Page 40 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

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24 Chapter 2 The ‘culture and civilization’ tradition

‘Civilisation’ and ‘culture’ are coming to be antithetical terms. It is not merely that
the power and the sense of authority are now divorced from culture, but that some
of the most disinterested solicitude for civilisation is apt to be, consciously or
unconsciously, inimical to culture (1977: 26).

Mass civilization and its mass culture pose a subversive front, threatening ‘to land
us in irreparable chaos’. It is against this threat that Leavisism writes its manifestos, and
proposes ‘to introduce into schools a training in resistance [to mass culture]’ (Leavis,
1933: 188–9); and outside schools, to promote a ‘conscious and directed effort ...[to]
take the form of resistance by an armed and active minority’ (Q.D. Leavis, 1978: 270).
The threat of democracy in matters both cultural and political is a terrifying thought
for Leavisism. Moreover, according to Q.D. Leavis, ‘The people with power no longer
represent intellectual authority and culture’ (191). Like Arnold, she sees the collapse of
traditional authority coming at the same time as the rise of mass democracy. Together
they squeeze the cultured minority and produce a terrain favourable for ‘anarchy’.
Leavisism isolates certain key aspects of mass culture for special discussion. Popular
fiction, for example, is condemned for offering addictive forms of ‘compensation’ and
‘distraction’:

This form of compensation . . . is the very reverse of recreation, in that it tends, not
to strengthen and refresh the addict for living, but to increase his unfitness by
habituating him to weak evasions, to the refusal to face reality at all (Leavis and
Thompson, 1977: 100).

Q.D. Leavis (1978) refers to such reading as ‘a drug addiction to fiction’ (152), and
for those readers of romantic fiction it can lead to ‘a habit of fantasying [which] will
lead to maladjustment in actual life’ (54). Self-abuse is one thing, but there is worse:
their addiction ‘helps to make a social atmosphere unfavourable to the aspirations
of the minority. They actually get in the way of genuine feeling and responsible think-
ing’ (74). For those not addicted to popular fiction, there is always the danger of
cinema. Its popularity makes it a very dangerous source of pleasure indeed: ‘they
[films] involve surrender, under conditions of hypnotic receptivity, to the cheapest
emotional appeals, appeals the more insidious because they are associated with a
compellingly vivid illusion of actual life’ (Leavis, 2009: 14). For Q.D. Leavis (1978),
Hollywood films are ‘largely masturbatory’ (165). Although the popular press is
described as ‘the most powerful and pervasive de-educator of the public mind’ (Leavis
and Thompson, 1977: 138), and radio is claimed to be putting an end to critical
thought (Leavis, 2009), it is for advertising, with its ‘unremitting, pervasive, masturbat-
ory manipulations’ (Leavis and Thompson, 1977: 139), that Leavisism saves its most
condemnatory tone.
Advertising, and how it is consumed, is Leavisism’s main symptom of cultural
decline. To understand why, we must understand Leavisism’s attitude to language. In
Culture and Environment, Leavis and Thompson state: ‘it should be brought home to
learners that this debasement of language is not merely a matter of words; it is a