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Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy and the cultural turn

It is widely recognized that, without Richard Hoggart, there would have been no Centre for cultural studies. It is not always so widely acknowledged that without The Uses of Literacy there would have been no cultural studies. In an early text, I called it one of cultural studies’ three ‘founding texts’ (Hall, 1980), and this is an opportunity to expand further on that judgement. The paper therefore offers some reflections on the ‘moment’ of The Uses of Literacy — what early cultural studies learned from and owed, methodologically, to the book, its connections with wider debates at the time and its formative role in what came to be known as ‘the cultural turn’. The latter phrase is the kind of clumsy abstraction Richard Hoggart would not be caught dead using, and there is no point elaborating on it conceptually here. It simply registers an inescapable fact about what I called elsewhere the growing ‘centrality of culture’ — the astonishing global expansion and sophistication of the cultural industries; the growing significance of culture for all aspects of social and economic life; its reordering effects on a variety of critical and intellectual discourses and disciplines; its emergence as a primary and constitutive category of analysis and ‘the way in which culture creeps into every nook and crevice of contemporary social life, creating a proliferation of secondary environments, mediating everything’ (Hall, 1997, 215).