I

Explanations of socio-cultural change are very varied in character and type, but that offered in Terry Eagleton’s study The Function of Criticism: From The Spectator to Poststructuralism (Verso: 1984), p. 80, is a good example of one still widely found type. Eagleton's narrative is based on the development of capitalism, and explains the isolation of intellectuals in a society by suggesting that the conditions which created such intellectuals forced the bourgeois into conflict with the repressive political authority of the aristocracy, then destroued the public sphere “leaving in its wake a deracinated cultural intelligentsia whose plea for ‘disinterestedness’ is a dismissal of the public rather than an act of solidarity with them.”

This makes some kind of sense, but only if you accept that the story in the first place, rather as creationism explains the existence of organic diversity. The question is whether we cannot find a better story to account for social change and thus explain the position of critics, i.e. as one epiphenomenon amongst many.

The real problem is that Eagleton can provide no engine of social change, no causative agent. It is not enough to say “economic forces”, since this would be merely equivalent to invoking an unspecified God; we want to know why economic forces are causal and dynamic.

The answer might come from population growth. As populations get larger the possibility of invoking a common interest, except at gross levels in time of war, and then only with difficulty, declines. This factionalization will make criticism that transcends these factional interests very difficult, but it should not be forgotten that insofar as factions share interests, or in so far as individuals within opposing factions share interests, criticism useful to both may be possible. This approach is preferable to Eagleton’s since it not only has a more plausible causal base, one located in individual psychology rather than nebulous social forces, but it is better able to explain the current situation, where we see that although society is deeply factionalized there is still a considerable degree of interfactional communication and exchange of criticism, which by all accounts is valuable. On Eagleton’s view this ought to be impossible or simply the twitching of dead corpse, which I think is the line he takes when he looks at Scrutiny and laughs at its belief that the “technical” and the “humanist” were in harmony, and that “the more rigorously criticism interrogated the literary object, the more richly it yielded up that sensuous concreteness and vital enactment of value which were of general human relevance.”

On my view the community detected by Scrutiny is a real one, though hardly enough to overbalance the multiple conflicts in other fields. Co-operation between individuals in rival factions is possible, and perhaps even frequent. And even where interests are not shared, activities most certainly are, and hence some exchange of comment and information can take place. It would be possible, for example, for inhabitants of two different countries whose only contact was through books (written let us say in the same language) and who prosecuted a deadly and relentless war against each other with long-range missiles, it would be possible for inhabitants to read and criticise works dealing with relationships not involved in the conflict between them, but not relationships pertinent to the conflict; they might, perhaps, share cooking books for example. But of course no common sphere would be established, only an exchange of concepts. Yet this is an important fact, and helps us to see why it should be that a criticism not affected by class should be possible when limited to certain subjects and excluding others.

II

By suggesting that criticism must have a general value for the entire society, Eagleton makes a moral not a practical judgement. He has not shown that criticism which is valuable to a faction, or assists in negotiations, or conflicts, between factions is not of value for those factions. Furthermore, since he argues that criticism was born of factional interest, that of the bourgeois middle ranks of the late seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries, it is not clear why he should claim that it has lost function because of a further fracturing of the social domain. We could as reasonably say that the process of factionalisation, due to population growth perhaps, accelerated, and that as more groups became literate so they joined the critical debate, thus undermining the bourgeois claim to be exclusively the representatives of the people. This would, on this view, be considered a problem for one faction, but not a disaster for the business of criticism itself.

Similarly, in the nineteenth-century, factional criticism is abundant but does not demonstrate a crisis in criticism so much as a crisis in factionalism. Criticism may be failing to have much interfactional use, and serve merely as tool for the formation and binding of relations within factions, but this does not indicate that criticism is losing function. Quite the reverse; it continues to be of great importance.

Eagleton has a totalitarian, collectivist view, and requires that for anything to be of great use it must clearly bind in all members within a state (except the bourgeois of course, who are his scapegoats), and thus when a technique such as criticism fails to do this he interprets it as a failure. Hence at the close of his book he attempts to rally his readers round a criticism which would function in the same way for all individuals. This is naive, merely. We need hold no brief for criticism, certainly within the universities, to see that it may have considerable public function even today. Clearly the discussion of works of all kinds, films, stories, poems, pictures, continues in our social systems, and we can presume that it would not do so if it were not serving, or appearing to serve, some function for those who undertook it. But equally Eagleton is right in saying that this criticism forms no unified public sphere. The question is whether this matters for those writing criticism or marking critical comments, or for those reading adn listenging to it. If the function it performs is mostly internal to factions, and occasionally interfactional, either negotiating compromises or maintaing boundaries, then we might say it has function still. It may not be a function of which we approve, or which we find in our interests, but this would mean no more than that we find ourselves in a faction threatened by other factions, and ultimately we must wonder whether Eagleton’s attempt to reinvent the traditional functions of criticism, to find a common critical standard, is any more convincing than that of any of the universalizing writers he discusses in the body of his study. Indeed, we might see some deep structural similarity between conservative writers who attempt to maintain the fiction of a unified public sphere, and thus persuade individuals whose best interests would be represented in factionalization or fragmentation, to stay within the co-operative group, and Eagleton’s attempt to bind the society together under the banner of working class solidarity. I would go further and suggest that this similarity confirms what is already evident in the logic of factional analysis, that Eagleton’s position has no absolute moral superiority to it, as he assumes, but is only one among many factions, each with no ultimate justification, each attempting to prove one, each jockeying for positition with all the others.

Of course, we cannot rule out a physical crisis could weld all the factions into one again, but this seems highly unlikely given the variety of interests represented in the global world, which are now more numerous even than they were in the world of nation states, where criticism might at least function as international communication. Whereas, today a critical line emerging from a country may represent only one faction within that nation, as may indeed its art overall. So criticism is, at least for the time being, factional.

Now, if I am right in saying that criticism has a function in our time, but that it is only sectarian at best, then certain other points may be made with regard to criticism in the universities.

We could tolerate factional criticism within the university world, as we do at present, on the grounds that university intellectuals should participate in the general debate. We could insist that university criticism should aim for a degree of generality which rises above faction and sect. Or we could eject it from the university altogether.

The second of these suggestions seems impossible of realisation, and would in any case be sure to be hijacked by some faction or other, as Eagelton threatens to do, while the first is inadequate simply because the criticism of the universities is of puny consequence in the public world. By which I mean, that the current situation is unlikely to continue because criticism is useless, even by its own standards. It would make more sense, simply, for criticism to leave the university and for its academic perpetrators to enter the public world where they would be forced to identify with the factions they have in fact been serving all along, and perhaps to do better work for those factions. In its place we could institute an integrated use of literature as data leading towards human self-understanding, as I have extensively outlined elsewhere. Am I doing more than ejecting the critical factions in the interests of my own factional interests? Perhaps not. If my analysis of Eagelton’s position above is correct I am not able to escape its implications. If, for example I were to claim that integrated science, the candidate field for replacing criticism, was above faction in that it represented the interests of a very large community of factions, though perhaps not all, then I would be making a very similar claim to that made by Eagleton. I would have two options; one I could cheefully accept this on the grounds that it is a winning faction and I don’t care what others think. Secondly I could claim that the fault in Eagleton’s position is that he has not provided a convincing case for his transfactional position, where scientific integration does so.

Neither of these positions are attractive. The first is entirely tenable, and is I believe probably the most solid, whereas the second is open to innumerable questions. Scientific process may not be factionalized, since it can be used by anyone to great effect as a means to power and can easily be turned on its inventors. But the possession of scientific power and knowledge is not itself above faction and interest, therefore it would be futile to pretend that there is a global scientific community which stands above the strife and can readily assume world leadership. International science is riven with factions, and is still, as it must be, strongly involved with national interest.

But I will make a subsidiary claim for science, that within a given national group, and globally, it promises to be able to provide more for more factions, and perhaps even promises to enable us to reach agreements between factions. I do not claim that the scientific project is selfless, or a reflection of general interests, but I do think it is the best co-operative tool that we have.

The strongest single argument to undermine the more extreme contentions of the importance of knowledge of the past is that the required degree of historical knowledge is obviously impractical. So long as one event remains undocumented, undiscussed, our conception of all the others remains provisional, and consequently in every historical narrative there are ellipses and thus uncertainties as a result of our inability to complete our descriptions. This is inevitable. Every event bleeds into another and subdivides mercilessly. What are we to do? Stay calm. When we read a history of the war of 1870 we may realize that there are many things missing, for example there may be no mention at all of the diet of the principal figures, let alone individual soldiers. On the one hand we know that this doesn't matter, and on the other we know that it does. Indeed, the more we know of the interconnection of even the slightest phenomena with the largest, the less happy we will be with any account that sets a firm limit to an event, excepting those prudent, commonsensical accounts which do not pretend to complete statement. But academics insisting on the historicisation of a phenomenon are frequently, perhaps intrinsically incautious. Jameson, for example, in a review of Eagleton's Ideology of the Aesthetic once remarked that it "confronted" the "whole history" of the concept, as if anyone could possibly do such a thing. Some authors may, however, actually believe that Jameson's type of praise is deserved and accurate, but most historians will recognize its absurdity. It is simply a reviewer's exaggeration, and irritating even in that context. But readers do believe this, and even encourage authors to make the pretence, noisily applauding their preferred stevedores as they struggle by theatrically under the pretended burdens of vast but empty barrels, barrels that resound noisily at every step. It requires a strong character to resist the corrupting effects of an enthusiastic readership.

It is a consistent trope of the literary intellectual over the ages that the quality of public discourse is declining. I find myself saying such things as I look over The Times every morning. But is it consequential? Does the quality of public discourse have any influence on the quality of decision-making? Is it purely epiphenomenal? Not quite, I think. The quality of public discourse has little effect on the quality of private decision-making. People are not stupid, and no matter what they say, will make their private decisions not on the basis of public discourse, but as they always have, on the basis of self-interest. Generally speaking, over time and over the entire population, they will make very good decisions.

In addition, one should never forget that poor public discourse may be perfectly adequate as a vehicle for excellent private decision-making, and indeed may for one reason and another create excellent circumstances for private individuals. For example, because the nonsense of public discourse may hamper the efforts of others, or simply create a niche, however temporary, in which a private individual can thrive.

But there is perhaps some ground for concern that when public decision-making is so large a part of decision-making overall, as it is at present, that the quality of public discourse does have a negative influence, since public decision makers will tend to make their decisions consistent with the prevailing discourse. In this respect they are no different from the private decision makers described above, and are attempting to camouflage the fact that public decisions are in fact taken to favour public decision-makers. It is best to seem in tune with the public. Of course civil servants will often represent this decision making to themselves as entirely responsible, and democratic, just as other private individuals will pretend to objectivity when serving their own ends. No matter; we know the truth in both cases from the outcomes of their decisions.

This suggests that the quality of public discourse only has a significant bearing on decisions taken in regard to matters of shared interest. Of course, notoriously, the extent of shared interest is unclear and contested, for obvious reasons. It seems, therefore, that we may never know whether poor public discourse is deadly or trivial, but judging from the actual behaviour of the people, there is a moderate concern that the sophistication of our culture is maintained, whereas we take a great deal of trouble over our own internal discourse and that of our families. That is perhaps one of the strongest indicators of the only moderate degree of common interest between individuals in general society.

The difference between the higher and lower social levels, and the explanation of the confused states of the grades between, is this: at the lower levels people are obsessed by a generalised vanity, of class, species, town, or whatever; and the further you progress up the social tree the more individualised the vanity becomes. This is one reason that the lower ranks are obsessed with morality, and the upper with genius. – And both with breaches of their absolutes.

Once these generalities are observed, it is important to add that the situation is complicated for the observer by the way in which economic stratifications run at ninety degrees to those which I have already mentioned. These financial considerations are largely the result of historical accident; or to put it another way, not enough time has passed since the beginning of the game to make its results an accurate guide to the processing power and general capability of the individuals concerned. – Many more dice throws are needed Now, this processing power is one of the most remarkable means of distinguishing between human individuals, but it is not the only one. However, it provides a reliable guide to human character in spite of the other forces involved, and also in spite of the differences established by the roulette of wealth allocation. The higher orders are individualistic and the lower social. But this is unimportant unless you see that both are forms of self-admiration, each merely taking a different route.

While on my way through Midsummer Common to fish I passed three young men sitting on a bench. They had stayed up all night, and were now enjoying the sensation of being the last men left alive. (He who walks the streets of his town in the first light believes himself its conqueror for the rest of the day.) They passed judgment:

A. Funny old life, fishin'.

B. Fishin', who's fishin'?

C. He's fishin'!

B. Fishin'? At five in the morning! The Evil Bastard!

1. If we could in fact talk to the animals, the garden would be unbearably noisy.

2. Britannia's heart was broken by the First War, and her back by the Second.

3. If this be art, then god bless philistia.

4. Be not too officious with the truth.

5. If you are not well-respected, keep silent when discovering a great truth, lest you dishonour it.

6. That intellectual progress is dialectical, one could accept, but why must it be so mean-spirited? 

Our joy in artefacts is always vain, but there are, if not degrees of narcissism, more or less direct paths by which the reflection may reach us. Arts which take the roundabout way, such as music as non-representational painting, appear to gesture in the direction of transcendent objectivity, and their admirers, Schopenhauer and his remarks on music are an example, claim that they are free of human self-obsession altogether. But the applauding audience at any concert, the great prices paid for a picture, are conclusive proof that they are very far from that. Once detected, these arts become all the more distasteful for their failed deception, and their persistent apologists little better than those who take their whisky from a teapot.

People say that Walter de la Mare is the last of the romantics, and it is easy to see what they mean in a general and imprecise sense, but it is so misleading as to be quite unacceptable as a description. He is nothing like a romantic. There is none of the aggressive foregrounding of the poetic personality, or the asserted identity between that construction and the actual author. De la Mare fades away into the distance behind his fables, behind his observations even. This cultivation of impersonality is very notable in itself, and even more so because it is strikingly successful and extreme in character. Think what another impersonal poet, T. S. Eliot, made of this attempt when working within a position authentically descended from that of the romantics. He hides or rather shows himself in a multiplicity of assumed identities. For all this evasiveness, the self is paramount, is always firmly present, whereas De la Mare is just nowhere to be found, and in this respect he is certainly not a typical romantic poet, if we define that poet by describing the area thus, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth. De la Mare is more like Keats if anything, but with an even stronger negátive capability (accent supplied; the capability is not negative, but negative).

It is true that some of the romantics, as defined above, have mysticism in common with De la mare, but this equivalence teaches us little, so vague is the term. De la Mare’s mysticism is elusive and undemonstrative, it intimates without describing the presence of a parallel world, but says nothing about the transcendence of this further realm. It is simply additional. From the other side of the filmy layer separating us from this strange land, our everyday earth perhaps seems as curious and dreamlike; we are imaginative fantasies for them. The romantics, on the other hand, are nothing if not transcendentalists. They see in a vision, or inhabit through imagination and their own incantations a layer of existence that is not only higher but is asserted to be infinitely superior in every way to the present world, though this can only be gestured towards rather than fully communicated, since the reader is neither welcome nor invited to be anything else than a spectator, a member of the congregation supervised by the initiated priest. Again the contrast with De la Mare is obvious; the reader is complicit and drawn into the vacuum left by the deliberate withdrawal of the authorial personality.

Indeed, there is nothing definite in his writing except the style, a fact that explains his fading reputation at the present time, and would in other cases make him only a writer’s writer, but De la Mare is certainly a reader’s writer too, a view that can be verified, I think, by cutting his work at any random point. No study is required, a page will serve.

Though it is painful to grant, even for a disenchanted literate, there is a strong possibility that in our time one might be better off knowing nothing of the any of the arts or the interpretation of the arts of previous periods. A little commonplace morality, and a lot of mathematics might be much better. I am for the generous sceptic as against the cultured dogmatist.

Historians long for solitude, and find it in the dead calm of diachronic retrospection, a zone in which there is movement but no will (and perhaps even the movement is but a series of pictures).

The conclusion that I draw from this speculation is that a tyrant is not so much of a misanthrope as is a scholar; which is, perhaps, something that we already knew, for is it not obvious that in exercising the human will to power the tyrant is communing with those he subjects; whereas the scholar wishes only to have business with the marks that living people leave behind. To the tyrant, a person is just a "mark" in the sense used by criminals, the man is a target, a source of income of whatever kind; but to the historical mind a man is only a mark in a still more depleted sense.

The point is simple: a scholar of history who writes in loathing of the cruelties of the past may have less in common with the oppressed of his own time than does the oppressor, but only where the oppressor is one person. Perhaps that is why historians and not only historians are so prone to nostalgia for the warm humanity of an individual tyrant. – The bureaucratic dictator is altogether too much like the historian himself.