6.- mulhern collini paper

8/12/2019 6.- Mulhern Collini Paper

1/15

The Poverty of Criticism:

On the Mulhern-Collini Controversy*1)

Criticism Reemerged

David Simpsons article in a recent issue of the New Left Review has shown

that aftershocks from the several-year controversy on the idea of culture

between Francis Mulhern and Stefan Collini in the journal have yet to

diminish. The debate began with Collinis sympathetic but edgy review of

Mulherns Culture/Metaculture (2000). Mulhern, as he defined in his book, had

made bold claims of a hidden continuity between cultural criticism and

Cultural Studies.1) In Culture/Metaculture Mulhern put these two discourses of

culture into a common category of metaculture, which he holds is to make a

symbolic resolution of politics as such. On the one hand this categorization

was bold enough in its deliberate challenge to the supposed political

orientation of the dominant forms of Cultural Studies, with their emphasis on

the materiality of culture and its embedded ideological characters. On the

other hand, Mulherns designation of cultural criticism as metaculture is notnew; rather, it confirms the widely acknowledged death of cultural criticism.

* This research was supported by the Duksung Womens University Research Grants of 2005.

1) Mulhern distinguishes between the two modes of cultural discourse: Kulturkritik and Cultural

Studies. The former covers the tradition of cultural criticism in Europe since the 19th century

including such British critics as Matthew Arnold, F. R. Leavis, T. S. Eliot and Richard Hoggart,

while the latter indicates British Cultural Studies the central figure of which is Stuart Hall.

2006 10 pp.

115-133


2/15

2 Jikwan Yoon

Interestingly, the debate between Collini and Mulhern has foregrounded theproject of cultural criticism, along with its practical significances, while

blurring the topics related to Cultural Studies, though, as Collini

acknowledged, Mulhern originally devoted more effort to the latter. Setting

aside the question of the debates productivity, I think the debate is an

interesting and thought-provoking event that has filled the pages of a

left-wing journal with dubious, phantom-like Arnoldian terms such as criticism,

distance and disinterestedness. Having long ago disappeared from left-wing

terminology, these terms have subsequently been adopted by other writers

including liberals, humanists, and traditionalists among them. The triumphant

but seemingly temporary reemergence of these terms is primarily due to

Collinis successful strategy of sparking a debate on his favorite topic of

cultural criticism and, in part, to the sincere and valuable responses of the

Marxist critic Mulhern.

In the early stage of the debate, however, Mulhern reveals an impulse to

exorcise the phantoms, as manifested in his rather impatient and

condescending tone (originating from a leftist Olympian attitude?). A similar

attitude is found in Simpson, who, joining the debate later with a brief and

rather biased comparison of the writing styles of the two antagonists, glosses

over Collinis agenda in favor of Mulherns. However, Simpson defends

Cultural Studies echoing a formulated defense of its politicality: he presumes

an easy identification of politics and culture and simply reminds us of the

political foundation of cultural institutions. Simpsons writing shows the typical

response of a cultural leftist: he dismisses cultural criticism or criticism in

general as bourgeois and elitist, yet resists efforts to put Cultural Studies, at

least in its structuralist and post-structuralist form, into the same camp as

cultural criticism. Nevertheless, as Mulhern himself reiterates, though elements

of cultural criticism have permeated Cultural Studies and even negated their

directives, its persistence intimates the possibility that it is inseparably fusedwith modern life and society.

The Mulhern-Collini controversy deserves to get more theoretical concern for

it can reignite the imagination and practices of the Left with such repressed

things as the Arnoldian idea of criticism. At the risk of being labeled

anachronistic, I think it is important to look again at the traditional concept of

criticism, which has been marginalized in the contemporary Anglo-American


3/15


4/15

4 Jikwan Yoon

goes beyond their contrary ideological stances: they have a fairly differentunderstanding of what politics, or political practice, is and should be. The

antipathy against criticism and culture among those who prefer an immediate

engagement and political practice has a long history that goes back to the

dispute among mid-Victorian intellectuals over the function of criticism and

the idea of culture. Indeed, Mulherns accusations against cultural criticism,

such as non-practicability and transcendental, remind us of a critique by

the utilitarian J. F. Stephen, who described the Arnoldian ideas of criticism

and culture as a transcendental theory of philosophy (Coulling 144).

What is significant in this contemporary version of the function of criticism

debate is that the opponent of criticism is a Marxist whose principal concern

is with the legacy of cultural criticism. Mulherns Marxist position opens new

vistas in the old debate, a feat that Arnolds adversaries, the Comtist and

Utilitarian bourgeois ideologues, failed to do in their full rejection of the idea

of criticism as apolitical and impractical. From his vantage point, Mulhern has

imposed on himself the theoretical task of relating the ideas of culture and

criticism to the Marxist paradigm, and his suggestion of cultural politics is

the result. For in his idea of cultural politics, the discrepancy between culture

and politics opens the possibility of certain creative interrelations and

engagements. However, his double position, denying any meaningful political

function of cultural discourses and recruiting its force in the name of 'cultural

politics' may lead to a disadvantage when it allows, as it sometimes does,

theoretical fluctuation between the two opposing modes and forms of logic.

Collini is correct in questioning this fluctuation as vague. In his latest article

in the debate, Collini pointed out that Mulhern replaced his own version of

cultural politics with a total denial of the possibility of any legitimate form

of cultural criticism(Politics 71) and that Mulhern does not fully recognise

this fact. Although Mulhern condemns that culture as a principle illegitimately

resolves politics and that the whole culture-oriented project is the end ofpolitics, he does not seem to deny that the tradition of cultural criticism has

significantly affected the formation of modernity of which politics had played a

great part.

Where does this vagueness or duplicity come from? To answer this question,

one must start with the common ground of the two opponents. Despite many

explicit contrasts, they inherently seem to agree on the essential non-identity


5/15

The Poverty of Criticism: On the Mulhern-Collini Controversy 5

of politics and culture. Both writers consider politics and culture as separatespheres, though they use different expressions: Mulhern calls the difference a

discrepancy; Collini calls it disjunctiveness. Their emphasis on the

seperateness functions as a timely corrective to the dominant cultural

tendency of conflating or even identifying the two spheres. However, there

remains a more difficult and important task of elucidating how to establish a

real and living connection between the two spheres. In their struggle for this

connection, they seem to share some symptoms of failure which are brought

about by their common poverty of criticism. To borrow the phrases Mulhern

uses in his description of metaculture, Mulherns poverty of criticism is the

result of a declared principle, while Collinis is a self-defeating final

implication (Culture/Metaculture xix).

In his defense of culture and criticism, Collini advocates the political

significance of cultural criticism, for it requires the presumption that

disciplined reflection partly grounded in an extensive intellectual and aesthetic

inheritance can furnish a place to stand in attempting to engage critically with

the narrow pragmatism (or specialism) of any particular political programme

(Culture Talk 46). Moreover, against Mulherns definite No to this modest

proposal, on the ground that reflection as such cannot affect anything, even a

critical engagement with politics, Collini protests that he limited its

contribution to the narrow pragmatics of politics. Here again, Mulherns

attitude echoes the anti-Arnoldian attacks of Victorian utilitarians, though

Collinis response also sounds like a retreat from Arnolds project of

privileging critical reflection as something necessary and urgent for social

change.

In his advocating the political function of criticism, Collini deserves to be

placed in the line of the Arnoldian idea of culture. However, his modest and

inevitably eclectic stance implies a reservation about the possible intervention

of criticism. In fact, he ends up denying any possibility of transformativeeffects that disciplined reflection can have in social and political movements.

Collinis tautological dictum intellectual practice is intellectual practice may

be a logical conclusion of his restrictive understanding of critical potentials.

This view differs radically from Leaviss sanction of (literary) criticism as a

locus of critique within the technologico-Benthamite civilization. It also

differs greatly from the Arnoldian idea of using criticism for urgent fights and


6/15

6 Jikwan Yoon

as a most efficient weapon against the dominant Philistinism. Moderate andrealistic, Collinis understanding of the function of criticism deprives of culture

and criticism much of the practical energy that the more militant proponents

think they have. And, worse, it makes it impossible to search for an

integration of the idea of culture and criticism with leftist thinking. The

retreat by Collini incites Mulhern to detect lacunae in Collinis eclectic attitude

and declare that criticism has no place in politics. Hence, Collini and Mulhern

stand again on the same ground. They push the idea of criticism back into its

self-referentiality, forever excluding it from the sphere of politics as such.

Mulherns concept of politics as such is double-edged: on the one hand, it

successfully avoids the fallacy of reducing everything to politics; on the other

hand, it tends to obliterate any possibility of overcoming the dichotomy

between culture and politics. By this concept, he tries to designate the

material sphere where the more essential class struggle for hegemony in the

totality of social relations goes on; and he combines this idea with a socialist

solution to the basic contradictions of a capitalist society, which are

represented by the working class movement. However, on could ask if the

struggle in the level of culture is ever entirely disappeared from the process

of politics as such. That is, is the cultural struggle ever excluded from the

organization of actual alignments along political lines? At every moment of a

struggle such critical and cultural activities as objective judgment and

persuasion should be practised. Furthermore, the real strength of the forces

mobilized for movements significantly depends on cultural resources, the

formation of which is based on everyday cultural practices and on the

participation of cultural institutions at various levels of society. Wars of

position in a Gramscian sense have become more essential in the

transformation project, not only for Western countries but for a third world or

a semi-peripheral country like South Korea.

Simpsons point about journals, books, and newspapers being a workplace iscorrect in this sense, as is his proposition that not only politics as such but

even classrooms can be arenas of politics. However, even if we follow

Simpson and acknowledge that classrooms do not simply reproduce the social

dominants but rework a set of finite social relations with unpredictable

social outcomes (74), we cannot avoid asking a few basic questions, if not

even inquire into the degree of that unpredictability. For instance, what is


7/15


the content of the struggle that occurs in a classroom, and how vigorous isthe struggle? Simpson, however, is symptomatically silent about this. It is one

thing to identify a classroom as political ground; it is another to understand

the difference between Simpson's classroom (teaching and writing about

Cultural Studies) and, for example, Leaviss classroom (training a critical

mind). It is crucial to consider which type of classroom produces more

effective politics in the long run.

Talking about cultural workers, Simpson supposes the existence of politics as

such in some adequate self-consciousness on the part of teacher/writer

(without which there is only ideology, as there is everywhere else) (77).

However, although self-consciousness can be political consciousness, in that it

refers to a persons sense of his or her own political position, I doubt

whether self-consciousness is necessarily accompanied by a recognition of the

sphere beyond ideology. A sense of position can not help being ideological if

it does not contain a radical recognition of something beyond. A project of

enhancing or preserving the creativity that has been systematically threatened

with nullification, against which a Leaviss classroom fights in its own way,

may be more resourceful for a long-term mobilization even in the realm of

politics as such. The same can be said for the question of communication.

Disciplined reflection becomes public through communicative forms, written or

spoken, which are materialized in cultural institutions such as journals. The

effort to democratize forms of communication is important. So, too, is the

everyday struggle of writers to fill the space given to them (sheet of paper,

etc.) with creative elements and produce some resources available for the

fight against the capitalist system, under which most forms of communication

currently operate.

Beyond the Dichotomy of Culture and Politics

Mulherns emphasis on the hidden continuity between cultural criticism and

Cultural Studies invites us to rethink the similarities and differences of the

two types of cultural discourse. Prioritizing culture ahead of politics, as

Mulhern suspects common in both of the types, causes a conceptual problem

only as it hinders the achieving a proper access to the multileveled meanings


8/15

8 Jikwan Yoon

of culture and politics. This is why Collini criticizes Mulherns tendency tosubsume all of the discourses on culture into a single category of metaculture.

According to Mulhern, culture in principle questions the notion of politics as

such, doing so in the following manner: in the declared principle, in the case

of Kulturkritik, or as a self defeating final implication, in the case of Cultural

Studies. Furthermore the latters political assault on high-cultural privilege

has turned out to be, at the same time, a renewed attempt at a cultural

dissolution of politicsa popular leftist mutation of metacultural

discourse(Beyond Metaculture xix-xx).

It is necessary here, however, to more elaborately distinguish among the

different paths that the two different cases of authorizing the culture in

principle take in the process of dissolving politics as such. Kulturkritik,

declared as it may be, always leaves its mission of dissolving politics

unfulfilled; Cultural Studies, on the other hand, through its permeation of

culture, leads to the dissolution of politics. When Arnold, whom Mulhern

regards as a central figure in the Kulturkritik mode, suggested the idea of

disinterestedness, which refers to a sense of detachment from short-term

political practices; he presented the idea as a way of coping with and

resisting dominant and powerful bourgeois ideologies, such as utilitarianism

and individualism. The notion of nullifying politics as such seemed to be

simply impossible to Arnold. In this sense, the prefix meta is more suitable

for Cultural Studies than for cultural criticism, at least in terms of the cultural

criticism envisioned by Arnold. The proposition here, in contrast to Mulherns,

is that the relationship between cultural criticism and Cultural Studies is best

characterized by discontinuity rather than continuity. Moreover, while cultural

criticism has never declared that politics will entirely dominate culture,

Cultural Studies insists on the ubiquitous presence of culture. The

discontinuity between the two approaches centers on the question of quality

and value. As Mulhern himself rightly comments, Cultural Studies favor astrictly egalitarian ethic of attention within them. . . . without any presumptive

test of quality (Culture/Metaculture xviii). A greater amount of emphasis

should be put on this opposition of egalitarianism and a quality-oriented mind

rather than subsuming the two discourses of culture into a single category

when they are contrasted.

An introduction of the structuralist view of culture as signifying practices


9/15


brought about a break between cultural criticism and Cultural Studies,endowing the latter with more scientificity by putting the question of quality

out of consideration. By weakening an element of critical recognition and

strengthening that of systematic understanding, Cultural Studies entered into

the circle of a theoretic network and therefore increase its discursiveness. By

significantly incorporating the Gramscian ideas of hegemony and civil society

to cultural theory, Cultural Studies has developed its project of interpreting

political agendas at a given conjuncture. However, a textualizing impulse in

Cultural Studies sweeps over to reduce the uttered political orientation into

textual practice, turning the hegemonic struggle into a matter of winning

hegemony within textual spheres. Mulhern also criticizes the textual

orientation of Cultural Studies but he does not recognize the possibility that

this fatal retreat into textuality may, at least partly, be caused by an

exclusion of criticism from the discussion on culture.

When pure theoreticism and purely strategic thinking are considered as the

two other sides of one coin, a powerful objection against Mulherns idea might

be found in the following statement of his own on a paradox: culture, as it

enters directly into the sphere of political practice, negates its ideal

self-image, becoming a tactic(Beyond Metaculture 103). It may be

important to think about the ontology of this paradox, especially in terms of

overcoming the dichotomy of culture and politics. The paradox seems to be

inspired by the everyday experience of subjects, whether an individual or a

group, in their struggle in specific historical moments and movements.

Mulhern himself implies his inclination to strategic thinking when he describes

political practice as trans-cultural in its reworking of values as demand,

sometimes promoting given identities and preferences, sometimes rearticulating

or disturbing or backgrounding them, according to judgements based on a

socially determinate programme and strategy(103).

One can dwell on Mulherns idea of judgments based on a socially determinateprogramme and strategy. Any judgments cannot be done properly irrespective

of social condition, but if not to fall into a mechanical reflection of a given

determination, a vital consciousness is needed in order to see things as they

really are. This very consciousness is called a spirit of criticism, as Arnold

said, which applies fresh ideas to the fixed things as freely as possible. For,

even if political practices in the hegemonic struggle should be strategically


10/15

10 Jikwan Yoon

performed, there must be the moments when some creative breakthroughs,rather than predetermined responses, are more demanded.

Gramscis distinction between long-term organic social movements and

short-term contingent ones highlights the multileveled strategies and

programmes that correspond to the various phases of social transformation.

The strategy with a longer and deeper dimension demands a more vital

connection to cultural practices as it should cover the total grasp of human

activities. Though politics, as Mulhern said, concerns a fight that determines

social relations as a whole, those social relations are inescapably connected

to human ontological conditions. Thus, the moment of genuine transformation

necessarily involves a combination of individual self-realization and social

liberation. Mulhern suggests cultural politics as an alternative to the practices

of Cultural Studies, but it is too deeply inclined to strategic thinking to entail

an ontological side of human conditions. The two dangers of culturalism and

politicism can be evaded, not by equating culture and politics without

mediation, but by reinvigorating the critical spirit to overcome the poverty of

criticism. Here the Arnoldian function of criticism is met again.

As was mentioned earlier, the Arnoldian ideal of disinterestedness, a state of

mind that can make a judgment that is free from sectarian interests, has been

open to accusations of both apoliticality and strong ideological features.

However, such critiques do not exhaust the potential of this ideal for

rethinking the relationship between culture and politics. They seem to be

contradictory but are concordant in their limited understanding of what the

idea of disinterestedness accomplishes in coping with the contemporary

bourgeois society.4)

Here, it is suggested that the idea of disinterestedness can be

reconceptualized in such a way that is possible to recruit from it a

transformative potentiality. It is especially interesting that Collini tried to

relate Arnold to Marx for the purpose of defending cultural criticism, but Iwould like to go further and propose theoretic connections between the

Arnoldian concept of criticism as disinterestedness and Lukacss thesis on the

unification of the objectivity and the partisanship. Such connection may sound

bold in its intention to subvert the long-established opposition between the

two but it is necessary to consider what the Arnoldians and Lukascians have

4) On a detailed discussion of this, see Yoon, Culture and Criticism 89-108.


11/15


12/15

12 Jikwan Yoon

cannot be rejected simply as a fallacy of the young Marx. Even The Capital itself isoriented towards a disinterested scientific reflection that differs from the bourgeois

interests that are represented by his contemporary political economists. Going

back to Lukacs, it is possible to add that his emphasis on the necessity of

self-criticism differs from Collinis assumption of the fundamental non-relatedness

between disinterestedness and partisanship; it also differs from Mulherns overall

prioritization of positionality. Lukacs suggests that impartial self-criticism on the

internalized devastating and degrading effect (81) of the capitalist system

nourishes people and gives them class consciousness, which in turn gives them the

potential to overcome the reified reality.

Comments by the two discussants on literary works clearly reveal their common

problem in thinking about a third possibility. Mulhern exemplifies his proposition

that the sphere of art and ideas also takes shape and direction in the same divided

historical world of sense that frames prevailing public discourse, with the Raymond

Williams analysis of English industrial novels and Hardys Jude the Obscure.

Williams thinks that in the English industrial novels a strong, and eloquent witness

to the reality of working-class suffering coexisted, imaginatively, with an

ungovernable fear of mass irrationality. In Hardys novel, Williams finds that a

critique of the prevailing social order of culture was mixed with the ambiguity of

its truncated biblical motto (What Is Cultural Criticism? 38).

According to Mulhern, the vision of literature does not easily escape

disturbance when the literature becomes reflective in the stronger

sense(What Is Cultural Criticism? 38). However, is the disturbance of vision

in itself, especially in Jude the Obscure, necessarily a limitation in the

reflexivity of a novel? Or does the disturbance of vision come from the

insight of a creative writer who reaches beyond the mundane perspective of

living? Mulhern seems to neglect such questions. Williams, on the contrary,

tries to elucidate the general structure of feeling of the society that the novel

describes; in particular, he tries to balance the recognition of evil with thefear of being involved. Furthermore, his analysis contains a critical judgment

that the sentimental coexistence of fear and pity produces artistic failure. To

illustrate this point, Williams distinguishes George Eliots Middlemarch from an

industrial novel, such as Felix Holt. In Middlemarch Eliot naturally sees the

society at a deeper level than its political abstraction indicates (118).

Mulhern shows little interest in the different levels of the novels achievement and


13/15


his generalization that the reflection of the novel must reveal a disturbance ofvision may negate all the theoretical assumptions of realism in literature. In this

sense, at least, Collini is more to the point when he says that the novel does not

offer a single, unambiguous, analysis of a given social issue but, rather, an

imaginative coexistence of different planes or registers of experience (On

Variousness 74). However, Collini's "imaginative coexistence" remains insufficient to

cover the true complexities of a society that mature realism is supposed to

represent in its, say, typicality in a Lukacian sense.

Although seemingly different in their understanding of literary works, Mulhern

and Collini are both far from Lukacs thesis on the unity of objectivity and

partisanship that, Lukacs suggests, only a successful realist work can

accomplish. They are also both far from Leavis insight on the way truth is

formed or revealed by truly excellent works of art. In respect of the

relationship between the achievement of literature and the depth of their

understanding of reality, Lukacs and Leavis are on one side while Mulhern

and Collini are on the other. The grouping is no mere accident; both Lukacs

and Leavis, despite positional differences, understand the centrality of the

critical faculty in overcoming the dichotomy between culture and politics.

Moreover, they share a concern about literature as a creative act that can

make the idea of disinterestedness real.


14/15

14 Jikwan Yoon

Works Cited

Arnold, Matthew. The Function of Criticism at the Present Time. The

Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Ed. R. H. Super. Vol. 3. Ann

Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1960-1977.

Collini, Stefan. Culture Talk. NLR 7 (2001): 43-53.

______. Defending Cultural Criticism. NLR 18 (2002): 73-97.

______. On Variousness; and on Persuasion. NLR 27 (2004): 65-97.

Coulling, Sidney. Matthew Arnold and His Critics. Athens: Ohio UP, 1974.

Eagleton, Terry. The Function of Criticism. London: Verso, 1984.

Lukacs, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1971.

Marx, Karl. The Capital. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.

Mulhern, Francis. Culture/Metaculture. London: Verso, 2000.

______. Beyond Metaculture. NLR 16 (2002): 86-104.

______. What Is Cultural Criticism? NLR 23 (2003): 35-49.

Simpson, David. Politics as Such? NLR 30 (2004): 69-82.

Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

Yoon, Jikwan. Under the Brass Sky. Seoul: Changbi, 2001.

______. Culture and Criticism in the Modern Society. Seoul: Changbi, 2003.


15/15

6.- mulhern collini paper

Documents