Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education PDF
Preview Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education
LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY General Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley Published Stanley Aronowitz SCIENCE AS POWER Norman Bryson VISION AND PAINTING: The Logic of the Gaze Teresa de Lauretis ALICE DOESN'T: Feminism, Semiotics and Cinema FEMINIST STUDIES/CRITICAL STUDIES (editor) Mary Ann Doane THE DESIRE TO DESIRE: The Woman's Film of the 1940s Alan Durant CONDITIONS OF MUSIC Jane Gallop FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: The Daughter's Seduction Peter Gidal UNDERSTANDING BECKETT: A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the Works of Samuel Beckett Peter Goodrich LEGAL DISCOURSE: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis Paul Hirst ON LAW AND IDEOLOGY Ian Hunter CULTURE AND GOVERNMENT: The Emergence of Literary Education Andreas Huyssen AFTER THE GREAT DIVIDE: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism Nigel Leask THE POLITICS OF IMAGINATION IN COLERIDGE'S CRITICAL THOUGHT Michael Lynn-George EPOS: WORD, NARRATIVE AND THE ILIAD Colin MacCabe JAMES JOYCE AND THE REVOLUTION OF THE WORD THE TALKING CURE: Essays in Psychoanalysis and Language (editor) Louis Marin PORTRAIT OF THE KING Christian Metz PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA: The Imaginary Signifier Jeffrey Minson GENEALOGIES OF MORALS: Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentricity of Ethics Laura Mulvey VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES Douglas Oliver POETRY AND NARRATIVE IN PERFORMANCE Michel Pecheux LANGUAGE, SEMANTICS AND IDEOLOGY Jean-Michel Rabate LANGUAGE, SEXUALITY AND IDEOLOGY IN EZRA POUND'S CANTOS Denise Riley 'AM I THAT NAME?': Feminism and the Category of 'Women' in History Jacqueline Rose THE CASE OF PETER PAN OR THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF CHILDREN'S FICTION Brian Rotman SIGNIFYING NOTHING: The Semiotics of Zero Raymond Tallis NOT SAUSSURE: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory David Trotter CIRCULATION: Defoe, Dickens and the Economies of the Novel THE MAKING OF THE READER: Language and Subjectivity in Modem American, English and Irish Poetry Peter Womack IMPROVEMENT AND ROMANCE: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands Forthcoming Lesley Caldwell ITALIAN WOMEN BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE Elizabeth Cowie TO REPRESENT WOMAN: The Representation of Sexual Difference in the Visual Media James Donald THE QUESTION OF EDUCATION: Essays on Schooling and English Culture, 1790-1987 Alan Durant SOUNDTRACK AND TALKBACK Piers Gray MODERNISM AND THE MODERN Stephen Heath THREE ESSAYS ON SUBJECTIVlTY Ian Hunter, David Saunders and Dugald Williamson ON PORNOGRAPHY Rod Mengham CONTEMPORARY BRITISH POETICS Jean-Claude Milner FOR THE LOVE OF LANGUAGE Jeffrey Minson GENESIS OF AUTHORSHIP PERSONAL POLITICS AND ETHICAL STYLE Denise Riley POETS ON POETICS Michael Ryan POLITICS AND CULTURE James A. Snead and Cornel West SEEING BLACK: A Semiotics of Black Culture in America Series Standing Order If you would like to receive future titles in this series as they are published. you can make use of our standing order facility. To place a standing order please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address and the name of the series. Please state with which title you wish to begin your standing order. (If you live outside the United' Kingdom we may not have the rights for your area. in which case we will forward your order to the publisher concerned.) Customer Services Department. Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 2XS, England. Culture and Governtnent The Emergence of Literary Education Ian Hunter Lecturer, School of Humanities, Griffith University, Queensland M MACMILLAN PRESS ©Ian Hunter 1988 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1988 978-0-333-38825-9 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended), or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WC1E 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and claims for damages. First published 1988 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Hunter, Ian, 1949- Culture and government: the emergence of literary education. - (Language, Discourse, Society). I. Literature-Study and teaching I. Title II. Series 807 PN59 ISBN 978-1-349-07869-1 ISBN 978-1-349-07867-7 (eBook) DOl 10.1007/978-1-349-07867-7 To Alison, Dorothy and William Hunter Contents Preface viii Acknowledgements xi 1 Introduction 1 PART I ENGLISH 2 Government 33 3 Culture 70 4 English 108 PART II CRITICISM 5 Two Models 157 6 The Pedagogical Imperative 194 7 Exemplary Knowledge 220 8 Conclusion 259 Notes and References 292 Bibliography 301 Index 312 Vll Preface In this book I have set out to reconsider the relation between the idea of culture and the machinery of government. My approach to this question is not through a general theory of culture and society. It concentrates instead on a particular if privileged historical location of this relation, the apparatus of literary education. In literary education - in the teaching of English and the discipline of literary criticism - generations of cultural historians, critics and theorists have found the exemplary reconciliation of the promise of aesthetic fulfilment and the realities of social existence. They have treated this reconciliation as nothing less than the form of 'man's' cultural completion. Whether it has been conceived of in terms of a gradual synthesis of his divided' ethical substance', or as a sudden theoretical recovery of his unconscious being, literary culture has been invested with the task of realising 'man's' vocation: to achieve a complete development of human capacities. Moreover, what appears to be the one attempt to question this conception of literary culture, by recalling it to a broader realm of social relations and activities - I am referring to the tradition of 'cultural materialism' - is, so I will argue, nothing more than a variation on the same theme. It retains the same conception of complete development and is subtended by the same figures of ethical synthesis and theoretical clarification. In fact, it differs only in the form in which it specifies the dialectic of 'man's' ethical substance, opting for the division between his culture and his society rather than that between his intellect and his emotions. It is the argument of the present work that literary education did not emerge as the (successful or failed) reconciliation of the promise of aesthetic culture and the logic of society and that it is not, therefore, the (nearly perfect or tragically flawed) vehicle for a complete development of human capacities. Literary education, or 'English', can best be understood as a specialised sector of the apparatus of popular education. This apparatus was not formed on the basis of a compromise between the aesthetic ideal and social necessity. Instead, we describe it as emerging in thedutonomous sphere of 'social welfare'; a sphere formed when traditional viii Preface ix techniques of individual pastoral surveillance were redeployed in a new machinery of government aimed at the 'moral and physical' well-being of whole populations. It was in this domain that popular education could take shape as an apparatus of moral supervision. And it was as the priyileged inheritor of this apparatus - not as the mediator of culture and society - that modern literary education first came into being towards the end of the nineteenth century. So I shall argue. If this genealogy is correct, then we must give up the idea that English and modern criticism will see to 'man's' cultural completion in either of the two proposed forms: through an aesthetic reconciliation of his divided ethical substance, or through the theoretical rehabilitation of his unconscious being. Indeed, I will argue that it is necessary to give up the idea that culture forms a totality at all, governed as it is by the figure of a 'complete' development of human capacities. The apparatus of popular education in which English emerged has as its object the formation of a highly specific profile of cultural attributes, in fact the attributes of a citizenry. This profile was produced by an historically unprecedented machinery of social investigation and administration, which began to emerge in England during the late eighteenth century and which by the middle of the nineteenth had largely succeeded in constituting the life of the population as an object of government. It was in and through this machinery, then, and not through the 'idea of culture', that a uniform development of human attributes became thinkable. The target of this development was not 'man' as the bearer of a divided ethical substance awaiting aesthetic reconciliation, or 'the subject' as the bearer of an unconscious being awaiting theoretical clarification. It was the individual as the member of a population whose health, literacy, criminal tendencies, private sentiments and public conduct had been constituted as objects of a new kind of government attention. Perhaps this list, with its mix of personal and social attributes, gives sufficient preliminary identification of this new form of government: drawing on an administrative apparatus aimed at re-shaping the attributes of whole populations, but operationalised through forms of conscientiousness which permitted individuals to govern themselves. It was on the cultural development of individuals specified in this new manner that literary education eventually went to work. The fact that this development is not a
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