"In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends..."

From “Literary into Cultural Studies”                  

[Excerpted & Abridged]                             

By Antony Easthope

Introduction

In 1962 Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions showed that most of the time the scientific community sails along happily within a paradigm. From time to time, however, new evidence or contradictions within the paradigm accumulate until the paradigm itself falls into doubt.

At this point there is a crisis, a return to ‘first principles’ and an intense interest in theory (for which there is no need while the paradigm rides high). Thereafter, a new paradigm is established, theoretical questions are put on the shelf and things return to normal.

The Basic Opposition between What is Literary and What is Not!

Something like this has happened in literary studies during the past two decades. Twenty years ago, the institutionalised study of literature throughout the English-speaking world rested on an apparently secure and unchallenged foundation, the distinction between what is literature and what is not. He did spell out this basic opposition in a pamphlet he published a year after the economic collapse of 1929. In Mass Civilization and Minority Culture Leavis wrote –

In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends: it is only a few who are capable of unprompted, first-hand judgment. 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 tradition.

Upon them depend the implicit standards that order the finer living of an age, the sense that this is worth more than that, this rather than that is the direction in which to go. In their keeping…is the language, the changing idiom upon which fine living depends, and without which distinction of spirit is thwarted and incoherent. By ‘culture’ I mean the use of such language. (1930, pp. 3–5)

Minority Culture vs Mass Civilisation

According to this proposition of F. R. Leavis, society then, is not to be thought of as a democracy but rather as an oligarchy with concentric circles of the elite (a ‘very small minority’) at the centre. This Minority culture is defined in a binary opposition with mass civilisation; works of literature consist of ‘human experience’ and so contrast with the texts of mass or popular culture; created by individual authors literature can evoke a ‘genuine personal response’ in the reader, whereas popular culture, collectively and commercially produced, is stereotyped, formulaic, anonymous and deficient in ‘human experience’.

Eagleton on the Great Shift from the Older Literary Paradigm

Just how far the older literary paradigm has shifted in the past two decades can be seen in the words of a powerfully influential contemporary critic, Terry Eagleton –

My own view is that it is most useful to see ‘literature’ as a name which people give from time to time for different reasons to certain kinds of writing within a whole field of what Michel Foucault has called ‘discursive practices’, and that if anything is to be an object of study it is this whole field of practices rather than just those sometimes rather obscurely labelled ‘literature’.

Only two generations separate Leavis from Eagleton here. Yet in those fifty-three years modern literary studies was invented, institutionalised in the academy, fell into crisis, and is now being transformed into something else, cultural studies.

The Collapse of the Old Paradigm

In 1975 Jonathan Culler in Structuralist Poetics explained that all local interpretations of the literary text took place according to much more deeply imbedded protocols for reading which he described as ‘literary competence.’

He shows how a banal newspaper story, arranged into lines like a poem, attracts a literary reading from which an entirely new sense of its significance emerges - set up as a poem, he says, the text claims that it is ‘atemporal’, ‘complete in itself’ and will ‘cohere at a symbolic level.’

In line with this, in 1975 Fish proposes that texts are constituted by ‘interpretive communities’, shared intersubjective protocols. Therefore, literature and literary value does not exist except as what the community imagines it to be because in the first place the text has no material identity.

Fish recounts how a list of names was on the blackboard after one class when students came for another –

Jacobs-Rosenbaum

Levin

Thorne

Hayes

Ohman (?)

- so he told the second group this was a religious poem and asked them to interpret it. Which they did, pretty well in his account, by exercising their ‘literary competence’ within the interpretive community, thereby claiming that there are no texts, only interpretations to a text.

Authored versus Collective Texts

In its object literary study discovers the ‘presence’ of an individual author, each envisaged as self-created, self-acting, undetermined, owing final allegiance only to himself and his imagination.

Accordingly, the material, institutional conditions for literary production - sales of the novels of Dickens, the contemporary reception of Jude the Obscure, the price of entry to Shakespeare’s theatre - are relegated to the ‘background’ while the creative works become the essential inside and are thus ‘foregrounded’.

Cultural studies can assume no such foundation. A film is manifestly a collective production, involving (in no particular order), producers, director, stars, camera operators, script writers, sound and lighting engineers, set mechanics, ‘front office’, promoters, advertisers, distributors, theatre managers, and so on (for prestige purposes present-day Hollywood increasingly names the seventy or so individuals who have worked on a production).

Conclusion

The object of cultural studies exhibits a shift from the author towards a decentred account of social production, displacing identification in the transcendent authority of self-creation with a necessarily more dispersed identification.

A discourse of knowledge begins to develop which can make no such claims to authority and power but rather installs its subject as relative rather than transcendent, determined rather than sovereign.