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Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice

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A neglected history: Richard Hoggarts discourse of empathy

Melissa Gregg
a

The Universit y of Sydney Published online: 04 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Melissa Gregg (2003) A neglect ed hist ory: Richard Hoggart s discourse of empat hy, Ret hinking Hist ory: The Journal of Theory and Pract ice, 7:3, 285-306, DOI: 10.1080/ 0958517032000135265 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 0958517032000135265

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Rethinking History 7:3 (2003), pp. 285306

A R T I C L E S
A Neglected History: Richard Hoggarts discourse of empathy
Melissa Gregg The University of Sydney

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Introduction
He doesnt look like a professor. Looks more as if he runs a pub.1

Richard Hoggarts career smacks of the kind of success graduate students only fantasize about in our current, cash-stripped academic climate. Granted the directorship of a new research centre for contemporary cultural studies almost solely on the strength of one book and that written in his early thirties Hoggart was, it may be admitted, in the right place at the right time. But such a hasty appraisal does him a disservice. His full resum is as diverse as it is striking. Before achieving scholarly recognition, Hoggart served in the Second World War with the Royal Artillery, and following the worst of the battle, was transferred to Naples to help protect the harbour. In this, less combative role, Hoggart had some spare time to form the Three Arts Club for the Allied Forces, the intention of which was to provide a space for servicemen to share artistic and literary ideas. Hoggart collected and edited the best of the soldiers writing and also taught part-time at the University of Naples. On returning home, these interests were extended by tutoring adult education classes for many years. This position brought the majority of Hoggarts political anxieties to the fore. In 1960 he appeared for the defence of Lady Chatterleys Lover at its Crown trial, and for two years served on the Pilkington Committee into the future of British broadcasting. After a stint as Senior Lecturer in English at Leicester University, Hoggart was only then appointed as the rst Director of the Birmingham School for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which would become his most celebrated educational role. Hoggart left Birmingham to become Assistant Director General at UNESCO for ve years, in France, and only retired after eight years as a committed Warden of Goldsmiths College at the University of London, Deptford. Throughout these varied roles, Hoggart remained loyal to two great passions: the effects of social change and its particular relation to education. His more than twenty books draw together essays and lectures given, usually
Rethinking History ISSN 1364-2529 print/ISSN 1470-1154 online 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1364252032000135265

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by invitation, on many public occasions over the years. For cultural studies, and its preoccupation with engaged intellectual work (Hall 1980a, 1980b, 1992), Hoggart remains instructive for the way his academic concerns remained pertinent to the quotidian reality of his constituent community. Hoggart felt no compulsion to privilege academic work over any other; rather, he experimented with a number of different environments in which to enact a political project. Hoggart brought a certain modesty to discussions of culture that suffered no delusions of the possibilities an insular form of academicism can claim. He became very much involved in the situation he sought to effect, which is precisely the way his breakthrough work came about. I want to look in detail here at the particular way The Uses of Literacy was written, with its amalgam of apparent recollections and personal observations. The style is commonly thought symptomatic of early experience, as Andrew Goodwins American introduction surmises (Goodwin 1990: xiii), or, in earlier appraisals, it is seen as a manifestation of subjective impressions, largely based on childhood memories (Thompson 1959: 53). In each case this experiential dimension is considered inferior to the sobriety of a more obviously sociological approach. That experience or memory may be used as a means to base an argument is assumed to be troublesome due to its inevitable bias, its rose-coloured lens. Cultural studies development has been characterized, however, precisely by this kind of writing of the self, the voicing of ones formative environment to provide the material for pressing critical inquiry. As Elspeth Probyn has demonstrated for the history of cultural studies, this speaking the self is unquestionably a form of intellectual practice:
The self is an ensemble of techniques and practices enacted on an everyday basis and entails the necessary problematization of these practices. The self is not simply put forward, but rather it is reworked in its enunciation . . . cultural studies and feminism offer the necessary elements needed to think the immediacy of theory of thinking the social through my self . . . the tools with which to think through the pleasures and pains of being in the social. (Probyn 1993: 23)

Informed by Foucauldian notions of care of the self, and Judith Butlers sense of performing gender, Probyn helps us realize that all articulations of our selves are particular displays. Far from being natural, uncensored or passive intimations of a xed identity, the enunciative act is a process of selection, of revealing delimited aspects of a complex whole. In speaking our experience, then, we come to discover the ways in which they resonate with others, forging bonds of mutuality or dissonance, but all the time nding fresh ways of communicating our ways of being in the world. Indeed, in

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Probyns formulation, It is only at the extreme limits of who we think we are that we can articulate, respect and use our differences (Probyn 1993: 2). It is this kind of self-conscious presentation I want to argue is at the core of Hoggarts work a tactical writing of experience which tries to draw together common reactions to the social (as Williams described it, the structure of feeling of society). This style of writing was a way of reinforcing the differences between working-class and middle-class life, yet at the same time sought ways to overcome this division, to advance a mutually benecial understanding and connection between classes. That The Uses of Literacy has yet to be recognized in terms of the theoretical paradigms now available in cultural studies works to endorse existing categorizations of the text as mere memoir, or worse, nostalgia.2 Such perspectives efface any kind of thoughtfulness behind Hoggarts approach, and attribute his motivation to whimsical, if not simply self-serving ends. But given his literary training, not to mention the title of the book itself, it is hard to sustain the idea that Hoggarts style could be anything other than deliberate. It is just not likely that his writing betrays such an unproblematized technique. Hoggarts unavoidable placement in pre-poststructuralist Britain bars him from fashionable endorsement in contemporary cultural theory, despite the continued relevance of his critique of class privilege, which survives the uctuations of mainstream politics and new sites of radical action. With Hoggarts autobiography now available, we are in a position to clarify the way he purposefully employed experience in Uses to make manifest broader social trends. The contrasting genres deploy similar theorizing selves, one veiled, the latter more explicit; and in combination give a more intricate, and mobilizing, account of Hoggarts concerns.

Boxed in Those willing to consider a more theoretical component to Hoggarts writing have continued the initial trend of mufing the distinctiveness of his address.3 He is seen as a colleague of Raymond Williams in the socio-culture arm of the British New Left (Sedgwick 1976: 136); or in a related role, again with Williams, as a Cultural Marxist (Dworkin 1997). These designations are important in providing a schematic account of the New Lefts rise within a particular historical conjuncture, but by associating him with the macroperspectives implicit in such terms as culture, Marxism, and, indeed, New Left, a clear understanding of Hoggarts distinct politics is prevented. While Sedgwick and Dworkins histories strive to account for the shared concerns of left-wing writers of a given period, the precise way that Hoggart differs from others in this cohort continues to be underplayed. This is particularly

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the case given the reams of analysis and debate bestowed upon the other typically hailed founders of British cultural studies: Williams, E. P. Thompson and Stuart Hall. Sedgwick and Dworkins representations make squabbles over Hoggarts partisan afliations the primary interest of his work, when he actually strove to distance himself from the uncritical loyalty ideologies tend to demand. Although he contributed to journals such as Universities and Left Review,4 Hoggarts political viewpoints were not outwardly expressed until much later in life, and make clear his aversion to Marxism (Hoggart 1990: 78). Hoggart was important for demonstrating the way political work could take place from the inside, without the need to offend or overthrow the achievements of his predecessors. According to former student Paul Willis, the overt politicization of the Birmingham Centre was something of an embarrassment for Hoggart, always down to earth and courteous (Willis 2001: 395). Claims Willis: I think he must have felt cause for alarm when [the Centre] ran in to a kind of continuation of New Left battles in different form (Willis 2001: 397). Relating writers to movements or categories not only forfeits their individuality, it also reduces their contribution to an allotted time frame, working against a critical application of their work in the present. At a time when Left politics is doubtlessly the underdog, it seems an important strategic move to take comfort in the different approaches of our many actors and forebears, and the way they can be used in service of a contemporary counter-hegemonic force. By associating Hoggart with the New Left movement, and only the postwar political climate in Britain, the concerns he raises in Uses may be seen to suffer, ipso facto, a similar fate.5 Factional ascriptions offered by political historians can, in this situation, ironically serve to encourage ahistoricism, for the way that they avoid connecting the concepts and themes which recur in politically concerned cultural thought. Against this, to read Hoggarts book as enacting a discourse of empathy is an attempt to see through the ephemerality of individual issues and realize a sensibility that eludes conscious political paradigms. I want to use the term empathy to describe a way of cutting through the hot air of polemics, and the particularities of historically specic political issues: of nding opportunities and means by which otherwise alienated individuals might be able to converse, communicate, understand, connect. Of course, empathy has a chequered history; its previous use in feminist consciousness-raising, for example, exhibits its potential for encouraging essentialist identication. Against this, I want to use empathy in a more modest way, as the route to a particular form of humanism Hoggart sees possible on each side of classsplintered British society. Empathy is the way Hoggart bridges the divide between two ways of life. Its invocation of deeper instincts, of affective

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responses, hopes to a nd a sense of greater good, an interest common to the working and middle classes. Hoggart uses empathy, I argue, in order to make reasonable the new measures he proposes in particular, the need for critical literacy in the face of a commercially driven mass communications industry. Hoggarts political critique is therefore more focused (indeed, neighbourly in that immediate sense of living with each other) than the socialist intervention of Williams; and in contrast to Thompsons restorative impetus, Hoggart maintains a stubbornly contemporary, and forward-looking perspective.6

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Rereading The Uses of Literacy In an interview with John Corner (1991) we learn that Hoggart began writing back in 1952 with the intention of creating a textbook for his university extramural classes. Part of this desire was out of practicality, and partly too a result of observation. He perceived a problematic disparity between the material studied within the classroom the realm of high culture and the culture in which students immersed themselves following the conclusion of teaching each week. The two sites, one of learned, the other of lived culture, were distinct, and as yet unrelated. Hoggart wanted to bridge the gap.7 The origin of the gulf between class cultures in Hoggarts time lay in the history of higher education in Britain and its exclusive availability to the middle and upper classes. But as education reform spread, Hoggart realized it would be necessary to extend patterns of judgement and discernment more broadly. He knew that students could make sense of new ideas and concerns mentioned in lessons by making teaching apprehensible in an interesting way. His task, then, was to seek relevancy. Hoggart decided to dedicate one half of the book to examples from the students own cultural world. This was a way of adapting the tools of literary analysis to new purposes, of making them more useful. It was not the idea of academic criticism that was problematic for Hoggart (he seemed to support Leavis general paradigm), rather there was an obvious benet in applying these hermeneutics to texts other than those typically seen as worthy of study. In several senses, then, Hoggart wanted to change teaching practices. These motivations comprised the underlying strategy and formed the principal tenets of Uses. First, the realm of popular culture and the cultural choices of the working class called for appreciation in their own right. The experiences of the working class were seen to be just as signicant as those of the bourgeoisie, which at that time featured exclusively on course reading lists. This was a challenge, quite revolutionary for its time, urging the questioning and rupturing of canons, and had to do with a certain empathy Hoggart himself felt for his students. How could he make his teaching useful for their

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needs, their interests? Hoggart realized that the exemplary nature of set texts had no pertinence for this new kind of student. The bourgeois mode of literary valuing was empty of any application to the lives these kids knew; indeed the abstract, aesthetic qualities for which the books were celebrated lacked the expression of any way of life. It was a controversial assertion Hoggart made, then: that the texts on offer needed connection with everyday knowledge, and further, that working-class life told as much about society and the lived world as the dynamics of the more privileged. Hoggart also believed that the increased availability of education following the Second World War necessitated a democratization of analytic tools. People needed help in grasping and reaping the rewards of the knowledgemaking mechanisms that, until this point in history, had been reserved for an endowed class. A guide for living in the changed circumstances of postwar society was required, one that was a reliable alternative to the persuasive motivations behind advertising. Hoggart sought a particular kind of vigilance in the face of the medias increasing role in everyday life. Without this hyperawareness, he believed, commercial interests would override the truly positive aspects offered by new communication technologies. Hoggarts answer to all these challenges was to help people gain a critical literacy. He wanted to make learning easier and more enjoyable, its benets obvious. But he also strove to emphasize the sheer opportunity which knowledge could secure. It was the comfort of feeling proximate to and practised in the information necessary for making decisions about life. Thus, although Hoggart began writing with certain intentions, he soon realized that in order to establish the grounds for this new subject matter, and his overall argument, he would have to locate the analysis quite specically. The rst half of the book therefore creates the world in which the artefacts of popular culture came into play, and it is this world that stands as the basis for the critique unleashed in the second half of the book.

Them and us The opening section, Landscape with gures, provides a textured exposition of the lifestyle usually assumed of those who make use of popular culture: that is, the working class. Hoggart activates a propensity for empathy by laying down the canvass on which these working-class lives are played out. He creates a landscape of urban density imbued with poverty. In minute detail, the inhabitants of this highly populated, cramped environment are described. He notes their distinctive attitudes, their positive engagement with life despite the difculties brought about by industrialization. The oral tradition of the people is emphasized, especially its strength before the mass

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penetration of the press, radio or television (pp. 2733). Certain phrases, superstitions and myths are given extra attention, to show how people came to terms with the basic features of life their lot. Rituals and traditions are given extensive discussion the activities in the neighbourhood for the mother, father and children of the family are all portrayed from the weekly shopping trip, to religious festivals, to Bonre Night (p. 68). The smells, sounds and tastes of the local area are enumerated to give a full account of the complexity of the life (p. 65). The absolute depth, the pervasiveness of the culture, is made evident. Revelling so indulgently in the particular reiterates and intensies the ultimate aim to concretize the hitherto unacknowledged materiality of working-class culture. Exemplifying Hoggarts recourse to empathy is the section titled Them and Us (pp. 72101). This critical component of the book acts as a major support for later claims which question the merits of losing the established working-class attitudes here so fondly depicted. The them/us distinction refers to the working-class ability to exercise an ideological closure which can separate their world from those that, to all appearances, run it. Drawing a barrier between them and us is a way of making a subordinate position palatable: among those typically labelled them include, patently, bosses; but also police, magistrates, doctors, means test ofcials and employment exchange bureaucrats. It is a term used in reference to those representatives of the outside world with whom working-class people may have some contact. The separation has the effect of marginalizing them, because they have no place in our world. As such it is a device for deating authority. Signicantly, the title is largely bestowed upon those who are seen as a threat to the separation (them/us) itself, and this is a crucial point which Hoggart wants to establish. Hoggart gures that any reader might understand the outrage one would feel knowing that an outsider could inuence access to loved ones, or dictate the terms in which a life is allowed to be conducted. These others in postwar Britain have the power to break up families, to incarcerate members away from the otherwise self-contained, tight community.8 So Hoggarts discourse of empathy is most successfully materialized by nding values shared by both classes, such as the privileged place of family, in order to garner an understanding response to the circumstances illustrated. For the characters Hoggart describes, the them/us divide works as a defence mechanism, to maintain a dignity and self-respect in everyday dealings. But for the reader, the concept helps in projecting ones own likely reactions to these threats to everyday domestic freedoms, that otherwise might not be contemplated or realized. Hoggart deploys a strategic display, a conscious performance of self and experience, in order to advance a favourable impression of the working-class

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lives he depicts. Prefacing the book with a number of qualications, which work to justify the selectivity of his depictions,9 Hoggart creates the illusion that his book is not ideologically motivated, that everything he does recount has a genuine transparency. So he describes the working-class people he imagines, and wants the reader to imagine, providing a second- and thirdorder hermeneutic rather than just observation. He writes of actual towns, of the kinds of houses; that the people are rent-payers, wage-earners or selfemployed. He comments on their educational standard, pattern of speech, type of voice, style of clothing. Hoggart sets his own terms for the discussion. He creates, crucially, what is an endearing picture, one which, also signicantly, is interchangeable. Thus he recounts his own family as an example because it serves as well as any (p. 24). The impression Hoggart tries to effect, through this particular enunciation of self, is that the great majority of these people are decent, honest and hard-working folk. Readers might share some of their values, gain a sense of their motivations, given this sympathetic portrayal. Hoggart has to paint an admirable and respectable picture of the working class if he is to prove the rest of his argument. This is why he avoids the issues E. P. Thompson wanted raised, which include:
the absence of conict in the early chapters, the absence of many adult preoccupations (especially at the place of work), the neglect of the role of the minority, the omission or under-estimation of most of those inuences which combine to create the labour movement in this century. (Thompson 1959: 53)

Thompson makes the point that working-class life is not as great as Hoggart wants to make out. There is more to the story. Notably, much of the history of these people is characterized by conict, which takes place not only within the class itself (something Hoggart rarely mentions), but also in organized struggle against oppressors. For Thompson, as a Marxist historian, these are the positive aspects of working-class culture that ought to be celebrated.10 But Hoggarts concerns are of a different nature, addressing social change and what it means for education and entitlement. To make the working class appear as generally good people is part of the strategy of encouraging empathy, serving to reinforce the point that they deserve better. In the 1950s they deserve better than to suffer from manipulation; whether at the hands of advertisers in the exploding media industry, or the propaganda of election campaigns in an era of bipartisan complacency. To help the reader engage with the people discussed, despite their traditional distance from the bourgeois gaze, is the facilitating task performed by Hoggarts address.

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Living-room wars11 Another example of how the discourse operates may be seen in this passage, which has Hoggart describing the typical working-class living-room:
It is a cluttered and congested setting, a burrow deeply away from the outside world. There is no telephone to ring, and knocks at the door in the evening are rare. But the group, though restricted, is not private: it is a gregarious group, in which most things are shared, including personality; our Mam, our Dad, our Alice are normal forms of address. To be alone, to think alone, to read quietly is difcult. There is the wireless or television, things being done in odd bouts, or intermittent snatches of talk (but rarely a sustained conversation); the iron thumps on the table, the dog scratches and yawns or the cat miaows to be let out; the son drying himself on the family towel near the re whistles, or rustles the communal letter from his brother in the army which has been lying on the mantelpiece behind the photo of his sisters wedding; the little girl bursts into a whine because she is too tired to be up at all, the budgerigar twitters. (Hoggart 1958: 36)

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Hoggart describes an uncomfortably cramped space, lled with all of those nick-nacks which pile up over time. There is no need to keep the room manageable anyway, in the sense that there is no chance of ever moving from this place. There is the feeling of revelling in the little one does own. In this way the room is a contrast to the slick, streamlined living areas celebrated in utopian images of modernity. The clean, minimalist look is in fact a luxury only the middle class can afford. There is little incentive to keep this room tidy for unexpected guests. It is functional rather than fashionable. As a burrow the depiction lends emphasis to the hidden nature, the sheer impenetrability of the room, of in fact the entire house. The associations here are in some respects negative. Impenetrability suggests a kind of backwardness, that the world outside cannot affect things too greatly. There is no contact with the excitement or faster pace of another kind of life. Indeed, there is no hint that escape might be possible. Yet Hoggart also seems to be saying that this is part of the rooms very purpose. This place is the comfort, the recompense, for the little effect one has in the outside world. As we have already seen, this is the way of dealing with by not having to acknowledge the reality of being part of a subordinate class. Insularity is the result of a long process of coping with a lower place in society, and is preferable, in Hoggarts eyes, to an otherwise exhausting contempt of ones superiors. The phone is not there to ring, a reection of the nancial position of this kind of working class at this time in history, but by mentioning it Hoggart also indicates more of the self-sufciency of these people. This is a local, neighbourhood society where contact across distances greater than the next

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street is infrequent. All of ones needs are met by a reciprocal reliance on proximate others. So one neighbour
is known to be something of a scholar and has a bound set of encyclopedias which he will always gladly refer to when asked; another is a good penman and very helpful at lling in forms; another is particularly good with his hands, in wood or metal or as a general repairer; this woman is expert at ne needlework and will be called in on special occasions. (Hoggart 1958: 22)

Hoggart engages with the details otherwise dismissed in stereotypes about the working class. Not all of their capacities can be essentialized in terms of manual labour. In mentioning the encyclopedia, that archetype of knowledge, an interest in learning is seen as common. A penman is sometimes needed, which signies the inadequacy of literacy levels. Men and women both have gifts to offer, and are revered and respected accordingly. Hoggart shows that within this diverse group dismissed collectively as the working class there are intricate patterns of specialization, ability and skill. There is a whole network of relationships established in this microcosm, separate and protected from the greater structures of middle-class surveillance and governmentality. That said, however, the notably restricted nature of the family group, and the few night-time visitors, also unveils conventions that generalizations tend to miss. There are levels of status within the group, and appropriate behaviours standards and codes specic to each situation. In contrast to that other reductive, if romantic generalization about the working class, there is no evidence of an inevitable solidarity which welcomes anyone at any time. The shared family personality is the primordial form of solidarity Hoggart brings out. Family loyalty comes rst, a value which manifests in the contempt for the means test ofcials and magistrates referred to above. The attitude is also reied in the working-class aphorisms Hoggart cites throughout the book, such as Theres no place like home (p. 33). An obligation to family comes before class, but, as I want to argue, the two are intimately intertwined. This familial bond is also what is signicant about the difculty Hoggart conveys of being alone in the living-room. It is a near impossible position to inhabit. To want to be alone, to think alone, to read quietly is to suggest that the family group is not all that is needed, that something else demands ones interest, that there is a world outside the precious living-room. Here we begin to notice the signicance of the ostensibly banal depiction above. On closer inspection, once Hoggart mentions the desire for solitude, the action of the room is henceforth characterized by an incessant soundtrack. There is a perpetual string of noises: the wireless,

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the television, the iron that thumps, the dog that scratches and yawns; the cat miaows, the son whistles and rustles the letter, the girl whines and the budgerigar twitters. Following the suggestion of reading as an activity, the passage builds to an acoustic crescendo which makes this very suggestion unimaginable. This is what Hoggart, as a student, seems to remember, and vividly. But the enumeration of noises, and their concentration in this one instance, hints at Hoggarts intent, which is to shepherd the reader into a heightened sensitivity regarding the potential for distraction. Hoggart shows the difculty posed by reading to the reader, who in turn can hopefully empathize with this as a problem for anyone contemplating a scholarly life. In this respect the scene is almost unbearable in its claustrophobia. There is just no relief from the numerous sounds. In effect, what the scene does is to make the scholarly life, in all of its bourgeois connement, appear strange. So Hoggart tries to effect a discourse of empathy on two levels. The one: to draw attention to, and respect for, the working-class way of life as he sees it. The world hidden within the terraces and walk-ups is revealed to more privileged readers for just how different and difcult it can be. Yet at the same time this is how the book can be appreciated by the working-class reader, the student in the night class who recognizes these scenes and can identify, quite literally in some cases, with the life described. This response (what Williams called the shock of recognition) also proved common for many rst-generation university students entering the academy on scholarships postwar (Hoggart 1990: 140). Thus one kind of reader can empathize with the insularity of the family, the stabilizing structures of enforced afnity which counter the non-existent hope for social mobility. But from the next generation who reads, and harbours the drive to want to avoid this same fate, there is a certain kind of empathy too. For students embarking on a new trajectory made possible by further education (and the established middle-class reader who can see the ladder of opportunity education will allow), the discourse of empathy invokes that sense of it being understandable that one would want to escape to enjoy a better kind of life, a life that involves all the opportunities, material success and cosmopolitanism brought by academia, for example. So within Hoggarts particular writing style there is here the chance for a momentary connection between classes a textual staging of the tensions involved in moving from one to another which makes plain the fact that class progression is full of difcult choices and negotiations. In the gure of the Scholarship Boy, Hoggart nds a way to articulate that unforgiving double bind, where the potential to escape one life ultimately beckons, but the reality of a kind of betrayal will always haunt.

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Scholarship blues The gure of the Scholarship Boy loses theoretical potency and contemporary usefulness in a too hasty association with Hoggarts experience. The impact of the term as a way of framing class mobility and familial relations is lessened if it is read within the self-evident, under-elaborated autobiographical framework typically accompanying Uses. Certainly Hoggarts personal experience gives an added weight to his musings. His intimacy with the subject has the inclination to slide into confession. But it is its conduity as a means to think through the social that is the important conceptual advancement often neglected in discussions of the Scholarship Boy passages, and which, I want to argue, makes them a worthy resource and example for framing historical change through the everyday. Hoggart employs the gure of the Scholarship Boy to encapsulate the emotional processes of inter-class subjectivity in postwar Britain, and it is in this guise of memoir or reection that he allows a politically engaged social commentary. Ultimately the Scholarship Boy is a means to embody trauma, an unavoidably direct way of evoking the articial progression perpetuated by the scholarship system. Reaching down and wresting the individual out of a complex, intricately structured way of life, the benefactor initiates a signicant rupture in familial and social relations. This is a trauma to which the patronage system, until Hoggarts intervention, had been blind.12 The appeal to empathy, however, has the readers assumptions reversed. Against common-sense dictums, that scholarship recipients are privileged souls, Hoggarts engaged narrative shows them as gures to be pitied: He begins to see life, for as far as he can envisage it, as a series of hurdle-jumps, the hurdles of scholarships which are won by learning how to amass and manipulate the new currency (Hoggart 1958: 229). Further: He begins to see life as a ladder, as a permanent examination with some praise and some further exhortation at each stage. . . . He has been trained like a circus horse, for scholarship winning (p. 230). The Scholarship Boy is a lonely, and tragic, gure. He exchanges the poverty of his upbringing for an assured and better future. The path is put in front of him, but the trade-off is that he can only go alone. Hoggart emphasizes the solitude of this trajectory. It is a single race of hurdle-jumps, a ladder of opportunity, or a series of tricks to accomplish. In each case the student is called upon to perform for appreciative masters. It is this kind of learning, the unquestioned regurgitation of knowledge, that Hoggart seriously criticizes in the second half of Uses. The seemingly better life that awaits the Scholarship Boy is presented as predetermined, in the same sense that staying in the working-class neighbourhood is also futile. Neither option has any bearing, Hoggart implies, on the British class structure itself. What the students progression does ensure,

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however, is a radical displacement. The scholarship system will estrange all of the terms of cultural reference to which he is accustomed. The Scholarship Boys experience is a succession of disruptions, following the initial dislocation:
he has been equipped for hurdle-jumping; so he merely dreams of getting-on, but somehow not in the worlds way. He has neither the comforts of simply accepting the big worlds values, nor the recompense of feeling rmly critical towards them. (Hoggart 1958: 299)

The patronage system demands gratitude from the scholarship holder, because of the improved life chances it brings about. However, steeped in the overbearing sense of obligation behind the benevolence, the reader is encouraged to empathize with this poisoned chalice and all that it entails. For the obligation is a burden working in tension with all the intimate detail about working-class attitudes to which we have already been alerted. Complicating matters is the vivid description of traditional values Hoggart has shown to constitute the students cultural world. It establishes the grounds for understanding why the student struggles to conform to the solitude of academia. This atomized, isolated life goes against the gregariousness and warmth of the working-class family and neighbourhood. In this way, the Scholarship Boy encapsulates the real antagonism Hoggart sees as dening two different that is, classed modes of valuing. Thus the Scholarship Boy neatly summarizes an unenviable, torn position. What is initially a family betrayal becomes, on the scale of Hoggarts generation, a class betrayal. The articial progression of the Scholarship Boy to a different kind of life was, in a sense, too quick. The speed of his trajectory out of one set of values into another did not match the amount of time it would take for working-class attitudes to catch up. Probyns pleasures and pains of being in the social are made palpable here: Hoggarts Scholarship Boy is a classic example of thinking the immediacy of theory. Seeing the gure as representative of broader social circumstances, a kind of trauma was always going to be unavoidable. Ultimately this is why Hoggart writes this important experience: because the difculties of some people illuminate much in the wider discussion of social change (Hoggart 1958: 293).

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Generational change The level of detail Hoggarts discourse of empathy allows gives us an especially rich and material sense of how historical change comes about. The

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choice to move away from the working-class neighbourhood in post-Second World War Britain could not be made on the same grounds as those of a different time. All the terms for loyalty had altered. In his autobiography, Hoggart sees that the distinction between the poor and afuent in British society was sharper before the war: We knew about the reality of unemployment as we knew about chicken-pox and consumption and scarlet fever and early widowhood and heads in gas ovens and many other apparently inescapable and inalienable ills (Hoggart 1988: 176). At this earlier moment, before the great legislative reforms ensuring unemployment benets and health insurance (the welfare state), people lived under a constant threat and unease. Here too, Hoggarts mode of address is aimed to meet with an emotional response, an unchecked affective reaction from the reader. There was no comfort, or peace of mind, at this point in time. The sense of insecurity was ubiquitous. Controlling ones life, or planning ahead, were basically unthinkable options. A focus on the immediate, the present is the safeguard built up over time, to cope with the knowledge that interventions in workingclass life are only ever those of fate and luck (Hoggart 1958: 132). The autobiography in this instance complements neatly the insights of Uses: in each case Hoggart gives an extra glimpse of the history behind the workingclass spirit, hinting at the absolute revolution in working-class culture postwar prosperity would bring. Hoggarts autobiography brims with examples of the kind of historical writing which, like those in Uses, perceive increments of social change through the minutiae of culture. If relief was available before the war, for instance, it always came with strings:
We were on the Parish, the Board of Guardians, Public Assistance. [Hoggarts mother] had about a pound a week in all, though I imagine they also paid the rent which would be only three or four shillings a week. They took great care that you did not blue the public funds on beer, betting, trips to the pictures. No doubt they had had problems, so they gave the weekly allowance largely in the form of grocery coupons exchangeable at specied grocers only. (Hoggart 1988: 43)

Despite support from at least three charities, Hoggarts family still required further assistance to pay the rent. Hoggart is careful, though, not to appear ungracious. He is keenly aware that on top of their set weekly allowance, someone also took care of the rent. He is careful too in negotiating the issue of religion in the dispensation of the assistance. Whether transparent or not, this kind of aid rarely escapes preconceived ideas of appropriateness, and these issues continue today in the current era of mutual obligation and the privatisation of welfare services.13 Hoggart, however, appears reasonable, indeed empathetic, himself in the comment No doubt they had had

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problems. The ambiguousness of the statement avoids any direct criticism. But ultimately someone puts together this arbitrary monetary gure, which is only enough for essentials, and certainly not enough for any treats. Such an allowance provided, was meant to provide, no more than a bare living, one just above the level of undernourishment so long as the mother knew how to buy cannily and well, with great good sense (Hoggart 1988: 43). Hoggarts take on the situation implies that a particular kind of life is none the less, and unacceptably, imagined for the recipients. What is curious is how the prescribed amount can possibly be thought to sustain a way of life. The specicity of the allowance seems to actively dissuade those notorious elements of working-class culture, beer, betting, trips to the pictures. Hoggart makes plain that any kind of luxury is cancelled out in this desperate nancial situation. In this autobiographical mode, thirty years on from Uses, the empathy of the reader is again demanded: we cannot help but want to reach out to Hoggarts widowed mother, and her life of enforced stringency and struggle. As a companion to Uses in another sense, the autobiography claries that the outbreak of war was the principal factor in ensuring the delineations between us and them in Hoggarts urban landscape would be forever blurred. The kinds of sacrice required by the times and the need for camaraderie in war-time were symbolic of a changing Britain. Reecting on the situation Hoggart observes:
By 1944 there was an unusual feeling in the air among servicemen, not often articulated cogently, but indicated by banal-sounding phrases: We dont mean to go back to what it was like before; Things have got to change; Im not standing for that lot again; We didnt go through all this just to settle back where we were. There had been a sea-change among men who had been, most of them, ill-educated, not encouraged to have many expectations or to look forward to any change for the better, to progress, to movement. (Hoggart 1990: 60)

Who knows what the women were thinking away from all this admirable breast-beating, but amidst the chaos of war came a crystallization of thought for many servicemen. Forced into combat by the higher powers, with whom their day-to-day contact had been minimal before this time, Hoggart writes of an evident sense of contempt and outrage. The accommodating border between us and them had been breached. The working class had been summoned to enter the other world of the higher powers, to settle unknown disputes and serve the objectives of them. Thus Hoggart sees the Second World War as a particularly signicant moment in the breakdown between classes in Britain. It did not have the reliance on trench warfare typifying the First World War, and as such there was a quite unprecedented intermixing of

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ofcers and ranks. The phrases Hoggart chooses here are particularly potent. The reections are like eld notes, or random jottings from battle. He establishes the motivations and justications for a change in peoples attitudes with the experience of war. As readers, we are invited to make the relationships suggested by the soldiers comments. It is as if the futility to which their lives had been reduced as soldiers or civilians correspondingly exacerbated the need to recapture and retain a sense of self-worth. Returning home, these soldiers might contemplate new possibilities and allow their expectations to rise. Suggestions of progress or movement, once unthinkable from the loyalties of the cluttered lounge room, lose their previous status as taboo. The need for change becomes something deserved. The snippets of dialogue, the lived culture of war recounted here, draws attention to the soldiers lost dignity. We empathize with their new hopes and dreams as they learn their place in the world. Noticing the effect of new knowledge on the men, with the introduction of compulsory current affairs discussion, Hoggarts passion for educational advocacy is also sparked. The very ruminations on the politics of pedagogy which underpin the second half of Uses are here animated, and the democratization of knowledge tools previously withheld from workers becomes a fundamental tenet of Hoggartian cultural studies:
there they all sat, month after month, being introduced not only to the main issues in social security policy or educational planning or industrial prospects or trade unionism or local government, but more importantly being introduced also to the idea that these things concerned them and that they could have, should have, a say in the discussion and resolution of them. (Hoggart 1990: 62)

With this extended list of different kinds of policies and concepts Hoggart makes clear the extent of the soldiers ignorance. Without addressing it specically, the inadequacy, the obviously classed nature of Britains education system in this description becomes obvious. There was just so much they did not know. The issues which ought to have pertained most to these people had not even been made plain to them before. To have a say in these matters would have broken the traditional walls of physical and ideological separation of them and us. So while a successful self-defence mechanism, the segregation and insularity of the private realm of home and neighbourhood had prevented the possibility of self-determination in a public, in any way political, sense.14 Thus with access to this new knowledge, some of the opportunities of the outside world could now be glimpsed, perhaps even reached. Like those students in the extra-mural classes in the years to follow this moment, Hoggart is part of the rst generation with the means available to access unprecedented opportunities. Yet he conveys the complexity of the

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situation in a way that overcomes the dialectical impasse of disloyalty to family and class. Rather, Hoggart argues the absolutely crucial role of education in the production of a more equitable society. Being able to learn, to selfactualize, and act in accordance with their own needs was just another of the necessities that had been denied the working class. Against his contemporaries of the 1950s and 1960s, whose debates were stalled to the extent that they relied on a purely scal interpretation of class character, Hoggarts was a cultural denition of class. The strength of this innovation was that it shifted analytical attention from the production (political/economic) to the consumption (social/cultural) side of modern society (Hartley 1999: 15). As Hartley recognizes, Hoggart turned the terms of the debate on their head. His interest was on a higher level than the bickering between Left and Right, because access to education, in particular, was an issue that concerned both sides. To stress the centrality of the cultural realm was really different: until this point it was still seen as the superstructure, the added-on consideration for serious political thought.15

Conclusion A recent interview with Richard Hoggart coincides with the fortieth anniversary of The Uses of Literacy (Gibson and Hartley 1998). In it, he is still very much caught up in debates about social change, what it means for education, and what is at stake more generally:
what Im going around arguing, until people start saying Oh hes at it again, is this: if you train people only to the level which is required by all these [government] initiatives, all you do is produce a society which is capable of being conned. People are not encouraged to be critical, theyre not given a critical literacy. Theyre given a literacy which is just enough to ll in the football pools and the lottery coupon and read the Sun and so on, and thats not good enough in a democracy in a commercial democracy above all. . . . People look a bit awry, as though youre expecting too much of most people, which youre not. (Gibson and Hartley 1998: 13)

In conversation Hoggarts rhetoric is not so veiled. People are no longer in danger of being manipulated or persuaded by the new mass-culture postwar, they are verily being conned. The opportunities promised by wider economic improvements have only meant that the divisions between classes are evident somewhere else. The education system still maintains limitations on the possibility of social mobility. The working classes still rely on fate and luck the football pools and lottery coupon to give them access to a better life.

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Hoggarts concerns are essentially the same: he identies the factors perpetuating an inequity of opportunity that a professedly democratic society ought to prohibit. That he is still going around arguing for educational reform shows that despite many other changes since the 1950s, this fundamental aspect of his project, from The Uses of Literacy onwards, maintains a contemporary relevance. Hoggart signicantly inuenced accepted intellectual thinking by becoming part of the very situation he sought to change. He was prepared to carry out a political vision without limiting it to a predetermined institution or discipline.16 But Hoggart found his major insights required constant reiteration over time; indeed, his autobiography and interviews shirk the more prudent strategies of earlier writing in line with the lack of signicant improvement in classes speaking to each other. In our age of the digital divide, city/country antagonism and North/South income disparities, Hoggarts critique continues its pertinence and challenge. To foster empathy, and work to improve opportunities for those with whom we might otherwise connect, requires practical strategies to realize and make visceral their, and our, everyday struggles. Hoggart especially inspires, though, for the way that he uncautiously pursued a textual methodology which, above all, would help people understand their history, and those of others. His discursive address forces a more overt responsibility on the part of his readers to engage with, and work to change, past and present inequalities. The risk that Hoggart took in striving for empathy in The Uses of Literacy (a risk which continues to thwart his complete deication in the cultural studies canon) is one we might consider in some of our own work. If our ultimate aims are to secure more democratic accounts of the past, and more inclusive participation in forging our collective future, then employing some affect might be a faster way to get there. Providing the most forceful articulation, cognizant of the inadequacies of all of our disciplines, is a step we still hesitate to take. And while Hoggart will not be remembered as a historian, he will stand as someone who fully perceived the connection between historical change and our particular performances and acts within a living culture. In the quieter moments, when the disciplinary bickering dies down, it is worth contemplating this modest but imperative point, and what it means for the histories that all of us, every day, are creating. Notes
1 Remark to Hoggarts wife Mary, from her domestic helper (Hoggart 1992: 81). Richard Johnsons comments mentioned in the abstract refer to his plenary address

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A Neglected History at the Pavis Centre Conference Cultural Returns: Assessing the Place of Culture in Social Thought held in Oxford, September 2002. Again, see Goodwins summary of Uses, where it is acknowledged as notoriously nostalgic (Goodwin 1992: xiv). The exceptions to this trend are few but sincere: Gibson (1998, 2001); Hartley (1999); Passeron (1970, 1999). Usually in reference to broadcasting policy, for example (1958), BBC and ITV after three years, Universities and Left Review 5: 326. Sedgwicks narrative, for example, brackets off the chance of any longevity to New Left revisions, claiming the movement spread wide but never penetrated (Sedgwick 1976: 114). Yet I would argue that the critique of class reductionism, indeed, the cultural turn the New Left was involved with, is terrain still inadequately registered by some mainstream political parties in the West. Although Thompsons mammoth task, of more appropriately historicizing the whole way of struggle that characterizes working-class life, remains a testimony to the selective articulatory processes that take place at all levels of representation at all times. Considering recent trends in academic publishing, Hoggarts motivation to write a textbook is interesting. He saw a hole in the market both in publishing and pedagogy for intellectual appraisals of popular culture. Today, however, with the market brimming with publications in this same area, the need for textbooks has returned: ironically in order to make sense of the burgeoning eld. Textbook fashions are representative of broader social change, which is also the signicance of Hoggarts intervention. The increased availability of higher education, and the subsequent corporatization of the university as an institution, is an element of such change in our own time. As John Hartley points out, today we are not studying to lead or to manage society, but to join it. Now we are what we analyze; products of and participants in the popular-knowledge-producing apparatus of internationalized consumer society (Hartley 1999: 45). Here Hartley redenes the role of the university to t the context of our expanded economic base. Not only do we need to think our economics on global terms, but, correspondingly, we need to learn a whole new currency of knowledge. We have to learn how to act, basically: what expectations and behaviours are appropriate, given this changed world of broader, indeed global, opportunity. This is precisely the kind of guide Hoggart was writing in Uses, albeit for a different time. That the publishing trend has turned full circle is an interesting development within cultural studies own brief life-span. These same instances of discretionary power also govern our contemporary everyday in the West thinking of detention centres in Australia is a particularly topical example and have done throughout our colonial past. An apology for a bias towards literary analysis opens the book, and ensuing paragraphs give reasons for Hoggarts decision to generally overlook the political, or exceptionally earnest of the working class (p. 15). He also recognizes the difculty, given his own background, of writing about the working class without sentimentality (p. 17). Thompsons humanist, historical perspective drew inspiration from the moralizing authority of William Morris utopianism to balance the academic and alienating

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Melissa Gregg discourse of Marxist doctrine. His work constantly tried to recapture the silenced voice of the working class, especially in The Making of the English Working Class (1965), a text also mentioned often as formative in British cultural studies early development. This title is taken from Ien Angs book, published in 1996, but I use it here to show the importance of the living-room for cultural studies long before the introduction of television. As with the principles behind Mark Gibsons article Richard Hoggarts grandmothers ironing (Gibson 1998), and as he elaborates further elsewhere (Gibson 2001), I am interested in recapturing some of the stylistic strategies often neglected in appraisals of early British cultural studies. In a longer contemplation of these issues, I compare the similarity here between the benevolent, though culturally myopic assumptions behind this form of patronage and others, thinking especially of the stolen generations of indigenous children in Australia. In Hoggarts time, charities are the sole providers of help, but today any distinction between charitable, business or government assistance has become negligible through their interdependence and overdetermination. This is another instance of the wheel having turned full circle: government responsibility for welfare came in with Labour in Britain, and is now on the way out again. And the morality behind such assistance is increasingly less veiled. Hoggart intervenes here, incidentally, in debates about voter apathy so furiously circulating in Left circles at this point in time. Apathy did not explain why Labour took so long to win a majority in Britain; it was the fact that people had never been educated about political issues, and therefore which party ought to be the most attractive. Althussers work had not penetrated critical thinking in the British Left at this time. Within a decade, however, this situation would alter signicantly. A change in editorial arrangements at New Left Review in the mid-1960s brought Perry Anderson to ascendancy, and under his inuence, continental philosophy became a signicant component of radical left-wing political theory. E. P. Thompson was the most serious objector to this move (see Thompson 1978), which initiated a split between humanist and structuralist interpretations of Marxism (the latter was associated with Althusserianism). Thompson became increasingly marginalized for his parochialism, both in Left circles and in terms of gaining a broader recognition in the chronicles of cultural studies (Hartley 1992: 17). An interesting development worth noting is the unique status Hoggart enjoys in France since his work was translated and introduced by Jean-Claude Passeron (1970), and following Hoggarts work there with UNESCO. The collection edited by Passeron (1999) comes from a conference held in Marseille in 1994. My thanks to Jeremy Ahearne for this helpful information.

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References
Ang, Ien (1996) Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World, London: Routledge.

A Neglected History Corner, John (1991) Studying culture: reections and assessments: an interview with Richard Hoggart, Media, Culture and Society 13: 13751. Dworkin, Dennis (1997) Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gibson, Mark (1998) Richard Hoggarts grandmothers ironing: some questions about power in international cultural studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies 1(1): 2544. Gibson, Mark (2001) Monday Morning and the Millennium: Cultural Studies, Scepticism and the Concept of Power, Ph.D. dissertation, Edith Cowan University.

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Gibson, Mark and Hartley, John (1998) Forty years of cultural studies: an interview with Richard Hoggart, International Journal of Cultural Studies 1(1): 1123. Goodwin, Andrew (1992) Introduction to Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, New Brunswick and New Jersey: Transaction Press. Hall, Stuart (1980a) Cultural studies and the centre: some problematics and problems, in Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Culture, Media, Language, London: Hutchinson, pp. 1548. Hall, Stuart (1980b) Cultural studies: two paradigms, Media, Culture and Society 2: 5772. Hall, Stuart (1992) Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies, in Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler and Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 27794. Hartley, John (1992) The Politics of Pictures, London: Routledge. Hartley, John (1999) The Uses of Television, London: Routledge. Hoggart, Richard (1958) [1957] The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hoggart, Richard (1970) La Culture du Pauvre: tude sur le Style de vie des Classes Populaires en Angleterre, trans. Jean-Claude Passeron, Paris: Minuit. Hoggart, Richard (1988) A Local Habitation: Life and Times, Volume I: 191840, London: Chatto & Windus. Hoggart, Richard (1990) A Sort of Clowning: Life and Times, Volume II: 194059, London: Chatto & Windus. Hoggart, Richard (1992) An Imagined Life: Life and Times, Volume III: 195991, London: Chatto & Windus. Passeron, Jean-Claude (1970) Introduction to Richard Hoggart, La Culture du Pauvre: tude sur le Style de vie des Classes Populaires en Angleterre, trans. Jean-Claude Passeron, Paris: Minuit. Passeron, Jean-Claude (1999) Richard Hoggart en France, Paris: Bibliothque Publique dInformation.

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