Mass Culture and Working Class Longing
Fred Inglis, Richard Hoggart: Virtue and Reward
Polity, 280pp, £25.00, ISBN 9780745651712
reviewed by Benedict Clarke
In ‘Culture is Ordinary’ (1958), a short essay which was to become tremendously influential in the development of cultural studies, Raymond Williams wrote:
There is a distinct working-class way of life, which I for one value - not only because I was bred in it, for I now, in certain respects, live differently. I think this way of life, with its emphases of neighbourhood, mutual obligation, and common betterment, as expressed in the great working-class political and industrial institutions, is in fact the best basis for any future English society.
The emphasis that Williams gave to working class culture was, in an important sense, a rejection of certain tendency in Marxist theory to assume that all culture was necessarily bourgeois. Fred Inglis’s Richard Hoggart: Virtue and Reward, published half a century after ‘Culture is Ordinary’, charts the life of a significant English intellectual who diagnosed the decisive transformation of working class culture that followed Williams’ pronouncement.
Hoggart was born and grew up in and around Leeds, a place which he drew upon for perhaps his most significant study, The Uses of Literacy (1957). This study dealt with the emergence of ‘mass culture’, in the form of popular literary publications such as magazines, newspapers and pulp fiction, as well as movies. In it, Hoggart diagnosed a ‘drift’ in which working class life became increasingly interfused with mass communication - its attendant content being advertising and exchange relations. The threat of mass culture to flourishing working class institutions returned to Hoggart throughout his life. The adult education courses he ran in north-east Yorkshire, on ‘The English Novel’ to ‘Choral Music’ to ‘Beginners French’, were in fidelity to an autonomous culture, distinct from the purely instrumentalised demands of society. He was acutely aware of the throttling grip that Oxford and Cambridge held over English cultural life and his commitment to education was driven towards widening participation through other means than the dominant university milieu. In 1964 Hoggart founded the brilliant and groundbreaking Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, which would become synonymous with the studies of race and class undertaken by, amongst others, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. This institution kick-started the discipline of cultural studies and introduced a critical imperative in the humanities which continues to mark radical thought in Britain today.
Inglis' biography positions Hoggart within a tradition of English social criticism, in the wake of Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin and William Morris. The subject of Hoggart’s work is ‘never smaller than the condition of England,’ Inglis states, a perspective which is decisively fashioned from his experiences and struggles as an intellectual from working-class Leeds. Returning from the Second World War, Hoggart’s politics were informed by the democratic socialism of the Labour Party. In Leeds, Inglis argues, ‘he found not a brutal, lost proletariat but a thick-textured, active culture, carried by the old big words, for sure – solidarity, neighbourliness, community – but also by its jokes, its tiny gestures, its biking excursions and seaside outings, its downright bloodymindedness before the dreadful creepiness of status and snobbery.’
It is working class virtue that Inglis draws from Hoggart; his sensitivity to communal solidarity and mutual betterment in English industrial communities, which determined in many respects, the greater part of his working life. The biography at times runs into a distinctly sentimental account of Hoggart, in what could be best described as post-industrial longing: ‘today no one can doubt the losses in cultural life caused by the disappearance of the strong (and killing) disciplines of physical labour, the manly pride taken in the many crafts of that labour, at the ship’s hull, at the coalface, in the foundry or beside the blast furnace.’ The localism of industrial production, which brought about the active working class communities of Hoggart's childhood, appears as profoundly lost in Inglis' reflections on post-industrial society - the virtues of ‘mutuality, fraternity, communality’ as ruins.
Inglis’ forceful repudiation of the banality of mass culture is overwhelmingly (and not unproblematically) coloured by the memory of an industrial working class. Inglis, in a summary passage on Hoggart, relates that;
at the beginning of his intellectual career he warned, in tones of grim realism, what might happen to a class culture as it became transformed into a mass culture. He saw, none clearer, those masses as being in thrall to commodities, to the crazy rout of acquisition, as well as to the emotional poverty so well reflected in EastEnders, or the desperately phoney matiness and sincere insincerity of the quiz shows and unreal reality TV.
This biography situates Hoggart as a witness to both the atomisation of working class culture and, at the same time, its residual persistence. It is from this perspective that Hoggart, and his detailed observations on mass culture, are cast as a powerful critique of the present from the standpoint of class.
There is a distinct working-class way of life, which I for one value - not only because I was bred in it, for I now, in certain respects, live differently. I think this way of life, with its emphases of neighbourhood, mutual obligation, and common betterment, as expressed in the great working-class political and industrial institutions, is in fact the best basis for any future English society.
The emphasis that Williams gave to working class culture was, in an important sense, a rejection of certain tendency in Marxist theory to assume that all culture was necessarily bourgeois. Fred Inglis’s Richard Hoggart: Virtue and Reward, published half a century after ‘Culture is Ordinary’, charts the life of a significant English intellectual who diagnosed the decisive transformation of working class culture that followed Williams’ pronouncement.
Hoggart was born and grew up in and around Leeds, a place which he drew upon for perhaps his most significant study, The Uses of Literacy (1957). This study dealt with the emergence of ‘mass culture’, in the form of popular literary publications such as magazines, newspapers and pulp fiction, as well as movies. In it, Hoggart diagnosed a ‘drift’ in which working class life became increasingly interfused with mass communication - its attendant content being advertising and exchange relations. The threat of mass culture to flourishing working class institutions returned to Hoggart throughout his life. The adult education courses he ran in north-east Yorkshire, on ‘The English Novel’ to ‘Choral Music’ to ‘Beginners French’, were in fidelity to an autonomous culture, distinct from the purely instrumentalised demands of society. He was acutely aware of the throttling grip that Oxford and Cambridge held over English cultural life and his commitment to education was driven towards widening participation through other means than the dominant university milieu. In 1964 Hoggart founded the brilliant and groundbreaking Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, which would become synonymous with the studies of race and class undertaken by, amongst others, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. This institution kick-started the discipline of cultural studies and introduced a critical imperative in the humanities which continues to mark radical thought in Britain today.
Inglis' biography positions Hoggart within a tradition of English social criticism, in the wake of Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin and William Morris. The subject of Hoggart’s work is ‘never smaller than the condition of England,’ Inglis states, a perspective which is decisively fashioned from his experiences and struggles as an intellectual from working-class Leeds. Returning from the Second World War, Hoggart’s politics were informed by the democratic socialism of the Labour Party. In Leeds, Inglis argues, ‘he found not a brutal, lost proletariat but a thick-textured, active culture, carried by the old big words, for sure – solidarity, neighbourliness, community – but also by its jokes, its tiny gestures, its biking excursions and seaside outings, its downright bloodymindedness before the dreadful creepiness of status and snobbery.’
It is working class virtue that Inglis draws from Hoggart; his sensitivity to communal solidarity and mutual betterment in English industrial communities, which determined in many respects, the greater part of his working life. The biography at times runs into a distinctly sentimental account of Hoggart, in what could be best described as post-industrial longing: ‘today no one can doubt the losses in cultural life caused by the disappearance of the strong (and killing) disciplines of physical labour, the manly pride taken in the many crafts of that labour, at the ship’s hull, at the coalface, in the foundry or beside the blast furnace.’ The localism of industrial production, which brought about the active working class communities of Hoggart's childhood, appears as profoundly lost in Inglis' reflections on post-industrial society - the virtues of ‘mutuality, fraternity, communality’ as ruins.
Inglis’ forceful repudiation of the banality of mass culture is overwhelmingly (and not unproblematically) coloured by the memory of an industrial working class. Inglis, in a summary passage on Hoggart, relates that;
at the beginning of his intellectual career he warned, in tones of grim realism, what might happen to a class culture as it became transformed into a mass culture. He saw, none clearer, those masses as being in thrall to commodities, to the crazy rout of acquisition, as well as to the emotional poverty so well reflected in EastEnders, or the desperately phoney matiness and sincere insincerity of the quiz shows and unreal reality TV.
This biography situates Hoggart as a witness to both the atomisation of working class culture and, at the same time, its residual persistence. It is from this perspective that Hoggart, and his detailed observations on mass culture, are cast as a powerful critique of the present from the standpoint of class.