If You Didn't Come to Party, Then Why Did You Come?

"The State Department pledged $90 million to rebuild Falluja, and the
New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art paid more than $45
million for Duccio di Buoninsegna's 8"x11" 'Madonna and
Child'."
Harper’s Weekly 11/16/04

Although contemporary glossings of Matthew Arnold’s concept of "culture" often deride his argument for its "non-anthropological" understanding of culture and for its "snobbish elitism," Culture and Anarchy complicates this reading through its devotion to the pedagogical functions of culture. Certainly there are limitations to Arnold’s, at times, utilitarian understanding of culture, both of "Art" and for the people who might have access to "Art," but Arnold also intimates the ideological functions served by the historically specific definition of culture he expands upon. Arnold explains that, to some degree, his definition of culture is like religion (but different). He also explains that, to some degree, his definition of culture is like the culture his detractors have accused him of purveying (but not really). Both distinctions hinge upon a similar goal for Arnold: the desire for perfection.

He sets perfection in opposition to curiosity as the end of culture in order to argue for the usefulness of culture as a tool with which an individual might remotivate his/her relationship to the social. Arnold writes:

"There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it,--motives eminently such as are called social,--come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent part. Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection."

This link between culture and the social marks culture as a structure that is pedagogical, positioning culture as a vector through which its interpreters might be led to think more abstractly about their capacity for subjectivity. His insistence upon perfection as the goal for those who attempt to gain a more complicated understanding of their worlds through culture (as opposed to those who might use it for cultural capital) elevates culture to religious proportions. Arnold conceives of cultural consumption as requiring both faith and ardor, like a lover or a cause.