By Clive Bloom (auth.)
In 1997, thirty years after the death of 'Swinging London', Britain back looked to be the centre of the cultural universe, with a thriving arts scene, a brand new Labour executive and a tender and enterprising best minister. 'Cool Britannia' appeared to sum up the hot spirit of the Nineties within the hip language of the Sixties. during this booklet, Bloom bargains an intensive and arguable consultant to the chances for highbrow lifestyles, pop culture, literary construction and political authority in multi-cultural Britain in 2000 and beyond.
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Extra info for Literature, Politics and Intellectual Crisis in Britain Today
Example text
I can do little by way of apology except to say that my first aim was not consistency but a radical scepticism of all positions – showing, to continue a certain culinary metaphor, what is on the end of the fork. I do not advocate that the intellectual avant-grade of the twenty-first century go back to the 1960s even if nostalgia and compulsion drive them there. There is no longer a clear radical catechism, but if there were it would have to include the decision to distrust all forms of liberation approved by the state; the decision to always take the money and spend it (on yourself); the refusal to offer coherent arguments that can be debated away (with patronising looks of pity); the determination to be useless and therefore pointless to co-opt; the need to be invisible: never to appear on television, radio or any form of the media; to debate only in order to disengage (step away) and disengage in order to become invisible.
Modern criticism was born of a struggle against the absolutist state; unless its future is now defined as a struggle against the bourgeois state, it might have no future at all. Criticism is and always has been a medicinal process determined to ‘cure’ authoritarianism in the name of health (utopian or post-revolution, post-capitalist pure culture) and the nature of this ethical struggle is not historical but traditional (Eagleton’s emphasis) at war with the ‘ersatz’ of modern social life (‘modern’ being a movable term across cultures and back and forth across history).
Historicised language) itself. During the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s the struggle for political gains took on, for the academic left, an aesthetic which the politically empowered right simply chose to ignore. The liberation discourse of Thatcherism only occurred when the control of the state became more and more centralised. The left/radical rhetoric of plurality could not cope theoretically with this contradiction. e. the end of the social realm) then leftradical critics had declared both the end of the autonomous individual (the agent of change) and the veracity of history (the stage for the agency of change – Marx’s ‘real’).
