Language as a Locator

Throughout the reading, I couldn’t help but compare Hoggart’s sociological study with Bourdieu’s. I thought one of Hoggart’s most interesting observations was that the good people of what are considered the lower-classes “would be exceptional people in any class: they reveal less about their class and more about themselves”(16). I believe this is important because it challenges sweeping generalizations made about specific classes (i.e. that the people of the lower-classes are more mirthful while the people if the upper-classes tend to be more ambitious) and demonstrates that each class performs a multitude of different behaviors, and you cannot categorize behaviors strictly through socio-economic status. In a way, Hoggart sets up the lower classes as an independent subculture as opposed to just a class within a hierarchy. He talks about the sub-hierarchies in different communities, the different levels of skilled and manual labors, the author’s misrepresentation of the affects of politics in working-class life, and how income does not necessarily define status in this class (e.g. the teacher who makes less than the steelworker.) He also points out that the differences between the working class and the lower-middleclass is not necessarily distinguishable upon first glance, but with further inspection, it can be discerned that the lower-classes earn a wage as opposed to a salary, rent instead of own their home, and buy off the rack. He gives a sense of where education and manners became a more useful indicator of status due to the declining ability of sight to gage a person’s class. Hoggart then brings up the issue of speech and language’s role in indicating class differences—which is how I got stuck on My Fair Lady. Language, especially dialects and accents, determines your location in the hierarchy.

I also thought that his commentary about his method, and how it compares with the methodological approach of other sociologists (again, I was really thinking of Bourdieu here), was really compelling. Especially given our discussion of Bourdieu and his, at times, hyper-statistical analyses of culture, I thought it was really refreshing to read Hoggart’s comment that “I think such an impression is wrong if it leads us to construct an image of working-class people only from adding together the variety of statistics given in some of these sociological works” (18). I also thought that his observation that he was a part of the working-classes, but as a scholar also removed from them, represents the paradoxical position of the scholar in general—is it truly possible to give a thorough and impartial analysis of a culture if you are a part of it? At the end of his “Questions of Approach” though, Hoggart says: “The reader sees what is intended to be said and also, from tone, from the unconscious emphases and the rest, he comes to know the man saying it” (19). It is as if Hoggart is saying that we can get a clear, uncontaminated perception of a sociological study by understanding the bias of the author and understanding how that bias affects the author’s work.