‘Towards a Common Culture’Terry

Eagleton

Summarized and Presented by CHAHDI Chadi

The outline goes thus:

• A Common Culture in T.S. Eliot’s terms

• A Common Culture in Raymond Williams’ terms

• Forms of Culture: The Residual, the Dominant, and the Emergent

• The Culture Industry and Post-modernism: a Critique

Culture as Solidarity

Culture as Civility

‘a way of life of a particular people living together in

one place’

It is that ‘makes life worth living’

Culture as unconscious

Culture as conscious

A Common Culture (in T.S. Eliot’s terms)

A Common Culture (in T.S. Eliot’s terms)

Lived by the Masses

Lived by the Elites

Eliot states that Culture must be

in relation to religion so as to

have its influence on the masses. Religion creates

the social cohesion in its act of uniting

reflective awareness with

spontaneous conduct.

A combination of Society and

art, anthropology

and aesthetics

The same culture but differs in

degrees of self-consciousness

‘Towards a

Common Culture’

The masses embody the ‘gut’ whereas the elites represent the ‘mind’. Culture must be shared by both of them to produce an ‘ideal society’. However, the development of this culture is shouldered by the elites.

• Eliot rejects the theory of liberalism that tends to destroy this notion of the common. Q. Why?

A. Because each of the two (the elites and the masses) have their own roles in society. In this regards, it is to the upper class (the elites, the conscious mind) that Eliot assigns the task of transmitting and sustaining culture from one generation to another.

A Common Culture (in T.S. Eliot’s terms)

Deduction:

A Common Culture (in Raymond Williams’ terms)

It is collectively made by all the members of a society.

Culture thus is “remade and redefined by the collective practice of its members.”

The notion of a common culture is basically premised upon a common social and political participation and collaboration.

Culture is based on both consciousness and unconsciousness as ‘aspects of the same process.’ (culture as an idea)

The transformation of values takes place with the working-class movement by their ethnic solidarity and cooperative institutions.

Cultural Politics and Politics of Culture:

A Common Culture (in Raymond Williams’ terms)

Eagleton opposes this, believing that culture appears inherently political only when it is forcibly involved in a process of struggle (domination and resistance).

Cultural politics devotees do not give priority to culture. In fact, they consider culture as inherently political, and it is thus based on the notion of ‘identity politics’ .

For Raymond, what matters is the politics of culture, for its purpose is to restore the rights to the people, not to render its devotees ‘hostile or indifferent’.

A Comparison: • What is shared between Eliot and Raymond is that culture is uneven

and plural (unevenness and plurality).

• For Eliot, unevenness appears unexpectedly from a fixed structure of levels, for each class has its own participation. For Raymond, it is the result of the participation of many agents in a whole complex system of culture.

• The commonness of culture for Raymond originates in the political form based on plurality. For Eliot, it is common only in its content.

A Common Culture

Residual: “an active element of the present, an expression of values and experiences which a dominant culture fails fully to accommodate”

Dominant: “an equal composite of the ‘high’ and the postmodern”

Emergent: new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships are continually being created.”

Forms of Culture: The Residual, the Dominant, and the Emergent

These, in Eagleton’s terms, definitely oppose the postmodern claim of the end of history. Q. How?

A. There has never been anything that is completely new in history. Everything extends from the past to emerge in the present in a new form.

The Culture Industry and Post-modernism: a Critique

Terry Eagleton believes that what has come directly after the cultural politics (1960s) was the culture industry which brought the idea of culture into imminent during the post-war capitalist era.

It is based on a general process of commodity production.

Its aim is to manipulate the public, creating consumers of the mass media.

This cultural pessimism (kulturpessimismus) manifests itself in the way how culture has been reshaped and deployed to contain the whole society.

It is this culture industry that paved the way to postmodernism to appear.

The debate over this goes very deep to anticipate the ‘death of civility’ and the survival of consumerism.

The Culture Industry and Post-modernism: a Critique

By the appearance of postmodernism, the struggle between high and low culture (Kulturkampf) has become of no importance. It is now all about consumerism and commodity production!

Eagleton writes:

Instead, the high/low distinctions were themselves largely relocated within a hybrid, cross-cutting culture which spread its influence into every social enclave, rather than as hierarchy of isolated, mutually uncomprehending universes.(125)

Thus, postmodern culture is classless. Q. Why?

A. As long as postmodern culture is based on consumerism, this latter goes beyond all the divisions of society into a classless state where all what matters is commodity production.

The Culture Industry and Post-modernism: a Critique“If the 1930s left had undersold culture, the postmodern left

over-valued it.”

Culture is now different in content and status. It has become largely pervasive with its transformative influence on the entire social realm (economic, state power, even ‘the very structure of the psyche’). Now

culture is the new social dominant.

This will result in a profound cut from politics. The identity politics survived after the political turbulent of 1960s,

while the class struggle ceased to appear. This marked a shift from politicized culture to cultural politics (culture in the sense of identity: e.g. women struggle; national liberation struggle).

Culture as Radical Protest 

The Culture Industry and Post-modernism: a Critique

Eagleton adopts David Edgar critique of postmodernism for its reifying the concept of culture and celebrating the counter-culture while it turns a blind eye to the ‘collective means of social democracy’, the ‘dominant structure’, and ‘political activity’.

Eagleton deduces that liberal pluralism based on its identity politics is merely another image of communitarianism (remember Eliot’s take on this) in its different form.

He says that though these identity politics are “deaf to the need for wider political solidarity, they represent a kind of group individualism which reflects the dominant social ethos as much as it dissents from it.”

They are a common culture as well, though they are based on cultural diversity (closed cultures)!

The Culture Industry and Post-modernism: a Critique

Where is the problem?

The entire modern primary problems (war, famine, poverty…) are not cultural. “They are not primarily questions of value, symbols, language, tradition…”

The situation for Eagleton is materialistic where people are engrossed in ‘material problems’ (e.g. debt and drugs).

It is the problem of postmodernism and the culture industry where all life is built on consumerism and commodity production.

Culture is not only what we live by. It is also, in great measure, what we live for. Affection, relationship, memory, kinship, place, community, emotional fulfillment, intellectual enjoyment, a sense of ultimate meaning: these are closer to us than charters of human rights or trade treaties. Yet culture can also be too close for comfort. This very intimacy is likely to grow morbid and obsessional unless it is set in an enlightened political context … It is time, while acknowledging its significance, to put it [culture] in its place.

Eagleton finally writes: