“Criticism” is a curiously protean word. In academic discourse, as in ordinary speech, it can refer simply to the act of appraisal, sometimes with a censorious edge. It’s used to describe reviews, whether positive or negative, of new books and movies, but it can also refer to the routine work of academics in English departments or cultural-studies programs. At times used as a synonym for the German Kritik or the French critique, each with their own unique philosophical associations, it can also function as their antonym, suggesting a preference for an Anglophone ideal of close reading over the specialized language of European theory. Far from rendering it useless, the elasticity of the word is the source of its appeal. It allows academics to imagine a form of writing that travels seamlessly between the university and the public sphere, a mode that can criticize in every sense of the word: cultural writing, that is, that still matters.
Twenty years ago, this slippery term was at the center of a debate between two of the UK’s most prominent critics and historians of criticism, the Marxist literary scholar and critic Francis Mulhern and the historian and public intellectual Stefan Collini. In 2001, Collini published a gently skeptical review of Mulhern’s Culture / Metaculture, a leftist critique of the political agenda of cultural studies, in the New Left Review, where Mulhern is now associate editor. The fierce exchange that followed lasted three years and ultimately rippled outward to include intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic; the UK-educated, California-based literary scholar David Simpson was given the last word in the pages of the New Left Review, while the Columbia professor and cultural theorist Bruce Robbins, an early reviewer of Culture / Metaculture, surveyed the aftermath of the debate in 2020 in boundary 2. Together with an excerpt from Culture / Metaculture and two concluding essays taking the reader up to the present, the debate has now been republished this year as What Is Cultural Criticism? (Verso). Contrary to the implication of the title, the debate doesn’t turn on criticism’s definition, but on its scope and impact. Does the study of culture have a special role to play in public life and its passionate political contests? Can criticism, honed on the interpretation of art and expression, change society?
For Mulhern, the answer is simple: no, it can’t. A stern critic of critics, he argues that, since the 19th century, analysts of culture have suffered from delusions of grandeur. They’ve repeatedly depicted culture as the underlying force driving history, “the necessary, unregarded truth of society” (9-10). And they’ve been quick to apply their inflated estimate of its importance to their own work. In a world where the cultural is the political, cultural criticism swiftly becomes a proxy for political action: the critic as the unacknowledged legislator of the world. “Metacultural discourse,” according to Mulhern — by which he means writing that places culture at the center of society — “has been the form in which culture dissolves the political.” In Culture / Metaculture, Mulhern rested his claim on a series of brilliant readings of 20th-century critics, showing how an otherwise disparate group of thinkers, from the conservative T.S. Eliot to the radical Stuart Hall, shared the same logic.
Can criticism, honed on the interpretation of art and expression, change society?
Implicitly in Culture / Metaculture, and more explicitly in some roughly contemporaneous essays collected in his 1998 volume The Present Lasts a Long Time, Mulhern attempts to reckon with the European left’s migration into universities and its transformation from a political movement to a literary and cultural one. Already a committed Marxist by the time he entered university, Mulhern saw at firsthand the emergence of an academic humanities with sweeping claims to political relevance but no concerted program of action. He’s scarcely alone in his dissatisfaction with the intellectual world that emerged: Many writers have made similar charges, especially cultural conservatives keen to attack “tenured radicals,” in Roger Kimball’s famous phrase, for their abandonment of high culture. For Mulhern, the primary problem is the equal but opposite one of reviving a leftist politics that embraces action rather than endless reflection. Without a realistic sense of the difference between culture and politics, he argues, criticism is inevitably quietist, diverting intellectuals’ energy from real forms of change.
Collini, though on the left, is no Marxist, and he’s more sanguine about the value of culture, and the scholars and critics who study it, for the public sphere. Unabashedly eclectic, he sees literature and the arts as useful precisely because they counterbalance the reductive tendencies of politics, or, in the current age, the totalizing imperatives of the market. To draw on culture, Collini claims, is to invoke “the kinds of values that those principally engaged in controlling the wealth and power of the world habitually tend to neglect.” Criticism may be an unmethodical pursuit, but, for that very reason, critics are in an excellent position to contest the crude generalizations that underpin much public debate. “Any resources that help alert us to variousness, and thus to prevent our conceptions from foreclosing the range of our perceptions,” Collini writes, “are worth having and worth nurturing.”
Much of the interest of reading the exchange, two decades on, is in watching each writer illustrate his propositions with his prose. Mulhern’s characteristic mode is the Olympian abstraction, in keeping with his insistence on a philosophical perspective. “Culture,” he asserts, “is no less but also no more than the instance of meaning in social relations.” Collini, by contrast, favors a more intimate tone. He’s a master of the first person in both its singular and plural variants, and he knows just where to insert an apt example or a suggestive aphorism. There’s a telling moment when Mulhern dismisses a comment of Collini’s as too localized and specific, remarking, “This is criticism as home truths. Home truths have force but little scope.” “But surely,” Collini retorts, “the point about ‘home truths’ is that they have precisely the scope that is appropriate to the occasion: that is what makes them effective.” That’s their difference in a nutshell.
Intellectual divisions make for absorbing reading, but they also create ideal conditions for confusion. Inhabiting different planes of abstraction, the two writers often talk past one another. At times, Collini struggles to grasp the implications of Mulhern’s more lapidary turns of phrase. (Readers will likely sympathize with his difficulties.) “We may each be blundering about in the other’s prose,” Collini admits, “trying to cope with the unfamiliar by reclothing it in more familiar garb.”
The tendency to reinterpret each other’s words means that it takes a long time before the full dimensions of the debate come into view. When they’re revealed at last, the central dispute turns out to be less a question of the value of criticism to politics than of the value of politics to criticism. How far does an intentionally eclectic, politically uncommitted criticism reach, Mulhern asks, “even as criticism, and how consequentially”? The answer, in his view, is “not very.” Cultural or literary critics need a clearly defined historical and political theory to produce genuinely illuminating work. They need, in other words, Marxism.
Collini, naturally, disagrees. Political theories may stimulate criticism, but they cannot foreclose it. Cultural criticism, as he sees it, is an autonomous practice, grounded in the close and sympathetic interpretation of a multiplicity of individuals. Its value lies precisely in the fact that it can’t be reduced to a single, unified political statement. Criticism’s gentle persuasion is “more like contagion than like a mathematical demonstration; more like coming to enjoy someone’s company than like losing at chess.”
It is at this impasse that the second section of What Is Cultural Criticism? draws to a close, marking the conclusion of the debate in 2004. Today, two decades later, much has changed. Both writers have risen to even greater prominence as public intellectuals. Both have also left academe: Mulhern resigned from the University of Middlesex in 2010, the same year the closure of its highly ranked philosophy department plunged the institution into controversy; Collini retired from teaching at Cambridge in 2014. Meanwhile, the academic landscape they once inhabited has been transformed. Although there were signs that the academic humanities were in trouble during their debate, no one could have anticipated the extent or rapidity of decline. The apparently endless free fall of academic literary study, much discussed in this publication and elsewhere, has changed the terms and stakes of debate.
In these altered circumstances, Mulhern and Collini’s object of contention, criticism, has moved closer to the center of discussion. “Criticism” has been proposed as the essence of literary study in a number of recent books, including Jonathan Kramnick in Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (2023) and John Guillory’s Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022). For some, it’s become the symbol of a lost ideal, as in Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017) and Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read (2023). A revitalized criticism that reaches beyond the academy, making cause with the common reader, is the aim of the tendency known as “post-critique,” an umbrella term that includes works such as Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015), among others.
It’s easy to sympathize with the impulses driving the return to criticism. Most people working within the humanities see the need for a deep imaginative engagement with literature, and most realize that, more than ever, it’s become dauntingly difficult to find the time and space literary immersion demands. Most also admire the sharp writing and finely drawn discriminations characteristic of the best critics. As Ryan Ruby and Sam Kahn argue in articles in Vinduet and Compact respectively, we’re living in a golden age for literary criticism, which is flourishing in small magazines and online. More pressingly, as higher education continues to contract, the embrace of criticism seems to offer a sphere of possibility outside rapidly collapsing professional structures.
But it’s not clear that a return to the glory days of midcentury criticism, for academics, would be possible, even if it were desirable. The triumphs of the New Critics were enabled by a shared literary canon and a fine-grained knowledge of literary history reaching back centuries. They were the inheritors of the great Victorian and Edwardian scholars who produced monumental scholarly editions, biographies, bibliographies, and other reference works. Scholarship was not inimical to these critics’ iconoclastic aesthetic judgments or their brilliant interpretive feats: It was their precondition.
The same is true of the wave of bold, exciting criticism today. As Ruby and Guillory both suggest, much of it is the result of the exodus from the academy of precariously employed adjuncts and current or former graduate students unable to find permanent positions. Scholarship’s loss has been criticism’s gain. But such a migration, by its nature, is a temporary phenomenon. As graduate cohorts diminish ever further in size, the scholar-critics who now write witty and immaculately informed reviews for literary journals, or publish essays on social media, are not likely to have successors. Nor is the universe of reference works and literary historical scholarship that still underpins their intellectual work likely to be renewed. Substack may be an exciting space for literary debate, but it won’t produce a new edition of the works of Francis Bacon.
Scholarship was not inimical to midcentury critics’ iconoclastic aesthetic judgments or their brilliant interpretive feats: It was their precondition.
Mulhern and Collini both understand this. For all their differences over the character and practice of criticism, their critical writings are equally grounded in the intellectual and literary history of 19th- and 20th-century Britain and Europe. Throughout their work, a rich tradition of historical scholarship is continuous with criticism, underpinning even the most overtly public forms of writing. It’s a point that both have made in recent reviews. Writing on North’s Literary Criticism, Mulhern observes that criticism “has depended more than its advocates care to admit on the labours of scholarship.” Likewise, reviewing Guillory’s Professing Criticism, Collini suggests that Guillory has overstated the importance of criticism, as opposed to historical scholarship, to the formation of literary study as a discipline. “Much pedagogic practice in the mid-20th century may have consisted in the more or less ‘close reading’ of texts arranged in chronological order,” he argues, “but even this was intellectually parasitic on the prior labours of literary historians.”
Perhaps it’s not surprising that, in the third and final section of What Is Cultural Criticism?, it’s the crisis of the universities that leads to a tentative rapprochement between the two old opponents. In a review of Collini’s Speaking of Universities, which forms the penultimate chapter of the volume, Mulhern pays tribute to his interlocutor’s energetic defense of the university, and especially the humanities, against the forces of financialization and bureaucratization. And in a final, summative essay, Collini acknowledges that his advocacy for higher education has given him a new appreciation for the destructive power of global capital. Academe, and the forms of criticism that have emerged within it, may be flawed. Nonetheless, as both writers realize, it’s a terrain that’s too important to be surrendered. The forms of research pursued in the academy, still our best and virtually only reserve of deep knowledge of human history and culture, underpin both Mulhern and Collini’s models of criticism. In 2004, the two writers’ critical and political disagreements came sharply to the fore. In 2024, their differences are as stark as ever, yet they seem to matter less than their shared scholarly ground, even as it crumbles beneath their, and our, feet.