Culture and the State (review)

The emergence of modern aesthetics in eighteenth-century Europe resulted in notions of “culture” and “art” that form part of the fabric of our lives. Aesthetics was never just a philosophical category or belletristic topic among others; though its modernity lay precisely in its presumption that a special kind of experience or object could be isolated as “aesthetic,” it was also a discourse that claimed to touch upon the essence of human being, and, furthermore, cast human identity as a process of self-fashioning or Bildung that, on a general level, became humanity’s historical evolution from savagery to civilization. Unlike the classical poetics it replaced, therefore, aesthetics had enormous ideological reach. The treatises on the sublime and the beautiful that proliferate in the later part of the eighteenth century are the salient ridge of a hugely complex discursive formation with no clear boundaries, and with any number of real social consequences. Those of us who teach literature owe our livelihoods to aesthetic discourse, and university teaching forms only one rather small, ambivalently privileged part of the institutional and discursive machinery of “culture”: culture, here, signifying a pedagogical and recreational space putatively separate from—though always also intrinsicated with—social, commercial, and political spheres.

Critical studies of aesthetics thus inevitably play for large stakes, and it is no small part of David Lloyd and Paul Thomas’s accomplishment to have located a focal point capable of organizing aesthetic discourse into the appearance of an analyzable whole. Culture and the State argues for a fundamental relation between its titular terms. “As culture comes to represent the fundamental common identity of human beings,” the authors argue, “so the state is conceived, ideally, as the disinterested ethical representative of this same common humanity” (146). It is culture’s “function” (2) to serve the state by forming subjects capable of disinterested reflection, and thus capable of recapitulating the state’s universality. Culture produces the consensual grounds for representative democracy—hence the emphasis, in middle-class Victorian political writings, on education as a prerequisite for political enfranchisement. History is acculturation and culture is pedagogy, an endless movement toward the ideal that Matthew Arnold called “our best self”—a best self prefigured, as readers of Culture and Anarchy (1869) will remember, in the formal abstraction of the State. This acculturative movement forms subjects into citizens, and has as its quite manifest intention the subsumption of class conflict. Arguing for the historical and institutional force of this idea of culture, Lloyd and Thomas align themselves with Gramsci and to some extent against Foucault by insisting on “the ultimate unity of the state formation as an instrument of class rule” (21). In the normalization of aesthetic culture lies the achievement of bourgeois hegemony.

Aesthetic disinterest is thus “rooted in violence” (147); and arguably the most original aspect of Culture and the State is its emphatic affirmation of working-class contestation of aesthetic discourse during the era of the first Reform Bill. In a preparatory move, the book’s first chapter focuses on Rousseau and Schiller, the former being read in Starobinskian fashion as the proponent of “transparence,” and, consequently, of direct over representative democracy. In contrast, Schiller, writing in response to the French Revolution, provides aesthetic culture with one of its earliest and most important theoretical statements, replacing the immediacy of the Rousseauist fête with the recreational space of the theatre, where the subject learns to identify with the species through reiterated identification with an aesthetic representation. Lloyd and Thomas’s second chapter examines texts by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, pointing to the links Coleridge establishes between culture and the state, and characterizing Wordsworth’s poetry as a form of aesthetic education that teaches an “ethical habit of generalization of particular experiences” (77). The chapter then turns to radical and working-class writings of the 1820s and 30s, and discovers in them a “systematic refusal” to imagine culture apart from the economic and political sphere, and a deep suspicion of the...