Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Richard Hoggart: The Uses of Literacy 43
They are a depressing group . . . perhaps most of them are rather less intelligent
than the average [working-class youth], and are therefore even more exposed than
others to the debilitating mass trends of the day . . . they have no responsibilities,
and little sense of responsibilities, to themselves or to others (248–9).
Although ‘they are not typical’, they are an ominous sign of things to come:
these are the figures some important contemporary forces are tending to create, the
directionless and tamed helots of a machine-minding class. . . . The hedonistic but
passive barbarian who rides in a fifty-horse-power bus for threepence, to see a fivemillion-dollar
film for one-and-eightpence, is not simply a social oddity; he is a
portent (250).
The juke-box boy symptomatically bears the prediction of a society in which ‘the larger
part of the population is reduced to a condition of obediently receptive passivity, their
eyes glued to television sets, pin ups, and cinema screens’ (316).
Hoggart, however, does not totally despair at the march of mass culture. He knows,
for instance, that the working class ‘are not living lives which are imaginatively as poor
as a mere reading of their literature would suggest’ (324). The old communal and selfmade
popular culture still remains in working-class ways of speaking, in ‘the Working-
Men’s Clubs, the styles of singing, the brass bands, the older types of magazines, the
close group games like darts and dominoes’ (ibid.). Moreover, he trusts their ‘considerable
moral resources’ (325) to allow them, and to encourage them, to continue to adapt
for their own purposes the commodities and commodified practices of the culture industries.
In short, they ‘are a good deal less affected than they might well be. The question,
of course, is how long this stock of moral capital will last, and whether it is being
renewed’ (ibid.). For all his guarded optimism, he warns that it is a ‘form of democratic
self-indulgence to over-stress this resilience’ in the face of the ‘increasingly dangerous
pressures’ (330) of mass culture, with all its undermining of genuine community with
an increasingly ‘hollow . . . invitation to share in a kind of palliness’ (340). His ultimate
fear is that ‘competitive commerce’ (243) may have totalitarian designs:
Inhibited now from ensuring the ‘degradation’ of the masses economically . . .
competitive commerce . . . becomes a new and stronger form of subjection; this
subjection promises to be stronger than the old because the chains of cultural subordination
are both easier to wear and harder to strike away than those of economic
subordination (243–4).
Hoggart’s approach to popular culture has much in common with the approach of
Leavisism (this is most noticeable in the analysis of popular culture in the second part
of the book); both operate with a notion of cultural decline; both see education in discrimination
as a means to resist the manipulative appeal of mass culture. However,
what makes his approach different from that of Leavisism is his detailed preoccupation
with, and, above all, his clear commitment to, working-class culture. His distance from