Week 3

"Versions of Culture" - Terry Eagleton

I find this text incredibly hard to read, not because the words themselves are complicated—although I do feel a tinge of anger when four different “-ism’s” are mentioned in self-confident succession, followed by a deliberate use of “environs” instead of “environments” and a continued use of “men” as a stand-in for “people” despite the year being 2000—but rather because I keep disagreeing with Eagleton on nearly every point. Frustratingly, it isn’t hard to do so. His arguments lack a coherently formatted core, he almost never gives examples when laying out his ideas, and as one Amazon reviewer said “he doesn't cite any sources” [1]. On top of that, he keeps changing his definition of culture while restating the same points in subtly different, and increasingly more poetic ways for pages upon pages. And perhaps this is how literary critics write their books—I’m not sure, I haven’t read many—but what I have read is anthropological research, and defining ‘culture’ is a bedrock of the field. So, with that subtle framing and despite my hesitations, I will attempt to tackle Eagleton’s writing even if for one or two paragraphs.

Eagleton has this one key notion of culture: the origins of culture is in agriculture and thus in labor. While this makes sense and is plausible, Eagleton then goes on to say “The very word ‘culture’ contains a tension between making and being made,”[p.5] alluding to an ‘inherent’ and thus ‘true’ meaning of the word ‘culture’. He does this a few times, and I find it frustrating. Words are meant to assign labels to socially understood concepts. These concepts can and do change, thus changing the meanings of their words alongside them. Other times, the words shift and change the concepts they are meant to label—for example, the term ‘gay’ switching from denoting happiness to categorizing a type of romantic and sexual existence. This means that words have etymological histories but not inherent meanings. It is in this counterintuitive goose chase that Eagleton seems to define ‘culture’ in both its ‘inherent’ etymological meaning and its social and political meaning.

I would now go on to say how culture is not always derived as a result of labor, but I can not, for Eagleton dismisses both a plural understanding of culture—to my understanding, the notion that there are many categorizable cultures—and a formal view of culture—again, in my understanding the notion that ‘culture’ as a term with a definition can be applied neatly to distinctly ‘different’ social structures—without offering any real alternatives. He links the two by saying “Those who regard plurality as a value in itself are pure formalists, and have obviously not noticed the astonishingly imaginative variety of forms which, say, racism can assume” and offering a counter to these strictly categorizational ideas through the words of Edward Said, “all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic.” [p. 15] I do partially agree with this. Cultures are fluid, dynamic, largely unbound yet are very real and perceptible. A great example of this can be found in Chinese cuisine. Chris Thomas and Stephanie Li of Chinese Cooking Demystified attempted to categorize the cuisine of China, a country with over a billion people yet which is often known for only 8 distinct cuisines. Cuisine is incredibly fluid and difficult to categorize but at the same time perceptively different from region to region. By defining some key categorization methods, Chris and Stephanie arrived at 63 over different cuisines through their 25 000+ word blog post and still stressed that the number can be disputed and much refined [2.]. But what maddens me about Eagleton is that despite making this seemingly sound claim—which he could pack with more evidence than “no human culture is more heterogeneous than capitalism” [p. 15]—he does not build on it to write up a coherent definition of culture, rather leaving the reader with a wishy–washy sense of where he is actually trying to go. I simply can not criticize or engage with Eagleton’s writing in a very meaningful way, as he puts it, “under pain of infinite regress.” [p. 4]

I do not think all Eagleton’s ideas are poor or invalid, rather I find the writing in this chapter overly floaty and ungrounded for an academic piece. I found Eagleton’s 2024 LRB talk “Where does culture come from?”[3.] much more coherent and compelling, although I confess to not finishing it. But both while listening to the talk as well as while reading, I felt a certain attitude that Eagleton has to his academics. It is one based on frequent references to dead European wise-men, social movements (romanticism, post-modernism, modernism, imperialism … the list is long), and a mix of German and French phrases (Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft, engagé…), rather than seemingly going out in the world and experiencing it—to me, evident in his lack of diverse real-life examples. Perhaps I get this notion because I am neither a literature nor a philosophy major—as in this analysis might be equivalent to me reading a microbiology paper and wondering why I don’t understand it—but I do find that to tackle topics as large as ‘culture’ and ‘humanity’, this sort of slow high-brow near-romantic literary and philosophical analysis does not cut it.

Note on citations: [p. X] marks a page in the reading while [X.] marks a citation in the bibliography.

[1.] Mel. “Blatant Bigotry.” Amazon, review of The Idea of Culture by Terry Eagleton, https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Culture-Terry-Eagleton/dp/0631219668#:~:text=He%20doesn%27t%20cite%20any%20sources. Accessed 22 Sept. 2025.

[2.]Chinese Cooking Demystified. “63 Chinese Cuisines: the Complete Guide.” Substack, 19 Nov. 2024, https://chinesecookingdemystified.substack.com/p/63-chinese-cuisines-the-complete. Accessed 22 Sept. 2025.

[3.]London Review of Books (LRB). “Terry Eagleton: Where Does Culture Come From?” YouTube, 26 Apr. 2024, www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkY-vBFLu50. Accessed 22 Sept. 2025.