No word can have caused more raised voices in intellectual circles over the last decade or so than the vexed term "culture". We have seen the "culture wars", those furious battles spawned in the US academy over the meaning and value of Western culture. We have watched the rise of "cultural studies", challenging every academic discipline from Eng. Lit. to sociology. We not only have our own thriving Irish cultural studies but, as if to remind us that culture is not merely an academic concern, the transformation of Unionism into a "cultural tradition" and much of the island into a "cultural" region of Europe. As the American critic Geoffrey Hartman reminds us, we now have "camera culture, gun culture, service culture, football culture, the culture of dependency, the culture of pain, the culture of amnesia, etc".
Terry Eagleton, in his stimulating and very readable The Idea of Culture, dives head-on into this proliferation of meanings and associations that swirls around the word. The very title of the book is a paradox, since what Eagleton reminds us is that there is no one idea of culture. His excellent first chapter traces the history of the word and its many associations, from its roots in agriculture to its emergence in the late 18th century as a term to designate the cultivation, not of beets, but of aesthetic taste. As Eagleton recalls, this tradition of culture was meant to cure us of the painful economic and political divisions of industrial society by opposing fragmentation with an idea of wholeness and spiritual freedom that was truly human.
But a quite different understanding of the term develops out of anthropology. Where modern societies have culture as an aspect of their complex organisation,primitive societies are cultures; here, culture implies the whole way of life of a people. Eagleton quotes the American linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir: "Culture is defined in terms of the forms of behaviour, and the content of culture is made up of these forms, of which there are countless numbers." It would be hard, remarks Eagleton acerbically, to come up with resplendently empty definition.
Irony aside, an anthropologically based understanding of culture as involving the very specific ways of life of particular groups does provide a useful corrective to the rather elitist universalism of high culture. The problem for Eagleton is that it tends to lapse into the intense particularisms of what he thinks of as identity politics: all that remains for him are cultural differences which provide no basis for the kind of universal claims on which an emancipatory politics must be founded.
Eagleton is passionately committed to retrieving at least some of the universal claims of culture, excoriating the foibles of post-modernity and identity politics which all too often seem to amount to much the same devil. But despite the polemical edge of this manifesto, it is often hard to decipher the definition of culture that he espouses. That's partly because Eagleton, delighting in ironic mischief, savours so much the vexed dialectic between culture as local and particular and culture as universal, appreciating the moment of truth in each.
At times, especially when he is tilting at identity politics, Eagleton loses his balance and dialectic becomes caricature. Surely the ends of "a gay rights group and a neo-fascist cell" are so different that to say, as Eagleton does, that "what they have in common is in a sense as striking as their political differences" is simply reductionist.
Eagleton, fuelled by a misdirected anti-Americanism, paints contemporary social movements with the broad brush of "identity politics", forgetting that the energy of such movements derives from their protest at what Frantz Fanon called the "unilateral declaration of universality" of western culture. Eagleton betrays a certain British leftist hauteur in the assumption that movements for gay rights, civil rights or even decolonisation are incapable of self-ironising. Try that out on Act-Up or on Culture Clash, the Chicano comedy group. Or look for irony in the liberal defender of high culture when pressed on the racist assumptions behind European aesthetic values.
Eagleton is at his most persuasive when he himself espouses what most post-1960s "identity" movements ultimately stand for: a politics of culture that is "inseparable from radical socialist change". He draws with great eloquence from Shakespeare as much as from Marxism, arguing that "a common culture can be fashioned only because our bodies are of broadly the same kind, so that one universal rests upon the other". That is no less true, of course, of the cultural differences that make the myriad variety of a world that is not yet completely subdued to commodity culture.
In seeking to trim the overweening ambition of much that passes for cultural politics, Eagleton risks missing the rich implications of his own insight. The human body is at once the site of affective identity and cultural difference, and a socialism that demands solidarity while dismissing the intricacies of our desire for difference runs the risk of being as dully homogenising as the capitalism it opposes.
Nonetheless, Eagleton, as ever, gives plenty of reason for believing that the struggle for a culture that offers more than compensation for the unfreedom of industrial society is far from over and well worth engaging. The Idea of Culture is a book which challenges our attention.
David Lloyd is the Chair in Humanities at Scripps College, Claremont, California, and author of several books on Irish culture and literature, including most recently Ireland After History.