Page 40 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 31

Literature and society: from culturalism to cultural materialism

for Leavis, is its capacity to sustain a culturally superior
minority: ‘In their keeping...is the language, the changing
idiom, upon which fine living depends, and without which
distinction of spirit is thwarted and incoherent. By “culture”
I mean the use of such a language’ (Leavis, 1948, p. 145).
Like Eliot, Leavis subscribed to a theory of cultural decline.
In his version, however, the problem arises quite specifically as
a result of industrialisation and the techniques of mass produc-
tion that unavoidably accompany it. Together these generate a
‘technologico-Benthamite’ civilisation, the defining characteris-
tics of which are cultural levelling and standardisation. Hence the
remarkably bleak conclusion to New Bearings in English Poetry: ‘the
finer values are ceasing to be a matter of even conventional
concern for any except the minority... Elsewhere below, a
process of standardization, mass production and levelling down
goes forward . . . So that poetry, in the future, if there is poetry,
seems likely to matter even less in the world’ (Leavis, 1938,
pp. 213–14). Such pessimism echoes that of Eliot, though the
weight accorded to material factors is, perhaps, more reminiscent
of 1930s Marxism. And yet Leavis also insisted that: ‘enormously
. . . as material conditions count, there is a certain measure of spir-
itual autonomy in human affairs... human intelligence, choice
and will do really and effectively operate’ (Leavis, 1962, p. 184).
It was through the discipline of English, through the University
English School, and through the English teachers that it would
train, that such intelligence, choice and will were to become oper-
ative. So Leavis recovered for the culturalist tradition both the
general cultural evangelism and the more specifically pedagog-
ical strategic orientation first broached by Arnold.
As with Arnold and Eliot, so too with Leavis—a common
culture, that of the pre-industrial organic community, and its
continuing echo in the legacy of the English language, are pitted
against modern industrial civilisation. Here, though, there can be
no compromise with the existing class structure, such as Eliot was
clearly prepared on occasion to countenance. Rather, the literary
intelligentsia was to be mobilised against the developing mass
society. In itself, this almost certainly represents a much more
plausible programme of action than any in either Arnold or Eliot.

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