Page 41 - Decoding Culture

34 DECODING CULTURE
cultural decline and in ensuring the preservation of a stable status
quo. However, it is the spirit rather than the detail of Arnold's views
that inform this century's embodiment of the 'culture and civiliza­
tion' position, so I shall here concentrate on the mediation of these
ideas in the work of Leavis and his associates. They address con­
cerns about distinctively twentieth-century culture and they were
hugely influential, if indirectly, in forming the 'literary' context in
which cultural studies first developed.
Leavis himself wrote abundantly on a range of literary and cul­
tural topics, much of his work appearing initially in the journal
Scrutiny in the 1930s. Scrutiny represented a crucial moment in lit­
erary and cultural criticism in the English-speaking world
(Mulhern, 1979) and served as a focus for the emergence of what
might loosely be called 'Leavisism'. For my present purposes,
Leavisism can be understood as having two main components: a
general cultural critique and, not unrelated, a body of detailed
analysis and evaluation of literary and cultural texts. I shall begin
this account by briefly examining the familiar features of
Leavisism's cultural critique, and then go on to consider some
aspects of the critical methodology that Leavis developed in the
course of his specific analyses. Both features had an important
impact on early cultural studies.
The basic terms of Leavis' position are made very clear on the
first page of Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture. 'In any period,'
he writes, 'it is upon a very small minority that the discerning
appreciation of art and literature depends' (Leavis, 1930: 3) . But
this minority's significance extends beyond their capacity to appre­
ciate 'art and literature' for they constitute 'the consciousness of
the race' (ibid: 4). He continues in similar vein:
Upon this minority depends our power of profiting by the finest
human experience of the past; they keep alive the subtlest and most
perishable parts of the tradition. Upon them depend the implicit

Copyrighted Material