Page 39 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 30

Contemporary Cultural Theory

attainable. For whatever the deleterious social and cultural
consequences of the rise of capitalism (and there can be little
doubt that Eliot is here often very acute), industrialisation itself
appears an essentially irreversible process. Stripped of its
peculiar Christian medievalism, and rendered compatible, if not
with secularism, then at least with Nonconformist Protes-
tantism, Eliot’s social theory might easily have proven much
less pessimistic in its general import. It is precisely such a
transformation in the culturalist paradigm, requiring a partial
rehabilitation, at least, of Arnold’s earlier reformism, that we find
in the work of Dr Leavis of Cambridge.

F.R. Leavis
The journal Scrutiny, and the group around it—F.R. Leavis
himself, his wife Q.D. Leavis, Denys Thompson, L.C. Knights—
inherited from Eliot a number of their characteristic themes,
especially a clearly organicist conception of culture, and a cor-
respondingly pessimistic understanding of recent historical
process as cultural decline. Leavis’ own organicism is at its most
apparent in his sense of literature itself ‘as essentially something
more than an accumulation of separate works: it has an organic
form, or constitutes an organic order in relation to which the indi-
vidual writer has his significance’ (Leavis, 1962, p. 184). The centre
of Leavis’ intellectual effort consists of an attempt to map out the
tradition of the English novel on the one hand, the tradition of
English poetry on the other, each imagined in exactly such organi-
cist terms, and imagined, moreover, as bearing important moral
truths—in particular, as bearers of the value of ‘life’, by which
Leavis means, in short, non-determined, spontaneous creativity
(Leavis, 1972, p. 15). For Leavis, as for Eliot, literary and non-
literary culture are thus inextricably connected: in a healthy
culture, there is ‘behind the literature, a social culture and an art
of living’ (Leavis, 1962, p. 190). And for Leavis, again as for Eliot,
such cultural health must entail some kind of unity of sophisti-
cated and popular cultures. But Leavis nonetheless privileges elite
culture—or ‘minority culture’, to use his own phrase—much
more than did Eliot. The essential value of a common culture,

30