Page 34 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

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18 Chapter 2 The ‘culture and civilization’ tradition

order. It marked the beginning of what Benjamin Disraeli would call the ‘two nations’
(Disraeli, 1980), and it eventually gave birth to the first political and cultural move-
ment of the new urban working class – Chartism. It is out of this context, and its
continuing aftermath, which the political study of popular culture first emerges.

Matthew Arnold

The study of popular culture in the modern age can be said to begin with the work of
Matthew Arnold. In some ways this is surprising as he had very little to say directly
about popular culture. Arnold’s significance is that he inaugurates a tradition, a particu-
lar way of seeing popular culture, a particular way of placing popular culture within
the general field of culture. The tradition has come to be known as the ‘culture and
civilization’ tradition. My discussion of Arnold’s contribution to the study of popular
culture will focus mainly (but not exclusively) on Culture and Anarchy (1867–9), the
work that secured, and continues to sustain, his reputation as a cultural critic. Arnold
established a cultural agenda that remained dominant in debate from the 1860s until
the 1950s. His significance, therefore, lies not with any body of empirical work, but
with the enormous influence of his general perspective – the Arnoldian perspective –
on popular culture.
For Arnold (1960), culture begins by meaning two things. First and foremost, it is a
body of knowledge: in Arnold’s famous phrase, ‘the best that has been thought and
said in the world’ (6). Secondly, culture is concerned ‘to make reason and the will of
God prevail’ (42). It is in the ‘sweetness and light’ of the second claim that ‘the moral,
social, and beneficial character of culture becomes manifest’ (46). That is, ‘culture . . .
is a study of perfection . . . perfection which consists in becoming something rather
than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an
outward set of circumstances’ (48). In other words, culture is the endeavour to know
the best and to make this knowledge prevail for the good of all humankind. But how
is culture to be attained? According to Arnold, we shall attain it by ‘the disinterested
and active use of reading, reflection, and observation, in the endeavour to know the
best that can be known’ (179). Culture, therefore, no longer consists in two things, but
in three. Culture is now the means to know the best that has been thought and said, as
well as that body of knowledge and the application of that knowledge to the ‘inward
condition of the mind and spirit’ (31). There is, however, a fourth aspect to consider:
Arnold insists that culture seeks ‘to minister to the diseased spirit of our time’ (163).
This would appear to be an example of culture’s third aspect. However, we are quickly
told that culture will play its part ‘not so much by lending a hand to our friends and
countrymen in their actual operations for the removal of certain definite evils, but rather
in getting our countrymen to seek culture’ (163–4; my italics). This is Arnold’s fourth
and final definition: culture is the seeking of culture, what Arnold calls ‘cultivated inac-
tion’ (163). For Arnold, then, culture is: (i) the ability to know what is best; (ii) what