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draw on the full possibilities of human life, that spread out through and
take their strength from deep involvement with the culture of which
they are a part.
There is a strain of pessimism in Hoggart, and he knows -- more
than half believes -- th at all human systems of communication may fail
in their basic purpose. Man may not really want to say anything or have
anything to say. The sound of man's own voice in the wind may finally
be all that is desired. Or, if the communication is sought for, the signals,
as in Ionesco's
The Chairs,
may never be received or interpreted cor–
rectly. But despite these doubts, Hoggart continues to make two great
assumptions, "that it matters to communicate and that one can communi–
cate. . . ." The contents, means, and ends of communication are, in
Hoggart's system, the traditional optimistic values of liberal democratic
society. "The individual matters . .. more than the society." But the
individual needs to avoid the conventionalized, and therefore empty,
languages of his culture and seek out instead a rhetoric which will truly
reveal him to himself and present that authentic self to others, thus
permitting true identification and sympathy. This true self is, in Hog–
gart's view, the only matter that is finally communicable, the only
subject matter that can reach across the void and maintain its strength
through the mediating terms to communicate genuinely with the
"other." Such truths of self, which in all their variety and multiplicity of
shapes should also be the substance of public broadcasting and the
concern of cultures, tend to take quite humble forms of loss in Hoggart's
system: the stunted figure of a miner disappearing into the dark alley of
a northern industrial town, or, at a more intense level, Captain Snegirov,
in Dostoevsky's
The Brothers Karamazov,
revealed before his son as a
helpless and failed human being.
On Culture and Communication
is a modest book, modest in size
and in tone. But it makes the traditional humanist claims that the value
of things is only to be understood from a moral perspective and through
humane values. A communications system will be meaningful, will effec–
tively communicate, only if both its methods and its contents accord
with certain fundamental values such as freedom, the recognition of
diversity, honesty, tolerance of variety, and the recognition of the
intense overwhelming reality of the individual self. Without these we
have only "a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying
nothing." This, Hoggart quietly fears, may in fact be all that we do have.
A.B. Kernan
