Page 79 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

68 Chapter Two

He had also a second purpose. He compared English working class culture
before and after World War II, detecting a marked deterioration when com-
mercial or mass culture gained ascendancy. Mass culture does not emerge
from the lived conditions of ordinary people and hence, for Hoggart, lacks or-
ganicism and authenticity. He deemed commercial cultural products (popular
music, American television, crime and romance novels, and so forth) banal,
pretentious, and intrinsically phony. By displacing indigenous culture, he
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claimed, commercial culture “colonized” the working class. To gain audi-
ence, media appealed to, but in the process distorted, many admirable work-
ing class traits. For instance, advertisers played upon working class tolerance
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and love of freedom, but debased these traits through exaggeration. Media
amplified the ideal of freedom, for example, “until it [became] the freedom
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“to ‘be’ anything at all, and certainly not to object to anything at all.” Here,
as elsewhere in Hoggart’s work, a basic Aristotelian principle (good carried
to an extreme reverts to ill) is in play.
Finally, in The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart addressed concentrations of press
ownership and aspects of the production of media texts, not merely their
consumption or interpretation. Thereby Hoggart, too, helped establish critical
political-economic treatments of British cultural industries.
The Uses of Literacy shares several characteristics with Adorno’s work.
First, Hoggart presented a nondeterministic, dialectical mode cultural analy-
sis. On the one hand, he wrote that in the face of commercial indoctrination
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“working class people still possess some older and inner resistances.” He
noted particularly the “capacity of the human spirit to resist.” He speculated
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that common people regard art and entertainment primarily “as an escape, as
something enjoyed but not assumed to have much connection with the matter
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of daily life.” He proposed, too, that people are able to compartmentalize
their lives, so that life at home is distinguished from life outside, and “real”
life is segregated from mere entertainment. 40 On the other hand, resistance
and cynicism as audiences’ chief defenses against media dissimulations can
themselves be detrimental, engendering the stance that nothing is worth
much: “The new attitude,” he lamented, “is frequently a refusal to consider
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any values, because all values are suspect.” (Support for this assessment is
to be found in Michael Mann’s remarks that contemporary British working
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class culture is characterized by inconsistencies, cynicism, and fatalism. )
Even though the British working class may resist the intended indoctrination,
then, media may have detrimental consequences nonetheless.
Hoggart remarked, too, on the deskilling of the labor force through indus-
trialization, which one could regard as an additional source of apathy and
cynicism. He wrote: “The common man knows his job and can do it without