Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies

Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies Edited by

Sue Owen

Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies

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Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies Edited by

Sue Owen University of Sheffield, UK

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Sue Owen 2008 Individual chapters © contributors 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–54545–8 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–54545–9 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Richard Hoggart and cultural studies / [edited by] Sue Owen. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–54545–8 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–230–54545–9 (alk. paper) 1. Hoggart, Richard, 1918—Influence. 2. Culture—Philosophy. 3. Great Britain—Intellectual life—20th century. 4. Criticism— Great Britain—History—20th century. I. Owen, Susan J. PR55.H6R52 2009 306.092—dc22 2008025818 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To John

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Contents

Notes on Contributors

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Introduction Sue Owen

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1 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy and The Cultural Turn Stuart Hall

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2 Richard Hoggart: Literary Criticism and Cultural Decline in Twentieth-Century Britain Stefan Collini

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3 Richard Hoggart, Cultural Studies and the Demands of the Present Lawrence Grossberg

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4 Richard Hoggart and the Way We Live Now Jim McGuigan 5 Richard Hoggart and the Epistemological Impact of Cultural Studies Richard E. Lee 6 From the Juke Box Boys to Revolting Students: Richard Hoggart and the Study of British Youth Culture David Fowler 7 ‘Them’ and ‘Us’ Robert J.C. Young

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8 Repurposing Literacy: The Uses of Richard Hoggart for Creative Education John Hartley

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9 Critical Literacy, Cultural Literacy, and the English School Curriculum in Australia Graeme Turner

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10 The Importance of Being Ordinary Melissa Gregg

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11 The Antipodean Uses of Literacy Mark Gibson

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12 Relativism and Reaction: Richard Hoggart and Conservatism Charlie Ellis 13 The Uses and Values of Literacy: Richard Hoggart, Aesthetic Standards, and the Commodification of Working-Class Culture Bill Hughes

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14 Hoggart and Women Sue Owen

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Stefan Collini is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge University and is Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society. His publications include Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (OUP, 1991); Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait (OUP, 1994); English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (OUP, 1999); and Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (2006). In progress: Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (2008). Charlie Ellis recently completed a PhD on ‘conservatism and the spirit of the market in post-Sixties Britain’ at the Department of Politics, University of Sheffield. He is currently engaged in research at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh. David Fowler teaches Modern British History and Economic History at The University of Cambridge and is Senior Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He is preparing a full-scale biography of Rolf Gardiner, a Cambridge graduate of the 1920s, a pioneer of Anglo-German youth and student movements and a supposed British Fascist of the 1930s. He is the author of Youth Culture in the Twentieth Century (Macmillan, forthcoming) and The First Teenagers: The Lifestyle of Young Wage-Earners in Interwar Britain (Frank Cass, London, 1995), along with several articles on Modern British youth culture and British social history. Mark Gibson is Chair of the Graduate Communications and Media Studies Program in the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University. He is the editor of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies and the author of Culture and Power: A History of Cultural Studies (Oxford: Berg, 2007). Melissa Gregg is ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. She is the author of Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices (Palgrave, 2006) as well as a number of articles on cultural studies, new media, feminism, and queer theory. Lawrence Grossberg is Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, Adjunct Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the University Program in Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He ix

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is the co-editor of the journal Cultural Studies. His recent books include Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics and America’s Future (Paradigm, 2005); New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (with Tony Bennett and Meaghan Morris (Blackwell, 2005)); and MediaMaking: Mass Media in a Popular Culture (with Ellen Wartella, D. Charles Whitney, and MacGregor Wise (Sage, 2005)). He has recently published essays on the state and futures of cultural studies, Richard Hoggart, James Carey, Stuart Hall, theory at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), and the possibility of other ‘modernities’. In progress: Cultural Studies and the Challenge of the Contemporary. Stuart Hall is Professor Emeritus at the Open University. He was Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham and Professor of Sociology at the Open University, from where he retired in 1997. He currently chairs the boards of two cultural diversity visual arts organisations. He is the (co-)author of many works including The Popular Arts (1964); Policing the Crisis (1978); New Ethnicities (1988); The Hard Road to Renewal (1988); Resistance Through Rituals (1989); Modernity and Its Future (1992); What is Black in Popular Culture? (1992); Cultural Identity and Diaspora (1994); Questions of Cultural Identity (1996); Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (1996); Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997); and Visual Culture (1999). He was the founding editor of New Left Review. John Hartley is Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and Research Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Recent books include Television Truths (Blackwell, 2008); Creative Industries (Blackwell, 2005); A Short History of Cultural Studies (Sage, 2003); The Indigenous Public Sphere (W.A. McKee, Oxford, 2000); Uses of Television (Routledge, 1999); and Popular Reality (Arnold, 1996). He is the editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies (Sage). Bill Hughes is completing his PhD on communicative rationality and the Enlightenment dialogue in relation to the development of the novel at the Department of English Literature in the University of Sheffield, UK. He is currently teaching in the Department. His research interests are in eighteenth-century literature, cultural and literary theory, particularly the Bakhtin circle and the Frankfurt school, and aesthetics. He has also published and is preparing articles on the dialogic aspect of eighteenthcentury theories of language, the eroticism of knowledge in Fontenelle, and the proto-feminism of Bernard Mandeville.

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Richard E. Lee is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University. His research is focused on long-term, large-scale social change from the world-systems perspective, concentrating especially on the intellectual and disciplinary structures of knowledge, in writings that range across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Recent publications include Life and Times of Cultural Studies: The Politics and Transformation of the Structures of Knowledge (Duke University Press, 2003), and the collections World-Systems Analysis: Contemporary Research and Directions (edited with Gerhard Preyer, Protosociology 20, 2004) and Overcoming the Two Cultures: Science versus the Humanities in the Modern World-System (edited with Immanuel Wallerstein, Paradigm, 2004). Jim McGuigan is Professor of Cultural Analysis in the Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University. His books include Writers and the Arts Council (Arts Council, 1981); Cultural Populism (Routledge, 1992); Culture and the Public Sphere (Routledge, 1996); Modernity and Postmodern Culture (Open University Press, 1999, 2nd edn. 2006); and Rethinking Cultural Policy (Open University Press, 2004). He is the co-editor of Technocities (Sage, 1999) with John Downie. In progress: Cool Capitalism for Pluto and Cultural Analysis for Sage. Sue Owen is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Analysis at the University of Sheffield. Her books include Restoration Theatre and Crisis (Oxford, 1996) and Perspectives on Restoration Drama (Manchester, 2002); and, as editor, A Babel of Bottles: Drink, Drinkers and Drinking Places in Literature (Sheffield, 2000) and The Blackwell Companion to Restoration Drama (Oxford, 2001). As well as numerous articles on a range of subjects (Restoration Drama, Aphra Behn, Andrew Marvell, drink, chaos theory, and Marxism), she has published ‘The Abuse of Literacy and The Feeling Heart: The Trials of Richard Hoggart’, Cambridge Quarterly (2005); and ‘Richard Hoggart as Literary Critic’, International Journal of Cultural Studies (2007). She organized ‘The Uses of Richard Hoggart’, an international, cross-disciplinary conference on Richard Hoggart at Sheffield in April 2006 and co-edited with John Hartley the special Hoggart issue of the International Journal of Cultural Studies (2007). In progress: a book-length critical study of Richard Hoggart and, as editor, Re-Reading Richard Hoggart for Cambridge Scholars Press. Graeme Turner is ARC Federation Fellow and Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. One of the pioneers of cultural studies in Australia, his most

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recent publications include Understanding Celebrity (Sage, 2004), and Ending the Affair: The Decline of Television News and Current Affairs in Australia (University of New South Wales Press, 2005). His current research project is a large international study of post-broadcast television. Robert J.C. Young is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University. He was formerly Professor of English and Critical Theory at Oxford University. His books include White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (Routledge, 1990, new edition 2004), Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race (Routledge, 1995), Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Blackwell, 2001), Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2003), and The Idea of English Ethnicity (Blackwell, 2007). His edited books include Untying the Text (Routledge, 1981), and Poststructuralism and the Question of History (with Derek Attridge and Geoffrey Bennington (Cambridge, 1987)). He is also General Editor of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (Routledge), and was a founding editor of the Oxford Literary Review. His work has been translated into 16 languages.

Introduction Sue Owen

Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) is one of the seminal texts of the mid-twentieth century. The book, originally entitled The Abuse of Literacy, celebrates in Part I the resilient culture of working-class people but offers in Part II a powerful critique of the specious populism and banality of popular newspapers and magazines, the false palliness of adverts, and the literary flatness and moral emptiness of many popular novels. The book struck an immediate chord: it was widely reviewed in the popular press and discussed on the radio.1 The book had a profound influence on perceptions of the working class both inside and beyond the academy in the UK, the USA and Australia, and was translated into French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish and Portuguese.2 It had a massive impact far beyond the academy, reaching a wide readership and influencing a generation of novelists and playwrights.3 The Uses of Literacy spoke from and to the climate of post-war questioning of cultural elitism. The book had an enormous impact: in part for the intrinsic interest, quality and originality of its argument, and in part because of its bearings on wider discussions about the pace and direction of post-war social change. As Stuart Hall argues in this volume, Hoggart’s argument takes its bearings from the broader debate about post-war affluence and what came to be known as working-class ‘embourgeoisement’. Together with other key works such as Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society, The Uses of Literacy laid the foundations of British cultural studies. It changed forever ideas of what constitutes a worthwhile focus for cultural analysis. It put the working class on the cultural map, not as objects of middle-class scrutiny but as people with a culture and a point of view of their own. Hoggart’s key departure from his predecessors in cultural enquiry, such as F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, was to advocate ‘a little more humility about what audiences actually take from unpromising 1

2 Introduction

material’ (Hoggart, 1963, 242). This is a central theme in The Uses of Literacy: to know working-class readers is to understand that they are not as easily influenced as is assumed. Hoggart’s other major departure was in valuing popular culture in a way the Leavises never would have: ‘Perhaps no one should engage in the work who is not, in a certain sense, himself in love with popular art’ (Hoggart, 1963, 242). Hoggart’s work contains the seeds of the important mid-twentieth-century shift from deploring to enjoying popular culture, though enjoyment is always tempered by critical discrimination. Questions of value, for Hoggart, cannot be evaded: It is plain that behind almost any discussion today about the arts, and indeed about any of those areas if British culture with which I have been involved, lies the evaded question of value judgments. (1993, 240) For Hoggart, the idea of value must be defended. Otherwise democracy is open to abuse: It is true . . . that it is better to be free to find our own rules than to have them imposed by church or state. But it is precisely in these kinds of democracies that this openness is comprehensively abused by people with their own ulterior purposes, does not lead to our being left alone, let alone aided to find our own beliefs. We are besieged by a mass of apparently conflicting but actually consonant voices, each peddling its own patterns of overt or more likely hidden beliefs. All of them – politicians, advertisers, tabloid newspaper hacks and many another – are interested parties; the ways of life they offer have overwhelmingly at their centre the notion that it’s all a matter of taste, and of changing taste, since that’s what keeps the wheels of this kind of society turning. Openness becomes emotional promiscuity, choice becomes whim; but underneath is a passivity, the acceptance of things as they are and are offered. (1993, 240) A crucial aspect of the argument of The Uses of Literacy is that the ‘popular persuaders’ (all ‘consonant’ in method, however different in their particular ideology) exploit and graft themselves onto old, positive values. Thus, traditional working-class openness becomes shared passivity: ‘Above all, you mustn’t resist, like a stone in the water, snagging the inchoate flow. Or make distinctions’ (1993, 242). And he is not afraid

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to challenge those who abandon critical value judgements in favour of populism and so critically disempower those from disregarded subgroups whom they ostensibly defend. Hoggart challenges the view that ‘anything goes’, that one should not be a snob or a spoilsport, that high-mindedness or intellectual snobbery must be avoided at all costs and cannot be distinguished from intellectual discrimination and critical stringency. For Hoggart it is crucial to tackle this error in order to arm people against the manipulations of the popular persuaders and to challenge the tyranny of relativism which they exploit.4 This book offers a long overdue reappraisal of Hoggart’s contribution to cultural studies. The contributors to the volume range from eminent figures within cultural studies to younger scholars, and their range of opinions on Hoggart is considerable, but all agree on his significance. It is important to remember that Hoggart came to cultural studies from a background in literary criticism. Hoggart believed that ‘great’ works of literature supremely embody the meanings within cultures; that they perceptively and honestly explore and recreate the natures of societies and the experiences of human beings within them; that ‘great’ writing bears its meanings by creating orders within itself and so helps reveal the orders of values within societies whether by mirroring them or by resisting them and proposing, usually obliquely, new orders, and so the expressive arts, and especially literature, are guides of a unique kind to the value-bearing nature of societies. (1995, 87) As Bill Hughes argues in this volume, Hoggart sees the working class as armed and empowered through education and, in particular, through an encounter with good literature. One of the continuing threads through the collection is how the roots of Hoggart’s critical practice in literary studies have been forgotten and need to be revisited: Hall’s, Grossberg’s and McGuigan’s chapters all in different ways, and from differing perspectives, recover this aspect of Hoggart’s work and in so doing make what is still a slightly unusual (for cultural studies) rapprochement with literary studies. The chapters by Turner and Hughes also pursue this line of enquiry, using Hoggart’s ideas to rescue and renegotiate an idea of literary value more subtle than either Arnoldian elitism or the populist backlash against it. Thus, Hoggart is being revaluated from within cultural studies, and the issues raised are important for the whole field. And at the same time, there starts a rapprochement between cultural studies

4 Introduction

and literary studies, fields with overlapping interests and many common goals. The socio-political relevance of these concerns is brought out in this volume, for example in the chapters by Ellis and Gregg. The Editor of the present volume, like Hoggart himself, came to cultural studies from a background in literary criticism. The importance of the present volume rests not only upon its rethinking of Hoggart’s position within cultural studies, but upon its recovery of the complicated (and in recent terms, largely ignored) relation between Hoggart’s roots in literary studies and his foundation of the new ‘discipline’ of cultural studies. Given Hoggart’s interdisciplinarity, his attempt to bridge the gap between literary criticism and cultural studies, it is scarcely surprising that the reception of Uses in the academy has been mixed (though not as mixed as some have thought), and that its reputation has changed over time. From the start, both the argument and the method were controversial. In his autobiography Hoggart describes reactions to his book amongst academic colleagues: ‘Many people I knew in internal departments of English kept fairly quiet about it, as though a shabby cat from the council house next door had brought in an odd – even a smelly – object into the house’ (1991, 143). Hoggart had breached decorum in several ways: by making popular culture the object of critical scrutiny, by mingling literary analysis and socio-political issues, by mixing personal memoir with social history and cultural analysis and by focusing upon the question of class. On the Left, the reaction was guarded (though not as guarded as some have thought) from a different perspective. The second issue of the Universities and Left Review (summer 1957) was devoted to a debate on Uses and mixed praise with criticism. Raymond Williams praised Hoggart’s deep loyalty to his own people but repudiated his critique of working-class materialism and criticized his exclusion of the politically active minority of the working class. This debate has been read differently by Francis Mulhern and Stuart Hall. Where Mulhern sees grave criticism of Hoggart’s method, Hall sees a collective effort to expand the definition of culture and politics and a growing perception of culture as one of the constitutive grounds of all social practices (Mulhern, 2000, 62–3; Hall in this volume). Hoggart was overshadowed in the 1970s by Marxism within cultural studies (Hoggart, 1993, 98). The problem with Uses for Marxists was twofold: in Part I Hoggart paints a portrait of working-class life and culture, drawing on his own experience in a way which prefigures feminist writing of the 1980s. This was out of tune with the hyper-theoretical mood of the 1970s. Secondly, Hoggart’s stand for value could seem similar to the elitism of T. S. Eliot and the Leavises (despite crucial distinctions which were ignored).

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More perceptive about the book’s theoretical weight and methodological importance was the French sociologist and cultural theorist Jean-Claude Passeron. The Uses of Literacy was published in France in 1970 as La Culture de Pauvre: Etude sur le Style de Vie des Classes Populaires en Angleterre, with an introduction by Passeron. Passeron is an important figure in the European history of ideas. He collaborated with Pierre Bourdieu in the 1960s in various works exploring the epistemological foundations of popular culture, including Le M´etier de Sociologue: an assertion of the scientific basis of sociological methodology. Taking his distance from Bourdieu, Passeron moved into exploring the sociology of culture and was drawn to the work of Hoggart. His Introduction to Uses is very significant. Patrick Gaboriau and Philippe Gaboriau, in an overview of ‘Popular Culture Studies in France’, cite it as one of the key theoretical texts in the evolution of French studies of popular culture (1991, 178). Passeron’s introduction was translated into English in 1971, at a time when the British intelligentsia was beginning to be excited by the ideas of French intellectuals, and published in the series Working Papers on Cultural Studies by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). An introductory passage states that Passeron ‘suggests the theoretical foundations and hypotheses in this apparently untheoretical book and goes on to indicate the ways in which it seems to have been misunderstood by bourgeois intellectuals’. The first statement is extremely important, while the second is an understatement: Passeron argues that the book confronts intellectuals with their own biases. Where British critics might see a weakness in the book’s jargonfree style, its grounding in personal experience and empirical method, Passeron sees the autobiographical element as a strength, as it allows Hoggart to ‘relativise his own judgments’ (Passeron, 1971, 121) or, in other words, to avoid claims to a specious objectivity typical of bourgeois intellectuals. More than this, it allows an honest representation, understanding and reinstatement of the popular voice in culture. Passeron discerns a theoretical rigour behind the ‘liveliness of the description’ in Hoggart’s book (1971, 122). He explains how the book has social scientific validity in the tradition of ethnography. Hoggart’s lack of distance is a strength not a weakness, allowing him to give a more complete picture than an ethnographer could, in a ‘properly sociological effort on the part of the author to hold together systematically a whole play of determinations and a whole constellation of attitudes’ (1971, 124). Hoggart’s style allows him to ‘let the object of study speak for itself’ (1971, 124), and thus to redress the bias of studies of the working class by intellectual outsiders. His combination of ‘distancing and participation’

6 Introduction

allows him to ‘perceive and explain by example even the very nuances of the behaviour of intellectuals with working-class backgrounds’, and his ‘particular habit of mind is peculiarly effective when bourgeois or petitbourgeois ethnocentrism needs ousting’ (1971, 126). His method reveals the ‘class biases’ of apparently ‘obvious’ views of the working class which are ‘in their own way as racist as those of pre-scientific ethnographers limited to detailing the barbarism of the ‘primitives’ (1971, 127). He exposes the ‘apparently neutral language’ and the self-serving ‘screen of an ideology of experts’ behind which bourgeois intellectuals hide. Such French praise of British empiricism is astonishing. Passeron establishes Hoggart’s social-scientific credentials and traces the debt to Uses of a whole swathe of sociological studies throughout the 1960s. Of even greater significance is Passeron’s rebuttal of misreadings of Hoggart as non- or even anti-theoretical. Hoggart is able, ‘without any great theoretical fanfares, to pose some questions as pertinent for theory as for the empirical analysis of the transformations in popular culture and the receptivity of the different class levels to the ideological solicitations contained in the message of the cultural industry and directed at them’ (1971, 128). This is because Hoggart’s understanding of working-class resilience gives him a more complex perspective on the reception of the mass media and hence a more nuanced appreciation of transformations in popular culture. Far from considering Hoggart untheoretical, Passeron discerns ‘the originality of this theoretical approach’ which allows him to ‘tease out the law which subordinates the efficacy of the factors of change to their relevance to the pre-existing structures’ (1971, 130). Thus, Hoggart is able to demolish retrospective myths of a golden age of working-class culture, as well as making ‘a protest in the name of scientific objectivity against aristocratic, populist, apocalyptic or foolishly optimistic pronouncements which come between the life of the working class and its necessarily intellectual or bourgeois observers’ (1971, 121). Passeron shows an exceptional awareness of Hoggart’s theoretical importance, and the reception of Passeron’s ideas in the milieu of the Birmingham CCCS in the early 1970s is extremely significant.5 Hoggart had founded the CCCS at Birmingham University in the early 1960s. He explains the thinking behind the move in his inaugural lecture in 1963.6 Due allowance should be made for his literary audience: the new field of cultural studies was conceived as within English Literature. Hoggart had been prompted to study popular culture partly by the questions asked by his students in adult education about connections between literature and daily life. He had made such connections

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in The Uses of Literacy, and in his inaugural lecture at Birmingham he challenges others to follow his lead as he makes the case for widening the boundaries of English. It is hard now to recapture the force of Hoggart’s challenge to received wisdom about the loftiness and timelessness of English Literature: English, once again and finally, has to do with language exploring human experience, in all its flux and complexity. It is therefore always and finally in an active relation with its age; and some students of literature – many more students of literature than at present – ought to try to understand these relationships better. (1963, 243) Schools of English, Hoggart argues, have a mission to engage with how language is being used in the world today, even if this means moving outside disciplinary boundaries. He admires the boldness of those who tackle ‘interconnections between history, politics and the aesthetics of popular taste’ (1963, 239). This is iconoclastic stuff in 1963, and Hoggart is careful to situate his argument in the context of initial praise for literary values and an assertion of the primacy of literary critical method. This might be a sop to the School of English which employed him. But it goes deeper. Hoggart is not debunking literary criticism but giving it a higher – or perhaps broader – mission. A training in English encourages ‘increased respect for the life of language, and for the unpremeditated textures of experience’ (1963, 234). Thus, the literary critic is uniquely fitted to expose debased uses of language by the persuaders and manipulators, when ‘prose has its eye only slightly on the object and almost wholly on the audience’ (1963, 235). This is effectively a political stand: As it is, too many of us stay most of the time within our well-defined academic areas – but succumb easily to occasional invitations from the world outside. We do not with sufficient confidence separate ourselves from that world nor sufficiently critically engage with it. By insisting on the difficult but responsible life of language, and on the overriding importance of the human scale, we can try to do our part in resisting the unreal, unfelt and depersonalized society. (1963, 237) This still seems pertinent. The remit of the new cultural studies, as Hoggart envisages it, is threefold: ‘one is, roughly, historical and philosophical; another is, again

8 Introduction

roughly, sociological; the third – which will be the most important – is the literary critical’ (1963, 239). The ‘historical and philosophical’ approach includes the need to know more about the history of ‘the cultural debate’ along the lines pioneered by Raymond Williams in Culture and Society, and a better definition of terms to avoid confused assumptions as ‘The clash of undernourished generalizations and of submerged apologetics takes the place of what should be a dialogue’ (1963, 240). Some might call this work ‘theoretical’. It has gone on in the last 40 years without Hoggart’s appeal for it being recognized. And his appeal remains topical: whilst terms like ‘highbrows, middlebrows and lowbrows’ might now be discredited, other dubious terms Hoggart questions, such as ‘the common man’ and ‘the masses’, may still have a certain regrettable currency. And Hoggart’s appeal for more philosophers to come into the field has been entirely unheeded, so that there is still a cavalier creation of ‘new little cultural patterns’ such as ‘the Angry Young Man’ movement (1963, 240). The sociological approach Hoggart envisaged would include attention to the background and rewards of writers and artists; the audiences for ‘different levels of approach’; the opinion-formers and their channels of influence; organizations for the production and distribution of the written and spoken word (including the impact of the ‘paperback revolution’ and what it means to see books as commodities); links between commercialization and (literary) reputations; and finally how little we know about all sorts of interrelations: about interrelations between writers and their audiences, and about their shared assumptions; about interrelations between writers and organs of opinion, between writers, politics, power, class and cash; about interrelations between the sophisticated and the popular arts, interrelations which are both functional and imaginative; and how few foreign comparisons we have made. (1963, 241) Hoggart insists throughout on accuracy and historical specificity and on the avoidance of schematism and specious generalizations. At the same time, he draws a much bigger map here than he is often given credit for. He appears to envisage cultural studies as a multi-disciplinary project to build up an overall view of contemporary culture through attention to specifics. This method of a dialectic between the particular and the general has not really been grasped by his successors. And, though some of

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the issues he outlines have been addressed, others remain comparatively unexplored. Hoggart reiterates that the literary critical approach is the ‘most important of all’ and explains why it is distinct from the sociological approach: Most important of all: the directly literary critical approach in cultural studies is itself neglected. Yet it is essential to the whole field because, unless you know how these things work as art, even though sometimes as ‘bad art’, what you say about then will not cut deep. Here, we particularly need better links with sociologists. It is difficult, outside a seminar, to use a literary critical vocabulary – to talk about ‘the quality of the imagination’ shown; or to discuss the effect on a piece of writing of various pressures – for instance, to talk about corner-cutting techniques, or linguistic tricks, or even (perhaps especially – about what tone reveals. All this needs to be analyzed more, to be illustrated and enforced – and at all levels, not just in relation to mass arts.7 It will be clear that there is a literary critical slant to all this from which later cultural studies has largely departed. Hoggart values literary critical method for its truth-revealing power, its ability to reveal tones and nuances, to identify influence, to elucidate, expose and debunk. But always Hoggart insists on the quiddity of the literary or cultural object of study. The text is never to be read as historical evidence, but always from inside out rather than outside in. Unsurprisingly, these disciplinary distinctions were not always maintained in the way Hoggart envisaged them, especially after his departure from the Centre, though, as Hall and Grossberg point out in this volume, his influence was stronger than some have supposed. The importance of Hoggart’s initiative in founding the CCCS would be hard to overstate. Hoggart is best known for The Uses of Literacy, but has been a prolific writer, publishing 27 books, including 2 in 2004 at the age of 87. These range from works of cultural analysis such as The Way We Live Now, to works of personal reflection such as First and Last Things and Promises to Keep, and to collections of essays on a wide variety of topics, such as the two volumes of Speaking to Each Other, Between Two Worlds and An English Temper. It flows from his conception of the intellectual’s social and political role that he has not lived in the ivory tower but has engaged in society, striving for change from within. He has been an Assistant

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Director-General of UNESCO and has undertaken many activities in arts, cultural matters, broadcasting and education. Amongst other positions, he has served as a member of the Albermarle Committee on Youth Services, a member of the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting, Reith Lecturer, Chair of the Broadcasting Research Unit, Vice-Chair of the Arts Council, Chair of the Statesman and Nation Publishing Company, Chair of the Advisory Council for Adult and Continuing Education and member of the British Board of Film Classification Appeals Committee. Hoggart was a leading witness for the defence in the trial at the Old Bailey in 1960 of Penguin Books Ltd. for publishing D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. His evidence is widely acknowledged to have been central in leading to the acquittal, which marked a watershed in public perception and shifted cultural parameters. Hoggart was the first British critic to take TV and radio seriously. He made a number of critical interventions: his Reith lectures, his contributions to the report of the Pilkington Committee and his works on media, including Only Connect: On the Nature and Quality of Mass Communications, The Mass Media: A New Colonialism and Mass Media in Mass Society. His recurring ideas are respect for the medium of broadcasting and its possibilities; respect for its audiences; no regard to vested influence of government or advertisers which means commitment to the licence fee; provision for all not just those worth wooing for an ulterior end; the idea that we all at times belong to a number of minorities or overlapping communities and sometimes belong to majorities; the idea that there is a qualitative difference between assessing, on the one hand, the size of audience and, on the other, the intensity with which individuals respond to difference programmes; the notion that quality is determined by integrity before the subject and intended audience and not by ‘height of brow’ (this is especially important given the broadcasters’ dismissal of critics as elitist or culturally snobbish); promotion of enabling rather than prohibitive legislation; the view that broadcasters should be obliged to provide space for programmes which do not at first attract large audiences; the idea that if, in the effort to increase audiences, producers make programmes they secretly despise, they will soon despise the audiences they make them for and eventually despise themselves; and the view that broadcasting should not hesitate to reflect ‘The quarrel of this society with itself’ even though politicians may not like the result (Hoggart, 1993, chapter 8). Hated by Margaret Thatcher and Mary Whitehouse, Hoggart nevertheless strove to serve culture in the public sphere, as an important extension of his ideas about the need for cultural quality.

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The very range and diversity of Hoggart’s socio-cultural interventions has meant that his reputation has been slow to gain ground. The re-evaluation of Hoggart in this volume follows on from an important conference, The Uses of Richard Hoggart, at the University of Sheffield in April 2006. This was an extremely successful international, crossdisciplinary event, attended by people from UK, France, USA and Australia. Scholars from nine disciplines (English Literature and Language, Politics, Cultural Studies, Sociology, History, Education, Adult Education, Epistemology and a biologist) held a genuine intellectual exchange across disciplinary boundaries. Speakers ranged from ‘big names’ such as Hoggart himself, novelist David Lodge and contributors to this volume who are eminent within cultural studies, to young scholars and representatives of a diverse range of organizations from UNESCO to the WEA, relatives and friends of Hoggart and members of the wider community. The success of the conference indicates that the time for a re-evaluation of Hoggart was exactly right. A particularly strong Australian contingent at the conference, whose attendance was part-funded by the Australian Research Council, reflected the influence of Hoggart’s ideas in Australia. Following the conference, John Hartley from the Queensland University of Technology published (with Sue Owen) a special Hoggart issue of the International Journal of Cultural Studies, ten years after he and Mark Gibson printed a seminal interview with Hoggart in the same journal. From the USA, the conference was privileged to have contributors as diverse as epistemologist Richard E. Lee, cultural studies’ Lawrence Grossberg and historian Michael Rosenfeld.8 This diversity of range and unity of purpose is reflected in this volume. The first chapter is by Stuart Hall, first Research Fellow and later Hoggart’s successor as Director of the Birmingham CCCS. Hall’s testimony is important, both because of this early collaboration with Hoggart and understanding of his method and importance and because Hall’s importance as a cultural critic of the Left has led to his being identified with Marxist thought which has been seen as being against Hoggart and superior to him. Hall is unequivocal about the importance of Hoggart’s role in founding the Centre and the importance of The Uses of Literacy as one of the founding texts of cultural studies. He revisits both The Uses of Literacy and Hoggart’s inaugural lecture in order to show how Hoggart breaks from the discourse of cultural decline put forward by Arnold and his successors (the Leavises, Eliot et al.). For Hall, Hoggart’s emphasis on working-class resilience makes a decisive break with the pessimism of his predecessors. Like Passeron before him, Hall traces the methodological underpinnings in Hoggart’s work. He charts Hoggart’s conceptual

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innovations, the chief of which was to redefine culture to include how working-class people spoke and thought, their ways of ‘making sense’ of the world. This is far removed from ‘culture’ as the ideal court of judgement, whose touchstone was ‘the best that has been thought and said’, which animated the tradition from Arnold to Eliot and Leavis. Moreover, Hall counters Marxist views of Hoggart’s ‘Arnoldian’ irrelevance by situating Hoggart’s redefinition of culture in parallel to that of Raymond Williams rather than in subordination to it. Hall reinstates Hoggart within the history of cultural studies, finding in Hoggart the roots of innovations at the heart of the field and its spirit of interdisciplinarity. Hall sees the residue of Hoggart’s ‘literary’ approach not as a flaw, but as the germ of the preoccupation with semiotics in the CCCS milieu. For Hall, Hoggart is no longer a ‘Matthew Arnoldian liberal humanist’, but the precursor of Althusser and Sassure. Hoggart’s work is not to be located in opposition to Marxism, post-structuralism and other strands of theory, but as the catalyst of their reception into English cultural studies. Hall locates the reception of Uses of Literacy within the context of the rise of the New Left. He sees Hoggart’s arguments not as in conflict with those of the left, but as being in keeping with leftist assessments of the ‘conjuncture’. Stefan Collini defended Hoggart and deplored his neglect in comparison to Raymond Williams in English Pasts in 1999, arguing that ‘Richard Hoggart is an English moralist’, in the best sense, and that ‘More than ever, we need him to be in good voice’ (1999, 230). In this volume, Collini locates Hoggart in the context of British intellectual history. His argument is somewhat distinct from Stuart Hall’s. He assesses how far The Uses of Literacy shared the dominant critical practice of the ‘New Criticism’ of F. R. Leavis and the broader tradition which not only shared some of Leavis’s assumptions but also drew upon Auden and Orwell. He considers that Hoggart shared the cultural pessimism and moral confidence of the dominant post-war school of criticism, identifying a rhetoric of secularized Protestantism in Hoggart’s writing. He examines the affinities between The Uses of Literacy and the pastoral mode which emphasized the importance of community and a stable way of life. He also traces links to the ‘condition of England’ tradition. He ends by comparing Hoggart and Raymond Williams, praising the generosity and delicate economy of Hoggart’s own review of Williams’ work; and he salutes the strain in Hoggart’s work that makes it hard to align him with any school of thought. Lawrence Grossberg’s assessment is very much in keeping with Hall’s. He draws on his own experience as a student at the CCCS in 1968

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to assert Hoggart’s central role at the Centre and to rescue Hoggart’s vision of cultural studies from later misreadings. He shows how Hoggart’s literary-critical practice helped students in ‘honing the skills necessary to read for tone and values’. He shows the theoretical and epistemological underpinnings of Hoggart’s subtle attention to the complexities of how texts relate to the lives of individuals and to the values at work in both texts and society. He looks at the changing ‘problematics’ in response to which cultural studies asserted itself, then and now, and shows how Hoggart, like Raymond Williams, responded to the challenge posed by scientism and positivism. Like Hall, he argues for the seminal role of The Uses of Literacy, which he reads as ‘anti-reductionist’, holding on to the complexity of human reality. He argues that Hoggart’s portrait of the working class in the book is far from static and that the book may be read as ‘an attempt to theorize cultural transmission as an epistemological opening into a theory of social change’. Grossberg locates his defence of Hoggart’s vision in the context of a broader enquiry into the nature of cultural studies. For Hoggart and others at the Centre, cultural studies meant asserting that intellectual work matters; that the right questions need to be asked about the proper way to carry out intellectual work. It meant challenging disciplinary boundaries, questioning the binary logic of the humanities, as well as scientism, reductionism, universalism and the desire for completeness. Finally, he describes the ‘problematic’ of the situation in the USA today and the continuing relevance of Hoggart’s insistence on the importance of the imagination in making a better future. Whereas Hall and Collini focus on The Uses of Literacy, Jim McGuigan assesses the impact of Hoggart’s The Way We Live Now (1995). He draws on the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu to show how Hoggart refreshes the ‘game’ of English Literary study, rather than seeking to destroy it. He examines the gains and losses in the break between Hoggart’s conception of cultural studies as an adjunct to English and the subsequent ‘autonomisation’ of the field. He compares Hoggart’s critique of Thatcherism with Stuart Hall’s. The American title of The Way We Live Now is The Tyranny of Relativism and McGuigan explores what Hoggart means by relativism, analysing Hoggart’s own resistance to relativism by tracing the continuities between The Uses of Literacy and The Way We Live Now. He asserts Hoggart’s consistency and continuing relevance and salutes his resistance to pressures to accommodate to popular taste to which others have succumbed. Epistemologist Richard E. Lee brings a different disciplinary perspective to bear. Lee’s argument was strongly endorsed by Stuart Hall at the

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conference on Hoggart, and Hall sees Lee’s argument as very much in keeping with his own. Lee locates Hoggart’s work within the context of the enormous consequences the cultural studies movement has had as an epistemological project in the contemporary reordering of the disciplines of knowledge. Lee’s chapter is therefore macrocosmic, situating the arguments of the previous chapters in the broader context of epistemological shifts within the sciences as well as humanities. First, Lee locates the impact of The Uses of Literacy in the dual context of traditional ‘English social criticism’ and ‘the turn to culture by the independent left in Britain during the 1950s’. Lee defends Hoggart from the charge of being apolitical, arguing that The Uses of Literacy ‘legitimated a return to class politics, albeit one based on the solidarities of backstreet life’. He then goes on to situate Hoggart’s achievement and importance in the context of a ‘secular crisis of the structures of knowledge’ in ‘a period characterized in the economic arena by a world-scale crisis of capital accumulation and in the geopolitical arena by intractable difficulties in reestablishing medium-term stability’. He concludes that cultural studies as a knowledge movement has played a fundamental role in the epistemological crisis of the structures of knowledge in the modern world and that Richard Hoggart’s contribution in that respect has been clear from the very beginning. David Fowler traces Hoggart’s engagement with the emergence of a youth culture from the 1950s to the 1980s. He begins with Hoggart’s section on the ‘Juke Box Boys’ in The Uses of Literacy and goes on to analyse the Albermarle Report on teenagers which Hoggart co-wrote with Leslie Paul in 1960 and to examine some of his journalism on the subject. He identifies sources for Hoggart’s views on youth culture which have not hitherto been grasped and examines his relationship with Ray Gosling and Colin MacInnes. He shows that previous cultural critics have been wrong to suppose Hoggart disapproved of youth culture. He preferred provincial youth culture, more rooted in the community. Whilst Stuart Hall developed research on youth culture at the CCCS, Hoggart originally pioneered this work. Fowler’s analysis is therefore in keeping with Hall’s in appreciating Hoggart’s role in subsequent developments at the CCCS. Robert Young’s title ‘ ‘‘Them’’ and ‘‘Us’’ ’ is taken from the title of chapter 3 of The Uses of Literacy, in which Hoggart defines the ways in which working-class people describe themselves and the upper classes. Young analyses Hoggart’s characterization of class division and working-class identity, and considers in particular the moments when he represents divisions within the working class, including questions of race and ethnicity, and the means through which individuals or groups move ‘up (or

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down) the scale’. Young explores the contradictions of Uses. For example, he considers the way in which racial difference is both evoked and occluded. He analyses the contradiction between Hoggart’s disapproval of 1950s popular culture and his evocation of popular speech and attitudes which leaps to life in a manner comparable to Joyce’s Ulysses, overpowering his arguments against it. Young also considers the disparity between the book’s two halves, arguing that ‘If the first half of the book is with ‘‘us’’, the second half is definitely with ‘‘them’’.’ The next two contributions are at the interface of cultural studies and Education. John Hartley asks, after 50 years, what are the implications of Uses of Literacy for educational modernization, in the light of subsequent changes from ‘read only’ literacy to ‘read–write’ uses of multimedia? This chapter argues that a broad extension of popular literacy via consumer-created digital content offers not only emancipationist potential in line with Hoggart’s own project, but also economic benefits via the dynamics of creative innovation. Multimedia ‘popular entertainments’ pose a challenge to formal education, but not in the way that Hoggart feared. Instead of producing ‘tamed helots’, commercial culture may be outpacing formal schooling in promoting creative digital literacy via entrepreneurial and distributed learning. It may indeed be that those in need of a creative makeover are not teenagers but teachers. Like Hartley’s, Graeme Turner’s argument has a wide application for schools and universities in UK and USA, as well as Australia. He reflects on the contemporary currency of what Hoggart calls ‘critical literacy’ through a discussion of a series of debates about the formation of ‘critical literacies’ in the senior school curriculum in Australia. Among the ramifications of these debates is the complicated political and pedagogical alignments it has created: a cultural studies scholar can find himself located on the same side as those who would entirely disapprove of cultural studies, while arguing for the importance of categories of experience – such as the literary text – that cultural studies has often set aside. Turner traces the history of ‘critical literacy’ from the perceived ‘dumbing down’ in the turn to popular culture, through to the view in media and cultural studies that English studies were simply a site for colonization. He interrogates the idea of critical literacy from two sides. On the one hand, the perception of language as central prevents understanding of specific media. On the other, in the classroom a focus on critical literacy has led to repetitive, routine exercises; to spotting targeted ideologies; and to choosing between models of reception for texts. Hoggart used a more humanistic vocabulary and spoke of creativity and imagination, but this has largely been lost: pleasure in reading

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Introduction

rarely rates a mention. Those who have ‘updated’ the curriculum bear responsibility for implying English no longer has content. The ‘Humanities’ have been usurped by a Social Sciences model. Humanistic, ethical and moral reflections such as those offered by Hoggart have been sidelined in favour of methodological outcomes. We have lost the idea that both literary and popular culture may offer dimensions of experience worth having for their own sake. Structure has usurped content, and genuine cultural literacy has been lost. Hoggart’s ideas point the way to a re-evaluation. Melissa Gregg discusses ‘the importance of being ordinary’. Anti-elitist discourse in politics often misses the dignity of the individual and the variety and depth in working-class culture. Hoggart’s focus on ordinariness in The Uses of Literacy is different. He reveals the narrowness of scholarly boundaries, according to which only the exceptional had been worth studying. Hoggart is more interested in home and neighbourhood than in politics. His politics of empathy is directed to the majority who take their lives much as they find them. He establishes ordinariness as a key facet of cultural studies’ concerns. He makes the relationship between analyst and the analysed convivial. He engages the reader with ordinary attitudes. But whereas for Hoggart ordinariness increases empathy, in Australian politics, at the time of writing, ordinariness denies empathy and is used against perceived excesses of political correctness, or outsiders such as Muslims. Change involves envisaging what it is like to be disadvantaged. Hoggart offers the ‘landscape with figures’ necessary to imagine what it would be like to live differently and provides the humane connections disavowed in politicians’ objectifications. Gregg argues for the need to reinstate the concept of ordinariness put forward by Hoggart and Raymond Williams as against the notion of the ‘everyday’, based on the ideas of Lefebvre, which has predominated in cultural studies. Mark Gibson asks whether Hoggart’s ideas can be made to travel, given his ‘Englishness’, a quiet confidence in the value of English social patterns. In some respects Gibson’s argument echoes Collini’s here. Gibson examines claims (e.g. by Perry Anderson) linking Hoggart to conservatism, and criticism of him (e.g. by Gilroy) for ignoring the black community. But Gibson rejects the idea of Hoggart as conservative, showing how his regard for English traditions sits alongside progressivism. Gibson discusses ‘Hoggartian’ writers in Australia (Craig McGregor and Donald Horne), showing how they share Hoggart’s interest in the ordinary and arguing that literacy must begin from the ordinary. Hoggart celebrates specificity; but at the same time his ideas

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relate to the common cultural history of England and Australia. Hoggart’s ideas can be used to remind Australians of the dangers of missing the possibilities in the ordinary; and to help guard against excessive suspicion of Englishness. A more complex understanding of Englishness can help develop cultural literacies in Australia. Charlie Ellis’s argument carries on from Collini’s and Gibson’s, since he discusses Hoggart’s possible conservatism. He anatomises Hoggart’s blend of conservative anger at Britain’s cultural decline and selfdefinition as a moderate leftist. He considers Hoggart’s critique of conservatism in Farnham: A Landscape with Figures (a text few critics have discussed). He explores Hoggart’s socially liberal values and his defence of D. H. Lawrence. He notes that Hoggart found a grain of truth in Mary Whitehouse’s critique of shallowness, even whilst disagreeing with her values. Hoggart’s demon is moral gutlessness and he sees a need to make choices and not be led by purse-power. He sees the free market as leading to social stratification and the creation of an underclass, and these concerns far outstrip his fears about decline. Hoggart is therefore liberal in some spheres and conservative in others, and Ellis aligns him with ‘Left Conservatives’ such as George Orwell and Jeremy Seabrook. This does not detract from the force of his message: Hoggart embodies a ‘conserving radicalism’, fundamentally at odds with the market-driven politics of the contemporary Conservative movement. Bill Hughes sees Hoggart as being on the Left, politically. Despite Hoggart’s own rejection of Marxism and his rejection by Marxists in the 1970s, Hughes sees his work as being within a Marxist framework. Hughes rejects Althusserian Marxism and Marxisant varieties of postmodernism and returns to Marx, showing that both Marx and Hoggart defended Art in a wider sense against narrow notions of utility. Hughes argues that Hoggart reasserts use value against cynical production of cultural objects as items for exchange and reasserts cultural value against relativism. He argues for a rehabilitation of the defence of literary value (often seen as elitist). He strives to liberate Hoggart from charges of uncritical empiricism through a comparison of Hoggart and Adorno. Hughes also, like Turner, connects these ideas about value to Hoggart’s thinking about education. Sue Owen considers Hoggart’s treatment of women and the reception of his work by feminists. She identifies ways in which Hoggart’s writing prefigured feminism: his humane approach to the study of the working-class and popular culture, his refusal to oversimplify and his resistance of totalizing judgements about ‘the masses’. Hoggart’s seems proto-feminist in using personal pain as a springboard for politically

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engaged meditations (for example in the description of his mother’s sufferings and death in Uses) and in finding wider significance in particular lives. Hoggart’s method is to look for meaning in the personal and to extrapolate social significance from minutely observed detail. The Uses of Literacy is marked by a capacity for feeling and a domestic focus typical of 1980s feminists, of the empirical, British kind. Hoggart’s response to criticisms of his lack of emphasis on the politically active working class was illuminating: ‘my own experience had been overwhelmingly domestic, internal, home and woman-centred’. It might be thought that Hoggart’s celebration of the capacity for feeling and his domestic focus would have resonated with feminists, at least the empirical, British kind. But feminists such as Beatrix Campbell and Carolyn Steedman have criticized Hoggart, and their misreadings have coloured views of him since the 1980s. Owen offers a detailed comparative analysis of Hoggart’s writing and that of Steedman and Campbell. She argues for the achievement and historical importance of these two writers but rejects their oversimplified critique of Hoggart. Feminist misreadings of Hoggart may be due in part to failure to relate to his style, particularly the muting of personal pain. Writing before the licensed rage of identity politics, Hoggart achieves a tone that is judicious with an undertone of restrained passion. Sympathy is balanced by detached, ironic observation. If Hoggart’s method resembles 1980s Anglo-feminism, it is also opposite in its striving for detachment and objectivity. It is this combination of ‘distancing and participation’ which Passeron, cited earlier, finds peculiarly effective. Thus, all the contributors to this volume from disparate perspectives unite not only to establish Hoggart’s reputation beyond a shadow of a doubt but also to point to a method of humane and scrupulous cultural analysis which can offer hope for the future.

Notes 1. The Daily Herald called Hoggart ‘an angry young man’ and printed a follow-up quiz, inspired by his ideas and purporting to explore contemporary social attitudes: H. Ritchie, Success Stories: Literature and the Media in England, 1950–1959 (London: Faber, 1988), 35. The book was reviewed in the Radio on 10/3/57 and again, after the paperback appeared, on 2/3/58. It served as the focus for a discussion forum on 19/1/58 and Hoggart made many guest broadcasts from 1957 onwards to talk about the effects of modern media on the traditional working class. Jones, 1998, Appendix: Broadcasts, 48. 2. Other works by Hoggart were translated into Danish, Dutch, German and Spanish, but not Uses: Jones, 1998, 41–44.

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3. See David Lodge, ‘Richard Hoggart: a Personal Appreciation’, International Journal of Cultural Studies: Special Issue: The Uses of Richard Hoggart ed. Sue Owen and John Hartley, 10.1 (March 2007), 29–38. Alan Bennett, Untold Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 402. 4. The Tyranny of Relativism is the title of the American edition of Hoggart’s The Way We Live Now (N. Brunswick: Transaction, 1998). 5. The only problem with Passeron’s analysis is a tendency to deplore the petitbourgeoisie, which Hoggart himself never does, and to attribute to them the mindless craving for escapism which petit-bourgeois intellectuals falsely attribute to the working class. 6. See also Hoggart, 1992, chapter 4: ‘Great Hopes from Birmingham’. 7. 1963, 241–42. He elaborates the distinction between literary and sociological methods in ‘The Literary Imagination and the Sociological Imagination’; given as a talk to the Sociology Section of the British Association at its 1967 annual conference, distributed as a pamphlet and reprinted in Speaking to Each Other, Vol. II, 244–258. 8. Whilst Lee’s and Grossberg’s chapters appear here, Rosenfeld’s is to be found in Re-Reading Richard Hoggart, ed. Sue Owen (Cambridge Scholars Press: 2008). This volume includes a range of essays on Hoggart’s life and contribution to Literature, Language and Education.

Works cited Collini, Stefan. (1999). ‘Critical Minds: Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart’, English Pasts, Oxford: OUP. chapter 11. Gaboriau, Patrick and Philippe Gaboriau. (1991). ‘Popular Culture Studies in France’, Journal of Popular Culture 24.4, Spring, 177–81. Hoggart, Richard. (1957). The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments, London: Chatto and Windus. ——(1963). ‘Schools of English and Contemporary Society’, Inaugural Lecture at University of Birmingham, in Speaking to Each Other, Vol. 2: ‘About Literature’. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, first pub. 1970, 231–43. ——(1991). A Sort of Clowning: Life and Times, Vol. II: 1940–1959. Oxford: OUP. First pub. 1990. ——(1993). An Imagined Life: Life And Times, Vol. III: 1959–91. Oxford: OUP. First pub. 1992. ——(1995). The Way We Live Now. London: Chatto & Windus. Jones, Marilyn. (1998). Richard Hoggart: Bibliography. In Hoggart Archive at University of Sheffield. Mulhern, Francis. (2000). Culture/Metaculture. London: Routledge. Jean-Claude Passeron. (1971). ‘Introduction to the French Edition of Uses of Literacy’, Working Papers on Cultural Studies (Spring) 120–31. First pub. as Introduction to La Culture de Pauvre: Etude sur le Style de Vie des Classes Populaires en Angleterre. Paris: Editions Minuit, 1970.

1 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy and The Cultural Turn Stuart Hall

It is widely recognized that, without Richard Hoggart, there would have been no Centre for cultural studies. It is not always so widely acknowledged that without The Uses of Literacy there would have been no cultural studies. In an early text, I called it one of cultural studies’ three ‘founding texts’ (Hall, 1980), and this is an opportunity to expand further on that judgement. The paper therefore offers some reflections on the ‘moment’ of The Uses of Literacy – what early cultural studies learned from and owed, methodologically, to the book, its connections with wider debates at the time and its formative role in what came to be known as ‘the cultural turn’. The latter phrase is the kind of clumsy abstraction Richard Hoggart would not be caught dead using, and there is no point elaborating on it conceptually here. It simply registers an inescapable fact about what I called elsewhere the growing ‘centrality of culture’ – the astonishing global expansion and sophistication of the cultural industries; the growing significance of culture for all aspects of social and economic life; its reordering effects on a variety of critical and intellectual discourses and disciplines; its emergence as a primary and constitutive category of analysis and ‘the way in which culture creeps into every nook and crevice of contemporary social life, creating a proliferation of secondary environments, mediating everything’ (Hall, 1997, 215). My observations here are premised on the assumption that something like a ‘cultural turn’ did indeed occur across Western societies and their fields of knowledge just before and, in the UK with gathering momentum, immediately after the Second World War; and that, in its own particular way, The Uses of Literacy belongs to that moment is indeed an early example of it as well as playing a seminal role in producing it. The project of The Uses of Literacy, as we know, was many years in gestation. Originally planned as an analysis of the new forms of mass 20

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publishing, the radical innovation represented by Part I – the attempt to contextualize this in a deeper ‘reading’ of the culture of their readers and audiences – was only subsequently put in place. However, by its publication in 1957, its general intention had become unmistakeable. The book attempted to provide a complex answer to these questions: what were the relations between attitudes in the popular papers and magazines and the working-class readers to whom they were typically addressed; more urgently, how are the newer, more commercially driven forms of mass communications changing older working-class attitudes and values; what, in short, are the ‘uses’ to which this new kind of ‘literacy’ was being put? Note that, in Part I of the book, the term ‘working-class culture’ seems to apply, interchangeably, to both the typical attitudes, values, and ways of life of working people in the pre-war decades and the forms of publication, entertainment, and popular culture which circulated amongst them. Critics have pointed out that these had very different sources – the latter being produced not by working-class people themselves but by the commercial classes for the working classes; and that, as Raymond Williams noted in a very early review of The Uses of Literacy, ‘the equation of ‘‘working class culture’’ with the mass commercial culture which has increasingly dominated our century’ produces damaging results (Williams, 1957, 30). Nevertheless, even if he does not reduce one to the other, Richard Hoggart does assume that, in the earlier period, a sufficiently close relationship had come to exist between publications and their readers to allow him to represent them as constituting something like ‘An ‘‘Older’’ Order’. Such a mutually reinforcing relationship, he argued, could no longer be assumed between the working classes and the new forms of mass culture; and this is the nub of the general judgement on cultural change which the book as a whole finally offers. This elision between what people read, what they thought and how they lived – always a complex and much debated issue – was compounded by the lack in Part II of a sustained attempt ‘to describe the quality of ordinary working-class life, so that the closer analysis of publications might be set into a landscape of solid earth and rock and water’ (Hoggart, 1958, 324). This helped to produce the unresolved tension between two, very different registers evident in the two halves of the book. Hoggart, of course, was fully conscious of this at the time (‘two kinds of writing are to be found in the following pages’) and has frequently subsequently acknowledged it (Hoggart, 1992). Nevertheless, it had its determinate effects.

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In comparison with the many simplistic, reductive, nostalgic or empiricist accounts on offer, there is a complex and richly nuanced conception of cultural change at work here. The argument is not driven by simple oppositions between old/new, organic/inorganic, elite/mass, good/bad. Hoggart was aware of the unsystematic nature of the ‘evidence’ and sensitive to the temptations to nostalgia: ‘I am from the working classes . . . this very emotional involvement presents considerable dangers’ (Hoggart, 1958, 17). He does not underplay the impact of growing affluence nor exaggerate the pace and degree of change. The language is carefully modulated in relation to the thesis of cultural decline: The persistence in so strong a measure of older forms of speech does not indicate a powerful and vibrant continuance of an older tradition, but the tradition is not altogether dead. It is harked back to, leaned upon as a fixed and still largely trustworthy reference in a world now difficult to understand. (Hoggart, 1958, 28) ‘[A]ttitudes alter more slowly than we always realize . . . ’ (Hoggart, 1958, 13). Nevertheless, the overall drift of the diagnosis cannot be doubted: My argument is not that there was in England one generation ago, an urban culture still very much ‘‘of the people’’ and that now there is only a mass urban culture. It is rather that the appeals made by mass publicists are for a number of reasons made more insistently, effectively, and in a more comprehensive and centralised form than they were earlier; that we are moving towards the creation of a mass culture . . . and that the new mass culture is in some important ways less healthy than the often crude culture it is replacing. (Hoggart, 1958, 24) ‘Diagnosis’ is a useful term here – the word ‘healthy’ is telling – since it reminds us of what this conclusion owed to, and how much it was influenced by, the cultural critique offered by the Leavises and Scrutiny: the embattled position adopted in F.R. Leavis’ own cultural writing; the narrative of decline at the heart of Q.D. Leavis’ influential Fiction and the Reading Public (1932); the strenuous programme of cultural resistance which informed Scrutiny’s educational project and manifestos like Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (Leavis, 1930); and the critique of the debased language of advertising offered by Scrutiny-influenced writers

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like Denys Thompson and others. The book also shared much common ground with the pessimistic critique of mass culture offered by conservative critics and writers, some of them American. Quotations from de Toqueville, Arnold, Benda, Lawrence, Eliot, John Dewey, Ortega y Gasset, and so on lend authority to the narrative of cultural decline). Mulhern, in his sustained assault on cultural studies in all its manifestations, is at pains to show that however much anyone – apart from Raymond Williams – struggled to break free from what he calls the metacultural discourse of ‘Kulturkritik’, they were doomed to repeat it. While acknowledging that Hoggart made serious efforts to counter this tendency, Mulhern insists that his ‘discursive affiliation’ with this tradition remains intact (Mulhern, 2000). However, as Mulhern himself acknowledges, ‘Genealogy is not destiny’ (Mulhern, 2000, 174). Leaving aside the assumption which governs Mulhern’s discourse – namely that an always-already alternative cultural theory was already available, in a complex Marxism already wise to its own tendency to reductionism – what seems more interesting is to note the ways The Uses of Literacy, in trying to break from this master-discourse of cultural decline, was precisely ‘a text of the break’ (as Mulhern recognizes Raymond Williams’ The Long Revolution also was); and for that very reason opened possibilities which cultural studies and ‘the cultural turn’ were subsequently to build on. The dominant Scrutiny narrative was constructed on the back of an unspoken assumption about the limited cultural resources and restricted moral universe of working-class readers and audiences. Only Scrutiny’s ‘saving remnant’, whose sensibilities had been refined by a long cohabitation with the authority which the literary tradition offered and whose moral backbone had been stiffened by strenuous and sustained critical engagement with litcrit. (‘This is so, is it not?’), offered a site of resistance to the mass appeals and blandishments of the new, debased culture. Hoggart’s account is aware of the limitations of that starting point. I am inclined to think that books on popular culture often lose some of their force by not making sufficiently clear what is meant by ‘‘the people’’, by inadequately relating their examination of particular aspects of ‘‘the people’s’’ life to the wider life they live, and to the attitudes they bring to their entertainments. Even George Orwell, whose studies on popular culture were in some ways paradigmatic, ‘never quite lost the habit of seeing the working class through the cosy fug of an Edwardian music hall’ (Hoggart, 1958, 9, 15).

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On the contrary, the implied argument in The Uses of Literacy runs, working-class audiences are not empty vessels on which the middle classes and the mass media can project, tabula rasa, whatever they want. They are not simply the products of ‘false consciousness’ or ‘cultural dopes’ (Hall, 1981). They have a ‘culture’ of their own which, though it may lack the sophistication and authority afforded by the literary tradition and is certainly not unified, is in its own way just as dense, complex and richly articulated, morally, as that of the educated classes. It follows that the effects of cultural products cannot be ‘read off’ or inferred directly from the contents of what is produced for them to consume because to have ‘social effects’ of any depth they must enter into and be in active negotiation with an already fully elaborated social and cultural world. Reading, in this sense, is always a cultural practice. Apart from anything else, this contains a salutary lesson – indeed, a profound conceptual insight – about how social ideologies actually work. If the ‘older’ popular culture, however commercially organized and crude in its appeals, seemed less of an ‘assault from the outside’, this was not because it was an authentic product of that culture or because it could simply be imposed on working-class audiences but because it was closer to – mirrored more faithfully or, better still, worked more ‘authentically’ along the groove of – the habits, attitudes and unspoken assumptions of working-class cultures, and had more fully ‘indigenised’ itself, by long cohabitation, as it were, within the complex history of the formations of an urban-industrial corporate class. If the new forms of mass culture were effecting change, then, it could only be because they too addressed themselves to the lived textures and complex attitudes of the culture in which they sought to embed themselves; working along its grooves, while at the same time inflecting and disconnecting them, dislodging them, from within and attaching them to new modes of feeling, habits, and judgements – ‘unbending the springs of action’. It is pertinent to ask, then, not only how much this owed to and derived from the discourse of ‘Kulturkritik’ but how far and in what significant ways did it break with that discourse? What were the methodological and conceptual innovations implicit in its practice of writing and thinking on which new directions could be built? One can list them without elaboration. A conception of ‘culture’ very different from that which animates the tradition of Kulturkritik is at work here. By ‘culture’, Hoggart meant how working-class people spoke and thought, what language and common assumptions about life they shared, in speech and action, what social attitudes informed their daily practice, what moral categories they deployed, even if only aphoristically, to make judgements

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about their own behaviour and that of others – including, of course, how they brought all this to bear on what they read, saw and sang. This view of culture as the practices of ‘making sense’ was very far removed indeed from ‘culture’ as the ideal court of judgement, whose touchstone was ‘the best that has been thought and said’, which animated the tradition from Arnold to Eliot and Leavis. The aim to make culture in this latter sense a central and necessary part of the object of study, however fitfully achieved, was as defining a break as Williams’ third definition in The Long Revolution – culture as ‘ways of life’ – and moreover, despite significant differences, a break moving in a parallel direction. This was a formative moment for cultural studies. There was a profound insight embedded here which runs like a thread through the subsequent twists and turns of cultural studies. It posed a critical challenge. It set cultural analysis irrevocably against any tendency to reductionism – whether to pure ideology, ‘the economy’ or ‘class interests’ (while not denying that social interests have a bearing on how ideologies and culture develop or that social location is significant for which ideas are taken up and made effective). Of course, this had consequences for its theoretical work. The relation between the cultural and the social could not be assumed; and, since it did not operate automatically – as what Marx once called ‘the reflex’ of the economy in the sphere of thought – it had to be re-conceptualized, in all its concreteness and historical specificity. Culture did not consist of free-floating ideas; it had to be understood as embedded in social practices. But it was something other than a reflection of some more determinate ‘base’ in some dependent ‘superstructure’. The question of the Centre’s relation to classical Marxism is written into this conceptual conundrum, and begins to explain why the Centre went on such a long theoretical ‘detour’ [sic]. Secondly, there was the insistence that ‘ways of life’ had to be studied in and for themselves, as a necessary contextualizing of any attempt to understand cultural change, and not inferred from textual analysis alone. We may call this the social imperative at the heart of Hoggart’s method; and from such origins the interdisciplinary character of cultural studies (which has since been somewhat obscured by the Humanities deluge) derived. Thirdly, there was the emphasis on culture as primarily a matter of meaning: not meanings as free-floating ‘values’ or as ideals embodied in texts but as part of lived experience, shaping social practice and inscribed in social structures, institutions and relations: cultural analysis as ‘the clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life’ (Williams, 1965, 57) to which E.P. Thompson, with his more acute consciousness of class, insisted, ‘ways of life’.

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Fourthly, there was the methodological innovation evidenced in Hoggart’s adaptation of the literary-critical method of ‘close reading’ to the sociological task of interpreting the lived meanings of a culture. One says ‘sociological’, but clearly something more innovative than standard empirical sociological methods was required. Nothing less than a kind of ‘social hermeneutics’ is implied in these interpretive procedures: ‘we have to try to see beyond the habits to what the habits stand for, to see through the statements to what the statements really mean (which may be the opposite of the statements themselves), to detect the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances’ (Hoggart, 1958, 17). Of course, ‘reading the culture from inside’ was possible for Hoggart, with his working-class background, his rich childhood memories and experiences, to draw on. Students trying to follow the book’s methodological imperatives and staff attempting to teach students how to apply them to a piece of work – things which the establishment of ‘a centre’ required – were not so fortunate and required more stringent pedagogic protocols. This methodological requirement was implicit in the establishment of ‘a Centre’ from the very beginning. In its earliest days, the Centre established two working groups to address such issues: in one, which I chaired – an attempt to clarify the social/cultural relationship and how it could be thought – the reading ranged far and wide over ‘other disciplines’: the point where the transdisciplinary and theoretical aspects of cultural studies were first joined. In the second, Richard Hoggart took students through a close reading of such texts as Blake’s Tiger, Tiger, the opening of Sons and Lovers, Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant, Sylvia Plath’s Daddy ‘reading for tone’ – that is, for modes of address and implied attitudes to the audience. But these were early days. Much that followed in the evolution of cultural studies in the 1970s and 1980s were therefore developments of the mixed and incomplete openings offered by The Uses of Literacy as a ‘text of the break’: resisting its cultural narrative, while deepening the epistemological breaks which its methodological innovations exemplified. Many of these leads were, admittedly, not very conceptually developed, even in the ‘Schools of English and Contemporary Society’ lecture, which mapped out the Centre’s initial programme (Hoggart, 1970). However, when the complaint about ‘the turn to theory’ in cultural studies is made – and Hoggart himself has made it in its sharpest form – it is difficult to see where else the Centre could have begun other than by deepening these moves by way of sustained conceptual interrogation and methodological self-reflection – as it were, ‘working on the break’.

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Thus, to take some examples, the move to cultural studies as a fully interdisciplinary enterprise and the break with ‘the literary’ as its governing discourse was implicit in the injunction to study the society and the culture as ‘lived’ equally with its texts, and was extensively taken up in various ways in the work of the Centre in the 1970s: though nothing in The Uses of Literacy took us quite as far as Williams’ ‘theory of culture as a study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life’ (Williams, 1965, 63) or, as we tried to translate that in the 1970s, the study of ‘the cultural’ and its relation to other practices in a social formation. The trace of the ‘literary’ remained in Hoggart’s close and sensitive attention to language and his insistence (in his inaugural lecture) that popular and mass cultural texts must be understood as functioning ‘as art – even as bad art’: a comment which, whilst not quite bypassing the traditional high/low good/bad categories of the mass culture debate, reinforced attention to language as a cultural model and the symbolic modality in which culture operates. This connects with the persistent return, via the dialogue with semiotics, post-structuralism and theories of discourse, to the necessary ‘delay through the symbolic’ without which all cultural studies threatens to become reductionist (Hall, 2006). The notion that audiences actively bring something to, rather than simply being spoken to by, texts – that ‘reading’ is a social practice, an active exchange – was taken up in the critique of the dominant ‘effects’ tradition in mass communications research which organized much of the Centre’s early research projects. It certainly underpins my own work on the ‘encoding/decoding model’ (Hall, 1980), and was subsequently revived in the productive encounter with Bakhtin’s idea of the dialogic, in the ‘active audience’, reader-response approaches, and can be traced even in the elements of overkill in the so-called ‘populist’ emphases of later work on audiences and popular culture. The legacy of culture as the interpretive study of meanings embedded in ‘ways of life’ is to be found in the many studies which deployed ethnographic, participant observation and other anthropological techniques associated with what Clifford Geertz called ‘thick description’ and, beyond that, took us to the language of ‘signifying practices’. The view that textual materials only have real social effectivity when they ‘work along the groove’ of existing attitudes and inflect them in new directions contains a model of how social ideologies really achieve their effects much in advance of existing models of influence, ideological domination and false consciousness; anticipating much that was to follow in theories of multi-accentuality and transcoding, and the impact

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on cultural studies of the more fully developed Gramscian model of ‘hegemony’ and cultural power as dependent on ‘the wining of consent’, Althusser’s ‘three practices’ and ‘over-determination’, and a very different conception of the popular (see Hall, 1981). And so on. The publication of The Uses of Literacy had an enormous impact: in part for the intrinsic interest, quality and originality of its method and argument; and in part because of its bearing on wider discussions about the pace and direction of post-war social change. The growing commercialization of mass culture, the birth of television, the burgeoning of youth culture and the rise of mass consumption were part and parcel of what came to be known as ‘the affluent debate’. The impact of these forces on the working class had particular resonance for the Labour Party, its electoral prospects and what Anthony Crosland, in his prophetic book, called The Future of Socialism. Was the class basis of Labour’s support being eroded by socio-cultural change? True, culture had played a somewhat residual role in Labour thinking. The roots of ‘Labourism’ in the dense, defensive, subaltern, corporate structures of working-class culture had not been the subject of much serious reflection until exposed by the newer class attitudes and values emerging with the onset of commercialization. Hoggart’s book played directly into these anxieties. These issues fuelled the Labour Party’ revisionist debates of the late 1950s and was the context for influential books like Mark Abrams’ Must Labour Lose?, with its negative assessment of Labour’s prospects amongst its heartland working-class supporters in the wake of social change, and was summed up in Gaitskell’s famous 1959 Labour Party Conference speech, where – taking us to the heart of the culture and politics debate – he poignantly enquired whether Labour as a political force could survive the coming of ‘the car, the telly, the washing machine and the fridge’. Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ and the aspirational culture have long historical antecedents in these debates. Richard Hoggart did not directly address these questions, and workingclass politics did not figure largely in the book. As is well known, he chose to concentrate on the majority to whom the appeals of the mass publicists were primarily addressed and deliberately downplayed the role of what he called ‘the purposive, the political, the pious and the self-improving minorities’ (Hoggart, 1958, 22): contrary to, say, Raymond Williams, who regarded politics as part of the ‘high working class tradition’ and the building of political institutions as among its most outstanding cultural achievements (‘an extension of primary values into the social fields’ (Williams, 1957, 31). Yet the opening paragraphs of The Uses of Literacy show that Hoggart’s argument took its bearings from the

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broader debate about post-war affluence and what came to be known as working-class ‘embourgeoisement’. ‘It is often said that there are no working-classes in England now, that a ‘‘bloodless revolution’’ has taken place which has so reduced social differences that already most of us inhabit an almost flat plain, the plain of the lower middle- to middleclasses . . . We are likely to be struck by the extent to which working-class people have improved their lot, acquired more power and more possessions . . . no longer feel themselves members of ‘‘the lower orders . . . ’’ ’ (Hoggart, 1958, 14). The conclusion is, of course, measured and complex, but unmistakeable in its thrust: ‘We may now see that in at least one sense we are indeed becoming classless . . . We are becoming culturally classless’ (Hoggart, 1958, 142). This became a focus of debate in early New Left circles, though what I called ‘a sense of classlessness’ had acquired there a wider and more critical meaning (see Hall, 1958, and the shocked responses by Raphael Samuel, 1959, and Edward Thompson, 1959). The broader connections between cultural studies and the ‘first’ New Left have been widely noted (Hall, 1989). In particular, The Uses of Literacy also had a formative influence on the milieu which I inhabited in the period of its publication – principally because, for fortuitous reasons, such concerns as the changing nature of contemporary capitalism, the consequences of the new consumerism, the politics of post-war social change and the relationship of politics to culture formed critical contested ground in the heady debates of the time. A nascent ‘new left’ had emerged in Oxford as a distinct, informal student formation in the mid-1950s. Its subsequent coalescence with others into a movement was triggered by the events of 1956 – the invasion of the Suez Canal by Britain, France and Israel and the brutal Soviet response to the Hungarian Revolution, and their effects in loosening the grip of the Cold War on political debate (Hall, 1989). The publication of The Uses of Literacy made a huge impact in these circles. There was a vigorous discussion in progress, amongst students from a variety of Left tendencies in Oxford, about the nature of postwar capitalism, the character of the historic compromise represented by the welfare state, the changing nature of class, the nature of the Soviet experiment, the impact of the Cold War, the revival of imperialism, the value of Marxism and the prospects for the Left in these new historic conditions. Many of its members were literary critics and familiar with the Leavis/Scrutiny argument about mass culture, though the majority had largely rejected both its assumptions about cultural decline and the elitist and the conservative character of its programme of cultural resistance. Some people were already in conversation with Raymond

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Williams and had read early chapters of Culture and Society in draft form. In this milieu, culture came to be seen not as an absolute value but a condition of existence of all social practices and thus an active force in politics and social change: offering what (in the issue of the Labour Club journal, Clarion, which I edited in 1957 and which was dominated by responses to The Uses of Literacy) I called ‘quite different kinds of evidence’ (Hall, 1957, 3). All this provided fertile ground for the reception of Hoggart’s book, stimulating fierce debate. The second issue of Universities and Left Review (1958), one of the two founding New Left journals which followed, contained a major symposium on The Uses of Literacy, including Raymond Williams’ influential review. Hoggart and Williams both contributed essays to subsequent issues and Williams became a leading figure in the New Left. These debates have been read, subsequently, by its critics as evidence that in the discourse of cultural studies, culture subsumes politics (Mulhern, 2000); but this seems a rather perverse finding. It was part of the effort – then no doubt still at a primitive stage – to expand the definition of culture and politics, which came to be distinctive of both the New Left and cultural studies: to see culture as one of the constitutive grounds of all social practices – including politics – in so far as they are ‘signifying’ (i.e. in so far as they have ‘relevance for meaning’, as Max Weber once put it). Unless social groups and classes are always-already inscribed in their appointed political place by ‘determination by the economic in the last instance’ and ‘wear their political number plates on their backs’, as Nicos Poulantzas once graphically put it, how could the recruitment of social forces to political positions and programmes and their mobilization in the contest over power not be – also – a cultural issue? And how could these processes occur without working, in part, on the constitutive ground of the meanings by which people make sense of their lives? This, Mulhern argues, makes ‘culture’ everything – too excessive, ‘without fixed composition or tendency . . . a heterogeneous mass of possibilities’. One can only reply, not everything: but a dimension of, and a condition of existence of, all signifying practices (which of course also have material conditions of existence); and not without ‘tendencies’, but never finally determined, and thus always open to more than one possibility – and so always with a degree of contingency. The proposition that the ‘constitutive function’ of politics is to ‘determine the order of social relations as a whole’ (Mulhern, 2000, 173) only muddies the water. Richard Hoggart used the term ‘Americanization’ to connote the wider set of changes which framed his argument. When the New Left came

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to debate these issues more directly, the US also provided a privileged point of reference – for very good reasons. The commercialization of culture, the new dynamic forms of mass culture – television, pop music, advertising, youth culture – the expanded incorporation of the masses more fully into the market and the phenomenon of mass consumerism were all to be found in the US, emerging, in the post-war period, in their strongest contemporary forms. This marked the shift in the index of ‘leading instance’ of advanced industrial capitalist society from Britain to the US. Already, in the 1950s, this looked like setting free explosive new cultural forces; it is only clear retrospectively how much the book belonged to, and in its own displaced ways addressed, the opening of a new conjuncture. We cannot discuss this shift in detail here but we can see its broad contours much more clearly in retrospect. There was a post-war boom, with rising living standards. The long-term redistributive shift accomplished through the Keynesian welfare state was much more limited than the prophets estimated (though Immanuel Wallerstein is right to argue that it was quite enough to scare capital out of its wits and, in its time, provoked the great counter-surge of globalization, market forces, the new global division of labour, the neo-liberal revolution and the ‘new world order’). In fact, affluence did not represent ‘classlessness’ as such; rather, it marked the early stages of that long transition (not yet completed) from the older, tiered, socially embedded, hierarchical class structures and Protestant Ethic typical of Western European bourgeois societies to the more truncated, ‘post-industrial’ class structures of the US, based on corporate capital, money, celebrity, lifestyle, hedonism and consumption. Underlying this was the prolonged shift from nineteenth-century entrepreneurial capitalism, via the apotheosis of the ‘high noon’ of imperialism, the First World War, the failure of the proletarian ‘moment’ and the interwar Depression, to the great surge of power represented by the concentrations of corporate capitalism, the managerial revolution and Fordist economies of scale of the late twentieth century. Mass society, mass culture, mass consumerism and mass markets were integral aspects of this historic shift. Precisely how to understand their real interdependencies, subsequent evolution and their relation to culture remains one of cultural studies’ unfulfilled tasks – probably lost forever in the hyper-theoretical and post-political climate which came to prevail. Of course, in the immediate decades after The Uses of Literacy, the shape of things was to be dominated by the historic compromise of the welfare state and the social-democratic consensus. But by the end of the 1970s – and massively reorganized on a global scale – the forces we were

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trying to understand began to return to the stage with unstoppable force and profound consequences for culture, and did, indeed, change the world.

Works cited Hall, S. (1957). Editorial, Clarion, Journal of the Oxford Labour Club, Abingdon, Oxon. ——(1959). ‘A Sense of Classlessness’, Universities and Left Review, 5, Autumn. ——(1980). ‘Cultural Studies and The Centre: Some Problems and Problematics’, in Culture, Media, Language, ed. S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis. London: Hutchinson and The Centre For Cultural Studies. ——(1981). ‘De-constructing The Popular’, in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel. History Workshop Series. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ——(1989). ‘The ‘‘First’’ New Left’, in Out of Apathy, ed. The Oxford University Socialist Discussion Group. London: Verso. ——(1997). ‘ ‘‘The Centrality of Culture’’: Notes On The Revolutions Of Our Time’, in Media and Cultural Regulation, ed. K. Thompson. Vol. 6 of the Culture, Media and Identities Course Books. London: Sage and Open University. ——(2006). ‘Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three ‘‘Moments’’ In Post-war History’, History Workshop Journal 61, Spring. Hoggart, R. (1958). The Uses of Literacy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——(1970). ‘Schools of English and Contemporary Society’, Speaking To Each Other, Vol. II. London: Chatto and Windus. ——(1992). An Imagined Life. Life and Times, Vol. III: 1959–1991. London: Chatto and Windus. Leavis, F.R. (1930). Mass Civilization and Minority Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge Minority Press. Leavis, Q.D. (1932). Fiction and the Reading Public. London: Chatto and Windus. Mulhern, F. (2000) Culture/Metaculture. The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge. Samuel, R. (1959). ‘Class and Classlessness’, Universities and Left Review, 5, Spring. Thompson, E. (1959). ‘Commitment in Politics’, Universities and Left Review, 6, Spring. Williams, R. (1957). ‘Working-Class Culture’, The Uses of Literacy Symposium, Universities and Left Review, 2, Summer. ——(1965). The Long Revolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

2 Richard Hoggart: Literary Criticism and Cultural Decline in Twentieth-Century Britain Stefan Collini

I Richard Hoggart occupies a larger place in the history of British culture in the 1950s than he does in the history of literary criticism. In so far as his work is now attended to within the categories of academic disciplines, it is, of course, for its founding contribution to cultural studies, even though his relation to much of the work that bears that label has long been more vexed than the conventional celebratory accounts usually allow. But such disciplinary pigeon-holing cannot do justice to Hoggart, and claims for his importance need to be made in other terms. His part – both as emblem and as scribe – in what was termed the ‘entry of the working class into society’ in the two decades after the end of the Second World War; his identification of the emotional and intellectual strains endemic to the trajectory of ‘the scholarship boy’; his demonstration of the legitimacy and fruitfulness of closely analysing the manifestations of so-called ‘popular culture’; his subsequent advocacy of the values of public service in broadcasting and the other media: all these are rightly associated with his name and remain to his credit. I have written elsewhere about the trajectory of his career as a whole and especially about some of his more recent books, and I shall not repeat any of that account here (Collini, 1999, 210–30). I have been taken to task by some critics for being too indulgent towards Hoggart or for overestimating his achievement (e.g. Mulhern, 2002, 90), but I stand by the terms of that earlier assessment which concentrated on matters of style and personality. It still seems to me hard not to admire the modest, honest, thoughtful voice of his best prose, just as it is hard, even on relatively limited acquaintance, not to like and feel affection for the man himself. 33

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Here, however, it seems right to return to what will, beyond all question, always be thought his most significant publication, The Uses of Literacy, but I find that, in reconsidering this book and attempting some kind of characterisation of its place in British intellectual and literary life, the question of disciplinary identity cannot altogether be ignored, despite my temperamental preference and my conviction that, in Hoggart’s case, anything that smacks of academic turf wars is peculiarly inappropriate and pointless. In particular, I want to focus on that book’s relation to the practice of literary criticism in the decade or so after the end of the Second World War, and to consider some of the complex and unobvious connections between that practice and claims about cultural decline. In his later reflections, Hoggart has always insisted that he did not share the cultural pessimism of those commentators who wrote in the style of Eliot and Leavis, and it is certainly true that once he was given, from the end of the 1950s onwards, a prominent public platform from which to pronounce on such matters, his was a valuable voice arguing for a more discriminating assessment of contemporary social change than, as he put it in 1965, either ‘a self-indulgent nostalgia or a brash band-waggonning’. (Hoggart, 1973, 63). But the focus of my enquiry here is at a double remove from these explicit pronouncements: first because it returns to the actual idiom and strategy of the second half of The Uses of Literacy itself, rather than to its author’s later, self-conscious affirmations of its affinities and purposes; and second, because I want to reconsider the cultural logic of a whole style of critical practice, one which I believe Hoggart shared more fully when writing his classic work than either his later self or other scholars have always registered. One of the hazards of writing about Hoggart is the fact that he has been such a copious autobiographer. Not only have the three volumes of his Life and Times given his view of matters as recollected in the mid- and late 1980s, but a lot of his other writing has also drawn on his own experience in direct or anecdotal mode. There is often, therefore, an authorised version of aspects of his life already in place, guiding the attentions of critics and historians. But the deceptiveness and unreliability of memory hardly needs insisting on: it so often tells us more about preoccupations at the time of remembering than at the time remembered. The best and most vivid of Hoggart’s frequently recalled memories have been about his childhood and early life, the period that may be least likely to be reshaped by any tendentious self-justification. The selectivity of hindsight may have operated more insidiously in his reconstructions of his later intellectual and professional life.

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This general caution particularly needs to be borne in mind, I suggest, when considering the style of literary criticism at work in The Uses of Literacy and its relation to the precept and example of other critics, above all F.R. Leavis. Hoggart’s later acknowledgements of a general indebtedness to the work of the Leavises may serve as something of a screen here, hiding a more complex relationship under a cloak of apparent frankness. Hoggart, as is well known, did not see himself as endorsing the Leavises’ embattled and disdainful attitude towards contemporary social changes, and in the 1960s he elaborated his own distinctive approach to the study of such changes, accompanied by several position-statements that emphasised his distance from Leavisite condescension. But I want to consider how this relation looks if we return to The Uses of Literacy itself, a book which, we should recall, was largely drafted between 1952 and 1954 (it was first sent to the publisher in the early summer of 1955). And here the central questions are as follows: first, how far Hoggart’s book shared in what was the, or at least a, dominant critical practice of the period; second, what relation to a readership and its values did that practice assume; and third, how far there was an intrinsic rather than merely contingent connection between this critical idiom and a pessimistic or alarmist interpretation of the direction of contemporary cultural change?

II Although no one way of writing about literature had a monopoly on critical practice in Britain in the first 10 or 15 years after the end of the war, there was one highly visible strain within the greater variety that in some sense made the running during this period.1 It was very much a critical practice, only patchily formulated into an explicit set of methodological protocols. Its practitioners increasingly tended to be based in universities though at least as actively concerned with the world outside the walls as with conventional scholarly preoccupations; it also had a strong presence in adult education and in sixth-form teaching. In so far as the practice had institutional connections, it tended to be with certain journals rather than particular university departments: Scrutiny was its most natural habitat, until its closure in 1953, and thereafter Essays in Criticism (founded in 1951) and, more intermittently, Critical Quarterly (from 1958), and also publications associated with adult education (such as Highway) and with the teaching of English in schools (especially The Use of English, founded in 1949). As a critical style, it was marked by close attention to the verbal texture of literary works; it had learned from Eliot, Richards, and Empson,

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as well as from the beginnings of the New Criticism in the United States, though it tended to scant the value of detailed textual explication for its own sake and scorned mere critical showiness. It was of its time in its intolerance of the kind of belles-lettristic connoisseurship that had survived into the interwar period, but it was equally disdainful of the kind of detailed historical scholarship about literature which abstained from personal and evaluative engagement with the work – the practice associated with a different type of journal such as Review of English Studies. Above all, it was a critical practice that aspired to be diagnostic of the quality of human living ‘embodied’ or ‘enacted’ in particular uses of language. Literary language was taken to be distinctively ‘exploratory of experience’ in ways which favoured ‘authenticity’ and ‘concreteness’. ‘Great’ literature was assumed to furnish the most powerful illustrations of how such use of language operated at its most creative and hence provided a yardstick against which lesser, shallower, more flawed, or inauthentic uses of language could be measured. In this mode, the ‘energy’ and ‘tautness’ of a piece of writing revealed the ‘healthiness’ and ‘maturity’ of the attitudes to ‘life’ that it embodied. All the key terms tended to involve this kind of ethical as well as formal appraisal. The quality most admired in literature and criticism alike was – in a conjunction of terms that served as the signature of this practice – ‘seriousness’ about ‘life’. It would be too easy to label this critical practice as ‘Leavisite’, even though it clearly owed more to Leavis and Scrutiny than to any other single source. Many of its practitioners were ambivalent about the minority emphasis and the intransigent cultural pessimism associated with Scrutiny; their own styles tended to be less dismissive and more catholic than that of pur et dur Leavisites, though no less strenuous. They endorsed the broadening of literary criticism’s remit to include what Leavis had called ‘culture and environment’, while remaining sceptical of some of the more belligerent forms of anti-modernism or celebrations of ‘the organic community’. They returned with almost incantatory frequency to a similarly restricted range of literary touchstones: Shakespeare or Bunyan, for the ‘vitality’ of a language that had roots in both polite and popular culture; George Eliot, for her combination of imaginative sympathy and ‘ethical seriousness’; and, above all, Lawrence, for his hold on ‘finer human living’. But they ranged more widely than this, being more appreciative of the diversity of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing than had been common among the Scrutiny, faithful, and notably more responsive to contemporary work since Eliot and Lawrence – to Auden and Orwell, for example.

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The relations between critic and reader presumed by this practice allowed much to be taken for granted. All literary criticism, it could be said, struggles with the paradox of ‘recognition’. For the reader to ‘recognise’ what the critic is pointing to there must be common assumptions and a shared frame of reference; otherwise the reader is simply being told, without in any sense recognising the truth of what he/she is being told. But this general or structural feature of criticism assumed a particularly marked form in the practice I am discussing. A couple of observations from Michael Bell’s excellent discussion of Leavis may be helpful here. According to Bell, Leavis’s ‘characteristic endeavour is not to disclose meaning as something that needs unravelling: it is to give an adequacy of attention to the self-evident’. In practice, the feature in question has not been self-evident to others, but that, Bell suggests Leavis is saying, is not because of any esoteric or coded quality in the feature itself, but because of the inadequacy of the attention they have given it hitherto. And again, ‘Leavis’s criticism requires some of the same conditions of consensus that satire does’ (Bell, 1988, 49, 75). ‘Consensus’ risks overstating the requirement here, but the presumption of some kind of pre-existing community of values is surely right. Much of the work could then be done by adjectives that needed no defining: to point in a piece of writing to what was ‘concrete’ or ‘vital’ or, by contrast, to what was ‘pallid’ or ‘hollow’ was enough. This style of literary criticism, it is clear from the researches of John McIlroy and others, enjoyed a particularly enthusiastic take-up among adult education tutors in the immediate post-war years,2 and Hoggart fully shared the romance of this ideal of criticism in the late 1940s and the early 1950s: indeed, it provided his principal intellectual identity. Its presence is already evident in his early study of Auden, not an author admitted to the Scrutiny canon. The same cadences and affinities are evident in Hoggart’s early contributions in the late 1940s to Adult Education and Highway, the journals written and largely read by adult education tutors, and also in an essay on Graham Greene for Essays in Criticism, a journal which attracted some of the same contributors. One of these was Williams himself, who wrote, among other things, a response to a piece on the teaching of literature by Hoggart in Adult Education in 1948, and who was closely involved with F.W. Bateson in the early years of Essays in Criticism.3 In my view, this style of criticism was always prone to fall into pastoral in the extended sense so brilliantly analysed by Empson.4 The combination of its ethically strenuous idiom with the confident presumption of agreement made it fatally easy to project the contrast between, on the

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one hand, what is ‘genuine’, ‘grounded’, and ‘humanly representative’ and, on the other, what is ‘shallow’, ‘inauthentic’, and ‘commercially driven’ onto a temporal contrast between a past simplicity and a present corruption. Considered abstractly, ethically diagnostic literary criticism of this kind ought in principle to seem equally available to support a story of progress, in which the narrow, limiting values exhibited in past literature give way to the liberating and expressively rich abundance of contemporary culture. And yet that bald statement of possibility pulls us up short, immediately aware of how incongruous, even slightly scandalous, that version would have sounded during this period. This may have something to do with the critic’s education in the acknowledged masterpieces of the past, and something more with the way in which the ethical idiom appeared to favour values that were seen as ‘grounded’ in a stable way of life, emphasising community, sense of place, ‘normal’ sexuality and family life, and so on. This encouraged a tendency to associate the results of accelerated change with ways of life that were ‘ungrounded’, lacking the vitality of deeply felt shared experience. I shall return in a moment to the question of whether, in the light of these observations, The Uses of Literacy does not disclose an altogether more intimate connection between this kind of literary-critical practice and diagnoses of cultural decline than is commonly allowed.

III Although it has nearly always been overlooked in subsequent accounts, there is a loosely historical narrative at the heart of The Uses of Literacy, one which operates at two levels. There is, first, a lightly sketched history of the formation and transformation of the urban working class from the early nineteenth century onwards. But, second, there is also what might be termed an ‘historical logic’ to the book’s main arguments, a trajectory which, I shall suggest, not only shapes but also depends upon the kind of literary-critical engagement with popular publications to be found in the second half of the book. The long-term account of the formation and re-formation of the working class on which Hoggart relies was familiar from the standard accounts to be found in the work of a range of progressive or radical social historians writing in the first half of the twentieth century. Its longest perspectives stretch back to the urbanisation consequent upon the Industrial Revolution, and to the formation of a relatively self-enclosed working-class life from about the 1870s or 1880s onwards, especially in the northern industrial cities and towns. As internal evidence suggests

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and the book’s brief bibliography confirms, the Hammonds and G.D.H. Cole were among the chief sources. Within this larger narrative nestles one about the gains achieved by working-class organisations and by state action from the late nineteenth century onwards: political self-expression, opportunities for cultural self-improvement, better conditions of work, basic gains in health and welfare. Notoriously, The Uses of Literacy has little to say about political action and the world of organised labour, but a few of the key moments in this familiar story of social and political progress are nodded to in passing (e.g. 25, 77, 139, 318–19). And then, nestling within this in its turn, there is clearly an awareness (that had not yet taken the form of an established historiographical narrative) of the initial effects of full employment and rising prosperity from the late 1930s onwards. The hardship of working-class life in the 1920s and during the early years of the Depression receives frequent mention, but the material gains of the past 10 or 15 years are also registered, developments that were soon to be discussed in contemporary social science under the headings of ‘the affluent worker’ and ‘the embourgeoisement thesis’. Later historians have substantiated the impressionistic judgements about changes in patterns of employment, rises in real wages, and so on, along with associated changes in social attitudes which Hoggart had in fact also touched upon, such as the unwillingness of working-class girls to go into domestic service after the war.5 What I am terming the ‘historical logic’ of the book’s main arguments is stretched across this basic chronological frame without being closely tied to it. That logic suggests that the moral qualities displayed by the older working-class life were born out of the difficult circumstances dwelled upon in the radical histories; given such conditions, dignity, resilience, and mutual support were adaptive responses. In addition, this was a world which produced its own amusements and forms of self-expression; its culture was endogenous, not subject to the pressures of ‘commercial’ media from ‘outside’. Indeed, it was a world which most members of the middle and upper classes knew very little about at first hand. This was the world so fondly and movingly evoked in the first half of the book. Quite when ‘the newer order’ of publications and entertainments started to impinge on this older culture is left a little vague, but several references to ‘the last ten or fifteen years’ suggest it does not pre-date the late 1930s and is largely a post-war phenomenon. The book contains numerous qualifying asides about how it is not idealising the older world or undervaluing the benefits of the more recent prosperity. But, as so often in Hoggart’s writing, these qualifying statements do not in

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practice modify the thrust of the overall treatment. As I shall illustrate in more detail below, the positive terms are practically all attached to the older order, the negative terms thickly clustered around the new. Of course, it is famously part of his strategy in the book to argue that the working class are not passive and endlessly malleable recipients of the messages put across by the newer media, but that they have resources of discrimination and resistance. Yet in so far as they do – and once again his general statement that this is the case is in practice rather overborne by the weight of examples illustrating the corrupting power of the newer publications – it is only because the values of the older order have not yet entirely disappeared. In other words, this does not really qualify the pessimistic reading of the central clash; it just says it takes longer than alarmist jeremiads may at first suggest. As with all accounts of a fall into a world governed by commercial forces, there is no real grasp of the part played by economic imperatives in shaping the old world. In this respect, the contrast Hoggart makes is structurally similar to that emphasised by historians such as the Hammonds in their account of the Industrial Revolution, in which an older order ruled by settled ethical and religious ideals gives way to a new world powered by the pursuit of economic gain.6 In Hoggart’s account, the self-contained working-class districts in the large northern industrial centres have some of the features that early anthropologists were prone to attribute to ‘primitive’ communities, most notably a freedom from ‘outside’ commercial forces. Since my insistence on this informing historical logic may not meet with immediate acceptance from those used to thinking of Hoggart as both more even-handed and open-minded than the well-known proponents of decline among his contemporaries, it may be as well to come at the issue slowly and somewhat obliquely. Let me begin, therefore, by spelling out the extent to which the second, prosecutorial half of the book is pervaded by, and its case dependent on, a traditional moral vocabulary that assumes agreement. It is a vocabulary in which the residues of the nineteenth century’s secularised Protestantism are prominent, though adapted for the purposes of that quasi-Existentialist strenuousness that particularly flourished in the first couple of decades after the war. At its core is the contrast between, on the one side, effort, self-control, and social purpose, and, on the other, passivity, indulgence, and selfishness. Hardship is held to encourage the first set, prosperity the second. This provides the framework for considering the impact of the ‘newer publications’ and the social changes they portend. In brief, the older

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virtues give way to ‘a soft mass-hedonism’, ‘an arrogant and slick conformity’, and ‘a destroying self-flattery’. That the changes tell in only one moral direction is taken to be self-evident: ‘The enquiry, it will be seen, is mainly concerned with what may be called invitations to self-indulgence’ (1992, 171). There has been material improvement for the working class, but it threatens to leave them with ‘a largely material outlook’. ‘The temptations . . . are towards a gratification of the self and towards what may be called a ‘‘hedonistic-group-individualism’’.’ The moral lesson is enforced in general terms: ‘These forces would not have their success were it not that we are all inclined to prefer the easy to the hard road, and the levelling half-reason which justifies weakness to the hard fact which shocks and insults before it braces.’ The working class are especially vulnerable to this: they now have more money and freedom, ‘but they also have the freedom of a vast Vanity Fair of shouting indulgences’ (173–4). To say that the cadences of the Protestant preacher are audible in such passages is to make a cultural, not a reductively biographical, observation. Since it is the pervasiveness of this vocabulary in the second half of the book that I am drawing attention to, simple listing may be rhetorically the most effective form of illustration. So, in quick succession we get ‘shiny barbarism’, ‘the new callowness’, ‘barbarians in wonderland’ (193); ‘a slick and hollow puppet-world’, ‘a passive visual taking-on of bad mass-art geared to a very low mental age’; ‘We are a democracy whose working people are exchanging their birth-right for a mass of pin-ups’ (213), though there can sometimes still be ‘the remnant of a healthier quality’ (216). The old songs, for example, were ‘strong and healthy in idiom’, had ‘fibre’ and ‘vitality’; the new are ‘un-vital’, displaying ‘hollow brightness’. The newer publications have ‘a cheap gum-chewing pert glibness’; these publications ‘weaken the moral code they evoke’ (244). There are constant warnings of ‘the spread of self-indulgence’ (289), ‘the dangers of spiritual deterioration’ and ‘the hypnosis of immature emotional satisfactions’ (323). ‘Integrity and devotion to a craft’ are praised (327), and a single page celebrates ‘energy’ and ‘vitality’, ‘moral resources’, ‘a valuable ethical rudder’, ‘a moral appeal’, a ‘stock of moral capital’ (325). Throughout, the moral confidence and the cultural pessimism reinforce each other. For example, the enthusiasm for cycling ‘is valuable evidence that urban working-class people can still react positively to both the challenge of their environments and the useful possibilities of cheap mass-production’ (329–30). He feels no need to argue for the assumption that going cycling is a ‘positive’ reaction but going to the

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cinema is not. And why ‘still’, unless we are all supposed to be taking for granted that working people used to respond more positively before technology and prosperity combined to weaken their fibre? It has often been observed that Hoggart was writing just before the widespread ownership of television sets, and therefore did not include this medium in his analysis, but his few asides make the likely drift of any commentary all too plain, as in his references to ‘an undiscriminating looking in, night after night, at TV’, in which ‘the eyes would register but not connect to the nerves, the heart, and the brain’ (189). By this point it is hardly surprising that when he wants an emblematic figure who is ‘of his time’, he begins by considering ‘a rootless minor technician, trained by a technical institute to serve a technocratic age; some of his attitudes are in part the product of a special form of not-belonging to any traditional social order’ (283–4). Here in one of the several places in Hoggart’s writing of this period when we seem to be in the company of Orwell at his most conservatively splenetic.7 To bring out the relation between this diagnosis of moral decline and the literary-critical practice discussed earlier will require more extended analysis and illustration. Consider, first, the note he strikes when discussing the current prevalence of a form of cynicism: It may be that this attitude is stronger among those under thirty than among older people, since most older people have memories of the thirties and the war, of sacrifice and co-operation and neighbourliness: the later forties and the fifties have not given such scope for the rediscovery of these virtues. (286–7) Adverse circumstances are conducive to morality: virtue develops out of effort in the face of difficulty. ‘Re-discovery’ suggests each generation needs to re-discover these values for themselves, but the current ease is not propitious for this kind of moral education. Hence the decline from ‘cooperation’ and related values to ‘cynicism’. Or consider this remark made about those serious but uprooted souls whom, following Arnold, he calls the ‘aliens’. Many of them have resisted the worst drugs; they stand for something. And as society comes nearer to the danger of reducing the larger part of the population to a condition of obediently receptive passsivity, their eyes glued to television sets, pin-ups, and cinema screens, these few, because they are asking important questions, have a special value. (316)

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The countervailing resistance of the ‘older’ values is not much in evidence here; instead, we do not seem far away from Leavis’s ‘mass civilisation and minority culture’ argument. Or, for an example of his invoking the values of the older order but in a particularly revealing way, consider this sentence from his celebrated phillippic against ‘milk-bar culture’. The milk bars indicate at once, in the nastiness of their modernistic knick-knacks, their glaring showiness, an aesthetic breakdown so complete that, in comparison with them, the layout of the livingrooms in some of the poor homes from which the customers come seems to speak of a tradition as balanced and civilised as an eighteenth-century town house . . . . Compared even with the pub around the corner, this is all a peculiarly thin and pallid form of dissipation, a sort of spiritual dry-rot amid the odour of boiled milk. (247–8) There is a fine eloquence in the service of outrage here, but it again laments a kind of Fall: those ‘modernist’ knick-knacks represent the ‘breakdown’ of an older aesthetic order, a ‘balanced and civilised tradition’ to be found in those ‘older’ working-class homes. Even working-class pubs start to acquire the authenticity of ‘vitality’ here. Placing The Uses of Literacy within the literary-critical practice I described earlier helps alert us to the ways in which several of the commonplaces of that practice structure Hoggart’s account of cultural decline. Again, fairly extensive illustration may be required to support this claim. Consider, to begin with, a passage from late in the book where he is discussing the contemporary popular press: The new-style publications fail not because they are poor substitutes for The Times but because they are only bloodless imitations of what they purport to be, because they are pallid but slicked-up extensions even of nineteenth-century sensationalism, and a considerable decline from the sinewy sensationalism of Elizabethan vernacular writers. (338–9) This strikes me as one of the most revealing sentences in the book, and an encapsulation of so much of the informing rhythm of its argument. First, there is the disowning of an anyway improbable requirement: in this case, that the benchmark for measuring the worth of any popular paper is provided by The Times. This same gambit is repeated at several points

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in the book. Thus, when deploring the way the crudity of characterportrayal in popular fiction makes people less willing to engage with any subtler analysis, he writes, ‘This is not to regret that they are unwilling to tease out the situation of Strether in Henry James’s The Ambassador [sic]’ (234). Or again in disclaiming any wish for all lowbrows to be highbrows he writes, ‘The ability to read the decent weeklies is not a sine qua non of the good life’ (338). In all three cases, he is making things easier for himself by contrasting his position with such patently unrealistic notions: he can then go on to say that he is only asking that publications, whatever social class or level of ‘brow’ they are addressed to, should have a seriousness or authenticity of their own. Hoggart may appear to anticipate an unsympathetic response from those readers who entertain the monocultural standard represented by The Times, Henry James, and ‘the decent weeklies’; in practice, his prose assumes a ready assent to his waving aside of such unrealistic expectations. The second characteristic of the quoted passage which is representative of the book as a whole is the surely bizarre intrusion of Elizabethan pamphleteers into an account of mid-twentieth-century popular newspapers. Part of the conventional wisdom of the English critical tradition from Eliot, if not from Arnold, onwards included the belief that the last truly common culture in which both educated and popular speech and writing shared similar creative energies was to be found in the Elizabethan period. (Those familiar with Leavis’s critical idiom would also have recognised that ‘sinewy’ was one of the master’s favoured terms for good prose, a quality he held to be conspicuously lacking in most modern writing.) The casualness of the allusion, the very lack of a justification for this improbably remote comparison, is what is most eloquent in this passage. Any reader of Scrutiny or Essays in Criticism could immediately feel at home despite any foreignness in the surrounding material from contemporary popular culture. The third thing to remark is the submerged presence of a two-stage version of decline. Here again, many of his first readers would have recognised a classic Leavisian rhythm: there had been a sharp decline from Elizabethan period to the nineteenth century, but even then elements of a common culture survived which had since been entirely destroyed. Marked by pauses and unevennesses of pace though it may have been, the process was emphatically unidirectional: within this critical idiom there seemed to be no question of proposing that contemporary popular fiction marked an advance on Victorian sensationalism, still less on ‘Elizabethan vernacular writers’. No like-for-like comparison is seriously proposed: the latter citation has totemic force.

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The question of Hoggart’s implied readers intrudes in a different way in the following passage, where, having quoted several working-class phrases about enjoying oneself when possible (‘a little of what y’fancy does y’good’, and so on), he continues, In all these, still much used today, there is a note which has never been silent in English working-class life since the Wife of Bath, which sounds in Shakespeare’s clowns, Mistress Quickly and Juliet’s nurse, in Moll Flanders and in the nineteenth-century music halls. It has lost some of its old quality now, but more of its raucous and earthy flavour remains than is usually thought. (141) ‘English working-class life since the Wife of Bath’: this is a striking conflation of the literary and the historical. The whole sequence – Chaucer, Shakespeare, Defoe – bespeaks the literary canon, a world of reference having little to do with the contemporary working-class attitudes he is ostensibly characterising. The move into ‘the nineteenth-century music halls’ reveals the attempt to see this as a single tradition of popular culture, though it should hardly need saying that the representation of a certain type of character by the highly educated Chaucer in a work addressed to a tiny minority of the population had precious little in common with the demotic entertainments of the music halls over four centuries later. And then the cadence of that final sentence, which epitomises so much of the argument of the book: some of the ‘old quality’ has been lost, but not as much as ‘is usually thought’. ‘Thought by whom?’ is one question: perhaps by those who habitually talk about Chaucer and Shakespeare and Defoe? And is this in practice a repudiation of nostalgia or a refinement of it? So often this part of the book claims to be disowning a prevalent nostalgia while simultaneously using the literary motifs associated with that nostalgia to reinforce an attachment to the ‘older order’ now on the brink of extinction. What I am calling the historical logic of his argument becomes so insistent as the book moves towards its conclusion that almost any page might furnish illustrations. Consider the way he introduces an additional example by calling it ‘a further instance of a possible interplay between material improvement and cultural loss’: the possibility of cultural gain seems excluded in advance. He then goes on: ‘At present the older, the more narrow but also more genuine class culture is being eroded in favour of the mass opinion, the mass recreational product, and the generalised emotional response’ (343). Such sentences would

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have been entirely at home in the pages of I.A Richards’s warnings of the perils of ‘mass’ culture in the 1920s. Or, for a characteristic passage in which the Leavisian echoes are to the fore, take his assertion that popular newspapers and other commercialised cultural forms ‘can be accused . . . not of failing to be highbrow, but of not being truly concrete and personal. The quality of life, the kind of response, the rootedness in a wisdom and a maturity which a popular and non-highbrow art can possess may be as valuable in their own ways as those of a highbrow art.’ But the ‘new’ publications do not possess these qualities; rather they ‘make their audience less likely to arrive at a wisdom derived from an inner, felt discrimination in their sense of people and their attitude to experience. It is easier to kill the old roots than to replace them with anything comparable’ (339). Those essentially literary-critical values of ‘concreteness’ and ‘felt discrimination’ seem to be indissolubly tied to ‘old roots’: in these terms, change can be figured only as destructive.8 These affinities are systemic: they can sometimes make it difficult to distinguish Hoggart’s prose from that of the wider critical practice. Consider, for example, the following passage, without (for the moment) any identifying reference: Most mass-entertainments are in the end what D.H. Lawrence described as ‘anti-life’. They are full of a corrupt brightness, of improper appeals, and moral evasions. To recall instances: they tend towards a view of the world in which progress is conceived as a seeking of material possessions, equality as a moral levelling, and freedom as the ground for endless irresponsible pleasure . . . . A handful of such productions reaches daily the great majority of the population: their effect is both widespread and uniform. Or this: Can a hundred D.H. Lawrences preserve even the idea of emotional sincerity against the unremitting, pervasive, masturbatory manipulations of ‘scientific’ Publicity, and, what is the same thing, commercially supplied popular art? Or this: This kind of literature . . . is the most advanced form so far produced of that more general group of writings which provide sensationwithout commitment. It is, in the last resort, an hermaphrodite and masturbatory literature, which feeds on itself.

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Or this: In the popular newspaper the tendency of the modern environment to discourage all but the most shallow and immediate interests, the most superficial, automatic and cheap mental and emotional responses, is exhibited at perhaps its most disastrous. The consistency of idiom, tone, and cultural reference requires no commentary.9 Let me take as my final example a passage in which so many of these notes come together. It serves as, in effect, the peroration to Hoggart’s celebrated description of the listless youths he observes in the milk-bar; he allows that they are not wholly typical of working-class people, not yet at least, but that nonetheless they are the kinds of readers implied by the ‘newer working-class entertainment literature’. These are the figures some important contemporary forces are tending to create, the directionless and tamed helots of a machine-minding age . . . . The hedonistic but passive barbarian who rides in a fiftyhorsepower bus for threepence, to see a five-million-dollar film for one-and-eightpence, is not simply a social oddity; he is a portent. (250) There are hints of a Huxleyian dystopia present here, but the louder reverberations come from the central strand of the English cultural tradition I described earlier. It is not fanciful to hear distant echoes of Matthew Arnold, not merely in the transposed class-ascription of ‘barbarian’, but also of Arnold’s inveighing against ‘your middle-class man’ who ‘thinks it the highest pitch of development and civilization when his letters are carried twelve times a day from Islington to Camberwell, and from Camberwell to Islington, and railway trains run to and fro between them every quarter of an hour’ (1871, 21–2). There are even closer affinities with one of T.S. Eliot’s most unlovely rants against the ‘possessors of the inner voice’ who ‘ride ten in a compartment to a football match at Swansea, listening to the inner voice, which breathes the eternal message of vanity, fear, and lust’ (1951, 27). Audible, too, is the familiar Leavisian cadence, above all in that favoured word ‘portent’.10 In passages such as this, assumptions about cultural decline seem intrinsic to the critical practice, not merely contingently associated with it.

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IV Let me now come at the question of this literary-critical practice’s relation with its implied readers in a quite different way. We have long known from Hoggart’s later reminiscences – and this has now been documented in more reliable detail by Sue Owen’s researches in the Hoggart archive – that in order to meet the anxieties about libel expressed by the publisher’s lawyer, Hoggart in many places substituted passages he himself invented for the originals taken from named publications.11 But it seems possible that neither Hoggart himself nor later scholars have fully grasped the implications of this substitution. The lawyer’s anxiety was that it would not be sufficient merely to remove the attributions and identifying marks ‘because the quotations remain recognisable’ and so an aggrieved author and his publishers could still sue with every chance of success given Hoggart’s severe and dismissive commentary on these passages (Owen, 2005, 168). Clearly, ‘recognisable’ here means ‘as a version of their own words’, not ‘as an example of the type of publication to which theirs belonged’. But for Hoggart it was crucial that the invented passages be ‘recognisable’ in this latter sense. If they were not, if they were seen to be an academic author’s pastiche of a popular genre, Hoggart’s criticism of contemporary publications would lose much of its force. He would be seen to be criticising what he had put there in the first place, albeit in an attempt to imitate actual publications. So Hoggart faced a dilemma: if his invented passages stuck too closely to the wording of the originals, he risked being sued, but if he departed too far from them he ran what is in some ways a more disturbing risk that readers would not take the passages to be authentic. In reconstructing this episode, Owen judges that ‘Hoggart’s parodies or pastiches are very convincing’ (2005, 169). But convincing in what sense? It is surely important that they cannot be parodies in any strict understanding of the term if Hoggart is to succeed in his purpose. The success of parody, it might be said, depends upon the second version bearing as close a resemblance as possible to the original while still conveying enough collusive knowingness to recruit the reader for the purpose of mockery or satire. When a substitute cannot be recognised as such, it cannot serve the purposes of parody. But it was crucial to Hoggart’s purpose that his readers did not recognise these passages as parodies, for the essence of parody is to exaggerate or distort, however subtly or brilliantly, the characteristics of the original, whereas Hoggart’s more forensic case depended upon his readers sharing his dismay that these newer publications operated

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at such a low level. It could be said that the category we are dealing with here, in however minor and insignificant a form, is that of ‘hoax’ rather than parody; in principle the affinities are rather with Ossian or Ern Malley than with Max Beerbohm. But what process of ‘recognition’ were his readers undergoing if (as we may presume was the case for the vast majority of them) they had never read the originals of the publications in question? Could they be assumed simply to ‘know’, in some less direct way, what these publications were like? What his readers were being asked to ‘recognise’ was, surely, the low level of the writing, the all-too-imitable formulae, which they expected these publications to exhibit. In a sense, therefore, Hoggart’s invented examples are redundant, since his readers already ‘know’ that this is what these publications are like. What he is doing by including them is, in effect, encouraging his readers to give an adequate attention to the self-evident. And he needs to do this if his historical contrast with the values imputed to the ‘older order’ is to stand up. The good practical critic always has the potential to be a good imitator or parodist. And Hoggart’s invented passages surely have to be seen as a form of criticism. The very fact that the originals could be so easily and successfully imitated might be held to reveal their mediocrity. It was, after all, axiomatic in the larger critical practice Hoggart shared that the creative or exploratory uses of language characteristic of great literature could not, by definition, be successfully imitated. An imitation of, say, one of the powerful speeches from a Shakespearean tragedy could never be mistaken by a competent reader for the original; the best that could be achieved would be something immediately identifiable as imitation. (And presumably not as very successful imitation, since the assumption is that the original does not have ‘mannerisms’, but is, rather, the most fully adequate rendering of felt experience.) But this assumes a ‘competent reader’, as does parody itself: it will be hard for the reader who has never read any Henry James to get the full point of Beerbohm’s ‘The mote in the middle distance’. ‘Recognition’ presumes some kind of familiarity. Here Michael Bell’s observation that I quoted earlier about Leavis’s criticism requiring ‘some of the same conditions of consensus that satire does’ returns. Satire, like parody, requires both ‘recognition’ of the original being satirised and agreement on the values against which its failings can be measured. The success of Leavis’s criticism depended on his readers being in, or being capable of being brought to, this condition, and so did Hoggart’s. In this section of The Uses of Literacy he puts his readers, an imagined tutorial class, through a series of ‘practical criticism’ exercises,

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but in one sense they are otiose, since his readers already know what is wrong with popular publications of this sort. (When he published an extract from this part of his book in the journal Use of English in the Spring of 1957, his first sentence, revealingly, was, ‘We all know only too well that much contemporary popular literature is sensational.’12 ) The exercise starts to resemble the joke about telling jokes just by their number. But had not something similar long been the case with this style of criticism’s use of its positive touchstones? There is scarcely ever felt to be a need to analyse in detail the strengths of a quoted passage from Shakespeare or Lawrence or whoever; a brisk reference to its greater ‘maturity’ suffices. Similarly in this section of Hoggart’s chapter. The intrusive presence of canonical literary references in this chapter is striking in itself, but so is Hoggart’s assumption that his readers know what qualities these works exhibit. ‘There has been a literature of sexual adventure for centuries; one thinks of Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller, in one of its aspects, or of Defoe’s Moll Flanders’ (260). One thinks of these works – and one immediately sees the point. After another of his made-up passages he casually remarks, ‘It will be seen that the style is debased Hemingway’ (263). Having introduced a passage from A Farewell to Arms, he merely says, ‘The similarities are illuminating here; but Hemingway’s world, I need hardly say, is much more mature than that of the gangsternovelette authors’ (271). He hardly needs to say it; his readers already know it. But perhaps the most remarkable appeal to self-evidence comes at the very end of the chapter. In gangster-fiction, he asserts, there can be no endings ‘which are really beginnings, attempts to restart life by staying in the same spot and doing what you can to build the city’. The moralising, almost hectoring, tone here certainly underlines his utter lack of sympathy for the genre. This is then followed by an invented passage about ‘hitting the road’ again, after which he points out, overinsistently, that the escape takes place in a ‘life-consuming machine’, and the endless cycle of moving on is bound to be repeated. The chapter then ends with a quote. There comes to mind the ending, a century and a half ago, of Sense and Sensibility: Between Barton and Delford there was that constant communication which strong family affections would naturally dictate; and among the merits and happiness of Elinor and Marianne let it not be ranked

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as the least considerable, that though sisters, and living almost within sight of each other, they could live without disagreement between themselves or producing coolness between their husbands. (272) Ending a chapter with a quotation always places a premium on its significance being self-evident. But what exactly is supposed to be so evident here? It is surely that Austen depicts the working of ‘strong family affection’ and that the characters stay in the same place, and share a community, and that this is what real human happiness is made of. This use of the quotation is ethically prescriptive to an extraordinary degree, far more so, one cannot help feeling, than Austen had intended it to be in its original setting. But that’s what ‘comes to mind’ when reading ‘gangster-fiction’. Isn’t it?

V In re-creating something of the original and, as it seems to me, most illuminating context of this part of Hoggart’s early work, I am not intending to belittle his achievement. The Uses of Literacy, the first half above all, remains a brave and important book to have written at any point. But almost all discussion of that work is now coloured by a kind of double retrospective teleology. The more obvious of these is conventionally dated back to 1964 and the founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham: the book’s role as a founding text for ‘cultural studies’ has undoubtedly shaped much interpretation of it. The less obvious perspective dates from 1958 and the appearance of Williams’s Culture and Society: the timing of the two books, the partially similar class backgrounds, and the class concerns of the two authors led to their being bracketed together in subsequent discussion, and led, most importantly for my purpose, to Hoggart’s book being treated as a late contribution to what it soon became common to call ‘the cultureand-society tradition’. By the mid-1960s this emphasis was given a kind of official endorsement by the in-house account of the Birmingham Centre’s history (largely written by Stuart Hall) which saw Hoggart’s book as part of ‘the response to industrialism’, ‘the prolonged engagement of the literary imagination with industrial society’, that had been charted by Williams.13 There was clearly some point to seeing the relationship between the two works in these terms, but it also encouraged a serious misperception of the kind of book Hoggart had written. To put it with culpable brevity, Culture and Society explored the way in which a long sequence of

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writers had sought for some kind of alternative to ‘the logic of industrial society’ in values and concerns that were eventually brought together under the label of ‘culture’. But The Uses of Literacy was not animated in this way by the search for an alternative to what Williams called ‘the bourgeois idea of society’. Hoggart’s work was not driven, as Williams’s was, by the political desire to relativise individualism, as the expression of a form of economic life that dated only from the end of the eighteenth century, and to supplant it by a systematic ordering of society on the principles of equality and solidarity. In the dominant left story, which Williams extended and re-directed, the focus was on the structural injustice introduced into English society by the unchecked dominance of the competitive principle at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. In The Uses of Literacy, by contrast, the focus was on the undermining of an ethic of effort and self-restraint, built up in the circumstances created by the settled industrialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by the arrival of a combination of populist egalitarianism and material prosperity. Forces vaguely designated as ‘commercialism’ were assumed to be adept at preying upon those whose moral fibre was ripe for weakening, but there is no very clear story of what enabled these forces to be more insidiously effective in the present than they had been in the past, other than an undeveloped sense that the lack of material prosperity in the pre-war working class meant that there had not been sufficient financial incentive for ‘outside’ forces to cultivate a working-class market. In several ways, The Uses of Literacy belongs to the extended tradition of ‘condition of England’ writing that stretched from the nineteenth century deep into the twentieth, not least in its combination of a personal voice, an attention to emblematic aspects of contemporary culture, and a marked moral passion. But Hoggart, despite obvious affinities, did not altogether belong with those ‘happy peasants’ who took some pre-capitalist, rural order as their benchmark, nor did he line up with those who advocated the supersession of capitalism by some social order founded upon an alternative economic principle.14 The values his book endorsed were recognised to have grown up within the conditions of industrial capitalism. In contrast to the positions to which his work was assimilated in the 1960s and 1970s, Hoggart’s was a less historical, less political, and less theorised account, one which was more personal, more moral, and, above all, more literary in its inspiration and focus. It is preoccupied above all with ethical decline, with the loss of meaning and value that are alleged to come with mobility and prosperity. Rather than belonging with Culture and Society, The Uses of Literacy is better seen

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as a prose version of Sons and Lovers interwoven with an updating of Fiction and the Reading Public. The moral urgency that gave the book so much of its force was articulated through the literary-critical idiom that flourished at the time, particularly in the milieu in which Hoggart was writing. It has often been remarked that the book was fortunate in its timing, indeed that it could only have been written as a particular set of changes in working-class life, associated with the first wave of post-war prosperity, were taking place. But the book could also not have been written had Hoggart not been able to presume a large measure of agreement from his readers that the proper aim of literary criticism is to identify indications of ‘moral health’ in King Lear or ‘maturity’ in Lawrence. As I remarked earlier, I am aware that intellectual-historical ‘placing’ of this kind risks striking a note of superiority, even of condescension. Let me end, therefore, by saluting a strain in Hoggart’s work that is too easily overlooked, a strain that can still surprise us and that should make us wary of assigning him to any single camp or category. One of the moments in his writing that I particularly admire comes towards the end of his review of Williams’s Culture and Society in Essays in Criticism in 1958. The review is, of course, a highly favourable one for the most part, though he does, perhaps predictably, express the mild reservation that Williams’s concluding chapter has not been expressed in a more concrete and detailed way, a way that would allow ‘us’ to check the nature and degree of our assent to its abstract assertions. And then, surely less predictably, he goes on to say that the extent of our agreement with the final chapter will ultimately be determined by the extent to which we share the ‘strong positiveness’ of Williams’s ‘feeling about experience’. There follows a passage that needs to be quoted in full: My own feeling, which naturally does not prevent me from admiring the energy and the intelligence supporting Mr Williams, is that ‘life’ is rather more a working in the dark, rather more stoical and ironic than he implies. I do not think this a remnant of socially or aesthetically induced outsiderdom, nor does it make for a dispirited attitude towards social activity – any more than Mr Williams’s attitude makes for a shallow ‘progressivism’. This is not, of course, a criticism of Mr Williams but an observation of the difference in the wells of energy from which we all draw in writing or reading books. (Hoggart, 1978, 178–9) On one reading, the most striking feature of this passage is its defensiveness. It contains no fewer than four disclaimers cast in syntactical

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negatives – this ‘does not prevent me from admiring’, ‘I do not think this a remnant’, ‘nor does it make for’, ‘This is not, of course, a criticism’. Indeed, the passage spends so much energy fending off possible implications that one begins to wonder why Hoggart feels so nervous about what seems at first to be a relatively minor difference of emphasis from Williams. He clearly wants to stand, and to be seen to stand, shoulder to shoulder with his colleague on all the public matters affected by the book’s argument, without undermining the solidarity by damaging criticism. Yet he is driven to register, in the politest and most tentative terms, what amounts to his sense of recoil from the relentless, programmatic optimism of Williams’s chapter. ‘My own feeling . . . is that ‘‘life’’ is rather more a working in the dark, rather more stoical and ironic than he implies.’ At the touch of this delicately weighted phrase, Williams’s confident, upbeat generalities start to crumble. I suspect Hoggart was driven to surround this quiet phrase with so many disclaimers because at some (perhaps not wholly conscious) level he was aware of the profound gulf in outlook he was hinting at and so was attempting to minimise its impact in this instance. As so often in the best moments in his writing, he shifts to an existential rather than a social or political focus: rather than attempting to take issue with Williams’s arguments at the same level of abstraction, he is only saying something about ‘the difference in the wells of energy from which we all draw in writing or reading books’. The use of the first-person plural is eirenic here, the metaphor of ‘wells of energy’ a kind of olive branch given Williams’s own emphasis on ‘releasing the clamps on our energies’. But the genie cannot be put back into the bottle. No attentive reader could avoid reflecting on how different, and perhaps how much more persuasive, Williams’s final chapter would have been if it had been shaped by a ‘more stoical and ironic’ sensibility. Hoggart, of course, never wrote a book like Culture and Society: that book and much of Williams’s other best work exhibited a historical reach and a conceptual power that were not part of his repertoire. Still, it remains, I think a telling moment, a very writerly moment in which a phrase like ‘rather more a working in the dark’ embodies the uncertainties and imprecisions that cannot, he is implying, be rendered more certain or more precise without being false to our deepest existential intuitions. It is a moment that should prevent us, should prevent me, from too readily assuming that he can be wholly encompassed by any of the familiar cultural labels. It is a moment when confrontation with the work of someone with whom he would be expected to have everything in common forced him to identify within himself this one, small but enormous, ground of difference. And for

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this, too – for the generosity of his overall response to Williams’s work, for his diffident yet determined articulation of a difference too important to be glossed over and too elusive to be laboured, for the delicate economy of the phrasing, and for the honest recognition of something about himself that others scarcely ever notice about him – for this, too, I salute him.

Notes 1. What follows is my own account of this practice; for some useful prompts to thinking about it and its influence at this time, see Bernard Bergonzi, Exploding English: Criticism, Theory, Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand, and Lawrence Rainey (eds), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol 7: Modernism and the New Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Brian Doyle, English and Englishness (London: Routledge, 1989); Francis Mulhern, The Moment of Scrutiny (London: New Left Books, 1979). 2. See particularly John McIlroy, ‘Teacher, critic, explorer’, in W. John Morgan and Peter Preston (eds), Raymond Williams: Politics, Education, Letters (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 23–4, 25–6, 30. 3. For early pieces by Hoggart, see Highway 38 (July 1947), 198; 40 (Nov 1948), 17–20; 40 (June 1949), 194–5; Adult Education 20 (June 1948), 187–94; and Wiliams’ response, 21 (1948), 96–8. For Williams’ involvement with Essays in Criticism, see Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: New Left Books, 1979), 84. 4. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto, 1935), esp. Ch. 1. 5. For example, Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 109. 6. See Stefan Collini, ‘The literary critic and the village labourer: ‘‘culture’’ in twentieth-century Britain’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 14 (2004), 93–116. Presumably it was partly on account of this structural similarity that Graham Hough, in the passage discussed in that article, included Hoggart among the ‘happy peasants’ who, by implication, were yearning for this state of pre-industrial simplicity. 7. Cf. Orwell on ‘the new townships that have developed as a result of cheap motor cars and the southward shift of industry’: ‘In those vast new wildernesses of glass and brick the sharp distinctions of the older kind of town, with its slums and mansions, or of the country, with its manor houses and squalid cottages, no longer exist . . . . It is a rather restless, cultureless life, centring round tinned food, Picture Post, the radio and the internal combustion engine. It is a civilisation in which children grow up with an intimate knowledge of magnetoes and in complete ignorance of the Bible. To that civilization belong the people who are most at home in and most definitely of the modern world . . . .’ The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941), in Peter Davison (ed.), George Orwell: The Complete Works, vol. 14 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1998), 408.

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8. Cf. ‘it seems probable that the cheap sex-fiction has developed in the way illustrated partly because our great cities have become more crowded, and because a sense of direction has become harder to find in them’ (270). 9. The first passage comes from Uses of Literacy, 340; the second from Leavis, For Continuity, 105; the third from a section which Hoggart cut from the original typescript of Abuses of Literacy as a result of the barrister’s objections (quoted in Owen, 174-5); and the fourth from F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment (London: Chatto, 1932), 103. Cf. also Fiction and the Reading Public, 136. One cannot help thinking that criticism of this kind risks giving masturbation a bad name. 10. For example, Leavis described Edmund Gosse as ‘a portent’ of low critical standards early in the century, and C.P. Snow as ‘a portent’ of a similar shallow relativism almost 30 years later; F.R. Leavis, For Continuity (Cambridge: Minority Press, 1933), 75; ‘Two Cultures: the significance of C.P. Snow’ (1962), repr in Nor Shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism, Compassion, and Social Hope (London: Chatto, 1972), 47. 11. A Sort of Clowning, 145; ‘An interview with Richard Hoggart’, Uses of Literacy, 384; in both cases, Hoggart records with some pride that ‘I have met no one who recognised that the pieces were imitations.’ 12. Use of English, 8 (1956–7), 111. 13. See, for example, the section on ‘Placing the Centre in its Context’ in the fifth Annual Report of CCCS, which is based on a lecture given by Hall in 1967. 14. See note 6 above.

Works cited Arnold, Matthew (1871). Friendship’s Garland In The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, R.H. Super (ed.), 11 vols. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–77, Vol. V. Bell, Michael (1988). F.R. Leavis. London: Routledge. Collini, Stefan (1999). English Pasts; Essays in History and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eliot, T.S. (1932, rev. ed.1951). ‘The function of criticism’, in Selected Essays. London: Faber. Hoggart, Richard (1958). ‘An important book’, Essays in Criticism, 8, 178–9. ——(1973). ‘The Condition of England Question’, Times Educational Supplement 19 February 1965, reprinted in Speaking to Each Other, 2 vols, I: About Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin. First pub. London: Chatto, 1970. ——(1992). The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and entertainments. Harmondsworth: Penguin. First pub. London: Chatto, 1957. Mulhern, Francis (2002). ‘Beyond metaculture’, New Left Review, 16. Owen, Sue (2005). ‘The Abuse of Literacy and the Feeling Heart: the Trials of Richard Hoggart’, Cambridge Quarterly 34.2, 147–76.

3 Richard Hoggart, Cultural Studies and the Demands of the Present1 Lawrence Grossberg

In search of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies In 1968, as a result of a number of fortuitous events and unfortunate political forces, I went to study – all too briefly – at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS).2 To be honest, I had no idea what the Centre was. I had never heard of Richard Hoggart or Stuart Hall. I went with an interest in the ‘social life’ of ideas (philosophies) and popular symbols, and an abiding interest in how popular music functioned to bind together politics and the popular on the one hand, and the various fractions of what was then known as the counterculture on the other. I had no idea what cultural studies was – my professors at the University of Rochester assured me that I would feel intellectually at home there – but fortunately, most people at the Centre were equally uncertain. To reiterate a common phrase (first used, I think, by Angela McRobbie), we all understood that we were making it up as we went along. It was in the often fraught, contradictory and tension-filled (although too often, the differences have been oversimplified as if they could be reduced, for example, to the certainly real intellectual, stylistic and political differences between Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall) but for me always exciting, generous, and open-minded space of the Centre that the trajectory of my intellectual and political life was initiated. I want to ask what ‘cultural studies,’ at least as I understood it (if only tacitly) when I left the Centre, might owe to Richard Hoggart, although it may not be a ‘Hoggart’ that any of you recognize or want to embrace. This is the case for two reasons. First, I do not think I can isolate Richard’s contribution from the broader space of discourse that was the Centre. And second, I have to acknowledge that the brevity of my sojourn at the CCCS had consequences, both positive and negative. Most importantly, 57

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what I took away from the Centre was not any sense of or even any part of the whole theoretical trajectory that defined the history of the Centre, nor did I leave with any sense of the specific set of problematics (semiotics, resistance, identity, and so on) that came to be associated with different eras and different groups at the Centre. Instead, what I did take away was an understanding of cultural studies as a response to a series of frustrations and criticisms and, more implicitly and incipiently, as a practice and a project, even if, as I said, they were for me almost empty of any specific theoretical and political content. In that sense I want to talk about what I took from the particular trajectory that Richard, Stuart, and others were constructing or imagining in the Centre. Let me begin then briefly describing what many of you may already know as Richard’s early vision of cultural studies. Unlike most British students, I imagine, what was important for me was not, as is more commonly the case, The Uses of Literacy. To be honest, as a young American, I was not particularly taken with this supposedly founding text of cultural studies. I did not understand ‘working class culture,’ and understood even less why ‘Americanization’ was so problematic. (Admittedly, I was very young, na¨ıve, and not yet sensitive enough to issues of the global circulations of culture and power.) I had read enough anthropology to wonder what all the fuss was about. The texts by Hoggart that did matter to me were the essays he wrote after The Uses of Literacy, some of which seemed to offer the beginnings of a critique of The Uses of Literacy, even as they began to lay out the project of cultural studies. According to this vision, culture (primarily literature and art but also expressive culture more broadly understood) made available, to those trained to find it, a distinctive kind of social knowledge. This knowledge is not available through any other means. It is a kind of knowledge that Hoggart describes at various times as poetic, metaphoric, intuitive, and subjective. It is a privileged knowledge of or access to what Williams called the ‘structure of feeling.’ Producing such knowledge requires a careful scrutiny of the words on the page, moving between what Hoggart called ‘reading for tone’ (in all its psychological, cultural, and aesthetic complexity) and ‘reading for value.’ The latter seeks to uncover the complex field of values that are embodied, reflected, or resisted in the work.3 Crucially, Hoggart argued that such literary-critical methods could be fruitfully brought to bear on a wider range of human activities and products than traditional literary critics might have imagined. In particular, Hoggart wanted to move such analysis from the realm of high culture into the popular and media cultures that increasingly occupied the center stage of modern Western societies.

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This literary-critical practice defined one of the weekly seminars that constituted the regular business of the Centre. Once a week, Richard (or another faculty member or visiting researcher) presented the students with a mimeographed copy (the only forms of reproduction in the Centre were mimeographing and carbon paper) of passages from some text: at the beginning from works of high literature, but as the year progressed, from more popular literary works and even excerpts from mass print media. While the works were identified at first, as the year moved on we were often given works without any identification and asked to figure out where they might have come from. Sometimes we were asked to compare passages, determining by such careful scrutiny which were ‘high literature,’ which popular literature, and which mass media. I remember the first seminar, when Richard handed out copies of the first stanzas of William Blake’s ‘The Tyger,’ and left us to our own devices. After a few hours of conversation and analysis, we were ready to present our collective reading to Richard. Despite our confidence that we had done a reasonable job of providing a close reading of the words on the page, Richard quickly undercut our confidence and provided just a hint of what such a close reading might have to say about the text. The entire year in that seminar was spent honing the skills necessary to read for tone and values.4 I was attracted not to the critical practice (reading values off of texts)5 but to the larger question that, for Hoggart, founded the project of cultural studies. The question Hoggart (1969) posed to the texts was not, as it became at a later moment at the Centre, what people do with a text but ‘what relationship does this . . . complex text have to the imaginative life of the individuals who make up its audience.’ For Hoggart, culture gives us knowledge of life embodied, life lived in all its complexity, the experiential wholeness of life, or what Eliot called (and Hoggart was fond of quoting) ‘the real world of theology and horses.’ Culture gives us access to the texture of life as it is lived, as it develops in a particular historical and moral context; it tells us what it felt like to be alive at a certain time and place.6 This notion is built on a set of assumptions, which Hoggart (1969) describes as follows: that a society bears values, cannot help bearing values and deciding their relative significance; that it makes what seems like a significant or ordered whole out of experience, a total and apparently meaningful view of life; that it embodies these structures of values in systems of meaning, rituals, forms; that it lives out these values expressively,

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in its actions and arts; that this living out of values is a dialectical process, never complete, always subject to innovation and change; that no one individual ever makes a perfect ‘fit’ with the dominant order of values of his culture. If I may be allowed a small tangent here, I would like to point out that this is a theoretical position! I say this because Hoggart (like Williams sometimes) is often described as being either anti-theoretical or, at least, atheoretical. But this ‘dismissal’ depends on an argument that slides from a number of correct observations – that Hoggart did not see himself as a theorist; that he disliked certain kinds of (at the time, increasingly influential) theories; and that he despised theory for its own sake, as if theory could answer questions before one even begins the real (empirically grounded) work of analysis – to the fundamentally incorrect conclusion that Hoggart’s vision of cultural studies was not theoretically based and that he thought cultural studies could somehow function without theory.7 I want to return to Hoggart’s vision for cultural studies its proper modesty, one he declares in An Imagined Life (1993) when, after offering the vision of cultural studies I have just described, he says, ‘All the above describes only one area of what are now called ‘‘cultural studies.’’ ’ This is a modesty that is too often denied by criticisms of Hoggart (and the Centre), which too quickly dislocate his articulation of the project of cultural studies from its context, and hence from its own questions. That is, they do not begin by asking why that particular question constituted the focus of cultural studies in this particular context. To understand Hoggart’s vision for cultural studies, we must relocate it in its context; in that way, we can also restore to Hoggart’s problem his question – if not his answer – a certain relevance in the contemporary context. That can be accomplished only by connecting my sense of Hoggart’s vision in the context of the early CCCS to the context in which I now find myself. For in different contexts, cultural studies has rearticulated itself in response to different and changing ‘problematics.’ It is common enough to acknowledge, although less often fully embraced, that cultural studies takes its shape in response to its context, that cultural studies is a response in part to ‘experienced’ changes, to changing political challenges and demands, as well as to emerging theoretical resources and debates. Such acknowledgments usually miss the more complicated story of the changing problematics of cultural studies, a notion felicitously described by David Scott (2004). Without such a sense of the complexity of the project and history of cultural

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studies, one is likely to fall into Francis Mulhern’s (2000) trap of identifying all of cultural studies with a single vision – the cultural critique of social change – and with the questions that Williams identified as constituting what he called the ‘culture and society’ tradition. Mulhern fails to understand that the cultural studies’ project, even as articulated by both Williams and Hoggart, while drawing on these traditions, also attempted to escape their legacy. For example, this is made explicit in Williams’ efforts (however unsuccessful they might have been) to refuse the separation of culture and society, which is a basic assumption of both the culture and society tradition and the broader European traditions of cultural criticism, as Mulhern understands them. Instead, Williams argues that understanding any practice (cultural or otherwise) demands that it be replaced into a reconstituted social totality. But this is another story, for another time and place. Let me try to explain this notion of problematics by talking briefly about David Scott’s (2004) argument that various anti-essentialisms are limited by the fact that they have challenged, deconstructed, and historicized only the answers but never the questions themselves. Scott proposes seeing contexts as ‘problem spaces’: he wants us ‘to think of different historical conjunctures as constituting different conceptualideological problem-spaces; and to think of these problem-spaces less as generators of new propositions than as generators of new questions and new demands.’ In other words, if cultural studies responds to contexts, contexts must be understood as posing specific questions and demands. I want to use this notion to suggest that for the past three decades cultural studies has been assumed to be defined largely by three problematics (located in their respective problem-spaces) – and, often, their intersections: First, a problem-space (or problematic) of agency and resistance, which constructs a narrative the object of which is ‘to displace a story of submission with a story of resistance.’ (Scott, 2004) This is, quite obviously I think, the driving force behind much of the ‘classic’ work associated with British cultural studies, including subcultural theories of symbolic resistance as well as notions of the active audience (the encoding–decoding model). Second, a problem-space (or problematic) of power and subjectivity in which culture is understood as the production of experience and difference together. Third, a problem-space (or problematic) of hegemonic struggle, concerned with the struggle, on the part of an historical bloc or

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alliance, to win popular consent to particular forms of leadership (both political and economic) and state power by operating on the terrain of and within the spaces of the popular and common sense. This move was inaugurated at the Centre by Policing the Crisis and developed in the analytic work on Thatcherism, racism and raciology, and New Times. But it seems to me that Hoggart, as well as Williams (and also James Carey in the United States, with whom I later studied8 ), was responding at least in part to a different problematic, writing in a different problemspace, one that I would describe as epistemological. Here I want to recall one of Hoggart’s favorite quotations, one he frequently cited during my time at the Centre: May god us keep From single vision and Newton’s sleep (William Blake) In this problem-space, the fundamental challenge is posed by the power of science (or perhaps more accurately, scientism and positivism) or, more generally, by the assumption that there is only one valid way of knowing, usually defined by the epistemology of the formal or hard sciences. (But it is important to realize that the ‘usually’ in the previous sentence, while historically correct, does not define the relation as a necessary one.) Within this problem-space, the project of cultural studies is to contest any single vision, and the critique of single vision has to be extended from its particular instantiation in the universalization of the claims of scientific epistemology, to the broader critique of any epistemological assumption that makes the intellectual’s work easier than it should be, that reduces one’s ability to be surprised by the results of inquiry. The project of cultural studies, in this problem-space, then, is to contest any single vision of knowledge – whether behaviorism, functionalism, utilitarianism, or political economy, or even more recent forms like cognitive theory, chaos theory, or network theory, or even, dare we suggest, aesthetic formalism or religious fundamentalism. This problematic would seem to replace at least a part of cultural studies, including Hoggart’s sense of the project, in the tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften and the later Methodenstreit more centrally than in Williams’ culture and society tradition. Or at least it suggests that Hoggart read the latter tradition in methodological and epistemological terms, rather than simply and solely in normative terms. Much of this argument was carried on around and through the concept of

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experience, and this epistemological problematic may have found its clearest expression in William’s notion of the community of process. Hoggart’s effort to respond to an epistemological problem-space was obscured by the way The Uses of Literacy was read, not only as if it defined Hoggart’s model of cultural studies, but also (1) in terms of his failure to follow his own strategies of reading, thus making it simply another piece of ‘nostalgic’ social and cultural criticism, retelling a story of decline; (2) in terms of its implicit response to the problematic of resistance; and (3) as an alternative theory of mass media. As Stuart Hall (1969– 1970) put it, The Uses of Literacy was read ‘essentially as a text about the mass media,’ which he purports to explain by continuing, ‘such were the imperatives of the moment.’ But he contradicts this reading by adding, ‘The notion that the Centre, in directing its attention to the crucial study of ‘contemporary culture’ was, essentially, to be a centre for the study of television, the mass media and popular arts . . . though never meeting our sense of the situation . . . nevertheless came by default to define us and our work.’ What many people seem to have missed was Hoggart’s sense that working-class culture was not a stable formation into which the mass media entered as an agent of change; rather workingclass culture was always and already changing even as it encountered the new American popular culture. The Uses of Literacy was less commonly understood as an attempt to theorize cultural transmission as an epistemological opening into a theory of social change, a theory Richard Hoggart synechdotally collapsed into the recurring image of ‘modification-with-adaptation’ (or what would later come to be called articulation). Hoggart’s project, at least his vision of cultural studies, was to bring the epistemology of cultural interpretation to bear upon the question of social transformation (as lived, as social relations). He attempted to bring an epistemology of the humanities to bear upon the questions of social theory (as posed by Marx, Weber, Toennies, Durkheim), in order to offer an epistemology of changing, lived, social relations.9 Clearly, I am not talking about Hoggart’s methodology (reading for tone and for value) but what lies behind it epistemologically, although I have to admit that it was not developed nor even consciously offered at the Centre.

In search of cultural studies It was here for me that cultural studies as a practice and a project, as another form of knowledge production, began to take shape. (And in this way I now see The Uses of Literacy as in part trying to validate

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working-class culture as embodying legitimate forms of knowledge practices as well.10 ) Of course, this project was shaped by its own material conditions, including (1) not only the physical marginality of the CCCS at the University of Birmingham, but also the academic marginality of the cultural studies projects of Hoggart and Williams more generally. After all, Hoggart was hired at Birmingham as an Auden scholar, not as the author of The Uses of Literacy; (2) the political contradictions of the lived experience of the 1960s; (3) the enormous diversity, bordering on the chaotic, at the Centre. This diversity was a constant and consistent feature of the Centre, although it is often eclipsed in histories that present only ‘the diversity that won’ (to echo John Clarke’s phrase); and (4) the rather atypical post-graduate students who populated the Centre. Many were part-time and commuter students who had jobs and lives elsewhere. Almost all of them had what can only be described as non-typical interests and atypical backgrounds, but most importantly, most of them were involved with their subjects in other than purely academic ways – as participants (having been shaped by the practices and relations they were studying) who were somehow politically invested in the questions they were trying to pose. Cultural studies, as it was put forth as a kind of discursive imaginary at the Centre, assumed that culture (symbols, language) mattered,11 but just as importantly that intellectual work mattered, both inside and, even more importantly, outside the academy. In that sense, Hoggart and the project of the Centre seemed to be attempting to make the academy listen to the demands of politics, the demands of the world outside of (or intersecting with) the academy, but at the same time to make social and everyday politics listen to the authority of intellectual work. Even more, it seemed to me, a young man searching for a project that could weave together my various passions and my various interests, that the Centre under Richard’s leadership was not trying to create a new academic norm or field, but to articulate a different kind of intellectual project, a different way of asking and answering questions. That is to say, it was propelled by a sense of the inability of the dominant academic norms to provide adequate answers to the compelling and important questions of the age, questions that demanded a new approach to the project of understanding social actualities and human possibilities. But even more, it was the failure of the dominant academic norms to even ask the questions, questions that came, at least in part, from outside the academy, from outside the discourses of academic reproduction. In this early moment of the Centre, the project was sensed and understood more out of a sense of discomfort and dis-satisfaction, and it was

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articulated as a critique, rather than a completed and positive vision of an alternative. The objects of these frustrations and critiques were a set of interrelated assumptions about the proper way to carry out intellectual work: the disciplinary organization of knowledge; the presentation of theoretical possibilities in binary terms; the commitment of reductionism and simplification; the claim of universalism and the desire for completion; the demand for an objectivity that bracketed out any passion and commitment. All of these were, it was taken for granted at the Centre, to characterize the dominant practices of the human sciences, to continue a certain scientistic notion of knowledge, and to be fundamentally inadequate to the demands of the then current human context. The Centre’s early vision, its epistemological commitments were offered more as refusals of these basic dominant logics of the academic enterprise. First, cultural studies was predicated on a sense of discomfort (but not a complete rejection of) the disciplinary organization of knowledge, for it continued to acknowledge that they provided necessary starting points and bodies of expertise. But the fundamental assumption of the Centre, that human existence could be understood only relationally, meant that cultural studies was bound to transgress the boundaries between disciplines. It would have to take up the objects that ‘constituted’ a number of disciplines, but it would have to change those objects as well, precisely because such disciplinary objects were not yet understood relationally. Just as importantly, the sense that no aspect of human life (as well as human life in its lived totality) could be separated from questions and effects of culture also meant that cultural studies would further transform disciplinary objects, since they would have to be understood partly through the lens of culture, as always discursively constructed, at least in part. That is, cultural studies began with the assumption that the disciplines themselves, as cultural practices, constituted potential objects of cultural studies, objects of a potential self-reflexive analysis. As a result, cultural studies would have to be interdisciplinary and anti-disciplinary; it would need to transform the disciplines even as it drew upon them, and it would have to be reflexive about the ways it accomplished this, becoming self-conscious about its own conditions of knowledge-production. Thus if the early work of British cultural studies is often described as bringing together literary and sociological studies, it is better thought of, I think, as having rewritten what it means to do either of these because precisely, they must be done together. More specifically, the Centre was not trying to teach or do sociology as

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sociologists were doing it, but as sociologists should have been doing it – recognizing that its object (‘society’, for example) is both relationally and discursively constructed – under the specific historical circumstances in which they were operating. Thus cultural studies embodied a certain modesty and risk. It demanded that one combine the rigor of competence with the risks of speaking outside of or beyond one’s disciplinary and credentialized competences. Second, cultural studies was predicated on a sense of discomfort with what one might call the argumentative logic of the humanities, which tended to think in terms of binary relations of opposition, interaction, contamination, or mediation. This was true whether one was thinking of paradigms (humanism/structuralism, materialism/idealism), or politics (domination/subordination, power/resistance), or problems (individual/social, structure/agency, stability/change). The logic of cultural studies is and always has been, I believe, to occupy the middle ground, not in the sense of a compromise (the Aristotelian golden mean) but in the sense of operating in the between, to open up possibilities, to see multiplicity instead of difference. I believe this propensity helps account for why it seemed so ‘easy’ for the Centre to turn to Althusser (with his notion of unity-in-difference, of teeth-gritting harmony) and to Gramsci (unstable equilibriums, temporary settlements, articulation, anti-anti-essentialism). Third, cultural studies was predicated on a sense of discomfort with what is perhaps the most basic logic of the academic enterprise, a logic which reveals the assumed scientism of most academic work (including much work in the humanities that purports to be anti-scientific in its humanism). This is a logic that dictates that academic understanding is predicated on processes of simplification and reduction. The early efforts to establish cultural studies (in Hoggart and Williams, and at the Centre) were predicated on the desire to find a way to hold on to the complexity of human reality, to refuse to reduce human life or power to one dimension, one axis, one explanatory framework. Nor was it willing to assume that one could simply acknowledge the difficulties, the contradictions, the excesses, the resistances, which always rendered such singular explanations inadequate, as an afterthought, an addendum. They are, in fact, precisely what lived reality is all about and one must include them from the very start. Cultural studies was, therefore, decidedly anti-reductionist! Fourth, and closely connected to the assumption of reductionism, the Centre assumed that much of academic work is predicated on the assumption of universalism. Theories are supposed, within whatever

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stated conditions are included within the theory itself, to be universally applicable. Theory is itself contextual, and just as importantly, the relationship between theory and its object is also contextual. That means that rather than assuming theory can produce answers, or that it is unnecessary in the face of the empirical world, and rather than thinking of this relationship as one of either application or description, cultural studies envisioned a changing and historically determined dialectic as it were. Cultural studies opposes its own commitment to a radical contextualism – not only of the object of study – but of any theoretical effort, as well as any political judgments – to such scientific epistemological universalism. And in some ways, I believe, this contextualism serves to sum up the various epistemological dimensions that I have ascribed to the practice of cultural studies. Closely connected to the desire for universalism, especially in the humanities (and here it may part ways with and even contradict the reductionism of the sciences), is a desire for completeness (and a desire to protect oneself from the possibility of criticism). Such a dream – of a perfect analysis – would not only provide the measure of our scholarship but also guarantee the politics (the political purity, the political utility) of our labor, guaranteeing that our work would produce only the effects we want and insulating us from the possibility of being co-opted. The mirror image of this desire is the increasingly common practice of critique in the humanities, which dictates that we are always and inevitably disappointed with any analysis since it can never be complete. Even more, and even more damaging, such failures mark the complicity of every incomplete analysis in the very systems of power it seeks to understand and challenge. That which fails serves the enemy, apparently. Again, the project of the Centre seemed to stand against such practices and assumptions. Cultural studies argued that such ‘failures,’ if failures they be in fact, were simply the sign and effect of complexity, and of the need for more work, the need to ‘keep on theorizing, the demand for ongoing and collective work.’ And finally, there was in the Centre a refusal, a fundamental refusal, of the demand, so powerfully enforced in the academy, that one bracket one’s passion, one’s biographical sympathies, and one’s political commitments in the name of a (spurious) intellectual (read scientific) objectivity. Cultural studies knew, as did the pragmatists (who so strongly influenced Jim Carey) that without such investments in the world, in our lives and the lives of others, there is no desire or need for or possibility of knowledge. This – perhaps not so unique but it was certainly new to me – practice of knowledge production demanded that one do more than

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constantly discover what you already know. In other words, where you end up (in your analysis of what is happening and in your assessments of the political stakes, struggles, and possibilities) will rarely be where you began, or even where you might have expected to arrive. And while one went on seeking a better understanding in order, to some extent, to find other political possibilities, there could never be any guarantee of political utility or outcome or purity. Cultural studies sought to combine academic rigor and competence with social passion and political commitment. This search for epistemological counter-logics defines for me, as I look back, the project that I was to find (but only in retrospect) in Richard’s vision of cultural studies, and in the work of the Centre. I do not want to read too much of the present into the past, for it is clear to me that while I was at the centre, and when I left, these counter-logics were at best implicit, even nascent. What was clear was that there was an epistemological problematic; what was clear was that the challenge, the project, was to find a different epistemology, one that not only rejected the dominant intellectual practices of the human sciences, but also found a positive expression, in its very epistemology, of its deeply held commitment to (an ontology of) relationality, and the necessary effectivity of culture. These logics were also what bound together, as intellectual practices and projects, British cultural studies with the work of Jim Carey, my teacher in the United States, to whom Stuart Hall sent me as the only person he knew of trying to do cultural studies in the United States at the time (as I have said, Carey’s roots were, unlike the British, in the pragmatism of the Chicago school and the Canadian political economy of Harold Innis). This is an effort aimed toward not a particularistic or relativist practice but a radically contextualist one, not a culturalist project but an anti-reductionist one (which is, by the way, how I would now read The Uses of Literacy).

In search of the present But what was it about the context in which Hoggart and others imagined the project of cultural studies that spoke of an epistemological problematic? As Stuart Hall has written about it (1990), at least a part of the context determining the emergence of cultural studies in the 1960s was a crisis of the university. This crisis was defined most powerfully by the growing power of a narrowly defined scientific model of knowledge, and the consequent rise of ‘scientism’ as an ideology throughout the cultural, political, and economic spheres. But it also involved a complex

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set of developments unsettling both the social sciences (in an emergent left critique of their pseudo-objectivity and of the ease with which they were co-opted into the service of the operations of the existing relations of power) and the humanities (in a broader critique of their growing irrelevance, elitism, and esotericism). This was a crisis not only of the university but also of knowledge itself, lived and experienced not only in the academy but also in many of the dominant cultural institutions of the West. We, too, today, at least in the United States (for that is the context I have been studying), are in the midst of a comparable crisis, one partly of our own making. It is, I believe, a much more generalized and a much deeper crisis, one that the left too often forcefully limits to the institutions of higher education, and then reduces to an economic crisis of capitalization, ignoring the multiplicity of crises that are articulated together, as well as the political, social, and cultural dimensions of these crises. For many people, of many different political stripes, education is ‘in trouble.’ Of course, the content of the diagnosis, and its supposed political consequences, varies widely, but in almost every case, someone’s political perspective seems to predefine their understanding of the crisis. As university professors, we are naturally concerned about our own nests. We are disturbed by decreasing state funding even in the face of rising enrollments in public universities. We are disturbed by signs of de-professionalization, embodied in external demands for objective outcome assessments, national exams, and even curricula, and, most recently, a proposal for a corporate-defined government-granted university degree equivalent to the GED.12 We are disturbed by the increasing and increasingly shared perception of the fragility of our status as experts. We are (hopefully, but not always) disturbed by various attempts to interfere with and/or to close off discussions and curricular innovations (attempts which have come from both the left and the right). We are disturbed by a growing corporatization of universities (although it is more like the corporatization of the US airlines or auto companies than like that of more innovative and successful corporations and despite the fact that it is often carried out in completely contradictory ways). We are or should be disturbed by the fact that funding trumps ideas, and process (the illusion of rational democracy) trumps vision. But the problems facing higher education, even public higher education, while real and crucial for the future of our societies, look smaller when placed next to the many crises (each constructed differently by

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those with different values and political agendas), of public schooling, whether framed as a question of value or ‘success’ or finance. Even more disturbing, the very notion, meaning, and value of education seem to be under attack. So even a supposed ally of public education like Representative Major Owen, writing in The Nation’s Alternative State of the Union issue (2006), framed the need for a major financial investment in education in a very contemporary way: Not only do we lack the skilled workforce we need; we are accumulating masses of dysfunctional citizens who imperil our society . . . a waste of human recourse that places the nation at risk. The danger is not simply that we will lack the skilled work force and decisionmaking capacities we need. From burglars and car-jackers to suicide bombers, we can also expect continuous rebellions fomenting fear and terror. There is something troubling about the rhetoric of education, as well as the rhetorical construction of kids, in this ‘concerned’ appeal. Still more disturbing is that the very concept and value of knowledge is being challenged. In fact, a key site in the contemporary struggle over the future configuration of US society13 involves the attempt to redefine the very meaning of knowledge – and with it, the value of education and the assumption of secularism – and at the same time, to reconstruct the loci of ‘intellectual’ authority. And it is the new right that seems to have a better strategic understanding of how to wage this battle. As one recent review (Kakutani) put it, It is a case about how much value contemporary culture places on the very idea of truth. . . . We live in a relativistic culture where television ‘reality shows’ are staged or stage-managed, where spin sessions and spin doctors are an accepted part of politics, where academics argue that history depends on who is writing the history, where an aide to President Bush, dismissing reporters who live in the ‘reality-based community,’ can assert that ‘we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’ We can get a glimpse of how far along this struggle has moved if we think about the apparent unwillingness or inability of any institution to publicly adjudicate competing knowledge claims or contradictory evidence. Instead, it is increasingly common to blame the message for the messenger, so the assumed political bias of the source (for example, the

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supposed liberal bias of network news or the N.Y. Times or Fox News and the National Review) is sufficient grounds for dismissing the claims of any report they might present. Similarly, evidence – whether in the form of scientific data, research findings, or first-hand observation – no longer seems to have any privilege. At the very least, this makes it almost impossible to forge any sort of public consensus on any issue capable of transcending the political partisanship that now completely saturates the fields of knowledge production. In fact, it seems to make conversation, negotiation, and compromise both suspect and impossible. This – let us call it a struggle rather than a crisis – calls into question (echoing, I think, the Centre’s early epistemology) the proper sites of knowledge production; both the left and the right agree that it is no longer solely the university that can claim to be the producer and protector of knowledge. In The Weekly Standard, the flagship journal of neo-conservatism, James Piereson suggests that It is not coincidental that the modern university emerged at precisely the same time that the modern liberal [in the sense that one might identify the left with liberalism – LG] movement was in the process of defining itself. One might go further to say that for 140 years, from the close of the Civil War to the present day the fortunes of liberalism in America have been intertwined with those of the university, and that important changes in the one have been accompanied by parallel and consistent changes in the other. Looking back over this period, therefore, it appears that liberalism, as we know it in the 20th century originated with the emergence of the modern university. While I might disagree with implicit claims of causality, and with the author’s claim (elsewhere in the essay) that the modern research university can simply be read as the victory of German idealism over good old reliable English empiricism (remember that it is commonly said that Hoggart preferred good old English empiricism to continental theory), I do believe Piereson is right to see the connection between, dare I say, knowledge and power, to see the relations between a particular formation of knowledge production and particular configurations of modernity. But the current struggle has produced more than just a crisis in the appropriate sites of knowledge production and authority – that is, those sites whose discourse has the power and the right to claim the status of knowledge. It has also produced a crisis in the very meaning of knowledge itself – in what constitutes knowledge and what is entailed exactly in its authority. And perhaps even more devastatingly, it has produced

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a crisis in the very values and authority of knowledge itself: what right does knowledge have to claim some value and authority over other forms of discursive authority (such as religion or market realism)? These crises and struggles, which directly and immediately implicate us as intellectuals, critics, and knowledge producers, are part of a larger context of struggle, contingency, and transformation that seems to locate us in a moment of significant transition from one configuration of modernity (the liberal modernity that began to take shape, at least in the United States, after the civil war14 ) to another modernity, a coming modernity that is being forged out of the multiple competitions among the new right (itself a fragile alliance of various political, cultural, and economic fractions), various forms of liberalisms, and various fractions of the left, with a good dose of chance and popular activism and un-involvement thrown in for good measure. In fact, given that the current formations of both the new right and the new left emerged in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, just as liberal modernity reached its height of social and political power, we might see the current struggle over American modernity as the continuation of the self-conscious and strategic appearance of an organic crisis that began to take shape after World War II (and became explicit and visible in the 1970s). Minerva’s owl, as it were. The point is that the current problem-space in which we have to reformulate our vision of cultural studies is itself, in part, a rearticulation of that very problem-space that called cultural studies into existence at the Centre. And I think it is fair to say that we – I use the collective pronoun invitationally – are not yet responding effectively, either to the larger struggle over modernity or to the more narrowly defined struggle over epistemology and value. There are lessons, important lessons, to be learned from the early visions of Hoggart, Williams, Carey, and – insofar as he located himself, albeit to a smaller extent, in this problem-space – Stuart Hall. But there is something more, something crucial, we might learn from Richard Hoggart, because of his attempts to forge a practice that would enable him (and others) to understand, in all their complexity, multidimensionality, and lived reality, the changes taking place in English society, to understand what was going on. Hoggart understood that knowledge and imagination are inseparable, that they stand or fall together, and that they change together. And so, in the end, the epistemological project/work of cultural studies is inseparable from Richard Hoggart’s concerns about imagination in the second half of The Uses of Literacy. And it is only now that I understand that Richard’s nightmare

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was always the vision of a certain trajectory of our possible future, of a future that is no longer open, where imagination is no longer articulated to either knowledge or reality. It is a nightmare in which lived reality is divorced from the power of imagination; it is a nightmare in which, as it were, we had to echo the words of Beckett: ‘imagination dead imagine.’ That is, I think, the challenge posed to us: to re-imagine knowledge and imagination themselves as well as their relationship, and to inquire into their conditions of possibility as another possible future. That is, we must do what cultural studies always does – to reinvent itself in the new problem-space, in order to understand what is going on, to open up the imagination of other possibilities, and, in that way, to contribute to the making of a better future. That is what Richard Hoggart has given me – 50 years into his future.

Notes 1. This chapter was first delivered as a paper at ‘The Uses of Richard Hoggart’ conference, Sheffield University, England, April 2006. I am grateful to Sue Owen for all her work and support, and especially for giving me the opportunity to thank Richard Hoggart for all he did for me, both intended and indirect. I have chosen to keep the informal presentational style of the chapter as delivered. This is an expanded and revised version of my essay ‘Rereading the past from the future,’ International Journal of Cultural Studies 10.1 (March, 2007), 125–34. 2. Richard had a kind of continuing intellectual presence at my undergraduate university, the University of Rochester, after his visit there in 1956–1957, and some of my professors in the history department had maintained some contact with him. 3. It is crucial to remember that Hoggart distinguished between value descriptions – finding the values implicit within particular examples of expressive culture and value judgment. 4. The other seminars were (1) a reading seminar, later called the theory seminar, under the guidance of Stuart Hall, in which we read an enormously wide range of texts in sociological and anthropological theory, pragmatism, existentialism, semiotics,and so on. In this seminar, participants explored how to theorize the project as it had been formulated by Williams and Hoggart; and (2) a research seminar in which individuals presented their own research and, eventually, a collective and collaborative – group – research project was formulated around a particular text, ‘Cure for Marriage.’ It was here, in practice, in research, that the participants tried to figure out what cultural studies was, and what it meant to do it: What did it mean to understand culture in relation to society, and society through culture? And it was here that participants tried to come to terms with the demand for complexity and interdisciplinarity that was implicit in Williams’ definition of cultural studies as the study of all the relations among all the elements in a whole way of life.

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5. Truth be told, I have never been very interested in reading or interpreting particular texts. 6. It might be possible at this point to try to construct Hoggart as a precursor of contemporary developments – for example, an emphasis on embodiment and affect, on everyday life and even perhaps over-determination. 7. The defense of Hoggart as anti-theoretical is often predicated on, or aligned with, the rather patronizing assumption that ‘ordinary people’ cannot or will not read theory, and hence that anything addressed to them must be atheoretical. 8. James Carey drew on Dewey, Innis, and Mumford – and in 1963 suggested the label ‘cultural studies’ to describe ‘a wedge discipline against positive science’ (including behaviorism, functionalism, utilitarianism, and political economy). 9. It is worth noting that this problematic of epistemology and science reappeared throughout the early work of the Centre, especially in a number of essays by Stuart Hall. See, for example, ‘The Hinterlands of Science.’ 10. In that sense, The Uses of Literacy demonstrated the complexity of attitudes, intelligences, feeling, and moralities within working-class culture. 11. Simply put, the assumption was that what happens to the language tells you something about what is happening in society. 12. A high school equivalency course/exam. 13. What I have elsewhere called the struggle over the coming American modernity: see my Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics and America’s Future. (Boulder: Paradigm, 2005). 14. This is not to suggest that it emerged in some linear and uncontested trajectory, or that its dominance was ever complete, unchallenged, or uncompromised.

Works cited Mulhern, F. (2000). Culture/Metaculture. London: Routledge. Hall, S. (1969–1970). ‘Introduction’ to The Annual Report of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Birmingham: Birmingham University. ——(1990). ‘The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities,’ October 53: 11–23. Hoggart, R. (1957). The Uses of Literacy. New York: Oxford. ——(1969). ‘Contemporary Cultural Studies.’ CCCS, University of Birmingham. ——(1993). An Imagined Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kakutani, M. (2006). ‘Bending the Truth in a Million Little Ways.’ New York Times, 17 January. Owen, M. (2006). ‘Education Mobilization.’ The Nation, 6 February. Piereson, J. (2005). ‘The Left University.’ The Weekly Standard, 3 October. Scott, D. (2004) Conscripts of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press.

4 Richard Hoggart and the Way We Live Now Jim McGuigan

Introduction Richard Hoggart’s The Way We Live Now was published in 1995, just short of 40 years after the publication of his ‘classic’, The Uses of Literacy (1957). The later of these two books did not achieve anything like the success of the earlier book. Why? I ask this question because I regard The Way We Live Now as an important book in its own right as well as representing a continuity in the tradition of thought that tends to be called ‘cultural studies’. Cultural studies, in the sense associated with Hoggart, is strongly marked by its formation as a feature of socialist intellectual life in Britain. Today, cultural studies is sometimes mistakenly treated as though it were an orthodox academic discipline with no necessarily socialist affiliation – sometimes quite the opposite, in fact1 – instead of an interdisciplinary space for critical scholarship inspired by socialism and oppositional politics of a left-wing kind, which at its best eschews all orthodoxy, including the conventional wisdoms of neo-liberal capitalism and its social-democratic variant. I first read The Way We Live Now in the 1996 paperback edition. The Uses of Literacy also came out in paperback2 a year after its initial publication, in its case, to much public acclaim and exceptionally high sales for such a book. Many of us, especially the older ones, probably still possess a dog-eared copy of the reprinted Penguin edition with the detail of a Lowry painting on the cover. I suspect quite a few younger scholars in and around cultural studies will not have read it, though they will probably have heard of it. They may not even have heard of The Way We Live Now. 75

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Hoggart’s game Hoggart was an early player in the game of cultural studies, author of a ‘seminal’ book and founder of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary cultural studies (CCCS), aided with money from the paperback publisher of The Uses of Literacy, which was used largely to employ Stuart Hall as a research fellow. Hall’s role in the subsequent dissemination and internationalisation of cultural studies now tends to obscure Hoggart’s role in establishing an organisational base for a new field of study as an adjunct to a department of English but with a troublesome relation to sociological styles of research. Hoggart was a significant player in this respect and one whose contribution to the field is finally being revalued after a period of some neglect. By definition, such significant players in the inauguration of what appears to be a new game are controversial. This is because of their advanced role in transforming how the game is to be played or, perhaps, eventually replaced. Players of the older game tend to be alarmed by Young Turks earnestly trying to change the game. As Pierre Bourdieu has shown, there are game-playing rules that transcend particular moments of the game in the arts and scholarship, which usually form a typical narrative of revolt and incorporation (Bourdieu, 1996). In effect, what seems like a revolution in the heat of the moment turns out later to have been a reform or rectification, a means of refreshing the game instead of destroying it. In educational terms, Hoggart was an agent in broadening the game of English and literary study so that some now call it ‘cultural studies’. It was never Hoggart’s intention to overthrow English and literary study for something completely different, although young acolytes were inclined to see ‘the project’ that way and may have been only too keen to dismiss Hoggart as pass´e, albeit with some qualification.3 There was a definite break between Hoggart’s conception of cultural studies as an adjunct to English and the subsequent autonomisation of cultural studies as a separate field of study from the 1970s onwards. Something was gained and something was lost. As late as 1995, in The Way We Live Now, Hoggart argued that students should not be allowed to study soap opera until they have studied a literary text properly, like Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1996, 176.) Whether or not you agree with that piece of pedagogic advice, it is clearly evidence of Hoggart’s consistency. When I read The Way We Live Now, it was the consistency that struck me most. At the time, I was especially pleased to see such intransigence from a trusted figure, incidentally a characteristic that Hoggart shares with the late Raymond Williams.4 It is commonplace to say that we are living

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through a period of very fast and dramatic change, to which we must adapt in order to stay in touch. This is both exciting and disconcerting. In these circumstances, however, it can be comforting to note that some things do not change, such as Richard Hoggart’s position on questions of culture and society. Of course, the game changed a great deal between the late 1950s and the mid-1990s, not only the cultural education and research game but the political game too. Again, as Bourdieu notes, however autonomous a particular game is, it is not entirely separate from the wider power game in society. Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hoggart’s particular dispositions, derived from a northern working-class and ‘scholarshipboy’ habitus, facilitated certain kinds of position-taking not only in the game of culture but also in the game of power. He became a public intellectual, a respected voice on cultural matters and received into the magic circle of ‘the great and the good’, the type of person asked to serve on committees that made policy recommendations to government on such topics as youth services and the organisation of broadcasting.5 Hoggart was part of the fermentation process that brought Labour to power in 1964 after 13 years of Tory government. He left Birmingham for UNESCO in the late 1960s, and in the 1970s, as well as becoming the Warden of Goldsmiths College in London, he served as Vice-Chair of the Arts Council of Great Britain until summarily dismissed at Margaret Thatcher’s instigation. Along the way, he gave the Reith Lectures on BBC Radio 4. His testimony at the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960 had made him a figure of ‘the permissive society’, as seen from the Right. More generally, he was an exemplary social-democratic intellectual in the public sphere of post–Second World War Britain. Such figures are rare these days. They are said to have been left behind by history, their views no longer relevant to present-day concerns, rather like Friedrich von Hayek in the 1950s and 1960s. It is unlikely that Hoggart’s views will eventually have as great an impact as Hayek’s had when revived in the 1970s and 1980s with the advent of neo-liberalism and exemplified by Thatcher’s pioneering attack on the structures and discourses of social democracy. Yet, Hoggart’s orientation remains relevant in all sorts of ways.

The Way We Live Now Introducing The Way We Live Now, Hoggart places his book within the tradition of writing on ‘the condition of England question’, in Thomas Carlyle’s phrase. His focus remains quite localised, not even presuming to comment on Britain as a whole, never mind ‘the global world’. The

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title is borrowed from Anthony Trollope’s mammoth novel of the 1870s, the two-volume The Way We Live Now,6 which was adapted splendidly for BBC television in 2001 with a script by Andrew Davies. The Way We Live Now is the kind of classic realist text that might, I would hazard to guess, have pleased Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and, quite possibly, Gyorgy Lukacs as well, though I have no knowledge of whether any of them read it. Written by a Victorian civil servant of impeccably bourgeois credentials, the original Way We Live Now dissects the complex social relations and skulduggery of Victorian capitalism and politics. Hoggart himself comments, A solid reading of Trollope is instructive here. In some senses he is immured in the class he addresses and writes about, and fascinated by those above that class; sometimes his novels show this uncritically and disablingly. But for much of the time his books rise above and out of these constrictions and become illuminating critiques of the societies they depict, morally penetrating and at the same time exceptionally charitable because so perceptive into human frailty. Doubters might begin with the long task of reading The Way We Live Now. To read – one almost has to say ‘really read’ – a novel of that calibre is to be offered a valuable extension of consciousness; to describe this as offering, vicariously, aspirations towards middle-class styles and values is to lead yourself into an ideological dead-end. (Hoggart, 1996, 22) Hoggart’s task in The Way We Live Now had already been anticipated in Stuart Hall’s early sighting of ‘The Great Moving Right Show’7 and subsequent analyses of the immensely consequential impact of ‘Thatcherism’ and ‘authoritarian populism’ on British culture and society.8 Curiously, Hall’s work in this respect is not cited by Hoggart in The Way We Live Now, although he does make the occasional swipe at hegemony theory. The fact of the matter is that Hoggart has never been much interested in theory. As Hoggart puts it himself, he does not have a ‘theoretic’ cast of mind (interview with the author). Nevertheless, he does try to paint a big picture in The Way We Live Now, taking in education, the arts, mass and popular culture, broadcasting, language and literacy, cultural studies, class and status, patronage and sponsorship, media effects and censorship, memory and aphorisms, the role of intellectuals, and what to do about it all. As Hoggart remarks less than halfway through this critical survey and catalogue of abusive remarks, ‘it’s always pleasant to lay about you, especially with paradoxes and contrast’ (1996, 102).

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I think we can safely say that Hoggart has always been at odds with the theoreticist and far-Leftist tendencies once espoused by cultural studies but he is also inclined to be disappointed by the surprising diminution of social critique in that field of education and research over recent years, as represented most profoundly by the populist accommodation to ‘the way we live now’. He is neither theoretical nor uncritical. The coherence of The Way We Live Now derives not from a theory as such but, rather, from a historically located sensibility, which is characteristic of the social-democratic consensus that prevailed in Britain from wartime 1940s, ‘the people’s war’,9 to its break-up during what might be called the failed revolution of the 1970s and the subsequent counter-revolution. Hoggart’s sensibility was mediated by a cultural project associated with adult education in the 1950s,10 in which ‘serious’ literature and the history of ‘ordinary people’ were very important features of what Williams called ‘the long revolution’.11 It is this sensibility – or, indeed, ‘structure of feeling’ – that provides Hoggart with the standpoint from which he attacks ‘relativism’.

The problem of relativism The North American edition of The Way We Live Now is entitled The Tyranny of Relativism (subtitle: Culture and Politics in Contemporary English Society). Addressing his American readers, Hoggart remarks, ‘the entire ‘‘developed’’ . . . world is subject to ‘‘the tyranny of relativism’’ ’ (1998, xii). Thus, he reassures his American readers that the subject matter of the book is not, after all is said and done, English parochialism. Hoggart qualifies the use of ‘developed world’ in this statement with the parenthesis, ‘(what a question-begging epithet that is)’. At the ‘Excellence and Standards in the Arts’ conference, hosted by New Universities Quarterly in 1980, Hoggart delivered the opening keynote, entitled ‘The Crisis of Relativism’. The theme of relativism, then, is an old one for Hoggart. It was provoked in the 1970s by the cultural democracy movement, which sought to open up popular participation in the production of art and media. This movement, which I have called productionist populism, preceded a sharp turn towards uncritical celebration of mass-popular consumerism, consumptionist populism, in the cultural studies of the 1980s.12 In the ‘Excellence and Standards’ talk, Hoggart identified ‘a sizeable attack, first, on traditional definitions of art and, second, on the idea of standards in the arts; . . . this attack is usually made in the name of openness and democracy’ (1980, 21). Against this

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attack, he was to insist upon the necessity of judgement as to quality and discrimination between good and bad work. At the time, Hoggart was particularly incensed by the substitution of political ideology for cultural evaluation, and had himself come into conflict with feminism in that respect, which did not endear him to most latter-day exponents of cultural studies. Hoggart was prepared to be unpopular and, indeed, risk being dismissed for old-fashioned and perhaps even reactionary views in espousing this position against relativists of one stripe or another. However, he was not always wrong. Hoggart’s notion of relativism is not, strictly speaking, epistemological; nor even anthropological. It is about values, cultural and moral, ‘the obsessive avoidance of judgments of quality, or moral judgment’, as he says in The Way We Live Now (1996, 8). Hoggart sounds, briefly, like a dyed-in-the-wool Tory of the old school when he complains about waning deference to authority since the Second World War. Yet, he also argues that the Conservatives under Thatcher had exploited this cultural trend in order to push the free-market agenda, whilst also noting, similarly to Hall, the authoritarian aspect of Thatcherism. Supposed customer preferences are flattered and the Left has no response since it has given up on qualitative judgement too. Hoggart puts the general argument succinctly: ‘relativism leads to populism which then leads to levelling; and so to reductionism, to quality reduction of all kinds – from food to moral judgments’ (ibid.). He goes on to note ‘the powerful links of relativism to consumerism’. In a ‘relativist-consumerist society’ there is enormous emphasis on rapid change and popular benefit yet, curiously, inequality and limited opportunity persist. Hoggart quite rightly notes that the free-market, ‘relativist’, sensibility has invaded the public sector, where organisations are now expected to operate like private businesses in a competitive environment. Universal middle-classness, share-holding democracy and the market solution to all problems are the myths legitimising the way we live now that Hoggart traces through various institutions and practices from education to what he calls ‘the misuse of language’. I personally think that Hoggart’s general critique of contemporary culture and society in Britian – now several years old – is broadly correct. There are, however, some obvious criticisms to be made of it. Hoggart’s standpoint – founded upon what Richard Sennett has recently named out of desperation ‘social capitalism’,13 roughly, the welfare state and all that – albeit nostalgic does provide a critical place from which to view the present. A purely negative, backward-looking critique is unsatisfactory in spite of neo-liberalism’s noticeable success in turning the clock back.

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In looking for alternatives to the present state of affairs, however, it is not entirely negative to cite times when some things were done differently – and possibly better – in the past.

‘Good of its kind’ Nevertheless, Hoggart concedes too little to ‘relativism’, in fact nothing at all, especially considering that his own perspective is so historically relative. Hoggart’s attack on, in his own words, the ‘ ‘‘good of its kind’’ argument’ is particularly limiting. He raises it, in The Way We Live Now (1996, 59), with regard to an American cultural studies conference where some women graduate students challenged the expertise of the speakers and claimed equal rights for themselves.14 The issue there, however, seems rather different from the usual argument over ‘good of its kind’, which is not just an attack on elitism, academic or otherwise. The ‘good of its kind’ argument usually comes into play around debates over the superiority or inferiority of particular forms and media. It was Hoggart himself who originally put the ‘good of its kind’ argument most influentially. For instance, in an Observer article of 1961, he criticised discrimination between forms and media, and argued for discrimination within forms and media: The crucial distinctions today are not those between the News of the World and the Observer, between the Third Programme and the Light Programme, between sex-and-violence paperbacks and egghead paperbacks, between Bootsie and Snudge and the Alan Taylor lectures, between the Billy Cotton Band Show and the Brains Trust, between the Top Ten and a celebrity concert, or between ‘skiffle’ and chamber music. The distinctions we should be making are those between the News of the World and the Sunday Pictorial, between ‘skiffle’ and the Top Ten; and, for ‘highbrows’, between the Observer and the Sunday Times, or, in ‘egghead’ paperbacks, between Peter Townsend and Vance Packard. (1973, 129–30) Hoggart famously distinguished between ‘the processed’ and ‘the lived’. This applied to popular culture as well as the consecrated arts. Crucially significant then was the debate over the value of mass-popular culture. Hoggart wanted to distinguish between the truly ‘popular’ and the merely ‘mass’. For him, the popular was lived whereas the mass was processed. The protocol following from that distinction was put into practice by Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, explicitly acknowledging

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Hoggart’s influence, in their guide book for teachers of 1964, The Popular Arts. There, they argued, In terms of actual quality (and it is with this, rather than with ‘effects’, that we are principally concerned) the struggle between what is good and worthwhile and what is shoddy and debased is not a struggle against the modern forms of communication, but a conflict within these media. (1964, 388) In his book of 2004, Mass Media in a Mass Society, building upon his remarks in The Way We Live Now, Hoggart repudiated the position that he himself had argued for so strenuously over 40 years previously: That favourite exculpatory phrase on the lines of ‘Agreed, it’s not very high-brow but at least it’s good of its kind’ is especially tempting. It seems to avoid the awful business of having to say that some things might be better than others, that some things show the feebleness of their authors’ talents and others are no more than market-invented hogwash. In such a world all products should be without distinguishing value-judgements, never set against any other things. All views are horizontal, never vertical. The excusing phrase above is used as a blanket acquittal to avoid any criteria of value being applied, especially to all of what could be called ‘the popular arts’. This is a pity because it can have a valid as well as an invalid use. (2004, 60) The qualifying phrase at the end of this passage is vital since it recalls Hoggart’s own role in formulating the ‘good of its kind’ argument in the first place. He goes on to reiterate it: A valid use of that ‘good of its kind’ rule could start by recognizing just what in any particular popular art, other than the numbers who consume it, might actually make it good: verbal or musical inventiveness, say; that might do nicely. (Ibid.) Hoggart even notes that some work defined as ‘highbrow’ might be quite as meretricious as any ‘lowbrow’ work. Nevertheless, he goes on to qualify the ‘good of its kind’ argument decisively by saying that ‘The scales of value should run from the very top to the bottom of what is

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offered at any time, in any genre; but some scales reach higher, and some lower, than others’ (2004, 60–61). So, we are back at the original problem, which remains a dead end, that some art forms are inherently superior to others and that this should concern us probably more than value issues within particular forms and media. To make the argument against ‘good of its kind’, in The Way We Live Now, Hoggart had already invoked the superiority of John Milton’s Paradise Lost over Bob Dylan’s lyrics, echoing the trite comparison of Keats and Dylan made by David Hare on a Late Show in the early 1990s. It is unfortunate that Hoggart felt the need to shore up his position by recourse to some absolute standard established in the selective tradition of great literature. Today, it is a hopeless position to adopt politically when the real terrain at stake is that of mass-popular culture. Hoggart’s own distinction between ‘mass’ and ‘popular’ is no longer useful. The debate between populist cultural studies and literary elitism is stale – and largely won by the populists – whereas the defence and the pursuit of something like ‘standards’ in mass-popular culture, especially television culture, are urgent matters. John Mepham responded to the challenge several years ago, when the British tradition of public service broadcasting was under serious threat and competition from proliferating commercial channels was being promoted by governments not only in Britain but throughout Europe. He made an interesting stab at reformulating the question of ‘quality’ under postmodern, relativistic conditions. Mepham argued that while quality may be contingent in relation to particular tastes and values, it is not entirely arbitrary. It has something to do with purpose, with how we constitute – and reconstitute – the project of ‘good television’, for instance, in drama, a project close to Hoggart’s own heart. With a neo-liberal Conservative government in power at the time that Mepham went on his Quixotic quest, though little has changed since with the advent of a neo-liberal Labour government, the television project was being transformed almost exclusively in free-market terms, breaking with the traditional paternalism of public service broadcasting. Mepham did not want simply to defend the public service tradition since it had established a dubious notion of quality around the distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ television. For Mepham, if quality matters, it should not be confined to minority, ‘serious’ programming but should apply to the whole range of majority, ‘popular’ programming too. For Mepham, ‘quality’ is bound up with social, cultural and ethical values. It includes, therefore, ‘a social project, a cultural purpose and a normative framework’. The social project in a ‘culturally plural society’

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must entail ‘a rule of diversity’; that is, a range of different values and interpretations must be represented. The cultural purpose may have several aspects but Mepham stresses ‘the provision of usable stories’, by which he means stories of relevance to people in their everyday lives, enabling them to understand what is going on and helping them to consider the best courses of action. The normative framework, for Mepham, prescribes ‘an ethic of truth-telling’. Television should not deliberately mislead the public. Broadcasting professionals have a duty to tell the truth as they see it. Mepham defines ‘High quality television . . . television which is excellent as measured by its faithfulness to these principles – the rule of diversity, the cultural purpose of providing usable stories, and the ethic of truth-telling’ [italics in the original] (1991, 22). Mepham is not at all na¨ıve about truth, as he says: It is precisely because there is no Truth, no guaranteed foundation of true principles which could act as a criterion of truth, no certainty derived from access to reality independently of our research and its instruments, that an ethic of truth-telling is essential. (1991, 26) Clearly, with regard to ‘factual’ television, news and current affairs, it is only reasonable to expect truthfulness but why is this relevant to drama? Mepham believed it was, particularly in terms of willingness to dramatise troubling issues in bold and striking ways, not to rely upon comforting clich´es. Writing in the early 1990s, Mepham cited BBC Television’s EastEnders for its startling at the time and, therefore, pioneering representation of homosexuality. I am not sure that he would be citing EastEnders today. Let us take another example to further clarify the issues, a more recently ‘innovative’ programme, BBC Television’s Little Britain. One of the most successful television programmes of the mid-2000s, measured by viewing figures and industry awards, Little Britain is symptomatic of a trend towards what I would call ‘cruel comedy’, the kind of comedy that is derived from abuse of the weak. Its scatter-gun ridicule and vicious stereotyping represent a pervasive degeneration and reversal of the progress that had been made in British television comedy since the 1980s. That it has been so popular and seldom criticised, with some honourable exceptions (Hari, 2005, 35), is solemn testimony perhaps to the way we live now in Britain. The programme presents itself as just harmless fun, not to be taken seriously. However, when you explore the

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sources of its humour, it is arguably anything but harmless. The humour is largely focused upon derision of the weak, including disabled people, the elderly, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, members of ‘the underclass’, the overweight, the unintelligent and women old and young. Journalist Johann Hari asked the obvious question ‘what does it say about us as that we are a nation that pines for gags about stupid, poor people and old women pissing themselves in public?’ (ibid.). That there has been hardly any academic criticism of Little Britain15 is a sad indictment not only of cultural studies today but of the humanities in general. If nothing else, the older school of socio-cultural criticism, exemplified quite recently by Hoggart’s The Way We Live Now, could scarcely have let the matter pass so lightly.

Accommodation and resistance With the exception of his rather baffling reversal of opinion on the ‘good of its kind’ argument, which undermines one of the great strengths of his earlier position as a cultural critic, Hoggart has remained remarkably consistent over the years whilst others have more readily blown with the wind. For the most part, he has stayed more or less in the same place. This is a much less accommodating place than hitherto. In that sense, he is a figure out of time, not simply because he has grown old. Hoggart has retained a distinctly autonomous position despite or because of his practical engagements in the public sphere. In his defence of the autonomy of the intellectual, Bourdieu observed that ‘The threats to autonomy result from the increasingly greater interpenetration between the world of art and the world of money’ (1996, 344). He also commented upon ‘the grip or empire of the economy over artistic or scientific research’ (1996, 345). Bourdieu refers to the whole range of economic pressures on intellectual work in the era of neo-liberalism. Few of us in the academy have actually been bought off but none of us have been immune from the pressures referred to by Bourdieu. Nowadays, for instance, we are required to treat our students as customers. It is tempting to simply give them what they want, especially in a subject like cultural studies, to satisfy tastes already formed by consumer culture rather than to strive for something better. Another temptation is to turn cultural studies into a kind of Business Studies. Having adopted a ‘postmodern’ managerial perspective and choosing to relay the vacuous claims that are made by government these days concerning employment

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prospects in cutting-edge ‘creative industries’, some erstwhile exponents of cultural studies depart opportunistically from the field.16 That would not be Hoggart’s way.

Notes 1. McGuigan, ‘The Politics of Cultural Studies and Cool Capitalism’, Cultural Politics 2.2, July 2006, 137–58. 2. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958). First pub. 1957. 3. See, for instance, Charles Critcher, ‘Sociology, Cultural Studies and the PostWar Working Class’ in J. Clarke, C. Critcher and R. Johnson (eds), Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 1–71. 4. See McGuigan, ‘Reaching for Control: Raymond Williams on Mass Communication and Popular Culture’ in W.J Morgan and P. Preston (eds), Raymond Williams: Politics, Education, Letters (London: Macmillan, 1993), 163–88; and my ‘ ‘‘A Slow Reach Again for Control’’: Raymond Williams and the Vicissitudes of Cultural Policy’ in J. Wallace, R. Jones and S. Nield (eds), Raymond Williams: Knowledge, Limits and the Future (London: Macmillan, 1997), 56–70. 5. See McGuigan, ‘Richard Hoggart: Public Intellectual’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 12.2, July 2006, 199–208. 6. Trollope, Anthony, The Way We Live Now (London: Penguin, 1993; edn. first pub. 1974–1975). 7. Stuart Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’ in S. Hall and M. Jacques (eds), The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983), 19–39. This article was originally published in Marxism Today in early 1979, months before Thatcher’s first general election victory. 8. Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988). 9. Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–45 (London: Panther, 1969). 10. Tom Steele, The Emergence of Cultural Studies 1945–65: Cultural Politics, Adult Education and the English Question (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1997). 11. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965; first pub. 1961). 12. For a discussion, see McGuigan, Cultural Populism (London: Routledge, 1992). 13. Sennett, Richard, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 14. This conference, ‘Cultural Studies Now and in the Future’, which signalled a decisive shift in the power centre of the field to the United States and its massive depoliticisation, was held at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The papers are collected in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies (London & New York: Routledge, 1992). 15. I have made some attempt to substantiate with specific examples my criticisms of Little Britain in ‘Identity and ‘‘the Crisis of Community’’ ’ in M. Higgins and J. Storey (eds), The Companion to Modern British Culture (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 16. See, for instance, John Hartley (ed.), Creative Industries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).

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Works cited Bourdieu, Pierre (1996). The Rules of Art – Genesis and Structure of Literary Art. Cambridge: Polity. First pub. 1992. Hall, Stuart and Paddy Whannel (1964). The Popular Arts. London: Hutchinson. Hari, Johann (2005). ‘Why I Hate Little Britain’. The Independent, 22 November, p. 35. Hoggart, Richard (1973). ‘Culture: Dead and Alive’, in Speaking to Each Other, Vol.1 ‘About Society’. Harmondsworth: Penguin.129–132. First pub.1961. ——(1980). ‘The Crisis of Relativism’, New Universities Quarterly 35.1, 21–32. ——(1996). The Way We Live Now. London: Pimlico. First pub. London: Chatto, 1995. ——(1998). The Tyranny of Relativism: Culture and Politics in Contemporary English Society (American edition of The Way We Live Now). New Brunswick: Transaction. ——(2004). Mass Media in a Mass Society: Myth and Reality. London: Continuum. Mepham, John (1991). ‘Television Fictions: Quality and Truth-Telling’, Radical Philosophy 57, 20–27.

5 Richard Hoggart and the Epistemological Impact of Cultural Studies Richard E. Lee

It is difficult today to grasp the impact the publication of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) had on the intellectual world of the late 1950s. What is clear, however, is that the book itself and the knowledge movement of which it formed an initial component have had an enormous effect on the way many scholars understand the world of human social relations. Moreover, the development of that knowledge movement, cultural studies, must now be recognized as a fundamental challenge to the large-scale structures defining and organizing what counts as legitimate, authoritative knowledge in the modern world. Both Hoggart’s book and the deployment of ‘culture’ as a major category of analysis were part of a specific historical conjuncture. On the one hand, the turn to culture by the independent left in Britain during the 1950s was immediately occasioned and furthered by the geopolitical events that figured in the East–West struggle and the multifaceted dominance of the United States that formed their context. The assertions of both the liberal, social democratic, West and the Communist, Stalinist, East were called into question and the theoretical perspectives associated with the blocs proved grossly inadequate in explaining the changes in social structure and practice that so clearly seemed to have taken place since 1945. On the other hand, the importance of the category of culture had constantly been espoused by the long line of social critics in the literary tradition, but in a way that had eventually depoliticized the analytic perspective it had for so long grounded. Already jolted by the experience of East Germany in 1953, the entire left, including the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which had preached unity and reconstruction in the immediate post-war period, was traumatized by the events of 1956: the revelations of Khrushchev’s 88

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‘secret speech,’ Hungary, and Suez. Three years after the death of Stalin, Khrushchev revealed the atrocities of the regime and denounced the ‘cult of personality,’ thus breaking ground for home-front ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘peaceful coexistence’ worldwide. But in Budapest students called for Soviet withdrawal and multiparty elections. The result was a rebellion that was put down in three days with 10,000 casualties. And when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, the British and the French conspired in a secret deal with the Israelis to get it back. However, Eisenhower refused to support the pound sterling, under pressure from the expense of such a deployment, and the invasion collapsed. As developments in the Soviet East drove members out of the CPGB, so Labor’s support of intervention in Egypt revealed the imperialist implications of the social-democratic consensus. ‘ ‘‘Hungary’’ and ‘‘Suez’’ were thus ‘‘liminal,’’ boundary-marking experiences. They symbolized the break-up of the political Ice Age’ (Hall, 1989: 13). In the face of Stalinism and social democracy, neither of which seemed to offer people many possibilities in controlling their own lives, the first New Left reaffirmed humanist values with an emphasis on experience and agency. The campaign, or political project, gave intellectuals a leading role in constructing a theory and practice to which the creativity of individuals in the production of society, politics, and history was central. For scholars, the delegitimation of both of the major contemporary approaches to social analysis – the quantitative, comparative method of the Columbia School and the orthodox base-superstructure model – opened a space for the deployment of ‘culture,’ culture repoliticized through the first New Left, as a primary analytic category. If this particular conjuncture of British life and place in the world in the 1950s defines the synchronic topography of the first flowering of cultural studies, the diachronic trajectory of a tradition of English social criticism, which had kept ‘culture’ alive as an analytic category and in which the role of the intellectual as social agent was inscribed, was equally determinate. Indeed, the ‘turn’ to culture by the independent left in Britain during the late 1950s was just as surely a ‘return’ to culture, at least in name. Culture was the code word around which the notions of Authenticity, Tradition, and the Organic Community had coalesced over a century and a half, in opposition first to revolution, then to laissez-faire liberalism, and finally to the reformist progress of social engineering. There was, as well, an underside to what developed as a nationalistic, ethnocentric, and textual model. The ‘high-cultural’ tradition of order evolved as a response and corrective to the pressures generated through the practical interactions on a world scale among working people. These

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pressures were manifested in vocal and violent resistance to exploitation both at home and abroad, to colonial domination, and to slavery. As the legacy of the French Revolution dismantled any possibility of a static world, in England, the literary intellectual in the role of social critic became a central figure interpreting that world in which change now had to be accepted as normal. Class and inequality and popular culture and education, treated as national issues, formed the terrain of the ‘Revolution Controversy’ and the ‘Condition-of-England-Question’ during the first half of the nineteenth century. Both the rhetorical construction of ideological structures and the legitimation of, or opposition to, the institutions in which they found their material expression were developed discursively in the debates. This work was engaged and overtly political in that period when protest and insurgency went cruelly repressed. During the second half of the century the conspicuously political role of the critic was subtly undermined from within. Social criticism was carried forward and solidified in pursuit of order (culture) and in opposition to radicalism (anarchy). Laissez-faire liberalism was transformed as it absorbed the conservative critique, and, served by the new social sciences, responded to and internalized radical agendas in an increasingly circumscribed nationalistic mode. An uneasy consensus colonized both the left and the right, and real political alternatives withered. As the century closed, art lost its social referent and criticism slipped into aestheticism. With popular politics increasingly out of its purview, English studies did service in the war effort, underwent technical development, and was effectively institutionalized as an anchor to national identity. Social criticism, then, was carried forward and solidified in pursuit of order, explicitly identified with culture by Matthew Arnold, and in opposition to the radicalism of the Reform movement and the revolts in Jamaica and Ireland, identified with anarchy. As the century closed and the politics of social action were squeezed out of criticism, the social sciences took over the collective component of Arnold’s project. The activist criticism of the early nineteenth century was transformed via Arnold’s espousal of order, ‘force ‘till right is ready,’ in which he interpellated the state; Walter Pater’s ‘internal flame’ of disciplined contemplation focused on and inside the individual; I. A. Richards’s methodology of decontextualized close reading; and the elitism and neglect of history of Cambridge English and the Scrutiny circle grouped around F. R. and Q. D. Leavis. Nonetheless, although practical politics may have been expunged, values remained a primary consideration. Thus, we are transported from a literary activism in which the relationship of order to

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revolution and exploitation were actually debated during a period of a very real repression of politics in the early nineteenth century, to a twentieth-century erasure of politics in criticism itself. The geopolitics of the mid-1950s come together with this 150-year trajectory of British criticism in the formation of the first New Left and the emergence of cultural studies. Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, and Richard Hoggart, each in his own way, contributed to the intellectual and scholarly (as well as political) bases of these movements. Notwithstanding the differences they exhibited in practical politics or analytical emphasis, the national perspective and common concerns for education, popular cultural forms, and the ‘lived’ experience of class, which they shared, represent a continuity in English cultural criticism that survived in the immediate directions cultural studies would take. Although Williams and Hoggart were nurtured in the English critical tradition, through their association with the Leavises, both took a critical stance. Williams was explicit about the less attractive side of Leavisism. ‘The concept of a cultivated minority, set over against a ‘‘decreated’’ mass, tends, in its assertion, to a damaging arrogance and skepticism. The concept of a wholly organic and satisfying past, to be set against a disintegrated and dissatisfying present, tends in its neglect of history to a denial of real social experience’ (Williams, 1958: 263). On the plus side, Williams registers ‘Leavis’s great stress on education’ and the excitement of ‘practical criticism,’ even though it tended ‘to become too dominant a mode, precisely because it evades both structural problems and in the end all questions of belief and ideology’ (1979: 66). For Hoggart, F. R. Leavis was a ‘looming and intransigent figure . . . one from whom many of us had learned more than from any other living critic, even if we had reservations about some of his views’ (1992: 10, 62). Hoggart ‘became increasingly uneasy, especially with Mrs Leavis’s work,’ and addressed his reservations about her ‘separation from the material she was writing about’ in The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart in Corner, 1991: 139). The Uses of Literacy was ‘written back to front – first a Leavisite kind of analysis, then the description of working-class life with which it opens’ (Hoggart, 1992: 5). Reminiscent of one aspect of the Scrutiny ‘Manifesto’ of 1932, Part One is recuperative, a positive recovery of working-class culture in the anthropological sense (not the artistic or Arnoldian) as Hoggart remembers the urban North of the 1920s and 1930s from his childhood. This notion of working-class culture as intrinsically valuable and worthy of study presents us with one of the initial and lasting concerns of cultural studies. Part Two is an indictment of ‘invitations

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to self-indulgence’ (Hoggart, 1957: 142), which further links it to the concerns of Leavis and Scrutiny as well as reflecting a long and nagging anti-Americanism associated with the debasement of popular culture. The effort to come to grips with mass culture and resistance to it represent a second continuing concern of cultural studies. In rejecting some of the approaches in the social sciences and the humanities and adopting others, Hoggart’s perspective draws attention to the constraints imposed on understanding social relations by this disciplinary separation. He valued the novelist for bringing the reader close to working-class life, but the ‘complex and claustrophobic impression’ that is left by certain novels, like Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, and sociological surveys whose images are built up from additive models, informs his central, and vastly influential, programmatic statement: ‘we have to try to see beyond the habits to what the habits stand for, to see through the statements to what the statements really mean (which may be the opposite of the statements themselves), to detect the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances’ (Hoggart, 1957: 18). The two major techniques he employs, which were to be thoroughly exploited by cultural studies, are literary analysis and ethnography. Certainly, one of his achievements was to extend literary-critical methods to popular fields such as music, news media, and fiction. Ethnography, in this case, is a personal ethnography of his own working-class background. The value judgments that punctuate the text, and the absence of class as social relation and struggle, situate