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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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.

Notes on Contributors xi

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 Métier 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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Introduction

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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Hoggart: Literary Criticism and Cultural Decline

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 and the Way We Live Now

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 passé, 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 clichés. 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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Hoggart and Epistemological Impact of Cultural Studies

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 The Uses of Literacy in the Scrutiny tradition and tend to set it apart from the lines of inquiry it inspired. Leavis’s solution to Hoggart’s ‘regrettable aspects of change’ (Hoggart, 1957: 41) had been education, reminiscent of Richards, and even Carlyle: ‘We cannot, as we might in a healthy state of culture, leave the citizen to be formed unconsciously by his environment; if anything like a worthy idea of satisfactory living is to be saved, he must be trained to discriminate and to resist’ (Leavis and Thompson, 1933: 5). All the same, Hoggart’s work – rooted in the family, which, in turn, is inserted in a greater, dichotomous world of ‘Them’ and ‘Us’ – valorizes working-class culture itself with respect to massification and commercialization. Although evocative of popular cultural analyses to come, as Graeme Turner has written, the contradiction between his ‘conflicting social and theoretical allegiances . . . from an affectionate account of the social function of popular culture to an evaluative critique of its textual forms’ shows an ‘ambivalence about the class he has left and the limitations of the theoretical tradition he has joined’ (1990: 49).1

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In Hoggart, Williams, and Thompson, the elite, literary-critical tradition, drained of politics, intersected and melded with the theoretical and practical commitment to both politics and history at the popular level on the left. A renewed and refocused interest in the working class appeared as a common theme in the literature associated with the first New Left and claimed as formative by cultural studies: Universities and Left Review greeted Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy with four articles in a special section of its second issue in 1957. In the tradition of Leavis and Scrutiny and in reference to the ‘culture debate’ – a continuity with a century and a half of humanistic (and conservative) social critique – Hoggart’s recuperation of values and meanings contingent on the rejection, or upending, of the high/low culture distinction by reading working-class, popular, culture as a ‘text’ was decisively innovative and informed first New Left discussions of both the base-superstructure and the class and classlessness questions in the 1950s. From ‘below,’ Hoggart was recovering an urban working-class experience that was being undermined by commercialism and validating it in the face of elite cultural expressions. From ‘above,’ Williams was exposing the usurpation of texts of resistance and combating their appropriation by the forces of reaction. Both, however, were limited by the gradual exclusion of the politics of struggle from the tradition of criticism informing their work, a point often made by Thompson. Williams and Thompson shared a dedication to historical analysis inherent in Marxism, but neither Williams nor Hoggart seemed to be writing just history, or sociology, or literary criticism for that matter. Williams and Hoggart approached their subject matter from the humanities, but their work rejected disciplinary boundaries, and the rejection was reciprocal; they defied the disciplines, and the disciplines disavowed them. Well received for its distinction, conviction, and intellectual honesty, Hoggart’s work did not fit into pre-established categories. His reviewers characterized his work as that of a ‘gifted amateur in a field where modern sociological techniques of inquiry seem inadequate for the task at hand’ (Tropp, 1958: 221); and, ‘it must be said that this is not a report of professional social research. . . . [It] is primarily a product of sensibility’ (Freidson, 1958: 98). Hoggart was criticized as well for his ‘womancentered’ depictions (Corner, 1991: 142). Arthur Calder-Marshall wrote, ‘Like Mr Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, Mr Williams’s Culture and Society 1780–1950 and The Long Revolution are not works of scholarship but autobiographies of cultural displacement, disguised as objective studies’ (1961: 217). All the same, The Uses of Literacy legitimated a return to class politics, albeit one based on the solidarities of backstreet life.

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If the cultural struggle and the political were indivisible, it was because the hierarchical division between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ seemed an organizing principle of British social life (Samuel, 1989: 56). During the mid-1960s, with the political project of the first New Left at an impasse and the quest for theory foraging beyond the national setting, it was in the academic context that the alliance developed between the conservative tradition of social critique and literary-critical methods and the first New Left concern for a positive, and political, re-evaluation of popular culture and individual agency. In different ways, both were ‘humanist’; both emphasized ‘values.’ The early years of the institutionalization of cultural studies, coinciding with the establishment of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in 1964 by Richard Hoggart and his tenure as director, extended the program begun in The Uses of Literacy. That is, popular culture, or working-class culture assailed by mass culture, was distinguished from elite or middle-class culture(s) and read through the methodological lenses of the literary-critical tradition. Literature was experienced ‘in and for itself’ by ‘reading for tone’ and ‘reading for value’ as mechanisms for the extraction of the aesthetic, psychological, and cultural elements (produced in a certain kind of society at a certain period) to find ‘what field of values is embodied, reflected or resisted.’ Works of art are bearers of meaning; there ‘is no such thing as ‘‘a work of art in itself’’.’ Thus the major assumptions are: 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, rituals, forms; that it lives out these values expressively, in its actions and its arts; that this living out of values is a dialectical process, never complete, always subject to innovation and change; and that no one individual ever makes a perfect ‘fit’ with the dominant order of values of his culture. (Hoggart, 1969: 160–63) Of course, the elite tradition did not simply evaporate: in 1966 Hoggart contended that ‘without appreciating good literature no one will really understand the nature of society’, even though ‘literary critical analysis can be applied to certain social phenomena other than ‘‘academically respectable’’ literature.’ Hoggart also remained captivated by the ‘scientific’ mode: ‘literary critical analysis of the mass arts is not a substitute

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for social scientific analysis but a useful – an essential – adjunct’; but he continues to distinguish between high and mass arts, ‘great art tells us infinitely more’ (1966: 225, 242, 247). In his inaugural lecture of 1963, ‘Schools of English and Contemporary Society,’ for ‘contemporary cultural studies’ Hoggart indicated ‘many ancestors; but Dr Leavis in his culture and environment work and Mrs Leavis in her studies in popular fiction are more important than most.’ The particularistic approach to which this alluded meshed with the departmental niche, albeit tenuous, CCCS had found in English. All the same, Hoggart’s project did not respect disciplinary lines. He divided the new field into three parts, drawing on both the humanities and the social sciences: one part ‘is roughly, historical and philosophical’; this was a necessity if there was to be a serious commitment to the analysis of cultural change. Change implies history. But a concern for history is a concern for time and the temporal dimension had been banished from literary studies. Another part ‘is, again roughly, sociological’; here, Hoggart singles out biographies of artists and studies of audiences along with the production relations of culture and their interrelations as fundamental to the work as he conceived it. The third part, the most important, ‘is the literary critical’; however, the high/middle/low terminology is ‘useless’ and ‘discussion of conformity, status, class, ‘Americanization’, mass art, folk art, urban art and the rest is simply too thin’ (Hoggart, 1963: 254–55). This was all quite prophetic. For Stuart Hall, cultural studies was a ‘conjunctural practice . . . developed from a different matrix of interdisciplinary studies and disciplines’ and ‘emerged precisely from a crisis in the humanities,’ the extension of Leavis’s project of taking questions of culture seriously, by Hoggart and Williams (Hall, 1990: 11). Colin Sparks notes the explicitly political dimension of the crisis: the ‘dominant tradition was openly unashamedly and profoundly undemocratic; cultural studies, from its inception, was a champion of democracy’ (1977: 17). Because of hostility from the mainstream humanities and social science establishment, cultural studies ‘was not conceptualized as an academic discipline at all’ in Britain, even though, at rock bottom, with Leavis, cultural studies shared the premise that language was the key to serious scholarly understanding of national culture. In fact, interdisciplinarity at CCCS did not mean ‘a kind of coalition of colleagues from different departments’ but rather a decentering or destabilization of ‘a series of interdisciplinary fields’ (Hall, 1990: 11, 12, 16). The recognition of the inadequacies of received categories of analysis, the emphasis on the relationality of the field, and this decentering and

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destabilization of the naturalized, taken-for-granted separation of the humanities and the social sciences and the divisions among the social sciences has been fundamental to the cultural studies project with its emphasis on values and interpretation in social analysis. What makes this of particular importance is that the questioning of the bases of the disciplinary structure defining and organizing what counts as legitimate and authoritative knowledge in the modern world has come under scrutiny from all quarters. This crisis, indeed, is part of a larger secular crisis of the processes reproducing the modern world as a recognizable continuity. The end of the third great world conflict of modern times in 19452 was marked by conjunctural fluctuations of the processes reproducing the long-term structures of the modern world over the past 500 years in the realms of production and distribution, and coercion and decision making. These were manifested as a Kondratieff A-phase of world economic expansion and the beginning of the period of US hegemony in the interstate system. Today we are living through 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. All indications suggest, however, that this situation is of a long-term, rather than cyclical, nature. In the third great realm of system processes co-constitutive with the economic and the geopolitical in reproducing the structures of the modern world, that of the structures of knowledge or the arena of cognition and intentionality, the existence of a long-term crisis, not just a mediumterm, conjunctural adjustment, became observable after the upheavals of 1968 (see Lee 2003).3 Today the processes reproducing the structures of knowledge are just as much in crisis as economic and geopolitical processes, suggesting that this is a single, secular crisis of the constitutive social relations of the modern world-system and that we are living through a transition leading to their transformation (see Hopkins and Wallerstein et al., 1996). During the 1960s and 1970s the equilibrium, consensus model that, it was argued, wrote history and power out of the equation was contested from across the entire spectrum of the structures of knowledge: from the humanities, ‘cultural studies’; from the social sciences, ‘science studies’; and from the sciences, ‘complexity studies.’ The theorizations of the challenges to the liberal order (such as the Vietnam War, and the civil rights, feminist, and student movements) were outgrowths of and contributed to challenges to the prevailing structures of knowledge in the long term. Beginning in this period, work in diverse fields of the

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social sciences and the humanities, eventually coming together under the rubric cultural studies, led to conclusions and interpretations incompatible with the premises on which the relational structure of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities were founded. Developments that indicate a collapse of the frontier separating the humanities from the social sciences have included the recognition of ‘values’ as an integral part of all knowledge formation, widespread methodological ecumenism, the rise of structuralism, the renewal of an appreciation of the significance of the local and the complex, and the revival of an emphasis on contingency and temporality associated with agency and creativity. Under this same broad umbrella of critique, sciences studies (including ‘sociology of scientific knowledge,’ ‘social studies of science,’ and ‘science and technology studies’) emanating from the social sciences has offered ‘exogenous’ appraisals of the development of science ranging from the way the social field influenced the directions of the development of science to the contingency of scientific knowledge, its (social) constructedness, and its local situatedness. New disciplinary/departmental groupings have also been invented, challenging the fact–values divide and illustrating how essentialist categories of difference have functioned to subordinate entire groups. Diverse strands of ‘feminism and gender studies’ have pointed to the constructedness of the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ and have noted how scientific discourse of the female body has functioned to position women in society. Many scholars of ‘race and ethnicity’ in the West have attacked essentialism as well while disputing Western universalism and objectivity. By the same token, many of those studying ‘non-Western societies’ have emphasized alternatives to the Western development model and pointed to the implications of these alternatives for epistemology. The ‘culture wars’ and the ‘science wars’ are striking evidence of the depth of the resistance these new developments have encountered. They continue a long history of debate and conflict in the modern world over how valid knowledge may be produced, what are the grounds and the scope of its authority, and who may speak in its voice (see Lee 2004b). Thus is raised the concrete question of what social action may be considered legitimate. At the very moment of the worldwide triumph (and very real success) of the Newtonian worldview, that is of a deterministic world of natural laws based on time-reversible dynamics, a new knowledge movement that would challenge its premises began to take root.

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As direct outgrowths of internal developments in mathematics and the natural sciences themselves, complexity studies (see Lee 1992 and 2004a) take a singular position completing, as they do, the disciplinary range of challenges to the long-term structures of knowledge from the privileged pole of the sciences. No longer comfortable with the role of the sciences as guarantor of ‘truth,’ complexity studies have had the effect of overturning the ‘scientific’ bases for such long-debated antinomies as structure versus agency, determinism versus freedom, and order versus chaos in the analysis of social reality. Although there is no consensus on the exact meaning of ‘complexity,’ during the last four decades it has become increasingly apparent that there exist complex phenomena that arise from very simple mechanisms and that this realization has implications across the disciplines. The rethinking that we are witnessing today, which has grown out of concrete research in complex systems, represents a synthetic approach as opposed to a reductionist one; indeed, a science of complexity holds out the possibility of representing change without reverting to reductionism. It marks a shift away from emphasizing equilibrium and certainty and defining causality as the consistent association of antecedent conditions and subsequent events amenable to experimental replication and hypothesis testing. Thus, at the lower end of the hierarchy of the structures of knowledge, cultural studies attests to the disintegration of the boundary between the humanities and the social sciences. Along with the demise of the self-evident validity of the uniquely ‘modern’ ideas of the original object and the autonomous human creator, the independent, self-interested but responsible individual, the liberal ‘subject,’ has lost ‘his’ foundations (see Lee 1996: 205). At the upper end, the concurrent emphasis in complexity studies on contingency, context-dependency, and multiple, overlapping temporal and spatial frameworks bears striking resemblance to the concerns of social scientists, and ‘objectivity’ associated with externalism is called seriously into question by the identification and study of the feedback mechanisms of complex systems, including historical social systems. It is not just that new models of complex systems are being made available to social scientists, or that developments across the structures of knowledge are having similar epistemological consequences, but rather that the ontology itself underpinning the claim to legitimacy of knowledge constructed on the ‘scientific’ model is undergoing a transformation. The question remains, if complex behavior is not amenable to explanation through hypothesis testing and theory construction because such systems, including now social systems, albeit deterministic, are

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inherently unpredictable, how can we proceed? Indeed, the hypothesis testing may be part of the contemporary epistemological quandary. It is part of a framework oriented toward the development of explanations for particular phenomena and the generalizations on which such explanations rest. This framework includes the corollary that once the theory is known, outcomes of specific interventions can be predicted and, therefore, social science knowledge can be exploited in policy making. This was the basis for the cross-national comparative research (the analogue of laboratory studies in the natural sciences) on which modernization theory depended. By the 1960s, the empirical failure of this work called seriously into question its theoretical and methodological underpinnings (not incidentally, just as the world economy entered a period of contraction, US hegemony came to an end, and the politics of knowledge formation became an issue for antisystemic movements). Contemporary events in our globally integrated world have shown that methods that specify (often only implicitly) an exemplar and then endeavor to predict the impact of interventions designed to move supposedly autonomous units toward some ideal state perform poorly. This is what both scholars and policy-oriented analysts are experiencing (again) today, to their dismay. All the same, large-scale regularities do persist over time and particularistic ‘rich description,’ or interpretive accounts based on an understanding, verstehen, of local value contexts, or resorting to ‘human creativity’ or ‘free will’ explanations, fail as well to capture the interrelatedness of structure and emergence. One answer to how to proceed remains that of individuating possible futures, or what Immanuel Wallerstein has called ‘utopistics’ (1998) and what Ilya Prigogine lamented as his fear ‘of the lack of utopias’ (2004: n.p.). Social analysts may henceforth feel licensed to make the shift from fabricating and verifying theories to imagining and evaluating the multiple possible consequences of diverse interpretative accounts of human reality and the actions they entail. Herein lies an alternative for a unified historical social science to both the nomothetic and the idiographic models of social scientific inquiry. It constitutes a mode of constructing authoritative knowledge of the human world, which is of engaging in science, by producing defensible accounts and future scenarios without chasing the chimera of predictability. The combination of the conviction that there is a ‘real’ world and that the future, although it is ‘determined’ by the past, is nonetheless unpredictable and the parallel assaults on dualism (see Prigogine 1996) challenges the epistemological status of the sciences as unique discoverers, guardians, and purveyors of valid knowledge, that is truth, by

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redefining what it means to describe the evolution of natural systems. Across the disciplines these arguments may be represented as a concern for spatial–temporal wholes constituted of relational structures representing the persisting regularities normally associated with a ‘scientific’ approach on one hand and the phenomenological time of their reproduction and change (the ineluctable reality of the arrow-of-time) that captures the play of incommensurable differences associated with a ‘humanistic’ approach on the other. Difference, of course, involves values. We are thus presented with a reunification of ‘is’ (the realm of facts and the goal of science) and ‘ought’ (the field of values and the challenge of the humanities) in the construction of systematic knowledge of human reality (see Putnum 2002). Cultural studies practitioners have long proclaimed the salience of values and today natural scientists studying complex systems refer to such systems as ‘creative.’ The result is that values need no longer be, must no longer be, construed simply as a matter of individual ethics or morality in the creation of authoritative knowledge of human reality, but must hereafter be conceived as an integral part of a historical social science. Indeed, authoritative knowledge thus constructed would have no pretensions to universality (validity for all times and places) but rather offer defensible interpretations for particular times and places. In this secular crisis of the structures of knowledge, the message for social scientists so convincingly conveyed by developments across the disciplines is that the grand intellectual antinomies that have been the subject of hot debate for so long – holism versus reductionism, structure versus agency, determinism versus freedom, order versus disorder, fact versus value – are dependent not just on contradictory epistemological positions, but more surely on a specific ontological view of the natural world as made up of fundamentally deterministic and predictable systems. We are not living the ‘new world order’ but a transition period of ‘new world disorder,’ a time of massive fluctuations far from equilibrium in the language of complexity studies. Change will not depend only on our normatively motivated action for its initiation. During a period of wide fluctuations in the constitutive processes of a system driven far from equilibrium, including, I submit, a system of social relations, small fluctuations can have enormous impact even to the extent of effecting total systemic transformation – instabilities expanding possibilities, that is opportunities, by reducing constraints. By the same token, the direction of change will, as complexity studies show, be exquisitely dependent on small fluctuations, for instance, in the form of our value-laden decisions and actions. Although from the perspective of the system as a whole

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these normatively motivated decisions and actions appear quite random, from the point of view of the individual actor they are highly rational and focused on specific system outcomes. This is not so much the simple return of agency, but the manifestation of the fundamental relationship between agency and structure – the indivisibility of chance and necessity. As I have argued elsewhere (Lee, 2001/2002) and as the work rehearsed in the preceding paragraphs I believe attests, the definition of valid knowledge claims in terms of ‘who, what, when, where, why’ and the ‘view from nowhere’ is giving way. As organic intellectuals all, we may (indeed, I would argue we must), without forsaking our dedication to ‘science,’ turn our attention to producing authoritative knowledge in terms of ‘for whom, for what, for when, for where’ and ‘from whose point-of-view.’ The confluence of cultural studies, science studies, and complexity studies and those contemporary disputes that have come to be known as the culture wars and the science wars underscore the covert, long-term, structural nature of the debates and impinge directly on the manner in which scholars make claims for the legitimacy of their interpretations of social reality. In sum, 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 Richard Hoggart’s contribution in that respect was clear from the very beginning. The outcome of this crisis will eventually be a reformulation of the criteria on which we deem knowledge legitimate and authoritative, and thus how we structure our decision making and social action. There is no way, however, that we can know if the transformation underway at present, and in which we will all play our part, will result in a more substantively rational human world. But the combined political, economic, and intellectual pressures of the present crisis, including that of the structures and institutions of knowledge production, at least offer an opportunity and hold out that possibility; indeed, such has been the embedded subtext of the cultural studies project.

Notes 1. Certainly, the general issues surrounding analyses of popular culture using literary methods were to remain central to cultural studies. However, the implications of the approach as employed by Hoggart could not escape E. P. Thompson’s critique: the tendency to view working people as subjects, recipients, victims, data, and the attendant inclination to regard cultural

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phenomena autonomous of class power – ‘What is at issue is the mind of the working-class: its consciousness of itself, its knowledge of its own potential strength.’ Notwithstanding Hoggart’s contention that the working-class world is resistant to change in a positive way, Thompson cited this presentation as precisely that of emphasizing the ‘passivity of the present-day working-class reader,’ thus inducing ‘a sense of hopelessness.’ Thompson points out the ahistorical foundation of the class and classlessness debate (‘When has the working class not been ‘‘built into the market’’?’) and identifies the same shortcomings in The Uses of Literacy, that is, ‘the misleading and anti-historical framework of the book’ (Thompson, 1959: 54, 52). 2. The Thirty Years’ War, the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars, the 1914–45 World Wars. 3. In the simplest terms, by the structures of knowledge I mean those patterns of what can and cannot be thought that determine what actions can and cannot be deemed feasible in the material world. These structures of knowledge of the modern world, which emerged along with the axial division of labor and the interstate system during the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the ‘long’ sixteenth century, are unique in human history in that they admitted as legitimate two ways of knowing, rather than just one. Those two ways of knowing were premised on a differentiation and separation between ‘truth’ and ‘values’ and were eventually institutionalized as a hierarchical separation between the ‘sciences’ and the ‘humanities.’ The medieval structures of knowledge recognized diverse fields or subject-matters; rhetoric was not astronomy. What was not recognized was differing bodies of knowledge that were based on contradictory visions of the way the world worked; all knowledge was imbued with values. The putatively value-neutral social sciences, which seemed to offer the possibility of a ‘scientific’ or non-value-oriented policy-making process in the service of ‘progress,’ came to occupy a tension-charged space between the sciences and the humanities in the wake of the irresolvable contest between the equally value-laden, but mutually exclusive, positions taken by conservatives and radicals in the humanities on the political future of the world following the French Revolution.

Works cited Calder-Marshall, Arthur. (1961). ‘Letters to the Editor: ‘‘The Long Revolution’’.’ Times Literary Supplement, Friday, 7, April, 217. Corner, John. (1991). ‘Studying Culture: Reflections and Assessments. An interview with Richard Hoggart.’ Media, Culture and Society, 13, 2, April, 137–152. Freidson, Eliot. (1958). ‘Review of The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart.’ American Journal of Sociology, 64, 1, July, 97–98. Hall, Stuart. (1989). ‘The ‘‘First’’ New Left: Life and Times.’ In Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On. Edited by Robin Archer, Diemut Bubeck, Hanjo Glock, Lesley Jacobs, Seth Moglen, Adam Steinhouse and Daniel Weinstock. New York: Verso, 11–38. ——(1990). ‘The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities.’ October, 53, Summer, 11–23.

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Hoggart, Richard. (1957). The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-class Life, with Special References to Publications and Entertainments. London: Chatto and Windus, 1967. ——(1963). ‘Schools of English and Contemporary Society.’ In About Literature. Vol 2 of Speaking to Each Other: Essays by Richard Hoggart. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. ——(1966). ‘Literature and Society.’ In A Guide to the Social Sciences. Edited by Norman MacKenzie. New York: New American Library. ——(1969). ‘Contemporary Cultural Studies: An Approach to the Study of Literature and Society.’ In Contemporary Criticism. Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 12. London: Edward Arnold, 1970. [First published as CCCS Occasional Paper No. 6.]. ——(1992). An Imagined Life. Vol. 3: 1959–91, of Life and Times. London: Chatto & Windus. Hopkins, Terence K. and Immanuel Wallerstein, et al. (1996). The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World-System, 1945–2025. London: Zed. Leavis, F. R. and Denys Thompson. (1933). Culture and Environment. London: Chatto & Windus. Lee, Richard. (1992). ‘Readings in the ‘‘New Science’’: A Selective, Annotated Bibliography.’ Review, XV, 1, Winter, 113–71. ——(1996). ‘Structures of Knowledge.’ In The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World-System, 1945–2025. By Hopkins, Terence K. and Immanuel Wallerstein, et al. London: Zed, 178–206. Lee, Richard E. (2001/2002). ‘Sesion ´ Inaugural.’ Inaugural Address, Third International Conference on Sociocybernetics, Spanish-English Parallel Text. Journal of Sociocybernetics, 2, 2, Fall/Winter, 43–8. ——(2003). ‘The ‘‘Third’’ Arena: Trends and Logistics in the Geoculture of the Modern World-System.’ In Emerging Issues in the 21st Century World-System. Edited by Wilma A. Dunaway. Westport: Greenwood, 120–27. ——(2004a). ‘Complexity Studies.’ In Overcoming the Two Cultures: The Sciences versus the Humanities in the Modern World-System. Lee, R. E. and I. Wallerstein, cords. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 107–17. ——(2004b). ‘The ‘‘Culture Wars’’ and the ‘‘Science Wars’’ ’ In Overcoming the Two Cultures: The Sciences versus the Humanities in the Modern World-System. Lee, R. E. and I. Wallerstein, coords. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 189–202. Prigogine, Ilya. (1996). The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature. New York: Free Press. ——.(2004). ‘Beyond Being and Becoming.’ New Perspectives Quarterly 21, 4: n.p. Putnum, Hilary. (2002). The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Samuel, Ralphael. (1989). ‘Born-again Socialism.’ In Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On. Edited by Robin Archer, Diemut Bubeck, Hanjo Glock, Lesley Jacobs, Seth Moglen, Adam Steinhouse and Daniel Weinstock. New York: Verso, 39–57. Sparks, Colin. (1977). ‘The Evolution of Cultural Studies.’ Screen Education, 22, Spring, 16–30. Thompson, E. P. (1959). ‘Commitment in Politics.’ Universities and Left Review, 6, Spring, 50–55.

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Tropp, Asher. (1958). Review of The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart. American Sociological Review, 23, 2, April, 221. Turner, Graeme. (1990). British Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Media and Popular Culture: 7. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Wallerstein, Immanuel. (1998). Utopistics: Or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century. New York: New Press. Williams, Raymond. (1958). Culture and Society: 1780–1950. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. ——(1979). Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. London: New Left Books/Verso, 1981.

6 From the Juke Box Boys to Revolting Students: Richard Hoggart and the Study of British Youth Culture David Fowler

Richard Hoggart’s academic career during the 1950s and 1960s coincided with the emergence of distinctive national and international youth cultures in Britain and across the world. Hoggart, first as a provincial WEA tutor in the 1950s and then as a Professor at The University of Birmingham during the 1960s, had first-hand knowledge of some of the most significant youth movements and cultures to emerge in the post-war period; from the Teddy Boys of the early 1950s to the global student revolts of the late 1960s. Moreover, his work is infused with references to Youth Culture. These range chronologically from his vivid description of ‘juke box boys’ lounging in the milk bars of Northern England, and described in The Uses of Literacy (1957) – ‘boys aged between fifteen and twenty, with drape suits, picture ties and an American slouch’ – to the early identification of the teenage consumer in the Albemarle Report of 1960, which he co-wrote with Leslie Paul, and on into the late 1960s and beyond. He wrote about provincial Youth Culture in the ‘Swinging’ Sixties; about the student protest movements of the late 1960s and even, briefly, about Oxbridge youth under Thatcherism. It is surprising, therefore, that no cultural historian has yet appraised what Richard Hoggart has written about British Youth Culture – except Robert Colls, briefly, in his recent book Identity of England, who pointed out that Hoggart’s censorious views about Youth Culture are the one section of The Uses of Literacy in which he lost his grip on his subject (2002, 90).1 Several questions need to be posed if we are to understand, and indeed assess, Hoggart’s references to Youth Culture in his work. The obvious starting point is to examine what he has written and hope this uncovers whether he felt that Youth Culture was a good thing for British society 105

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or not. The gist of what has been written by other historians is that he did not see Youth Culture as a creative force in the 1950s and the 1960s (Colls, 2002, 190; Moran, 2006, 552–559). But this does not mean that he disliked Youth Culture. It may simply mean that he disapproved of certain types of Youth Culture; or disapproved of culture industries that exploited youth; the American pop industry of the late 1950s perhaps being the prime candidate.2 Another central question in this quest to understand Richard Hoggart’s views about British Youth Culture is, what were the influences that shaped Hoggart’s thoughts on Youth Culture? Historians use archives as the foundation for their analysis of social movements such as Youth Culture. But no one at the time Hoggart came to national attention in the late 1950s had undertaken a detailed archival study of British Youth Culture. My own work on the interwar teenager as a consumer (Fowler, 1995) drew on primary historical sources such as the interwar poverty surveys of Seebohm Rowntree (an author, interestingly, who Hoggart had read by the mid-1960s: Hoggart, 1965, 4) and the records of Lads’ and Girls’ clubs, not to mention the reports and wages surveys of Government Departments such as the Ministry of Labour and the Juvenile Employment Bureaux administered by local education authorities. In some ways, the concept of Youth Culture as something unique to the post – Second World War period permeated the literary journals of the 1950s and it was a deeply flawed and ahistorical vision of Youth Culture that few people at the time questioned, including Richard Hoggart.3 My own research focuses on the period between the two World Wars when, I argue, Youth Culture took shape not only in the form of the teenage consumer with unprecedented levels of disposable income and a new leisure world of dance halls, cinemas and holidays becoming regular features of a new youth lifestyle – which might surprise Richard Hoggart even now – but also Youth Culture as a concept, as an idea for young people to promote, was also pioneered during this earlier period.4 Youth Culture as an idea emerged in Britain in the early 1920s in the universities and it was most prominently discussed in Cambridge, where an undergraduate named Rolf Gardiner was busy trying to establish a Youth Culture across Northern Europe. He used literature such as his pioneering cultural journal Youth: An Expression of Progressive University Thought, published in Cambridge from 1920 to 1924, to promote the idea of Youth Culture.5 Gardiner had no journalists or social commentators to tell him where Youth Culture was to be found. He had learned about Youth Culture on visits to Germany, where he encountered the phrase ‘Jugend Kultur’ (Youth Culture), which in that country meant

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youth movements.6 But, back in Britain, he developed it in new ways, exploring what he and his friends termed ‘new ways of living’(Fowler, 2007, ch. 2). The key point here is that Youth Culture in twentiethcentury Britain began with upper-middle-class youth who had time and income to undertake foreign travel. In its earliest guise, it was an organic movement rooted in small youth communities within universities and it developed by word of mouth, through student literature and through the international cultural exchanges organised by prime movers such as Rolf Gardiner (ibid.). By the time Hoggart was writing in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Youth Culture had lost its links with the Universities and as the organic movement it started life as during the 1920s, through prime movers like Rolf Gardiner. It was now seen as closely linked with the burgeoning American pop music industry.7 Youth Culture is first seen in Hoggart’s work in chapter 7 of The Uses of Literacy, which includes an account of his encounters with a group of male youths, most of them aged from 15 to 20, in a milk bar somewhere in the North of England.8 The period in question is sometime around the mid-1950s. He builds up, Sermon-like, a critique of the entire universe of these ‘Juke Box Boys’ and to see how he does it we need to sample his rich prose. But before we do so, it is worth pointing out that Hoggart’s observations are based solely on his own random encounters with Juke Box Boys, who are presumably Teddy Boys, standing by a jukebox in a Northern milk bar. Hoggart was not peering at these youths through a window, which might have made them seem even more exotic, but sitting in the same milk bar. He was actually preparing to go and teach an extra-mural class, and, possibly in work mode, he may just have been in a bad mood at the time. But his description of what he observed found its way into his classic work The Uses of Literacy and it came over as a diatribe more suited to a nineteenth-century Presbyterian pulpit than to a detached work of social and cultural criticism.9 He saw no good at all in the British teenager’s interest in American popular music, which, of course, was chiefly heard away from parents in the milk bars and coffee bars of provincial and Southern England.10 We have to forget, at this point, that American popular music of the mid-late 1950s – Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and others – gave rise, eventually in the early 1960s, to the music of The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other home-grown and creative pop groups. In short, what had emerged by the early 1960s, indisputably, was an astonishing flowering of British popular music created, essentially, by youths in their teens and early twenties, many of whom wrote their own songs.11 One

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contemporary sociologist even argued, persuasively, that pop music on Merseyside transformed potential or actual delinquent youths into creative artists.12 The youth cults that emerged during the early 1960s, in fact, often blossomed from the dreariest London suburbs. The Mod culture is the best example. It seems to have started among a small group of fashion-conscious friends in Stoke Newington and other parts of North London around 1960.13 It became, as is well known, a national and international youth movement that inspired pop music television programmes, the fashion industry, many youth pop groups, at the time and since; and moreover, it enabled thousands of young males and young females to create the first geographically mobile Youth Cult in Britain as they escaped the new suburbs of post-war London and created their own leisure worlds in coastal towns.14 But all of this is to look into a future that Richard Hoggart could not have foreseen in the mid-1950s. On the other hand, we could recall that Brian Epstein first discovered The Beatles performing one lunchtime in a basement cellar in Liverpool in 1961, a venue far less salubrious than the milk bar Richard Hoggart entered around 1956.15 Hoggart’s account is a carefully constructed, but highly distorted, glimpse of Northern Youth Culture in the era just before The Beatles. He begins: Like the cafes I described in an earlier chapter, the milk bars indicate at once , in the nastiness of their modernistic knick-knacks, their glaring showiness, an aesthetic breakdown so complete . . . I have in mind . . . the kind of milk bar – there is one in almost every northern town with more than, say, fifteen thousand inhabitants – which has become the regular evening rendezvous for some of the young men. (1957, 203) We learn that the young men in question are 15–20-year-olds who attend these milk bars ‘night after night’ and put ‘copper after copper’ in the jukebox, and we hear about how they react to the records – ‘The young men waggle one shoulder or stare, as desperately as Humphrey Bogart, across the tubular chairs’ (1957, 204). The passage ends with a harsh judgement on the lives of Northern Teddy Boys. As Hoggart puts it, ‘these are . . . the directionless and tamed helots of a machine-minding class’ (1957, 205). There is no mention in The Uses of Literacy that Richard Hoggart talked to any of these Teddy Boys, so we do not know anything specific about their family backgrounds. But, presumably, he modified his views about Teddy Boys very soon afterwards. Only a couple of years after The Uses of Literacy was published Hoggart encountered a Teddy Boy

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who was not only articulate but had been to university and had written his autobiography published by Faber and Faber before he was 22: the prolific writer on teenage affairs Ray Gosling (Gosling, 1962; 1980). So, what was the purpose of including this brief and rather alarmist account in his pioneering and path-breaking survey of working-class culture? Hoggart’s point, it seems, was that these working-class youths of Northern towns were not creating their own culture. They were just ciphers for American pop music and, he argued, it dulled their brains. The young men who poured their money into the jukeboxes were like zombies. They stared vacantly into space or waggled their shoulders. At this juncture, we might become curious about the types of records they listened to and what their tastes in music said about the imaginative worlds of 1950s teenagers. Other social investigators of the time found, for example, that British youths were so inspired by the glamour of America that they wanted, as soon as was feasible, to emigrate there.16 But Hoggart’s account of the Juke Box Boys does not probe this question of why working-class youths were so fascinated by America and whether, in fact, it did give them an imaginative world not immediately apparent in the mechanical gesture of putting copper after copper into the jukebox. We also ought to bear in mind that there were no pop videos in the late 1950s, so there was still scope for youths who listened to records to imagine the worlds depicted in them. Finally, we do need to know something about the historical context, which is absent from Hoggart’s description. These youths were in limbo; but it was not a limbo created by the vacuous pop world. The lives of these youths were shaped more than anything in the mid-1950s by the fractured experience of leaving school at 15, taking jobs for two to three years and then being drafted into the military services for two years to complete their National Service.17 Hoggart’s next foray into the worlds of the young was a review of a film about Teddy Boys published in the journal Sight and Sound in late 1959. Richard Hoggart could be a harsh critic, especially when reviewing books, which he sometimes did for the New Statesman around this period.18 But he liked Karel Reisz’s documentary film about Lambeth Teds, We are the Lambeth Boys. His review was a characteristic piece of imaginative prose, which this time took the form of an open letter to Reisz, saying what the reviewer liked and did not care for. He began with all the film’s faults. ‘It (your film)’, he proceeded, ‘says nothing about juvenile delinquency, home relationships, personal problems or private sex-life (though all these would affect the people in the film)’ (1959, 164). The same criticism might have been levelled at Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy, incidentally. But at last, in this review, we begin to see Hoggart’s views about Youth Culture emerging. The film was about a group of Teddy

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Boys who were also members of a youth club and Hoggart found them captivating. The film showed them in conversations at their work in a Post Office, apparently discussing gang warfare they were conducting with other gangs. It revealed that the boys did have an inner life, despite their boring jobs, and Hoggart found it quite heroic; referring to ‘the richness, the horror and the glory, of the inner life below the drab outer level’ (1959, 165). In a later article on the same subject, published 26 years later, more details are given about the Lambeth Boys of 1959. They were tough, but their songs revealed that their values were the same as those of their parents. They were proud to boast, for example, that they had good ‘manners’. As one of their songs put it, We are the Lambeth Boys We know our manners We spend our tanners We are respected wherever we go. (Hoggart, 1985, 107) There is an irony, of course, in the fact that they win respect through being good at fighting. The Lambeth Youth Club in the film was an unusual Youth Club in that it was run by former pupils of Mill Hill, a boys public school in London. Every year, the Lambeth youths had to play in a cricket match against pupils at the public school, and Hoggart, whose sympathies were clearly with the working-class youths, described this match as ‘a guarded, uneasy occasion on both sides, for all the attempts at heartiness’ (Hoggart, 1985, 108). Twenty five years after the original film was made, a follow-up film of a later generation of Lambeth Boys was screened in the mid-1980s. Richard Hoggart reviewed the follow-up film and was struck by how the conversations had changed hardly at all across almost three decades. ‘I heard nothing in the substance of the talk’, he noted in 1985, ‘which was different in kind from what it would have been like a quarter of a century ago: boys are only out for their oats; girls only want a bit of legover’ (ibid., 106). Even the songs were, more or less, the same though Hoggart noticed that the word ‘manners’ had disappeared from the most famous song: Everywhere we go People want to know Who we are We are the Lambeth Boys. (Ibid., 107)

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He found much evidence of continuity, however. The annual cricket match was still played in 1985 (though a new feature was the presence in the youth club team of West Indian youths) (ibid., 108). The youths of Lambeth still took great care over their personal appearance. The original group always had neatly combed hair with a side parting and the boys always wore suits. By the 1980s, they still wore suits but designer suits. Their diets had barely changed at all. They had chips with everything in 1959 and in 1985, though a new dish had appeared over the intervening 30 years – chips with a side salad. In the youth club the most striking similarity with the earlier period was that the youth leader who was running the club in 1959 was still running it 25 years later; an example of community service that Richard Hoggart no doubt found admirable (ibid., 108). An academic sociologist would want to know far more about what was below the surface in these two films and only touched on in Hoggart’s reviews. An obvious theme for a more in-depth study would be the extent of racism in a community that had witnessed a major influx of West Indians over the intervening years. ‘Hardly a black face in the late ‘50s; now more black than white’ was Hoggart’s pithy summary of this complex subject (ibid., 106.) But what had been revealed in interviews with the original Lambeth Boys 25 years on was just how racist they had become (ibid.). The impulses behind this racism were not discussed by Hoggart, though he can hardly be blamed for this. A popular media magazine was not the right forum for these questions to be probed in greater detail. If Hoggart had a thesis about the Lambeth Boys’ culture across almost 30 years, from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s, it was that deference had disappeared from their vocabulary. His evidence was that words such as ‘manners’ and ‘respect’ had disappeared from their songs; which is an intriguing observation (ibid., 106–7). But this is a symptom of a possible change in behaviour, rather than its cause. If deference had declined, why had it declined? One possible explanation is that the youths who appeared in the first Lambeth documentary in 1959 would all have done, or be about to do, National Service. The state and authority figures were still a prominent feature of their lives, in other words, beyond school. The Lambeth youths of 1985, by contrast, would not encounter the state beyond the age of 16 unless they were arrested, became unemployed or married young – and even then they would encounter the state only fleetingly. The next phase of Hoggart’s critique of British Youth Culture is the most intriguing. In 1960 when he was a lecturer in English Literature at Leicester University, Hoggart was asked to sit on a Committee on

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the Youth Service under a patrician Countess, Lady Albemarle. There is an amusing account of this Committee’s work in his autobiography (1992, 19–21). After she had selected 12 people to sit on the Committee, the Countess delegated all the writing-up of the final report to just two people: Richard Hoggart and Leslie Paul, a socialist youth leader who had been involved with the Woodcraft Folk and had written a book which defined a cultural movement of the 1950s, Angry Young Man (1951). The research period for the interviews, the fieldwork and the production of the Report was just 12 months and all the meetings took place in the regal environment of a Central London townhouse (Hoggart, 1992, 21.) At this stage, Hoggart’s own thinking on Youth and Youth Culture was still largely shaped by his instincts and observations, rather than by detailed research. As he put it, at the outset of the Albemarle Committee’s work, ‘I was concerned about the barren lives of many young people and glad to have a chance to look into whether some useful suggestions could be made’ (1992, 19). The tone of his statement suggests that the Committee had a rather broad remit and this is borne out by the final Report. It was not restricted to a discussion of the Youth Service, as suggested in its official title, but also included an interesting chapter, presumably written by Hoggart, on the lifestyles of 1950s teenagers that looked in detail at their disposable incomes (Ministry of Education, 1960, ch. 2). The best critique of the Albemarle Report was provided by one of the beneficiaries of the Youth Service grants it made available – the intrepid and perceptive writer on teenage affairs Ray Gosling (Gosling, 1961). The Committee was set up by the Conservative Government soon after the Labour Party had established its own Youth Commission in 1959; a gimmicky committee which had on its panel a footballer (Jimmy Hill), a Jazz band leader (Humphrey Lyttelton), a TV script writer (Ted Willis), and a young pop star was asked but declined (Tommy Steele).19 Gosling argued that the Albemarle Committee had no new ideas on youth, and in his words, ‘It says nothing about teenager 1960’ (1961, 15). This was a fair criticism. The Committee certainly had no new ideas on the lifestyles of teenagers and it even used a researcher who had advised the Labour Party on teenage spending, Dr Mark Abrams (Ministry of Education, 1960, ch. 2). Abrams was an acute social commentator, but he was primarily a market researcher serving leisure entrepreneurs. Indeed, he worked for the largest market research organisation in London, the London Press Exchange (Fowler, 1995, ch. 4). In his work, the lives of teenagers were depicted largely in market terms. He tells you how many teenagers

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there were in, for example, 1959, how much they earned and how they used their disposable incomes (ibid.). His observations were, essentially, superficial sound bites: ‘teenage spending is on teenage goods in a distinctively teenage world’ was one of his major conclusions in his pamphlet The Teenage Consumer (1959: see Fowler, 1995, ch. 4). This would have sounded wide of the mark to a teenager such as Ray Gosling in 1960. He had just dropped out of university, and was living on his wits; taking a succession of jobs in Leicester, from garage work to work promoting local bands in an attempt to simply survive (Gosling, 1980, 61–7). Abrams was writing for business people who wished to tap the teenage market. He did not provide an in-depth account of the regional experiences of late 1950s teenagers; an angle that was completely absent in fact from his work(Fowler, 1995, ch. 4). We learn nothing in Hoggart’s published work about his views on Abrams’ researches into late 1950s teenagers. The relationship between Ray Gosling and Richard Hoggart is touched upon in the published work of both authors. Gosling was a precocious and talented writer who in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when he was still in his early twenties, knew far more than Hoggart and indeed any other contemporary writer about British Youth Culture. His only rival was Colin MacInnes, an Australian in his forties who lived in a squat in Central London and wrote novels about teenage life around Soho and West London – Absolute Beginners (1959) being the best known.20 What made Gosling more interesting than MacInnes, certainly for Hoggart, was that he wanted to shape Youth Culture as well as write about it; and secondly, his work focused on provincial experiences of Youth Culture, an angle that MacInnes who was an archetypal Soho bohemian simply lacked, or had no interest in acquiring.21 Gosling came to the attention of Hoggart in print in late 1962 when Hoggart, by this time a professor at The University of Birmingham, and making plans to establish a Centre for Cultural Studies, found himself reviewing an incisive account of teenage life written by Gosling, a 22year-old, and entitled Sum Total. It was published by the distinguished publishing house Faber and Faber.22 At this time, Gosling’s articles were appearing regularly in highbrow literary periodicals such as Universities and Left Review, The New University, an Oxford undergraduate periodical, the Marxist journal New Left Review and the society magazine Queen.23 He was soon to become Colin MacInnes’ protégé and flatmate in London.24 At the time Sum Total was published, however, Gosling had recently left Leicester University after just one year (he was thrown out) and he had been living a peripatetic teenage existence, to-ing and fro-ing

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between London, Northampton and Leicester (Gosling, 1980). No doubt influenced by the two celebrated American novels of the period – J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Jack Kerouac’s ‘beat’ novel On the Road (1957) – he tried to turn himself into a real-life British teenage hero; a subversive, in other words. In his review of Sum Total, Hoggart depicted Gosling as a romantic figure; as he put it, ‘partly inspired by revolt against the nicely plotted route to security for the scholarship winner’ (1962, 788). It is interesting to speculate on whether Richard Hoggart would have said this in the late 1960s when he had children at university. But his review, though mixed, ended on a positive note: ‘Sum Total, for all its bumpiness, shows that he (Gosling) has a genuine talent.’25 We gain some insights into Hoggart’s own developing views on Youth Culture from this review. Indeed, having written no full-length articles on teenagers himself, such reviews were invaluable tools for Hoggart to clarify his own ideas. A core theme that was emerging in Hoggart’s own thoughts, here and in the review of We Are the Lambeth Boys, was that the forms of Youth Culture he approved of were provincial youth cultures with close ties to their parents and communities; in other words, a not fully autonomous Youth Culture was what he preferred. He praised Gosling for mentioning his ‘Mum and Dad’ and ‘Grandma’ – ‘Mum and Dad never seem far away; and Grandma is always there, back in the old terrace-house’ (1962, 788). But in Gosling’s case this became something of a fiction as he left his home town of Northampton after he went to university in Leicester in the late 1950s, and by the early 1960s he had moved to London. Gosling and Hoggart actually met in Leicester when Gosling was, for a brief period around 1960, a youth leader – before he was sacked (Gosling, 1980, 61–7). In fact, Gosling had secured a large grant of £12,000 to develop his Leicester Youth Club and Hoggart was a member of the Youth Club’s Management Committee (ibid., and 1961, 23). It is unclear from the published accounts of this episode whether Hoggart had a hand in Gosling being sacked, but he certainly hinted in his review of Sum Total that Gosling was a poor organiser.26 The two still had broadly similar ideas. Gosling, like Hoggart, believed that Youth Culture should be rooted in local communities and he set about trying to attract the youths who lived close to his club in a very unsalubrious part of Leicester. He gives us some idea of what he was up against in his short pamphlet on his life as a youth club leader, Lady Albemarle’s Boys (1961). The club’s members ranged from ‘the most desirable virgin of 19 to the murderer of 25, who got away with manslaughter’. On more than one occasion Gosling, who was the only full-time secretary, was badly beaten. In one

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management meeting he attended with Richard Hoggart he had two black eyes (Gosling, 1962, 26; 1980, 66). It is not clear from Gosling’s writings, or Hoggart’s own for that matter, whether Hoggart ever visited the Leicester Youth Club that Gosling ran in the evenings. He may have disapproved if he had done. What was in the club? There was a coffee bar with a jukebox; a dance hall with a resident rock band; a television, billiard tables and magazines – all of the impedimenta associated with Americanised mass culture that Hoggart loathed (Gosling, 1962, 26). But, in addition, there were quiet rooms; an office; newspapers and an information and advice centre. It is obviously worthwhile, therefore, given these tantalising details on the interiors of early 1960s’ provincial youth clubs, for historians to study them – their aims and social impact – in more detail. For one thing, this youth club does reveal just how eclectic the leisure worlds of even supposedly uncultured teenagers were in the late 50s and early 60s and it gives the distinct impression that an interest in reading and current affairs – or indeed social aspirations – were not absent from the lives of poorly educated youths. Richard Hoggart and Ray Gosling were in brief contact, therefore. But a far more significant influence in Hoggart’s academic investigations of Culture was Stuart Hall. Without Stuart Hall, it is questionable whether the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham would ever have produced all the amazingly rich research papers, many still unpublished, on aspects of Youth Culture and youth subcultures stretching from the mid-1960s and on into the 1970s and beyond.27 Hoggart himself gave no indication in his Inaugural Lecture at Birmingham that his new Centre would study youth cultures. He thought research was needed on popular fiction; the press and journals; strip cartoons; the language of advertising; public relations and possibly just a hint that he was seriously interested in exploring youth cultures, ‘popular songs and popular music in all their forms’. He may not have had in mind pop music, however, for potential research theses, as he seemed ambivalent about its value. ‘It is hard to listen to a programme of pop songs . . . without feeling a complex mixture of attraction and repulsion’, he announced in his Inaugural Lecture (1970, 242). Hoggart arrived at Birmingham University in 1962 and Stuart Hall, who was at the time a school teacher in London, became Hoggart’s first Research Fellow in Popular Culture in 1964 (Hoggart, 1992, 90). He was appointed to work on ‘popular culture and communication’.28 By the time he had arrived in Birmingham Stuart Hall had published several articles in literary journals about aspects of Youth Culture: an

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article on ‘Student Journals’, for example, in New Left Review; reviews of Colin MacInnes’ novel Absolute Beginners and Mark Abrams’ pamphlet The Teenage Consumer (both published in 1959), for Universities and Left Review; and an article about what he called ‘the politics of adolescence’ in the same journal (Hall, 1959a; 1959b; 1961). Stuart Hall was not interested in judging the late 1950s youth in Britain, but in seeking to understand how they reacted to broad cultural trends such as Americanisation. He was also interested in their reactions to cultural subjects taught in schools (Hall, 1959b). Hall wanted to understand why youth cults like the Teddy Boys rebelled. Was the culture of the Secondary Modern School behind this rebellion? He was interested in the impact James Dean’s films Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden had upon British youth. Later on, he became interested in the social phenomenon of Beatlemania.29 In short, he was the prime mover in the study of youth subcultures, and Youth Culture more broadly, at Birmingham during the 1960s and several research students completed theses and research papers on aspects of Youth Culture: Paul Willis, for example, on pop songs and Youth Culture with special reference to Birmingham; John Clarke on skinheads and Youth Culture; and Janice Winship on young women’s magazines.30 Stuart Hall himself even wrote a research paper on ‘Hippies’, which was subsequently published.31 Richard Hoggart seems to have left Stuart Hall to develop academic research on Youth at Birmingham. But there is some evidence that, by the late 1960s, Hoggart himself was actively involved in this research. For instance, he presented a research paper at a graduate seminar in 1969 on the theme ‘Reflections on the Student Movement’ (CCCS, 1968– 1969, 15). It is unclear whether this paper was published. It is clear from the CCCS’s annual reports, however, that the student protests of the late 1960s were the inspiration for several graduate dissertations at Birmingham. Some of the Centre’s graduate students undertook, in 1968, an in-depth study of a Birmingham student protest. They analysed press reactions; student leaflets and student periodicals; and an official report on the protests produced by the University’s Registrar (ibid., 19). It is not surprising that the University began to suspect that the CCCS was behind much of the student protest at Birmingham (Hoggart, 1992, ch. 5). Richard Hoggart’s published essays on Youth Culture, and on student life in Britain during the 1960s, are reflective pieces mostly written after, usually several years after, the events they describe. He was interested in two central themes: the impact permissiveness was having in the universities and in the provinces; and, to a more limited extent, the causes

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of the student revolts of the late 1960s. His most incisive essay was a short piece he wrote for The Guardian in 1967, exploring whether the Permissive Society had transformed provincial cities as much as ‘Swinging’ London. The essay is so suggestive that it could provide, even now, the basis for a stimulating Ph.D thesis. Hoggart provides in this short essay a model of how Youth Culture, in his view, developed in British society. He argued that it was a Londoncentric idea and only after a time lag (unspecified) did it reach provincial towns and cities. The vehicles for the spread of this Youth Culture, he suggested, were pop programmes such as ‘Ready, Steady Go’, radio, magazines, fashion and records. It was a model he must have found somewhat disturbing as, at one point, he noted that teenagers in Leeds, his home town, were only interested in buying clothes sold by ‘the taste leaders’ in London (1969, 78). He must have had in mind designers like Mary Quant.32 He did not elaborate on whether these ‘taste leaders’ operated in other fields such as pop music and the media; but he must have been thinking also of pop stars – of the 23-year-old millionaire pop star Mick Jagger, for example, who, in July 1967, immediately after being acquitted of a drugs charge, was interviewed by the Editor of The Times and three senior churchmen for ITV’s award-winning weekly current affairs programme World in Action, and was watched by several million TV viewers (Fowler, 2007). Jagger was surely one of the metropolitan ‘taste leaders’ Hoggart was alluding to; though whether Hoggart saw Jagger on World in Action is a moot point as he only switched on the television, according to his wife, about once every two weeks (Sandbrook, 2005, 368). Hoggart did not conclude in this stimulating essay that provincial cultures were finished. Instead, he offered the tantalising thesis that the ‘generation gap’ was most pronounced in the provinces, rather than in London, precisely because civic culture and working-class culture were so entrenched there and this alien Youth Culture was superimposed on settled communities with strong civic cultures. A researcher who wanted to pursue this Hoggart model would need to analyse whether, during the 1960s, there was a liberalisation of values in provincial towns and cities brought about by the changes in Youth Culture. It is a brilliant hypothesis. How could it be investigated? One area would be to look at how film and theatre censorship were affected by developments in Youth Culture, given that provincial Watch Committees were the bodies that issued certificates for films and licences for theatres. No one, to my knowledge, has yet investigated how provincial and civic life were affected by Youth Culture during the so-called ‘Swinging’ Sixties.

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Hoggart’s essays on student cultures of the 1960s are more personal reflections, rather than pieces suggesting new areas for social and historical research. They also contain some fascinating ideas – for example, that female students were far less liberated than male students by the spread of birth control from around 1967.33 But in his discussion of the causes of the Student Protests in the late 1960s he seems to have been too influenced by the work of Colin Crouch, a young Sociology student at the LSE in the late 1960s, who argued that the protests at LSE were an idealistic search for new types of student community: a doubtful thesis that ignores the facts.34 LSE’s students, 40 per cent of whom were international students in the late 1960s, were primarily interested in concrete political and indeed educational issues such as the higher fees the Labour Government had imposed on international students studying in Britain (Fowler, 2007). Many students at LSE, it should be recalled, were from developing countries and there was a lot of discussion about Third World poverty at their meetings (ibid.). They also wanted to reform the universities and wrote cogent policy documents on how the curriculum in British universities should be re-fashioned.35 They were not airy-fairy, whimsical utopians as historians such as Kenneth Morgan have suggested;36 but social reformers many of whom progressed from support of libertarian social causes in the 1960s to support of economic liberalism and Thatcherism during the 1980s.37

Notes 1. Sandbrook (2005), discusses Hoggart, but not his work on youth. For a recent article on Hoggart’s discussion of milk bars in The Uses of Literacy see Moran, op. cit. For the post-war history of British Youth Culture see D. Fowler, Youth Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, forthcoming); W. Osgerby, Youth in Britain since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); on the global student revolts see especially A. Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c.1958 – c.1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), ch. 12. 2. See Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, 203–205, for his critique of American influences shaping provincial youth cultures. 3. For contemporary comment on ‘the birth of the teenager’ post 1945 see, most famously, Mark Abrams’ pamphlet The Teenage Consumer (1959). The supposed novelty of post-war teenage lifestyles permeates contemporary political and literary journals such as Universities and Left Review, Socialist Register, New Left Review, New Statesman and Society and also political discourse as well. See, for example, Ministry of Education (1960), ch. 2. Some historians have also perpetuated this myth. See, for example, William Osgerby, Youth in Britain since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) passim.

David Fowler 119 4. See my forthcoming survey (London: Macmillan). I am also preparing a fullscale biography of Rolf Gardiner, which focuses on his central role in interwar Youth Culture and European Youth Movements of the period, The Youth Apostle: A Biography of Rolf Gardiner. 5. Copies of Youth: An Expression of Progressive University Thought are held in the Periodicals Section of Cambridge University Library and in the British Library at St Pancras. 6. The concept of Jugend Kultur was frequently discussed in Youth. Gardiner’s own thoughts on ‘Youth Culture’ are discussed in his Diaries, held in the Rolf Gardiner Archive, Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge University Library. 7. For an incisive contemporary essay linking the British teenage culture of the late 1950s with American pop music see Ray Gosling, ‘Dream Boy’, New Left Review, 3, May–June 1960, 33–34. For an exploration of the subject by an historian see Sandbrook (2005), ch. 13. 8. Hoggart (1957, 203–205). Hoggart does not provide details in The Uses of Literacy of the milk bar he visited. Years later, however, he revealed that he had encountered the Juke Box boys ‘several times’ in a milk bar in Goole, as he prepared to take his evening classes. He was, at the time, an extra-mural tutor in English at The University of Hull and Goole was close to Hull (Hoggart, 2001, 308). 9. For the historian Robert Colls’ critical assessment see Colls (2002, 190); for Nicholas Tredell’s rigorous questioning of Hoggart on this section of The Uses of Literacy see Hoggart (2001, 308–309). Hoggart’s views on the youths who frequented milk bars were alarmist even at the time. For more favourable discussion of milk bars as valuable ‘public spaces’ for youths to meet see T. R. Fyvel, The Insecure Offenders: Rebellious Youth and the Welfare State (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1963; first pub. 1961, 67–69); and for George Melly’s retrospective reflections of London milk bars see G. Melly, Revolt into Style (London: Allen Lane, 1970, 48). Pearl Jephcott, in a contemporary survey of Nottingham youth, noted that milk bars were valuable meeting places for youths and girls; especially on Sundays in ‘the dead hour between Sunday dinner and the five o’clock picture queue’: Pearl Jephcott, Some Young People (London: Allen and Unwin, 1954, 34). 10. On the role of jukeboxes in post-war British youth culture see A. Horn, ‘Juke Boxes and British Youth Culture, 1945–1960’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Lancaster, 2004. 11. For the pioneering study of 1960s youth pop groups as creative artists see Melly, Revolt into Style; much of it based on his pop reviews in the New Statesman and Society. On the Beatles as songwriters see Wilfrid Mellers, Twilight of the Gods: The Beatles in Retrospect (London: Faber, 1973), and the brilliant study by the late Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Records and the Sixties (London: Pimlico, 1994). 12. C. Fletcher, ‘Beat and Gangs on Merseyside’, New Society, 20 February 1964, 11–14. 13. ‘Faces Without Shadows: Young Men Who Live For Clothes and Pleasure’, Town, Vol.3, No. 9, 1962, 48–53. 14. For an elaboration of these points see Fowler (1995). On the Mods, see also J. Green, All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture (1998), ch. 5; Osgerby, Youth in Britain, 41–47, is somewhat superficial.

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15. Sandbrook (2005, 465) describes Epstein’s first encounter with The Beatles in November 1961. He describes the venue (the Cavern) as ‘damp’ and’dingy’. 16. See the personal testimony of the 19-year-old-youth interviewed in B. S. Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, English Life and Leisure: A Social Study (London: Longmans, Green, 1951): ‘This country’s no good. It’s finished. I’d like to go to America’ (249). 17. For the disorientating effects of National Service among Glasgow youths see T. Ferguson and J. Cunnison, In Their Early Twenties: A Study of Glasgow Youth (Oxford: OUP, 1956), 31–32. 18. He described a biography of Lord Thompson, a Fleet Street newspaper editor, he reviewed for the New Statesman as ‘a totally inconsiderable biography in any serious meaning of the term’. See New Statesman, 29 October 1965, 648. 19. These details have been extracted from the Youth Commission Papers held in the Labour Party Archives, Manchester. On this Commission see also C. Ellis, ‘The Younger Generation: The Labour Party and the 1959 Youth Commission’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 41, No. 2, April 2002, 199–231. Its membership is discussed on pp. 207 and 208. The theme of the post-war Labour Party and Youth Culture is discussed in S. Fielding, Labour and Cultural Change (Manchester: MUP, 2003), ch. 7, though he does not mention its Youth Commission survey. 20. For a useful portrait of Colin MacInnes see Gosling (1980, 71–77). See also T. Gould, Inside Outsider: The Life and Times of Colin MacInnes (London: Allison and Busby, 1993). 21. Gosling notes that MacInnes abhorred provincialism and castigated him for being from the provinces (1980, 93). 22. Hoggart (1962, 788). Ray Gosling, like Hoggart, was from a working-class background. His father was a car mechanic. He was born in Northampton in 1939. See Gosling (1980) for his family background. 23. Brief details of Gosling’s publications in this period are given in The New University, October 1960. 24. Gosling lived with MacInnes in London from 1962 to 1964. He implies in his later memoir that the two had a homosexual relationship (1980, 71–72). 25. Hoggart (1962, 788). Hoggart’s review was slightly patronising. He referred to Gosling as ‘the only talking teenager’, revealing a touch of envy, it seems, that Gosling was in such great demand as a writer on youth affairs, when Hoggart was only contributing occasional book reviews to literary journals. 26. Hoggart (1962, 788). Hoggart was Chairman of the Trustees of the Leicester Youth Club Gosling ran, so he must have had some part in Gosling being dismissed. See Gosling (1980, 62). 27. A rich collection of the Birmingham CCCS’ unpublished research reports on youth is held in the Periodicals Section, Cambridge University Library at L200.b.301. 28. G. Cannon, ‘Popular Culture and Society’, New Statesman, 17 October 1963, 22. Details of Hall’s status as a schoolteacher are in Hall (1959a). 29. Ibid. See also S. Hall and P. Whannell, The Popular Arts (London: Hutchinson, 1964, 312) (on Beatlemania). 30. Details are given in University of Birmingham, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Annual Reports, held in Cambridge University Library, L200.b.214.

David Fowler 121 31. S. Hall, ‘Hippies: An American Moment’ (University of Birmingham, CCCS Stencilled Paper, 1968) reprinted in J. Nagel (ed.), Student Power (London: P. Merlin, 1969). 32. Discussed in The Permissive Society: Guardian Inquiry on pp. 18–25, but not mentioned by name in Hoggart’s piece. 33. Hoggart, 1965 and 1992, ch. 5. See also R. Hoggart, ‘The Student Movement and Its Effects in the Universities’ in S. Armstrong (ed.), Decade of Change, Society for Research into Higher Education, Annual Conference Papers (Surrey, 1979), 3–10. 34. I am currently working on Student Protest Movements of the 1960s, from archives. Hoggart’s own reading on student protest, and even on student cultures, was slight. He had not read Ferdynand Zweig’s survey of students at Manchester and Oxford published as The Student in an Age of Anxiety (1963) by the time of the Earl Grey Lecture in 1965. He cites Crouch’s work in his essay ‘The Student Movement and Its Effects in the Universities’ published in 1979; but by this date there was a wealth of other scholarly work on the student protests of the late 1960s besides Crouch’s The Student Revolt (1970). See, for example, H. Kidd, The Trouble at LSE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) and T. Blackstone et al., Students in Conflict: LSE in 1967 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970). Nowhere in his 1979 article does Hoggart mention his own son Simon’s involvement in a student protest movement at Cambridge in the late 1960s, the ‘Free University’ movement. For a discussion of student protest in these years see D. Fowler, ‘From Danny the Red to British Student Power: Labour and the International Student Revolts of the 1960s’ in P. Corthorn and J. Davis (eds) The British Labour Party and the Wider World (London: Tauris, 2007). 35. See, for example, D. Adelstein’s pamphlet, Teach Yourself Student Power (Radical Student Alliance, 1968) and Adelstein’s essay in A. Cockburn and R. Blackburn (eds), Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis, Action (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), which also contains an insightful essay on ‘The Meaning of the Student Revolt’ by Gareth Stedman Jones, then a Research Fellow at Oxford University. 36. K. Morgan, The People’s Peace: British History, 1945–1990 (Oxford: OUP, 1990), 292–298, 354–355. 37. On the links between the 1960s student libertarians and Thatcherism see R. Cockett, ‘The New Right and the 1960s: the Dialectics of Liberation’ in G. Andrews et al. (eds), New Left, New Right and Beyond: Taking the Sixties Seriously (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 85–105.

Works cited Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1968–1969). Annual University Report. University of Birmingham. Colls, Robert (2002). Identity of England. Oxford: OUP. Fowler, David (1995). The First Teenagers: The Lifestyle of Young Wage-Earners in Interwar Britain. London: Routledge. ——(Forthcoming). Youth Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Macmillan. Gosling, R. (1961). Lady Albemarle’s Boys. London: Fabian Society.

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——(1962). Sum Total. London: Faber. ——(1980). Personal Copy: A Memoir of the Sixties. London: Faber. Hall, Stuart (1959a). ‘Politics of Adolescence?’, Universities and Left Review, 6, Spring 1959, 2. ——(1959b). ‘Absolute Beginnings’. Review of Colin MacInnes and Mark Abrams. Universities and Left Review, Autumn, 17–25. ——(1961). ‘Student Journals’. New Left Review, 7, January-February, 50–51. Hoggart, Richard (1957). The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments. London: Chatto and Windus. ——(1959). ‘We are the Lambeth Boys’, Sight and Sound, Vol. 28, No.3, Summer– Autumn, 164–65. ——(1967) ‘Proper Ferdinands?’ in The Permissive Society: The Guardian Inquiry. London: Panther. Reprinted as ‘Images of the Provinces’ in Speaking to Each Other Vol. 1. London: Chatto, 1970. Citations from the original version. ——(1970). ‘Schools of English and Contemporary Society’, Inaugural Lecture, University of Birmingham, in Speaking to Each Other Vol. 2. London: Chatto, 1970. ——(1985). ‘Lambeth Boys’, Sight and Sound, Vol. 54, No.2, Spring, 106–109. ——(1992). An Imagined Life: Life and Times, 1959–1991. Oxford: OUP. ——(2001). ‘Looking Back’ in Between Two Worlds: Essays. London: Aurum. Ministry of Education (1960). The Youth Service in England and Wales: Report of the Committee Appointed by the Minister of Education in November 1958. London: HMSO. (a.k.a.The Albermarle Report). Moran, J. (2006). ‘Milk Bars, Starbucks and The Uses of Literacy’. Cultural Studies, Vol. 20, No. 6 (November), 552–73. Sandbrook, Dominic (2005). Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain From Suez to The Beatles. London: Little, Brown.

7 ‘Them’ and ‘Us’ Robert J.C. Young

I am reading that book again. Yes, I am.

Them The world is divided into ‘Them’ and ‘Us’. ‘They’ are the ones who look down on you, who tell you to know your place. ‘They’ are the ones who put bromide in your tea, but also deliberately puncture one condom in every ten (Hoggart, 1957, 30): ‘They’ are ‘the people at the top’, ‘the higher-ups’, the people who give you your dole, call you up, tell you to go to war, fine you . . . ‘get yer in the end’, ‘aren’t really to be trusted’, ‘talk posh’, ‘are all twisters really’, never tell yer owt’ . . . , ‘slap yer in clink’. (Ibid., 62) ‘They’ treat you like muck. The world of class is divided into compartments, cut into perennial structures of two. In the colonial world, says Fanon, ‘the dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations’. ‘In the capitalist countries’, by contrast, ‘a multitude of moral teachers, counsellors and ‘bewilderers’ (literally, disorientateurs) separate the exploited from those in power’ (Fanon, 1965, 31). That is why they – the teachers and intellectuals – ‘aren’t really to be trusted’: they’re all twisters really. Twister: One who disrupts the miniscule brain activity of a chav by asking them a simple question, usually entailing basic arithmetic or anything taught outside of kindergarten. ‘That teacher’s a twister innit’. (Urban Dictionary) 123

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‘Democratic egalitarianism can encourage a suspicion of all authority and responsibility’, observes Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy – hereafter The Uses, on the analogy of ‘the Missis’ (224). Working-class resistance to forms of authority is first applied to the educational system which is your first sustained encounter with ‘them’. The boy ‘develops a strong patina of resistance, a thick and solid skin for not taking notice’ (227). Ask any teacher.

One of us The world is divided into ‘Them’ and ‘Us’. ‘They’ enforce the boundaries of their class by a hundred tiny tests to see whether, as with Lord Jim, you are ‘one of us’. Whereas the boundaries between the working class and the middle class are clearly drawn, the larger anxiety lies within the middle class itself. In a way that replicates the structure of the British university degree, or perhaps it is vice versa: the classes are split into three (upper, middle and lower), but the middle is itself then split between upper and lower middle, the 2(1) and 2(2) of the class system. And as with a degree, no one wants to be 2(2). The Uses paints a picture of a homogeneous working class, whose cultural identity stretches very occasionally into the lower middle class. What is policed obsessively in Britain are the boundaries between lower and upper middle class, between ‘new’ and ‘old’ money, the cultured and the showy nouveau riche. This is the reviled world of the Dursleys of no. 4, Privet Drive, from which we are supposed, like Harry Potter, to want to escape. This is the world enforced by Stephen Potter’s still adored distinctions between ‘U-ness’ and ‘non-Uness’, terms first coined three years before The Uses was published. The Daily Telegraph, 1970: ‘The point is not so much that U-speech and U-behaviour are, by some absolute standard, superior but that they are indicators’. (OED) ‘Send for the fish-knives, Norman.’ Do you have a toilet? I’ll just wait in the lounge. Pardon? Look – he’s pouring the champagne into Babysham glasses. Clearly, not one of us. For anything to be U it must also not be too popular – even in classical music, for example, the greatest cultural capital resource of the upper middle classes, you must always avoid Carmen or Swan Lake. The ultimate stigma is not living in an old jerrybuilt two-up two-down terraced house, but buying a new house on an

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estate. ‘Your neighbours will all be accountants, stockbrokers, businessmen!’ Upper-middle-class houses have to be old, to show that you do not belong to the commercial classes, to show that you have always had money like that for generations. It was never made, earned. Class (‘The only subject there is in England’): The houses in Chislehurst had greenhouses, grand oaks and sprinklers on the lawn. Men came in to do the garden. It was so impressive for people like us that when our families walked these streets on Sunday visits to Auntie Jean we’d treat it as a lower-middle-class equivalent of the theatre. ‘Ahhh’ and ‘oohh’, we’d go, imagining we lived there, what times we’d have, and how we’d decorate the place and organise the garden for cricket, badminton and table tennis. (Kureishi, 1990, 29, 164) The cultural producers of the upper middle classes surround The Uses like a pantheon of the Gods, providing touchstones of real worth and moral value: Milton, Locke, Wordsworth, Ruskin, George Eliot, TS Eliot, Chekhov, Orwell, Strachey and Virginia Woolf.

Them Them and us. But what about other thems – them others? The working class seems so homogeneous in The Uses. So resolutely Protestant for example, finding something sinister about the Roman Catholic Church. Who amongst the working class is likely to be Catholic other than Irish immigrants? In most industrial cities of England, there was a huge subclass of Irish immigrants, usually forming a lower social class within the working class. There is a strong sense in The Uses that the families of Hunslet bear the memory of a rural past, but not a rural past from elsewhere. The Irish had started to arrive in Leeds with the famines of the 1840s, and settled in the Quarry Hill area, one of the poorest, most run-down districts. The Fenians were active in Leeds in the 1860s. Somehow, though, the Irish here remain another ‘them’, hidden from view, definitely not ‘us’, mentioned only once as stage Irishmen. Immigrants in general, who in the first instance form the lowest level of the working class, remain almost invisible in The Uses. Here and there there’s the suggestion of racism towards them: the observed insensitive cruelty towards ‘a foreign wife’ (72); in the way internationalism ‘can co-exist with anti-semitism or with strong feeling against Roman Catholicism . . . but such intolerance comes out only occasionally, and

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the two worlds do not often meet’. Perhaps Leeds was different, but in many English cities, from London to Newcastle, local English and immigrant communities of Jews, Irish, and then later Caribbean, Bangladeshi and Pakistani certainly did meet, and 1957 was the time when this was first becoming a political issue at the national level – it was the year before the Notting Hill race riots. In the world of The Uses, there seems to be as little explicit consciousness of black people as of the colonies. The charlady secures her old felt hat with ‘a large pin with a piccaninny’s head carved on the blunt end – a relic of a day at the sea, I suppose’ (118); everyone knows that a local woman had a black child after the annual visit of the circus a few years ago. This illicit attraction is staged more spectacularly in one of the jumping rhymes, which Hoggart quotes without comment: I like coffee, I like tea I like sitting on a black man’s knee. (58) The regular version of this rhyme is I like coffee, I like tea, I like [the person’s name] to jump with me. Or more suggestively, I like the boys and the boys like me. Even Salman Rushdie, in The Satanic Verses, cites a comparatively anodyne version compared with Hoggart’s, when Saladin Chamcha is making threatening erotic anonymous phone calls to Gibreel: I like coffee, I like tea, I like things you do with me. Tell her that, the voice swooned, and rang off. (Rushdie, 1988, 444) The spectral appearance of the eroticised black man’s knee in The Uses suggests another dimension to the rather puritanical sex life that is evoked in the everyday lives of the working class. It also suggests the phantom presence of different communities who register no presence in the book.


Lady Muck ‘They’ treat you like muck. But if you start to have pretensions above your station, then you get no further than Lady Muck, ‘acting posh’, ‘being lah-de-dah’, ‘acting like Lady Muck’. Lady Muck, interestingly, was originally imported from Australia. ‘Here comes Lady Muck now.’ ‘She sat there, sipping away at her tea like Lady Muck.’ Where there’s muck there’s brass. Dirty money sticks to you, when the point is you should not show it. ‘Isn’t she queer?’(89) No. Heteronormativity is the rule here. Even if you are ‘not the marrying kind’. There is only one kind of outing in Hunslet. The day trip The word ‘trippers’, once one of the most dismissive epithets in middleclass vocabulary, was changed irrevocably by the Beatles’ song ‘Day Tripper’. Now the innuendo has shifted to the ‘package holiday’. To do something as part of a group is degrading. It is also human. One of the best moments of The Uses is the wonderful description of the de luxe charas rolling out over the moors to Scarborough: what is fascinating is that even on the beach, the territories are separated out between the classes. After a substantial lunch, the workers from Leeds fan out in groups: But rarely far from one another, because they know their part of the town and their bit of beach, where they feel at home. At Scarborough they leave the north side to the lower middle-classes who come for a week or two, and take rooms in the hundreds of little red villas. They leave the half-alive Edwardian elegance of the south end . . . to middleaged professionals, West Riding business-men who . . . have come in their Rovers. Everyone knows their place: the holiday town is divided up like every other town, between prosperous areas of dead silence and calm, and loud, boisterous carnivalesque life: They walk down Westborough to the half-mile long around the harbour, where Jews up from Leeds for the van-loads of gaudy knick-knacks jostle for space with tiled fish-and-chip saloons (‘Fish, chips, tea, bread and

centre-piece season with lavatoriallybutter – 3/-:

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No Tea with own Eatables’) . . . . Here again the same clutter, the same extraordinary Bartholomew Fair of a mess, but even messier and more colourful than they are used to in their own shopping-areas at home. They have a nice walk past the shops; perhaps a drink; a sit in a deckchair eating an ice cream or sucking mint-humbugs, a great deal of loud laughter. (122) Hoggart evokes the fun of the expedition en masse, a camaraderie which the lower- or upper-middle-class families would never experience. The mention of the Jews from Leeds – the only mention of Jews in the whole book – also brings to mind a more recent representation of the fun of the day trip, Gurinder Chadha and Meera Syal’s Bhaji on the Beach (1993) (tagline: A day to set yourself free!), a film which shows how close in some ways South Asian cultural habits of sociability come to those of the traditional English working class. Ethnic difference is nothing to class. Nice ‘Then they have a nice walk past the shops.’ It was Orwell who, most memorably, suggested the dimensions of the meaning of ‘nice’ in this context in his memorable essay ‘A Nice Cup of Tea’. ‘Anyone who has used that comforting phrase, ‘‘a nice cup of tea’’ invariably means Indian tea’, remarks Orwell sagely. ‘A nice cup of tea’ is not exclusively a working-class concept, but it always has the homely air of Irene Handel – ‘how about a nice cuppa tea, luv?’ – a nice cuppa, no droning on here about the respective attractions of ‘first’ or ‘second flush’. Tasty The highest compliment that my father would ever make about food was when it was all eaten. Then he would look up and say, ‘That was very tasty.’ The preference for ‘something tasty’, for strong taste: Daddies Sauce, HP Sauce, Branston Pickle, tomato sauce, chutney, piccalilli, English mustard, Marmite, Oxo and Bovril, dripping toast. Ahhh, Bisto! Tasteless We like our food tasty but our taste is tasteless. Gaudy, garish, flashy, extravagant, kitschy, loud, showy, colourful, cluttered, ornate, brassy: bling. Hoggart calls it ‘baroque’, ‘a sprawling, highly-ornamental, rococo extravagance’ (119). He warmly approves of it all, unless it is something that has been bought in harsh neon-lit, glaringly showy establishments.


For this old baroque is being abandoned for a new post-utility, tasteless ‘chain store modernismus’ of ‘multi-coloured plastic and chrome biscuit barrels’. Take ‘the huge, glossy affair aiming specifically at working-class customers’ – the modern furniture shop: These are surely the most hideously tasteless of all modern shops. Every known value in decoration has been discarded: there is no evident design or pattern, the colours fight with one another; anything new is thrown in simply because it is new. There is striplighting together with imitation chandelier lighting . . . notice after blazing notice winks, glows or blushes luminously. Hardly a homely setting. (90) Because they have no taste, working-class customers are easily persuaded by the suave but friendly salesmen ‘with their neat ready-made clothing, shiny though cheap shoes, well-creamed hair and ready smiles’, and succumb to the blandishments of the commercial world. Whether they employ the old or the new taste, however, it is always kitsch. Small Ad There is one lower-class character from the commercial world, who makes his living writing advertisement copy, who buys dirty postcards, who never appears directly in The Uses. Jewish, commercial, always thinking of improbably persuasive lines for his advertising copy, he stands for all the worst characteristics of modern society that threaten the working class. ‘Do you suffer from—?’ ‘Conqueror or Conquered . . . which are you?’ (227). The commercial classes who write these ads, and their jingles, are never visible. And yet he is there all the time, the canvasser at work. He forms a counter figure, the alter ego of the book, championing all that is ostensibly denigrated. Leopold Bloom. Advertising copywriter. He watches a line of men wearing sandwich boards. A procession of whitesmocked men marched slowly towards him along the gutter, scarlet sashes across their boards. Bargains . . . . He read the scarlet letters on their five tall white hats: H.E.L.Y.S. Wisdom Hely’s. Y lagging behind drew a chunk of bread from under his foreboard, crammed it into his mouth and munched as he walked. Our staple food. Three bob a day, walking along the gutters, street after street. Just to keep skin and bone together . . . . Doesn’t bring in any business either. I suggested to him about a transparent show cart with

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two smart girls sitting inside writing letters, copybooks, envelopes, blotting paper. I bet that would have caught on. Smart girls writing something catch the eye at once. Everyone dying to know what she’s writing. (Joyce, 1960, 194–5) Bloom, the writer of enticing copy, is also the fervent reader of the small ads. In the ‘Aeolus’ episode we are shown HOW A GREAT DAILY ORGAN IS TURNED OUT . . . . He walked on through the caseroom, passing an old man, bowed, spectacled, aproned. Old Monks, the day-father. Queer lot of stuff he must have put through his hands in his time: obituary notices, pubs’ ads, speeches, divorce suits, found drowned. (150, 155) Hoggart too loves the small ads, and loves to quote them, especially those offering various forms of compensation. First, cultural: Are you TONGUE-TIED? Do you wish to be SILVER-TONGUED in SPEECH? Life’s richest rewards may still be YOURS, even though you were not fortunate enough to go to a University. (250) Once again, we rejoin the world of Bloom, this time in Night Town, where he is accused in court by Philip Beaufoy, an upper-class writer in a morning suit, of plagiarism: BEAUFOY: (His lip upcurled, smiles superciliously on the court) my lord . . . We are considerably out of pocket over this bally pressman johnny, this jackdaw of Rheims, who has not even been to a university. BLOOM: (Indistinctly) University of life. (585) The ads that offer culture are structured in exactly the same way as those that proffer various kinds of psychological compensation. Hoggart comments, ‘These magazines appear to have a particular appeal . . . for adolescents of below the average intelligence and for others who, for one reason or another, have not developed or do not feel themselves adequate’ (206). Bloom. You. Me.


Do you suffer from nervousness, inferiority-feeling, lack of confidence, stammering, failure of necessary poise, hesitation and humility? All these indicate a fundamental maladjustment arising from a SUBCONSCIOUS FAILURE OF NERVE ORIENTATION. Learn to generate POSITIVE instead of NEGATIVE Drives! Create for yourself a DOMINANT and ASSERTIVE personality! . . . USE to the full your own ASTONISHING HIDDEN DYNAMIC! This volume can REDIRECT YOUR LIFE. (207) There is a compelling ad which is regularly posted outside my building at NYU. What I like about these sorts of advertisements is the way in which you feel compelled to answer ‘yes’ in response to their questions. ARE YOUR THOUGHTS KILLING YOU? Me: ‘Yes!’ REMOVE THE BLOCKS TO BEING YOU Get out of your head and into your self . . . FEEL YOUR ALIVENESS Reasonable fees. ‘Sexational’ (213) Bloom visits a shop that sells pornographic books, and looks at Sweets of Sin. He opens it at random. –All the dollarbills her husband gave her were spent in stores on wondrous gowns and costliest frillies. For him! For Raoul! Yes. This. Here. Try. –Her mouth glued on his in a luscious voluptuous kiss while his hands felt for the opulent curves inside her déshabillé. (302–3) He buys it. Hoggart, without letting on to us that he has been forbidden by his publisher, tells us that he is unable to quote soft-porn or violentsex gangster novels. So he makes his examples up, and even gives himself a pen name. His soft porn name is Paul Laforgue, who writes books such as Stolen Joys, Dangerous Bliss and Passionate Nights. If a Laforgue man and woman come together, with an attraction on each side, one has something after this fashion: His breast was throbbing against her as he tightened his embrace. Her eyes were like liquid flames. At that moment she was intensely feminine.

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‘You are all mine, my darling. How I love you,’ he murmured. She gave a low cry of blissful ecstasy, followed by a long sigh of utter happiness, and pressed him hotly to her. (214) The lament is that this evocative soft porn is being replaced by a new kind of fiction, which Hoggart calls the sex-and-violence novel, with titles like Sweetie, Take it Hot and The Killer Wore Nylon. He traces this bad influence back to James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Mickey Spillane. To illustrate its deficiencies, once again, he has to invent his examples, and become the author of the very kind of fiction which he is complaining about. Yet his own film noir creations are completely compelling. So she was no more than a little girl, huh? So I was just a heel and a low-down jerk? So what! All at once her body was pressing firm and yet trembling against me under that scanty dress. I could feel every line and curve of her. (214) In fact everywhere that Hoggart gives us examples of the debased new writing that the working class are reading, it leaps from the page with its energy and sauce. Take the lamented ‘brash confidence’ of the popular weeklies: Anyway, June and I knew we were in for a smashing time the moment we set eyes on the place . . . three dance-halls, two sunbathing parades, lots of milk bars – just the job! And then, sure enough, up rolled a real eyeful! One great big hunk of luscious manhood! Marlon Brando and Humph. Bogart in one. (194) Or take Hoggart’s imitation of the style that The Sun would one day turn into its very own: IT BEATS ME Here we go again, chums! Who is it this time? Only the 60-year-old bachelor Archprelate of Ponty-holeth (side photograph of the Archprelate in his gaiters) . . . . He was talking the other day to the League of Christian Women (average age 62) about THE WAY WE SPEND OUR SPARE TIME.


Well . . . well . . . Do you like a spot of T.V. after a hard day’s work? . . . You shouldn’t – not according to the bachelor Archprelate. . . . ‘Too many people’, he said, ‘take all their recreations passively nowadays. This can do them no good’. Do you like a mild flutter on the pools every week? . . . Sorry, pal, you shouldn’t – not according to the 60-year-old Archprelate. We can easily imagine how The Sun would have ended this article, along the Joycean lines of ‘U.P.: up’. At the same time, in a funny way, the Archprelate’s complaints about the working-class’ turn to passive, commercial forms of entertainment, are – exactly – those of The Uses itself. The passage stages Hoggart’s own intuition of how the working classes themselves would react to the second half of his book. If the first half of the book is with ‘us’, the second half is definitely with ‘them’. Innit? K.M.A. mate! Juke box boys One of the most evocative chapters of The Uses is entitled ‘The Newer Mass Art: Sex in Shiny Packets’. This is not about condoms, but spicy magazines and sex-and-violence novels. Once again, Hoggart is forced to make them up. He’s really good at it, doing a great Mickey Spillane. Before that, he treats us to a gem of a different kind: a portrait of the modern consumers who are fed an ‘almost entirely unvaried diet of sensation without commitment’ (202). Our first call is all too briefly focussed on the interestingly transsexual world of what he calls the ‘glassily hermaphrodite existence (‘‘life like a permanent wank inside you’’)’ of the national serviceman. This is followed by a more extended discussion of juke box boys: ‘those who spend their evening listening in harshly-lighted milk bars to the ‘‘nikelodeons’’ ’. These are the vitellone, loafers, drugstore cowboys of Leeds. Their regular rendezvous of ill-repute: garish milk bars: 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 living-rooms 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. (203)

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Amongst all possibilities, going to a milk bar in the evenings sounds innocent enough you might think. But these customers have something more in mind than milk: Most of the customers are boys aged between fifteen and twenty, with drape-suits, picture ties, and an American slouch. Most of them cannot afford a succession of milk-shakes, and make cups of tea serve for an hour or two whilst – and this is their main reason for coming – they put copper after copper into the mechanical record player. About a dozen records are available at any time; a numbered button is pressed for the one wanted, which is selected from a key to titles . . . . Almost all are ‘vocals’ and the styles of singing much advanced beyond what is normally heard on the Light Programme of the B.B.C. (203–4) While reading this patient explanation of exactly how a jukebox works, it is nice to recall that Walter Benjamin was referring to them, without sensing any need to explain them to his readers, in the 1930s. Since The Uses was published in 1957 we may assume that the music that Hoggart heard being played on jukeboxes around the country dates from the mid-1950s. The most popular songs at this time included Bill Haley and the Comets, ‘Rock Around the Clock’; Elvis Presley, ‘Hound dog, Heartbreak Hotel, Jailhouse Rock’; Carl Perkins, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’; Buddie Holly, ‘That’ll Be the Day’; Little Richard, ‘Tutti Frutti’; Chuck Berry, ‘Roll Over Beethoven’. Hoggart’s comments on these awesome classics are wonderfully unenthusiastic: Some of the tunes are catchy; all have been doctored for presentation so that they have the kind of beat which is currently popular . . . . They are delivered with great precision and competence, and the ‘nikelodeon’ is allowed to blare out so that the noise would be sufficient to fill a good-sized ballroom, rather than a converted shop in the main street. The young men waggle one shoulder or stare, as desperately as Humphrey Bogart, across the tubular chairs. (204)


For Hoggart, listening to this ‘jive and boogie-woogie’ becomes the expression of a particular purposelessness and directionlessness, turning the young men into ‘hedonistic but passive barbarian[s]’. 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. Many of the customers – their clothes, their hair-styles, their facial expressions all indicate – are living to a large extent in a myth world compounded of a few simple elements which they take to be those of American life. They form a depressing group and one by no means typical of workingclass people; perhaps most of them are rather less intelligent than the average, and are therefore even more exposed than others to the debilitating mass trends of the day. They have no aim, no ambition, no protection, no belief. (204) Step in T.S. Eliot, and Matthew Arnold chastising the masses for ‘indifferentism’. While Hoggart praises the power of working-class resistance to forms of authority and to the ‘phantasmagoria of passing shows and vicarious stimulations’ (202) of the mass culture industry, these youngsters must be denigrated for their ‘moral spivvery’. Yet the evocative language in which he describes them also tells us that these boys in their own way are expressing themselves, and that the point is that they like to express themselves in the way that ‘they’ would have disapproved of. The attraction to the ‘shiny barbarism’ of hip American culture is precisely that it offers them a way out of the submissive structure of ‘them’ and ‘us’. So the contradiction The Uses offers us is that the working classes should be aspiring to our kind of culture, to reading good books like George Eliot’s and listening to Fidelio or at least singing traditional songs, and resisting all that brash, new American commercial culture, as ‘we’ do. But look! They are doing exactly the opposite! They resist all our attempts to make them interested in proper literature, and they go instead for that commercial pop culture of Mickey Spillane and Elvis Presley! I ask you! It beats me. So? Hoggart? He’s well nang! Laters!

Works cited Fanon, Frantz (1965). The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. London: Macgibbon & Kee.

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Hoggart, Richard (1957). The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-class Life, with Special References to Publications and Entertainments. London: Chatto and Windus. Joyce, James (1960). Ulysses. London: The Bodley Head. Kureishi, Hanif (1990). The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber and Faber. Rushdie, Salman (1988). The Satanic Verses. London: Viking. Urban Dictionary, www.urbandictionary.com

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

Part One: The uses of multimedia literacy Introduction: Multimedia literacy – print, media, critical, digital1 If we do live in a commercial but humane democracy, as Richard Hoggart fervently hoped that we would, then the popular media are a chief means for interconnecting both the human and the democratic parts of the community, and for linking experts and specialists in government, business and the professions to the general population of ‘ordinary people’. As is well known, Hoggart thought that the ‘commercial’ part was getting out of step with the ‘humane’ part (to say nothing of the ‘democratic’). Commercially catered entertainments seemed to be propagating a new form of literacy – purposeless, consumptive, selfish – that was out of step with both the goals of formal schooling and the home and class culture of the industrialised working population. Hoggart was among the first to think about how commercial entertainment intersects with and extends formal literacy, and how that might affect culture and citizenship. In The Uses of Literacy, published in 1957, he wrote mostly about popular printed materials – he did not consider the ‘uses of television’ until 1960, when he published an interesting article in Encounter under that title (Hoggart, 1960). Since then, it may be argued that popular media have evolved not once but twice, first through television (1950s to 1970s) and then via interactive and online media (since the Clinton Presidency). The latter have also been at the forefront of a rapid acceleration in information technology, consumerism and globalisation. Thus, half a century after Uses of Literacy, it seems timely for a new attempt to be made to understand these forces in relation to the uses to which both lay populations and expert elites put their ‘media literacy’. 137

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One important change since Hoggart’s day is the extent to which media literacy itself has evolved from ‘read-only’ (broadcast, oneto-many) to ‘read and write’ (interactive, peer-to-peer). Early media theorists compared broadcasting to the pulpit or soapbox, where a single message was shouted from the perspective of some institutional vested interest. The role of the populace was to stand around passively and soak it up. However, in the last few years and at gathering pace, nonprofessionals have taken up these media as an autonomous means of communication for themselves. ‘Writing’ is catching up with ‘reading’. Here media literacy is merely following the historical pattern set by print literacy. In the early modern period the use of reading spread well before that of writing, and even if people could write, they tended not to have much use for that skill in everyday intercourse and commerce. Only when a significant proportion of people at large began to write as well as read (around two thirds of adults) did Western society produce journalism, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the novel and democracy. It was at that point that the social activists and emancipationists of the day realised what a friend they had in literacy, and so began the long haul to invest in it sufficiently, via public schooling and private propagation, for everyone to be a participant and for the skill to be put to useful ends. Ever since, ‘universal’ print literacy has been a measure of advanced status for any country wanting to compete in the modern world. In contrast, when the electronic (broadcast) media got going during the first half of the twentieth century, the intelligentsia was under the influence of high modernism on the cultural side and the spectre of demagogic totalitarianism on the political side. It was in this mental environment that Richard Hoggart’s authorial speaking voice and critical ‘method’ were forged. It was a climate in which few policy activists thought that a new ‘literacy’ was at hand, much less one that needed to be taught. Instead, they thought that ordinary people needed to be armed against the influence of such media, which were seen as a threat to print literacy and the rational and imaginative values it was said to promote. Just as no special training beyond native curiosity and scepticism was needed for people to appreciate stage shows or listen to sermons, so the new world of entertainment and persuasion (both political and commercial) seemed to need no special literacy. If it was involved at all, it needed to be a ‘critical literacy’, dedicated to counteracting rather than extending the reach and sway of what were thought to be powerful and unscrupulous forces acting upon the people. This is what was taught in schools: not how to make the most of the electronic media, but how to make the least of them. It did not occur to many commentators that

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the general run of humanity might use these new media as they used a pencil or their own voice to express their own identity, relationships and ideas. Those who did think about the emancipationist potential of radio and cinema, like Berthold Brecht (1979/80), Humphrey Jennings (1985) or Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1997), tended to think about media literacy in class terms rather than personal ones: the ‘masses’ could represent themselves via new media, but mainly as masses. With the popularisation of online media in affluent economies, we need to extend the notion of ‘media literacy’ beyond the defensive notion of ‘critical reading’ and ‘media literacy’ as taught in schools, towards what ought to be called ‘digital literacy’ – a form of handson productive expression, taught by and within the milieu in which it is deployed, using multiplatform devices to ‘write’ as well as ‘read’ electronic media. As this capability edges towards the two-thirds level at which print literacy achieved its most dynamic cultural and political effects, there has been little call for the kind of investment in its propagation – not to mention its uses – that accompanied print literacy. Digital literacy is primarily taught on a ‘peer to peer’, informal basis. The investment is almost all private, seeking to develop markets rather than citizens. It is a ‘demand-side’ rather than a ‘supply-side’ model of literacy-propagation, and for that very reason it has attracted less attention than it warrants from educational and cultural thinkers, who tend to cluster around publisher/provider models and not to know enough about how digital literacy is learnt (by doing) in informal contexts, or how it is used among untutored populations. Richard Hoggart thought that the popular uses of print literacy were largely purposeless, even wasteful – they amounted to ‘abuses’ – and he was even less enamoured of such self-taught ‘media literacy’ as he encountered, for example his famously dim view of youthful taste in popular (American) music. Now, digital literacy too is developing apace in a commercial environment, largely for non-instrumental purposes – self-expression, relationship maintenance, communication, entertainment. Should it be taken up in formal public education more systematically than it has been? What might that contribute to a humane but commercial democracy? Or should we take a dim view of the whole shebang?

Modernising education Since at least Shakespeare, modern commercial entertainment has linked the top of society with the bottom, the gaps between different demographics – class, gender, region, ethnicity and so on. – being what it

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is that ‘the media’ mediate among audiences. Since broadcasting, the same media that carry entertainment serve to convey government, business and political information. Partly because of this linking of different sections of society and different types of knowledge and discourse, the media of entertainment are often held to offer (or inhibit) emancipationist potential in commercial democracies. Walt Whitman said, ‘to have great poets, there must be great audiences too’ (1883, 324). How to connect the two; how to promote intellectual and creative as well as political emancipation so as to achieve ‘greatness’ in demand as well as supply? Here is where Richard Hoggart came in – he ‘theorised’ the gap between modern expert literary and political elites (his professional peers including Whitman’s ‘great poets’), and the working class (his culture of origin and Whitman’s ‘great audience’). One of the ways that Uses of Literacy bridged that gap was that its own readership ranged from the ‘top’ of society to the ‘bottom’ (on the role of Penguin/Pelican books in this process, see Hartley 2003, 20–7). What constitutes a ‘great’ audience and how can it be nurtured? How does popular literacy link as well as separate the diverse and even conflicted demographics from the top of society to the bottom? What is needed to provide a space in which the life of the imagination can be shared among the have-nots as well as the haves in a given community? The Hoggart I find ‘useful’ here is the one who combines an analysis of imaginative, non-instrumental literacy with a practical contribution to the shaping of education, both formal and informal.

Print literacy Hoggart’s work is really about the uses of print literacy. After its invention and technical propagation throughout Europe and across the world – a process that took a mere century in a universe without paved roads – print literacy remained for a long time largely tied to instrumental purposes: religion (ideology), commerce, government (control). That gap between elite and lay populations was marked by a difference between those who could and did read and write (for all purposes including personal expression) on the one hand and the larger population who were taught a ‘read-only’ version of print literacy on the other. They could read but did not write (especially not for publication). At a societal level print literacy was geared to the needs of closed expert systems: clerical, scientific, governmental, commercial. It was rarely used by ‘ordinary’ folk for leisure consumption (let alone production), personal expression, the maintenance of communities of interest or the life of the imagination

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(‘literature’). One of the purposes of instrumental print literacy was modernisation itself; to such an extent that influential commentators saw political democracy as a ‘consequence’ of literacy (Goody and Watt, 1964). At the same time, however, it was the popular media – not formal education – which began to fill the gap between elites and popular readerships with non-instrumental read-only literacy. The plain folks got sensationalism (both radical and commercial) along with their science and sermons. In other words, and more accurately, a demand-led element was established in the economy of literacy, in addition to the existing supply-side provision. Hoggart was the first to notice that these demand-led uses of literacy were both quite different from expert or instrumental uses and also worthy of serious enquiry. Hoggart was interested in mass entertainment from the point of view of the popular readership. Famously he found it wanting, at odds with self-made working-class culture. That is why his work is associated with the valorisation of ‘critical literacy’, which means astute readership. Critical literacy was thought to be emancipationist, to allow for independent thought and active participation: ‘critical’ popular readers may turn into activists, or novelists. In Hoggart’s time – the era of one-way, broadcast communication and supply-side providers – there was little room for a popular uptake of publishing. The broadcast media failed completely to promote published writing among wide sections of their newly acquired mass readership. So the lag between reading and writing remained. People could enjoy stories, but not tell their own; right up to now. Popular self-publication can, however, now be contemplated, because the era of one-way ‘readonly’ media of mass and broadcast communication is transforming into the interactive era of ‘read–write’ multimedia. The shift from print via broadcasting to multimedia raises the ‘Hoggart question’ for the era of the Internet: what are the cultural, non-instrumental uses of multimedia literacy?’ This question underlies a fair bit of my work, which includes an attempt to think about the ‘uses’ of journalism and television in similar terms. Both Popular Reality and Uses of Television (Hartley, 1996; 1999) are focused on the broadcast era; I argued that historically the media and journalism have performed an informal educational function, even while the formal sector was trying to use schooling to inoculate teenagers against popular culture. More recently I have become interested in the uses of interactive digital media by ‘lay’ populations, a development occurring largely outside of the formal education sector. However, the question of education remains pertinent. What investment – public,

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private and personal – is being made in multimedia literacy for digital communication, compared with the provision of schooling to produce universal print literacy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? What attention needs to be paid to non-instrumental and imaginative uses of multimedia literacy? What role should formal education play in bridging the remaining gap between producers and consumers? What are universities for in this era, and how may they need to adapt to survive? Universities and the expert paradigm Universities have proven themselves adaptable over the long term – they are among the oldest surviving human organisations, along with the Catholic Church and the Isle of Man Parliament. That survival is based on fulfilling some fundamental human needs, like the puberty rite (which we now call teaching) and the need to establish pecking orders without violence (which we now call research). Now, we are facing the knowledge economy, and universities must adapt again. How will barely post-medieval institutions cope with the accelerating tempo of technologically driven change in the twenty-first century? Closed expert process In the past, universities were built around stored knowledge: the library, the lab. Following what Richard E. Lee (2007) calls the ‘long sixteenth century’, modernisation meant abandoning the medieval library and switching from the preservation to the expansion of knowledge. The modern model of innovation, which can be glossed as the implementation of creative ideas, was borrowed from industrial manufacturing, ascendant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where knowledge was produced by a closed, linear process. Bright people with scientific expertise would be isolated (in labs) where they could be as creative as they liked, since individual flashes of brilliance were contained inside a corporate environment and goal-driven process. The fruits of their ideas (now called IP) were codified, scaled and transmitted down a pipeline, preferably also controlled by the producer organisation, to waiting consumers. This model of innovation as a closed production process based on expertise is shared by research labs, elite universities, the creative departments of companies, city planners and so on. Exclusion of consumers In the closed expert system, the division of labour between producer and consumer has been extreme throughout the modern era. Production is the sphere of government, business, organisation, control. Lay people

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have been more or less excluded from formal knowledge production – it has been their job to learn how to be wise consumers (and disciplined workers). Consumers are reduced to passive, feminised behaviour, not action, manipulated by marketing which is subject to the controlling analysis of psychological expertise, so that the innovations prepared for them will be taken up and accepted, hopefully with euphoria and ‘irrational enthusiasm’ (in a phrase made famous by former Federal Reserve banker Alan Greenspan, who deplored the same emotion among stock traders, because while emotionalism is required among consumers it is no basis for rational economic decisions). Even if things never work out so neatly in practice, influencing behaviour nevertheless remains the ‘business plan’ of the marketing and PR sector. And so, along the consumer/producer divide, the interests of business, government and expert elites on the one hand and consumers on the other were never fully aligned in the industrial era. In the middle, literally mediating between otherwise opposed elites and masses (Eco, 1986, 81–5, 145–50), grew up the entertainment industry – the very phenomenon investigated in The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart, 1958). Open innovation networks The closed expert-process system is breaking down; it is unsuited to the knowledge economy (Leadbeater, 2002, 182). Expertise is migrating out of organisations along with technologies, and organisations are open to external sources of innovation, including from their own users/consumers, through globalisation and increasing participation in tertiary education. Innovation is myriad-sourced. Knowledge is networked. Consumption is increasingly co-production; it is active not passive, making not taking, using not behaving. And while learning is a fundamental requirement of innovation it cannot be confined to the elite organisation or research centre. Learning becomes a porous, distributed system, and innovation becomes an open network. The propagation of innovation throughout society has begun. Consumers are no longer passive recipients, they are participants. In the knowledge economy, consumers are sources of ideas, redefining products. Inventions are not complete until explored, extended or even reinvented by users. And as is well known, the consumer and services sector of the economy is now much larger than primary industry or manufacturing, so the sheer scale of consumer activity drives innovation too. In open models, innovation is democratic not technocratic; it needs the widest possible base of participation, not isolated expert elites,

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patented applications and controlled value chains. Knowledge requires ‘flow’ as well as ‘base’. Unlike other properties, it increases when it is shared. Value is a web not a chain. Innovation is a true science/arts hybrid – it has a science-engineering component but a culture of use in social networks. Innovation requires the promotion of diversity and interaction, as well as of expert research. Symbolic values and economic values have converged and integrated in convergence among telecommunications, computers and media.

The uses of innovation Here is where we may discern an answer to the question of what universities may be ‘for’ in the digital era of open innovation and distributed learning. It is not simply a matter of universities making use of digital technologies. More fundamentally, they can be part of the push towards developing (or unleashing) creative innovation as an agent of change and growth in the knowledge-based economy; a prospect that raises these matters to the level of national policy in any country concerned with national competitiveness in a global environment. The research agenda of the humanities and creative arts needs to be brought into intimate contact with R&D in the business, economics and policy fields, focusing on arts/technology convergence, theory–practice integration and creativity for enterprise-formation. In that spirit, I have been working on the development of the new field of Creative Industries (Hartley, 2005): first in a process of educational renewal and modernisation by repurposing the arts, resulting in a Creative Industries Faculty and Precinct at QUT; more recently by putting some research grunt into the concept itself, resulting in ARC funding for a Federation Fellowship and Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (the CCI: www.cci.edu.au). The key word in this process is innovation. In current business, economic and policy discourse, innovation and especially creative innovation is the general purpose or enabling process that will maintain international competitiveness for advanced countries (and firms) and accelerate developing countries’ progress towards prosperity. The rhetoric that is used in these contexts to describe the innovative entrepreneur is exactly that which has been used throughout modernity to describe the creative artist. Artists have long been habituated to working with risk, intuition and constant change. The cultural sector has been ‘constantly innovative, anticipating and responding to the market through an intuitive immersion into the field, willing to break the rules,

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going beyond the 9–5, thriving on risk and failure, mixing work and life, meaning and money – this was a cutting edge sector which the others could look to as a model’ (O’Connor and Gu, 2006, 273–4). In other words, artists became the template for entrepreneurs, and creative enterprise the model for the new economy. Culture shifts from its position as a sphere of opposition to the modernising fury of commercial enterprise, to become a vital component in a country’s competitiveness. Suddenly, it seems, people at the humanities end of the academic spectrum may prove to be directly useful in the wealth-creating forums of business and government. And so, the wider question now is, if enterprise needs the creativity of the artist, and if innovation needs the ‘literacy’ of both the intellectual and an astute reading public (the Whitman proposition), how widely among the general or ordinary population can such capabilities be distributed? As for educational institutions, what role might they play in promoting the use of digital technologies for intellectual and creative emancipation among whole populations? How may they assist in scaling up that usage to benefit the innovation system? Or should that be done by the private sector, with just-in-time (sink or swim) ‘training’ for creative entrepreneurs and commercial pay-as-you-learn for the creative citizen? If the situation is left to develop haphazardly and commercially as it has already begun to unfold, the question of what universities are for will become more insistent and uncomfortable as distributed learning takes hold outside of formal education institutions. At the conclusion of Uses of Literacy Richard Hoggart remarks that ‘it seems unlikely’ that ‘a majority of any class will have strongly intellectual pursuits’. Recognising this, his recipe for action is not to try to turn people into intellectuals – getting workers to read The Times rather than the tabloids. As he wisely points out, ‘there are other ways of being in the truth’ (Hoggart, 1958, 281). His objection to popular entertainments is not that they fail to recruit workers to the intelligentsia, but that they ‘make it harder for people without an intellectual bent to become wise in their own way’. If that is the goal, is it still true that the popular media make it harder in the era of YouTube, MySpace, Flickr and the Wikipedia? If innovation and creativity are the hope of commercial democracies then it may be necessary to ask even more ambitious questions than those posed by the desire to educate a critically literate population. Indeed, these are the contemporary ‘uses of Richard Hoggart’: to investigate what ought to be hoped for in the currently unfolding phase of audio-visual literacy. Do contemporary interactive media constitute just such another way of ‘being in the truth’, and would massive public, private and personal investment in developing creative imaginative talents

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within a reformed educational infrastructure make a contribution not only to the inner life of individuals but also to the wealth of nations? This is the basic proposition of the Creative Industries initiative (both as an educational initiative and as an intellectual or conceptual problem) and of my current research programme. The questions I am strewing behind me here are those that preoccupy us at the CCI.

Repurposing education for innovation This detour around the expert system to arrive at innovation may be just the right route for repurposing universities. The work I am ‘reporting’ on here has only just begun. It has proven necessary at the outset to engage in some conceptual ground-clearing to clarify and simplify the economic argument about the growth of knowledge, as well as the educational imperative to train more creative entrepreneurs and artists (which amounts to the same thing) while broadening access to digital technologies for the citizenry at large. Underlying these economic and educational arguments is a commitment to the inner life of individual imagination – it is the source of creativity and of knowledge. In the notvery-elegant guise of ‘creative human capital’ it is also the royal road to economic improvement. This means that economic policy based on existing structures (the market) or institutions (like the firm) is not enough; it simply re-invents the past. Innovation policy requires that we enable agents to think for themselves about what they want to do. Economic policy needs to focus on ‘another way of being in the truth’ – namely that individuals drive innovation through the spread and increase of knowledge. The individual remains the ‘unit’ of creativity, no matter what scale is achieved in distribution or sales, and notwithstanding that individual creativity rarely gets very far on its own (it needs to work in teams). If we buy the argument that contemporary economies are complex adaptive innovation networks driven by myriad individual agents – rather than closed expert systems that can be controlled by elite institutions or leaderships – then the question arises of how to encourage individual imagination within a complex network. One answer is to focus on the figure who will take the system into the future as both agent and object of structural change: ‘the teenager’. This is the very group that Richard Hoggart encountered in milk bars, to his own dismay. His teens were objects: ‘the directionless and tamed helots of a machineminding class’ (1958, 205). He missed the opportunity to value these denizens of the milk bars as agents: for the R&D they were all too visibly

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pursuing as he watched, via juke box, clothes, dance movements, looks, Americanisms, in order to burst forth in due course as entrepreneurs of creative innovation and consumer affluence, not to mention the counterculture, in the 1960s pop culture. Given Hoggart’s preference for existing structure (self-made working-class culture) over dynamic change (American pop culture), what is needed is not a simple application of ‘Hoggart’ to current phenomena, but an argument for contemporary Hoggartians not to make the same mistake again, and to recognise that there are indeed ‘other ways of being in the truth’. What looks like aimless daydreaming and mischief to the institutionalised expert should also be seen (or at least investigated) as an ‘incubator’ in which future possibilities are growing. The gap between home, work and school where young people in particular can think about identity, mix with peers, express their own thoughts and escape some of the structures of social control also underlies popular entertainment, live and mediated, driving the imaginative content of the most important of the creative industries. Music, media and games are the ‘industrial’, scaled-up form taken by adolescent daydreaming (wish-fulfilment) and peer-group mischief (play or conflict). The popular media have grown up in the gap between elite systems (of government and business) and general populations, giving highly capitalised expression to people’s desires and fears, wishes and conflicts, plots and games. Normally, government is devoted only to controlling or at least minimising such tendencies. But teenagers seem opposed to parental or institutional control only because the latter are ‘maps of the past’ while the teenager is intuitively oriented to the future. Policy needs to think of the daydreaming mischievous teenager as an opportunity not a threat, even though actual manifestations of teenage-led creative innovation may not always present such a pretty sight. As Hoggart put it, The hedonistic but passive barbarian who rides a fifty-horse-power bus for threepence to see a five-million-dollar film for one-andeightpence, is not simply a social oddity; he is a portent. (Hoggart, 1958, 205) Portents are harbingers of change – teenagers are the agents of and demand drivers for innovation. Hoggart disliked the extent to which young people’s dreams were being dreamed for them by the entertainment industry (although he did not mind if it were done by Auden or Lawrence). That is still an issue, as it has been since at least Shakespeare, despite the massive increase in youthful self-expression made possible

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via consumer-generated content. However, even when facilitated by entertainment producers or ‘killer apps’ designed by adults, the teenager is still the ‘unit’ of demand for and expression of change, just as the individual is the ‘unit’ for creative innovation. It was exactly this that worried Hoggart about teenagers; his purpose being to describe what he wanted to call ‘an ugly change’ (Owen, 2005, 171) that threatened the ‘order of existence’ (Hoggart, 1958, 69) that he valued. For a later reappraisal of his ‘method’, perhaps it is sufficient to notice that he exercises detailed observational acuity in identifying cultural change and showing how the tension between order and change is keenly felt and culturally productive in its own right. It may indeed be necessary not to follow Hoggart’s own particular evaluations, which seem to value working-class family disputes and even household suicides (67–9) higher than milk-bar décor and ‘juke-box boys’ (203–4). Such preferences get in the way of recognising that the cultural tension between order and change, personified in the ‘juke-box boys’ themselves, is not a choice (when pushed, Hoggart chose order) but is itself a driver and generator of creative innovation. He recognises this in the implicit contrast between ‘tamed helots’ and creative imagination. How can a country avoid the former and encourage the latter?

The uses of multimedia My Federation Fellowship programme, ‘The Uses of Multimedia’, combines an in-depth analysis of the existing and potential uses of multimedia ‘literacy’ among ordinary populations – revisiting Uses of Literacy after 50 years – with some practical implementation work to extend participation in digital ‘read–write’ media. As far as the practical possibilities go, they take two forms. First, it is as important to think about ‘writing’ (publishing) in the context of interactive multimedia as it is to think about reading. So the encouragement of individual creative talent needs to be about ‘doing’ as well as ‘consuming’; about finding fit-for-purpose mechanisms to enable myriad individual expressions of personal and imaginative creativity, using workshops to stimulate self-made media for online social networks. A vehicle we are using at the CCI to experiment with this is ‘digital storytelling’ (Lambert, 2006). Second, scaling up individual talent and growing knowledge in an open, adaptive innovation network requires something very different from education as we know it. What is needed in fact might not be an institutional, library-based university at all, but a broadband/ broadcast hybrid network that links cultural institutions, online archives, commercial sites and channels

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with the ‘creative citizen’ who is source as well as destination, producer as well as consumer, writer as well as reader, teacher as well as learner. The form of such a network is of course already being explored intensively ‘out there’ in both interactive and broadcast media (although not as much in the commercial TV sector as one might hope); for example, Current TV (USA), the BBC (UK) and SBS-TV’s Freeload initiative (Australia). Such initiatives are not directly educational, preferring a self-educating ethic. How that works, and what may need to be added to make explicit the tacit knowledge required for the propagation of creative wisdom across a wide population in order to ‘have great audiences’, is a major question for both cultural analysis and public policy. Universities will ignore the lesson of consumer-led, distributive, iterative and multi-sourced learning at their peril, as will broadcasters and publishers. These ‘other ways of being in the truth’ are perhaps the best hope yet that the ‘truly concrete and personal’ expression that underlies Hoggart’s vision for ‘the quality of life, the kind of response, the rootedness in wisdom and maturity’ within ‘popular art’ can be achieved by a wide section of an international creative citizenry, with the surprising innovation that such expression is itself the R&D component of a creative economy, contributing to the growth of knowledge and progress of society.

Part two – educating teachers Can this effort to modernise and repurpose higher education extend to schooling too? This is quite a tricky issue, since one part of schooling is dedicated to ‘taming’ the ‘helots’; it is therefore the very environment from which many teenagers wish to escape, using their own untutored multimedia literacy to enjoy their own imaginative universe, where their private daydreams can be elaborated with the aid of stories of wishfulfilment, their fears expressed in songs of angst and romance and their own stratagems for mischief and peer-bonding advanced by means of various mobile devices from Nikes to phones. This disconnect – perhaps amounting to a structural contradiction – between formal schooling and informal acculturation has given rise, in turn, to public anxiety about what teens are up to. Just to give a typical case in point, the Australian Financial Review (Australia’s version of the FT) ran a long feature called ‘The Secret Life of Teens’. It suggested that what happens on the other side of the bedroom door in the family home today – where 14-year-olds hold electronic court via mobile, modem and media – is literally a closed world to parents and other grown-ups.

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Australian teenagers today are the most electronically savvy, the most educated and the most globally aware generation ever. They have money, they are pragmatic about studying hard and getting a job and they are optimistic. They are the ‘click and go’ generation, they live in democratised families, they negotiate and they feel entitled to privacy (‘The Secret Life of Teens’, 2004, 20). Teens are perennially fascinating objects of speculation in the serious as well as the popular media, because their ‘secret life’ represents in concrete form the potential shape of the future for everyone. Their lives may not be such a secret after all, but the realities of the world they are facing – their futures – may indeed remain hidden from the sight and imagination of some of those whose job it is to worry about them, including parents, journalists, educators, policy makers and elected representatives. If today’s teens do live in a world that is barely recognisable to some of those professionals, it is important to share the secret. However, it may not be easy to share the secret in school. Teenagers are used to teachers seeking to control, minimise and render ‘useful’ their digital literacy. They do not necessarily think that is what school is for. So it is not a simple matter of deciding to teach digital literacy in schools as we currently know them. To make a worthwhile contribution to the further development of digital literacy, schools will need to change themselves just as much as they seek to change teenagers. The main thing that needs to change in schools is . . . teachers. Creative workforce In seeking to identify the driver of social and economic advancement during the present century, John Howkins argues that IT alone is no longer enough. He suggests that the ‘information society’ is already beginning to give way to something much more challenging: If I was a bit of data I would be proud of living in an information society. But as a thinking, emotional, creative being – on a good day, anyway – I want something better. We need information. But we also need to be active, clever, and persistent in challenging this information. We need to be original, sceptical, argumentative, often bloody-minded and occasionally downright negative – in one word, creative. (Howkins, 2002) The sociologist of occupations Richard Florida has identified what he sees as a new economic class – the ‘creative class’ – that he argues will

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dominate economic and cultural life in the century to come, just as the working class predominated in the earlier decades of the twentieth century and the service class has since then. While the creative class is smaller than the service class, it is nevertheless the dynamo of growth and change for services and thence the economy as a whole, and incidentally for the temper of the times too – it is a cultural and social force as well as an economic one. ‘Classes’ have migrated, as it were, from blue-collar and white-collar environments to the no-collar workplace: Artists, musicians, professors and scientists have always set their own hours, dressed in relaxed and casual clothes and worked in stimulating environments. They could never be forced to work, yet they were never truly not at work. With the rise of the Creative Class, this way of working has moved from the margins to the economic mainstream. (Florida, 2002, 12–13) Florida describes how the no-collar workplace ‘replaces traditional hierarchical systems of control with new forms of self-management, peer-recognition and pressure and intrinsic forms of motivation’, which he calls soft control. Thus In this setting, we strive to work more independently and find it much harder to cope with incompetent managers and bullying bosses. We trade job security for autonomy. In addition to being fairly compensated for the work we do and the skills we bring, we want the ability to learn and grow, shape the content of our work, control our own schedules and express our identities through work. (Ibid., 13) Creative educators? The industrial organisation of workforces with strong unionisation leads to standardisation of work experience. When the employer is a command bureaucracy, as are many education authorities, then control, predictability and due process will always prevail over innovation, risk and customisation. Even their own organisations recognise that teachers are trained for something other than ‘fostering creativity’: To date, the fostering of creativity and of innovation in school students has not itself been a major focus of [teachers’] professional learning activity. . . . These are very substantial challenges. (MCEETYA, 2003, 163–4)

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Sir Ken Robinson, senior education advisor to the Getty Trust, makes the connection between economic and educational imperatives: The economic circumstances in which we all live, and in which our children will have to make their way, are utterly different from those of 20 or even 10 years ago. For these we need different styles of education and different priorities. We cannot meet the challenges of the 21st century with the educational ideologies of the 19th. Our own times are being swept along on an avalanche of innovations in science, technology, and social thought. To keep pace with these changes, or to get ahead of them, we will need our wits about us – literally. We must learn to be creative. (Robinson, 2001, 200–3) David Hargreaves says, ‘the time is ripe for exploring new ways in which to increase teachers’ professional knowledge and skill’. He argues the need for ‘deep change’ that will transform rather than simply improve schools. That need is driven by The growing recognition that in a knowledge-based economy more people need to be more creative and this in itself will require new approaches to teaching. Without reducing the importance of the basics, we must now aspire to nurture through education the qualities of creativity, innovativeness and enterprise. (Hargreaves, 2003, 3–4) For themselves as professionals and for their students, teachers need to • nurture the individual talent that will win employment; • develop in students the skills to manage a portfolio career – selfemployed, freelance, casual or part-time, not with a single employer or even industry; • learn project management and entrepreneurship as core skills; • encourage project-based work in teams with multiple partners who change over time; • connect to an international environment where continuing education is normal; • increasingly prioritise life-design as well as employment skills;

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• learn – for themselves as well as for their students – how to navigate from entry-level workforce jobs to wealth-creating destinations – which may include giving up employment and working independently. All these objectives require major changes in disciplinary knowledge, pedagogy, curriculum, assessment and the experience of education for both educators and students. Each of them is a ‘life’ skill rather than ‘literacy’, digital or otherwise. But all of them are required if digital literacy is to flourish across a wide population. Learning as a distributed system The starting point for renewing the public sector must be a renewal of its relationship with the society it serves. Ministers should be held accountable for solving problems which electors want solved, not running government departments. (Leadbeater, 1999, 207, 215) Charles Leadbeater’s strong warning about the perils of business-as-usual management, rather than tackling emergent problems, applies directly to the challenges facing those who promote learning within a knowledge society. Public education systems (including the independent schools sector) are not necessarily best placed to respond to the challenge of the new knowledge economy and the need for innovative, creative, adaptive and curious consumer-citizens to make it prosper. Twentieth-century educational modernisation, based first on massively expanding formal institutions and more recently on increasing their productivity with centrally regulated performance targets, has certainly strengthened the education system of schools, universities and government departments. But inadvertently it has had a negative effect both on the kind of knowledge imparted and on the wider social desire to learn, because it has snuck the industrial-era ‘closed expert system’ into the education ‘industry’ at exactly the moment when ‘industry’ itself is evolving towards a market-based open innovation network: This approach to modernization also reinforces a deeply conservative approach to education, as a body of knowledge imparted by organizations with strong hierarchies and demarcated professional disciplines. . . . Two traditions are reflected in this culture: the monasteries, which were closed repositories for knowledge in the form of precious manuscripts, and Taylor’s factory, which encouraged

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standardized, easily replicated knowledge. The result is a system that is a curious hybrid of factory, sanctuary, library and prison. (Leadbeater, 1999, 110) Instead of providing disciplinary knowledge in a controlled environment, Leadbeater argues that education should tip over to the demand side; it needs to inspire the desire to learn: The point of education should not be to inculcate a body of knowledge, but to develop capabilities: the basic ones of literacy and numeracy as well as the capability to act responsibly towards others, to take initiative and to work creatively and collaboratively. The most important capability, and one which traditional education is worst at creating, is the ability and yearning to carry on learning. Too much schooling kills off the desire to learn. (111) Merely expanding the formal education system is not the direction to take for creating a society characterised by ‘yearning for learning’: ‘We need hybrid public and private institutions and funding structures. Schools and universities should become more like hubs of learning, within the community, capable of extending into the community’ (Leadbeater, 1999, 111–12). Individuals and families can and will take more responsibility for their own knowledge needs. Learning services will be provided by private as well as public institutions, for purposes determined by the needs of the learners themselves rather than for formal accreditation and certification. In short, learning will become a distributed system, dedicated to creativity, innovation, customised needs and networked across many sites from the family kitchen to the business breakfast as well as the classroom and workplace. Educational practices in the various systems need to open up to become more permeable and responsive to changing economic and social factors. The model for distributed learning for an open innovation network has already been promulgated in the shape of online and mobile media. The shift from teaching as transmission of knowledge to learning as production of knowledge means that an important responsibility for the system will be helping people learn to learn and to become motivated to learn. In this scenario, teachers become learning entrepreneurs, managers or producers, and teaching gives way to the design of learning programmes. This is not just a shift in the lexicon, but a transformation of practice. If the purpose of education systems is to prepare young people in

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appropriate ways for the challenges and responsibilities they will face throughout their lives, and if society is changing, ‘so should the way in which we introduce young people to it’ (Bentley, 1998, 38). Learning entrepreneurs: ‘other ways of being in the truth’ Richard Hoggart was evidently not persuaded that the university as he knew it was adapted to the task of analysing, let alone promoting, desirable uses of literacy by working consumers. So when he went to Birmingham it was to set up something quite novel among the universities of the day, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. He continued to work through non-canonical educational institutions like the WEA, UNESCO and Goldsmiths, and to intervene in educational aspects of commercial culture; for example, the Chatterley trial and the Pilkington Report. His example may still be instructive, and not only at the level of tertiary education. Hoggart was a learning entrepreneur, seeking to develop the uses of literacy among the industrial workforce and popular consumers; to make them ‘critical’ – by which he meant ‘creative’ and ‘innovative’ as well as independent-minded, although the lexicon of the times differed. His important innovation – made against the grain of his own left-Leavisite and somewhat anti-American cultural prejudices – was to understand that popular literacy is not only a matter of formal education, but also a matter of culture, and that such a culture was decisively shaped by commercial media that young people enjoyed in their ‘free’ time. A distributed, entertainment-hungry ‘reading public’ was already an important component of ‘commercial democracies’ in the 1950s. With the subsequent acceleration of celebrity culture, the ‘economy of attention’ (Lanham, 2006) and peer-to-peer or DIY creative content-creation using digital technologies, the horizons of that public have been radically expanded: now, at least in principle, every readerconsumer can also be a publisher, a journalist and a ‘creative’. Hoggart wanted ordinary people and non-intellectual populations to be able to make the best of their literacy, to ‘become wise in their own way’. I see Hoggart as a ‘theorist’ of literacy and moderniser of the ‘idea of the university’ (Newman, 1907), as well as a founder of cultural studies (which was but the vehicle for this deeper purpose: Hoggart, 1992, 26). He was an emancipationist of the imagination and of the intellect; and that explains the continuing ‘uses of Richard Hoggart’. The question that faces his successors is whether it is schools and teachers rather than popular media that pose the greater threat to the realisation of those ‘other ways of being in the truth’ that he valued.

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Note 1. This chapter is a revised and extended version of work that was first published in the International Journal of Cultural Studies (10:1), March 2007, 135–144.

Works cited Bentley, Tom (1998). Learning Beyond the Classroom: Educating for a Changing World. London: Routledge. Brecht, Berthold (1979/80). ‘Radio as a Means of Communication: A Talk on the Function of Radio’. Screen, 20:3/4, 24–8. Eco, Umberto (1986). Travels in Hyperreality. San Diego & New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus (1997). Critical Essays. London & New York: Continuum Books. Florida, Richard (2002). The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books. Goody, Jack and Ian Watt (1963). ‘The Consequences of Literacy’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5:3, 304–345. Hargreaves, David (2003). Working Laterally: How Innovation Networks Make an Education Epidemic. Teachers Transforming Teaching. London: Demos: www.demos.co.uk/workinglaterally Hartley, John (1996). Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture. London: Arnold. ——(1999). Uses of Television. London: Routledge. ——(2003). A Short History of Cultural Studies. London: Sage Publications. ——(ed.) (2005). Creative Industries. Oxford: Blackwell. Hoggart, Richard (1958). The Uses of Literacy. Harmondsworth: Pelican (1st pbk. edn). ——(1960). ‘The Uses of Television’. Encounter, vol XIV, no 1, 38–45. ——(1992). An Imagined Life. London: Chatto and Windus. Howkins, John (2002). ‘Comments to the Mayor’s Commission on the Creative Industries’. London: www.creativelondon.org.uk. Jennings, Humphrey (1985). Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers. London: André Deutsch/Picador. Lambert, Joe (2006). Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community. Berkeley, CA: Digital Diner Press, 2nd edn. Lanham, Richard A. (2006). The Economy of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Leadbeater, Charles (1999). Living on Thin Air: The New Economy. London: Viking. ——(2002). Up the Down Escalator: Why the Global Pessimists are Wrong. London: Viking. Lee, Richard E. (2007). ‘Cultural Studies, Complexity Studies and the Transformation of the Structures of Knowledge’. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 10:1, 11–20. MCEETYA [Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training & Youth Affairs] (2003) Australia’s Teachers: Australia’s Future. Canberra: Department of Education Science & Training.

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Newman, John [Cardinal] (1907). The Idea of a University: Defined and Illustrated. London: Longmans Green: www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/index.html. O’Connor, Justin and Gu Xin (2006). ‘A New Modernity? The Arrival of ‘‘Creative Industries’’ in China’. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 9:3. Owen, Sue (2005). ‘The Abuse of Literacy and the Feeling Heart: The Trials of Richard Hoggart’. Cambridge Quarterly, 34(2):147–176. Robinson, Ken (2001). Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative. Oxford: Capstone. ——(2004). ‘The Secret Life of Teens’. Australian Financial Review, Feb. 14, 20. Whitman, Walt (1883 [1995]). Specimen Days and Collect. New York: Dover.

9 Critical Literacy, Cultural Literacy, and the English School Curriculum in Australia1 Graeme Turner

Introduction In this chapter I want to reflect on the contemporary currency of what Richard Hoggart has called ‘critical literacy’ through a discussion of a series of debates about a very different formation of ‘critical literacies’ in the senior school English curriculum in Australia. Among the ramifications of these debates is the complicated political and pedagogical alignments it has created: a cultural studies scholar such as myself finds that he is located on the same side of the debate 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.Implicit in that location is a sense of the continuing and enabling importance of Hoggart’s original notion of critical literacy even as well as it has been taken up and modified over the history of cultural studies.

The critical literacies debate in Australia From time to time during the last few years in Australia, controversies over the teaching of English have made it to the front pages and peppered the letters pages of the national and metropolitan newspapers; they have been debated on commercial talkback radio and on public radio current affairs programmes; and they have provoked comment from the leading political figures in the country – from the prime minister to various state premiers and their education ministers (Slattery, 2005; Slattery and Maher, 2005). Amid widespread horror that the Year 12 (the final year of secondary school) external exam in NSW required its candidates to ‘deconstruct’ an SMS message (instead of, say, a scene from Hamlet), the 158

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federal education minister commissioned an enquiry into the final year English curricula across the country. The results have fuelled the call for a national curriculum that is developed and overseen by the federal government rather than, as is currently the case, different state syllabuses managed by the various state governments. To some extent this debate might be placed under the broad heading of the so-called ‘culture wars’ which have shaped Australian cultural politics since the election of the Howard government in 1996. It is not coincidental that the state jurisdictions all have Labour administrations, and that the federal government is a conservative coalition. However, it also has important particularities. Central among them is the role played by what has been called ‘critical literacy’. Critical literacy, of course, is a central, even motivating, theme behind Richard Hoggart’s work, from The Uses of Literacy to Between Two Worlds. As used by Hoggart, the term has a broad provenance, involving not only ‘learning to sharpen the mind’ in order ‘to look closely at society and ask questions about it’, but perhaps even more fundamentally learning to ‘compare the quality’ of cultural productions (Gibson and Hartley, 1998, 13). The process of discriminating between cultural products is fundamental since only then is the possession of literacy useful. Working with a more limited, functional or transactional, form of literacy, Hoggart argues, simply produces ‘a society which is capable of being conned’. Although literate in that they are equipped to be consumers of cultural products, he says, ‘people are not encouraged to be critical, they’re not given a critical literacy’ (Gibson and Hartley, 1998, 13). While this is in many ways an intrinsically political concern, it is also the case that the critical literacy Hoggart recommends had other dimensions. If Hoggart’s work argues for the need to respect workingclass culture as itself something of significance, it also maintains an acknowledgement of the ‘distinction between working class culture and the greatest achievements of the English mind and imagination’ (Gibson and Hartley, 1998, 14). In the debates I am dealing with here, however, while the term ‘critical literacy’ is routinely sourced to The Uses of Literacy (interesting in itself, as I have not been able to find the precise phrase there – its use seems to have begun later), it has acquired more specialized and circumscribed meanings. The ‘critical literacy’ approach, as established in Australia, is a mode of discourse analysis developed by theorists from the discipline of Education and enthusiastically taken up by state education bureaucrats influenced by the branch of systemic linguistics identified with Sydney Professor M.A.K. Halliday. The success of this alliance is evident in the

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fact that the critical literacies approach has, improbably, been placed at the centre of every senior English syllabus in the country. Displacing the previously dominant disciplinary formations – literary criticism, primarily, and, more recently although to a lesser extent, media and cultural studies – its current pervasiveness has sparked widespread debate about its legitimacy, its usefulness, and the pedagogic consequences of its contemporary deployment through subject English in Australian secondary schools. Let me first sketch some of the outlines of these debates. Much of this will be familiar no matter where you come from, as it mobilizes long-standing and generic complaints about the influence of cultural and media studies on English teaching generally. It has its specificities, though, not least the characteristic failure to appreciate any significant distinctions between the approaches taken, respectively, by cultural studies, postmodernism, and critical literacies. Among the complaints about the hegemony of the critical literacies approach in Australian secondary school syllabuses are the following: • That it has displaced literature completely in favour of the most meretricious of media texts (usually expressed as replacing the study of Shakespeare with the study of Neighbours with the attendant implication that these are in some way viewed by our school teachers as culturally equivalent). • That this is symptomatic of a ‘dumbing down’ of the humanities generally through cultural studies’ pandering to young people’s interest in popular culture (in one instance, expressed as a shift in the focus of the humanities’ teaching and research ‘from Thucydides to Barbie Dolls’ (see Melluish, 2005a and b)). • That the syllabus has been taken over by jargon-riddled ‘postmodernists’ proselytizing an out-of-control relativism coupled with an inappropriate focus on politically correct causes such as feminism and multiculturalism. The result, according to one conservative educationist much liked by government, is that the education system has been geared towards the production of ‘politically correct New Age warriors’ (Donnelly, 2005). • That this is merely one among many areas where the schools are failing their students by not providing them with the literacy skills they require (that is, the ability to read and write) – a more fundamental issue but one which runs parallel to this debate as well. • And finally, that the main problem in all of this is the doctrine of ‘critical literacies’: a whole-school cross-disciplinary approach

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to the teaching of reading, writing and English which is claimed to inappropriately privilege the discursive analysis of the politics underlying literary, media, and other textual forms. (Indeed, according to its critics, it manages to be postmodernist, relativist, and politically doctrinaire all at the same time.) Hence, the much quoted excerpt from a textbook (clearly deserving everything that has come to it) which describes the story of the Three Little Pigs as really about ‘the virtues of property ownership and the safety of the private domain – both key elements of liberal/capitalist ideology’ (Slattery, 2005). At one level, as I say, this is just the latest in a long line of criticisms of subject English’s shift from teaching spelling, grammar, comprehension, and literature towards the development of other kinds of ‘reading’ skills as it fell increasingly under the influence of media and cultural studies approaches. For their part, media and cultural studies have long regarded the English syllabus as the most logical site for colonization and they, too, have effectively used the goal of literacy – media literacy, initially – as a means of inserting their project into the traditional objectives of subject English. In many ways, and certainly at the beginning, this was not inconsistent with Hoggart’s project in The Uses of Literacy (nor with that of the Birmingham Centre under Stuart Hall) – extending the purchase of literary criticism’s methods of textual analysis into the analysis of popular cultural forms. As cultural and media studies developed their own disciplinary techniques, however – semiotics, especially – they began to displace the literary techniques. They were not so tied to evaluative or aesthetic principles and thus could be used across the widening range of popular cultural forms coming under examination – particularly those that involved the visual. The fact that these methods could be taught as technical skills, in ways that more interpretative techniques could not, recommended them to teachers eager to find more objective means of assessing students’ performance. Over time the syllabus increasingly shifted its focus towards teaching the techniques used for media and cultural analysis – as well as what came to be called multiliteracies (which usually meant new media and computer skills). Consequently, it would not be surprising if people in cultural and media studies were inclined to leap to the defence of the critical literacies approach. After all, the move from ‘litcrit to critlit’ looks very much like the next step on the road towards an objective that cultural and media studies has pursued for the last 20 years – moving subject English away from a privileged focus on the literary text towards the wider objective

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of applying analysis and criticism to the full range of popular cultural forms. But that is not what I am going to do here. While I do not subscribe to all the criticisms of the critical literacies approach so far outlined, I do not want to defend it. In fact, I have quite different concerns about its fitness for the prominent, quasi-disciplinary, role it now plays in the pedagogy framing subject English in secondary schooling in Australia.

What’s wrong with critlit? I will try not to be delayed too long with this task. The critical literacies approach currently employed in Australian schools prides itself on being able to work across media and representational formats. It does so by making use of ‘discourse’ as the core concept and by using language as a central metaphor for explaining how all cultural forms communicate. It is not alone there, of course; there are plenty of other approaches to media and cultural studies which operate usefully on the assumption that all forms of communication work like languages, and that the appropriate means of examining our competencies in these various ‘languages’ is through the notion of literacy. More than most, however, this assumption prevents the critical literacies model from understanding much about the specificities of particular media as forms of communication, and therefore the limits to the metaphor of ‘language’ as a means of articulating discursive commonalities across media. English needs more media-specific analytic tools than the critical literacies approach provides. In comparison to those academic disciplines which have developed highly sophisticated approaches to dealing with the particularities of their specific form of cultural production – film studies, or television studies, for instance – critical literacies remains a very blunt analytical instrument indeed. The official pronouncements about the value of the critical literacies approach do not help much. The state school syllabus documents are full of embarrassingly garbled and just plain ham-fisted renditions of cultural, critical, and media theory (provoking one university academic to harrumph in the national press that this was the ‘pretentious’ work of ‘teachers pretending to be intellectuals’ [Slattery, 2005, 10]). Little wonder that such documents attract the attention of those who already regard the contemporary humanities as jargon-filled, ‘politically correct’ posing. One key critic peppers his newspaper columns with juicily inflammatory quotations from syllabus documents, such as an instruction to teachers to treat literary texts as a key site ‘where alternative reading positions can be made available to students outside of

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an oppressive male–female dualistic hierarchy’ (Donnelly, 2005). There is no shortage of such provocations. While its intentions are good, the Queensland English Extensions syllabus’s attempts to translate contemporary literary and cultural theory into a workable template of reading positions for teaching 17-year-olds who do not read books at all is just full of howlers for anyone who knows anything about the theoretical models upon which it is based. It is unfair, perhaps, for university academics to turn up their nose at the crudity of such formulations. Indeed, some of the academics whose work feeds into the construction of these syllabuses have their windy moments too. A discussion paper prepared for the Education Department in Tasmania defines the objective of the critical literacies approach as generating ‘ ‘‘student’’ dispositions, positions and positiontakings for viable and powerful life pathways through new cultures and economies, pathways that wind through globalised and local, virtual and material social fields’ (Luke and Carrington, 2002).2 Pity the English teacher seeking a guide to pedagogic practice from this. However, it is guidance these teachers desperately need. Terry Threadgold has argued that English teachers, perhaps more than any others, face an extraordinary range of demands at the moment as they struggle to understand the shifts in their disciplines while coping with new conceptualizations of the social role of their institutions. In particular, she suggests, there are now quite major disjunctions between ‘school English and tertiary studies, between school English and the curriculum documents that are supposed to specify what it is, and between school English and theoretical understandings of the economic, political, theoretical and ethical functions and underpinnings of the discipline’ (Threadgold, 1997, 354). This situation, a decade since these comments were first published, has only become worse. This brings me to the third issue, which is to do with what happens to the critlit approach when it is turned into lesson plans and assignment sheets in the classroom. Here, the reductiveness of its conception of the politics of the text – something that becomes more evident in practice than as a conceptual weakness in what is usually a relatively general syllabus rationale – becomes a real problem.3 In the classroom, the critical literacies approach has resulted in repetitive, routine exercises where students deal with a wide range of texts in a programmatic way in order to spot the targeted ideology, name it as a discourse, and put their pens down. Often, students are provided with a list of the discourses and ideologies they are required to distinguish in the text before them. In the Queensland Extension English curriculum, the one I know best,4

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the search for alternate readings of the literary text, in one instance, boils down to a choice between four models of reception – none of them provided with what I would regard as a convincing (or even functional) rationale but nonetheless imposing a rigid framework within which students must present their responses. Students and teachers alike bewail the repetitiveness, predictability, and pedagogic exhaustion of analytical exercises driven by a theoretical position where the end point is always already known in advance. At its worst – and my research would suggest that this is its most customary mode – this results, as Threadgold has suggested, not in critical literacy but in a form of ‘ventriloquism’ as students simply learn ‘to mimic the discourses of the master’ (365). The students’ boredom and their cynicism about the mechanical and formulaically pre-emptive nature of the exercises they are asked to perform on what they may never realize are potentially rich and interesting texts were perfectly reflected, I thought, in my own 15-year-old daughter’s response to an English assignment she had been given on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Asked at home what she was supposed to write about, she replied, with a deeply world-weary sigh, ‘Oh, bloody Othering!’ At that point, I must admit asking myself, ‘What have we done?’ A further problem is what I would describe as the exclusion of pleasure from the list of experiences assumed to accompany the consumption of texts. Hoggart might have described this with a more traditionally humanistic vocabulary, through the notion of the imagination or creative engagement, and that is a potential most English teachers today would still endorse and recognize as among the reasons for their becoming interested in teaching the subject in the first place – even as they also lament its excision from the concerns of the current syllabus. (In a recent seminar I helped organize for English teachers, one particularly telling contribution came from a teacher who, after 26 years of experience, admitted she ‘has never enjoyed teaching English less’ than she does under the critical literacies regime.) Even though cultural studies might frame it differently in order to point also to the pleasures of the generic, the visceral, the spectacular, or those of the fan, and even though cultural studies would not accept the hierarchical distinction Hoggart employs as a means of differentiating between the literary and a popular form such as television, there is a similar end in view: that of getting closer to the contingent relation between text and culture, and to the students’ own engagement with various media forms. That pleasure (of any kind, aesthetic or otherwise) rarely rates a mention in the syllabus documents of today undermines claims of a more studentcentred, or responsive curriculum. More importantly, it leaves out a

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crucial dimension of what cultural and media theory is able to offer to the study of texts, communication, and culture. The cultural, though, has largely been displaced by the social (if I can be allowed that distinction for the moment). As a result, the critical literacies model, when viewed from my cultural studies perspective, underplays how cultural identity is actively negotiated rather than passively reproduced through cultural consumption; it neglects the cultural status of certain texts, particularly literary texts, as forms of capital and thus their implication in the development of a student’s cultural literacy. It also greatly oversimplifies how we use the media; for instance, it neglects the possibility that not all media use is particularly meaningful, and that many kinds of texts produce pleasure as their primary outcomes.

From litcrit to critlit and what next? Now, it is important to acknowledge that I (among many others, of course) have to accept some of the blame for this. I am among those who spent time in the 1980s broadening the English curriculum to better reflect the benefits of developments in cultural studies – in one instance working with a team of academics from backgrounds in literary studies, cultural studies, and linguistics to rewrite Western Australia’s senior school curriculum.5 Among my strategic targets in this process was the excessive dominance of the literary text, as well as the essentially humanistic construction of subject English as the prime location for the development of the creative and imaginative capacities of the student. Omitted here, we thought at the time, was an account of the politics of texts and of signification itself. The attack on the centrality of the literary text to the English syllabus was politically assisted by the subject’s increasing alignment with the government’s instrumentalist and vocational imperatives for education. By including other kinds of socially and culturally relevant skills – multiliteracies – we thought of what we were doing as updating the English curriculum. However, an unforeseen effect was the creation of the impression that English no longer had a distinctive content: it became a vocational skills-based curriculum rather than one which developed the student’s cultural literacy. The effect of this, in my view, was that it exposed subject English to a takeover by the educationists (rather than the subject specialists) and a model of education that was more suited to the social sciences than the humanities.

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That kind of issue never crossed my mind in the 1980s, but it does occupy my thoughts at the moment. The traditional arguments describing what makes the humanities’ model of education distinctive point to its mission of generating educational experiences that are conceived of as being broadly humanizing. That is, a humanities education sets out to provide experiences which have creative, cultural, humanistic, moral, or ethical (as well as political) dimensions upon which the student is encouraged to reflect but which may not necessarily have specifiable, technical, or methodological outcomes at that time. This is a model which privileges students’ engagement with a prescribed body of content; it is the nature of that engagement itself which is the crucial component. In comparison, and putting it more crudely than perhaps I would prefer if there were more space, the social sciences model which informs systemic linguistics and the critical literacies project focuses more upon process and structure than upon content. The humanities model is interested in process and structure as well, of course, but largely, I would argue, as a means of understanding the production, organization, and provenance of content. Nonetheless, it is through debates about how that engagement with content might be objectively assessed that the humanities approach has lost much ground in Australia. I had that brought home to me recently when giving evidence to a government review of the English syllabus in Queensland. After making essentially the same points I have made in this paragraph, I was asked by one of those working in the state education bureaucracy, ‘how would you assess that?’ What I heard in that question was an education bureaucrat’s preference for certain kinds of empirical assessment as a means of demonstrating that something he could call learning had occurred over the discipline-based advice about what was conceptually or experientially fundamental to the knowledges generated by that discipline. Ironically, it is precisely the kind of discrimination so essential to Hoggart’s notion of critical literacy that this preference provisionalises as unassessable within the critical literacies framework for the current curriculum. Now, I am perfectly aware that this may seem like a highly oldfashioned (perhaps even highly dubious) set of positions for someone in cultural studies to be taking. I would have to say that this is what most interests me, in fact, about the debates I have been describing; that is, how oddly they have positioned the protagonists – and this includes myself. In presenting a critique of how the critical literacies approach in Australian schools has, in a sense, appropriated and distorted the legacy of cultural studies, I find myself on the same side (hopefully,

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temporarily) as those who would see cultural studies and popular culture texts as inherently worthless. Even more surprisingly, when I speak at teacher’s conferences at present, instead of arguing for the inclusion of popular cultural texts, I am more likely to be insisting on the importance of the literary text as among the necessary fields of content for subject English – if only as a means of retrieving that dimension of cultural literacy. Looking back over the last 20 years of intervention into the content and interests of subject English, I am tempted to suggest that among the shifts that these interventions have enabled has been a kind of asset stripping, leaving the English syllabus shorn of much of its cultural content (and not just in relation to literature) and open to a takeover bid by the social scientists and educationists who have turned it into a service industry focused on producing the skills of multiliteracies, on the one hand, and a crude attempt to produce a politicized reading subject (or as one syllabus puts it, ‘future agents of change’), on the other. What I want to argue here is that the successful ‘beating-up’ of the critical literacies project has actually served to mask the fact that it is a fundamentally different project, with very different goals and effects, to that outlined in The Uses of Literacy. Underpinning The Uses of Literacy is the perception that the subject of contemporary popular culture had lost that dimension of their response which enabled them to be critical, to discriminate between kinds of texts and cultural experience. For Hoggart, the point of such discrimination was to do with quality – with the quality of the text and the authenticity or validity of the experience they engendered, assessed against a set of propositions about the desired relation between such texts and one’s everyday life. Notwithstanding such an implicitly aesthetic agenda, there is a clearly political recognition of the need to understand that there also has to be some contingency about this relation. Discrimination, the prosecution of quality, had to be enabled so that ‘people without an intellectual bent’ could nevertheless ‘become wise in their own way’ (Hoggart, 1957, 338) – something, I would argue, is entirely the opposite to the effect of the pedagogic practices installed through the critlit project. The analytic practices taught within critical literacies project have their own mystificatory and elitist dimensions so it is by no means clear that the outcomes are democratizing. It may be that the differences between the practices embedded in the competing understandings of the term ‘critical’ are significant here. For Hoggart, the ‘critical’ in his analytic practice generated a close textual analysis – drawn, to be sure, from Leavisite literary studies but it has

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underpinned cultural studies ever since. It is what Stuart Hall points to as one of Hoggart’s continuing legacies to the field – his ‘adaptation of the literary-critical method of ‘‘close reading’’ to the sociological task of interpreting the lived meanings of a culture’ (2007, 42). In Hall’s presentation to the conference from which these papers are drawn, he pointed to the role of close reading in producing a kind of convergence between Leavism and British cultural studies through the shared seriousness with which exponents of each tradition examined the formations of ‘these words, in this order’. For critical literacies, ultimately focused on the contextual determinants supplying the discourses and ideologies for the individual text, close analysis is something of a luxury. The ‘critical’ in critical literacies is simply and reductively ‘the political’; for Hoggart and even more so for a cultural studies which has benefited from his work, it refers to a process of attempting to read texts through all their cultural relations, including a consideration of the pleasures generated for the reading subject. Importantly, as John Hartley has pointed out, Hoggart was not interested ‘in the professional or technical but in the cultural uses of literacy’ (1999, 15). What strikes me most strongly about the narrative I have been presenting is that critlit’s appropriation of Hoggart’s championing of critical literacy has turned this preference on its head. Despite their common root, the two applications of the term could not be more opposed to each other. Critlit, no matter how postmodernist and political it might sound to its conservative critics,6 is all about generating technical capacities – skills with a particular protocol of analysis. The cultural dimension of literacy, its connection with the subject’s own everyday life, has been displaced. Hoggart has no doubt of the intrinsic value, let alone the cultural capital, invested in the literary text and argues strongly for its centrality to a literate culture. The appropriation of Hoggart’s position in later versions of cultural studies has extended this appreciation – through the politics of pleasure as well as the ‘politics of politics’ – to a much wider range of cultural forms. Critical literacy approaches, though, see the text in all its forms only as a socio-political site, where meanings are installed and where the politics which enclose the text can be unpacked or, as the syllabus documents invariably say, deconstructed. The notion that a literary text, for instance, might be more accurately approached as a site of struggle between contending meanings, say, or that a popular television programme might offer dimensions of experience worth having for their own sake, has been sidelined in order to clearly demonstrate the processes through which texts are reduced to their socio-political determinants.

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For the teachers I have talked to, far from making them feel like ‘postmodern New Age warriors’, the vast gap between these two versions of what critical literacy could be is a disturbing one because it separates them from the passions which made them want to teach English in the first place. They may not necessarily share Hoggart’s intrinsic valuing of the literary text – indeed, they may have transferred their affections on to The Sopranos or the movies of Quentin Tarantino – but they do share his conviction of the importance of his original conception of a critical cultural literacy, as urgently needed today as it was in 1957.

Notes 1. An earlier and significantly shorter version of this chapter was published in the International Journal of Cultural Studies (Turner, 2007). 2. I should add that this is not at all typical of Alan Luke’s academic work; it is perhaps symptomatic of what happens when a small-scale, intra-disciplinary approach is asked to express itself as if it constitutes something of the scale of a discipline. The claims required simply defy assent. 3. I accept there may be many reasons for this, including the level of training and in-service provided to teachers who have little experience of the approach from their own university background. However, I think this is exacerbated by the fact that the training they have had – often in literary, cultural, or media theory, rather than just old fashioned litcrit – actually undermines their faith in the legitimacy and usefulness of the approaches they are being asked to employ. That is, they know there are weaknesses in the approaches, they would like to do something which would serve the goals of the syllabus more effectively, but are constrained in their ability to do so. 4. I have been among those consulted on draft versions of the syllabus from time to time, and have discussed my concerns with teachers at some length over many years. I have prosecuted these issues directly through the annual conferences of the local English Teachers Association, the national conferences of the same organization, and occasional public seminars – most recently in 2007. Finally, I have put three children through Queensland schools so I also have the perspective of a parent. 5. I was part of a small team of academics and education bureaucrats who rewrote the Western Australian English curriculum in the early 1980s, dividing it into a ‘language’ curriculum in which the media were to be studied systematically for the first time and a literature syllabus. I was also involved in the in-servicing programme required to implement the new syllabus. 6. According to Slattery and Maher, ‘postmodernism’ had ‘infiltrated schools, often under the term Critical Literacy, raising fears that the secondary school syllabus had been heavily politicized by the same theories that radicalized the universities in the late 1980s and which encouraged an ‘‘indifference to, and even a hostility towards, literature’’ ’ (2005, 3).

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Works cited Donnelly, K. (2005). ‘Cannon fodder of the culture wars’, On Line Opinion, 11 February http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article+3024. Accessed 2/3/2006. Gibson, M. and J. Hartley (1998).‘Forty years of cultural studies: An interview with Richard Hoggart, October 1997’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 1:1 April, 11–24. Hall, S. (2007). ‘Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy and the cultural turn’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 10:1, March, 39–50. Hartley, J. (1999). Uses of Television, Routledge, London and New York. Hoggart, R. (1957). The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life With Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments, Penguin, London. ——(2001). Between Two Worlds: Essays 1978–1999, Aurum, London. Luke, A. and V. Carrington (2002). ‘Globalisation, literacy, curriculum practice’, Discussion paper for Education Department, Tasmania, http://www.education. tas.gov.au/english/luke3.htm; also published in R. Fisher, M. Lewis and G. Brooks (eds) Language and Literacy in Action, Routledge, New York. Melluish, G. (2005a). ‘Out with Thucydides, in with the Barbie Dolls’, The Australian, 25 February). ——(2005b). ‘A World without the humanities?’, Quadrant, XLIX: 4, April. Muspratt, S., A. Luke and P. Freebody (1997). Constructing Critical Literacies, Hampton Press, Cresskill, N.J. Slattery, L. (2005). ‘This little pig goes post-modernist’, Weekend Australian, July 23, 1, 10. Slattery, L. and Maher, S. (2005). ‘States deconstruct postmodern trend’, The Australian, July 25, 3. Threadgold, T. (1997). ‘Critical Literacies and the Teaching of English’ in S. Muspratt, A. Luke and P. Freebody (eds) Constructing Critical Literacies, Hampton Press, Cresskil, New Jersey 353–386. Turner, G. (2007). ‘Cultural literacies, critical literacies and the English school curriculum in Australia’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 10:1, March, 105–114.

10 The Importance of Being Ordinary Melissa Gregg

ALGERNON. I certainly wouldn’t let Jack buy my outfit. He has no taste in neckties at all. CECILY. I don’t think you will require neckties. Uncle Jack is sending you to Australia. ALGERNON. Australia! I’d sooner die. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1985)

Introduction ordinary. not distinguished by rank or position; characteristic of the common people; vulgar, unrefined, coarse (Oxford) In his ground-breaking work, The Uses of Literacy, Richard Hoggart challenged conventional modes of representing working-class culture by focusing on the lives of ‘ordinary’ people that had been lacking from scholarly studies. ‘I am writing particularly of the majority who take their lives much as they find them’, he wrote, ‘and in that way are not different from the majority in other classes’: of what some trade union leaders, when they are regretting a lack of interest in their movements, call ‘the vast apathetic mass’; of what, song-writers call, by way of compliment, ‘just plain folk’; of what the working-classes themselves describe, more soberly, as ‘the general run of people’. (Hoggart, 1958, 22) This description rested on the basic and powerful premise that academic accounts had failed to reflect the cultural practices of the 171

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vast majority of the working class. For Hoggart, it seemed the working classes were noticed only when they behaved in pre-appointed or romantic ways, which at the time usually meant pursuing their rights as workers. Historical accounts accorded too much emphasis to the ‘political’ manifestations of working-class cultural investments and achievements – the critique Hoggart would make of E. P. Thompson’s approach, for example – while sociological studies set about quantifying cultural dispositions and preferences with little feel for the ‘grass-roots’ of working-class culture (Hoggart, 1958, 16). In both cases, categorical descriptions took away the dignity of the individual as well as any sense of variety or depth to working-class experience. Moreover, the critic’s distance from the culture hindered attempts to adequately reflect its significance and function. The Uses of Literacy therefore produced the missing perspective that would go on to define the epistemological novelty of cultural studies: a grounded, local analysis offered the surest critique of the broad claims that had been made for ‘the’ working class as a whole. In a construction worth remembering, Hoggart aimed to write against that genre of ‘middle-class Marxist’ who had the effect of ‘partpitying’ and ‘part-patronising’ the working class ‘beyond any semblance of reality’ (Hoggart, 1958, 16). There are two things to take from Hoggart’s idea of ordinariness. First, the way that it revealed the categories for scholarly analysis to be so narrow that only the exceptional in society were worthy of study. His suggestion that the majority of working-class lives remained outside of analytic attention pointed to a fundamental problem in the academic value system. The second point is the recognition that most people in the working and middle classes demonstrate a profound lack of interest in politics. Daily life hinges upon the twin axes of home and neighbourhood, with any sense of a wider world kept at a safe distance from everyday dealings. Hoggart purposefully avoided reference to the outwardly political actors within the working class because they were a minority. This was a key distinction to make: to differentiate between the working-class movement and the culture as a whole. The sense of ordinariness Hoggart promoted is worth reconsidering in the light of recent developments in Australian politics that have seen ‘ordinariness’ develop as an ideological position in fierce contradiction to Hoggart’s intentions. During his term in office, appeals to ordinariness have proven extremely successful for the Australian Liberal Party Prime Minister John Howard, who has cultivated a public image of being an ‘ordinary Australian’ who is therefore able to speak with authority on behalf of other ‘ordinary Australians’ at the expense of large

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sections of the population. This strategy, identified in the bulk of media commentary surrounding the 10-year anniversary of Howard’s election (Bauer, 2006; Leak, 2006; McKay, 2006; O’Brien, 2006; Steketee, 2006), has proven remarkably difficult for cultural studies critics to oppose. As I will discuss in more detail, the key intellectuals providing a robust critique of Howard’s style have been mainly from political science, in the figure of Judith Brett (1992; 2003; 2005), or cultural anthropology, particularly the psychoanalytically inflected approach of Ghassan Hage (2003). But a cultural studies reading, one that is based on the ethics of ordinariness promoted by the field’s British pioneers, has been crucially absent from public debate. Indeed, in this situation cultural studies critics are themselves the ones that have been subject to the charge of ‘middle-class Marxism’, part of a misguided urban ‘elite’ who lament the lack of political zeal amongst suburban mums and dads. To begin to understand this scenario, we might observe how Howard’s lexical choices resonate with Hoggart’s in the following television interview screened on The 7.30 Report, the flagship nightly current affairs bulletin of the national public broadcaster. Howard told journalist Kerry O’Brien, I believe in being average and ordinary. One of the reasons I do is that’s who I am. I’m out of the lower middle class of Australia if you can use that kind of expression. That’s my background. I’m very proud of it. That’s who I am. The other thing is that Australians are deeply sceptical people. It’s one of the great differences between Australians and Americans. We’re far more sceptical than the Americans. They [sic] spot humbug and pretension and people who have delusions of grandeur and they spot it very quickly and they’re unerring in their instinct. (O’Brien, 2006) Taken from one of many interviews during his election anniversary, this quotation encapsulates the fluidity with which Howard uses ordinariness in his public statements. The grammatically perplexing shift from a personal ‘republican’ style of political performance in the use of the plural pronoun ‘we’ to his more commonly performed ‘realist’ style of political observation allows him to identify particularities of the Australian character.1 In doing so, Howard evokes a similar language to Hoggart and his contemporary Raymond Williams, both of whom sought to question any sense that to be cultured involved pretentiousness, as if culture were a thing to be owned, jealously treasured and displayed (see especially Williams, 1958). The idea of ordinariness that mobilised the rigorously

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sceptical cultural studies project in The Uses of Literacy operates with the same logic as – indeed, is difficult to distinguish from – the arch anti-elitism regularly espoused by Howard. It is for this reason, I suggest, that Howard’s discursive persona has proven so challenging for Australian cultural studies critics to describe, let alone oppose: it relies on the same mobilising tenets as cultural studies itself. In what follows then, I want to consider what happens when the ordinary – the most unaligned, apolitical category Hoggart sought to establish – becomes the most political category at work in public discourse. This is also to ask what new tactics are required when the ordinary – the very route to eliciting empathy for others in Hoggart’s use – becomes the precise means by which a government curtails the possibility of empathy.

Hoggart’s ordinariness ordinary. not different or special or unexpected in any way; usual (Cambridge) The key to Hoggart’s politics of empathy is that little aside in the passage above: it is directed to ‘the majority who take their lives much as they find them, and in that way are not different from the majority in other classes’. Hoggart’s writing employed an affective voice to build a relationship between the majority on each side of class-segregated Britain. Rather than affirming the distant and scrutinising gaze of the middleclass academic, he encouraged his readers to care about the lives of the people discussed. As Robert Young (2007) also notes, the most striking example of Hoggart’s appeal to ordinariness in The Uses of Literacy is the section titled ‘ ‘‘Them’’ and ‘‘Us’’ ’ (Hoggart, 1958, 72–101). The them/us distinction refers to those working-class habits of speech that exercise an ideological closure, separating ‘their’ world from those that, to all outside appearances, run it. Drawing a barrier between ‘them’ and ‘us’ in everyday dealings is a way of making a subordinate position acceptable. It relegates the surveillant Other to a distant and therefore comfortable place in the context of daily routines. In Hoggart’s account those to be labelled ‘them’ include work bosses and managers, police, magistrates, doctors, means test officials and employment exchange bureaucrats. The term refers to those representatives of the outside world with whom working-class people might have some contact. In Hoggart’s reading the separation has the effect of marginalising ‘them’ because ‘they’ have no place in ‘our’ world. It is therefore a device for deflating authority, but,

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significantly, it is a means to designate and pinpoint those who are seen as a threat to the separation (them/us) itself. Elsewhere I have described this writing style as empathetic (Gregg, 2003; 2006). Hoggart seems to wager that anyone reading might feel outrage at the prospect of an outside force influencing access to loved ones, or dictating the terms on which a life can be conducted. These bureaucratic Others in pre– Second World War Britain had the power to break up families, to incarcerate members away from the otherwise self-contained, tight community of neighbourhood and kin. With his insider’s perspective on the insecurity and instability of this world, Hoggart encourages readers to appreciate the lack of power these families feel in protecting their own (a vulnerability that many other involuntary members of the British Empire also suffered at a similar period in history, such as the successive generations of aboriginal children stolen from their families for assimilation purposes in Australia). Hoggart reveals how ‘ordinary’ people come to terms with what is a negligible agency. He writes so that the reader might engage emotionally with the subject. The voice is successful because it articulates values shared by both the working class and the middle class – in particular the privileged place of family – so as to maximise an affective response to the circumstances illustrated. For the reader unfamiliar with this kind of life, Hoggart’s discourse of empathy seeks a projection of one’s own likely reaction to these influences on normal domestic freedoms, threats that otherwise might not be contemplated, much less realised. It relies on the shared crosscultural appeal of family as a trigger that might generate empathy with the position of working-class people yet to see the effects of economic improvements post war. Hoggart’s strategic display advances a favourable impression of ordinary working-class life in order to find a mode of connecting two distinct audiences. The impression he tries to effect is that the great majority of working-class people are decent, honest and hard working. While Hoggart’s autobiographical volumes attest that working-class students recognised aspects of his descriptions from their own experience, it was middle-class readers who were being provided the chance to gain an appreciation of another culture’s motivations, perhaps even see similarities in some of their values, given the sympathetic portrayal of their routines. In Hoggart’s use, then, ordinariness is the way to generate empathy from and for others. It takes the reader inside an unfamiliar culture, but draws out shared values that act as powerful affective magnets. In this way, his writing transcended the economic or class-based distinctions of traditional politics of his time.

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Hoggart’s great legacy was to draw attention to the quiet dignity of everyday life and the sophistication evident within the most ostensibly unremarkable cultural practices. His discourse of empathy was a model for scholarly writing to bridge the spatial, institutional, economic and cultural divides in society. This function, which John Hartley calls ‘cross-demographic communication’, is a way of learning about others we may not normally encounter, and how to ‘communicate respectfully and equitably’ with them as a result (Hartley, 1999, 28). Hoggart’s pedagogical gift was ‘to teach how to see, how ‘I’ see, how others see’, providing a window on a world outside the imagination of his reader (ibid.). What was significant about this, as Hartley elaborates, is that ‘instead of addressing the fears, hopes and vested interests of onlookers’, Hoggart wanted ‘to teach his readers how to see ‘‘them’’ (contemporary populations) as ‘‘we’’ (fellow-readers); how to make seeing into knowledge; how to ‘‘know’’ how others see. He made the relation between analyst and analysed convivial not conflictual’ (Hartley, 1999, 28).

Ordinary or everyday? Like Williams, Hoggart insisted that working-class culture was dense, involving, stimulating and all-encompassing in nature. Both writers sought to nullify the way in which ‘Culture’ had the potential to be rarefied or converted into a mere competency to perform. As Williams famously wrote, ‘Culture is ordinary. An interest in learning or the arts is simple, pleasant and natural. A desire to know what is best, and to do what is good, is the whole positive nature of man. We are not to be scared from these things by noises’ (Williams, 1958, 78). This twinned emphasis, a pride in working-class culture and a concerted attack on pretension, is the exact basis upon which John Howard’s earlier statement relies. It is also the twinned emphasis that has been lost in more recent permutations of ‘the ordinary’ in cultural studies, particularly when it has been used synonymously with the French tradition of thought surrounding the quotidien. Hartley has been the key exception to this trend, although for different reasons. He claims the ‘semio-history’ of ordinariness promised in Hoggart’s work has been somewhat lost, or clouded at least, in the adversarial Left-Right politics of politicized academic study in the 1970s and 1980s; in the invention of cultural studies as a theorized form of identity politics; in the methodological disputes between so-called realists and so-called textualists, social scenes and humanities, modernists and

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postmodernists, rationalists and romantics. Cultural studies . . . has begun to forget its commitment to ordinariness as a positive civic goal. (Hartley, 1999, 16) It is the specifically British tradition of ordinariness that the preference for ‘the everyday’ tends to erase (see also Gibson, 2001; McCarthy, 2006). This may be a case of French philosophy simply proving the more fashionable heritage, or alternatively, it may be the combined impact of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau’s work appearing in translation more recently than the writing of Hoggart and Williams for cultural studies’ still largely English-speaking practitioners. Regardless, it is to some critical detriment that ‘the ordinary’ has become somewhat interchangeable with ‘the everyday’ in cultural theory (see, for example, Felski, 2000; Gardiner, 2000). Barry Sandywell has argued that ‘the ordinary has been systematically denigrated in the very act of being theorized as ‘‘everyday life’’ ’ (Sandywell, 2004, 161). Indeed, the regular slippage between the two terms, and their apparent synonyms, such as the familiar, the routine, the mainstream and the average, is a loss of etymological and political nuance the Left can ill afford. Reclaiming the theoretical rigour of these concepts is crucial to understanding their rhetorical, affective and critical appeal. As Sandywell further argues, it involves ‘a shared rejection of fixed, static and foundational presuppositions’ of ordinariness, so as to create ‘an awareness of the complex mediated nature of ‘ordinary life’ situated in class, gender, ethnic and sexual differences’ (Sandywell, 2004, 174). In the Australian context, for example, there is a manifest link between ordinariness and the national mythology of egalitarianism – a connection that, as the earlier quotation shows, Howard has been quick to exploit. Frances Bonner discusses this relationship in her book Ordinary Television, and identifies ordinariness as that which is not special; that which is not ‘an event’. Bonner sees a range of television presenters engaging in a sophisticated artifice to appear unremarkable, which is to say that they ‘need to convey at least an appearance of ordinariness. Exceptional intelligence or insight must be disguised or disavowed, as must high social status’ (Bonner, 2003, 47). As we will see in the next section, this statement also helps to explain some of the behaviour regularly displayed by Howard, especially when added to Bonner’s wider observation that ‘Ordinariness on television is enhanced by a tendency to construct comparatively homogenous groups, or at least to segregate those whose accents or behaviour signal class too clearly’ (Bonner, 2003, 51).

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Howard’s ordinariness ordinary. (colloquial) (Macquarie)

unpleasant

to

deal

with;

displeasing

Winning the 1996 election campaign with the promise to govern ‘for all of us’, over the past decade John Howard has carefully depicted his opponents in the Australian Labour Party as serving the so-called sectional interests of an urban-based intellectual elite.2 In contrast, the Liberals have sought to emphasise shared values – what it calls the ‘mainstream values’ – of ordinary Australians. As the work of Judith Brett has indicated (1992; 2003; 2005), this tactic did not originate with Howard but with former Prime Minister Robert Menzies, Howard’s only remaining competitor as longest-serving prime minister at the time of writing. Menzies famously framed his political objective as that of governing on behalf of ‘the Forgotten People’, a fictitious construct which encapsulated, if any actual human referent, the comfortably off white middle class. Its genius lay in its lack of overt class-based terminology, and instead its appeal to decency. Membership was not ‘based on a person’s economic role, as in Labor’s class-based schema’, explains Brett: ‘Rather it is based on virtue, strength of character, respectability and sense of responsibility. These are qualities possessed by individual people, and anyone may possess them, no matter what their job or their level of material wealth. Membership of the middle class is thus open to anyone who identifies with its virtues’ (Brett, 2005, 12). As she goes on to observe, in sympathy with Bonner’s analysis, ‘a system of classification of this kind, which is based on people’s individual moral qualities, has wide commonsense appeal. It accords with Australians’ egalitarian manners, in which we treat people on their merits’ (ibid.). The recourse to individual dignity and shared values is the same tactic I have ascribed to Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy. In Howard’s more recent application, however, the idea of ordinariness established by Menzies takes on a further dimension. Fiona Allon has described this in terms of a narrative of loss emanating from Howard’s idealised childhood, in which ‘the same familiar imagery appears: harmonious, middle-class suburbia, uniform in its ordinariness, quiet and safely Anglo-Saxon’: When John Howard nostalgically invokes the 1940s and 1950s, it is to draw attention to the ‘egalitarian innocence’ which he feels has been irrevocably lost from Australian society. For Howard and his brothers Earlwood was ‘an ordinary, unexciting, regulated and secure suburb’.

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His memories of the area during his youth are of a classless, suburban utopia where ‘everybody was about the same’. (Allon, 1997, 13) This narrative of loss relates Howard to Hoggart in a further sense if we consider the charges of nostalgia regularly attributed to The Uses of Literacy (see Turner, 1990, 48). What is different, however, is the defensiveness in Howard’s use of ordinariness. It is rarely left as a positive trait in its own right, open to the expansive interpretation that was so crucial to Menzies’ deployment of the term. Howard’s ordinariness is unfailingly used to position his politics against an implied Other, so that Rather than simply opposing the workplace and home as did Menzies, Howard instead depicts the traditional home and nuclear family as under threat, in the process of being disfranchised by ‘privileged interest groups’, ‘minority fundamentalism’ and ‘political correctness’ – code, of course, for all the alternative and not so alternative life-styles and groups of which he disapproves. (Allon, 1997, 12) The clearest instance of this oppositional tactic I have mentioned is the consistent refrain whereby the opinions of ordinary Australians are used as a commonsense corrective to the so-called intellectual ‘elite’ (with all of its attendant popular signifieds including Left-wing, intellectual, educated, media literate, member of the ‘chattering classes’ or the chardonnay-drinking or café latte-drinking set). But this is only one of a range of remarkably flexible analogies and alternatives that can be mapped onto the same binary, such as when ordinariness is used in contrast to the following: • Special interests: groups seeking redress for a perceived grievance, including Indigenous Australians, women, alternative, particularly queer lifestyles, the environmental lobby, and entire political parties such as The Greens and Labor depending on the issue. • ‘Politically correct’: the excesses of inclusive language, including the niceties of a ‘mushy multiculturalism’ that is simply outdated in an era of terrorism.3 Such sentiments were evident when Liberal politician Danna Vale was hardly rebuked for expressing her anxiety that Australians were ‘aborting themselves out of existence’ and will soon be outnumbered by Muslims in the debate surrounding the passing of legislation to regulate the abortion drug RU486.

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• Muslim: the default subjectivity of those who refuse to ‘integrate’ into ‘ordinary Australia’. This leads to scenarios whereby Western notions of feminist equality and dress can be physically enforced in classrooms, just as the failure of young men to bring towels with them to Cronulla Beach can be taken to indicate an incitement to mob violence.

While Howard himself may not invoke all of these antonyms for ‘ordinariness’, the number of times that he does make concerted contrasts nonetheless establishes the conditions for such an alarming chain of equivalence to emerge (for some of the more regular formulations employed during his leadership, see Figure 10.1). Howard has recognised that ordinariness gains traction as a political tool by virtue of the number of ways it can summon an implicit, and sometimes explicit, opposite (see also Nicoll, 2004). While in Hoggart’s use an appeal to ordinariness was the very route towards building empathy, in Howard’s it is the precise means by which the possibility of empathy is curtailed. And unlike Hoggart, whose ‘them/us’ distinction illustrated its value as a defence mechanism in response to a lack of power in the wider world, in Howard’s utterances it is used as a defence mechanism formulated to maintain a position of power. Far from serving as a device to understand the position of those

Ordinary

Remarkable (e.g. ANZAC Diggers)

Ordinary

Exceptional (e.g. misbehaving military officers in Iraq)

Ordinary

Elite4

Ordinary

Special interests

Ordinary

Utopian/American

Ordinary

Politically correct

Ordinary

Muslim

Ordinary

Terrorist

(Us)

(Them)

Figure 10.1

Howard’s strategically flexible new configuration of ‘them’ and ‘us’

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yet to benefit from economic prosperity, it is instead a way of ensuring those who have prospered in a period of economic growth continue their good fortune. This is a situation in which the ordinary has become the default political subjectivity, standing in place of explicit political agendas by denying its politicised nature.

Reclaiming a politics of empathy ordinary 2. below the average level of quality; somewhat inferior (Macquarie) The importance of ordinariness in Australian public life was confirmed in Judith Brett and Anthony Moran’s Ordinary People’s Politics (2006), a longitudinal study of voter attitudes spread over a period of two decades. Compiling vignettes of various Australians’ thoughts on the ‘life, politics, and the future of their country’, the book shares aspects of Hoggart’s original project in its expressed wish ‘to talk about the many ways in which ordinary people are not interested in politics’ (Brett and Moran, 2006, 7). Describing the motivations of Liberal voters in particular, the authors surmise that the most they can be accused of is ‘a bit of smugness’ in their preference for the status quo. These are people who simply are not interested in those ‘who demand or need more from politics’: Living at the centre of their worlds, they looked out as far as they needed, but have only a patchy sense of the society and the economy as a whole. Social problems were to them the problems of individuals, and they saw the solutions as largely in these individuals’ hands. They were not unduly harsh, nor quick to blame. They were not even unsympathetic . . . But they could not conceive of themselves being in situations where they would not be able to marshal the resources they needed to solve their problems – except for the area of health. And so they could not really imagine how others could be in such situations . . . This is not a case of blaming the victim but of the inability to imagine ever being a victim. (Brett and Moran, 2006, 179) This subtle reading gets to the heart of the difference between Hoggart and Howard, both of whom appear concerned to speak on behalf of ‘the majority who take their lives much as they find them’. It acknowledges that those benefiting from conservative politics share some degree of complicity with the disadvantages that continue to exist in society, and

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yet the desire for change rests on a capacity to envisage what it would be like to be in a less fortunate situation. As I have suggested, this is precisely the function that Hoggart’s discourse of empathy performed. It showed exactly what it was like to be in the situation of a poor, workingclass family who needed more from politics. His highly personal writing meant that the reader could not ignore the reality of another kind of life. It provided the ‘landscape with figures’ (Hoggart, 1958) necessary to imagine how it would be to live differently. It is this form of scholarship that is sorely required in today’s altered political environment to reveal the inequalities in opportunity that persist in contemporary culture. The separation between ‘them’ and ‘us’ so crucial to Hoggart’s description of working-class life was never meant to be celebrated because it was desirable: it was merely a creative way for ordinary people to deal with an unacceptable arrangement of society. The them/us divide helped to maintain dignity and self-respect in everyday encounters, but the distinction was born of a fundamental injustice, where the less-educated and the resource-deprived had little recourse or outlet for equal treatment. It may be fair to say that major global events coinciding with John Howard’s Prime Ministership – including the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center in 2001, the Bali bombings in 2002 and the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 – have revitalised a longing for ‘the ordinary’ and ‘the everyday’ amongst Australian citizens. Rita Felski has highlighted how the desire ‘for order, stability and the security of ritual’ can reassert itself in troubling times (Felski, 2002, 612). Yet this explanation fails to provide a language to condemn the ways that ordinariness is used for opportunistic political advantage by leaders in full knowledge of such widespread feelings of vulnerability. Popular television programmes emerging in Australia in the past few years indicate the depth of suspicion and defensiveness in the national psyche. Most notable of these is Channel 7’s Border Security: Australia’s Frontline, filmed in the customs section of arrival halls of airports around the country as well as patrol boats policing territorial waters. Coming alongside significant changes to the tone and genre of current affairs journalism more broadly (see Turner 2005), these trends provide worrying evidence that Australians remain wedded to fears of contamination or invasion from foreign others, along the lines expressed by extremist One Nation Party politician Pauline Hanson in the 1990s (see Morris, 2006).5 What Ghassan Hage (2003) has called the ‘paranoid nationalism’ of Howard’s Australia appears to be a reaction against those who would threaten the hegemony of a white, Anglo-Celtic idyll akin to the ‘ordinary, unexciting, regulated and secure suburb’ of

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Howard’s childhood home. Today, the forced insularity of Hoggart’s huddled back-to-backs has been traded for the voluntary insularity of the gated community and the aestheticised café and canal-side lifestyle. In the safety of the planned neighbourhood, there is no need to learn about those less fortunate because they can not afford the price of entry. On a broader scale, the Howard Government will also be remembered for incarcerating refugees in desert camps for years on end while legislation was changed to prevent their capacity to enter the country at all. Under a redefinition of territorial waters, all initial processing of asylum claims now takes place on islands away from mainland Australia. There is no possibility of empathy when those who are most in need of it are taken away from sight. In a jarring reflection written on the occasion of John Howard’s 10-year anniversary, social researcher Hugh McKay summarised the prime minister’s traits as follows: Some leaders inspire us with the noble idea that we might create a better society; Howard sets our sights on a lower, lesser target. Far from inspiring nobility of purpose, he encourages us to be comfortable with some of the baser aspects of our own ordinariness. (McKay, 2006) McKay comes closer than most to articulating the problem with a prime minister who claims to be ordinary. Not only does such a formulation efface the real legislative privilege and power that comes with office, particularly since the Coalition of Liberal and National parties won a majority in both Houses of parliament in the 2004 poll. The importance of being ordinary has been that it has allowed Howard to shrug the responsibility of leading citizens in basic civic conduct. It has pardoned him for the expectation of being exemplary as his role might, ordinarily, warrant. Scholars learning from the ethical example of Richard Hoggart need to insist that this kind of government is not ordinary in the sense of being usual or common. Developing a specific register for ordinariness, we can recognise when our leaders are instead illustrative of that wonderfully Australian, colloquial sense of the word – that is, when their performance is mediocre, below par or unfit for an appointed role. After all, it is ‘pretty ordinary’ for a leader to give citizens little encouragement to bestow hope in and generosity towards others, to generate a climate that caters for the most ingrained, paranoid and defensive aspects of the collective psyche.

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It is for this reason that etymological specificity is both critical and useful. In the transnational exchange of cultural studies theory, the ingenuity of local context can offer the means to interrogate the words of those who work against us – even as they profess to speak the same language. Cultural studies’ confusion of ordinariness and the everyday has had the political consequence of allowing the former to stand as a catch-all repository for preferred political values, with all other desires for politics appearing extraordinary in contrast. Paying heed to the uses of ordinariness, and offering opportunities ‘to see how others see’, cultural studies can continue to confront those who benefit from the ongoing division between ‘them’ and ‘us’. Against the fashionable disavowal of privilege, we must summon our most refined intellectual resources to delineate and demand a sense of ordinariness that maintains individual dignity at the same time as it affirms our shared humanity.

Notes 1. My thanks to Joan Leach for useful references on this issue. 2. That is, when it is not simply a mouthpiece for the union movement: the prominence of industrial relations issues in the lead-up to the 2007 election campaign (a result of the Federal Government’s unpopular ‘WorkChoices’ legislation) meant that both sides of politics were claiming to speak on behalf of ‘ordinary workers’. 3. ‘Mushy multiculturalism’ was a formulation employed by Peter Costello, Australia’s Treasurer and aspiring successor to Howard, in a speech to the Sydney Institute in February 2006. The phrase was used to describe the ease with which migrants can gain citizenship in Australia without pledging an appropriately binding form of allegiance. The original speech is available on the Treasurer’s website, along with subsequent clarification provided in a radio interview (Costello 2006a, b). Australian politicians’ unusual use of radio airwaves – particularly the medium of talkback – to announce and gauge support for policy initiatives is discussed in Turner (2006). 4. Howard’s use of elite bears interesting relation to Lefebvre’s definition of the everyday that which is ‘left over’ after all that is superior, specialised and technical has been singled out. See Seigworth and Gardiner (2004); Lefebvre (1947). 5. Ms Hanson’s maiden speech to parliament in 1995 expressed concern that the country ‘was in danger of being swamped by Asians’. It is perhaps relevant to note here that Jennifer Rutherford’s documentary about the One Nation party released in 2001 had the title ‘Ordinary Australians’, a phrase regularly adopted in Hanson’s public statements, and which critics claim Howard adopted as part of an incorporation technique to win back One Nation voters after the latter party’s eventual downfall.

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Works cited Allon, Fiona (1997). ‘Home as Cultural Translation: John Howard’s Earlwood’ Communal/Plural 5: 1–25. Bauer, Tim (2006). ‘The House of Howard’ The Bulletin 03/07/2006. Bonner, Frances (2003). Ordinary Television: Analyzing Popular TV. London: Sage. Brett, Judith (1992). Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People. Sydney: Pan Macmillan. ——(2003). The Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——(2005). ‘Relaxed and Comfortable: The Liberal Party’s Australia’ Quarterly Essay 19: 1–79. Brett, Judith and Anthony Moran (2006). Ordinary People’s Politics: Australians Talk About Life, Politics and the Future of Their Country. North Melbourne: Pluto Press. Costello Peter (2006a). ‘Worth Promoting, Worth Defending: Australian Citizenship, What It Means And How To Nurture It’ Address to the Sydney Institute, 26/2/06 Available at: http://www.treasurer.gov.au/tsr/content/speeches/2006/ 004.asp. ——(2006b). Interview with Paul Murray, Transcript available at: http://www. treasurer.gov.au/tsr/content/transcripts/2006/017.asp. Felski, Rita (2000). Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture. New York: New York University Press. ——(2002). ‘Introduction’ New Literary History Special Issue ‘Everyday Life’ 33(4): 607–622. Gardiner, Michael E. (2000). Critiques of Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Gibson, Mark (2001). ‘Myths of Oz Cultural Studies: The Australian Beach and ‘‘English’’ Ordinariness’ Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 15(3): 275–288. Gregg, Melissa (2003). ‘A Neglected History: Richard Hoggart’s Discourse of Empathy’ Rethinking History 7(3): 285–306. ——(2006). Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices. London: Palgrave. Hage, Ghassan (2003). Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. Annandale: Pluto. Hartley, John (1999). The Uses of Television, London and New York: Routledge. Hoggart, Richard (1958 [1957]). The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Leak, Bill (2006). ‘Howard’s Australia: Howard The Ordinary’ New Matilda 01/03/06 Available at: http://www.newmatilda.com. Lefebvre, Henri (1991 [1947]). Critique of Everyday Life: Volume One. Trans. John Moore. New York and London: Verso. McCarthy, Anna (2006). ‘From the Ordinary to the Concrete: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Scale’ in Mimi White and James Schwoch (eds) Questions of Method in Cultural Studies. Oxford: Blackwell. McKay, Hugh (2006). ‘Howard: An Ordinary Bloke Who Feeds a Nation’s Prejudices’ The Age 21/02/06. Morris, Meaghan (2006). ‘ ‘‘Please Explain?’’: Ignorance, Poverty And The Past’ in Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture. London: Sage.

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Nicoll, Fiona (2004). ‘After Keating: Queer(y)ing Ordinary Mums and Dads’ in David Carter (ed.) The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on Australia’s Intellectual Life. Carlton: Melbourne University Publishing. O’Brien, Kerry (2006). ‘John Howard Reflects on Highs and Lows as PM’ The 7.30 Report ABC Television 02/03/06. Sandywell, Barry (2004). ‘The Myth of Everyday Life: Toward a Heterology of the Ordinary’ in Gregory J. Seigworth and Michael E. Gardiner (eds) Rethinking Everyday Life: And Then Nothing Turns Itself Inside Out. Cultural Studies 18.2/3, 160–180. Seigworth, Gregory J. and Michael E. Gardiner (eds) (2004). Rethinking Everyday Life: And Then Nothing Turns Itself Inside Out. Cultural Studies 18 (2/3). Steketee, Mike (2006). ‘No Suburban Solicitor’ The Australian 02/03/06. Turner, Graeme (1990). British Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Boston: Unwin Hyman. ——(2005). Ending the Affair: The Decline of Television Current Affairs in Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press. ——(ed) (2006). ‘Talkback Radio’ Media International Australia 122. Wilde, Oscar (1985). The Importance of Being Earnest: And Other Plays. New York: Signet Classic. Williams, Raymond (1958). ‘Culture is Ordinary’ in Norman MacKenzie (ed) Conviction, London: MacGibbon & Kee: 74–92. Young, Robert J. C. (2007). ‘ ‘‘Them’’ and ‘‘Us’’ ’ International Journal of Cultural Studies 10 (1): 51–62.

11 The Antipodean Uses of Literacy Mark Gibson

Can Richard Hoggart’s ideas and inspiration be made to travel? I want to address this question through a reflection on the value of Hoggart’s work for thinking about cultural literacies in Australia in the mid-2000s. There are pragmatic reasons for this focus. ‘Literacies’ have recently become a hot topic in Australian public debates, particularly as a result of conservative diatribes about declining educational standards (see, for example, Donnelly, 2004), and the term has acquired considerable political leverage. Having long had an interest in Hoggart’s work, I have thought of it immediately as an obvious place to start in taking these debates somewhere more interesting and edifying. But I think there are issues of more general interest in the attempt to translate this work to different contexts from that in which it developed. There are two kinds of travel to be considered here. The first is a displacement in time. Hoggart has remained active in public debates around education and literacy for over 50 years. When I met him with John Hartley in 1997 for an interview for the International Journal of Cultural Studies (Gibson and Hartley, 1998), he was in London for a meeting as Chairman of the Book Trust and was still passionately engaged in initiatives to improve literacy in Britain. It is probably fair to say, though, that his characteristic approaches to these questions were primarily formed in the 1950s and 1960s – particularly, of course, as they found expression in The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart, 1957). There is a question, therefore, about how well these approaches can be transferred to twenty-first century contexts in which there is much that appears at least to have been radically transformed. My interest, however, is more in a second kind of travel – a displacement in national location. How well can Hoggart’s insights 187

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be translated to other places – specifically, in my case, to Australia? To ask this question is immediately to confront his obvious and unabashed Englishness. It is not only that he has always cultivated an intimate conversational style, probingly honest in revealing the background from which he speaks. As he is, as a matter of fact, English, such a style could not help but produce writing which is deeply embedded in English contexts and idioms. It is also that Hoggart projects a quiet confidence in the value of English social patterns, political arrangements and styles of thought. This is evident, for example, in the titling of a volume of essays An English Temper (Hoggart, 1982). It can also be seen in approving observations of the relatively muted response in England to the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. As he pointed out of the British student movement of the time, ‘One would think that the political model being drawn upon had been found somewhere over the mid-Atlantic or mid-Channel, without the intervention of any British history.’ Following observations on the subject by Colin Crouch, however, he goes on to suggest that ‘in a deeper manner the British student movement, even at its most lively, was nevertheless English to the core in another sense, in that with some exceptions it showed a gentleness rarely found elsewhere’ (Hoggart, 1982, 54). This gentleness is clearly, for Hoggart, a quality to be valued. To focus on Hoggart’s Englishness is to risk exposing some still raw nerves in the cultural politics of the last 40 years which, if we wanted simply to celebrate his work, might best be left alone. For questions of Englishness have been a point of continuing sensitivities, often leading to awkward standoffs and angry exchanges. The opening shots on one side of the debate might be attributed to Perry Anderson in his landmark 1964 essay ‘The Origins of the Present Crisis’. Surveying the scene of English intellectual life in the 1950s and 1960s, Anderson could see only a ‘miasma of commonplace prejudices and taboos’:

Traditionalism and empiricism . . . fuse as a single legitimating system: traditionalism sanctions the present by deriving it from the past, empiricism shackles the future by riveting it to the present. A comprehensive, coagulated conservatism is the result, covering the whole of society with a thick pall of simultaneous philistinism (towards ideas) and mystagogy (towards institutions) for which England has justly won an international reputation. (Anderson, 1964, 40)

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The syndrome was one, for Anderson, in which even ‘alternative’ voices were irredeemably enmeshed and he explicitly includes Hoggart: The whole dense, object-infested universe described by Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy testifies to the monumental positivity of the oldest working-class in the world. Too much so . . . The very density and specificity of English working-class culture has limited its political range and checked the emergence of socialism in England. (Anderson, 1964, 45) Recuperating Hoggart against these charges is made difficult by the fact that the other side of the debate – the defence of Englishness – has often been associated with strident nationalism and aggressive right-wing politics. The emblematic example is probably still Margaret Thatcher’s assertion of Britain’s continuing ‘greatness’ at the height of the Falklands War: Once again Britain is not prepared to be pushed around. We have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have instead a new-found confidence – born in the economic battles at home and tested and found true 8000 miles away. That confidence comes from the rediscovery of ourselves and grows with the recovery of our self-respect. (quoted in Gilroy, 1987, 53–4) The quote here is taken from Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. Like Anderson, Gilroy tends in that book, and in other essays extending its arguments, to collapse Englishness – Englishness at least which proclaims itself without apology – into a generalised and highly problematic ideology. He is respectful of Hoggart – ‘His thoughtful and stimulating book elaborated the distinguishing features of working-class English cultural identity’ (Gilroy, 1996, 45) – but criticises him sharply for his ‘enigmatic silences’ (46) on questions surrounding mass black settlement in Britain after the Second World War. In the context of Gilroy’s broader argument, this comes close to a charge of a kind of unreflective racism. It is a charge which was driven home more explicitly against Raymond Williams, for similar shortcomings, in an identification by Gilroy of his respect for ‘settled communities’ with the racial exclusivism of Enoch Powell (1987, 49ff). It is tempting, in view of this history, to downplay Hoggart’s Englishness, emphasising themes which might be seen as having a universal appeal. This line has, in fact, become common in histories of cultural

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studies, in attempts to reconcile the Britishness of the original coinage of the term ‘cultural studies’ with what is now an international field. Jon Stratton and Ien Ang have suggested, for example, that the common element cutting across different global sites of cultural studies is the ‘empowering validation of the marginal, although the naming of the marginal differs greatly from one context to another’ (Stratton and Ang, 1996, 377–8). In the case of Hoggart and the other British pioneers of cultural studies, this was a ‘critical concern with, and validation of, the subordinate, the marginalized, the subaltern within Britain’ (376). There was still a British particularism in this: ‘their intellectual struggles took place by taking Britishness for granted as a given and secure marker of identity, as it were’ (378). But it is a Britishness which can be seen, in the wider frame of international cultural studies, as merely a residue. It was not intrinsic to the early initiatives of British cultural studies and was subsequently overcome in the more universalist discourse of post-colonial theory. There are two reasons, however, why I prefer not to adopt this line. The first is that it sits awkwardly as an account of Hoggart’s actual writing, if not of other significant figures in the formation of British cultural studies. It is not only that terms such as ‘subordinate’, ‘marginalized’, ‘subaltern’ are not ones he has tended to use. It is also that he has specifically resisted the sort of theoretical positions with which they are generally associated. In The Uses of Literacy, for example, he rejects the perspective of the ‘middle class Marxist’, which, notwithstanding good intentions, he saw as ultimately condescending: He pities the betrayed and debased worker, whose faults he sees as almost entirely the result of the grinding system which controls him. He admires the remnants of the noble savage, and has a nostalgia for those ‘best of all’ kinds of art, rural folk-art or genuinely popular urban art, and a special enthusiasm for such scraps of them as he thinks he can detect today . . . Usually, he succeeds in part-pitying and partpatronizing working-class people beyond any semblance of reality. (Hoggart, 1957, 16) Despite his unsparing descriptions of the hardships of working-class life, Hoggart chooses quite deliberately not to read it through the prism of a generalised schema of domination and subordination, focusing instead on its specific texture and density, a cultural inertia which makes it irreducible to wider social relations.

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The second reason I want to maintain some attention to Englishness is that it is an important subtext in current debates in Australia around cultural literacies. Like much else in the Australian public sphere, these debates have tended to be polarised over the past ten years around what journalists sometimes refer to as the ‘three Rs’ – reconciliation (meaning reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous people), refugees and the republic. In broad terms, traditional, Anglo-centric notions of an appropriate stock of cultural literacies are pitted against positions calling for literacies in Asian and Aboriginal cultures (reconciliation and refugees) and which affirm Australia’s post-colonial identity (the republic). And in broad terms, the former has been gaining ground against the latter, reversing what had seemed, through much of the 1970s and 1980s, to be the natural trend. As Australian school children now once again start the day raising the flag – a flag, as former Labour Prime Minister Paul Keating once put it, which has ‘someone else’s flag in the corner of it’ – conservative pundits such as Christopher Pearson hold forth in the national broadsheet The Australian on the bankruptcy of progressive initiatives in education: The jig is up. Thirty-odd years of curricular experiment and faddish methods of teaching reading have demonstrated their true worth. Thirty-odd years worth of students have been increasingly denied the most powerful means of meritocratic advance, of general selfbetterment and, most importantly, of access to the canon of great works which are the core of Western civilisation. (Pearson, 2006, 27) Hoggart sits oddly in relation to this debate. He is unapologetically English and has always maintained a regard for ‘the canon of great works which are the core of Western civilisation’. Yet he has also projected a progressive, democratic tenor and been a key innovator in what Pearson would no doubt see as the ‘faddish’ attempt to extend literacies to the ordinary, the unexceptional, the everyday. But far from being a problem, this category violation seems to me a useful reminder of other possibilities. It leads us to ask whether ‘progressive English’ might not, after all, be an oxymoron. Having said this, I do not think it is useful to attempt simply to ‘apply’ Hoggart to Australia. To do so would violate his respect for the specificity of local contexts and experiences. As John Frow and Meaghan

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Morris have argued in relation to cultural studies, Australia has its own traditions of social and cultural observation which developed independently of British examples: ‘Our own first encounter with a ‘‘culture and society’’ approach in the late 1960s came not from reading Raymond Williams but in attending WEA (Workers’ Educational Association) summer schools on film run at Newport Beach in Sydney by John Flaus’ (Frow and Morris, 1993, xxv). Where I think Hoggart is useful, however, is in alerting us to certain common features in Australian examples. A problem with many assertions of Australian independence – including Frow and Morris, I would suggest – is that they tend to disavow any association with Englishness, closing off attention to the ways in which developments, while separate, may also be related. I have myself interviewed John Flaus: while he is very Australian, he also seems to me very much of a kind with the early pioneers of cultural studies in British adult education. The similarities are as noteworthy as the differences. To develop the argument a little further, I want in the space remaining to introduce two writers – Donald Horne and Craig McGregor – whose writing might be seen as approximating an Antipodean Uses of Literacy. The approximation is a loose one. There are significant differences not just of national location but also of class or generation. Horne was born in 1921, only three years later than Hoggart, but to a middle-class family – his father was a school teacher – in rural New South Wales. McGregor grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, a more proximate site to Hoggart’s Leeds, but he is younger, having been born in 1933. Horne has quite a different political biography. In later life, he was best known as a leading republican and spokesman for progressive causes, but he began his career as a conservative – even for a time, while working in England, as a member of the British Conservative Party. He was one of a generation of Australian intellectuals who fell under the influence of the Scottish–Australian libertarian philosopher John Anderson at the University of Sydney. In the 1950s, Anderson’s libertarianism turned to anti-communism as did many of his followers, Horne among them. Where then are the comparisons to be made? As a first approximation, I would say it is an interest in the ordinary and a sense that ‘literacy’ – an understanding of how meanings are made – must begin with the ordinary. As Horne puts it in his 1964 classic The Lucky Country, ‘It is hard to imagine how one can understand Australia unless one approaches sympathetically the life most Australians lead and the values

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they follow’ (Horne, 1964, 21). There are striking similarities between his diagnosis of the obstacles to this and Hoggart’s comments at the beginning of The Uses of Literacy on the problems of writing about working-class life: Most Australian writers seem to find it impossible to come to grips with their own people. They caricature their fellow countrymen or idealize them for qualities most of them do not possess . . . This failure to take Australian life seriously leads to a hollowness and hesitation in attitudes: since the realities of Australian life have not been written about in detail they do not exist for the bookish; what they see of Australian life seems somehow unreal . . . (Horne, 1964, 20) In offering a corrective to this, Horne undertakes a kind of anthropology of the everyday, again similar in style to Hoggart’s, ranging over suburban houses and gardens, the beach, sport, pubs and corner stores, attitudes to money and the ethos of egalitarianism. McGregor’s People, Politics and Pop, published four years later than The Lucky Country, is more polemical in taking up the cause of the ordinary against educated opinion. A central essay of the book weighs into the so-called ‘Godzone debate’, spurred by attacks in the literary journal Meanjin on the supposed cultural desert of Australian suburbia and the vacuity of its representative figure, the ‘bloke in the bungalow’, Alf: Well, the time has come to declare oneself, and so now in all humility I declare I AM AN ALF You see, I grew up in one of those proliferating Western suburbs of liver-brick bungalows with their blasted eyeholes for windows and pocket-handkerchief front lawns . . . Landseer’s Stag At Bay in a gilt frame hanging on the wall and a gramophone which played Barney Google and the Warsaw Concerto in the corner and Woolworths cups with flowers in them and good china for the visitors on Sunday and Blue Hills on the radio and gladdies in the plastic vase and days spent at the footy or the Show . . . And it was there I learnt . . . that in the lives of ordinary people . . . there was more richness, humour, tension, love, anger, creativity, death, birth – indeed life – than the intellectuals and pundits . . . ever dreamt of. (McGregor, 1968, 163–6)

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McGregor is also more tuned than Hoggart or Horne to the beat of the 1960s: there are essays in the book on Beatlemania and Peter, Paul and Mary and a later edited collection on Bob Dylan (McGregor, 1972). But there is in his work a strikingly ‘Hoggartian’ impulse: ‘The closer you look at the lives of ordinary people the more rewarding and subtle they become’ (McGregor, 1968, 167). What, then, does all this have to do with ‘Englishness’? In a literal sense nothing. I am not suggesting that Horne and McGregor should be seen as derivatives of British models. Horne seems to me to put things in their proper perspective in his later book on England, God is an Englishman: When I first arrived in Britain there were still people who would call me a ‘colonial’, by which they meant not that most of the inhabitants of Australia and of the British Isles were of common origin but that Australians were a kind of by-product of the present generations of Britain . . . I would try to explain that Australians were derived not from them but from a history that they were also derived from. (Horne, 1969, 37) McGregor does, in fact, mention Hoggart as among his inspirations – along with Raymond Williams, Reyner Banham and Stuart Hall (McGregor, 1968, 57). But it is the common history, not a simple line of descent, that I am wanting to draw attention to. My suggestion is that this history has produced a particular kind of attention to the ordinary, a particular kind of ‘cultural literacy’. The value of the English case, specifically, is a certain clarity of recognition of its peculiarities as a style of thought. Because it is more explicitly marked – that is, as ‘English’ – it has accumulated a rich archive of reflection and commentary. This has sometimes been highly critical – I have already cited Anderson and Gilroy – but also at times affirming. One of my favourite examples of an endorsement, because it comes so clearly from an outsider, is Jean-Claude Passeron’s introduction to the French edition of The Uses of Literacy: The discussion of the realities of class is certainly to the credit of numerous fractions of the French intellectual milieu, but it is not altogether wrong to suppose that its theoretical and abstract tone serves also to keep at bay a whole set of realities at once simple and scandalous – or worse than scandalous, vulgar. The whole

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empirical force of these realities is evident when a description at once ethnographic and autobiographical such as Richard Hoggart’s brings them into focus directly, above literary artifice and scholarly exercises. (Passeron, 1971, 130)

For a balanced appreciation of both the strengths and the weaknesses of ‘Englishness’, I think it is hard to go past Stuart Hall – particularly his essays on the subject from the 1970s (Hall, 1972; 1980). I have elsewhere attempted to clarify the political bearings of Englishness through the writings of Michael Oakeshott, particularly his distinction between the ‘politics of faith’ and the ‘politics of scepticism’ (Gibson, 2007; Oakeshott, 1996). There is not the space to expand on this here, but the central point is the recognition of a form of politics, ‘the politics of scepticism’, which seeks to maintain a sense of the specificity of the political and, conversely, a respect for practices and forms of life which have no immediate political valency. This is to abstract a little from Oakeshott himself, for whom it was more specifically a style of government – one in which government is viewed as a limited activity. He was, of course, a conservative and the examples that come to mind may be the attempt, historically, to preserve the independence of the aristocracy or, more recently, to limit government interference in the ‘free market’. But he also suggests, and I think he may be right, that the politics of scepticism cuts across the opposition between ‘left’ and ‘right’. It is in this context, I think, that we should take seriously the fact that Raymond Williams did place some value – as a socialist – on ‘settled communities’, or that Hoggart insisted on the qualities independent of political positions to be found in working-class life. A similar respect for these qualities can be found in the Australian examples I have cited. As Horne observed in The Lucky Country, ‘Australia is not a country of great political dialogue or intense searching after problems . . . There is little grandiose ideology and politics is usually considered someone else’s business’ (15):

On an Australian beach on a hot summer day people doze in the sun or shoot the breakers like Hawaiian princes in pre-missionary Waikiki. The symbol is too far-fetched for Australian taste. The image of Australia is of a man in an open-necked shirt solemnly enjoying an ice-cream. His kiddy is beside him. (16)

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In what is, I am afraid, a similarly masculinist passage, McGregor rhapsodises about the virtues of Australian suburbia: Above all, it gives you complete independence. You can do what you like, say what you like, copulate with your woman in the sun on the back lawn, raise crayfish, fly kites, train greyhounds, nurture a secret passion for painting Frosted Meringue lipstick on the toenails of wedgetailed eagles . . . (McGregor, 1968, 50) These impulses remain strong in Australia and by no means exclusively among those with Anglo-Celtic ancestry. What seems to me currently lacking, however, is a sense of the variety of forms they can produce. When he came to power in 1996, Prime Minister John Howard stated as an aspiration for his government that Australians should feel ‘relaxed and comfortable’. While often mocked for its blandness and lack of ambition, not to mention its odd contradiction with hardline policies on refugees and national security, the idea probably did resonate with a wide cross section of the Australian electorate. Like it or not, there has been a pervasive desire in Australia over the last ten years for a reconnection, following the politicisation of everyday life of the 1960s and 1970s, with the ordinary accepted fairly much for what it is. At the same time, however, there has been an extreme limitation in the imagination of possibilities to be extracted from this. On one side, the ordinary is brandished as a talisman in a campaign by conservatives to discredit the authority of left liberal ‘elites’. There is rarely any effort, here, at the sort of close observation of everyday life which might give some substance to claims to speak in its name. The strategy works politically because the terrain of the ordinary has been largely uncontested. On the other side, the Australian left remains deeply suspicious of the figure of the ordinary, particularly where it has Anglo overtones. The complex intellectual heritage surrounding this figure tends to be reduced to stereotypical images of white picket fences, tasteless English food, Anglo xenophobia and John Howard’s defence of the monarchy. It is probably as true of Australian intellectuals today as when Horne observed of them in the 1960s: ‘They feel betrayed by their own people’ (Horne, 1964, 20). It is here, for me, that I find a use in Australia for Richard Hoggart. He is a reminder of the possibilities that are being missed. It may be tempting, following the cultural nationalist leanings of the Australian left, to find substitutions with local heroes, but there is actually a value in considering a figure who is unambiguously and inescapably English.

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It forces a more complex understanding of what Englishness might mean, transforming at the same time our understanding of Australia. Re-reading Hoggart may, paradoxically, be a good place to start in expanding cultural literacies in the Antipodes.

Works cited Anderson, Perry (1964). ‘Origins of the present crisis’, New Left Review 23, 27–53. Donnelly, Kevin (2004). Why Our Schools Are Failing, Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove. Frow, John and Meaghan Morris (eds) (1993). Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader, St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Gibson, Mark (2007). Culture and Power – A History of Cultural Studies, Oxford: Berg. Gibson, Mark and John Hartley (1998). ‘Forty years of cultural studies – An interview with Richard Hoggart, October 1997’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol.1, no.1, April, 11–23. Gilroy, Paul (1987). There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, London: Unwin Hyman. ——(1996). ‘British cultural studies and the pitfalls of identity’, James Curran, David Morley and Valerie Walderdine (eds) Cultural Studies and Communications, London: Arnold, 35–49. Hall, Stuart (1972). ‘The social eye of picture post’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies 2, 70–120. ——(1980). ‘Cultural studies and the centre: some problematics and problems’, Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (eds) Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, London: Unwin Hyman, 15–47. Hoggart, Richard (1957). The Uses of Literacy, London: Chatto and Windus. ——(1982). An English Temper: Essays on Education, Culture and Communications, London: Chatto & Windus. Horne, Donald (1964). The Lucky Country – Australia in the Sixties, Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin. ——(1969). God is an Englishman – So Why is England in Such a Mess? Sydney: Angus and Robertson. McGregor, Craig (1968). People, Politics and Pop – Australians in the Sixties, Sydney: Ure Smith. ——(ed.) (1972). Bob Dylan: A Retrospective, New York: Morrow. Oakeshott, Michael (1996). The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Passeron, Jean-Claude (1971). ‘Introduction to the French edition of uses of literacy’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies Spring: 120–131. Pearson, Christopher (2006). ‘The betrayal of education’, The Australian, 14 January, 27. Stratton, Jon and Ien Ang (1996). ‘On the impossibility of a global cultural studies: ‘‘British’’ cultural studies in an ‘‘International’’ Frame’, in D. Morely and K.-H. Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies London: Routledge, 361–391.

12 Relativism and Reaction: Richard Hoggart and Conservatism Charlie Ellis1

It took me years and the acquaintance of some intelligent, imaginative and humane Conservatives – whose Conservatism was based not on self-interest but on a feeling for the importance of history, tradition and duty – to learn to be hospitable to the idea of the good Conservative. (Richard Hoggart, A Local Habitation, 130) In the various accounts of the evolution of British Cultural Studies, Hoggart tends to be portrayed as a seminal but outdated figure, from whose nostalgic cultural vision the subject has since wisely escaped. Such an allegation is not unsupported by Hoggart’s recent ‘sociocultural’ writings (Corner, 1991, 138), and in debates on topics such as broadcasting, higher education and the state of the English language, Hoggart tends to be found among those bemoaning ‘dumbing-down’ (Hoggart, 2004a, 132–138) and defending ‘traditional values’ (Bennett, 2001). One reviewer characterised his Mass Media in a Mass Society as a ‘jeremiad’ containing ‘a litany of Victor Meldrew style gripes’ (Kelly, 2004), while Keith Miller has argued that Hoggart’s ‘ranting hostility towards relativism and anti-elitism’ revealed him to be a deeply conservative figure, ‘livid with nostalgia’ (Miller, 2004). Indeed, reading Hoggart’s The Way We Live Now in the context of recent works of conservative social criticism, one cannot but note a number of linkages (see, for example, Hitchens, 2000; O’Hear, 1996; Phillips, 1996; Scruton, 1996). Hoggart shares with them a belief that Britain has suffered a social and (especially) cultural decline and cites similar symptoms. Like Phillips and Hitchens in particular, Hoggart believes that modern society is riddled with moral and cultural ‘relativism’,2 ‘the obsessive avoidance of judgements of quality, or moral judgement’ (Hoggart, 1996, 3). 198

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This thematic resemblance between Hoggart and the conservatives of the right is evident in Roy Bland’s sympathetic review of Hoggart’s The Way We Live Now in the Salisbury Review. Bland contends that while Hoggart was ‘no supporter of the Tory Party . . . wise conservatives will heed his analysis and even at this late hour take up the challenge to resist any further slide towards relativism’. Bland goes on to suggest that the Salisbury Review is ‘in a good position to lead that resistance’ against the ‘relativist cancer’ (Bland, 1996, 50–51), a view, as we shall see, that Hoggart would strongly contest. Because of the tenor of his critique of relativism, Horowitz claims that ‘Hoggart is far easier on Mrs Thatcher than on the Conservative mood’ (1997, 70). However, as Moore notes, The Way We Live Now also belongs to the ‘genre’ of writings (such as The State We’re In) which reviewed ‘the wreckage of British Society in the wake of Thatcherism’ (1996, 521), and connects with writings on ‘marketisation’ (Leys, 2003) and the decline of the ‘public domain’ (Marquand, 2004). It is Hoggart’s conservative and anti-market attitudes which I will examine, through some of his interactions with the ‘Conservative movement’3 : in particular his clashes with the moral right, his involvement in the formation of British Cultural Studies, and his critique of the free market.

Hoggart’s politics In the same way that Ian Gilmour and other One Nation Tories are considered by social democrats (including Hoggart) to be the ‘acceptable face’ of Conservatism (Hoggart, 1999, 60, 77), Hoggart is often thought to be representative of moderate, ‘fair-minded’ socialism (Mount, 1994; Worsthorne, 2004, 10). Hoggart’s most extensive ideological self-description is to be found in the introduction to his book on Farnham, in which he describes himself as being ‘on the left’, and ‘[o]bviously . . . not politically Conservative’. As he notes, Townscape with Figures includes ‘continuing criticisms of Conservatism’ and ‘the classsnobberies of the Conservative-voting middle class’ (1994, xviii). Thus he thinks himself ‘not a Conservative and not a Liberal Democrat’, but ‘a Socialist’ though ‘a centre and central Socialist’ who is ‘unwilling to be reassigned towards the Right by those who are further left’. In short, he is a ‘non-Christian, ethical socialist’, who subscribes to a ‘non-utopian’ politics which rejects ‘all absolutisms, ideologies, single solutions, blueprints and dogmatisms’ (ibid., xix). He has described his family as ‘above all ‘‘respectable’’, protestant, puritanical, firmly anti-vulgarity, non-political except for many conservative – rather than Conservative – instincts’

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(Hoggart, 2003, 13). Not only might such a description fit Hoggart himself, but it also makes clear that he is fully aware of the Conservative/conservative distinction, and wishes to distance himself from the former only.

Hoggart and the permissive society Though he echoes concerns from the right regarding the state of modern Britain, Hoggart first rose to national prominence as a spokesman for socially liberal values, as the ‘star defence witness’ at the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial (Wroe, 2004). The Lady Chatterley verdict is widely considered to be a key event in the creation of the permissive society. According to Mary Whitehouse, it ‘opened the floodgates of obscenity’ (Whitehouse, 1993), while Hitchens believes it to be a critical step in The Abolition of Britain (the subtitle of his book is From Lady Chatterley to Tony Blair). Hoggart himself notes that, at the time, he would have imagined that the case would have become a ‘footnote’ in works on Lawrence or censorship, but instead it has ‘echoed loudly down the decades’ (1993, 52). Certainly, the same arguments would re-emerge in Hoggart’s subsequent clashes with the moral right.4 As with the trial, these debates would centre on the question of whether literary or artistic ‘excellence’ could justify explicit material. Hoggart considered the move to accept ‘literary merit’ in such debates to be a ‘liberating’ step (1993, 52), but Whitehouse believed that reference to literary or artistic ‘excellence’ (such as in the case of the dramas of Dennis Potter) was merely a means for the liberal cultural elite to legitimise tawdry material. For Hoggart, Whitehouse’s attitudes tended towards cultural philistinism: in her dismissal of Potter’s work, she was condemning some of the major achievements of British post-war culture (Creeber, 2000). Hoggart himself was more concerned about the social impact of mass entertainment, in that the ‘stagemanaged sentimentality’ and ‘manipulation of nostalgic emotion for the entertainment of mass audiences’ in shows such as This Is Your Life constituted a particularly egregious form of ‘trivialisation’ (Hoggart, 1993, 136; 2001b). This reflects Hoggart’s perspective on the debate on the Permissive Society. For him, there was an overemphasis, on the part of the moral right, on some types of (generally sexual) activity, while other morally questionable practices were overlooked. He considered ‘mass culture’ to be as great a threat to the ‘the older order’, and that the ‘prosperity

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of the Sixties’ had produced, in the major provincial cities, ‘a rash’ of ‘gambling clubs, cabaret clubs, [and] strip clubs, which for brassiness and vulgarity would take some beating’ (1969, 77). Thus Hoggart has subsequently argued it was not ‘Sexual liberation’, but ‘consumerism’ which was at the ‘heart’ of the ‘Permissive Society’ (2004b). The moral right had not understood this, though some free-market thinkers have indeed celebrated the socially liberalising effects of commerce (Brittan, 1973). For both Hoggart and the moral right, broadcasting was an important crucible of social and cultural change. Hoggart believed that Whitehouse’s claim to be defending traditional Reithian values in broadcasting was illegitimate, and instead her campaign posed a threat to the values she purported to cherish. There was, as Hoggart noted, far more to Reith than his Christian moralism, and the outlook of Whitehouse and the NVLA ignored the Arnoldian component of Reithian thinking. As Hoggart puts it, ‘[t]he Guardians may think of themselves as the upholders of cultural standards’ but they ‘usually lack the qualities of mind necessary to fulfil that role’ (1973a, 201), and failed to understand that the ‘job of public service broadcasting’ was to ‘not only reinforce existing taste but to seek to widen it’ (2001a, 40). Hoggart argued that remaining within pre-existing cultural boundaries played into the hands of commercial interests, as it would produce ‘neutered art’ which would keep ‘cosy the big audiences commercial entertainment needs’. Thus the demands of the moral guardians were, Hoggart suggested, the ‘lineaments’ not of ‘a civilised democracy’ but ‘the false democracy of aggressive philistinism’. Hoggart did concede that there was a ‘grain of truth’ in the moral guardians’ critique, in that ‘the recent increased freedom [had] gone to the heads of some writers’ and broadcasters (1973a, 204). In a much later piece (written just after her death), Hoggart reflected that, though Whitehouse had ‘laid herself open to mockery’, if some of her liberal critics ‘had been willing to look beyond the unpleasant rhetoric of her arguments’, they might have realised that she was indicating, if not altogether consciously, ‘something shallow in their own attitudes’. While overstated and simplistic, Whitehouse’s warnings were worth taking seriously; and that ‘behind her blinkers’ she was alerting society to the need to make ‘choices’ and judgements, and for the shape of society to be decided not ‘by the power of the purse and its pressure to be entertainment-led’, but instead as the ‘result of wide, mature, and . . . morally-aware thought’ (2001b). This relates to Hoggart’s concerns regarding ‘relativism’: he believes that cultural producers need to be aware that what they produce

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can have a profound impact on society, and that they need to take responsibility for this. Inglis is thus surely correct to describe Hoggart’s ‘demon’ as ‘moral gutlessness’. What Hoggart’s interactions with the moral right reveal is that he is more concerned about cultural rather than moral decline, believing that an overemphasis on the latter does nothing to reverse philistine tendencies. However, he was keen to emphasise that the belief in ‘judgement’ strong among moral conservatives was worth emulating in the cultural sphere. It is to Hoggart’s approach to the study of culture that we now turn.

Cultural populism and the market Hoggart’s involvement in the formation of British Cultural Studies has, like the Lady Chatterley trial, placed him in conflict with the Conservative movement, members of which have cited this ‘controversial modern discipline’ (Scott, 1990, 48) as a source of relativistic values, and a hotbed of political radicalism. Phillips has suggested that through the discipline of cultural studies the ‘teaching of culture had become a political and ideological battlefield’(1996, 128), while Scruton believes cultural studies to be a subject ‘built around a political agenda rather than critical analysis’ (1998, 149). Thus, as Mount notes, cultural studies was ‘always regarded by its enemies as something of a leftist racket’ (1994). Hoggart has echoed some of these concerns, somewhat anxious that the subject was studied by those ‘on the left’ (1993, 98–9), and fearing that the subject has become riddled with cultural relativism. Thus, as Miller notes, though ‘[o]ne of the midwives of Cultural Studies in Britain’, he was ‘clearly not overjoyed at how the lad is turning out’ (2004). His belief in the innate superiority of high culture and his ‘distaste for theoretical speculation’ (Scott, 1990, 51) have caused him to be alienated from the discipline. Phillips has argued that the increasing ‘despair’ with which Hoggart discussed cultural studies was clear evidence that it had lost its respect for ‘the values of the past’ (1996, 125). Hoggart himself concedes that ‘[t]he invasion of [relativism] began with the founding of the subject itself’, and that it is ‘in the thick of the relativistic society and is itself affected by that relativism, sometimes disablingly’ (1996, 72–3). Thus, in his inaugural lecture at Birmingham, Hoggart criticised those who thought that newspapers, popular novels and popular music were ‘beneath serious critical consideration’, but went on to argue that ‘[a]ssimilated lowbrowism is as

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bad as uninformed highbrowism’ (1973b, 242–3). According to Hoggart, the former now dominates the discipline. While conservative critics of cultural studies argue that the subject has been mired in cultural relativism, some on the left have argued that the subject’s major flaw was a ‘compliance’ with the market, which was cultural relativism’s true source. That is (as McGuigan puts it), in waging ‘patricidal war against aesthetic and social elitism’, the theorists of ‘populist cultural studies’ have assisted the rise of ‘market populism’ (McGuigan, 2003, 592), producing a ‘peculiar homology between a one-dimensional and consumptionist cultural studies and the sovereign consumer of market ideology’ (ibid., 593). For Philo and Miller, many practitioners of media and cultural studies have ‘wandered up a series of dead-ends’ and are ‘incapable of commenting critically on the society within which it existed’ (2004, 4). This is neglectful as the increasing compliance of the academic left with ‘free market culture’ has occurred at the same time as the policies of the New Right have disrupted the social fabric by ‘hollowing out’ the public domain and increasing material inequality (ibid., 7). The degree of overlap between those engaged in cultural studies and market thinking has concerned Thomas Frank, the chief critic of market populism (Frank, 2001). Frank has argued that while those involved in cultural studies have seen it as a radical discipline, engaged in the breaking down of ‘false and reactionary’ academic boundaries (Frank, 2002, 10), its rejection of cultural traditionalism has been combined with an acceptance of the status quo in the economic sphere. Its practitioners appear to have ‘no problem with the free market, with what it gives consumers [and] with what it does to people’s lives’ (ibid., 34) and that there is a ‘surprisingly short walk’ from cultural populism to the ‘sterner stuff of market populism’ (ibid., 37); cultural studies offers little more than an ‘apologia for the existing economic arrangements’ (ibid., 36). While Hoggart’s language is different, this is broadly his view. As Collini notes, for Hoggart, and those like him, concerns regarding cultural relativism are, at root, connected to a concern about the further penetration of commercial values (cited in Wroe, 2004). While he talked in his 1971 Reith Lectures of a ‘powerful resistance within British culture’ to ‘making distinctions’ and ‘recognising different standards’, Hoggart believed that these ‘relativistic’ (Hoggart, 1972, 83) trends had been accentuated by Thatcherite Conservatism. His underlying fear has been that those on the left who were ‘nervous’ of appearing ‘judgmental’ would end up ‘implicitly propping up the low-level capitalist persuaders’ (Hoggart, 1995).

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Hoggart’s cultural conservatism That Hoggart’s recent writings have a nostalgic aspect is undeniable, but this is not just a product of age, as it is also true of his earlier work. Mannheim (1986) posits that the conservative utopia is ‘the past’; and a number of commentators on Hoggart allege that he is essentially backward-looking and fearful of progress. Watson alleges that ‘[b]oth The Uses of Literacy and Culture and Society are pervaded by a sense of sorrowful nostalgia for a lost Europe when socialism once looked like a reasonable hope for intelligent men’. These were ‘sad, backward-looking books, obsessed with the ‘residual values of a dying system of belief and with the daunting task, after the collapse of such high hopes, of saving something or other from a doctrinal wreck’ (1977, 18–19). Turner notes that ‘nostalgia’ was ‘central to the book’s project’, and that ‘[i]n common with the rest of the culture and civilisation tradition’, Hoggart looked ‘back to a cultural fall, when earlier versions of working-class culture were lost’ (1996, 44–5). The charge of sentimentality and nostalgia is linked to a further allegation that the concerns expressed by ‘Hoggart and the dumbing-down brigade’ (Bazalgette, 2003), revealed an essentially conservative and anti-democratic (Horowitz, 1997, 71–2) view of culture. Jenks describes Hoggart’s recollections of Hunslet as containing a ‘romanticism bordering on sentimentality’ and producing a ‘model of culture’ which, ‘although vibrant and valuable in its own right, is nevertheless passive, receptive and tending towards complacency’ (1993, 154) (precisely the type of criticisms Hoggart had made of the moral right). According to Wollheim, ‘[t]he pessimistic attitude adopted by certain radical thinkers [such as Hoggart] in the mid-twentieth century towards mass culture’ was ‘highly reminiscent of the pessimistic attitude adopted by many conservative thinkers in the mid-nineteenth century towards mass politics’ (1961, 19). In Toynbee’s term, Hoggart was guilty of ‘cultural panic’, a ‘close cousin’ of ‘moral panic’, which both ‘sprung from a ‘rich vein in the human psyche dating back to our expulsion from Eden’, according to which the world is always ‘getting worse’; that despite the improvements in our ‘physical and material circumstances’, we are ‘morally, spiritually, and culturally impoverished compared with our great forebears’ (2001, 192). Campbell considers the ‘anti-consumerist talk’ of Orwell, Seabrook and Hoggart to be essentially ‘anti-mass pleasure’ (1984, 227). What populist critics of Hoggart and his acolytes allege is that their resistance to mass culture stems from a fundamental pessimism regarding the tastes and abilities of the masses,

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who are not trusted to make the right choices. Consequently, it is, they argue, legitimate for Hoggart to be lumped in with self-confessed social and cultural elitists, and fellow opponents of ‘mass culture’, such as Eliot and Leavis. The charge of cultural elitism has been made not only by those (such as Wollheim) on the left, but also by ‘market populists’ (Frank, 2000). Though usually classified as being on ‘the right’ and being part of the Conservative movement, there is little authentically conservative about market populist thought which, in contrast to much social and cultural conservative thought, is an optimistic, forward-looking creed. Given the primacy it places on the legitimacy of individual choice, market populism is also an inherently relativistic mode of thought, and in the cultural sphere tends towards a defence, and often a celebration of popular culture.5 The clash between Hoggart and the market populists is evident in Richard North’s defence of ‘mass affluence’, Rich is Beautiful. North argues that Hoggart, in his efforts to preserve traditional working-class culture, was effectively dissuading the working classes from seeking social and material improvement. North suggests that in The Uses of Literacy ‘we enter a world in which Northern England might as well be the rainforest or the arctic, with their splendid primitives threatened by corruption by the superficialities of western capitalism’. North believes that Hoggart tends only to see the worst side of the social changes affecting the working classes; that while many of them were ‘hoovering up junk’, others were ‘losing family members to universities’. Because of rising affluence, people are ‘freer than ever to abandon’ working-class life, and North celebrated this social mobility (2005, 131–2). Similarly, the poet and critic William Scammell argues that Hoggart’s distaste for mass culture has caused him to reject the best means for achieving greater social and economic equality. Hoggart has, Scammell argues, been ‘effortlessly swallowed’ by ‘the Establishment’, become a member of the ‘chattering classes’ and had made himself ‘absolutely essential to every government committee ever set up to postpone the redistribution of power, wealth and education’ (Scammell, 1990, emphasis added). For Scammell and North, it is the spread of affluence which best achieves these aims and, given time, affluence will produce a wider diffusion of the type of culture Hoggart covets. Thus the ‘present generation of ex-working class people are the first in their families to know anything like affluence’ and therefore it is ‘hardly surprising’ that they ‘spent it on ‘bad’ things like fast food, rather than ‘good’ things like books’. However, ‘time’ would ‘bring the grace that

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prolonged affluence tended to bring to the middle and upper classes of old’ (North, 2005, 259). Like Wollheim, North believes that traditional working-class culture did not offer the basis on which to build the culture of the future; instead it needed to be and is being transcended – and, North argues, market-derived affluence is the most reliable means for achieving this.

Cultural stratification Hoggart sees few signs of this market-led improvement. Instead, the free market has produced severe ‘social stratification’, exemplified by the appearance of an ‘underclass’, alongside the emergence of the ‘ubiquitous, ever-expanding ‘executive class’, which was undermining any attempt to raise cultural standards (1993, 266; 1999, 63–4). He considers that ‘embourgeoisification’ and ‘Americanisation’ have ‘proved to be false trails’ (1998, 466), in that they have failed to produce a ‘widely diffused’ culture (1964, 443). This emphasises that Hoggart is a cultural as well as social critic of the market society. Thus not only were the ‘underclass’ being deprived socially but also, in the evocative phrase, first used in The Uses of Literacy, ‘culturally robbed’ (1963, 201). Furthermore, those institutions which had given those at the bottom access to literature, learning and culture (WEA, public libraries, the universities, the BBC and so on), the cultural ‘countervailing forces’ (Hoggart, 1999, 102), were being eroded. John Corner suggested to Hoggart that The Uses of Literacy could be described as ‘pessimistic’ in its cultural verdict, and in light of what was to occur in the 1960s ‘over gloomy’. Hoggart admitted that he had seen ‘hopeful signs’ in the ‘more open’ climate of the 1960s, but that he was ‘no longer as hopeful’, and that the British cultural scene of the 1990s presented ‘a very depressing prospect’. Because of this ‘cultural stratification’, the counter-tendencies (such as Waterstones, or BBC Four) benefited only the ‘already aware groups’ (Corner, 1991, 146). There is a great deal of culture out there, but few know where to access it, and therefore the cultural divisions in society are widening and hardening (Hoggart, 1999, 102). What emerges from the above is that his ‘conservative’ concerns are always outstripped by his concerns about the market, which he has consistently cited as the main source of cultural decline (McGuigan, 2006). As we have seen, he feared that the moral critique of broadcasting played into the hands of those providing vapid mass-market material. Similarly, while he shared the concerns of commentators of the right about a shift towards cultural relativism,

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he believed their attachment to market fundamentalism de-legitimised their critique. Hoggart’s view thus seems to cast him adrift politically from right and left. However, his dual concern about the socially destructive impact of the market typical of the social democratic left, alongside a cultural prognosis which might be deemed conservative, places Hoggart in a discernible strand of social democratic thinking with a ‘lineage’ which ‘stretches from Orwell and Hoggart in the 1940s and 1950s to Jeremy Seabrook in the 1980s’ (Scott, 1990, 51; Zuberi, 2001, 42). Evident in the cultural critiques made by members of this strand is a profound sense of cultural ‘fear’: that ‘letting things go’ will lead to cultural decline. Hoggart is, as McGuigan notes, possessed of the ‘gloomy prognosis’ that ‘mass culture was overwhelming the authentically popular’, but that this ‘radical pessimism’ is ‘taken much further by the passionate jeremiads of Jeremy Seabrook’ (McGuigan, 1992, 53–5), Hoggart’s ‘latter-day apostle’ (Campbell, 1984, 224), or ‘child of Richard Hoggart’ (Benyon, 1982, 289). Oakeshott outlines that for ‘the man of conservative temperament’, the ‘grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise’, as ‘every change’ is ‘an emblem of extinction’ (1991, 407, 412). A certain degree of ‘regret’ is evident in Hoggart’s and Seabrook’s discussion of changes in British culture and working-class life. But, does this make them conservatives?

Hoggart as ‘left conservative’ As Mannheim notes, ‘[t]raditional conduct is . . . not tied . . . to political or any other types of conservatism’, and politically ‘progressive’ individuals may, ‘not withstanding their political convictions . . . bear themselves largely in a traditionalist way is some spheres of life’ (1986, 73). Daniel Bell has famously described himself as socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture’ (1996, xi), and this might also be considered appropriate for Hoggart, for whom such ideological ‘inconsistencies’ were indeed coherent. When reviewing A. H. Halsey’s autobiography, Hoggart describes his friend’s ideological self-description as ‘[i]n short both a socialist and a conservative’ (1996, 102), as ‘an admirable combination’ (Hoggart, 1997, 429). What I would argue is that the political position exemplified by Hoggart and Halsey is a form of conservatism, albeit one not which should be considered part of the political right. As with any other strand of political thought, the members of this ‘left conservative’ (Kenny, 1996, 18) strand are not uniform in their

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views but do share much. Like conservatives of the right, they generally possess a deep cultural and social pessimism, and tend to perceive that in a number of important spheres ‘things are getting worse’, but this is combined with an opposition to, rather than a strong belief in, the free market. It is a prominent voice in most social or cultural debates and is expressed by some prominent public intellectuals (Lasch, Selbourne, Sennett among others), as well as public figures such as John Humphrys, for whom Hoggart was ‘something of a hero’ (2004), and Alan Bennett. It is this tendency which Ignatieff (1989) is referring to when he argues that ‘[i]nstead of confronting conservative mythology head-on, many British liberals, social democrats and former socialists’ had ‘taken refuge in a lament for the vanished civilities of post-war British citizenship and in jeremiads against market values’. He goes on to allege that when ‘the rhetoric of citizenship’ is used ‘not to understand market society but simply to express moral distaste for the vulgarity of market values, it becomes a form of moral narcissism’ which reassures ‘those who cannot bear the moral complexity of market society that they are sensitive and superior beings’. To break free from this ‘theoretical and practical cul de sac’ (66) it is essential that social democrats work ‘themselves free of the seductive pleasures of moral superiority about the venality of the market and false nostalgia about the vanished compassion of the old civic contract’, if they are to develop a ‘robust alternative vision to market conservatism’ (72). For Hoggart et al., their thought does contain a ‘robust alternative’. The left-conservative tradition is perhaps best exemplified by Orwell. Like Hoggart and Seabrook, Orwell’s political radicalism is combined with the ‘the pessimism of a genuine conservative’ (Thody, 1995, 136). While many on the right have taken the message of Nineteen EightyFour to be essentially anti-collectivist, Orwell also criticised the excesses of commerce.6 In his dystopia, Orwell’s critique of the oppressive state is combined with a view that such a state could most easily control the masses through ‘prolefeed’ (Orwell, 1954, 247), produced by the Ministry of Truth and consisting of ‘rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology . . . films oozing with sex’ (ibid., 38). As Crick points out, this was, rather than a depiction of Stalinism or Nazism, a ‘Swiftian satire of the British popular press’. According to Crick, ‘Orwell was deadly serious in arguing that capitalism, faced with a largely literate and free electorate, could only by means of cultural debasement maintain a class system so grossly unequal and inequitable’ (Crick, 2000). For Crick, Seabrook and others in this strand, ‘dumbing down’ serves both the commercial and the political interests

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of the free market: a view also present in Hoggart’s cultural criticism. In 1961 he wrote that ‘the mass media, especially in a commercial society, does not generally disturb or call in question the status quo’ (1964, 451), and this remains an undercurrent of his thought. For Hoggart, it is mass and not ‘elite’ culture which helps maintain the existing social structure. According to Hoggart, the essential ‘spirit’ of the market is a populist one. He charts the rise of this in The Uses of Literacy, where he notes that ‘competitive capitalism’ has ‘changed horses’ and is now portraying itself as ‘the champion of those hitherto ‘‘degraded’’ classes, because now those classes, if all their sixpences are added together, are worth riding for’ (1963, 243). In Hoggart’s view, the ‘rise of mass-consumerism’ has been the ‘essential tap-root’ of relativism’, rather than (as conservatives of the right allege) liberal collectivism (Hoggart, 2003, 56). Hoggart thus argues that the main failure of the post-1960s British elite has been acceptance of the validity of free-market values in the cultural sphere, and that it has been the neoliberal rather than ‘liberal elite’ which has done most harm. If Hoggart is a conservative, then his is a conservatism which opposes the core belief of the contemporary Conservative movement right: that the market is an innocent party in Britain’s social and cultural decline. Further, those values and institutions which Hoggart defends in conservative terms are those he believes have the potential to produce a society radically different from both that of the 1950s and the post-Thatcher age, and which are essential to ‘protect us from the entertwining tentacles of capitalist practice’ (Hoggart, 2004, 22). His position is similar to Blackwell and Seabrook’s notion of a ‘conserving radicalism’ (1993). As Neocleous remarks, in Seabrook’s ‘radical conservatism’, the ‘resistances of the past’ were to be ‘understood as forms of conservatism – a desire to hold on to existing ways of life’ (1999, 26). Seabrook considers his to be a ‘truer conservatism’, in that contemporary Conservatism was based on a ‘fundamental contradiction’, between a desire to maintain traditional social values and the ‘brutal radicalism’ of the free market. In this context, the ‘only radical politics left’ has to be ‘based upon resistance, recuperation and remembering’, and ‘resistance to change in a world of feverish turbulence and imposed instability’ can ‘form the roots of an energising and transforming radicalism’ (Blackwell and Seabrook, 1993, 4, 14, 66, 96, 143). Despite the ‘mildness’ (Mount, 1994) of Hoggart as a man and in his politics, he too embodies a ‘conserving radicalism’, fundamentally at odds with the market-driven politics of the contemporary Conservative movement.

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Notes 1. I’m grateful to Mike Kenny for encouraging my interest in Hoggart’s social and cultural criticism and to Sue Owen and Bernard Crick for their comments on earlier versions of the chapter. 2. The American edition of The Way We Live Now is – perhaps more accurately reflecting the contents – entitled The Tyranny of Relativism. 3. Not so much the Conservative Party itself, as those think tanks and opinion formers sympathetic to it: in other words, ‘the right’. 4. It should however be noted that not all of the Conservative movement were in agreement with the moral right. The future Conservative minister Norman St John Stevas was a defence witness in the trial, and echoed the defence made by Hoggart, Roy Jenkins, and other ‘liberal’ defenders of the book. According to St John Stevas, the book was of ‘high literary merit’, a ‘contribution of considerable value to English literature’, and an ‘undoubtedly moral book’ (Rolph, 1961, 136). 5. For the libertarian Chris Tame, popular culture, ‘while despised by the statist intelligentsia’, constituted ‘the real cultural ‘alternative’ or ‘underground’ of the twentieth century’ (1985, 245). 6. Those economic liberals who have quoted his review of The Road to Serfdom (that state socialism tends to ‘lead to concentration camps, leader worship and war’) tend to overlook that it also includes the claim that ‘capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war’ (Orwell and Angus, 1970, 144).

Works cited Bazalgette, P. (2003). ‘TV Totalitarianism is Dead. Power to the Digital People!’, The Observer, 30 November. Bell, D. (1996 [1978]). The Cultural Contradiction of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books. Bennett, O. (2001). Cultural Pessimism. Edinburgh University Press. Benyon, H. (1982). ‘Jeremy Seabrook and the British Working Class’, The Socialist Register. London: Merlin, 285–301. Blackwell T. and J. Seabrook (1993). The Revolt Against Change. London: Vintage. Bland, R. (1996). ‘Against Relativism: A Cause for Conservatives’, The Salisbury Review, Autumn. Brittan, S. (1973). Capitalism and the Permissive Society. London: Macmillan. Campbell, B. (1984). Wigan Pier Revisited. London: Virago. Corner, J. (1991). ‘Studying culture: Reflections and Assessments. An Interview with Richard Hoggart’. Media, Culture and Society, 13, 137–151. Creeber, G. (2000). ‘The Anxious and the Uprooted: Dennis Potter and Richard Hoggart, Scholarship Boys’, in V. W. Gras, & J. R. Cook (eds) The Passion of Dennis Potter. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Crick, B. (2000). ‘Big Brother Belittled’, The Guardian, 19 August. Frank, T. (2000). ‘The Rise of Market Populism’, The Nation, 30 October.

Charlie Ellis 211 ——(2001). One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of Economic Democracy. London: Secker & Warburg. ——(2002). New Consensus for Old: Cultural Studies from Left to Right. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm. Halsey, A. H. (1996). No Discouragement: An Autobiography. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hitchens, P. (2000). The Abolition of Britain. London: Quartet. Hoggart, R. (1963 [1957]). The Uses of Literacy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——(1964). ‘Mass Communications in Britain’, in Ford, B. (ed) The Pelican Guide to English Literature: Volume 7: The Modern Age. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——(1969). ‘Proper Ferdinands?’, in Thomas, H. (ed) The Permissive Society. London: Panther. ——(1972). Only Connect. London: Chatto & Windus. ——(1973a). Speaking to Each Other: Volume I: About Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——(1973b). Speaking to Each Other: Volume 2: About Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——(1988). A Local Habitation: Life and Times 1918–40. London: Chatto & Windus. ——(1993). An Imagined Life: Life and Times, 1959–1991. Oxford University Press. ——(1994). Townscape with Figures. London: Chatto & Windus. ——(1995). ‘On the Side of the Angels in the Library’, The Independent, 3 August. ——(1996). The Way We Live Now. London: Pimlico. ——(1997). Review of A. H. Halsey, No Discouragement: An Autobiography, The Political Quarterly, 68.4, 428–430. ——(1998). Review of McKibbin, R. Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951, The Political Quarterly, 76. 3, 464–467. ——(1999). First and Last Things. London: Aurum. ——(2001a). Between Two Worlds. London: Aurum. ——(2001b). ‘Valid Arguments Lost in an Obsession Over Sex’, The Guardian, 24 November. ——(2003). Everyday Language & Everyday Life. New Brunswick: Transaction. ——(2004a). Mass Media and Mass Society. London: Continuum. ——(2004b). ‘It was an Innocent Decade’, The Guardian, 20 July. Horowitz, I. L. (1997). ‘British Exceptionalism’, Modern Age, Winter, 66–73. Humphrys, J. (2004). MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, Edinburgh International Television Festival, August: http://www.mgeitf.co.uk/ Ignatieff, M. (1989). ‘Citizenship and Moral Narcissism’, The Political Quarterly, 60.1, 63–74, Inglis, F. (2004). ‘A Ruskin for the Couch Potato Generation’, The Independent, 26 March. Jenks, C. (1993). Culture. London: Routledge. Kelly, S. B. (2004). ‘Books-Round Up’, Scotland on Sunday, 11 April. Kenny, M. (1996). ‘After the deluge: Politics and Civil Society in the Wake of the New Right’, Soundings, 4, Autumn, 13–26. Leys, C. (2003). Market Driven Politics: Neoliberal Democracy and the Public Interest. London: Verso. Mannheim, K. (1986 [1936]). Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge. Marquand, D. (2004). The Decline of the Public. Oxford: Polity.

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McGuigan, J. (1992). Cultural Populism. London: Routledge. ——(2003). ‘Critical Renewal?’, Sociology, 37.3, 591–597. ——(2006). ‘Richard Hoggart: Public Intellectual’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 12.2, 199–208. Miller, K. (2004). ‘The riddles of television’, Times Literary Supplement, 30 September 30. Moore, R. (1996). ‘Extended Review: The Way We Live Now’, British Journal of the Sociology of Education, 17.4, 521–530. Mount, F. (1994). ‘Hoggart’s back’, Times Literary Supplement, 27 May. Neocleous, M. (1999). ‘Radical Conservatism, or, The Conservatism of Radicals: Giddens, Blair and the Politics of Reaction’, Radical Philosophy, January/ February, 24–34. North, R. D. (2005). Rich is Beautiful: A Very Personal Defence of Mass Affluence. London: Social Affairs Unit. Oakeshott, M. (1991[1962]). ‘On Being a Conservative’, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (expanded edition). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. O’Hear, A. (1996). After Progress. London: Bloomsbury. Orwell, G. (1954 [1949]). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Orwell, S. and I. Angus (eds) (1970). The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: Volume 3. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Phillips, M. (1996). All Must Have Prizes. London: Little Brown. Philo, G. and D. Miller (eds) (2001). Market Killing. London: Longman. Rolph, C. H. (ed) (1961). The Trial of Lady Chatterley. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Scammell, W. (1990). ‘Doing well out of doing good’, The Spectator, 16 June. Scott, P. (1990). Knowledge and Nation. Edinburgh University Press. Scruton, R. (1996). England: An Elegy. London: Pimlico. ——(1998). An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture. London: Duckworth. Tame, C. (1985). ‘The New Enlightenment’, in Seldon, A. (ed.) The New Right Enlightenment. Sevenoaks: Economic & Literary Books. Thody, P. (1995). The Conservative Imagination. London: Continuum. Toynbee, P. (2001). ‘Who’s Afraid of Global Culture’, in W. Hutton and A. Giddens (eds) On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism. London: Vintage. Turner, G. (1996). British Cultural Studies. 2nd edn, London: Routledge. Watson, G. (1977). Politics and Literature in Modern Britain. London: Macmillan. Whitehouse, M. (1993). Quite Contrary. London: Sidwick & Jackson. Wollheim, R. (1961). Socialism and Culture. London: Fabian Society. Worsthorne, P. (2004). In Defence of Aristocracy. London: Harper Collins. Wroe, N. (2004). ‘The Uses of Decency’, The Guardian, 7 February. Zuberi, N. (2001). Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music. University of Illinois Press.

13 The Uses and Values of Literacy: Richard Hoggart, Aesthetic Standards, and the Commodification of Working-Class Culture Bill Hughes

In chapter 1 of Capital, Volume I, Karl Marx famously depicts the commodity – the dominant kind of things produced under capitalism – as a mysterious, irrational, and contradictory being. The contradiction is between use-value – deriving from the real, sensuous qualities of a thing and the use that human beings make of it – and exchange-value, an abstract quality that effaces the useful properties of things in order that they can be measured against a common standard for exchange. This chapter will show how Richard Hoggart has charted the increasing commodification of working-class culture in the twentieth century, and how he reasserts use-value against the cynical production of cultural artefacts for exchange – and also how he goes some way to show what that value is in a way that recovers the idea of literary value and defends the notion of aesthetic standards. He carried out this project not just in The Uses of Literacy but also in various other writings throughout his career and, most importantly, in the practice of his teaching. I am aware that Hoggart would not align himself with Marxism so I apologise for appropriating some of his surplus product in this way for my own ends, though I do so with great respect. I am aware, too, of course, that the suggestion that there is even such a thing as literary value goes against much thought that would claim to be radical today. This viewpoint comes variously from varieties of Marxism and post-structuralism, or an unarticulated anti-elitism, and also from older, more positivist strands of thought. Much of this is avowedly radical, yet 213

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I believe this suspicion and relativism is not at all emancipatory. I hope to show against this that the concept of value is in crucial need of rehabilitation and that Hoggart’s work, as seen through Marxist categories of use and value, can provide the foundations of such a defence. Hoggart’s work is committed to the value of literature, especially for the working class in their movement towards self-emancipation (it is no accident that he was deeply engaged with the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA)1 ), and this inspires his anger over the increasing commodification of culture that threatens that project. His approach necessarily involves ideas of agency; Hoggart shows that we are neither dominated mechanically by mass culture nor threatened by the imposition of literary values by an elite. The potential for resistance and subversion is always present, notably in workingclass culture itself, but certainly intensified by the acquisition of ‘high’ culture. First, however, using Marx, I want to amplify different senses of value that are involved in my discussion. From Capital: The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. [ . . . ] The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of a commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter. (1976, 125, 126) That is use-value; in contrast, ‘Exchange-value appears first of all as the quantative relation, the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind’ (ibid., 126). Marx goes on to describe what happens to the use-value of commodities in the market: clearly the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their use-values [ . . . ] If then we disregard the use-values of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour has been transformed in our hands. If we make abstraction from use-value, we abstract also from the material constituents and forms which make it a use-value. It is no longer a table, a house, a piece of yarn or any other useful thing. All its sensuous characteristics are extinguished. (Ibid., 127, 128) This, then, is how Marx describes the disappearance of use-value in the exchange process. Use-value represents the particularity of the product;

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the qualities which make it of value for human beings. And that value, or usefulness, relates to any human needs, and, along with bare necessities, can include the more sublimated needs catered to by the aesthetic, or any sense of social utility that a work of literature may fulfil. ‘Usefulness’ has many shades, and a sense of a narrow and unaesthetic utility must not be allowed to conceal this. In fact, part of the social critique that literature offers is its negation of narrow utility; for Hoggart, ‘Art is free, gratuitous, unnecessary’ (Hoggart, 1995, 80). Art is ‘unnecessary’, useless, in the exchange process; yet it is useful in a wider sense. Raymond Williams in Keywords delineates these shifts of meaning: utilitarianism was originally a radical materialism that embraced human desires. There was then a narrowing to the Gradgrindian apology for the calculative mentality of industrial capitalism that within the specific utilitarian system, characteristically limited definitions of usefulness – both its characteristic specialization to the individual and the brisk but limited practicality which Mill described as adequate only for ‘regulating the merely business part of the social arrangements’ – came to predominate, and to limit the concepts of both pleasure and happiness. [ . . . ] Utility, once a critical concept, became, in this context, at once ratifying and demeaning, and other terms had to be found to assert the principle of most people’s happiness. (1983a, 328, 329) Though useless by these criteria, literature is never completely disinterested in the Kantian sense, however; Hoggart employs a subtle discrimination involving a kind of disinterestedness that embraces both social values and passion.2 He declares his stance in the appropriately named essay ‘Why I Value Literature’: I value literature because of the way – the peculiar way – in which it explores, re-creates and seeks for the meanings in human experience; because it explores the diversity, complexity and strangeness of that experience (of individual men or of men in groups or of men in relation to the natural world); because it re-creates the nature of that experience; and because it pursues its explorations with a disinterested [my emphasis] passion (not wooing nor apologising nor bullying). I value literature because in it men look at life with all the vulnerability, honesty and penetration they can command . . . and dramatize their insights by means of a unique relationship with language and form. (Hoggart, 1973, 11)

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The social utility of literature is of value too. Adult education, as established in the late nineteenth century, originates in the kind of moral purposefulness which had established Nonconformity and the Labour Movement. The demand was predominantly for ‘education for social purpose’ [ . . . ] education which equipped a man to take his place as a citizen of a democratic community, and, usually to work for the good of his social class. (Hoggart, 1973, 205) This utility is political and emancipatory, democratic and classconscious. Yet this education, in Hoggart’s actual practice of teaching in the WEA, discovered that ‘social purpose’, that value, in literature – good literature, unabashedly acknowledging that evaluation. Marx and Engels themselves firmly believed in the category of aesthetic value without explicitly defending it or systematically integrating it into their theory.3 Later Marxists such as Jan Mukaˇrovsky´ and Herbert Marcuse have tried in very different ways to theorise a non-instrumental idea of value while others, for example Tony Bennett, have urged the whole abandonment of the concept of the aesthetic as inherited from Kant and eighteenth-century British writers.4 Terry Eagleton provides a well-known and somewhat ambivalent critique in The Ideology of the Aesthetic; elsewhere, he offers qualified defences of the idea of value, such as the following: A major problem with discussing the value question at all is how, by some as yet perhaps impossible dialectical feat, to assign its due importance while resisting that relentless fetishism of value at the core of humanist aesthetics. (Eagleton, 1983, 76. See also Eagleton, 1990). Many cultural theorists simply see the very idea of ‘literature’ as an oppressive and ideological construct. Marxism, because of its sensitivity to historicity, must entail at least a partial relativising of the aesthetic. It is not hard either to see how the notion of literary value has had ideological force and has been complicit in oppression.5 But Marx and Engels were quite right to adhere to what some people, attacking them, have characterised as an unsophisticated and still bourgeois aesthetic. Michael McKeon thinks that aesthetic value itself, because in aiming for universality it abstracts from the actual experience of a work, is complicit with exchange-value; much aesthetic theory (particularly that of Adorno) has been preoccupied with this problem of the necessary

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specificity of art and its subsumption under the aesthetic (Adorno, 1973 and 1997; Jameson, 1971 and 1990; McKeon, 1983, 63–82). A solution, I would suggest, must begin in an investigation of the dialectic between the universalising of exchange and the concreteness of use; Hoggart’s work seems to me to illuminate this and he insists on apprehending the specificity of individual works: If it is true [ . . . ] that sociology always risks missing what it is trying to discover because of its ‘love of clarity and exactness’ then we can say that literature may help to keep open our sense of the richness of human experience. (1973, 254) The dominant versions of the attack on value stem from a positivism that promotes a value-free social science and, lately, from a postmodernism that sees universals as dubiously metaphysical. Hoggart targets the first in his earlier work and the latter more recently. One can accept the historical contingency of the aesthetic yet uphold its value as a critical, even humanly essential, category and avoid descending into relativism; Hoggart’s work throughout his career is in harmony with this. Raymond Williams argues, It is not necessary to deny the effectively permanent value, within traceable historical and cultural continuities, of certain works of art from many historical periods, to be able to argue that judgment also, in its real forms of accessibility, recognition of theme and form, comparison, is itself a historical process. This need not mean that all judgments are relative, though that many of them are, including some of the most confident, is easily proved from the record. (1983b, 47) He goes on to say, Thus the question of value [ . . . ] can be also [ . . . ] a more open recognition of forms of material production – works of art – which embody and activate elements of that range of human faculties, resources and potentials which is factually wider than the determinations of any particular social order and which, both as historical evidence and as revolutionary aspiration, is the practical expression of actual and possible human development. (Ibid., 48) This is a far more satisfactory and emancipatory account of artistic value than the reductionist rejections of value on offer elsewhere, and

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includes within it the possibility of an opposition to commodification. I think, too, it is perfectly compatible with, and supported by, Hoggart’s advocacy of aesthetic worth. Hoggart resists that kind of literary evaluation which is impressionistic or which shies away from ‘cultural judgements’; he warns equally against ‘that attitude which claims to be ‘value-free’ [ . . . ] but which is really a hard-nosed unimaginativeness [since] we are acting most intelligently when we face evaluations, not when we evade them’ (1973, 257). There are real problems with the idea of aesthetic value. But Hoggart, going against the prevailing relativist current (and those older, positivist trends), had strong reasons for retaining the idea, and these do not serve reactionary ends. As we have glimpsed, Raymond Williams – closely associated with Hoggart in the origin of cultural studies – would develop a similar defence, drawing on Mukaˇrovsky, ´ among others; Hoggart did not explicitly theorise it but he moved in parallel with Williams in more ways than one, and to similar ends. As I have hinted, one aspect of this approach is to stress the oppositional nature of artistic, or literary, value – to emphasise its usefulness, in other words; its value for a vision of emancipated life. The notion here is that literature has educative and moral value and embodies a critical resistance to the dominance of exchange-value. In April 2006, 40 years after the event, the BBC dramatised the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover; we may note from that trial the heart of Richard Hoggart’s concerns over the value of literature. The trial was confined by the judge to the discussion of literary merit, so ‘value’ becomes of great importance and is caught up in wider ethical and political issues, as Hoggart realised perfectly. He defended the work for its usefulness – in the more magnanimous sense – stressing its moral purity, and how it serves as an antidote to the dehumanising effects of capitalist culture, of the degradation by utility in its narrow sense, the sense which equates human activity with exchange-value: ‘between Mellors and Lady Chatterley [ . . . ] there will be moments of coming together in love which will be all the better because they are not using [my emphasis] one another like creatures for enjoyment’ (Rolph, 1961, 98). And, Hoggart says, Physical relationships are not matters in which we use one another like animals. A physical relationship which is not founded in a much closer respect is a vicious thing. This spirit seems to me to pervade Lady Chatterley’s Lover throughout, and in this it seems that it is highly moral and not degrading of sex. (Ibid., 92)

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There are undoubtedly qualifications that might be made here, yet Hoggart’s ‘puritanism’ – a word he uses of Lawrence – is not an immaterialist anti-hedonism, as he explains: . . . many people do live their loves under a misapprehension of the meaning of the word ‘puritanical’. This is the way in which language decays. In England today and for a long time the word ‘puritanical’ has been extended to mean somebody who is against anything which is pleasurable, particularly sex. (Ibid., 99) Literary value, too, is a quality that can be apprehended by the working class, not just the learned; Lawrence’s moral intentions in writing about sex are transparent to ‘any good reading of the book, I don’t mean a highbrow’s reading, a good decent person’s reading of the book’ (ibid., 95). This is a far more democratic approach to reading than the prevalent doctrines of anti-elitism. Incidentally, this quote reveals another concern of Hoggart’s: what he styled elsewhere during the trial as ‘the corruption of language that Lawrence is attacking’ (ibid., 104). These concerns about language and accessibility have remained with Hoggart throughout his career. In the inspirationally curmudgeonly collection of essays The Way We Live Now (1995), Hoggart attacks the general degradation through commodification of contemporary culture, targeting in particular the institutionalisation of relativism and the deformed language and stunted value judgements that accompany and justify it. Crucially, he exposes with angry wit the abuses (recalling the suppressed title of Uses, The Abuse of Literacy) of managerial language, particularly as used in arts administration. Hoggart sets out the central themes of the book: . . . the decline of authority, the rise of relativism and of its siblings such as populism (the word ‘pluralism’ was avoided as suggesting diversity and openness; ‘relativism’ works the other way), and the dangers relativism and populism present to democracy. (1995, xi) Thus he suggests that anti-elitism, despite its claims, subverts democracy. I would agree and argue that it is a powerful factor in limiting workingclass aspirations and in undermining any radical social change. It is both patronising, and untrue to the facts as Jonathan Rose has pointed out in his detailed study of the reading practices of working people.6

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Elsewhere, Hoggart defines ‘Relativism’ as ‘the obsessive avoidance of judgements of quality’ (1995, 3). And it is explicitly linked to a consumer economy: That sequence – relativism to populism to levelling to reductionism – leads in technically sophisticated capitalist societies to concentration. Here the powerful links of relativism to consumerism become clear. So as to make economies of scale and enhance profits, consumerism must persuade people to allow themselves to be seen as, to come to see themselves as, a single body with shared tastes, small to large. (Ibid.) So, paradoxically, the freedom and individuality that late capitalism seems to offer is, in fact, the obliteration of particularity – precisely the effects of exchange-value that Marx delineated. Hoggart’s work parallels the more theoretical analyses of the ‘Culture Industry’ by Adorno and Horkheimer (1979). As they do, following classical aesthetics, he upholds the reality of artistic value, and approves of the social and ethical utility of art that accompanies it. Though not overtly theoretical in the sense that we have come to understand ‘theory’, Hoggart’s writing is not a simple disengaged empiricism either; there is something of the novelist in the way he passionately describes, and indeed invents, cultural phenomena and colours his account with a strong sense of personal involvement and commitment. Raymond Williams, in an early review of Uses, describes how ‘one feels Hoggart hesitating between fiction or autobiography on the one hand, and sociology on the other’, and explores this dichotomy suggestively (1989, 28). The Bakhtinian multiplicity of voices in Uses is also novelistic. I point, too, to Hoggart’s inventiveness here with regard to the parodies of cheap writing that he includes in The Uses of Literacy. As Sue Owen has shown from research into the manuscripts, Hoggart was forced to invent rather than quote for legal reasons, but those constraints encouraged a creative critique of mass culture that is no less powerful (Owen 2005). And this again brings him closer to Adorno than one might ordinarily recognise; Michael Rosen says, For Adorno, however, the particularities of individual experience are more than mere contingencies, to be left behind on the way to the discovery of general truths. The concepts of philosophy have an experiential dimension – a ‘sedimentary history’ – that it is part of the task of the philosopher to reawaken, and this is not something that can be carried out with the impersonal methods of the natural sciences. (Rosen, 2005, 5–6)

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Hoggart’s practice is akin to this; his personalisation and concretisation escapes that typically Anglophone naive empiricism which spurns the theoretical, though there is also something of the bluff, commonsense pragmatist in his tone. Hoggart’s ‘experiential dimension’ rescues his thought from Adorno’s ‘baleful enchantments of the concept’ (Jameson, 1990). The autobiographical elements in Uses also connect with Williams’s ideas of ‘lived experience’ and the way that Williams, too, self-consciously connected his work with his situation. I would offer some qualifications to this need for an affirmation of aesthetic value in progressive thought. A relativist levelling may be rejected whilst allowing that the canon should be open and negotiable – one does not have to be an uncritical relativist to admit the best of popular and even commercial culture – and Hoggart recognises this (1973, 242–243). And the canon, of course, is not fixed historically; it is open to revision and should be subject to critical dialogue. It is important, too, to recognise that the situation of the working class in culture can be described too monolithically: much critique of mass culture denies agency to subjects and treats them as passive victims of an inescapable ideological fatality and interpellation. There is also a danger that the Left has always been prone to a simplistic anti-consumerism that is reactionary, moralistic, immaterialist, and anti-hedonist. (That does not imply, of course, an inauthentic anti-elitism which embraces all mass culture indiscriminately.) But Hoggart largely avoids these pitfalls, and, especially in Uses, identifies the authenticity of working-class culture and the ways that working-class people resist and appropriate even mass culture. ‘Vocationalism’ in education – a version of narrow utilitarianism – is another of Hoggart’s main targets in The Way We Live Now. He points out that it is or seems value-free to those who wish to avoid a definition of education which raises troubling questions of social justice, about the needs of a democracy and, an even worse threat, about education as a good in itself, whatever its practical benefits [ . . . ] Vocationalism is one way of avoiding difficult choices of value, of looking seriously at the injustice that runs through the educational system. (1995, 22) So it comes down to values again; the use-value of education for its own sake as opposed to a value-free realm which in reality is determined by the market and which leaves real inequalities unchallenged. Further education – Hoggart has been involved in adult education for many

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years – suffered especially under Margaret Thatcher’s supervision of the reduction of everything to exchange-value: [The] Green Paper of 1987 set out precisely the tone and purpose, with its repetitive chatter of ‘market-oriented courses’ and ‘demandled provisions’; and its demotion of ‘recreational interests’. None of that old-fashioned nonsense about the wondering students asking speculative questions. (Ibid., 38) The Way We Live Now was written under the shadow of Thatcherism, but that project has been continued and, if anything, intensified under Tony Blair’s New Labour, and the attacks on both value and democratic impulses have been justified by appeals to populism and the market far more successfully than then. Some examples can be found in the attitude of the former Education Minister Charles Clarke to higher education.7 Hoggart’s comment that ‘Other freedoms – see the Criminal Justice Act of 1994 – have been progressively reduced; all of course in the name of freedom itself’ is also not without relevance here, suggesting the complicity of the invocation of anti-elitism with an authoritarianism that has continued under Blair (Hoggart, 1995, 15). For Hoggart, democracy and aesthetic value are intimately linked. Hoggart quotes several confidently philistine assertions at the head of chapter 3; ‘all these’ slogans, he says, ‘are concerned to admit no distinctions of worth; they assert that, though life is short, art is not difficult nor long to learn, and its powers are given to all. Populism, consumerism, mercantilism can all, in their own selective ways, cohabit with this view of the arts’ (ibid., 55–56.) But where the Frankfurt School’s condemnation of the ‘Culture Industry’ leaves little space for the working class to resist this monolithic domination, determination even, Hoggart, being less estranged from that class, grants ordinary people their agency. And the most important means of cultivating that agency is, for Hoggart, through education, particularly in great literature. The previous two quotes, which favour ‘speculative questions’ and point out that art is a skill that has to be acquired, reveal his constant connection of education with the opposition of use-value to exchange-value. It is interesting to note that most contemporary attacks on aesthetic value generally leave no space for agency; they have a similar disdain for the dialectic between subject and system, positing, in various ways, the intimidation or subjection of the populace by dominant elites and discourses with little space for resistance. Variations on these themes are present in Pierre Bourdieu,

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Barbara Herrnstein Smith, some Foucauldians, and Althusserian Marxists (Bourdieu, 1984; Smith, 1987 and 1988). Hoggart exposes the limits of such determinist theories thus: ‘Cultural materialism’ can reveal by how much writers can be conditioned by their societies. But it can also overestimate conditioning and its limitations are best revealed in the capacity of some major writers to break out into a free, often surrealist, image-driven world which cannot by any means be explained in socio-materialist terms. (1995, 85) For Hoggart, the notion that literature simply expresses the dominant bourgeois ideology, as many cultural theorists believe, is nonsense: ‘Writers are certainly conditioned by their age but, if they have reasonable ability, not determined by it’ (ibid., 69). This has more in common with Marx’s dialectical approach, as amplified by, say, Raymond Williams, than the reductive determinisms of those who uncritically devalue literature. And he quotes Williams with apparent approval: The attempt to distinguish between good, bad and indifferent work in specific practices is, when made in full seriousness and without the presumption of privileged classes and habits, an indispensable element of the central process of conscious human production. (Hoggart, 1995, 83) Hoggart rejects the relativism postmodernism espouses, and I think we should too. But not to retreat into a conservative idea of non-theorised and ahistorical value. It is true that Hoggart seems to have had no time to develop a theoretical underpinning and that he apparently favours that famously British empiricism (see also E. P. Thompson’s seemingly antitheoretical stance: Thompson, 1995). Hoggart sensed a shared direction in the projects of Thompson, and of Raymond Williams, who does have some suggestions on the place of value in literature.8 Essentially Marxist, they do not seem at all incompatible with Hoggart’s actual practices – in teaching and in writing – and with his evaluation of literature. And to summarise, these centre on the social utility of literature, which Hoggart fervently expressed in his teaching: . . . 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

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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. (Hoggart, 1995, 87) Finally, Hoggart wants to restore through culture the sensuous, material particularity of the world, the use-values that have been strained out of existence by exchange; here, he sums up his love for that human quality of literary language in its authenticity and concreteness: Literature is irredeemably of the earth and so bound up all the time with possible meanings, hints of meanings, with the weighed, creative and creaturely life; bacon and eggs, fish and chips, snot, farts, sleep, love, boredom. (Ibid., 75)

Notes 1. See his essay on ‘Education for Social Purpose’ ‘Teaching Literature to Adults’, for an example of the practical nature of this dedication (Hoggart, 1973, 205–230). 2. Kant’s aesthetic in the third critique certainly accommodates social utility; it does, however, exclude the arousal of desire. It is in this latter sense that art is disinterested (Kant, 1951). 3. There is a great deal of literature on this, but see, for example, Morawsky (1970, 301–314) and Rader (1967, 23–49). Marx’s deep engagement with literature in general is dealt with comprehensively in Prawer (1978). 4. Mukaˇrovsky´ works within Prague School structuralism, with its heritage of Russian Formalism; Marcuse attempts to fuse the Enlightenment aesthetic tradition of Kant and Schiller with late Freud. See Mukaˇrovsky´ (1979), Marcuse (1969a and b, 1972 and 1978), and Bennett (1990). 5. Marcuse’s earlier work suggests both the emancipatory, utopian force of the aesthetic and its role in oppression (1968, 88–133). 6. See Rose (2001) and his refutation of Herrnstein Smith (2004). It must be added that Rose keeps mixed company, approving of John Carey’s views about modernism’s supposed project of keeping the working class at bay (Carey, 1992). Rose’s work thus participates uneasily with that which sees artistic value as an elitist discourse. 7. Clarke notoriously, in a blatant espousal of exchange-value over human utility, supposedly spoke of mediaeval historians being ‘around for ornamental purposes’, and not valuable enough for the State to pay for them (Vasager and Smithers, 2003).

Bill Hughes 225 8. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1968) is considered alongside Williams’s Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958) and Hoggart’s own Uses to be among the founding texts of cultural studies.

Works cited Adorno, Theodor (1973). Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge. ——(1997). Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Theory and History of Literature, 88, Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer (1979). The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming. London: Verso. Bennett, Tony (1990). Outside Literature. London : Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge. Carey, John (1992). The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. London: Faber & Faber. Eagleton, Terry (1983). ‘The Question of Value: A Discussion’, New Left Review, 142, November–December, 76–90. ——(1990). The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell. Hoggart, Richard (1958). The Uses of Literacy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——(1973). Speaking to Each Other, Vol. II: About Literature. 2 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——(1995). The Way We Live Now. London: Chatto & Windus. Jameson, Fredric (1971). Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. ——(1990). Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic. London: Verso. Kant, Immanuel (1951). Critique of Judgement, trans. & intr. J. H. Bernard. New York: Hafner. Marcuse, Herbert (1968). ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——(1969a). Eros and Civilization. London: Sphere. ——(1969b). An Essay on Liberation. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——(1972). ‘Art as Form of Reality’, New Left Review, 74, July–August, 51–58. ——(1978). The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, trans. & revised Herbert Marcuse & Erica Sherover. Boston: Beacon Press. Marx, Karl (1976). Capital, Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes, intr. Ernest Mandel. Harmondsworth: Penguin. (3 vols 1976–81). McKeon, Michael (1983). ‘The Origins of Aesthetic Value’, Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Critical Thought, 57, Fall, 63–82. Morawsky, Stefan (1970). ‘The Aesthetic Views of Marx and Engels’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 28.3, Spring, 301–314. Mukaˇrovsky, ´ Jan (1979). Aesthetic Function, Norm, and Value as Social Facts, trans. with notes Mark E. Suino, Michigan Slavic contributions, 3. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literature. Owen, Sue (2005). ‘The Abuse of Literacy and the Feeling Heart: The Trials of Richard Hoggart’, The Cambridge Quarterly, 34.2, 147–176.

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Prawer, S. S. (1978). Karl Marx and World Literature. Oxford: OUP. Rader, Melvin (1967). ‘Marx’s Interpretation of Art and Aesthetic Value’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 7, 23–49. Rolph, C. H. (ed.) (1961). The Trial of Lady Chatterley: Regina v. Penguin Books Limited. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rose, Jonathan (2001). The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven: Yale UP. ——(2004). ‘The Classics in the Slums’, City Journal, Autumn, [accessed 26 March 2006]. Rosen, Michael (2005). ‘Being German’, Times Literary Supplement, 30 September, 5–6. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein (1987). ‘Value/Evaluation’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 86.4, Fall, 445–455. Repr. in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia & Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago & London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990, 177–185. ——(1988). Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. London & Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP. Thompson, E. P. (1968). The Making of the English Working Class, rev. edn. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——(1995). The Poverty of Theory: Or, an Orrery of Errors. New edn. London: Merlin. Vasager, Jeevan and Rebecca Smithers (2003). ‘Will Charles Clarke have his Place in History?’, The Guardian, 10 May, Education section, [accessed 16 April 2007]. Williams, Raymond (1958). Culture and Society 1780–1950. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——(1983a). Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. 2nd edn. London: Fontana. ——(1983b) ‘Culture’, in Marx: The First 100 Years, ed. David McLellan. London: Fontana. ——(1989 [1957]) ‘Fiction and the Writing Public’, review of The Uses of Literacy in What I Came to Say, ed. Neil Belton, Francis Mulhern and Jenny Taylor. London: Hutchinson, 24–29.

14 Hoggart and Women Sue Owen

I mentioned in the introduction to this volume that the time for a re-evaluation of Hoggart was exactly right. There may be two reasons for this. First, there is a need to return to the idea of class, and to the working class in particular, when other categories such as race, gender and sexual orientation have been prioritized within cultural studies.1 Secondly, it may be time for an informed re-evaluation of ‘totalizing’ theories of working-class culture. We are finding a new value in Hoggart’s 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’. The rehabilitation of Hoggart represents a shift in theoretical thinking. Discomfort with recent trends in theory, as applied to the working class, may be countered by reasserting Hoggart’s focus on the humanity, variety and specificity of working-class people, and the ‘quiddity’ of working-class life and culture. This is an emphasis which prefigured feminism. 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 makes a statement which seems extraordinary for a male academic writing about the working class: ‘my own experience had been overwhelmingly domestic, internal, home and woman-centred’ (Hoggart, 1991a, 142). In The Uses of Literacy he portrays working-class women with sympathetic but unromanticized insight. In the section on ‘Mother’ in chapter 2, as well as celebrating their strength, he depicts the financial struggles, domestic, contraceptive and health problems of women. This section contains moving glimpses of the hardships of his own mother and grandmother (Hoggart, 1957, 29–31). In chapter 10, he writes tenderly about the role of women in the life of the ‘scholarship boy’ or working-class intellectual. 227

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In his Life and Times he shows immense gratitude and appreciation for the struggles of his mother. He describes finding intense love and rootedness in his grandmother’s house and later with his wife. Marriage is vital to his creativity and emotional security. In a dialogue with poet Tony Harrison, he stresses the importance of marriage and of being reunited with the feminine: RH. It’s the same old story, isn’t it? But your wife is now appearing again and again in your poems, so in a way it carries on. I’m thinking of the role of women in your life, in our kind of early life and onwards. TH. . . . coming to terms with one’s own female qualities seems to be a very necessary struggle. You learn to do that by loving.2 Hoggart seems fully at ease with being ‘woman-centred’. He loves, respects and identifies with women and even uses female images for the process of writing: ‘Like a woman who in the fifth or sixth month of pregnancy settles harmoniously into the final straight, I knew then where I was going and that I could get there’ (Hoggart, 1991a, 140). Hoggart’s method of writing is to look for meaning in the personal and to extrapolate social significance from minutely observed detail. John Corner sees Hoggart’s blend of the personal and political as a methodological milestone: In [Raymond] Williams’s extensive and resonantly metaphoric use of the phrase ‘border country’ . . . and in Hoggart’s exploration of ‘the anxious and uprooted’ in The Uses of Literacy, both men connected directly personal, autobiographical issues to broader social ones in a manner which is far from conventional in British academic life (perhaps only recent feminist work has begun to shift the terms of the conventions). (Corner, 1991, 137) The passage in parenthesis is extremely significant. It is in his quasifeminist (at least early Anglo-American feminist) extrapolation of ideas from the personal, the domestic, the specific that Hoggart differs from more politically oriented cultural theorists: JC: That domestic-centredness of the account [of the working class in The Uses of Literacy] has been picked up critically by many other commentators too, of course.

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RH: Yes, broadening out from that, there’s virtually nothing about the world of work in it, nothing about the trade unions, there’s a bit about deferential Toryism, there’s certainly nothing about left-wing activism, there’s nothing about factories and industry. But I was not writing a comprehensive picture of the working class: I was recreating the working-class life I knew and that was a woman-centred life. An unhappy home of six people, four women – Grandma, two unmarried aunts, one unmarried cousin, and an uncle who had a white-collar job. There was deferential Toryism in so far as they thought of politics and no workmen coming in to the home at all. To write about that other side of life, I would have had to try to become a kind of quasi-sociologist and I didn’t know anything about that so I don’t apologize for omitting it. But it’s perfectly fair to say that the picture of working-class life is very partial. The fact that it’s women-centred is inevitable, partly because my home was women-centred and also because for children who might go further academically it’s almost always in working-class life the women who see to it. (142) Growing up in a world of women accounts for Hoggart’s domestic focus, for his sense of rootedness in what is known and for his assertion of the authenticity of what is personally experienced. As Michael Rosenfeld argues, for Hoggart ‘childhood memory transmuted into memoir becomes a form of political engagement’ and that ‘personal memories of working-class childhood inform public memory and texture the collective story’ (Rosenfeld, 2008). In the introduction to this volume, I paid tribute to Jean-Claude Passeron, who in 1970 was the first to recognize Hoggart’s methodological strengths. Where British critics of the 1970s tended to see a weakness in the book’s jargon-free style, its grounding in personal experience and empirical method, Passeron saw the autobiographical element as a strength, as it allowed 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 allowed an honest representation, understanding and reinstatement of the popular voice in culture. For Passeron, 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

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redress the bias of studies of the working class by intellectual outsiders. His combination of ‘distancing and participation’ 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 petit-bourgeois ethnocentrism needs ousting’ (1971, 126). Some misreadings of Hoggart have focused upon a charge of sentimentality. This seems to be an extension of misunderstanding his style of personal engagement with the way working-class people actually think and feel. Passeron does not counter this charge, as he associates sentimentalism with the petit bourgeoisie (1971, 131, n. 5) and presumably finds no trace of sentimentality in Hoggart. Hoggart says in Volume II of his Life and Times: Of adverse comments, the most interesting was that the first part of the book was ‘sentimental’ about working-class life, I have looked at it with that charge in mind and can find no sentimentality; it is an extremely qualified picture. But it does, where that seems right, speak with great warmth about some aspects of working-class life, some of the emotional aspects, and especially about the central place of women in holding homes together, I was forced to the sad conclusion that some intellectuals find it hard to take praise of good feeling, the celebration of where some people have got things emotionally right – and that when they meet this they almost instinctively reach for the label ‘sentimental’. This is notably true of some ‘radical left’ intellectuals, whether from working- or middle-class backgrounds; they tend to resent a description of working-class life which shows most people as, politically, uninterested rather than aggressive; they berate the messenger the more his evidence piles up. (1991a, 143) Hoggart’s interviewer in the Times Educational Supplement discusses the charge of sentimentalism: Hoggart wrote vividly not just about the harshness and limitations of working-class life, but about its compensating warmth and decencies. Yet at the time, some who were politically active on the left accused him of sentimentality. Today, having re-read the book, he robustly denies the accusation: ‘There are passages about decency and goodness; but there are lots of passages which are the reverse. I’m quite sure what the critics – who were usually from the middle classes – were actually saying was, ‘you

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have described certain warmths and comelinesses in working-class life which we find it hard to absorb into our critical vision of their culture.’ Their vision was diminished: they wanted me to say ‘this is dreadful,’ ‘these people are exploited’ – which of course is true.’ (Croall, 1990, B6) Here the criticism is of middle-class critics whereas in the first passage it was of ‘radical left intellectuals.3 In both cases, Hoggart argues with some plausibility that the critics’ preconceived framework of the exploited masses blocks acceptance of his portrait of ordinary working-class people. Stefan Collini seeks to rescue Uses from the charge of sentimentalism which tainted even his own memory of the book: In going back to Hoggart’s earlier work, I had expected to find it sentimental, my own memory of first reading it now being overlaid with later academic charges against it of too fondly evoking a world of scrubbed doorsteps, bread and dripping, and a ha’p’orth of wine-gums from the corner shop. But it is the literary confidence and stylishness of The Uses of Literacy that now seems so striking: its reputation for cosiness and nostalgia does not do justice to its experiments in form and its allusive, learned, manner. (Collini, 1999, 226) He also considers it a strength that the book ‘has none of the defensiveness about transgressing academic norms that one might now expect to find in a comparably ambitious work by an unknown lecturer in his late thirties’ (1999, 226). Sometimes the charge of sentimentality represents a misunderstanding of Northern discourse by southerners. Volume I of Hoggart’s Life and Times opens as follows: My Aunt Annie is dying in St James’s Hospital. To someone not from the North that curt opening sentence might seem an attempt to capture sentimental attention. To someone from, for instance, the Leeds working class such a statement has, and for decades, a simple force. The possessive – ‘my’ or, when you are speaking from within the body of the family, ‘our’ – belongs to the fabric of your life; to start ‘Aunt Annie is dying . . . ’ would evoke a different world. (Hoggart, 1989, 1)

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Hoggart constantly warns against the temptations of sentimentalism, for example in his critique of Orwell: Orwell sometimes sentimentalizes working-class life. His famous description of a working-class interior is slightly idealized and ‘poetic’. His account of working-class attitudes to education is oversimplified, and has a touch of the noble savage. (1973a, 111) Yet Hoggart palliates this criticism. Orwell’s sentimentality is a good fault: He was not foolish when he said that he felt inferior to a coalminer . . . He may have sometimes sentimentalized working-class interiors. But fundamentally he is not wrong to praise them . . . And it is not at all foolish – as some have called it – but it is sensible and humane, to say that the memory of working-class interiors ‘reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad one to live in.’ (1973a, 112) Hoggart is both critical and defensive of Orwell’s sentimental depiction of working-class life, because he has a nuanced understanding of the complex role of sentimentality within working-class culture. An outright rejection of sentimentality might be as brutalizing as the denial of working people’s feelings by employers and various kinds of ‘authority’. Hoggart values the working-class capacity for feeling. There is a danger of overlooking this in overemphasizing the dangers of sentimentality. Thus, he says that in teaching literature to adult (working-class) students ‘In proscribing sentimentality we may inhibit sincere emotion’ (1973b, 209.) He adds, ‘Our generation seems to reserve its ‘debunking’ for the ‘debunking’ of sentimentality, of overdone emotion. It might be better – it is just as useful an exercise, and one less likely to trouble the students in the wrong way – to examine clever and cynical writing instead’ (Ibid., 217). This double attitude to working-class sentimentality is reflected in Hoggart’s deployment of the phrase ‘the feeling heart’ in Uses. When the lawyers rejected the title The Abuse of Literacy as too inflammatory, The Feeling Heart was one of Hoggart’s suggestions for an alternative title for the book (Owen, 2005, 149). ‘The Feeling Heart’ is referred to in a passage at the end of the section on club-singing which concludes both chapter 5 and ‘Part I: An Older Order’:

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‘A feeling heart’ can often be soft and sentimental, but is not to be derided. Most of these [working-class] songs express, in their melodies, in their verses, in the manner in which they must be sung, the ‘feeling heart’. They touch old chords; they suggest values which people still like to cherish. Life outside, life on Monday morning, can be a dour affair. Meanwhile, these sentiments are right, people feel, ‘when y’ get down to it’. The songs warm and encourage at the time, and no doubt their sentiments remain somewhere in the memory through all the unsentimental ordinariness of the working-week. (137) Hoggart also invokes the term in a parody of a TV programme title to show how working-class sentimentality allows exploitation by the popular providers: ‘There is the appeal to old decencies, as in programmes with titles like, ‘‘For Your Feeling Heart’’; there are the new emphases, the stress on the acquisitive and the novel – ‘‘For Your Feeling Heart – in this programme You may Make Your Pile’’ ’ (277). The ‘feeling heart’ stands for traditional working-class values and cherished attachments which deserve respect. Hoggart asks for discriminating judgement in his reader. 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. Yet some feminists criticized him, as he recalls in his Life and Times: Similarly some feminists have resented the kind of importance given to women in the picture I drew, mistakenly seeing it as a form of inverted male chauvinism. (1991a, 143) Hoggart has not grasped the grounds of feminist objections here. Carolyn Steedman accuses him of psychological oversimplification: My mother was a single parent for most of her adulthood, who had children, but who also, in a quite particular way, didn’t want them. She was a woman who finds no place in the iconography of workingclass motherhood that Jeremy Seabrook presents in Working Class Childhood, and who is not to be found in Richard Hoggart’s landscape. She ran a working-class household far away from the traditional communities of class, in exile and isolation, and in which a man was not a master, nor even there very much. (Steedman, 1986, 6)

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Steedman, writing as a woman 30 years after Hoggart, with all the insights of feminism at her disposal, claims her own account of her mother’s life and her own ‘challenges the tradition of cultural criticism in this country, which has celebrated a kind of psychological simplicity in the lives lived out in Hoggart’s endless streets of little houses’ (1986, 7). Steedman’s book is a brilliant critique of the limited understanding of working-class girls’ and women’s experience in cultural studies, psychoanalysis and feminism, but it is a pity she has to make Hoggart into a straw man in order to make it. Accusing Hoggart of sameness and simplification in his depiction of working-class lives, she is actually guilty of this herself, lumping Hoggart together with Seabrook and failing to ‘read’ Hoggart’s attention to detail or to notice the scrupulous awareness of the particularity of individual lives which is his great strength as a writer. Here is what Hoggart actually says about his own mother, a widow and lone parent, in The Uses of Literacy: During the years in which my mother had the three of us on her own, she was never strong enough, since she had acute bronchial trouble, to do any outside work. She managed with surprising skill on a weekly twenty-odd shillings from ‘the Guardians’ (some of this was in the form of coupons exchangeable at specified grocers’). Surprising to a spectator, but not to her: she had been a gay young girl, I believe, but by this time had lost most of her high spirits. She was well past the striking of attitudes about her situation, and though she would gladly take a pair of old shoes or a coat, she thanked no one for their pity or their admiration; she was without sentimentality about her position and never pretended to do more than go through with it. It was too much an unrelieved struggle to be at all enjoyable, and three young children, always hungry for more food and pleasures than she could afford, were not – except occasionally – rewarding companions. She helped herself along by smoking Woodbines – furtively, in case ‘They’ found out: my brother was trained to put the two-penny packet in the drawer without a word if he came back from the shop to find a visitor at home. The tiny house was damp and swarming with cockroaches; the earth-closet was a stinking mire in bad weather. Food was unvaried but a lot more nourishing than it would have been with many mothers in that situation. My mother had firmness and intelligence enough to resist all our demands for fish-and-chips and tea, and we drank nothing but cocoa. We had a succession of cheap stews with vegetables throughout each week: I remember someone bringing (I must have been about six at the time) a small box of

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assorted biscuits to the house, and how dazzled we were by them. For a tea-time treat, we occasionally had sweetened condensed milk on bread. Pocket-money was one penny a week for the whole family, so our separate turns came up every three weeks. We were usually advised to buy something that could be shared, and we usually objected. We were always ‘well-turned out’, well darned throughout the year, and had new outfits at Whitsun; the last I remember were sailor-suits with whistles for the two boys. On one occasion my mother, fresh from drawing her money, brought herself a small treat, something which must have been a reminder of earlier pleasures – a slice of two of boiled ham or a few shrimps. We watched her like sparrows and besieged her all through tea – time until she shocked us by bursting out in real rage. There was no compensation; she just did not want to give us this, and there could be no easy generosity in the giving. We got some, though we sense that we had stumbled into something bigger than we understood. (Hoggart, 1957, 29) Steedman claims she ‘removes passivity from the figures in Hoggart’s and Seabrook’s landscape’ and ‘suggests what desperation may lie behind the doors of the terraced houses’ (Steedman, 1986, 102). But the desperation is already there in Hoggart. It is instructive to compare the two writers’ descriptions of their mothers’ deaths. Here is Steedman’s: She died like this. I didn’t witness it. My niece told me this. She’d moved everything down into the kitchen: a single bed, the television, the calor-gas heater. She said it was to save fuel. The rest of the house was dark and shrouded. Through the window was only the fence and the kitchen wall of the house next door. Her quilt was sewn into a piece of pink flannelette. Afterwards, there were bags and bags of washing to do. She had cancer, had gone back to Food Reform, talked to me about curing it when I paid my first visit in nine years, two weeks before her death: my last visit. She asked me if I remembered the woman in the health-food shop, when I was about eight or nine, pointing out a man who’d cured cancer by eating watercress. She complained of pains, but wouldn’t take the morphine tablets. It was pains everywhere, not just in the lungs where the cancer was. It wasn’t the cancer that killed: a blood clot traveled from her leg and stopped

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her heart. Afterwards the doctor said she’d been out of touch with reality. . . . Like this: she flung her left arm over her head, pulled her knees up, looked out with an extraordinary surprise. She lived alone, she died alone: a working-class life, a working-class death. (Steedman, 1986, 1–2) And here is Hoggart’s: It cannot have been very long after the incident of the spectacles that I came back from school at dinnertime (where the others were I do not recall, perhaps following on – or perhaps I have blotted them out) and found her lying on the clip-rug in front of the fire-range, lying not gracefully but all bundled up and hunched as though she had fallen, been at last discarded by life and the times. She had been racked by a coughing attack until she fell exhausted. Her face was grey, with the lines of a long illness finely etched, as though many washes in cold water with coarse yellow soap had left fine grains of dirt there. I think we then called a neighbour and that she arranged for her to be taken to hospital; I am not sure that we saw her there before she died. The Hoggarts took over and we went by tram to our grandma’s, temporarily; Molly may have been lodged in the house of a half-aunt in the next street. All this until the funeral and the making of decisions about our futures. . . . I do not know exactly what either our mother or our father died of. I think they called hers ‘consumption’, which was regarded as usually following on a bad chest and was expected to take the patient off quite soon. (Hoggart, 1989, 51–2) Ten years later, Hoggart questions the accuracy of these memories: ‘I thought I was the one who found her dying on the clip-rug in front of the fireplace: Molly seems to remember that she did. One of us has taken over the memory from the other, absorbed and adopted it’ (Hoggart, 1999, 3). Steedman was an adult when her mother died and Hoggart a child, but for both authors there is pain, and not just the usual pain of loss but pain at the circumstances of the death itself; and at separation, ignorance and powerlessness. The passage from Hoggart above is followed by an account of the pain of separation from his brother and sister, as the children were parcelled out to different relatives.

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Another influential feminist who criticized Hoggart was Beatrix Campbell. Campbell’s Wigan Pier Revisited (1984) had a profound influence in the 1980s and 1990s and her misperception of Hoggart entered received wisdom in certain sections of the academy and left-liberal intelligentsia. Campbell may have a point when she criticizes Hoggart’s celebration in Uses of traditional working-class values because ‘Looking at it from a feminist perspective, many of those good old values rested on the weary labours of women whose economic, social, sexual, cultural and political interests are yet to be given any political primacy by any political party’ (Campbell, 1984, 225). However, her method is somewhat disingenuous, as, like Steedman, she couples Hoggart with Jeremy Seabrook, citing the latter at length and Hoggart barely at all. This enables her to gloss over the nuances of Hoggart’s treatment, the finely balanced judgements and scrupulous distinctions and to make a ‘straw man’ based on quotation from Seabrook’s balder and cruder treatment of the issues. Nevertheless, her criticism is important because it shows that older working-class values have not only been undermined by capitalist tendencies in publishing and postmodernism in the academy, but also by feminism. The demise has been helped by political agitation by feminists in the labour movement. Campbell couples Hoggart with Orwell, who idealizes the workingclass domestic situation: We have already heard men and women who were Orwell’s contemporaries describe the imprisonment of working-class women in impoverished domestication, of men’s detachment from women and children. Old men and women have borne witness to the brutality of that ‘comely’ place, in which Orwell’s ‘perfect symmetry’ was synonymous with the subordination of women. A more recent cultural historian of the working class, Richard Hoggart, was a bit wiser. Writing in The Uses of Literacy (Penguin, 1981) about the inequalities inscribed in the working-class household, where the father is the master, he says: ‘This he is by tradition, and neither he nor his wife would want the tradition changed.’ Both he and Orwell treat tradition as if it were nature. Neither put themselves in the position of women and thus neither can imagine the political conditions necessary for women to begin to make their own choices. A glance at divorce statistics today shows that once women acquire the minimum means of survival – the right to their home and an income – they begin to be able to turn their back on tradition. In my experience, women both accept and resent men’s domination. Their acquiescence has not

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a little to do with the men’s movement’s defeat of women’s right to independent economic means – without resources women are in no position to make a run for it – and their right to access to political means within the labour movement. Neither Orwell nor Hoggart ask the question: where does women’s subordination and dependence come from? (Campbell, 1984, 223) We saw above that Hoggart criticizes Orwell’s sentimentality, though perhaps not enough. Campbell has two points here. The first is the charge of a lack of empathy for women. I have dealt with this above. However, applicable it may be to Orwell, it is an unfair reproach of Hoggart. Moreover, the accusation against Orwell and Hoggart of not trying to get inside the heads of the opposite sex is hypocritical for someone who claims in her introduction, ‘As a feminist I didn’t invert their bad habits by only talking to women – this book is about women and men, though it takes the standpoint of women as its reference point’ (Campbell, 1984, 6). Hoggart makes far more effort to convey the dilemmas and anxieties of working-class women than Campbell does with working-class men. Her men are uni-dimensional blocks against women’s advance, never mentioned unless in support of her pre-existing idea that ‘men and masculinity, in their everyday, individual manifestations, constitute a systematic bloc of resistance to the women of their own community and class’ (Campbell, 1984, 5–6). The second point is about dating. Campbell says in the passage cited above that Hoggart is ‘a more recent cultural historian’ and therefore should be ‘a bit wiser’ than Orwell (the phrase is used sarcastically to apply that he is not). The problem is that Campbell misdates Uses ‘1981’, implying that Hoggart’s work predates her own by only three years. This seems disingenuous: Uses, published 1957, written earlier, is ahead of its time in depicting the struggles of women, as well as celebrating their strength. Campbell obscures the fact that she is writing nearly 30 years after Hoggart. The dating issue is important, as to some extent the issue is a generational one: Hoggart refers to the working-class women he grew up amongst in the 1920s and 1930s. Campbell herself discusses the difference in perspective between these older working-class women and the new political activists of the 1980s, citing ‘A Sunderland woman in her mid-thirties, who has been a Labour Party member since the sixties and a feminist since the seventies’: Now feminists are joining the party as feminists, and they’re looking for a vehicle that will bring the power for them to implement women’s

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policies. They don’t need a legitimate way to meet women, or social reasons, because they’ve got plenty of those opportunities. They want to come to meetings, get on with the policy and get away. They haven’t time for bingo. Though with some of the older women the bingo is very important. And there are class differences, age and culture. We still have big arguments about childcare because it became a matter of pride to the older women that they could manage, managing became a part of their political creed. At first I couldn’t understand why we kept having these arguments, now I think it’s because they think it’s a weakness if you can’t manage, and when they hear women criticising the situations they coped with they feel their own lives are being trashed. (Campbell, 1984, 196)4 Hoggart and Campbell are in effect describing different generations of working-class women. There is an old-fashioned quality to Hoggart’s description of the role of ‘Mother’ in Uses: For most there is, in varying degrees, a steady and self-forgetful routine, one devoted to family and beyond proud self-regard. Behind it, making any vague pity irrelevant, is pride in the knowledge that so much revolves around them. This can make the most unpromising and unprepossessing young woman arrive at a middle-age in which she is, when in the midst of her home and family, splendidly ‘there’ and, under all the troubles, content. (Hoggart, 1957, 31) It is easy to see how this might offend feminists such as Campbell who tend to celebrate female defiance and unruliness. It is problematic that the older working-class wife who puts all her energies into husband and home is unlikely to write about her pleasure or difficulty in doing so.5 Campbell professes to speak for working-class wives more authentically than Hoggart. I have no doubt, however, that both my grandmothers would identify with Hoggart’s description more than with the following from Campbell: She came into the working-men’s club one lunchtime and got her bottle of stout. There she was, wearing a mac, a crimplene frock over her body which just seemed to hand like a cheese from her shoulders, a little woolly hat and NHS specs, and the inevitable shopping bag . . . No, she never had a paid job . . . because he wouldn’t like it.

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No, she hadn’t any friends, because he wouldn’t like it. No, she never was in the Co-op Women’s Guild, because he wouldn’t like it. ‘I just stopped at home.’ She was wonderfully direct, straightforward and honest. Nothing to hide . . . I thought she was a lovely person . . . He was very nice. She was very nice too . . . She never had any politics because she wasn’t allowed to. It’s the same with most of the old ladies I talk to, and frankly it breaks your heart. (Campbell, 1984, 109–110) This seems somewhat patronizing. Campbell may be as trapped in her 1980s feminist viewpoint as Hoggart is in his, but she seems less self-aware about it, less scrupulously honest and above all much less charitable. Moreover, in some ways Hoggart is a better ‘feminist’ than Campbell, in that he grounds his analysis in his own and others’ personal experience. Campbell writes in a style of polemic whereby anyone is fair game and the end justifies the means: something Hoggart would never sanction. And she writes from a (hidden) political agenda, that of the Communist Party. It is a weakness of Wigan Pier Revisited that this is never explicitly acknowledged. Thus, for example, the polemic against Trotskyites at the end seems merely bizarre to anyone unaware of her political affiliations. Steedman’s and Campbell’s criticism of Hoggart is ironic because his blend of personal and political is proto-feminist. Their own method (unconsciously) owes much to Hoggart’s use of his personal pain as a springboard for politically engaged meditations and his finding of wider significance in particular lives. So how may we account for feminist misreading of Hoggart? This may be due 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 a combination of ‘distancing and participation’ which we may follow Passeron, cited above, in finding peculiarly effective.

Notes 1. A point made by Stefan Collini in Absent Minds (OUP, 1999), 258. 2. Hoggart (1991b, 45). Similarly, for Harrison in ‘v’ a complex process of selfreclamation includes rediscovering the feminine in a loving relationship as well as reclaiming his poet self and his working-class self: ‘The ones we choose to love become our anchor’(Harrison, 1987, 248).

Sue Owen 241 3. I discuss the passages in this order as the interview with Croall followed the first publication of A Sort of Clowning in 1990. 4. Campbell’s handling of oral evidence presents a problem: she professes to quote directly women who are never named and who all sound like herself in tone and content. 5. There exist fascinating Edwardian accounts by working-class women: Maternity: Letters From Working Women, ed. M. Llewelyn-Davies (1915, repr. London: Virago, 1978); Life as We Have Known It, ed. M. Llewelyn-Davies (1931, repr. London: Virago, 1978). These discuss acute difficulties of pregnancy and childbirth in a situation of poverty and no birth control. They also convey the excitement of political and intellectual self-fulfilment through the Cooperative Women’s Guild. Yet they also show intense pride in home and family and love for husband and children despite the most adverse conditions. There is a marked difference from more recent celebrations of breaking out of unhappy marriages, such as the Taking Liberties Collective, Learning the Hard Way: Women’s Oppression in Men’s Education (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), and Jill Miller’s Happy as a Dead Cat (London: Women’s Press, 1993).

Works cited Campbell, Beatrix. (1984). Wigan Pier Revisited: Poverty and Politics in the Eighties. London: Virago. Collini, Stefan. (1999). English Pasts. (Oxford: OUP. Chapter 11, ‘Critical Minds: Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart’. Croall, Jonathan. (1990). ‘Scholarship Boy’: Interview with Richard Hoggart, Times Educational Supplement, 1.6.90, B6. Corner, John. (1991). ‘Studying Culture: Reflections and Assessments. An interview with Richard Hoggart’, Media, Culture and Society 13, 137–151. Harrison, Tony.(1987). Selected Poems. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hoggart, Richard. (1957). The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments. London: Chatto and Windus. ——(1973a). Introduction to George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (Heinemann, 1965). In Speaking to Each Other, Vol. II: About Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 104–121. ——(1973b). ‘Teaching Literature to Adults’: A Collection of Short Pieces From Various Sources reprinted in ibid., 205–230. ——(1989). A Local Habitation: Life and Times, Vol. I: 1918–40. Oxford: OUP. First pub. 1988. ——(1991a). A Sort of Clowning: Life and Times, Vol. II: 1940–1959. Oxford: OUP. First pub. 1990. ——(1991b). An Interview with Tony Harrison. Broadcast in ITV Writers on Writing Series, 1986, and printed in Tony Harrison, ed. Neil Astley. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 36–45. ——(1999). First and Last Things. London: Aurum Press. Owen, Sue. (2005). ‘The Abuse of Literacy and the Feeling Heart: The Trials of Richard Hoggart’. The Cambridge Quarterly 34.2, 147–176.

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Jean-Claude Passeron. (1971). ‘Introduction to the French Edition of Uses of Literacy’, Working Papers on Cultural Studies (Spring) 120–131. First pub. as Introduction to La Culture de Pauvre: Etude sur le Style de Vie des Classes Populaires en Angleterre. Paris: Editions Minuit, 1970. Rosenfeld, Michael. (2008). ‘Local Habitations: Working Class Childhood and its Uses in the Memoirs of Richard Hoggart, Robert Roberts, Paul Johnson and William Woodruff’ in Re-reading Richard Hoggart, ed., Sue Owen. Cambridge Scholars Press. Steedman, Carloyn. (1986). Landscape for a Good Woman. London: Virago.

Index

Abrams, Mark, 112–13 Must Labour Lose?, 28 The Teenage Consumer, 113, 116 Adorno, Theodor, 17, 216–17, 220–1 Albermarle Committee on Youth Services, 10, 111–12 Albermarle Report, 14, 105, 112 Allon, Fiona, 178 Althusser, Louis, 12, 28, 66 Anderson, John, 192 Anderson, Perry, 16, 188–9 Ang, Ien, 190 Arnold, Matthew, 12, 42, 47, 90, 135 Arts Council, 10, 77 Auden, W. H., 12, 36, 37, 64, 147 Austen, Jane, Persuasion, 76 Sense and Sensibility, 50–1 Bateson, F. W., 37 ‘Beatlemania’, 116, 194 Beatles, 107–8 Beckett, Samuel, 73 Beerbohm, Max, 49 Bell, Daniel, 207 Bell, Michael, 37, 49 Benjamin, Walter, 134 Bennett, Alan, 208 Bennett, Tony, 216 Berry, Chuck, 107 Blackwell, Trevor, 209 Blair, Tony, 28, 222 Blake, William, 62 ‘The Tyger’, 26, 59 Bland, Roy, 199 Bonner, Frances, 177, 178 Bourdieu, Pierre, 5, 13, 76–7, 85, 222 Brecht, Berthold, 139 Brett, Judith, 173, 178, 181 Bunyan, John, 36

Cain, James M., The Postman Always Rings Twice, 132 Campbell, Beatrix, 18, 204, 237–40 Wigan Pier Revisited, 237, 240 Carey, James, 62, 67–8, 72 Carlyle, Thomas, 77, 92 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 5, 6, 9, 11–13, 20, 51, chapter 3 passim, 76, 94–5, 115–16, 155, 161 Chadha, Gurinder and Meera Syal, Bhaji on the Beach, 128 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 45 Chekhov, Anton, 125 Clarke, Charles, 222 Clarke, John, 64, 116 Cole, G. D. H., 39 Colls, Robert, 105 Communist Party of Great Britain, 88–9 Corner, John, 206, 228 Crick, Bernard, 208 Critical Quarterly, 35 Crosland, Anthony, The Future of Socialism, 28 Crouch, Colin, 118, 188 Davies, Andrew, 78 Dean, James, East of Eden, 116 Rebel Without a Cause, 116 de Certeau, Michel, 177 Defoe, Daniel, 45 Moll Flanders, 50 Durkheim, Emile, 63 Dylan, Bob, 83, 194 Eagleton, Terry, 216 Eastenders t.v. series, 84 Eisenhower, Dwight, 89 Eliot, George, 36, 125, 135 Eliot, T. S., 4, 12, 34, 35, 44, 47, 59, 125, 135, 205 243

244

Index

Empson, William, 35, 37 Engels, Friedrich, 78, 216 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 139 Essays in Criticism, 35, 37, 44, 53 Fanon, Frantz, 123 Felski, Rita, 182 Flaus, John, 192 Florida, Richard, 150–1 Frank, Thomas, 203 Frow, John, 191–2 Gaboriau, Patrick, 5 Gaboriau, Philippe, 5 Gaitskell, Hugh, 28 Gardiner, Rolf, 107 Geertz, Clifford, 27 Gilmour, Ian, 199 Gilroy, Paul, 16, 189 Gosling, Ray, 14, 109, 112–14 Sum Total, 113–14 Gramsci, Antonio, 28, 66 Greenspan, Alan, 143 Hage, Ghassan, 173, 182 Halliday, M.A.K., 159 Halsey, A.H., 207 Hammond, J. L. and Barbara, 39, 40 Handel, Irene, 128 Hanson, Pauline, 182 Hare, David, 83 Hargreaves, David, 152 Hari, Johann, 85 Harrison, Tony, 228, 240 n.2 Harry Potter novels, 124 Hemingway, Ernest, A Farewell to Arms, 50 Highway, 35, 37 Hill, Jimmy, 112 Hitchens, Peter, 198, 200 Hoggart, Richard, A Local Habitation, 198 The Abuse of Literacy, 1, 219, 232 An English Temper, 9, 188 An Imagined Life, 60 Auden: an Introductory Essay, 37 Farnham: a Landscape with Figures, 17, 199 First and Last Things, 9

‘The Force of Caricature: Aspects of the Art of Graham Greene’, 37 Inaugural lecture: ‘Schools of English and Contemporary Society’, 7–9, 26, 27, 95, 115, 202–3 La Culture de Pauvre, 5, 194 Life and Times, 34, 228, 230, 233 Mass Media in Mass Society, 10, 82, 198 The Mass Media: a New Colonialism, 10 Only Connect, 10 Promises to Keep, 9 Reflections on the Student Movement, 116 Reith Lectures, 10, 77, 203 Review of Lambeth Boys, 110–11 Review of Sum Total, 114 Review of We are the Lambeth Boys, 109, 114 Review of Williams’ Culture and Society, 53–4 Speaking to Each Other, 9 ‘Teaching Literature to Adults’, 224 n.1, 232 Between Two Worlds, 9, 159 The Tyranny of Relativism, 79 The Uses of Literacy, 1–2, 4, 7, 12–15, 18, chapters 1 and 2 passim, 58, 63–4, 76, 88, 93, 105, 107–9, chapter 7 passim, 137, 140, 143, 145, 148, 159, 161, 167, 171–2, 174, 178–9, 190, 193, 204–6, 209, 220–1, 227, 231–8 ‘The Uses of Television’, 137 The Way We Live Now, 9, 13, chapter 4 passim, 198, 199, 219, 221–2 ‘Why I Value Literature’, 215 Holly, Buddy, 107 Horkheimer, Max, 220 Horne, Donald, 16, 192–6 God is an Englishman, 194 The Lucky Country, 192, 195 Horowitz, Irving, 199 Howard, John, 159, 172–83, 196 Howkins, John, 150 Humphrys, John, 208

Index 245 Ignatieff, Michael, 208 Inglis, Fred, 202 Innis, Harold, 68 Jagger, Mick, 117 James, Henry, 44, 49 Jenks, Chris, 204 Jennings, Humphrey, 139 Joyce, James, Ulysses, 15, 129–30 Kant, Immanuel, 215, 216, 224 n.2 Keating, Paul, 191 Keats, John, 83 Kerouac, Jack, On the Road, 114 Khrushchev, Nikita, 88–9 Lady Chatterley trial, 10, 77, 155, 200, 218 Lasch, Christopher, 208 Lawrence, D. H., 17, 36, 47, 50, 147, 200, 219 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 10, 218 Sons and Lovers, 26, 53, 92 Leadbeater, Charles, 153 Leavis, F. R., 1–2, 4, 12, 22, 29, 34–7, 43, 44, 47, 49, 90–3, 95, 205 Mass Civilization and Minority Culture, 22 Leavis, Q. D., 1–2, 4, 22, 35, 90, 91, 95 Fiction and the Reading Public, 22, 53 Lee, Harper, To Kill a Mockingbird, 164 Lefebvre, Henri, 16, 177 Little Britain, t.v.series, 84–5 Locke, John, 125 Lodge, David, 11 Lukacs, Gyorgy, 78 Lyttelton, Humphrey, 112 MacInnes, Colin, 14, 113 Absolute Beginners, 113, 116 Malley, Ern, 49 Mannheim, Karl, 204, 207 Marcuse, Herbert, 216 Marx, Karl, 17, 25, 63, 78, 213–14, 216, 220, 223 Capital, 213–14 McGregor, Craig, 16, 192–6 People, Politics and Pop, 193 McIlroy, John, 37

McKay, Hugh, 183 McKeon, Michael, 216 McRobbie, Angela, 57 Menzies, Robert, 178, 179 Mepham, John, 83–4 Miller, Keith, 198, 202 Milton, John, 125 Paradise Lost, 83 Moore, Rob, 199 Moran, Anthony, 181 Morgan, Kenneth, 118 Morris, Meaghan, 191–2 Mount, Ferdinand, 202 Mukaˇrovsky, ´ Jan, 216, 218 Mulhern, Francis, 4, 23, 30, 61 Nashe, Thomas, Unfortunate Traveller, 50 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 89 Neighbours t.v. series, 160 Neocleous, Mark, 209 North, Richard, 205 Oakeshott, Michael, 195, 207 O’Brien, Kerry, 173 Orwell, George, 12, 17, 23, 36, 42, 125, 128, 204, 207, 208, 232, 237–8 Nineteen Eighty-Four, 208 ‘Shooting an Elephant’, 26 ‘Ossian’, 49 Owen, Major M., 70 Passeron, Jean-Claude, 5–6, 18, 194–5, 229–30, 240 Pater, Walter, 90 Paul, Leslie, 14, 105, 112 Angry Young Man, 112 Pearson, Christopher, 191 Phillips, Melanie, 198, 202 Philo, Greg and David Miller, 203 Piereson, James, 71 Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting, 10 Pilkington Report, 155 Plath, Sylvia, ‘Daddy’, 26 Poulantzas, Nicos, 30 Powell, Enoch, 189 Presley, Elvis, 107, 135 Prigogine, Ilya, 96

246

Index

Quant, Mary, 117 Reisz, Karl, We Are the Lambeth Boys, 109 Reith, John, 201 Richards, I. A., 35, 46, 90, 92 Robinson, Ken, 152 Rolling Stones, 107 Rose, Jonathan, 219 Rosen, Michael, 220 Rosenfeld, Michael, 229 Rowntree, Seebohm, 106 Rushdie, Salman, The Satanic Verses, 126 Ruskin, John, 125 Salinger, J. D., The Catcher in the Rye, 114 Samuel, Raphael, 29 Sandywell, Barry, 177 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 12 Scammell, William, 205 Scott, David, 60–1 Scrutiny, 22–3, 29, 35–7, 44, 90–3 Scruton, Roger, 202 Seabrook, Jeremy, 204, 207, 208–9, 233–4, 237 Working-Class Childhood, 233 Selbourne, David, 208 Sennett, Richard, 80, 208 Shakespeare, William, 36, 45, 49, 50, 139, 147, 160 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 223 Sparks, Colin, 95 Spillane, Mickey, 132, 133, 135 Steedman, Carolyn, 18, 233–6, 240 Steele, Tommy, 112 Strachey, Lytton, 125 Stratton, Jon, 190

Thatcher, Margaret, 10, 77, 80, 189, 199, 222 Thompson, Denys, 23 Thompson, E. P., 25, 29, 91, 93, 101–2 n.1, 172, 223 Threadgold, Terry, 163–4 Toennies, Ferdinand, 63 Trollope, Anthony, The Way We Live Now, 78 UNESCO, 10, 11, 77, 155 The Uses of Richard Hoggart conference (Sheffield 2006), 11, 73 n. 1 Vale, Danna, 179 von Hayek, Friedrich, 77 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 31, 99 Watson, George, 204 WEA, 11, 105, 155, 192, 206, 214, 216 Weber, Max, 63 Whannel, Paddy, 81–2 Whitehouse, Mary, 10, 17, 200–1 Whitman, Walt, 140 Wilde, Oscar, 171 Williams, Raymond, 4, 12, 16, 21, 23, 27, 28, 29–30, 37, 53–5, 58, 60–2, 64, 72, 76, 91, 93, 173, 176, 189, 195, 217–18, 220–1, 223, 228 Culture and Society, 1, 8, 30, 51–2, 53–4, 93, 204 Keywords, 215 The Long Revolution, 23, 25, 79, 93 Review of The Uses of Literacy, 220 Willis, Paul, 116 Willis, Ted, 112 Wollheim, Richard, 204–6 Woolf, Virginia, 125 Wordsworth, William, 125