Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 3 Culturalism
studies approach to popular culture. The institutional home of these developments
was, especially in the 1970s and early 1980s, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies, at the University of Birmingham (see Green, 1996).
Richard Hoggart: The Uses of Literacy
The Uses of Literacy is divided into two parts: ‘An “older” order’, describing the workingclass
culture of Hoggart’s childhood in the 1930s; and ‘Yielding place to new’, describing
a traditional working-class culture under threat from the new forms of mass entertainment
of the 1950s. Dividing the book in this way in itself speaks volumes about
the perspective taken and the conclusions expected. On the one hand, we have the
traditional ‘lived culture’ of the 1930s. On the other, we have the cultural decline of the
1950s. Hoggart is in fact aware that during the course of writing the book, ‘nostalgia
was colouring the material in advance: I have done what I could to remove its effects’
(1990: 17). He is also aware that the division he makes between the ‘older’ and the
‘new’, underplays the amount of continuity between the two. It should also be noted
that his evidence for the ‘older’ depends, not on ‘invoking some rather mistily conceived
pastoral tradition the better to assault the present, [but] to a large extent on
memories of my childhood about twenty years ago’ (23, 24). His evidence for the cultural
decline represented by the popular culture of the 1950s is material gathered as a
university lecturer and researcher. In short, the ‘older’ is based on personal experience;
the ‘new’ on academic research. This is a significant and informing distinction.
It is also worth noting something about Hoggart’s project that is often misunderstood.
What he attacks is not a ‘moral’ decline in the working class as such, but what
he perceives as a decline in the ‘moral seriousness’ of the culture provided for the working
class. He repeats on a number of occasions his confidence in the working class’s
ability to resist many of the manipulations of mass culture: ‘This is not simply a power
of passive resistance, but something which, though not articulate, is positive. The working
classes have a strong natural ability to survive change by adapting or assimilating
what they want in the new and ignoring the rest’ (32). His confidence stems from his
belief that their response to mass culture is always partial: ‘with a large part of themselves
they are just “not there”, are living elsewhere, living intuitively, habitually, verbally,
drawing on myth, aphorism, and ritual. This saves them from some of the worst
effects’ (33).
According to Hoggart,
working class people have traditionally, or at least for several generations, regarded
art as escape, as something enjoyed but not assumed to have much connexion with
the matter of daily life. Art is marginal, ‘fun’. . .‘real’ life goes on elsewhere. ...Art
is for you to use (238).