motifs

The Question of Value:

A Discussion*
Terry Eagleton
Peter Fuller

Terry Eagleton: Let me begin with what strikes me as an interesting fact

about the so-called ‘canon’ of literature, which has recently generated so
much debate. I take ‘canonical’ works to be in some sense works of value;
but the truth is that if you write one such work of value, then by the laws
of the canon all the rest of your works make it into the canon too.
Wordsworth’s poems celebrating capital punishment are sucked into the
canon in the wake of The Prelude. What this means is that at any given
point the literary canon contains an enormous amount of rubbish. I mean
rubbish even in terms of the canon’s own modes of evaluation, let alone
in any other terms. Nobody I know is prepared to argue that Lem is
unquestionably inferior to Thomas Love Beddoes, but because Lem
happens to write in what is currently ranked as a subordinate genre, he
doesn’t make it into the canon and Beddoes, who writes in a currently
consecrated genre, does. The canon, in other words, makes no kind of
sense even in its own terms.
A major problem with discussing the value question at all is how, by some
as yet perhaps impossible dialectical feat, to assign it its due importance
while resisting that relentless fetishism of value at the core of liberal
humanist aesthetics. If one looks for example at the historical constitution
of the field we now know as ‘literature’, it is obvious that ‘value’ is as
central as it is in that history because the very definition of literature is
indissociable from the nurturing and transmission of certain highly specific
ideological values. Confronted with this history, and all its attendant
absurdities—that art is the most valuable of all human activities, that it
furnishes us with the very touchstone of the ‘human’ and teaches us in
some relatively direct sense how to ‘live well’—the Left has tended in recent
years to react in two different ways. On the one hand, and particularly in
the 1970s, there has been a more or less violent suppression of the problem
of value, hopelessly entangled as it seemed to be with a subjectivism
falling outside the parameters of a scientific criticism. The result of this
prudishness, to which some of my own work has been subject, has been
an evasion of the whole question of the effectivity of art, and of the
ideological struggle over evaluation. On the other hand, there has somet-
imes been a falsely populist skirting of the problem which would appear
to regard any discrimination between artifacts or cultural practices as
intrinsically elitist.

* This is an edited transcript of a meeting called ‘The Question of Value’ which was held at
the Institute of Contemporary Arts on 14 June 1983. It was chaired by Lisa Appignanesi,
director of seminars at the ICA, and formed part of the series: Dream Street: Aspects of Popular
Culture.

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But of course people go on discriminating anyway, and the point is surely
to examine from a materialist standpoint the grounds on which they do.
For Samuel Johnson, for instance, there was no problem at all about how
the reaping of aesthetic pleasure from a work could be reconciled with
ideological disapproval of it. It just couldn’t be done. Johnson was
incapable of enjoying art he found morally objectionable. For us post-
Romantics the process of evaluation is more complex, which is not to say
that it need remain mysterious. If we studied the interrelations between
ideology, semiotics and psychoanalysis in actual processes of reading and
viewing, we would no doubt be able to discover a great deal more than
we presently know about why people like some works of art more than
others. So far, I suppose, we have got as far as recognizing that value is
always ‘transitive’—that is to say, value for somebody in a particular
situation—and that it is always culturally and historically specific. We
need, however, to be a little bolder about drawing some of the implications
of that latter assertion: for example, that Shakespeare and Rembrandt could
quite easily cease to be of any value. Walter Benjamin once wrote that we
would only be able to read Proust properly when the class he represented
had disclosed something of its true substance in the final confrontation.
We will only be able to read Proust retrospectively; for a true evaluation
of him we must wait upon history. And the Proust who will then be found
either profound or worthless won’t be exactly the Proust we now read.
Meanwhile, as Benjamin might have said, we collect Proust, because we
never know when he might come in handy.
Peter Fuller: ‘People sometimes talk as though the ordinary man in the
street (of all classes, I mean) is the proper person to apply to for a
judgement on Works of Art. They say he is unsophisticated, and so on . . .
Now let us just look the facts in the face. It would be very agreeable if
he were. But if he were, you would not need all these efforts for Art
Education that you do need now. As a matter of fact he is not unsophisti-
cated. On the contrary he is steeped in the mere dregs of all the Arts that
are current in the time he lives.’ It’s all right. I’m only quoting. But before
I tell you who from, I want to go on a bit.
‘There is a tendency for all people to fall under the domination of tradition
of some sort; and the fine tradition, the higher tradition, having disap-
peared, men will certainly fall under the power of the lower and inferior
tradition. Therefore let us once for all get rid of the idea of the mass of
the people having an intuitive idea of Art, unless they are in immediate
connection with the great traditions of times past, and unless they are
every day meeting with things that are beautiful and fit.’
I wonder if my good friend, Comrade Doctor Eagleton, knows who that’s
from. I don’t expect he does; because if he did, he wouldn’t have said or
written some of the things he has. This is not a voice coming from the
right; nor even from ‘Liberal Humanism’; it belongs, in fact, to William
Morris, a self-avowed ‘Revolutionary Socialist’. As it happens, I agree
with the drift of what Morris is arguing here; but that isn’t why I started
off with this quotation.
Rather, the point I’m trying to make is that it just is not true that ‘The
Question of Value’ has a centrality in British culture because of some
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‘Liberal Humanist’ consensus. On the contrary, I don’t think ‘The Ques-
tion of Value’ is central: nor has it been for a very long time. Indeed, if
the range of philosophical and culturally effective positions, this century,
from logical positivism—remember the famous chapter six of Language,
Truth and Logic—through working-class philistinism, many Marxisms,
much structuralist, post-structuralist and semiotic thinking, to Thatcherite
free-market technicism, if these things have anything in common, it has
been that they have elided ‘The Question of Value’ altogether.
Nor, I think, is it by any means true that the Left has been as uniformly
silent on these issues as Terry Eagleton sometimes implies. I have already
cited the nineteenth-century example of William Morris. But, in the visual
arts at least, there have also been several twentieth-century critics of the
Left who have been preoccupied with the issue of value. For example, in
his major essay of the 1930s, ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’, the American critic
Clement Greenberg—then openly a Marxist—looked to a future socialism
not to initiate a new culture, but rather to conserve, and regenerate, the
little of culture that had survived. John Berger, too, from a very different
but still socialist position, has recently insisted upon the primacy of the
evaluative element in the encounter with art. ‘The refusal of comparative
judgements about art,’ Berger writes, ‘ultimately derives from a lack of
belief in the purpose of art.’ Nor, I suppose, is it any secret that I, too,
have been known to stress the necessity of aesthetic judgement in our
response to works of art.
Here I have to be very careful and to spell things out very clearly. I am
certainly not trying to relocate the defence of ‘The Question of Value’
uniquely in a particular, atypical left tradition. Again and again, William
Morris argued that he had learned everything he knew about art from
John Ruskin. ‘I am,’ Ruskin once wrote, ‘and my father was before me,
a Tory of the old school.’ Indeed, Ruskin’s politics differed from his
father’s only in that he erased every vestige of economic liberalism. As
Robert Hewison has recently shown, many of Ruskin’s cultural ideas were
the result of his association with ‘ultra-Tory’ circles. And, like Morris, he
was deeply concerned with ‘The Question of Value’. Thus he explicitly
rejected what he called ‘the common notion of Liberalism’—and also,
of course, of much contemporary Marxist anti-aesthetics—‘that bad art,
disseminated, is instructive and good art, isolated, not so.’ ‘The question,’
Ruskin said, ‘is first, I assure you, whether what art you have got is good
or bad. If essentially bad, the more you see of it, the worse for you.’
In other words—and this is really the crux of my argument—thinkers as
far apart as Morris, the revolutionary socialist, and Ruskin, the High Tory,
could make common cause in issues of aesthetics against a Liberalism
which sought to elide the question of values altogether. And, whatever
Terry may say, I think the situation remains similar today. To use the
jargon of the ICA programme, I believe that ‘the panoply of critical tools’
used to study popular culture, from sociology and semiology to decon-
struction, is collaborationist in the sense that, by eliding ‘The Question of
Value’ altogether, it simply reflects, uncritically, the prevailing anaesthesia
of our culture. Indeed, it does not surprise me in the least that as a
critic, of the Left, centrally concerned with ‘The Question of Value’, my
aesthetics (though not my politics) are closer to those of Roger Scruton
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and the ‘Higher Toryism’ of Peterhouse than to all that
discourse—semiotics and post-structuralist deconstruction—which goes on
up the road at King’s.
I’m not going to spell out my ideas about aesthetic value in any detail
again this evening: I’ve already done so in numerous talks, books and
articles. Basically, however, I believe that all human beings are endowed,
to varying degrees, with aesthetic potentialities; and that the development
of these potentialities is bound up with the exercise, in work and response,
of taste and the evaluative faculties. By this, I am referring not only to
the making of comparative judgements about works of art . . . but also to
that plethora of discriminating and preferential decisions which inevitably
have to be made in the pursuit of any creative, or imaginative, work.
This creative-aesthetic faculty used to be attributed to divine
inspiration—and in some quarters, I understand, it still is. I have tried to
root it in the specific psycho-biological conditions of human being. Hence
The Naked Artist and all that. But, of course, despite what some of my
critics have said, my position is in no sense whatever ahistorical. I argue
that—like so many human potentialities—this biologically given aesthetic
potentiality requires a facilitating environment to develop, and to flourish.
The trouble at the moment is that the decline of religious belief, and
the change in the nature of work brought about by the rise of modern
industrialism, and its subsequent development, have combined to erode
the conditions under which this great human potentiality can flourish.
That’s why it is no use going to the man in the street.
I therefore believe that the cultivation and exercise of aesthetic judgement,
in making and in looking, is not some sort of unfortunate, embarrassing
elitist extra, which we apologize for—or ‘let back into’ our critical
discourse in the way that Terry has done. It is central to art’s capacity to
propose a reality other and better than the existing one. Indeed, I am
arrogant enough to believe that if I sit in a room full of Rothko’s and try
to be receptive to them and to judge which of them is best, then I am
doing something more radical and challenging and creative than sitting in
the same room and trying to deconstruct these pictures according to one
of the prevalent critical methodologies. Indeed, I believe that the exercise
and affirmation of the evaluative response has much more to do with what
it means to be fully human—I do not apologize for one moment for the
use of that phrase—than the sorts of theories which we construct about
that response or, indeed, which we endeavour to deploy in place or instead
of the exercise of that response. In aesthetics this is often regarded as a
very recherché position. But if we switch the argument for one moment
to ethics, no one but a fool would think that the ethical theory we hold
is more important than our capacity to determine and to carry out right
actions. Indeed, it is possible to hold quite ludicrous ethical theories and
still be a good person. And that is what matters. In aesthetics the situation
may not be very different: but it ought not to be.
Discussion

A questioner: I understood from your remarks that, given the different

traditions of painting and literature, you had certain objections to Terry
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Eagleton’s claims about the importance of value. Leaving that to one side
for the moment, Terry Eagleton stressed that he would always ask the
question ‘values for whom?’—a question that would then refer us to
further questions about how a person appreciated or responded to value.
Presumably people could just respond in a direct way, i.e. take pleasure
from it. What I want to know is where you stand on this question of value
for whom. Are you saying something which amounts to a reassertion, in
a different way, of transcendent value? Or would you accept that, accor-
ding to the position you hold, the question of value has to be understood
in historically relative terms?

Fuller: The relativity depends on the time scale you are talking about. I
think that the relativity factor, the degree to which there is variability in
value, has been grossly, obscenely overstressed in recent times, not just
on the Left, but also in the whole sphere of the sociological approach to
the arts. My own way of rooting the relative permanence of value cannot
in any sense be called a transcendent theory. For I argue that the roots,
the grounds of that relative permanence are our existence as relatively
constant physical beings within a physical and material world which,
though subject to change and development, is subject to change and devel-
opment at a rate which is infinitely slower than change of a historical or
social kind. It is that which gives a ground to the relative permanence of
value in the field of art.

Now, Terry and I do have a legitimate area of difference. I think that in

an art like sculpture, which is immediately rooted in very definite material
and physical practices, this degree of constancy is far, far greater than in
literature. Thus, in the arts with which I am concerned, the biological
element is much weightier than it is in the arts with which Terry is
concerned. The problem has been, however, that in this period of ours the
understanding of literature is being imported wholesale—with absolutely
preposterous results—into the understanding of arts like painting and
sculpture. I also believe, as Raymond Williams and many other people do,
that there is an important area of relative constancy within literature itself,
in terms of rhythms and so forth. But it is obviously less important than
in practices like sculpture.

Same questioner: If you take a particular period, say the last two hundred
years in the visual arts, you would think that the question of value for
whom was not an easy one.

Fuller: Of course it would be useful and interesting to look at that.

Nevertheless, we know that it is possible to make convincing trans-histor-
ical and trans-cultural value judgements. And all the work that has been
done on that, every experiment in which people from different cultures
have been shown different artifacts, has demonstrated that where those
people have a degree of cultivated affective response (that is, where they
are involved in the production of such artifacts), there is an extraordinary
degree of agreement about which artifact is better and which the best. The
level of agreement is in the region of eighty per cent, from cultures that
are completely different and variable in every other respect. To deny that
relative constancy strikes me as simply a kind of gross idealism.
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Eagleton: There are two points I would like to make. I too believe, and
I don’t think anyone can deny, that there are trans-historical facts. But
what do we mean by trans-historical? We can say that an artifact has been
regularly and consistently valued over a period of time, perhaps because
of certain structures and bodies which are generic ones. But are we in fact
talking about the same artifact throughout those periods? Most people
would agree that all artifacts are reconstructed or reinterpreted. Since that
reconstruction is culturally specific, we are left with the problem of
whether people are valuing the same work. In a literal and simple way,
materially and physically, they are. But beyond that there is still a problem.

I also think that both left and right have repressed the biological elements
of aesthetics. But there remains the old sceptical Human problem about
how you move from fact to value in biology. I find it puzzling when
people talk as if you could unproblematically cross that bridge. Surely the
fact that there is a particular relative biological constancy or consistency
cannot itself be the ground or centre of the value of a work. No one would
argue, for example, that the fact that our legs are longer than our arms is
at the centre of the value of a work. One way in which we might get from
fact to value, biologically speaking, is by the Freudian concept of drive
inhabiting some area between the two.

Fuller: The psychoanalysis of interest to me has long acknowledged that

Freud’s theory of drives and so forth is part of a nineteenth-century
mechanicism, and not particularly useful. I think there are certain kinds
of psychoanalytic insight about the different relations between the self and
the other which begin to explain certain types of aesthetic experience. In
the end, however, there is always a question-mark about where the ques-
tion of value actually arises. It is perfectly possible to describe, say, the
‘engulfment’ effects that various works have. But that really doesn’t enable
you to distinguish between great work by Rothko and extremely mediocre
work by someone like Olitski, which would have the same psychological
description.

Actually one has to do what you are so reluctant to do. One has to say
that in a certain sense, aesthetics is like ethics: although we cannot reduce
it to our proofs, pin it down precisely to our formulations, it would be
nonsense to say that it is therefore irrelevant or arbitrary. We have to be
able to trust the necessarily non-rational responses at that point, and the
evaluative can never be absolutely demonstrable in rational terms. I can
evince all manner of arguments to support this: indeed, many critics of the
past, like Ruskin, evinced quite extraordinary and convincing arguments to
explain why Kate Greenaway was the second-best painter to Turner in the
nineteenth century. He also developed some extraordinary arguments in
support of his view of Turner. It seems to me that these latter are totally
wrong, but the judgement itself is transparently right. In the case of
Greenaway, the arguments are extraordinarily convincing, but the judge-
ment is hilariously wrong. When one is faced with such instances, one has
to admit that there is an aesthetic or evaluative response which, though
difficult, complex, interfered with, obstructed by ideology, never quite
pure, is still worth pursuing. It is worth the battles and the difficulties,
because it is about something important. It’s like the question of right and
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wrong in the world of ethics. I defend this preposterous pursuit and I’m
engaged in it.
A questioner: Am I to understand that the ghost of Roger Fry and signifi-
cant form is stalking us all here?
Fuller: Roger Fry was no fool, but he failed to understand the implications
of his own term ‘significant form’. It seems to me that he was referring to
the capacity of form itself to function symbolically, to carry meaning and
resonances not conveyed by mere representational devices. On that I am
sure he was right. At the same time, he insisted that his argument belied
the importance of symbolism in art, and I don’t go along with him there.
He drew attention to the fact that in painting, because we are the creatures
that we are, certain colours and forms carry certain kinds of resonance,
whether or not they show us spaces, trees, flowers, rocks or whatever.
About that I am absolutely certain he was right. In his last essays, he
almost rewrites the theory to say that he was talking about the symbolism
of form itself. It was Clive Bell who got it totally wrong. Fry was much
more intelligent and perceptive.
Eagleton: I would like to come back on a couple of the points that Peter
has made. Firstly, it doesn’t seem to me that the relative constancy of
biological activity necessarily means that it plays an essentially larger role
in our evaluation of a response to an artifact. It may or may not, but it
certainly doesn’t figure in isolation. There is a tendency here—which I
also see in Marxists like Timpanaro—to argue that because there are indeed
certain common human conditions, we should refer to these when we
account for major artifacts. However, not only are those conditions soci-
ally and historically mediated, as Peter would, I think, agree; but there is
a danger of concluding that the greatness of King Lear, for example, lies
in the fact that it is about suffering and death and the break-up of the
family. That certainly wasn’t true for Samuel Johnson. Although Johnson
himself suffered and died, sharing definite biological structures with
Shakespeare and those characters in Lear, this didn’t figure at all in his
response. For him the end of the play was morally disgusting—a response
which arose purely from his own ideological situation.
Secondly, I totally agree with Peter that the aesthetic response is not fully
rational, and that it would be disastrous to attempt to make it so. But one
needs to refine this point. The word aesthetics is itself used to cover a
multitude of values. If we actually look at what societies have meant by
these values, what elements of overdetermination have entered there, it
becomes a very flexible and analogical sort of term. Moreover, although
the aesthetic response is not fully explicable in terms of the ego or of
rationality, I do not think—as do so many traditionalists—that this is the
end of the argument. I’m not saying that this is Peter’s view, but often
the principal uses of the argument lead to the ‘You like it and I don’t—on
to the next artifact’ type of position.
I want to see a form of criticism that takes value conflict, and what we
used to call taste, as a starting-point; then asks what is actually involved
in the formation of aesthetic value. I think that the problem of aesthetic
judgement lies somewhere at the juncture of three dimensions: linguistics,
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psychoanalysis and the study of ideology. And that’s just to say: begin
here.

Fuller: I would agree. But one still has to confront the fact that two
different things are going on. Perhaps it has more to do with my field,
with paintings, than with literary work. When I am confronted with a
picture, I have to admit that the response is sometimes instantaneous. It’s
not like reading a book. You look at a painting and the response—‘good’,
‘bad’, ‘pleasure’—precedes any theorization about it. Indeed, there is a
peculiar moment when one looks at the sort of painting one doesn’t usually
like and finds that it is powerfully affecting one, or the reverse of that.
An example for me is a painter like Graham Sutherland, who does every-
thing that I say a painter should do: he looks at the world imaginatively;
he transforms what he sees; and he has a great sense of tradition. And yet
the paintings don’t work. My basic point, then, is that the judgement is
often immediate: and the sort of study Terry refers to is merely an intellec-
tual rationalization of it.

Eagleton: What you say about the immediacy of aesthetic response leads
to a transcendentalist position with which I radically disagree. It is inter-
esting that when philosophers want to find an example of a statement
which looks intuitive and yet demands a great deal of unconscious theoriza-
tion, the one they most often give is: This is red. That’s rather a low and
uninteresting level for us, culturally.

Fuller: It’s not uninteresting. It’s like human attraction. We may produce
ideas and theories about what attracts us to another person, at whatever
level that attraction may be experienced. But in the end those theories,
constructs and ideas go out the window when the event of attraction takes
place. My interest in painting is very similar. While we can give all sorts
of psychoanalytic, theoretical, ideological accounts of the event, there is
an element in the response which is irreducible to any of those accounts.
What I object to in so much of the modern critical theory about literature
and art is the insistence that somehow these primary process responses can
all be translated or replaced by a secondary process account. There is no
way at all in which you can reduce the experience of art to the verbal
account of it. I find suspicious your constant desire to do just that, perhaps
leaving a little space at the end for a flash which isn’t quite reduced to
words. With me it’s not that way round at all: the force, the power and
the attraction in the experience are more important. The words interest
me considerably—I articulate them constantly—but they come after the
experience.

Eagleton: Brecht once said that human experience and behaviour is as

mysterious as it is not because it has too few elements, but because it has
too many. It’s overdetermined. That is a very different way of posing its
irreducibility.

Fuller: Are you aware of the sculpture of David Wynne? He does boys
on a dolphin—things like that. It there any sense in which the judgement
that David Wynne is a better sculptor than Michelangelo seems to you
wrong or foolish?
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Eagleton: I must confess I haven’t heard of David Wynne, although I can
easily think of an equivalent in literature. When people say ‘A is better
than B’, this tends to be a monistic judgement. It implies that for all
purposes A is better than B. The word ‘better’ has a single meaning.
However, there are many individual claims you can make on a work of
art, and it responds more closely to some of these than to others. I
think the word ‘better’, like the word ‘aesthetic’, covers a multiplicity of
responses.
Fuller: Take two Vermeers or two Rothkos or two Shakespearean
sonnets—two quite closely related works which are actually engaged in
the same set. Does it mean anything to you to say that one is better than
the other?
Eagleton: Only if you take my point that value is conjunctural—which
you don’t. Only if you agree that it’s a very elastic term, covering a
multitude of things that one would want to say about an artifact. Only
if—and this is the real crunch—you can’t imagine a situation in which the
one object was indubitably better than the other while being regarded as
worthless by a whole culture. With these provisos I do see what this
‘better’ means.
A questioner: Does Peter Fuller conceive of an aspect of value which is
not simply encapsulated in the immediacy of individual response?
Fuller: My argument is not just about individual response. A quite central
part is about the deterioration of tradition in certain historical circum-
stances. Thus, the changes in symbolic orders brought about by the decline
in religious belief led to the erosion of decorative arts. Changes in the
nature of work have also shattered the possibility of a communal expression
of subjective life. And in that situation—which I find unwelcome, not
being in any sense an individualist—I might have all manner of theories
about how things might be. But in the end you have no choice but to
construct your own tradition. Whether you are a critic or an artist, there
is no way round that. You have to make tradition for yourself, precisely
by attempting to exercise this evaluative response on such work as there
is. The fact that there is no escape from such ‘individualism’ is, in a sense,
the tragedy of art. But it isn’t something I welcome. Indeed, I have laid
much emphasis on the problems it poses for artists who are trying to
transcend that limitation. And I think there are certain ways out. We are
able to respond to the natural world that we inhabit, and up to a point
our imaginative response to nature can take the place of shared religious
belief.
A questioner: What part does ideology play in the aesthetic response?
Eagleton: I think that many of the definitions we receive of that are very
subtle ones, and there are some who try to make them even more subtle
by making ideology co-extensive with the whole of our experience.
We have to look at the way what I call libidinal or unconscious and
ideological factors play together in creating this response. And maybe that
is already far too much of an opposition, because the unconscious is always
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already caught up in value questions. It is not as if we can talk first about
an ego (which is social, ideological) and then about some separate, libidinal
forces which disrupt this. There is no aesthetic device or form which is
not already full of ideological connotations; just as I would say in response
to Peter that there is no immediate perception of a person or a painting
that is not changed from within by ideological connotations. The aesthetic
is always ideologically connotated: what we take as ideology always has
to give it some forms and structures that will themselves have a relation
to dominant forms of perception. In a certain sense ideology is itself a
shape, and therefore in relating the two blocks—that’s a bad way of putting
it—we are looking at the elements of a single process. What people mean
by aesthetic response can actually be analysed as a specific interaction
between the two processes.
Fuller: There is a problem in the way Terry describes the libidinal and the
unconscious itself as ideologically structured. It seems to me that he is
using an extremely primitive and outdated analytic framework. In fact, I
don’t think it is useful to talk in terms of ‘the Unconscious’ at all, although
there are of course unconscious processes. The really important distinction
is between primary and secondary mental processes, and it seems to me
that primary processes do have a freedom from what he calls ideology.
They tend to be imaginative, iconic, symbolic, elastic; whereas secondary
processes tend to be structured, ordered, analytic, rational, verbal, ideo-
logical. What I find unsatisfactory is the refusal to allow the play in human
creativity, the play in human aesthetic response, of all those ideologically
unmediated responses. They are certainly important in creative work and
creative response, in whichever aesthetically healthy society you care to
choose. It is because our own society is not aesthetically healthy, because
it precludes or crushes out the possibility of such response, that one gets
theorizations like Terry’s that allow no space for them. I have already
suggested that the reason for this lies in the forms of social structure, the
ways that things are made in our society. We should at least accept the
possibility that the intuitive, imaginative, playful aspects of primary
process thinking and activity could be revitalized in a different form of
society, and cannot be subjected or reduced to this kind of ideological
structure.
A questioner: I think the discussion is slightly off track in talking about
the separation of ideology from art. The question is whether you can
separate ideology off from the subject.
Eagleton: I think there is a possibility of separating the two, but I’m
worried about what Peter said. Insofar as we are talking about primary
processes, I certainly would not deny that they have a much higher degree
of mobility and productivity than secondary processes. Nevertheless, we
do have to go back and say that the unconscious itself is opened by, in
the first place, a specific situation of the law: that is to say, there is no
mobility of desire which is not from the first implicated with a denial,
with censure.
Fuller: It is because you persist in positing this term ‘the Unconscious’ in
the way that you do that we part company. To me the unconscious is the
legacy that Freud retained from his religious thinking. There is no agency
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within a self which is determining and unknown to a self. Although there
are unconscious mental processes, there is not an Unconscious which is
subject to laws as you describe it. I am not, of course, arguing for a
relentless mechanical determinism. I believe it is more useful to think in
terms of primary and secondary processes—not to put one over and above
the other, but to say that both are necessary to creative human living. And
it is one of the problems with the form of society in which we live that it
disallows the capacity for the expression, in social ways, of those imagina-
tive, creative, improvising elements of, say, productive activity. It margina-
lizes them as leisure activity, and it is only when they are central to the
productive process and economic life that you get work of full aesthetic
value.

A questioner: I wonder if you could extend your remarks to popular

culture.

Fuller: My basic position is that the aesthetic element in human work was
once pervasive, and that the particular conditions of industrialism tended
to confine it to particular sorts of activity and, in the end, to the pursuits
of a particular class. The middle class in advanced industrial societies
therefore became the preserve within which the aesthetic continued to
exist, if not exactly to flourish.

Many commentators have observed that there is something particularly

middle class about aesthetic activity and assumed that we need a broader
conception of culture which takes in a very wide range of activity outside
the preserve of that class. That is not, however, necessarily my view at
all. It is as if one stood above the nineteenth century and surveyed it;
noticed that middle-class people tended in that century to be healthy and
well fed whereas working-class people were impoverished, small and thin;
and then went on to argue that health and being well fed were products
of middle-class ideology that ought to be dissipated by militant socialism
in the future. It is that kind of argument which is deployed against the
idea of aesthetic activity and aesthetic experience in the ‘popular arts’. Like
Morris, however, I do not take such a patronizing and insulting attitude
to what are often the impoverished residues of aesthetic activity in a class
that has been deprived of the possibility of these pursuits by the relentless
advance of industrial capitalism.

A questioner: Is your conception of aesthetic activity, then, bound by

canon?

Fuller: I think it is wrong to say that my conception of aesthetic activity

is confined to the higher arts. Indeed, I could not have been at more pains
to point out that in aesthetically healthy societies, the aesthetic dimension
permeates—is, in a sense, almost coincident with—human activities, skills
and pursuits of all kinds. Only in specific historical circumstances such as
ours does the aesthetic retreat into the enclaves of the higher arts. It must
do so because it has no life in general production. For this reason I defend
higher art. I defend the picture frame and the proscenium arch as providing
precisely that arena in illusion for what once was, and might again be,
involved in a society that is not as aesthetically sick as our own. In that
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sense it is not a defence of higher art per se, and it would be wrong to see
it like that.

A questioner: Is that not a narrow and exclusive definition of popular

culture?

Fuller: I think the term ‘popular’, as Raymond Williams points out, is

false when we are talking about adverts, or most television, or most
spectacles. These are not popular culture. In genuinely popular activities
there is often a very considerable aesthetic element, highly marginalized
though it is.

I do take an interest in some of the more obscurantist elements of what I

would call true popular culture. One minor example would be goldfish
breeding. There is no doubt whatsoever that in its aesthetic choices, its
judgements, its concern about extremely complicated colour patterns,
proportions and so on, this is a fully formed, incredibly discriminating
and sophisticated aesthetic activity, of a sort which cannot take place in,
say, industrial or office work; however marginalized and absurd, goldfish
breeding is an expression of this suppressed aesthetic element.

Let me give another example. Miklós Haraszti, the East European poet
who worked in a factory and wrote a book on his experience, found that
the piece-rates were being persistently lowered, so that the workers had
to work harder and harder each week to bring in the same amount of
money. But despite these extreme economic pressures, the men in the
factory were, almost without exception, engaged in the production of
‘homers’—completely useless ornamental objects which they made for
themselves at the risk of being sacked. They took them home, these non-
functional, fanciful bits of metal, in order to satisfy the longing for aesthetic
pleasure within themselves.

However much history and society force down this ornamental perspec-
tive, it is an element in human creativity and work which seems to come
back in distorted form: whether goldfish breeding here or ‘homers’ there.
I think the true potential of ‘popular culture’ is to be found in such
phenomena, not in television or adverts.

A questioner: But they exist.

Fuller: Yes, they do. But they are not created by the people who consume
them—they’re an imposition and an impingement.

Same questioner: But what is their aesthetic content?

Fuller: Negligible.

A questioner: It seems to me that Peter Fuller’s discussion was much too

defensive, and that there is a way in which you can project these arguments
further. Take the Sistine Chapel and Shakespeare’s tragedies—works that
were made extremely fast and are tangible, with their own sense of history,
yet also immediately popular. These were not the products of a solitary
artist in his or her garret struggling against the surrounding culture to
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complete a work of lasting value. They were celebrated at the time and
still grip us now.

Can we imagine any society into which such work could be transmitted
which would not recognize their quality? I mean, if you have a society in
which all graven images are taboo, or all acting is forbidden, then obviously
it can’t see Michelangelo or Shakespeare. But if there is not that sort of
impediment, people might argue about them, but they would recognize
the immense human force of such works. The recognition would need
critical apparatus—that is why you can have disagreement over Lear. But
I don’t believe that any society that could read Shakespeare would say,
this is completely trivial.

Eagleton: That is a very powerful case but I do radically disagree with it.
For it involves you in trying to imagine a situation which, historically, is
quite literally inconceivable. If, for example, we discovered a great deal
more about what ancient Greek drama actually meant to the people, and
if we began to re-read it in the light of concerns that proved to be utterly
alien to us, it is quite likely that we would not get anything like the
pleasure that we do at the moment. Think of the Chinese medieval period
. . . now there is a problem of translatability. What you are saying is that,
given translatability, any society must see its art as good. But within that
word, translatability, lie all the problems.

Fuller: But Terry, what happens to you when you listen to a great piece
of music? I have no critical apparatus at all with which I can handle my
experience of music. And yet, it is possible for me to perceive true gran-
deur, true greatness in a symphony, without being able to engage in any
critical discourse about it whatsoever. No doubt if I knew more, I would
appreciate more. But the nakedness of that response is essential to what
actually matters about our encounter with the arts.

Eagleton: That’s all fine and well, Peter. But I’m including in a rich
complexity of discussion precisely statements such as ‘isn’t that great!’ or
‘isn’t that fantastic!’ or ‘isn’t that awful!’. I don’t mean that one has to
stay in a theoreticist corner, in grey experience.

Same questioner: I think you’ve missed the point I was making. Despite
complexities of translation there is an evident major human force in some
great works which challenges their own historicity—despite the way they
intensely manifest their own times. I’m not saying at all that it is the
richness of their environment or later reaction to such works which gives
them value. I’m saying that they have that power and force despite the
many different reactions to them over very different periods of time.

Another questioner: One very precise element, which is also determined

to maintain those values, has been left out of the discussion. That is the
market.

Fuller: You can’t sell the Sistine Chapel.

Same questioner: They would if they could.

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Fuller: You’re wrong.

Previous questioner: You can’t simply reduce value to the market. The
value of Shakespeare is not determined by the market. But to go back, if
a banal Greek sculpture was discovered, then it would not radically affect
our experience. The powerful ones do. Of course people’s experience of
such an object is different in different times, and the way in which people
fetishize or prostrate themselves before certain works is abhorrent . . .

Eagleton: But you still contend that there is something called the work in
which there is some naked power, some force which you can identify over
and above all this.

Same questioner: ‘Over and above all this’ is a phrase which is like a
hostage to fortune. I would say this is both human and historical and
works in many different societies, and in that way clearly is transhistorical.

Fuller: But it is precisely because Terry won’t allow for a category of the
aesthetic—even supposing that it’s something we cannot fully explain—that
he and I part company. For him aesthetic value is relative, whereas for me
it is precisely within the realm of the aesthetic that these irreducible
elements appear. If you discount the aesthetic, you end up with the sort
of position that I think is implicit in Terry’s argument—that when all is
said and done, the difference between Michelangelo and David Wynne is
merely socially constructed and may change and develop. To me that is
obviously nonsense.

Eagleton: Although you would probably disagree, your argument seems

close to the now standard position that a classic is a work with some kind
of force for generating and disseminating a great variety of fruitful—or
what people claim to be fruitful—responses and perceptions. That is an
interesting case to make about a major literary work, and it is certainly
much better than the elitist claim that it just is major and there’s no arguing
about it. That is simply authoritarian. You have to see the relation between
certain forms of psychic intuition and authoritarianism, because if you
can’t in some rational way discuss what is ‘valuable’, then you are falling
back on the judgement of an elite. You are saying that it’s a matter of the
pulses. If you are reduced to silence when you try to identify or define
that force in the classic which is taken to be indescribable, then you simply
insist, take an authoritarian stand.

I, too, think there is something irreducible about the aesthetic. In fact, I

think there is something irreducible about experience. I may disagree about
why that is the case, I may quote more Brecht than someone else, but I
don’t think that pointing to the irreducibility of aesthetic experience is the
same as gesturing to some central silence or indefinable force in a classic
which is a motivating instance or dynamic of all art. It may be, for example,
that we do not need to postulate some intrinsic complexity within Baa Baa
Black Sheep; but it just happens that, given the historical background, it
does lend itself to a number of interesting discussions.

A questioner: How, then, do you deal with the extreme complexity of

certain masterpieces, particularly in painting?
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Eagleton: Traditionally people have said two quite different things about
great art. One is that it’s complex. The other is that the essence of all great
art is its basic simplicity. Now, surely one of the things Wittgenstein
discovered is that terms like simplicity and complexity are radically relative
to forms of life and practical behaviour. What you count as simple may
well be what I count as complex, because talk of absolute simplicity or
absolute complexity leaves out of account the specific codes in which a
viewer or a reader interprets a work. I don’t think you can tackle the value
problem if you put that in brackets.
Fuller: I see it the other way round. I see value, particularly in painting
and sculpture, as something realized through the transformation of
materials—both physical substances, and, say, pictorial conventions. It is
because value has been materially realized and expressed that these various
codes and modes of discussion can circulate around it. I gave earlier the
example of Ruskin’s response to Turner. Ruskin believed that Turner was
great because he revealed the glory of God in the natural world. Although
I do not agree with this explanation, I understand it. I, too, can see that
Turner is great. My explanation of that may well be wrong, too. That
won’t affect Turner’s greatness one iota. It is realized in the pictures—not
through discourse.
Eagleton: What you have just said about the successful realization of
material is already speaking in codes.
Fuller: I am using those ‘codes’, however, to refer to material properties
and qualities of specific works.

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