Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings

"To go from Lamb—this rather playful, tentative, strong character, but also oblique character—to Arnold—this man with a reputation for being at the top of the Ivory Tower, a polite prophet of culture (a ‘kid-gloved Jeremiah’, as one of his detractors liked to put it)—seems like an unlikely move. But there’s a strong line of communication between them, partly because I think Arnold was for a long time misread and caricatured. When critics have wanted to reject Culture with a capital-C as ideologically suspect, they’ve lumped Arnold in with F. R. Leavis, particularly in the twentieth century. But if you spend a lot of time with Arnold’s essays, you find what he’s really interested in is anybody’s creative sensibility and the conditions of culture in which an ordinary creativity is fostered and might flourish. At one point, Arnold says you could have it reading the newspapers; you don’t have to have it reading only the great classics. But because he says things like “the best that has been thought and said” and because Tory politicians nowadays quote him, they kind of miss what he’s saying. He’s not setting up a canon: he’s pointing out there could be more room for big ideas in a rather mechanical, commercialized, both moralistic and market-based existence. Arnold thinks that the creative freedom of ordinary ideas might serve as a basis for reorganising our own society. One of the connecting themes between Lamb’s and Arnold’s essays is the theme of education. Arnold was a school inspector. He scribbled essays on his breaks during visits to poor and provincial classrooms. He thought deeply about the forces in our culture that could democratize anybody’s ordinary creative experience – and not just for the wealthy and metropolitan. He was against models of education that were about training people for a specific role in a mechanical way—very anti what we might now call a purely ‘vocational’ education. In Collini’s edited collection, a late essay called ‘Equality’ (1878) is extremely important. This is one of the aspects of Arnold’s thinking that gets mislaid. Arnold’s is an economic model of equality in part. He praises the way recent events in French history have broken up and redistributed concentrations of wealth. This was an unusual thing for someone in Arnold’s position to say. Importantly, what he’s arguing for is not an ideological substitute or a sop to conceal the real workings of political and economic power. He argued that aesthetic and sensory freedom is the basis for enthusiastic and creative response to life; which, in turn is the basis for an active engagement with one’s own society and culture—the basis of any politics. That’s why I refer to it in my book as something called an ‘aesthetic liberalism.’ It’s an alternative to models of liberalism contemporaneous with Arnold, such as the theories of John Stuart Mill. Arnold thought the richness of our aesthetic experience should be the very foundation of whether we can imagine a collective life worth living. I’d say there is. We could go back slightly further: Lamb is opposed to a model of human interaction that is based purely on the transfer of information. With recent debates about social media, particularly Facebook, Lamb may seem to be wiser than we thought! “With recent debates about social media, particularly Facebook, Lamb may seem to be wiser than we thought” Arnold applies a tactful essayism to education. He makes a powerful case for thinking about education as the basis of feeling creatively alive in our own existence. Surely there’s no more important question to start discussions about education from, rather than what will it do for the economy; what will it do for elections? It’s a return to first principle questions—questions about values that we badly need today. Yes, in telling Arnold’s story in my book, I realized it is about moving from poetry to the essay form, because the essay allowed Arnold to make a different kind of cultural intervention. I see the essay in this period as offering particular resources for performing new ideas about social relations. My line of approach to the essay is not the only one, but it emphasizes the way the essay is less invested in system and final knowledge. (Theodor Adorno said in 1958, “it is virtually the essay alone that has successfully raised doubts about the absolute privilege of method.”) It allows for play; it allows for the tentative; it allows for not quite knowing where you’re going—the digression that could lead to a great insight. It provides a home for forms of creativity. The essay form should be relatively uncategorizable, or keep us on our toes. That’s how it keeps us interested. That’s a good question, and I have various answers to it. One way to distinguish the essay from the novel is its brief suggestiveness, as opposed to seeking to immerse you in a whole world. The essay is not invested as the novel is in narrative, and conclusions from which a final judgment or valuation can be made of everyone who was in that novel from the retrospective (the bad guys are punished, and the good guys get married, and so on.) Whereas Lamb says “narrative teases me. I have little concern for the progress of events”; and he says he prefers to spend time with “oddities of authorship” and “heads with some diverting twist in them.” “It allows for play; it allows for the tentative; it allows for not quite knowing where you’re going—the digression that could lead to a great insight. It provides a home for forms of creativity” That’s not to say there aren’t powerful essayistic elements or similar investments in major novels of the period. In Isobel Armstrong’s recent book, Novel Politics (2016) , I find connections with some of these essay-writers. But to get those you have to read against the grain of the some influential ways of understanding the novel, which are about creating solid, all-too-plausible, bourgeois liberal subjects. That’s probably been overplayed, but it is a basis from which you can distinguish the much more vagrant and unclassifiable essay."