Terry Eagleton, the Jeremy Corbyn of university English departments, has written about culture, not for the first time and not, I hope, for the last. But if he’s been here before with his trademark acerbity and dusty views of postmodernism, there are some bonus novel elements. Chief among these are the sideswipes at contemporary fatuities: the diminution of the universities as places of humane learning; the selective notion of safe spaces in debate; the cultural industry as a component of GDP. Those who argue excitedly for public investment in the arts or universities on the grounds that the returns from the knowledge economy are enormous won’t find much joy here.
Professor Eagleton’s thoughts on what constitutes culture – a national way of life, the very system of nurture that enables us to survive as a species, or a body of civilised learning common to European elites – are interesting if inconclusive, though one cannot argue with the fundamentals: “A professional caste of artists and intellectuals, as Marx recognises, becomes possible only when not everyone needs to labour for most of the time.” Briskly, he cuts a swath through much of the theory and all of the jargon and seems, when all is said, to be happy enough with Wittgenstein’s idea of culture: it’s just there; it’s what we do.
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