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Contents

Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction 1Sue Owen

1 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy and The Cultural Turn 20Stuart Hall

2 Richard Hoggart: Literary Criticism and Cultural Decline inTwentieth-Century Britain 33Stefan Collini

3 Richard Hoggart, Cultural Studies and the Demands of thePresent 57Lawrence Grossberg

4 Richard Hoggart and the Way We Live Now 75Jim McGuigan

5 Richard Hoggart and the Epistemological Impact ofCultural Studies 88Richard E. Lee

6 From the Juke Box Boys to Revolting Students: RichardHoggart and the Study of British Youth Culture 105David Fowler

7 ‘Them’ and ‘Us’ 123Robert J.C. Young

8 Repurposing Literacy: The Uses of Richard Hoggart forCreative Education 137John Hartley

9 Critical Literacy, Cultural Literacy, and the English SchoolCurriculum in Australia 158Graeme Turner

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10 The Importance of Being Ordinary 171Melissa Gregg

11 The Antipodean Uses of Literacy 187Mark Gibson

12 Relativism and Reaction: Richard Hoggart andConservatism 198Charlie Ellis

13 The Uses and Values of Literacy: Richard Hoggart,Aesthetic Standards, and the Commodificationof Working-Class Culture 213Bill Hughes

14 Hoggart and Women 227Sue Owen

Index 243

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1Richard Hoggart, The Uses ofLiteracy and The Cultural TurnStuart Hall

It is widely recognized that, without Richard Hoggart, there would havebeen no Centre for cultural studies. It is not always so widely acknowl-edged that without The Uses of Literacy there would have been no culturalstudies. In an early text, I called it one of cultural studies’ three ‘foundingtexts’ (Hall, 1980), and this is an opportunity to expand further on thatjudgement. The paper therefore offers some reflections on the ‘moment’of The Uses of Literacy – what early cultural studies learned from andowed, methodologically, to the book, its connections with wider debatesat the time and its formative role in what came to be known as ‘the cul-tural turn’. The latter phrase is the kind of clumsy abstraction RichardHoggart would not be caught dead using, and there is no point elaborat-ing on it conceptually here. It simply registers an inescapable fact aboutwhat I called elsewhere the growing ‘centrality of culture’ – the astonish-ing global expansion and sophistication of the cultural industries; thegrowing significance of culture for all aspects of social and economic life;its reordering effects on a variety of critical and intellectual discoursesand disciplines; its emergence as a primary and constitutive categoryof analysis and ‘the way in which culture creeps into every nook andcrevice of contemporary social life, creating a proliferation of secondaryenvironments, mediating everything’ (Hall, 1997, 215). My observationshere are premised on the assumption that something like a ‘cultural turn’did indeed occur across Western societies and their fields of knowledgejust before and, in the UK with gathering momentum, immediately afterthe Second World War; and that, in its own particular way, The Uses ofLiteracy belongs to that moment is indeed an early example of it as wellas playing a seminal role in producing it.

The project of The Uses of Literacy, as we know, was many years ingestation. Originally planned as an analysis of the new forms of mass

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publishing, the radical innovation represented by Part I – the attemptto contextualize this in a deeper ‘reading’ of the culture of their readersand audiences – was only subsequently put in place. However, by itspublication 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 andmagazines and the working-class readers to whom they were typicallyaddressed; more urgently, how are the newer, more commercially drivenforms of mass communications changing older working-class attitudesand 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’ seemsto apply, interchangeably, to both the typical attitudes, values, and waysof life of working people in the pre-war decades and the forms of pub-lication, entertainment, and popular culture which circulated amongstthem. Critics have pointed out that these had very different sources –the latter being produced not by working-class people themselves butby the commercial classes for the working classes; and that, as Ray-mond Williams noted in a very early review of The Uses of Literacy,‘the equation of ‘‘working class culture’’ with the mass commercial cul-ture which has increasingly dominated our century’ produces damagingresults (Williams, 1957, 30). Nevertheless, even if he does not reduce oneto the other, Richard Hoggart does assume that, in the earlier period, asufficiently close relationship had come to exist between publicationsand their readers to allow him to represent them as constituting some-thing like ‘An ‘‘Older’’ Order’. Such a mutually reinforcing relationship,he argued, could no longer be assumed between the working classesand the new forms of mass culture; and this is the nub of the gen-eral judgement on cultural change which the book as a whole finallyoffers.

This elision between what people read, what they thought and howthey lived – always a complex and much debated issue – was com-pounded by the lack in Part II of a sustained attempt ‘to describe thequality of ordinary working-class life, so that the closer analysis of pub-lications might be set into a landscape of solid earth and rock and water’(Hoggart, 1958, 324). This helped to produce the unresolved tensionbetween two, very different registers evident in the two halves of thebook. Hoggart, of course, was fully conscious of this at the time (‘twokinds of writing are to be found in the following pages’) and has fre-quently subsequently acknowledged it (Hoggart, 1992). Nevertheless, ithad its determinate effects.


PROOF22 Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy and Cultural Turn

In comparison with the many simplistic, reductive, nostalgic orempiricist accounts on offer, there is a complex and richly nuancedconception of cultural change at work here. The argument is not drivenby simple oppositions between old/new, organic/inorganic, elite/mass,good/bad. Hoggart was aware of the unsystematic nature of the ‘evi-dence’ and sensitive to the temptations to nostalgia: ‘I am from theworking classes . . . this very emotional involvement presents consider-able dangers’ (Hoggart, 1958, 17). He does not underplay the impactof growing affluence nor exaggerate the pace and degree of change.The language is carefully modulated in relation to the thesis of culturaldecline:

The persistence in so strong a measure of older forms of speech doesnot indicate a powerful and vibrant continuance of an older tradition,but the tradition is not altogether dead. It is harked back to, leanedupon as a fixed and still largely trustworthy reference in a world nowdifficult 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 thereis only a mass urban culture. It is rather that the appeals made bymass publicists are for a number of reasons made more insistently,effectively, and in a more comprehensive and centralised form thanthey were earlier; that we are moving towards the creation of a massculture . . . and that the new mass culture is in some important waysless healthy than the often crude culture it is replacing.

(Hoggart, 1958, 24)

‘Diagnosis’ is a useful term here – the word ‘healthy’ is telling – sinceit reminds us of what this conclusion owed to, and how much it wasinfluenced by, the cultural critique offered by the Leavises and Scrutiny:the embattled position adopted in F.R. Leavis’ own cultural writing; thenarrative of decline at the heart of Q.D. Leavis’ influential Fiction and theReading Public (1932); the strenuous programme of cultural resistancewhich informed Scrutiny’s educational project and manifestos like MassCivilization and Minority Culture (Leavis, 1930); and the critique of thedebased language of advertising offered by Scrutiny-influenced writers


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like Denys Thompson and others. The book also shared much commonground with the pessimistic critique of mass culture offered by con-servative critics and writers, some of them American. Quotations fromde Toqueville, Arnold, Benda, Lawrence, Eliot, John Dewey, Ortega yGasset, and so on lend authority to the narrative of cultural decline).Mulhern, in his sustained assault on cultural studies in all its mani-festations, is at pains to show that however much anyone – apart fromRaymond Williams – struggled to break free from what he calls the meta-cultural discourse of ‘Kulturkritik’, they were doomed to repeat it. Whileacknowledging that Hoggart made serious efforts to counter this ten-dency, Mulhern insists that his ‘discursive affiliation’ with this traditionremains intact (Mulhern, 2000).

However, as Mulhern himself acknowledges, ‘Genealogy is not des-tiny’ (Mulhern, 2000, 174). Leaving aside the assumption which governsMulhern’s discourse – namely that an always-already alternative culturaltheory was already available, in a complex Marxism already wise to itsown tendency to reductionism – what seems more interesting is to notethe ways The Uses of Literacy, in trying to break from this master-discourseof cultural decline, was precisely ‘a text of the break’ (as Mulhern rec-ognizes Raymond Williams’ The Long Revolution also was); and for thatvery reason opened possibilities which cultural studies and ‘the culturalturn’ were subsequently to build on.

The dominant Scrutiny narrative was constructed on the back of anunspoken assumption about the limited cultural resources and restrictedmoral universe of working-class readers and audiences. Only Scrutiny’s‘saving remnant’, whose sensibilities had been refined by a long cohabi-tation with the authority which the literary tradition offered and whosemoral backbone had been stiffened by strenuous and sustained criticalengagement with litcrit. (‘This is so, is it not?’), offered a site of resistanceto 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 oftheir force by not making sufficiently clear what is meant by ‘‘the peo-ple’’, by inadequately relating their examination of particular aspectsof ‘‘the people’s’’ life to the wider life they live, and to the attitudesthey bring to their entertainments.

Even George Orwell, whose studies on popular culture were in someways paradigmatic, ‘never quite lost the habit of seeing the working classthrough the cosy fug of an Edwardian music hall’ (Hoggart, 1958, 9, 15).



On the contrary, the implied argument in The Uses of Literacy runs,working-class audiences are not empty vessels on which the middleclasses and the mass media can project, tabula rasa, whatever they want.They are not simply the products of ‘false consciousness’ or ‘culturaldopes’ (Hall, 1981). They have a ‘culture’ of their own which, though itmay lack the sophistication and authority afforded by the literary tradi-tion and is certainly not unified, is in its own way just as dense, complexand richly articulated, morally, as that of the educated classes. It fol-lows that the effects of cultural products cannot be ‘read off’ or inferreddirectly from the contents of what is produced for them to consumebecause to have ‘social effects’ of any depth they must enter into and bein active negotiation with an already fully elaborated social and culturalworld. Reading, in this sense, is always a cultural practice.

Apart from anything else, this contains a salutary lesson – indeed, aprofound conceptual insight – about how social ideologies actually work.If the ‘older’ popular culture, however commercially organized and crudein its appeals, seemed less of an ‘assault from the outside’, this was notbecause it was an authentic product of that culture or because it couldsimply be imposed on working-class audiences but because it was closerto – mirrored more faithfully or, better still, worked more ‘authentically’along the groove of – the habits, attitudes and unspoken assumptions ofworking-class cultures, and had more fully ‘indigenised’ itself, by longcohabitation, as it were, within the complex history of the formationsof an urban-industrial corporate class. If the new forms of mass culturewere effecting change, then, it could only be because they too addressedthemselves to the lived textures and complex attitudes of the culturein which they sought to embed themselves; working along its grooves,while at the same time inflecting and disconnecting them, dislodgingthem, 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 andderived from the discourse of ‘Kulturkritik’ but how far and in whatsignificant ways did it break with that discourse? What were the method-ological and conceptual innovations implicit in its practice of writingand thinking on which new directions could be built? One can list themwithout elaboration. A conception of ‘culture’ very different from thatwhich animates the tradition of Kulturkritik is at work here. By ‘culture’,Hoggart meant how working-class people spoke and thought, what lan-guage and common assumptions about life they shared, in speech andaction, what social attitudes informed their daily practice, what moralcategories they deployed, even if only aphoristically, to make judgements


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about their own behaviour and that of others – including, of course, howthey brought all this to bear on what they read, saw and sang. This viewof culture as the practices of ‘making sense’ was very far removed indeedfrom ‘culture’ as the ideal court of judgement, whose touchstone was‘the best that has been thought and said’, which animated the traditionfrom Arnold to Eliot and Leavis. The aim to make culture in this lattersense a central and necessary part of the object of study, however fit-fully achieved, was as defining a break as Williams’ third definition inThe Long Revolution – culture as ‘ways of life’ – and moreover, despitesignificant differences, a break moving in a parallel direction. This was aformative moment for cultural studies.

There was a profound insight embedded here which runs like a threadthrough the subsequent twists and turns of cultural studies. It poseda critical challenge. It set cultural analysis irrevocably against any ten-dency to reductionism – whether to pure ideology, ‘the economy’ or‘class interests’ (while not denying that social interests have a bearingon how ideologies and culture develop or that social location is signifi-cant for which ideas are taken up and made effective). Of course, this hadconsequences for its theoretical work. The relation between the culturaland the social could not be assumed; and, since it did not operate auto-matically – as what Marx once called ‘the reflex’ of the economy in thesphere of thought – it had to be re-conceptualized, in all its concretenessand historical specificity. Culture did not consist of free-floating ideas; ithad to be understood as embedded in social practices. But it was some-thing other than a reflection of some more determinate ‘base’ in somedependent ‘superstructure’. The question of the Centre’s relation to clas-sical Marxism is written into this conceptual conundrum, and begins toexplain why the Centre went on such a long theoretical ‘detour’ [sic].

Secondly, there was the insistence that ‘ways of life’ had to be studiedin and for themselves, as a necessary contextualizing of any attempt tounderstand 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 matterof meaning: not meanings as free-floating ‘values’ or as ideals embod-ied in texts but as part of lived experience, shaping social practice andinscribed in social structures, institutions and relations: cultural analysisas ‘the clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit ina particular way of life’ (Williams, 1965, 57) to which E.P. Thompson,with his more acute consciousness of class, insisted, ‘ways of life’.



Fourthly, there was the methodological innovation evidenced inHoggart’s adaptation of the literary-critical method of ‘close reading’ tothe sociological task of interpreting the lived meanings of a culture. Onesays ‘sociological’, but clearly something more innovative than stan-dard empirical sociological methods was required. Nothing less thana kind of ‘social hermeneutics’ is implied in these interpretive proce-dures: ‘we have to try to see beyond the habits to what the habits standfor, to see through the statements to what the statements really mean(which may be the opposite of the statements themselves), to detect thediffering pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualisticobservances’ (Hoggart, 1958, 17). Of course, ‘reading the culture frominside’ was possible for Hoggart, with his working-class background, hisrich childhood memories and experiences, to draw on. Students tryingto follow the book’s methodological imperatives and staff attempting toteach students how to apply them to a piece of work – things which theestablishment of ‘a centre’ required – were not so fortunate and requiredmore stringent pedagogic protocols. This methodological requirementwas implicit in the establishment of ‘a Centre’ from the very begin-ning. In its earliest days, the Centre established two working groups toaddress such issues: in one, which I chaired – an attempt to clarify thesocial/cultural relationship and how it could be thought – the readingranged far and wide over ‘other disciplines’: the point where the trans-disciplinary and theoretical aspects of cultural studies were first joined.In the second, Richard Hoggart took students through a close reading ofsuch texts as Blake’s Tiger, Tiger, the opening of Sons and Lovers, Orwell’sShooting an Elephant, Sylvia Plath’s Daddy ‘reading for tone’ – that is, formodes of address and implied attitudes to the audience. But these wereearly days.

Much that followed in the evolution of cultural studies in the 1970sand 1980s were therefore developments of the mixed and incompleteopenings offered by The Uses of Literacy as a ‘text of the break’: resistingits cultural narrative, while deepening the epistemological breaks whichits methodological innovations exemplified. Many of these leads were,admittedly, not very conceptually developed, even in the ‘Schools ofEnglish and Contemporary Society’ lecture, which mapped out the Cen-tre’s initial programme (Hoggart, 1970). However, when the complaintabout ‘the turn to theory’ in cultural studies is made – and Hoggart him-self has made it in its sharpest form – it is difficult to see where else theCentre could have begun other than by deepening these moves by way ofsustained 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 fullyinterdisciplinary enterprise and the break with ‘the literary’ as its gov-erning discourse was implicit in the injunction to study the society andthe culture as ‘lived’ equally with its texts, and was extensively taken upin various ways in the work of the Centre in the 1970s: though noth-ing in The Uses of Literacy took us quite as far as Williams’ ‘theory ofculture as a study of relationships between elements in a whole way oflife’ (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 socialformation.

The trace of the ‘literary’ remained in Hoggart’s close and sensitiveattention to language and his insistence (in his inaugural lecture) thatpopular and mass cultural texts must be understood as functioning ‘asart – even as bad art’: a comment which, whilst not quite bypassingthe traditional high/low good/bad categories of the mass culture debate,reinforced attention to language as a cultural model and the symbolicmodality in which culture operates. This connects with the persistentreturn, via the dialogue with semiotics, post-structuralism and theories ofdiscourse, to the necessary ‘delay through the symbolic’ without whichall cultural studies threatens to become reductionist (Hall, 2006). Thenotion that audiences actively bring something to, rather than simplybeing spoken to by, texts – that ‘reading’ is a social practice, an activeexchange – was taken up in the critique of the dominant ‘effects’ tra-dition in mass communications research which organized much of theCentre’s early research projects. It certainly underpins my own workon the ‘encoding/decoding model’ (Hall, 1980), and was subsequentlyrevived in the productive encounter with Bakhtin’s idea of the dialogic,in the ‘active audience’, reader-response approaches, and can be tracedeven in the elements of overkill in the so-called ‘populist’ emphases oflater work on audiences and popular culture.

The legacy of culture as the interpretive study of meanings embed-ded in ‘ways of life’ is to be found in the many studies which deployedethnographic, participant observation and other anthropological tech-niques associated with what Clifford Geertz called ‘thick description’and, beyond that, took us to the language of ‘signifying practices’. Theview that textual materials only have real social effectivity when they‘work along the groove’ of existing attitudes and inflect them in newdirections contains a model of how social ideologies really achieve theireffects much in advance of existing models of influence, ideologicaldomination and false consciousness; anticipating much that was to fol-low in theories of multi-accentuality and transcoding, and the impact



on cultural studies of the more fully developed Gramscian model of‘hegemony’ and cultural power as dependent on ‘the wining of con-sent’, Althusser’s ‘three practices’ and ‘over-determination’, and a verydifferent conception of the popular (see Hall, 1981). And so on.

The publication of The Uses of Literacy had an enormous impact: in partfor the intrinsic interest, quality and originality of its method and argu-ment; and in part because of its bearing on wider discussions about thepace and direction of post-war social change. The growing commercial-ization of mass culture, the birth of television, the burgeoning of youthculture and the rise of mass consumption were part and parcel of whatcame to be known as ‘the affluent debate’. The impact of these forceson the working class had particular resonance for the Labour Party, itselectoral prospects and what Anthony Crosland, in his prophetic book,called The Future of Socialism. Was the class basis of Labour’s supportbeing eroded by socio-cultural change? True, culture had played a some-what residual role in Labour thinking. The roots of ‘Labourism’ in thedense, defensive, subaltern, corporate structures of working-class culturehad not been the subject of much serious reflection until exposed by thenewer class attitudes and values emerging with the onset of commercial-ization. Hoggart’s book played directly into these anxieties. These issuesfuelled the Labour Party’ revisionist debates of the late 1950s and wasthe context for influential books like Mark Abrams’ Must Labour Lose?,with its negative assessment of Labour’s prospects amongst its heartlandworking-class supporters in the wake of social change, and was summedup in Gaitskell’s famous 1959 Labour Party Conference speech, where –taking us to the heart of the culture and politics debate – he poignantlyenquired whether Labour as a political force could survive the coming of‘the car, the telly, the washing machine and the fridge’. Tony Blair’s ‘NewLabour’ and the aspirational culture have long historical antecedents inthese debates.

Richard Hoggart did not directly address these questions, and working-class politics did not figure largely in the book. As is well known, hechose to concentrate on the majority to whom the appeals of the masspublicists were primarily addressed and deliberately downplayed therole of what he called ‘the purposive, the political, the pious and theself-improving minorities’ (Hoggart, 1958, 22): contrary to, say, Ray-mond Williams, who regarded politics as part of the ‘high working classtradition’ and the building of political institutions as among its mostoutstanding cultural achievements (‘an extension of primary values intothe social fields’ (Williams, 1957, 31). Yet the opening paragraphs of TheUses 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 knownas working-class ‘embourgeoisement’. ‘It is often said that there are noworking-classes in England now, that a ‘‘bloodless revolution’’ has takenplace which has so reduced social differences that already most of usinhabit an almost flat plain, the plain of the lower middle- to middle-classes . . . We are likely to be struck by the extent to which working-classpeople have improved their lot, acquired more power and more pos-sessions . . . 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 onesense we are indeed becoming classless . . . We are becoming culturallyclassless’ (Hoggart, 1958, 142). This became a focus of debate in early NewLeft circles, though what I called ‘a sense of classlessness’ had acquiredthere a wider and more critical meaning (see Hall, 1958, and the shockedresponses by Raphael Samuel, 1959, and Edward Thompson, 1959).

The broader connections between cultural studies and the ‘first’ NewLeft have been widely noted (Hall, 1989). In particular, The Uses of Lit-eracy also had a formative influence on the milieu which I inhabited inthe period of its publication – principally because, for fortuitous reasons,such concerns as the changing nature of contemporary capitalism, theconsequences of the new consumerism, the politics of post-war socialchange and the relationship of politics to culture formed critical con-tested ground in the heady debates of the time. A nascent ‘new left’had emerged in Oxford as a distinct, informal student formation in themid-1950s. Its subsequent coalescence with others into a movementwas triggered by the events of 1956 – the invasion of the Suez Canal byBritain, France and Israel and the brutal Soviet response to the Hungar-ian Revolution, and their effects in loosening the grip of the Cold Waron political debate (Hall, 1989).

The publication of The Uses of Literacy made a huge impact in thesecircles. There was a vigorous discussion in progress, amongst studentsfrom a variety of Left tendencies in Oxford, about the nature of post-war capitalism, the character of the historic compromise represented bythe welfare state, the changing nature of class, the nature of the Sovietexperiment, the impact of the Cold War, the revival of imperialism, thevalue of Marxism and the prospects for the Left in these new historicconditions. Many of its members were literary critics and familiar withthe Leavis/Scrutiny argument about mass culture, though the majorityhad largely rejected both its assumptions about cultural decline andthe elitist and the conservative character of its programme of culturalresistance. Some people were already in conversation with Raymond



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 acondition of existence of all social practices and thus an active force inpolitics and social change: offering what (in the issue of the Labour Clubjournal, Clarion, which I edited in 1957 and which was dominated byresponses to The Uses of Literacy) I called ‘quite different kinds of evi-dence’ (Hall, 1957, 3). All this provided fertile ground for the receptionof Hoggart’s book, stimulating fierce debate. The second issue of Univer-sities and Left Review (1958), one of the two founding New Left journalswhich followed, contained a major symposium on The Uses of Literacy,including Raymond Williams’ influential review. Hoggart and Williamsboth contributed essays to subsequent issues and Williams became aleading figure in the New Left.

These debates have been read, subsequently, by its critics as evi-dence that in the discourse of cultural studies, culture subsumes politics(Mulhern, 2000); but this seems a rather perverse finding. It was part ofthe effort – then no doubt still at a primitive stage – to expand the def-inition of culture and politics, which came to be distinctive of both theNew Left and cultural studies: to see culture as one of the constitutivegrounds 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 MaxWeber once put it). Unless social groups and classes are always-alreadyinscribed in their appointed political place by ‘determination by the eco-nomic in the last instance’ and ‘wear their political number plates ontheir backs’, as Nicos Poulantzas once graphically put it, how could therecruitment of social forces to political positions and programmes andtheir mobilization in the contest over power not be – also – a culturalissue? And how could these processes occur without working, in part, onthe constitutive ground of the meanings by which people make sense oftheir lives? This, Mulhern argues, makes ‘culture’ everything – too exces-sive, ‘without fixed composition or tendency . . . a heterogeneous mass ofpossibilities’. One can only reply, not everything: but a dimension of, anda condition of existence of, all signifying practices (which of course alsohave material conditions of existence); and not without ‘tendencies’,but never finally determined, and thus always open to more than onepossibility – and so always with a degree of contingency. The proposi-tion that the ‘constitutive function’ of politics is to ‘determine the orderof social relations as a whole’ (Mulhern, 2000, 173) only muddies thewater.

Richard Hoggart used the term ‘Americanization’ to connote the widerset 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 privilegedpoint of reference – for very good reasons. The commercialization ofculture, the new dynamic forms of mass culture – television, pop music,advertising, youth culture – the expanded incorporation of the massesmore fully into the market and the phenomenon of mass consumerismwere all to be found in the US, emerging, in the post-war period, in theirstrongest contemporary forms. This marked the shift in the index of‘leading instance’ of advanced industrial capitalist society from Britainto the US. Already, in the 1950s, this looked like setting free explosivenew cultural forces; it is only clear retrospectively how much the bookbelonged to, and in its own displaced ways addressed, the opening of anew conjuncture.

We cannot discuss this shift in detail here but we can see its broad con-tours much more clearly in retrospect. There was a post-war boom, withrising living standards. The long-term redistributive shift accomplishedthrough the Keynesian welfare state was much more limited than theprophets estimated (though Immanuel Wallerstein is right to argue thatit was quite enough to scare capital out of its wits and, in its time, pro-voked the great counter-surge of globalization, market forces, the newglobal division of labour, the neo-liberal revolution and the ‘new worldorder’). 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 structuresand Protestant Ethic typical of Western European bourgeois societies tothe more truncated, ‘post-industrial’ class structures of the US, based oncorporate capital, money, celebrity, lifestyle, hedonism and consump-tion. Underlying this was the prolonged shift from nineteenth-centuryentrepreneurial capitalism, via the apotheosis of the ‘high noon’ of impe-rialism, the First World War, the failure of the proletarian ‘moment’ andthe interwar Depression, to the great surge of power represented by theconcentrations of corporate capitalism, the managerial revolution andFordist economies of scale of the late twentieth century. Mass society,mass culture, mass consumerism and mass markets were integral aspectsof this historic shift. Precisely how to understand their real interde-pendencies, subsequent evolution and their relation to culture remainsone of cultural studies’ unfulfilled tasks – probably lost forever in thehyper-theoretical and post-political climate which came to prevail. Ofcourse, in the immediate decades after The Uses of Literacy, the shapeof things was to be dominated by the historic compromise of the wel-fare state and the social-democratic consensus. But by the end of the1970s – and massively reorganized on a global scale – the forces we were



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

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——(2006). ‘Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three ‘‘Moments’’ In Post-warHistory’, History Workshop Journal 61, Spring.

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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.

July 13, 2008 18:37 MAC/RHC Page-243 9780230_545458_17_ind01

PROOF

Index

Abrams, Mark, 112–13Must Labour Lose?, 28The Teenage Consumer, 113, 116

Adorno, Theodor, 17, 216–17, 220–1Albermarle Committee on Youth

Services, 10, 111–12Albermarle Report, 14, 105, 112Allon, Fiona, 178Althusser, Louis, 12, 28, 66Anderson, John, 192Anderson, Perry, 16, 188–9Ang, Ien, 190Arnold, Matthew, 12, 42, 47, 90,

135Arts Council, 10, 77Auden, W. H., 12, 36, 37, 64, 147Austen, Jane, Persuasion, 76

Sense and Sensibility, 50–1

Bateson, F. W., 37‘Beatlemania’, 116, 194Beatles, 107–8Beckett, Samuel, 73Beerbohm, Max, 49Bell, Daniel, 207Bell, Michael, 37, 49Benjamin, Walter, 134Bennett, Alan, 208Bennett, Tony, 216Berry, Chuck, 107Blackwell, Trevor, 209Blair, Tony, 28, 222Blake, William, 62

‘The Tyger’, 26, 59Bland, Roy, 199Bonner, Frances, 177, 178Bourdieu, Pierre, 5, 13, 76–7, 85, 222Brecht, Berthold, 139Brett, Judith, 173, 178, 181Bunyan, John, 36

Cain, James M., The Postman AlwaysRings Twice, 132

Campbell, Beatrix, 18, 204, 237–40Wigan Pier Revisited, 237, 240

Carey, James, 62, 67–8, 72Carlyle, Thomas, 77, 92Centre 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, 45Chekhov, Anton, 125Clarke, Charles, 222Clarke, John, 64, 116Cole, G. D. H., 39Colls, Robert, 105Communist Party of Great Britain,

88–9Corner, John, 206, 228Crick, Bernard, 208Critical Quarterly, 35Crosland, Anthony, The Future of

Socialism, 28Crouch, Colin, 118, 188

Davies, Andrew, 78Dean, James, East of Eden, 116

Rebel Without a Cause, 116de Certeau, Michel, 177Defoe, Daniel, 45

Moll Flanders, 50Durkheim, Emile, 63Dylan, Bob, 83, 194

Eagleton, Terry, 216Eastenders t.v. series, 84Eisenhower, Dwight, 89Eliot, George, 36, 125, 135Eliot, T. S., 4, 12, 34, 35, 44, 47, 59,

125, 135, 205

243


PROOF244 Index

Empson, William, 35, 37Engels, Friedrich, 78, 216Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 139Essays in Criticism, 35, 37, 44, 53

Fanon, Frantz, 123Felski, Rita, 182Flaus, John, 192Florida, Richard, 150–1Frank, Thomas, 203Frow, John, 191–2

Gaboriau, Patrick, 5Gaboriau, Philippe, 5Gaitskell, Hugh, 28Gardiner, Rolf, 107Geertz, Clifford, 27Gilmour, Ian, 199Gilroy, Paul, 16, 189Gosling, Ray, 14, 109, 112–14

Sum Total, 113–14Gramsci, Antonio, 28, 66Greenspan, Alan, 143

Hage, Ghassan, 173, 182Halliday, M.A.K., 159Halsey, A.H., 207Hammond, J. L. and Barbara, 39, 40Handel, Irene, 128Hanson, Pauline, 182Hare, David, 83Hargreaves, David, 152Hari, Johann, 85Harrison, Tony, 228, 240 n.2Harry Potter novels, 124Hemingway, Ernest, A Farewell to

Arms, 50Highway, 35, 37Hill, Jimmy, 112Hitchens, Peter, 198, 200Hoggart, Richard, A Local Habitation,

198The Abuse of Literacy, 1, 219, 232An English Temper, 9, 188An Imagined Life, 60Auden: an Introductory Essay, 37Farnham: a Landscape with Figures,

17, 199First and Last Things, 9

‘The Force of Caricature: Aspects ofthe Art of Graham Greene’, 37

Inaugural lecture: ‘Schools ofEnglish and ContemporarySociety’, 7–9, 26, 27, 95, 115,202–3

La Culture de Pauvre, 5, 194Life and Times, 34, 228, 230, 233Mass Media in Mass Society, 10, 82,

198The Mass Media: a New Colonialism,

10Only Connect, 10Promises to Keep, 9Reflections on the Student Movement,

116Reith Lectures, 10, 77, 203Review of Lambeth Boys, 110–11Review of Sum Total, 114Review of We are the Lambeth Boys,

109, 114Review of Williams’ Culture and

Society, 53–4Speaking to Each Other, 9‘Teaching Literature to Adults’, 224

n.1, 232Between Two Worlds, 9, 159The Tyranny of Relativism, 79The 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’, 137The Way We Live Now, 9, 13,

chapter 4 passim, 198, 199, 219,221–2

‘Why I Value Literature’, 215Holly, Buddy, 107Horkheimer, Max, 220Horne, Donald, 16, 192–6

God is an Englishman, 194The Lucky Country, 192, 195

Horowitz, Irving, 199Howard, John, 159, 172–83, 196Howkins, John, 150Humphrys, John, 208


PROOFIndex 245

Ignatieff, Michael, 208Inglis, Fred, 202Innis, Harold, 68

Jagger, Mick, 117James, Henry, 44, 49Jenks, Chris, 204Jennings, Humphrey, 139Joyce, James, Ulysses, 15, 129–30

Kant, Immanuel, 215, 216, 224 n.2Keating, Paul, 191Keats, John, 83Kerouac, Jack, On the Road, 114Khrushchev, Nikita, 88–9

Lady Chatterley trial, 10, 77, 155, 200,218

Lasch, Christopher, 208Lawrence, D. H., 17, 36, 47, 50, 147,

200, 219Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 10, 218Sons and Lovers, 26, 53, 92

Leadbeater, Charles, 153Leavis, F. R., 1–2, 4, 12, 22, 29, 34–7,

43, 44, 47, 49, 90–3, 95, 205Mass Civilization and Minority

Culture, 22Leavis, Q. D., 1–2, 4, 22, 35, 90, 91, 95

Fiction and the Reading Public, 22, 53Lee, Harper, To Kill a Mockingbird, 164Lefebvre, Henri, 16, 177Little Britain, t.v.series, 84–5Locke, John, 125Lodge, David, 11Lukacs, Gyorgy, 78Lyttelton, Humphrey, 112

MacInnes, Colin, 14, 113Absolute Beginners, 113, 116

Malley, Ern, 49Mannheim, Karl, 204, 207Marcuse, Herbert, 216Marx, Karl, 17, 25, 63, 78, 213–14,

216, 220, 223Capital, 213–14

McGregor, Craig, 16, 192–6People, Politics and Pop, 193

McIlroy, John, 37

McKay, Hugh, 183McKeon, Michael, 216McRobbie, Angela, 57Menzies, Robert, 178, 179Mepham, John, 83–4Miller, Keith, 198, 202Milton, John, 125

Paradise Lost, 83Moore, Rob, 199Moran, Anthony, 181Morgan, Kenneth, 118Morris, Meaghan, 191–2Mount, Ferdinand, 202Mukarovsky, Jan, 216, 218Mulhern, Francis, 4, 23, 30, 61

Nashe, Thomas, Unfortunate Traveller,50

Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 89Neighbours t.v. series, 160Neocleous, Mark, 209North, Richard, 205

Oakeshott, Michael, 195, 207O’Brien, Kerry, 173Orwell, George, 12, 17, 23, 36, 42, 125,

128, 204, 207, 208, 232, 237–8Nineteen Eighty-Four, 208‘Shooting an Elephant’, 26

‘Ossian’, 49Owen, Major M., 70

Passeron, Jean-Claude, 5–6, 18, 194–5,229–30, 240

Pater, Walter, 90Paul, Leslie, 14, 105, 112

Angry Young Man, 112Pearson, Christopher, 191Phillips, Melanie, 198, 202Philo, Greg and David Miller, 203Piereson, James, 71Pilkington Committee on

Broadcasting, 10Pilkington Report, 155Plath, Sylvia, ‘Daddy’, 26Poulantzas, Nicos, 30Powell, Enoch, 189Presley, Elvis, 107, 135Prigogine, Ilya, 96


PROOF246 Index

Quant, Mary, 117

Reisz, Karl, We Are the Lambeth Boys,109

Reith, John, 201Richards, I. A., 35, 46, 90, 92Robinson, Ken, 152Rolling Stones, 107Rose, Jonathan, 219Rosen, Michael, 220Rosenfeld, Michael, 229Rowntree, Seebohm, 106Rushdie, Salman, The Satanic Verses,

126Ruskin, John, 125

Salinger, J. D., The Catcher in the Rye,114

Samuel, Raphael, 29Sandywell, Barry, 177Saussure, Ferdinand de, 12Scammell, William, 205Scott, David, 60–1Scrutiny, 22–3, 29, 35–7, 44, 90–3Scruton, Roger, 202Seabrook, Jeremy, 204, 207, 208–9,

233–4, 237Working-Class Childhood, 233

Selbourne, David, 208Sennett, Richard, 80, 208Shakespeare, William, 36, 45, 49, 50,

139, 147, 160Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 223Sparks, Colin, 95Spillane, Mickey, 132, 133, 135Steedman, Carolyn, 18, 233–6, 240Steele, Tommy, 112Strachey, Lytton, 125Stratton, Jon, 190

Thatcher, Margaret, 10, 77, 80, 189,199, 222

Thompson, Denys, 23Thompson, E. P., 25, 29, 91, 93, 101–2

n.1, 172, 223Threadgold, Terry, 163–4Toennies, Ferdinand, 63Trollope, Anthony, The Way We Live

Now, 78

UNESCO, 10, 11, 77, 155The Uses of Richard Hoggart conference

(Sheffield 2006), 11, 73 n. 1

Vale, Danna, 179von Hayek, Friedrich, 77

Wallerstein, Immanuel, 31, 99Watson, George, 204WEA, 11, 105, 155, 192, 206, 214, 216Weber, Max, 63Whannel, Paddy, 81–2Whitehouse, Mary, 10, 17, 200–1Whitman, Walt, 140Wilde, Oscar, 171Williams, 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, 215The Long Revolution, 23, 25, 79, 93Review of The Uses of Literacy, 220

Willis, Paul, 116Willis, Ted, 112Wollheim, Richard, 204–6Woolf, Virginia, 125Wordsworth, William, 125

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