lola seaton

THE ENDS OF CRITICISM

A Reply to Joseph North

‘W
hat is literary criticism for?’ This is the invit-
ing and perhaps exasperated question with which
Joseph North began his essay, ‘Two Paragraphs in
Raymond Williams’, which recently appeared in the
pages of this journal. The essay was a response to Francis Mulhern’s
review of North’s book, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History
(2017), which could be described as an extended diagnosis of the con-
temporary state of Anglophone academic literary criticism arguing
that it has lost its capacity to answer his essay’s opening question.1
‘Lost’, because this is a capacity, North insists, the discipline once had.
Previously, literary critics had ‘detailed and intellectually rigorous meth-
ods both for analysing the culture and for taking action to change it’, but
since what North calls ‘the turn to scholarship’ in the 1970s and 80s,
and the ensuing ascendancy of the ‘historicist/contextualist paradigm’,
cultural analysis—producing ‘politically inert forms of professionalized
knowledge’ about culture—has superseded the earlier accompanying
emphasis on intervening in culture.2

Today’s scholars have not only surrendered the cultural relevance and
political agency literary criticism once sought to have—and so forgotten
what it is for—the discipline has also lost sight of whom it is for. One
of the refrains of North’s book is that the methods of close reading and
practical criticism pioneered by I. A. Richards were originally a means
of cultivating our ‘aesthetic capabilities’, while texts were prized accord-
ing to their ‘value to readers’, as ‘instruments of aesthetic education’;
but that—thanks largely to the influence of the New Critics and their
deforming translation of Richards’s techniques—this initial pedagogical

new left review 119 sept oct 2019 105

 106 nlr 119

preoccupation with ‘better ordering our minds’ was displaced by an

unhealthy fixation on ranking texts into final hierarchies. These losses of
what North regards as criticism’s founding and signature emphases—
on cultural intervention and individual enrichment—are related, since
the two worked in concert, the one via the other: criticism was once ‘a
programmatic commitment to using works of literature for the cultiva-
tion of aesthetic sensibility, with the goal of more general cultural and
political change’.3

Roughly the first half of Literary Criticism is taken up with telling the
history of this double loss; in the second half of the book (which con-
sists of a single chapter, ‘The Critical Unconscious’, plus a conclusion,
which canvasses alternative 21st-century outcomes), North turns his
attention to questions of recovery. He surveys various movements and
developments in contemporary or near-contemporary criticism, in par-
ticular Queer and Affect Theory, and the works of Lauren Berlant and
D. A. Miller, in search of signs of discontent with the prevailing scholarly
mode—signs which he reads as the inchoate stirrings of an alternative
paradigm that will revive criticism’s original objectives.

In his recent essay for nlr, North acknowledges that he ‘didn’t say very
much’ in his book about what this alternative paradigm would look like
in practice. Taking up a suggestion in Mulhern’s review that Raymond
Williams might ‘serve as a fitting emblem’ for it, North endeavours to
‘sketch’ its details by turning to ‘two paragraphs’ in Williams’s work—
one from Politics and Letters (1979), the book-length interview with
Williams conducted by nlr editors, and another from The Country and
the City (1973), raised by the interviewers in the course of a discussion
about evaluation, Williams’s rejection of ‘the aesthetic’, and the ques-
tion of how to make authoritative critical judgements without resorting
to the idealist subject-position of the ‘trained’, ‘informed’, ‘cultivated’
reader. For Williams, one way of avoiding this was by what he called a
‘movement towards declaration of situation’, through ‘tracing back our

1
Joseph North, ‘Two Paragraphs in Raymond Williams: A Reply to Francis Mulhern’,
nlr 116/117, March–June 2019; Francis Mulhern, ‘Critical Revolutions’, nlr 110,
March–April 2018.
2
Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History, Cambridge ma and
London 2017, p. 12; hereafter lc; and North, ‘Two Paragraphs’, p. 177.
3
lc, p. 3. This accords with North’s claim that ‘the [political] struggle is being
fought, must be fought, on the terrain of sensibility’: lc, p. xi.
 seaton: Criticism 107

own social and historical conditions of response’. This was ‘necessar-

ily personal, a declaration of interest, and therefore completely variable
since everyone is initially in a different situation’—yet it ‘does not have
to lead to relativism’ because the valuations that emerged from the
process ‘would not be connected with those elements of one’s own situ-
ation which are really just biographical idiosyncrasies that issue into
personal preferences’:

They would instead be related to those which associated one with others in
certain more general acts of valuation. In other words, one should be able to
distinguish kinds of valuation which are crucial to communicate to others,
and preferences of style which one expresses all the time but are not of real
importance to anyone else.4

Williams seems to suggest that criticism has something to do with

establishing—both coming to know and setting down—the limits of
community, or the reach of sociality. His interviewers, pressing him
on the possibility of contradictions between ‘a socially communica-
ble valuation’ and ‘other potential sorts of valuation’, light upon the
paragraph from The Country and the City excerpted by North, in which
Williams contrasts England’s great country houses to the modest cot-
tages and farmsteads beside them, and the productive fields and woods
in which they sit.5

North gives a perceptive and sensitive reading of the passage from The
Country and the City, skilfully using Williams’s remarks in Politics and
Letters to illuminate it; yet he doesn’t quite deliver on his promise to
delineate a practice. That would involve not simply interpreting what
Williams is ostensibly saying in the passage, but giving an account of
what he is doing in it. In what follows—putting aside my own somewhat
mixed feelings about Williams’s writing, and fortified by comments
assembled from elsewhere in his oeuvre—I try to refine North’s ‘sketch’
of Williams’s practice, and to identify the methods he is using, if any.
I’ll then go on to venture some speculations on what critical strategies
might be at work in The Country and the City as a whole, before open-
ing the discussion out to explore—since methods are often the most

4
Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, London
and New York 2015 [1979], pp. 342–3.
5
Politics and Letters, p. 345. Since North quotes the passage twice in nlr 116/117 (see
pp. 169–70, 180), I won’t repeat it in its entirety here. The original can be found in
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, London 1973, pp. 105–6.
 108 nlr 119

powerful and durable of pedagogical legacies—what echoes of this

practice might be detectable in the work of one of the most compelling
cultural critics of the present era, the late Mark Fisher. What can contem-
porary critics learn from Williams’s (and Fisher’s) critical writing? What
are its lessons?

A Kantian conundrum

North’s conception of what literary study should (and shouldn’t) be

bears a striking resemblance to the ‘negative formulation’ put forward
in F. R. Leavis’s ‘Sketch for an “English School”’:

There is no more futile study than that which ends with mere knowledge
about literature. If literature is worth study, then the test of its having been
so will be the ability to read literature intelligently . . . The study of a literary
text about which the student cannot say . . . as a matter of first-hand per-
ception and judgement—of intelligent realization—why it should be worth
study is a self-stultifying occupation.6

‘An approach [to works of literature] is personal or it is nothing’, Leavis

also wrote, ‘nothing’ gently equivocating between meaning worthless or
impossible (i.e., not an approach at all). The student or critic of literature
thus doesn’t need ‘anything in the nature of a laboratory-method’ since
they ‘can have the poem only by an inner kind of possession’. Readers
are to rely solely on ‘the sensitive and scrupulous use of intelligence’,
unaided by ‘technical procedures’, ‘apparatus’ or ‘laboratory technique’.7
Leavis’s hyperbolically scientific idiom seems designed to convey the
inappropriateness, even absurdity, of applying something as imper-
sonal, or more exactly, transpersonal, as a method to something as ‘inner’
and ‘personal’ as reading. The upshot of this studiedly unmethodical

6
F. R. Leavis, Education and the University: A Sketch for an ‘English School’, 2nd ed.,
Cambridge 1979 [1948], pp. 67–8.
7
Leavis, Education and the University, pp. 68, 70, 71–2. Leavis’s hostility to methods
is matched by I. A. Richards’s enthusiasm for them. His Practical Criticism aimed
‘to provide a new technique for those who wish to discover for themselves what they
think and feel about poetry (and cognate matters) and why they should like or dis-
like it’, and ‘to prepare the way for educational methods more efficient than those
we use now in developing discrimination and the power to understand what we
hear and read.’ Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement, London 1929, p. 3.
Far from believing that technique precluded an authentic response to literature,
Richards’s introductory remarks suggest that we need technique to activate and
realize such response.
 seaton: Criticism 109

approach is that ‘in criticism . . . nothing can be proved; there can, in

the nature of the case, be no laboratory-demonstration or anything like
it.’ ‘Nevertheless’, Leavis continues, ‘one can very often, putting a fin-
ger on something in the text, make an observation that is irresistible
and final.’8 The echo of the idiomatic expression—‘I can’t put my finger
on it’—places literary study firmly in the realm of elusive impressions
and intuitions, and far from the hard certainties of science, whilst ‘irre-
sistible’ suggests it trades in seduction and persuasion, rather than the
presentation of ‘irrefutable’ evidence.

Though he is in some sense the anti-hero of North’s tendentious history,

at fault for giving ‘aesthetics’ and criticism their bad reputation (via an
alleged association with a reactionary idealism, such that the turn away
from criticism and towards scholarship was largely inaugurated by the
left), one can imagine Leavis reading North’s book with pleasure and
approval. Until, that is, he came across a significant claim in North’s
final chapter: the ‘search for a more personal method of reading . . .
is, really, in a buried way, a search for a new paradigm for criticism
proper’.9 Given Leavis’s allergic reaction to ‘laboratory-technique’ and
his associated advocacy of an intuitive and supra-methodical approach
to literature—more a matter of ‘knack’ or (natural) flair, than the dili-
gent acquisition of teachable techniques—the notion of a ‘personal
method’ would presumably have had the jarring, if intriguing, sound
of an oxymoron. There is indeed something paradoxical about the
phrase. Traditionally, a method is something that makes an experiment
repeatable and its results reproducible. This definitive characteristic
is precisely predicated on its capacity to transcend—to manifest an
indifference to—the person who happens to be using it. North’s para-
doxical demand marks a mysterious moment in Literary Criticism, his
word ‘buried’ suggesting—as if it were his book’s secret—that a return
to criticism’s original aims is simply a matter of (re-)discovering more
personal approaches to reading. There is then a slippage from North’s

8
Leavis, Education and the University, p. 74.
9
lc, p. 168. This claim is the culmination of a trend in which North elides the
words ‘critical’ and ‘personal’ (and a chain of associated terms: ‘affective’, ‘intimate’,
‘inward’, ‘idiosyncratic’), presenting them as virtual equivalents: ‘[Eve] Sedgwick
and [D. A.] Miller both point us toward a more positive, more personal, ultimately
more critical relationship to the text’, p. 173; my emphasis. But see also lc, pp. 167,
169, 170, 179.
 110 nlr 119

opening question about what literary criticism is for, to a connected, if

subsidiary one: how to do it?

To see what problem North’s paradoxical demand for a ‘personal method’

is being called upon to solve, it is worth noting the way North articulates
his dissatisfaction with the prevailing condition of literary criticism on
the following page:

Today the discipline at large possesses no systematic way to articulate to

itself the means by which a personal and affective intimacy with the text
can be made a primary site of intellectual value—not through contextual-
izing or theorization, but through the force of its own inwardness—not,
that is to say, by staking its claims to intellectual rigour on its perceptive-
ness or utility as cultural analysis, but by staking them instead on the
power and subtlety of its attempt to cultivate our common capabilities. In
such a context, any work that would stake its claims on a ‘merely’ personal
intimacy with the text must run the risk of being revealed as mere impres-
sionism or belletrism, such as cannot be taken seriously by the strictest
scholarly standards.10

North’s complaint seems to be that the scholarly paradigm currently

dominating the discipline denies, trivializes or simply can’t adequately
metabolize the personal (and ‘affective’ or ‘intimate’) elements of one’s
experience of literature—for which read: the significant elements. (One
could even say: professionalized literary study can’t quite handle the fact
that one’s experience of literature is, unavoidably, an experience, and one
from which criticism must begin.)

Without wishing to dehistoricize North’s complaint or downplay its

specific application to contemporary literary study, it may be help-
ful to see it as continuous with, or at least analogous to, one of the
longstanding questions dogging criticism—a question almost constitu-
tive of the discipline—which has to do with how critical judgements
acquire authority, since they can’t, as Leavis reminds us, be proven in
the way of experimental science. In requiring criticism to be both per-
sonal and methodical—a transposition of Kant’s terms ‘subjective’ and
‘universal’—North is asking that it both proceed from an idiosyncratic
experience and yet be shareable. The question that the demand for a
‘personal method’ is intended to settle, in other words, is how a critic
can secure the general relevance of their personal observations and

10
lc, p. 169.
 seaton: Criticism 111

subjective impressions (including all the incidental extra-literary expe-

rience that informs them); that is, how to prevent their impressions
degenerating into ‘impressionism’, and their judgements seeming rela-
tivistic and perhaps irrelevant.

North’s dissatisfaction with the contemporary modus operandi of the dis-

cipline can be seen as pivoting on an objection to its standard way of
resolving this problem, which is to demand that critics systematically
suppress their subjectivity and assume the pseudo-objective stance of
a disembodied, impersonal subject, whose pristine reception of a work
of literature will therefore achieve the epistemic, or perhaps merely
social, authority amenable to the ‘strictest scholarly standards’.11 This
false resolution of the problem—the demand that critical judgements
spuriously lay claim to the prestige of knowledge—precludes a more
interesting approach, which would recognize that ‘the [real] prob-
lem of the critic, as of the artist, is not to discount their subjectivity,
but to include it’.12 A sufficiently personal yet adequately methodical
critical practice would thus steer a course between twin dangers: sol-
ipsism and pseudo-objectivism, between taking one’s experience too
seriously—uncritically elevating one’s first-hand response to the status

11
There is a particularly vivid example of this complaint—in terms that strikingly
echo North’s—in an essay by Simon Jarvis: ‘Suppose I am to write about one of the
poems . . . I of course wish to begin from the experience which I believe I have had.
If not to bore any possible readers with the detritus of my own life, I am to delete
from this experience everything that is merely personal: not merely that which is
obviously so . . . but also anything that cannot also be proven to be an experience
that all right readers of these lines should have. So I must replace the lines in their
context . . . and so on . . . Now I have done all this, and I may think that I have made
knowledge, of a kind. This making has depended upon the deletion of everything
idiosyncratic about my experience and, with it, upon the deletion of everything that
makes that experience an experience. In its place sits . . . the reader: the placeholder
for my self-disowning, my idea of what “they” will allow to be what “everyone” must
feel.’ Simon Jarvis, ‘An Undeleter for Criticism’, Diacritics, vol. 32, no. 1, 2002, pp.
5–6. Perhaps another way of putting the complaint is that the way the discipline
mandates professional critics must write about literature has become increasingly
divorced from the experience of, and (ordinary, personal) reasons for, reading it in
the first place.
12
And ‘not to overcome [their subjectivity] in agreement, but to master it in exem-
plary ways. Then [the critic’s] work outlasts the fashions and arguments of a
particular age.’ Stanley Cavell, ‘Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy’, in Must
We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays, Cambridge 2002 [1969], p. 87.
 112 nlr 119

of an ‘impersonal judgement’—and not taking it seriously enough—

disowning that response altogether.

Statements in stone

Turning to the much-bruited paragraph from The Country and the City in
pursuit of this ‘inward’ yet ‘intellectually rigorous’ practice, perhaps the
first thing to note about the excerpt is that it is not obviously suitable for
North’s purposes: we are seeking a model for literary criticism, yet here
Williams is discussing country houses—not, for example, country-house
poems. In order to think through how Williams’s critical activity in this
passage might be relevant to contemporary literary critics, it is worth
turning to an earlier essay entitled ‘Communications and Community’,
collected in Resources of Hope. There, Williams writes:

Every society has communication systems, and these can be of a kind which
at first we don’t think of as communication systems at all. One very good
example is of some prominent feature in the place where we live. Think
how much of our sense of where we live can be expressed in some promi-
nent building, some hill, some feature, natural or man-made. This we feel
somehow expresses the meaning of what it is to live in that place, and
around that building, around that feature . . . The building of course was
specially created: it was put there, often, to express the community’s sense
of itself, some value it held in common . . . there the things are, built right
into the structure of what it feels like to belong to a group, to belong to a
community, to belong to society.13

Read in conjunction with this passage, it becomes clear that when

Williams refers to country houses as ‘statements in stone’ on the page
following North’s excerpt, and later, as an ‘explicit social declaration’, he
is not speaking metaphorically. ‘Prominent features in the place where
we live’, including ‘prominent buildings’ (like outsized manors), are
‘communication systems’—indeed, ‘very good examples’ of such sys-
tems. ‘After these of course there are the more formal communication
systems’, Williams continues.14 ‘After’ suggests he thinks of the fea-
tures of the places where we live as perhaps our primary experiences of
communication—as the occasions of our original ‘aesthetic’ experiences

13
Raymond Williams, ‘Communications and Community’ [1961], in Resources of
Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, London and New York 1989, p. 22.
14
As ‘more formal systems of communication’, Williams lists ‘the language of
the group, and all the institutions—religious institutions, institutions of informa-
tion . . . institutions of entertainment, institutions of art’: ‘Communications and
Community’, p. 22.
 seaton: Criticism 113

(to retain a term Williams rejects)—and so profoundly formative, since,

as he writes elsewhere, ‘we begin to think where we live’, and the ‘land-
scape in which we first lived’ is where we ‘learned to see’.15 But there is
a sense, too, in which Williams regards the places where we live as not
only the sites of our first exposure to culture, but also as paradigmatic of
cultural experience since the experience is manifestly social: the building
is ‘built right into the structure of what it feels like to belong to a group,
to belong to a community, to belong to society’.

Williams uses the word ‘criticism’ twice in ‘Communications and

Community’. In the course of explaining that communication is not ‘the
news after the event’, ‘secondary’ or ‘marginal’, but constitutive of expe-
rience and reality, he writes:

What we have to try to see, first, is that deeply involved in our minds and in
the shape of our society are certain communication patterns, only some of
which we are conscious of. These communication patterns are not some-
thing inevitable; they are man-made, subject to change, and subject all the
time to criticism.

These ‘communication patterns’ have a strangely doubled ontologi-

cal status: they are simultaneously outside us—in our society—and
‘deeply’ internalized; both public and profoundly inner. This means that
‘criticism’—the process by which these ‘communication patterns’ are
examined and where necessary amended or rejected—is a correspond-
ingly Janus-faced activity: criticizing and changing parts of the culture
that surrounds us might entail a form of self-criticism, and involve
challenging or repudiating aspects of our own consciousness (or even
unconsciousness). Williams mentions ‘criticism’ a second time when
explaining how
All of us, as individuals, grow up within a society, within the rules of a
society, and these rules cut very deep, and include certain ways of seeing
the world . . . But then—and this also is fundamental—we are able, as we
develop, to compare one rule with another, to compare the result of one
thing seen with another. We are capable of independent criticism. We are
also—and this is one of the most difficult but most interesting things—
capable of new seeing . . . We could not begin this process unless we had
first been given a very large part of our mental equipment by the training
of our society. But that vital last bit, when we can as individuals go over the
thing again, try to see the world in new ways . . . is equally important.16

15
Raymond Williams, ‘The Idea of a Common Culture’ [1968], in Resources of Hope,
p. 32; The Country and the City, p. 84.
16
Williams, ‘Communications and Community’, pp. 21–2. Italics mine.
 114 nlr 119

As with the ‘communication patterns’ which are both out there and
‘deeply involved’ in us, these ‘rules’—which come from outside us and
precede us—also ‘cut very deep’, enveloping and penetrating our minds.
This means that ‘independent criticism’ is, again, not simply a matter
of reflecting on what we see, but a much more strenuous and poten-
tially unsettling process of questioning and overhauling the deep-seated
habits of perception—the ‘ways of seeing the world’—that we may have
forgotten were learned.

Kinds of comparison

In this latter passage, ‘comparison’ emerges as a significant—if not the

quintessential—critical technique. Williams discusses comparison else-
where in his writing, and often in contexts where, though he does not
mention ‘criticism’ by name, he is discussing cases when learned rules
of seeing have come to seem inadequate or problematic—often associ-
ated with the presence of some ‘tension’ or crisis. In The Long Revolution
(1961), published in the same year as the essay on ‘Communications and
Community’ was written, Williams writes:

While it is right that we should hold ourselves open to learn . . . In some

cases we will be literally unable to receive what is offered; we simply can-
not see the world, cannot respond to experience, in that way. Often, again,
the power of the work will move us, yet still, later, we will reject it. For the
experience has to be fitted into our whole organization, and in some cases,
after a process of comparison that may be prolonged over years, acceptance
will not be possible.17

In this passage, comparison is the process by which an ‘experience’ of a

cultural object and the way of seeing that it entails, undergo protracted
examination and eventual rejection. Comparison crops up in Williams’s
Marxism and Literature (1977), too, and again, when a prevailing or pro-
posed way of seeing or ‘interpreting’ is coming under scrutiny: ‘There
is frequent tension between the received interpretation and the practical
experience . . . the tension is often an unease, a stress, a displacement,
a latency: the moment of conscious comparison not yet come, often
not even coming.’18

There are many illuminating clues in these passages about what crit-
icism involves, or the conditions in which it can occur—it requires a

17
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, Cardigan 2011 [1961], p. 55. Italics mine.
18
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford 1977, p. 130.
 seaton: Criticism 115

provisional withdrawal from the social and has a structure of recursive-

ness (‘when we can, as individuals, go over the thing again’) and a certain
duration (‘prolonged over years’)—but I want to isolate and linger on
comparison—‘by no means the only process’, but nevertheless a ‘power-
ful and important’ one—because The Country and the City passage that
North discusses is suffused with it.19 In a rudimentary sense Williams
is enjoining his readers to compare the country houses with the ancient
farms, to look from one to the other and back again, to notice the dif-
ference in size and to contemplate its meaning. But Williams is also
exhorting us to attempt a more complex and ambitious comparison: to
juxtapose not just different features of the landscape, but different ways
of seeing it. Telling us to stand still and look up, Williams is encouraging
us to weigh the vision of the landscape inscribed in our guidebooks—
which we might think of as society’s ‘official’ way of seeing—with our own
experience of the landscape, with what we actually see before our eyes.

This last kind of comparison relies on a quasi-metaphorical interpreta-

tion of the passage—the guidebook serving as a symbol of a society’s
established rules of seeing (or of not seeing, as the case may be).20
Indeed, the book as a whole has a submerged allegorical quality which
periodically surfaces, as if its pedagogical substance were stored and
offered more in the way of a parable or a fable (and thus might resemble
a moral more than a method). Saturated with imperatives, this passage
tells us what to do, but there is a sense in which The Country and the City
is also intent on showing us something—something it might not be easy
to tell us—which might be a way of parsing North’s claim that Williams’s
practice ‘knows’ something that he couldn’t articulate in theory.21

Before bringing this allegorical quality into relief, I want to note an obvi-
ous, and therefore easily missed, explanation of what drew North, like
the Politics and Letters interviewers before him, to the country-house

19
Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 130.
20
Country houses do seem particularly susceptible to taking on this wider symbolic
valence in Williams’s writing. Discussing Clive Bell’s Civilization, for example,
Williams writes: ‘What kind of life can it be, I wonder, to produce this extraordinary
fussiness, this extraordinary decision to call certain things culture and then sepa-
rate them, as with a park wall, from ordinary people and ordinary work?’ ‘Culture
Is Ordinary’ [1958], in Resources of Hope, p. 5; my emphasis. Williams also criticizes
George Eliot for her ‘re-creation . . . of a country-house England, a class England
in which only certain histories matter’: The Country and the City, p. 180. Country
houses are here a kind of shorthand for exclusionary cultural elitism.
21
North, ‘Two Paragraphs’, pp. 169, 182.
 116 nlr 119

passage: it stands out from the surrounding text. There is a sense in

which the paragraph offers itself for excerption, as if ripe for it: it is
conspicuously memorable. Williams’s interviewers refer to it as ‘one of
the most powerful single paragraphs in The Country and the City’ and as
‘extraordinarily moving’, and note that it ‘is brought home with tremen-
dous force’.22 What is the source of its power and pathos? In an immediate
sense, the former derives from the imperatives that inaugurate each sen-
tence, which not only give the piece its feeling of momentum, but also
involve, even implicate, the reader, by directly addressing them—we are
not onlookers, but potentially culpable: ‘But stand’, ‘Look’, ‘Think’, ‘See’,
‘And then turn and look’.

The directness of the imperatives is reinforced by the immediacy of

the deictic ‘that land’, ‘those fields, those streams, those woods’, ‘that
many houses’. This rhetorical device in particular is crucial to the logic
of the passage: by verbally pointing to the ‘land’, ‘fields’, ‘streams’, as
it were, ‘over there’, as if the landscape were before our eyes, we are
being asked—ordered, in fact—to imagine that they are: to ‘see’ what
isn’t literally visible to us. Once prompted to make this initial effort of
‘seeing’—of making present—what is invisible, it is only a further inten-
sification of this imaginative activity when Williams then enjoins us to
see what is also not literally visible within the invisible scene we have
made visible through imagining. For we are not simply being asked to
notice the landscape, but to see what it produces, and what produced
it; to extrapolate the invisible history of what we have brought before
our eyes—to ‘see’ the labour, and what the isolated farm has ‘managed
to become’. We are thus being instructed to overcome a double invis-
ibility: or rather, the initial goad to imagine prepares us for the second
imaginative act, which is precisely about conjuring into view a differ-
ent, perhaps fuller picture of the land than the ‘landscaped’ version
furnished by the ‘guidebook’.

An alternative way of describing and accounting for the ‘moving’ and

memorable effect of the passage is to characterize it as highly declama-
tory. The language comes over as in certain respects excessive—it seems
designed to produce supplementary effects in excess of its habitual
and dominant function of conveying sense, or imparting information.
One can see this even from the most literal and rudimentary case of

22
Williams, Politics and Letters, pp. 345–6.
 seaton: Criticism 117

redundancy—repetition: ‘village to village’ to ‘see the next and yet the

next example’, an enactment of the monotony of the obedient day-
trippers mindlessly filing through the English countryside to ‘admire’,
rather than really ‘see’ the grand houses. But more importantly, the rep-
etition also expresses the monotony of witnessing such a monotonous
way of encountering landscape, and thus conveys—dramatizes, even—
Williams’s own exasperation.

Williams’s tendency to double phrases in the passage is similarly exces-

sive—and expressive: ‘these other “families”, these systematic owners’;
‘that degree of disparity, that barbarous proportion of scale’. The second
phrase of each pair is a kind of grandiloquent (‘barbarous’) repetition
or expansion of the first, as if Williams is luxuriating in, and delib-
erately escalating, his contempt. One senses Williams is letting his
emotional temper rise in this passage, and this, too, contributes to its
distinctiveness: such unconcealed emotion about one’s subject matter is
unexpected in an intellectual work of this kind—all of which gives the
passage the aura of an outbreak, the taking of an unofficial opportunity
to discharge a long pent-up grievance. Indeed, the passage is poignant
in part because it is palpably impassioned: country houses—or the kind
of submissive reverence they elicit—were manifestly not of sheerly aca-
demic interest to Williams, but something about which he had personal
feelings. Williams hints at this just before the excerpted passage: ‘It has
always seemed to me, from some relevant family experience, that the dis-
tance or absence of one of those “great houses” of the landlords can be a
critical factor in the survival of a traditional kind of community: that of
tolerant neighbourliness.’23 Then perhaps one ought to posit a relation
between these different kinds of excess—between what one is tempted
to call the passage’s lyricism or literariness and one’s sense that Williams
has particular and strong feelings about his subject (as if he is taking it
personally), which he is here allowing to come through.

At his desk

This is not the only moment in which the presence of Williams’s per-
son can be felt in the affective textures of his prose. Indeed, Williams’s
letting show the personal convictions and investments, and above all, the
personal experiences motivating and shaping his writing, is a constant

23
The Country and the City, p. 105. Italics mine.
 118 nlr 119

and systematic feature of his work. Snippets of autobiography turn up

in even the most unexpected of places—such as in one of Williams’s
driest and most abstruse books, Marxism and Literature. One would
think a work of such a purely theoretical kind would be of necessity
impersonal, and so inhospitable to confession or anecdote; yet Williams
introduces it by giving an autobiographical history of his own intellec-
tual development in relation to both ‘Marxism’ and ‘literature’, as if the
book were about the confluence of two of his enduring preoccupations,
rather than the abstract work of theory it is.24 But the tendency is par-
ticularly pronounced and pervasive in The Country and the City, which
raises the question of what kind of book it is—a question whose answer,
or answers, are not obvious. The book is difficult to place on account of
its hybridity: described as a ‘social, intellectual and literary history’ in its
introductory chapter, this already composite history is then laced with
fragments and episodes of another kind of history—personal history, or
autobiography. But this fusion of modes in The Country and the City does
not entirely account for the impression the book leaves that it is not just
unconventional—more personal or memoiristic than ‘history’ tends to
be—but that it is sui generis.

The sense that the book is one-of-a-kind—that there is nothing to compare

it to, and perhaps that no-one else could have written it—derives from its
being autobiographical in a more complex and involved sense than that
implied by the periodic emergence of a few stray personal memories.
Indeed, one could describe The Country and the City as constitutionally
self-involved: alongside the official chronology of the book—the history
of English writing about the country and the city—there is an alternative
chronology—the history of Williams’s efforts to come to terms with this
history, and to grasp it in relation to his own, including not only his own
encounters with such literature, but his own direct, extra-literary experi-
ences of the rural world and the urban environment that such literature
represents, or misrepresents. The anecdotal incursions are thus not
‘stray’ or incidental at all—though they may sometimes be presented as
digressions—since we are not truly reading a straightforward or neutral
history of the ways in which ideas about the country and the city have

24
‘One way of making clear my sense of the situation from which this book begins
is to describe, briefly, the development of my own position, in relation to Marxism
and to literature . . . That individual history may be of some significance in relation
to the development of Marxism and thinking about Marxism in Britain during that
period’: Williams, Marxism and Literature, pp. 1, 5. Though note that Williams also
insists that his ‘book is not a separated work of theory’ but ‘an argument based on
what I have learned from all [my] previous work’: p. 6.
 seaton: Criticism 119

developed and changed, but a history of Williams’s working through of

these ideas—and a constant assessment of them in terms of whether
they express or betray his experience, ever Williams’s touchstone.

And since for Williams the process of writing is itself a way of working
through or metabolizing this general, shared history, The Country and
the City also contains the history of its own writing. This meta-history is
most obvious in the way the book is framed. The introduction ends with
a striking description of Williams at his desk:

This then is where I am, and as I settle to work I find I have to resolve, step
by slow step, experiences and questions that once moved like light . . . A
dog is barking—that chained bark—behind the asbestos barn. It is now
and then: here and many places. When there are questions to put, I have to
push back my chair, look down at my papers, and feel the change.

And then note Williams’s reversion to this present tense at the very end
of the book:

This change of basic ideas and questions, especially in the socialist and
revolutionary movements, has been for me the connection which I have
been seeking for so long, through the local forms of a particular and per-
sonal crisis, and through the extended inquiry which has taken many forms
but which has come through as this inquiry into the country and the city.
They are the many questions that were a single question, that once moved
like light: a personal experience, for the reasons I described, but now also
a social experience, which connects me, increasingly, with so many others.
This is the position, the sense of shape, for which I have worked.25

This closing sense of achievement—of the book recording Williams’s

journey from a ‘particular and personal crisis’ through to some kind of
resolution, in which such ‘personal experience’ has been alchemized
into ‘social experience’—returns us to the opening uncertainty, and to
Williams’s pensive, agitated state as he prepares to work. The resump-
tion of the opening’s unusual present tense—‘This is where I am’
becoming ‘This is the position’—paradoxically establishes a temporal
separation between Williams’s ‘present’ at the book’s beginning, and the
new ‘present’ he has reached by its ending, producing the sense that in
reading the book, one is following Williams’s progress, and witnessing
some kind of personal evolution or transformation.26

25
The Country and the City, pp. 7–8, 305.
26
Williams’s insistence on the length of time—‘for so long’—and on the associated
slowness of the effort emphasizes this sense of his progress through the book, and
of its documenting, even constituting, an intellectual and personal journey.
 120 nlr 119

In one sense, Williams’s present tense installs us in his compositional

present; but there is another sense in which he is also positioning him-
self in our reading present, insofar as his questioning, pre-compositional
pose mirrors the situation of the reader, who, not having yet read the
book, is naturally in a state of ignorance and expectation, too. This is a
rhetorical manoeuvre of course, and one borrowed from fiction. Indeed,
Williams is lightly fictionalizing his writing process, since the opening
present tense involves a kind of pretence: Williams writes as if he hasn’t
already written the book and doesn’t know how it will end—as if it were
happening ‘live’, rather than what is in effect an edited recording. This
mild fictitiousness is perhaps why, as in the country-house passage
North excerpted, Williams’s prose marks itself out by its felt proxim-
ity to imaginative writing (e.g., in the atmospheric symbolism of the
image of the chained dog), and seems to forgo the standard objectives
of communicative efficiency and clarity in the pursuit of the oblique
significance and extra-semantic linguistic effects one more readily
associates with fiction.27

Bildungskritik

In its opening pages, Williams gives a kind of pre-history of The Country

and the City:
The English experience and interpretation of the country and the city . . .
will have to be assessed, as a general problem. But it is as well to say at the
outset that this has been for me a personal issue, for as long as I remember.
It happened that in a predominantly urban and industrial Britain I was
born in a remote village, in a very old settled countryside . . . Before I had
read any descriptions and interpretations of the changes and variations of
settlements and ways of life, I saw them on the ground, and working, in
unforgettable clarity. In the course of education I moved to another city,
built round a university, and since then . . . I have come to . . . look forward
and back, in space and time, knowing and seeking to know this relation-
ship, as an experience and as a problem. I have written about it in other
ways but also I have been slowly collecting the evidence to write about it
explicitly, as a matter of social, literary and intellectual history. This book
is the result, but though it often and necessarily follows impersonal pro-
cedures, in description and analysis, there is behind it, all the time, this
personal pressure and commitment.28

27
Note also the fact that Williams’s announcements—‘This is where I am’ and
‘This is the position’—are almost literal instances of the ‘declaration of situation’
for which he called in Politics and Letters, as a way of fending off both relativism and
pseudo-objectivism.
28
The Country and the City, pp. 2–3.
 seaton: Criticism 121

Note how Williams makes a point of saying that his first-hand encoun-
ters with rural and urban life—‘on the ground, and working’—preceded
his extended reading about them, i.e., his formal education. The book is
thus in part an attempt to test what he has been taught about the country
and the city against his experience of them, through relentlessly asking
whether the former adequately and authentically lives up to the latter. It
is in this sense the story, and vehicle, of Williams’s unlearning of parts
of his education, or his repudiation of aspects of the official culture to
which it initiated him.

‘The making of a mind’, Williams wrote in an essay entitled ‘Culture Is

Ordinary’, ‘is, first, the slow learning of shapes, purposes, and meanings’;
‘second, but equal in importance, is the testing of these in experience,
the making of new observations, comparisons, and meanings.’ This is
where the allegorical aspect of The Country and the City becomes vis-
ible, because if one’s personal development—one’s initiation into a
culture, one’s becoming ‘cultivated’—involves both learning and testing,
then one needs both to be ‘trained’ to the ‘known meanings’, and also,
paradoxically, schooled in challenging them. In other words, one needs
to learn how to unlearn or ‘refuse to learn’ certain rules.29 Presumably,
one does not learn to disobey or discard rules in the same way that one
learns those rules; the capacity to question what one is taught is not nec-
essarily contained in what one is taught. This indicates that the ability
to criticize one’s official education and culture, and its ways of seeing,
might be difficult to teach. To read The Country and the City is thus to
witness Williams demonstrating, by dramatizing, the (selective) undoing
of his education, which is also, of course, a continuation of it, in part
conducted through writing, and the way that involves remaking himself
in the process.

The ‘particular and personal crisis’ Williams alludes to at the end of The
Country and the City evidently had something to do with the influence of
Leavis, and his dire diagnosis of the modern condition, which Williams
discusses in ‘Culture Is Ordinary’: ‘I was deeply impressed by [Leavis’s
diagnosis]; deeply enough for my ultimate rejection of it to be a per-
sonal crisis lasting several years. For, obviously, it seemed to fit a good
deal of my experience.’30 The Country and the City disentangles ‘true and
false ideas, true and false histories’ of the country and the city; but the

29
Raymond Williams, ‘Culture Is Ordinary’ [1958], in Resources of Hope, p. 4.
30
Williams, ‘Culture Is Ordinary’, p. 9.
 122 nlr 119

particular ‘false idea’ from which it receives its real impetus—the central
illusion it aims to dispel—is Leavis’s form of cultural nostalgia:

That very powerful myth of modern England in which the transition from
a rural to an industrial society is seen as a kind of fall, the true cause and
origin of our social suffering and disorder. It is difficult to overestimate
the importance of this myth, in modern social thought. It is a main source
for the structure of feeling which we began by examining: the perpetual
retrospect to an ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ society. But it is also a main source
for that last protecting illusion in the crisis of our own time: that it is not
capitalism which is injuring us, but the more isolable, more evident system
of urban industrialism.31

As we saw, Williams was ‘deeply impressed’ by elements of this

myth. Thus The Country and the City is not just a project of general
demystification—a disinterested refutation of an idea that Williams
believed to be manifestly wrong (and harmful, because distracting)—
but an effort of self-enlightenment, an examination into this myth’s hold
over his own mind, in order to ultimately loosen its grip. This returns us
to the equivocal ontology of ‘communication patterns’ or ‘rules of seeing’:
at once external—the ‘rules of society’—and imbricated in the innermost
structures of our consciousness, the process of questioning and rejecting
them involves not simply an investigation into our shared culture, but an
‘extended inquiry’ into ourselves. One way of parsing the moral of this
practice is to say, not that one must induce a personal crisis in order to
produce authentic intellectual work, or to advocate self-exposure as the
guarantor of all serious thought, but perhaps that you should in general
avoid expending energy on debunking ideas by which you remain wholly
unseduced—instead, like Williams, aspiring to argue against the Leavis
in oneself. This is a way of guaranteeing not anything as unfashionable
as intellectual authenticity but that the issues are live for you, that you
care to say what you are saying, and think it worth saying.

One of Williams’s central claims—one he makes throughout his work,

but which is put forward most systematically in Marxism and Literature—
is that culture is social (hence the fact that, as North explains in his essay,
we cannot separate our perception of the formal features of country
houses from ‘the history of exploitation that produced them’).32 We do
not encounter culture in a vacuum: the world does not fall away—the

31
The Country and the City, p. 96.
32
North, ‘Two Paragraphs’, p. 170.
 seaton: Criticism 123

way, admiring a grand country house, we dissolve the labourers into the
landscape. This is not to deny that certain kinds of cultural production
and cultural experience (and criticism) require a degree of solitude; nor
that cultural encounters can be deeply personal. Rather (and this seems
to me to be precisely the point of his critique of ‘the aesthetic’), Williams
objects to the way certain kinds of significant personal experiences are
taken to be private, i.e., unshareable, and often also ineffable—the fact
that they are beyond communication, beyond language, and so perhaps
beyond criticism, attesting to their transcendence. Another way of putting
this—and this is one of the salient lessons of Williams’s Bildungskritik, of
his allowing personal experiences to perpetually intrude in his writing—
is that all culture includes irreducibly common elements. He shows us
this by treating culture as if it belongs to him (though never to him alone
of course), which means claiming the right to evaluate it according to
the degree to which it finds forms adequate to present experience, and
to reject it if it fails to—since to truly possess something is to have the
power to disown it.

Then and now

In his critical survey of Williams’s achievement, Terry Eagleton wrote of

Williams ‘resolutely offering his own experience as historically repre-
sentative’, and claimed that his ‘discourse rests on a rare, courageously
simple belief—Wordsworth and Yeats come to mind as confrères—that
the deepest personal experience can be offered, without arrogance or
appropriation, as socially “typical”’.33 I’ve been trying to unravel the
methodological import and pedagogical force of such offering; but
Eagleton’s way of putting it raises the question of its cause or rationale—
the question of what gives Williams such ‘courage’ and resolution (as
well as the secondary question of why Williams’s conviction that he is
‘socially typical’, i.e., ordinary, should be ‘rare’, and so in some sense

33
Terry Eagleton, ‘Criticism and Politics: The Work of Raymond Williams’, nlr
i/95, Jan–Feb 1976, p. 9. Eagleton later related this paradox—Williams as simulta-
neously ‘ordinary and exceptional’—to his ‘curious ability to look on himself from
the outside’. See Eagleton, ‘Resources for a Journey of Hope: The Significance of
Raymond Williams’, nlr i/168, Mar–Apr 1988, pp. 10–11. See also Stanley Cavell’s
aperçu in The Claim of Reason: ‘those capable of the deepest personal confes-
sion (Augustine, Luther, Rousseau, Thoreau, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Freud) were
most convinced they were speaking from the most hidden knowledge of others.
Perhaps that is the sense which makes confession possible.’ The Claim of Reason:
Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, Oxford and New York 1970, p. 109.
 124 nlr 119

extraordinary). One can see Williams’s ‘simple belief’ at work in The

Country and the City, in, for example, how his reflections on the writing
of the book continue:

And since the relation of country and city is not only an objective problem
and history, but has been and still is for many millions of people a direct
and intense preoccupation and experience, I feel no need to justify, though
it is as well to mention, this personal cause.34

Since Williams knows that his personal experiences of the country and
the city are shared by ‘many millions of people’, he can divulge them,
since though personal, they are not unique. An empirical explanation for
this belief might look to the character of Williams’s personal experience—
his profound and ‘positive connection’ to the Black Mountain village
where he grew up, his sense of belonging to a community, and his related
affiliation with a class.35 But whatever its biographical source, Williams’s
confident disclosure of his personal investments—one could instead
describe it as an unusually full and meticulous ‘declaration of the situa-
tion’ from which he is speaking—also follows from theoretical principles.
What can seem from one angle as a digressive exercise in self-indulgence
is in fact an acknowledgement of sociality, and of its reach. For if Williams
is personalizing a general history—remorselessly viewing it from his own
perspective, and testing it against his own experience—he is also ‘soci-
ologizing’ himself, seeing his experience as related to the culture around
him. This is the paradox of culture, which ‘is both the most ordinary com-
mon meanings and the finest individual meanings.’36

If one’s representativeness, or one’s confidence in one’s representative-

ness, relies on the continued existence of certain shared experiences,
can it withstand the disappearance of the sociological conditions of those
experiences? The world that produced Williams and his writing—the
immediate milieu of the Anglo-Welsh countryside, the Edwardian rail-
way system, for which his father worked—has largely faded or vanished,

34
The Country and the City, p. 3.
35
‘When I go back to that country, I feel a recovery of a particular kind of life, which
appears, at times, as an inescapable identity, a more positive connection than I have
known elsewhere. Many other men feel this, of their own native places . . .’ Note
how his personal feeling—his sense of the community and landscape in which he
was born giving him ‘an inescapable identity’—immediately sends Williams into a
meditation on the way this personal feeling about a specific place is ordinary, and
widely shared. The Country and the City, p. 84.
36
Williams, ‘Culture Is Ordinary’, p. 4.
 seaton: Criticism 125

along with much of the community of the left to and for which he spoke.
This is to pose a question of whether Williams is, or continues to be, the
emblematic and perhaps exemplary figure North takes him for. Reading
Williams’s writing as someone who is part of a generation that was born
after Williams’s death, and whose lifespan coincides with the ascend-
ancy and hegemony of neoliberalism—and with no direct experience
or memory of social democracy, or its breakdown—it’s difficult to avoid
the intermittent sense that I don’t fully understand Williams (or perhaps
that he wouldn’t understand me).

Admittedly, a sense of Williams’s recurring elusiveness is not confined

to people of my generation: between passages of moving and rewarding
insight, Williams’s writing, usually in his efforts to avoid simplification,
can succumb to an aura—not without its seductions—of mystification.
His syntax has a tendency to become waterlogged, forcing one to wade
through too many abstract nouns, themselves somehow insular, even
idiolectal, as if he has developed his own technical vocabulary. Instead of
difficult ideas made simple and clear, we often get complicated expres-
sions of complexity. Yet I do not think my misgivings are just a question
of Williams’s style, but of a whole idiom and sensibility that can seem
alien and remote. His writing retains its immense power, but aspects of
it seem somehow far-off, inspiring the reverence of a relic, rather than
the urgent discipleship of a thoroughly contemporary figure speaking
to present concerns.

The half-truth of nostalgia

Yet, despite my intermittent estrangement from it, Williams’s writing

continues to embody a quality worthy of critical interrogation, though
one quite difficult to, as Leavis might say, put one’s finger on. In order
to try to illuminate it, I want to briefly compare him to a radically con-
temporary figure, who, though of course extremely different to Williams
in numerous ways—sensibility, formation, interests—nevertheless
seems to share this elusive quality with him: Mark Fisher. In the last
issue of nlr, Simon Hammond drew a more sustained comparison
between Fisher and Stuart Hall, the parallels between whom are per-
haps more concrete and immediate. The resemblances between Fisher
and Williams that I have in mind exist at an, as it were, higher plane of
abstraction, and I want to elucidate them by, counter-intuitively, draw-
ing a very local and possibly unpromising-seeming comparison between
The Country and the City and Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life.
 126 nlr 119

Ghosts is a collection rather than a sustained, cumulative project, but

despite this compositional difference, I’ve come to regard it as Fisher’s
own Bildungskritische opus, provided one understands personal growth
and cultural education as including a kind of prolonged mourning of
one’s youth—and this mourning as itself a form of demystification (and
so of education) insofar as it is a way of not simply letting go of the past,
but of letting go of—of refusing—one’s nostalgia for it. This in turn is,
paradoxically, a way of allowing what one valued about the past, or what
it promised, to return. And as with the influence on Williams of Leavis’s
‘perpetual retrospect’, one senses in Fisher’s work that cultural nostalgia
was a real and constant temptation.

As Fisher notes in his introduction, his book is about ‘the ghosts of my

life’, and it is accordingly replete with personal encounters—most often
first or early ones—with the work being discussed (much music, but also
literature and film). The eponymous essay of the collection begins: ‘It
must have been 1994 when I first saw Rufige Kru’s “Ghosts of My Life”
on the shelves of a high street record store.’ Fisher then describes the
‘shiver of exhilaration’ he felt upon realizing that it sampled the voice of
Japan’s David Sylvian on the track ‘Ghosts’. This triggers another, earlier
memory: ‘In 1982, I taped “Ghosts” from the radio and chain-listened
to it: pressing play, rewinding the cassette, repeating.’ A ‘fragment’
of Japan’s song also appears on another track—Tricky’s ‘Aftermath’—
fourteen years later. This leads to another memory of a first listening
experience: ‘When I first heard Burial a decade later, I would immedi-
ately reach for Tricky’s first album Maxinquaye [on which “Aftermath”
appears] as a point of comparison.’37

Memory, in Ghosts, is shown to be a very powerful instrument for inter-

acting with cultural objects, since it is a mechanism by which culture
assumes personal significance, and vice versa: a means by which per-
sonal experience can acquire a wider salience. Mnemonic association is
therefore one of Fisher’s indispensable critical tools, particularly in his
discussion of music that uses samples. Sampling, an allusive and utterly

37
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures,
Winchester and Washington 2014, pp. 30, 34, 39, 43. Comparison here returns
as an essential technique for comprehending culture—though whereas Williams
instructed us to use our imaginative faculties (to challenge the ‘landscaped’ vision
offered by the guidebook), for Fisher it is memory that seems to be the vital
comparative resource.
 seaton: Criticism 127

modernist practice, is explicitly preoccupied with cultural memory and

musical tradition. Fisher’s memoiristic criticism is thus particularly
appropriate to it, since samples are in some obvious sense designed
to activate the memories of listeners and to reflect on the shared cul-
tural history such activation presupposes.38 Fisher’s recollections thus
produce an account that interweaves the sampling history of the song—
which is in some sense public, or held in common—with his personal
listening history of those successive samples. Indeed, there is a sense
in which memory becomes the channel for Fisher’s particularly com-
mitted form of cultural engagement—or even cultural entanglement:
when Fisher hears Japan’s ‘Ghosts’ on the Rufige Kru record, he feels
that one of his ‘earliest pop fixations’ has been ‘vindicated’, and ‘as if a
disavowed part of myself—a ghost from another part of my life—was
being recovered’.39 Similarly, Fisher’s review of Burial’s self-titled album
begins: ‘Burial is the kind of album I’ve dreamt of for years; literally.’40
Fisher is so immersed in this music and its environing (counter-)culture
that he feels it reaches into his unconscious—into repressed memories
and wish-fulfilment dreams; indeed, the ‘lifetime’ (or afterlife in sam-
ples) of these songs is so in parallel with Fisher’s own, it is almost as if
he could have produced them.41

Memory is crucial to Fisher’s discussion of other art forms, too. See,

for example, Fisher’s review of Grant Gee’s film Patience (After Sebald),

38
The functioning of these mnemonic cues also presupposes listeners’ exposure
to this history, their familiarity with the music. Incidentally, this supports Francis
Mulhern’s claim that criticism to a large extent depends on scholarship—con-
tra North’s advocacy of the former over the latter (and cultural intervention over
knowledge-production)—since ‘it is impossible to imagine the critical purpose in
isolation from a training in cultural literacy’, and criticism ‘has depended more than
its advocates care to admit on the labours of scholarship’. Samples are only audible
as samples to the initiated, to those with a certain amount of cultural knowledge—
knowledge as the secretion of a lifetime of exposure to certain kinds of music. See
Mulhern, ‘Critical Revolutions’, p. 46.
39
Ghosts of My Life, p. 34. Indeed, part of North’s objection to the production of
‘professionalized knowledge’ about culture is that critics seem more like anthrop­
ologists or historians, treating cultural objects as documents of a past or foreign
culture, rather than as expressions from the culture in which they also participate.
40
Ghosts of My Life, p. 98.
41
One finds this closeness to the work under discussion in Williams, too, whose
literary criticism—say, of the novels in his The English Novel from Dickens to
Lawrence—seems to come from the sensitive and sympathetic perspective of a
fellow novelist.
 128 nlr 119

which opens with a recollection of a different film: ‘The first time I saw
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker—when it was broadcast by Channel 4 in the
early 1980s—I was immediately reminded of the Suffolk landscapes
where I had holidayed as a child.’42 In the preceding essay, a review of
Chris Petit’s film Content, Fisher begins with a reflection that moves in
the opposite direction:

At one point in Chris Petit’s haunting new film Content, we drive through
Felixstowe container port. It was an uncanny moment for me, since
Felixstowe is only a couple of miles from where I now live—what Petit
filmed could have been shot from our car window. What made it all the more
uncanny was the fact that Petit never mentions that he is in Felixstowe; the
hangars and looming cranes are so generic that I began to wonder if this
might not be a doppelgänger container port somewhere else in the world.
All of this somehow underlined the way Petit’s text describes these ‘blind
buildings’ while his camera tracks along them: ‘non-places’, ‘prosaic sheds’,
‘the first buildings of a new age’.43

There is a sense in which these openings are exact complements of each

other: both begin with seeing a Suffolk landscape in a film, but whereas
the second is a real landscape the adult Fisher knew well, which Petit’s
artistry defamiliarizes, turning it into a ‘generic’ and even unreal or, lit-
erally, utopian ‘non-place’ that is somehow not Fisher’s Felixstowe, the
first is an anonymous, science-fictional site—Tarkovsky’s ‘Zone’—which
reminds Fisher of a real landscape known so intimately (a place in his
childhood memories), that it is almost the antithesis of anonymous. This
dialectic between anonymity and intimacy, and between the generic (‘it
could be anywhere’) and the absolutely familiar seems somehow to distil
Williams’s teaching that culture is the collision of the ‘finest individual
meanings’ with the most ‘ordinary common meanings’, the field in which
the former opens out onto the latter, and vice versa: where personal experi-
ence finds its social foothold, and ‘common meanings’ reveal their sharply

42
Ghosts of My Life, p. 202. This typical opening—involving a declaration of the
circumstances in which Fisher encountered the cultural work he is discussing, and
an allusion to the conditions of that encounter (Channel 4’s avant-garde broadcast-
ing in the 80s)—seems to have learned from Williams’s counsel to trace back one’s
response to its ‘historical and social conditions’.
43
Ghosts of My Life, p. 199. Note also the way Fisher imagines the camera shoot-
ing from the domestic privacy of his own family car, as if—as with Burial’s album
seeming to issue from his dreams—what he is seeing/hearing could have come
out of him.
 seaton: Criticism 129

personal resonances.44 (Bildungs)criticism could then be described as the

articulation of this collision, ‘valuations’ which relate ‘elements of one’s
own situation’ to ‘those which associate one with others’.45

Structures of feeling

In referring to his personal memories and impressions—his Suffolk—

Fisher is not demanding that art simply mirror back what he knows,
and dismissing it if it fails to.46 (For one thing, Fisher’s approval of these
films is partly predicated on the way they prompt him to misrecognize
Suffolk—they make it strange, and allow him to see it anew.) But this is
where Williams’s difficult concept of a ‘structure of feeling’ becomes use-
ful, because if one is to let oneself be guided by one’s personal experience
in evaluating culture, and if one is to insist on the social relevance of such
valuations, then one needs a way of conceptualizing the ways in which
experience can be shared. In Marxism and Literature, Williams describes
a ‘structure of feeling’ as ‘a particular quality of social experience’ that
‘gives the sense of a generation or of a period’. Williams adds that this
social experience is ‘still in process’ and so ‘often indeed not yet recog-
nized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating’.
‘Methodologically, then, a “structure of feeling” is a cultural hypothesis’
with ‘a special relevance to art and literature, where the true social content
is in a significant number of cases of this present and affective kind’.47

Interestingly, Williams describes the ‘myth’ associated with Leavis as a

‘structure of feeling’: ‘It is a main source for the structure of feeling

44
These two openings could be seen as skilled negotiations of what I. A. Richards
identified as one of ‘the chief difficulties of criticism’: the ‘very pervasive influence
of mnemonic irrelevances’—‘misleading effects of the reader’s being reminded of
some personal scene or adventure, erratic associations, the interference of emo-
tional reverberations from a past’. Richards, Practical Criticism, pp. 13, 15. The
lesson of Fisher’s practice here is that the point is not to exclude such ‘erratic asso-
ciations’ and ‘emotional reverberations’ but to in a sense pursue them, to follow
them through in the conviction that they may acquire relevance to others, as well as
to the object under discussion.
45
Williams, Politics and Letters, p. 342.
46
Indeed, Fisher is repeatedly critical, though never contemptuous, of the way cur-
rent socio-economic conditions—in which ‘free time’ is ‘convalescence’—create a
desire for culture that instantly gratifies and that gives us more of what we already
know, encouraging us to turn to music for the same anaemic, if reliable fulfilment
we seek from Pret. See Ghosts of My Life, p. 187.
47
Williams, Marxism and Literature, pp. 131–3.
 130 nlr 119

which we began by examining: the perpetual retrospect to an “organic”

or “natural” society.’48 If The Country and the City is written in criticism
of Leavis’s ‘perpetual retrospect’—although, crucially, written from a
perspective which understands its pull—then the ‘structure of feeling’
to which Ghosts of My Life constitutes a reproach is the ‘formal nostalgia
of the capitalist realist world’. This exists alongside another kind—apt to
misrecognize itself—which may ‘best be characterized not as a longing
for the past so much as an inability to make new memories’, and so as a
kind of cultural amnesia.49 Indeed, the two are related since the formal
nostalgia is only possible because of this pathological forgetting of past
innovations: W. G. Sebald’s ‘formal anachronism’, Fisher argues, is a
denial of the history of 2oth-century literary experimentation, while the
Black Eyed Peas’s ‘Rave-appropriations’ aren’t ‘so much revivals of Rave
as denials that the genre had ever happened’.

This oddly forgetful nostalgia, Fisher explains, prevents us from

mourning—and longing for—the lost futures promised by the more
radical-experimental decades of his youth, since ‘if Rave hasn’t happened,
then there is no need to mourn it.’50 Indeed, the remarkable continuity
in the cultural criticism collected in Ghosts, as well as much of the power
of its analyses, comes from Fisher’s identification of the mood or ‘struc-
ture of feeling’ besetting contemporary culture. This is essentially one
of sadness, or what Fisher sometimes refers to as the melancholy of
‘hauntology’. Fisher’s explanation of this affective condition is psycho-
analytic in structure: our culture is living in the aftermath of a trauma it
can’t remember—the destruction of social democracy and the ‘cultural
ecology’ it facilitated; unremembered, this trauma can’t be mourned
(since we are unable to recognize that there is anything to mourn);
incompletely mourned, the trauma returns to haunt us. Oppressed by
an elusive discontent we can’t acknowledge and compulsively disavow,
cultural expression is temporally stuck, and chronically sad—a masked
sadness Fisher hears, for example, in the hollow elation and glassy opti-
mism of transnational club music exhorting us to feel good.51

Fisher’s ability to locate and articulate the disorder afflicting con-

temporary culture—as if Fisher knew his culture’s secrets (and that

48
The Country and the City, p. 96.
49
Ghosts of My Life, pp. 27, 113.
50
Ghosts of My Life, pp. 202–3, 181.
51
Ghosts of My Life, pp. 178–9.
 seaton: Criticism 131

voicing them could bring relief, not betrayal, except perhaps of capital)—
proceeds from a principle he mentions in his introduction to Ghosts.
Acknowledging the ‘personal dimension’ to his book, Fisher explains:

My take on the old phrase ‘the personal is political’ has been to look for the
(cultural, structural, political) conditions of subjectivity. The most produc-
tive way of reading the ‘personal is political’ is to interpret it as saying:
the personal is impersonal. It’s miserable for anyone at all to be them-
selves . . . Culture, and the analysis of culture, is valuable insofar as it allows
an escape from ourselves.52

One can feel the power of this well-known saying behind Fisher’s
diagnosis of culture, since it depends on a counterpart capacity to ‘soci-
ologize’ or ‘externalize’ his own experience, in this case his struggle
with depression:

Depression is the most malign spectre that has dogged my life . . . Some
of these writings were part of the working through of the condition . . . the
problem wasn’t (just) me but the culture around me. It’s clear to me now
that the period from roughly 2003 to the present will be recognized . . . as
the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s.53

The inverse of ‘the personal is impersonal’ also, I think, holds. And this
dialectic is nowhere better encapsulated than in the title of Fisher’s book:
Ghosts of My Life is, as Fisher says, about the ‘ghosts of my life’ but it is
also taken—sampled, even—from a lyric in Japan’s song (or perhaps
borrowed from Rufige Kru’s song, or Tricky’s . . . ), and so is in that
sense not exclusively his at all—except that the song itself has a deep sig-
nificance for Fisher, so is personal after all. How to summarize Fisher’s
and Williams’s shared capacity to belong to their culture so intently?—a
belonging predicated on selecting from it, prizing parts (e.g., for Fisher,
certain strands of experimental electronic music), and rejecting others
(e.g., Britpop, emphatically). Perhaps, borrowing Mulhern’s characteri-
zation of Leavis in The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’, we might describe it as a

52
Ghosts of My Life, p. 28. One difference between Fisher and Williams—not
unrelated to their generational difference—is that they express the stakes of cul-
tural criticism differently: where Williams speaks of ‘connecting’ and ‘associating’
with others, Fisher, in a distinctly (post)modern inflection, figures such solidarity
as a release from selfhood.
53
Ghosts of My Life, pp. 28–9.
 132 nlr 119

kind of cultural (and political) militancy (though carefully distinguishing

Fisher’s and Williams’s democratic and radically popular conceptions of
culture from Leavis’s minoritarian tastes).54

There is an evenness in the comparative judgements involved in Fisher’s

and Williams’s ultimate refusal of their different forms of nostalgia:
by resisting both over- and under-estimations of the past, they neither
catast­rophize the present, nor trivialize real cause for contemporary
gloom. Like Williams, Fisher holds to the knowledge that things were
in certain respects better before—the half-truth of nostalgia—as well
as the conviction that they are in significant ways better now, and that
we have the right to expect them to be better still, which is the ground
for any serious hope that they could be, and cause for determination to
make them so. ‘Haunting’, a key and ambivalent concept in Ghosts of
My Life, captures this careful, even-tempered treatment of cultural nos-
talgia. Alongside its more sinister and malign valence, haunting is also,
Fisher writes, ‘the refusal of the ghost to give up on us. The spectre
will not allow us to settle into/for the mediocre satisfactions one can
glean in a world governed by capitalist realism.’55 The ghost is not, or not
only, there to torment you—to incessantly remind you of what you have
lost—but to watch over you, to refuse to let you adjust to the loss and to
the lesser new reality, in order that you might continue to expect, and
demand, a more satisfying world.56 Fisher’s ghosts thus begin to resem-
ble guardian angels, watching out for our futures by keeping present the
derailment of the ‘virtual trajectory’ promised by our past. Perhaps there
is a sense, too, in which allowing ourselves to be haunted by Fisher’s and
Williams’s modelling of an occasionally intimidating kind of intensive
cultural engagement and intellectual seriousness, is a way of ensuring
we continue to learn from them—a pointer towards some of the things
that criticism could be ‘for’.

54
‘Genuinely militant writing does not consist in partisanship clamantly asserted
(though this may on occasion play a necessary part). Its fundamental precondition
is an analysis and a perspective capable of determining the meaning and potential
of particular conjunctures and so, the character of the interventions to be made in
them.’ Francis Mulhern, The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’, London 1979, p. 327.
55
Ghosts of My Life, p. 22.
56
A world, perhaps, ‘in which all the marvels of communicative technology could
be combined with a sense of solidarity much stronger than anything social democ-
racy could muster.’ Ghosts of My Life, p. 26.