their habits and customs,
in their religion’ (Eliot, 1962, p. 120).
A culture, in Eliot’s sense of the term, is only properly such
insofar as it is shared in by a whole people. But a common culture
is not, however, one in which all participate equally: it will be
consciously understood only by the cultural elites of the society,
but can nonetheless be embodied in the unconscious texture of
the everyday lives of the non-elite groups. In principle, culture
is not a minority resource to be disseminated through education,
but is rather already (more or less consciously) present in the lives
of all classes. But if this is so for a ‘healthy’ society, such as Eliot
imagined medieval Europe to have been, then it is much less so
for the increasingly non-Christian society conjured into being
largely by industrialisation. There is an important sense, then, in
which Eliot’s social theory becomes simply inoperable: if the good
society is one modelled as closely as possible on those of the
European Middle Ages, then in truth the good society is no longer

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