I read in the newspapers (and so betray my age) that we are in the middle of world-wide culture wars, fought on multiple fronts by many millions firing off tweets, some of which land on newspaper pages where I encounter them. The title of this book may lead some unsuspecting browsers to think that it will have something to say about those wars. It doesn’t; the bulk of the text was written before Twitter was invented in 2006 and comprises exchanges between Francis Mulhern and Stefan Collini in which they praise and criticise each other in about equal proportions.
In What
Is Cultural Criticism? Francis Mulhern provides the Marxist Super Ego. He
thinks that there is no privileged position from which we can criticise;
neither old-fashioned pre-1939 Kulturkritik (as he calls it, without italics) or
more recent Stuart Hall-style Cultural Studies can provide a neutral
metadiscourse about our culture. We should face up to this and embrace the
truth that the only coherent interventions in cultural space are political ones
and Cultural Politics the only viable option to discredited alternatives. We
have to take the plunge: Mulhern’s latest book (2024) is thus appropriately titled
Into the Mêlée. (The
title includes two diacritical marks which Microsoft does not, in this case,
supply automatically – I have had to insert them manually; it treats melee
as an assimilated word (like hotel). Verso sticks with the traditional and
Francophile-signalling version. The book could have been titled more simply Into
the Fray.)
In relation
to Mulhern’s Super Ego, Stefan Collini plays the part of persecuted Ego who
patiently defends a practice of cultural criticism which, in relation to
literary texts, attends closely to both words on the page and collateral
information but doesn’t proceed on the assumption that the important thing is
to assign the text to a box in some prior schematism, Marxist or otherwise. If
this means you get to be accused of “liberalism”, so be it.
In this
case, I think Collini’s fastidiousness wins. He has an outstanding record as diligent
historical researcher and careful expositor and critic who writes lucid and
vigorous prose. Those virtues are on display here. Mulhern I feel (and Collini
uses the expression) over-theorises, as is the habit of punitive Super Egos. But
as Collini observes, Mulhern’s own interventions in his other writings
including some of those included in Into the Mêlée are not particularly schematic except insofar as he
shows enthusiasm for chunking history so that Periods and Movements succeed
each other rather like Modes of Production. But, in my view, Periods and
Movements only exist so that academics can have Specialisms.
I have two
criticisms and a bit of Id which needs to stage a fight.
I am getting
older and have a habit now of repeating myself but surely not on the scale of
Mulhern and Collini and even in this relatively short book.
More
substantively – and this is especially in relation to Collini’s work – they are
both rather too accepting of the inherited canon of authors about whom they are
expected to have something to say. They don’t upset applecarts. The names of
Matthew Arnold, T S Eliot, F R Leavis, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart
appear repeatedly. Stuart Hall gets in briefly as originator of Cultural
Studies as we now know it.
Where are
the surprises? Who has been left out? There is a Penguin Classics edition of
George Eliot’s splendid essays in cultural criticism but she is entirely
absent. Queenie Leavis does not appear; it’s true her Fiction and the
Reading Public (1932) won’t be on the shelves of a local bookshop - you
will need to go to Amazon for a Print on Demand copy. It may not be a very good
book but it might be thought a precursor of what later in Birmingham came to be
called Contemporary Cultural Studies.
And in
relation to Matthew Arnold and F R Leavis, is it not time to move on and find
someone else to write about, let alone promote in stylish paperback? Culture and Anarchy
is written in a daft style which invites lampoon; it’s hard to take seriously
especially if, like me, you are a non-conformist tea-drinker. F R Leavis just
announces Who’s Who in the Great Tradition and if you don’t make the cut
(Laurence Sterne “trifler”; Charles Dickens “entertainer”) then, tough. And Leavis
wasn’t even a nice man; he appalled me when as a naïve undergraduate I joined a
group taking tea with him back in 1967. Asked a question about someone’s work
he replied to the effect that he hadn’t read him for a long time but he was
surely nasty now. An eyebrow went up. Is this cultural criticism?
That’s
enough of the Id.
Postscript 2 June 2025
Another way of posing the issue might be this, Is it possible to have a trial before having a verdict? Even in those cases which satisfy the conditions for what we call a fair trial there are things which weigh with juries before they hear any evidence, most obviously the appearance and demeanour of the accused. Justice is supposed to be blind, but jurors are normally sighted and no one appears to think that they should not be able to see the accused standing before them. Then there is the appearance and demeanour of the judge; if, for example, they are too obviously hostile to the accused or the defence lawyers then juries may swing the other way. The same goes for how the lawyers strike the jury. The obscenity case brought against Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1959 more or less collapsed early on when the prosecuting barrister, the never-to-be-forgotten Mervyn Griffiths-Jones, opened his case by asking the jury “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”. In similar fashion, Mandy Rice-Davies has her place in history for a one-liner reply to a lawyer’s challenge that Lord Astor denied her allegations, “Well, he would wouldn’t he?” which lives on from its 1963 original as the tag MRDA [Mandy Rice-Davies Applies]. Lord Astor stood no chance after just that one-liner. In other words, we have often have verdicts before we have had the (full) trial. And what we call a "show trial" has the verdict in place before the trial has even begun,
In cultural and literary studies work is routinely produced which starts with the verdict and then conducts the trial; something supposedly being studied has simply been taken as an example of cultural appropriation, orientalism, neo-colonialist thinking, and (on the other side) wokeism; there are many other alternatives and if all else fails one can always fall back on bourgeois ideology. But what we are getting is a show trial.
No room is left for surprises or even for unresolved puzzles. As I write thousands of student essays are probably being written identifying something as an example of cultural appropriation and therefore guilty, end of an essay which started from the conclusion. It is an exercise almost designed to obscure how cultures might work and change. In assessing the arguments of Mulhern and Collini I suggest as a leading question: How do cultures work and change? Few work for very long and all inevitably change and continuously so, as I argue in my little Culture as Anarchy (2023). Those who police cultures always want to slow the traffic; cultural theorists probably wish it woulds stop long enough for them to do their work. But, unfortunately, you can never step into the same river twice.
