Instances of Youthful Resistance - Essay Example

Research on youth culture most invariably tends to romanticise or over-politicise instances of youthful resistance. Discuss with reference to Thornton S., Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital and Nava M., Changing Cultures: Feminism, Youth and Consumerism. Introduction Youth culture has been studied from several ideological perspectives on assumptions that they are ‘not isolated and untouched by the surrounding culture’ (Keyes, 2000). This notion has lead researchers to assume that youth culture is not part of ‘growing up’, but a phenomenon that occurs as a precipitation of the social, political, cultural and ideological factors. There is not one monolithic youth culture that defines all young people. Popular youth culture embraces a diversity of sub-cultures or “tribes” such as skaters, druggies, snobs, band geeks, Satanists, Jesus freaks, techno-goths, computer dweebs, blacks, Latinos and white trash. Groups distinguish themselves by dress, style, music, body modification practices, race, ethnicity, and language. (Hines, 1999) Thus a researcher, who intends to study the ethnic, racial, political, cultural, sociological or linguistic aspect of a subculture, often ends up in analysing one of the factors and tend to romanticise or over-politicise these aspects. Subcultures were one of the major fields of inquiry at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s, and this overview will take as its starting point Resistance Through Rituals, the BCCCS’s 1976 collection of working papers on the subject. In the introduction, the authors acknowledge their debt to the interactionist sociological approach to deviant behaviour, and especially to Howard Becker’s 1963 book Outsiders. Here, Becker’s theoretical work on art worlds and on deviance intersect in the classic study of freelance dance band musicians, whose “culture and way of life [were] sufficiently bizarre and unconventional for them to be labeled [sic] as outsiders by more conventional members of the community” (Outsiders 79). Becker builds an intricate ethnographic analysis around the values encoded in the concept of “hipness” (as opposed to “square” society) and the way such values are made to operate tactically within the subculture. This study, published in 1963, is part of the corpus referred to by Gelder and Thornton as the “Chicago school” whose themes (male urban opposition to ‘mainstream’ commercial and moral values) clearly prefigure the main preoccupations of the British cultural studies work on subcultures in the 1970s. The most important contribution of the BCCCS to the field of subculture theory was to locate these deviant groups and behaviours within the class structure. Within this overarching structure are contained particular ‘parent cultures’ and their corresponding subcultures. Therefore, working-class subcultures are posited in relation to both the parent working-class culture and the ‘dominant’ (inauthentic) culture: Sub-cultures, then, must first be related to the ‘parent cultures’ of which they are a sub-set. But, sub-cultures must also be analyzed in terms of their relation to the dominant culture – the overall disposition of cultural power in the society as a whole. Thus, we may distinguish respectable, ‘rough’, delinquent and the criminal sub-cultures within working class culture: but we may also say that, though they differ amongst themselves, they all derive in the first instance from a ‘working class parent culture’: hence, they are all subordinate subcultures, in relation to the dominant middle-class or bourgeois culture (J. Clarke et al 13). One of the central tenets of this early approach was that subcultural style worked to provide a “magical” (that is to say, symbolic rather than material) solution to social problems. This idea came into British cultural studies from sociological deviance theory, but the BCCCS reworked it, taking into account a sophisticated theory of class relations: The latent function of subculture is this – to express and resolve, albeit “magically”, the contradictions which remain hidden or unresolved in the parent culture. The succession of subcultures which this parent culture generated can thus all be considered as so many variations on a central theme – the contradiction at an ideological level, between traditional working class puritanism, and the new ideology of consumption: at an economic level between a part of the socially mobile elite, or a part of the new lumpen. Mod, parkers, skinheads, crombies, all represent in their different ways, an attempt to retrieve some of the socially cohesive elements destroyed in the parent culture, and to combine these with elements selected from other class fractions, symbolising one or other of the options confronting it. (P. Cohen 23) Therefore, subcultures are of interest to researchers who seek to understand how the politics of class structures are impacted at times of social change because, through their symbolic practices, subcultures both represent and incompletely resolve the contradictions that such circumstances inevitably produce. The authors outlined several defining subcultural characteristics. Firstly, a subculture must be externally distinguishable from its parent culture: Sub-cultures must exhibit a distinctive enough shape and structure to make them identifiably different from their ‘parent’ culture. They must be focussed around certain activities, values, certain uses of material artefacts, territorial spaces etc. which significantly differentiate them from the wider culture. But, since they are sub-sets, there must also be significant things which bind and articulate them with the ‘parent’ culture. (J. Clarke et al 13-14) Secondly, subcultures were internally homologous. In Subculture: The Meaningof Style – the best known and most influential of the BCCCS subcultural analyses – Dick Hebdige establishes “homology” as a central category. To speak of the homological relations of a subculture is to describe “the symbolic fit between the values and lifestyles of a group, its subjective experience and the musical forms it uses to express or reinforce its focal concerns” (Hebdige,Subculture 113). Therefore, despite the chaotic appearance of punk’s symbols: The subculture was nothing if not consistent. There was a homological relation between the trashy cut-up clothes and spiky hair, the pogo and amphetamines, the spitting, the vomiting, the format of the fanzines, the insurrectionary poses and the ‘soulless’, frantically driven music. Hebdige’s application of the concept to punk is explicitly indebted to Paul Willis’ ethnographic studies of the “motor-bike boys” and the hippies, collected in his book Profane Culture. Of the symbolic choices of the motorbike boys, Willis writes: The solidity, responsiveness, inevitableness, the strength of the motorbike matched the concrete, secure nature of the bikeboys’ world. It underwrote in a dramatic and important way their belief in the commonsense world of tangible things, and the secureness of personal identity. The roughness and intimidation of the motor-bike, the surprise of its fierce acceleration, the aggressive thumping of the unbaffled exhaust, matches and symbolizes the masculine assertiveness, the rough camaraderie, the muscularity of language, of their style of social interaction. The motor-bike boys had “very specific tastes” that were clearly differentiated from the mainstream popular music of the time; their music was deliberately chosen from “the first really authentic and integrated period of rock ‘n’ roll” the ‘golden age’ represented by Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley. The dress, rituals, choice of material and symbolic objects, then, create a “general consonance of structure” which answers the lacks identified in the social situations of the boys, and at the same time distinguished the subculture from the aspirational, style-conscious mods and against various racial ‘others’. In the same anthology is Willis’ analysis of the hippie counterculture, which is interesting in that it stands in direct contrast to the aggressively masculine, socially conservative, immediate world of the motor-bike boys: “more than anything else it was language and conversation which demonstrated the elaborate, ornate, indirect and stylish nature of the hippy [sic] culture...everyday life had become a kind of art” (103). The hippies distinguished themselves from “straight” society on the basis of values which nevertheless reflected their predominantly middle class origins: naturalism, personal authenticity, individualism, mysticism, and creativity. Progressive rock (or “art rock”) as the music of choice “both attempted timelessness and an abstract, complex shape was marvellously formed both to mirror and momentarily complete this Promethean attempt to encompass a post-capitalist timeless mysticism” (169). It is significant that Willis’ study of the hippie “counterculture” is generally not included in the corpus of subculture theory from this period in British cultural studies. In practice, the subcultures of most interest to British cultural studies shared an additional set of defining characteristics that were not always overtly acknowledged: “authentic” subcultures were spectacular and public, maledominated, and demonstrably working class. The widely circulated term “counterculture” (rather than “subculture”) used to refer to the hippies is telling, signifying not only the more widespread development and influence of the hippies, but also their position in the class hierarchy. However, in the introduction to Resistance through Rituals, the authors made three key qualifications which, taken together, demonstrate that even the ‘original’ version of the theory could be applied to middle-class cultures (although of course this was not a priority at the time). Firstly, subcultures are not necessarily workingclass: the authors identify the bohemian avant-garde as a subculture of the urban middle-class intelligentsia. Secondly, subcultures are not necessarily distinct, bounded groups: “some sub-cultures are merely loosely-defined strands or ‘milieux’ within the parent culture” which “possess no distinctive ‘world’ of their own”. Finally, some subcultures are “regular and consistent” features of their parent cultures, rather than appearing dramatically at particular moments in history. Thornton’s study of club culture In her book Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Thornton refers to the youth cultures based around the raves and dance clubs from the late 1980’s to the mid-1990’s. The main sociological context of Thornton’s study was the approach to the study of youth subcultures developed by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in books like Resistance Through Rituals. This approach saw subcultures such as skinheads as expressions of class-based cultures that were rebelling against the dominant ideology of a capitalist state. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s there were a series of what have been called ‘spectacular’ youth subcultures: mods, rockers, skinheads, punks, and so on. Every subculture had a distinctive style of dress and appearance and particular tastes in music and usually in choice of drugs. Many of these subcultures were analysed by sociologists along the lines suggested by the CCCS – that is, seen as representing a primitive kind of resistance towards capitalism. From the 1980s onwards it became much more difficult to distinguish youth subcultures. Instead, there seemed to be a variety of styles that were short lived and shaped by the music and fashion industries. These could not be seen as authentic expressions of the anger of working-class youth in the way the CCCS had suggested. Thornton’s research focuses on a subculture, or cluster of related subcultures, in the late 1980s and 1990s. Thornton takes from Pierre Bourdieu the concept of ‘cultural capital’ and develops from it the concept of ‘subcultural capital’. Bourdieu (1977) argued that the most privileged groups in society are distinguished by their possession not only of economic capital but also social and cultural capital, and that the class system is perpetuated by these various forms of capital (not just wealth) being passed from one generation to the next. Cultural capital in Britain, for example, might include possession of a particular accent, and having attended an independent rather than a state school. From this Thornton explores the idea that a subculture may also have forms of cultural capital (such as knowledge of the latest music) that give status within the subculture. At the outset Thornton makes a series of points, derived from earlier findings but supported by her own, which establish the importance of club cultures. • Admissions to clubs and other dance events are higher than those to sporting events, cinemas and ‘live arts’ combined; clubs only go relatively unnoticed because they concern only one particular age group and the activity is mainly after the rest of the population is in bed. • There are few, if any, boundaries of class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality in dancing, but relatively firm lower- and upper-age boundaries. Young teenagers are excluded by parental rules about being out late and by lack of money, while older clubbers lose interest as they leave home and enter cohabiting or marriage relationships. • Clubbing is an integral part of growing up, providing a space where the young can act like adults in some ways and can achieve a distinct identity. Clubs are particularly empowering for girls. Dancing is the only out-of-home leisure activity that involves more females than males. • Music is an essential aspect of youth cultures. Young people buy and listen to more music than any other age group Thornton’s notion of Sub Cultures Popular culture is a space in which cultural differences are not about resistance to the power of the ruling class. Rather, groups create distinctions between themselves and others on the basis of subcultural capital. They acquire status within their own social world through possession of subcultural knowledge and through making distinctions between themselves and other groups of young people. This often involves a distinction between their own culture and that of the ‘mainstream’. Thornton’s respondents were contemptuous of the ‘chartpop disco’ where ‘Sharon and Tracy dance around their handbags’. But this mainstream of ‘them’ doesn’t really exist (after all, the charts are an eclectic mix of many kinds of niche music) and is defined simply as the opposite of ‘us’. The earlier tradition had assumed that subcultures began as authentic and subversive expressions of youth, then were taken over by the mass media and turned into commodities. Thornton argues that the media are implicated from the very beginning. Condemnation by the mass media is actively sought, while micro media (flyers, listings, fanzines, pirate radio, e-mail lists, and so on) are the sources of information that can supply subcultural capital. Clubbers produce these, and clubbers turn to them for information. Niche media (mainly the music and style consumer magazines) often try to identify and develop subcultures; New Musical Express was strongly associated first with punk and New Wave and later ‘Madchester’, while the established magazine that linked itself most closely to clubbing was iD. Subcultural capital relies on the media (but not mass media) which, in turn, means restricted accessibility. Subcultural capital is about ‘being in the know’. Thornton also notes how the media make use of sociological discourse and concepts in making sense of club cultures by using terms like ‘subculture’ and ‘moral panic’. Thornton’s problems Thornton used two methods in her research; the ethnographic research which includes participant observation and unstructured interviews in which she visited the raves and clubs and interviewed those involved in club cultures, the other included the study of a wide range of sources on club cultures and youth culture. One of the problems facing ethnographers is the relationship they have with the people they are studying. Thornton’s background and values are important to evaluating her work. Thornton was Canadian and came to Britain to research dance culture for her doctoral degree. Even though she says that she had been an avid clubber, in studying British club cultures she felt herself an ‘outsider’ or as she puts it ‘a stranger in a strange land’ for several reasons. Her nationality was also important, because the kinds of youth cultures she describes are often localised (although music can be global, the dance and style associated with it can vary with places). She was also working in places where almost everyone else was having good time, and where the ‘ethos of lose yourself in the music’ opposed her commitment to research and analysis. Thornton contacted the members of club cultures through the letters columns of style magazines, The Face and iD and the London listings magazines City Limits and Time Out. She used the replies she received to make contacts with guides and as a source in themselves of information about the value of club culture. Thornton’s archival research covers a wide range of documents that she uses to describe the developments of particular aspects of youth culture. For example she uses the archives of the Musician’s Union to describe how the union representing musicians who played in clubs and other places responded to the threats of their livelihoods posed by arrival of the recorded music, and the musical press (Melody Maker, New Musical Express, Billboard etc.) These factors combined to make it possible for Thornton to keep a distance from her subject matter. Thornton’s approach to studying the subcultures was also very different from that of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. She regarded empirical research as more important than the elaboration of theory. Thornton regards mass media and popular culture industries as inextricably bound up with cultures (for the CCCS, subcultures were constantly trying to avoid being incorporated, swallowed up and effectively neutralised). She is also concerned with social changes, particularly how club cultures were constantly changing, and treats the knowledge and values of club cultures as sub cultural ideologies, as ways in which young people assert their differences from the mainstream. By adopting this approach, Thornton romanticises her account of contemporary subcultures. Mica Nava’s approach Mica Nava’s propositions are thoroughly rooted in ideological biases. Her book Changing Cultures: Feminism, Youth and Consumerism looks at the issue with this perspective. Mica Nava is concerned more with consumerism and consumption. She regards consumption as an increasingly pervasive feature of modern societies throughout the world. In the West it has been a dominant aspect of socio-economic life for well over a hundred years and was a significant contributor to the development of capitalism from the 18th century, which is responsible for the changing cultures. Her studies have focused on the cultural formations of modernity, a term which in this context refers mainly to the new experiences and modern consciousness associated with technological development and the expansion of cities in Europe and North America during the first half of the twentieth century. Her particular concern has been to investigate and elaborate the historical specificity of English modernity. Women and consumer culture have served as a point of access to this question. The aspects of the burgeoning consumer culture of the time promoted and disseminated styles, practices and imaginaries that amounted to an oppositional culture of modernity – a contrary formation in which the new, abroad and cultural difference were a source of interest, pleasure and counter-identifications. Thornton and Mica Nava were not exceptions, there are plenty of studies that have either romanticised or politicised ‘youthful resistances’. In books such as Television Culture, Reading the Popular, and Power Plays/Power Works and in various articles, John Fiske stands at the front of those making the argument for subversive readings of mass culture, for the idea that consumers of mass culture have an active facility for resistance in reading mass culture texts. A good example comes from media sociologist Todd Gitlin in a highly partisan essay: ‘Twenty years on, avant-garde shock has become routine, and avant-gardistes have to go farther and farther out to prove they havent been taken in. Meanwhile, some of yesterdays outriders of youth culture have become theorists scavenging the clubs, back alleys, and video channels for a "resistance" they are convinced, a priori, must exist. Failing to find radical potential in the politics of parties or mass movements, they exalt "resistance" in subcultures, or, one step on, in popular styles, or even, to take it one step further--in the observation that viewers watch TV with any attitude other than devoted rapture.’ In a much more detailed and considered article, Michael Budd, Robert Entman, and Clay Steinman have critiqued what they call the "affirmative character" of cultural studies which ends up celebrating the status quo. In Sarah Thornton’s work on club cultures, music- and style-oriented youth cultures operate according to their own economies of “subcultural capital”: relying, as high cultural capital does, on group-specific knowledge and competencies, but with hipness displacing the bourgeois aesthetic as the organizing logic at work . These systems of knowledge and power work to construct internal hierarchies, distinguishing the insiders from the aspirational outsiders (as in the distinction, policed at the doors and on the dance-floors, between hip clubbers and mere “tourists”). At the same time, they also draw a boundary around the subculture, constructing the appearance of relative autonomy on the basis of its difference from, and superiority to, an imagined “mainstream” (100-101). This dual logic of distinction is valuable for two reasons: firstly, it allows us to look at the internal politics of subcultures and relate them to wider processes of cultural evaluation. Secondly, it allows us to attribute cultural agency to subcultures, and to see how subcultures use and exploit the imagined mainstream, rather than (only) how the “dominant” culture vilifies, exploits, or incorporates subcultures. Other theorists and researchers who work in the area of rave and club cultures have noted the temporally contingent nature of contemporary music cultures as 28 against the “whole way of life” model of the late 1970s (A. Bennett, Cultures of Popular Music 127). That is, the “expressions of collective identity” of rave or club cultures are contingent on the temporary existence of a shared space (the theme night at the club, the rave, the doof) as much as, if not more than, they are on the shared “real world” experiences of the participants (Rietveld 127-8). Like Straw’s work, this shift enables us to include in the subcultural frame not only club cultures, but also more conservative music cultures that are focused primarily around music performance and are not spectacularly articulated with everyday life (such as indie rock, or indeed classical music). After taking these critiques of, and alternatives or extensions to, classic subculture theory into account, it is now possible to see that there is a model of contemporary subculture theory that retains cultural studies’ core commitment to understanding the politics of everyday life, but is flexible enough to accommodate a much broader range of music cultures than those represented by the early work of the Birmingham school1. “Subculture” is therefore not a descriptive label that can be applied externally to only particular kinds of emergent, radical youth cultures. Rather, it provides a necessarily flexible model of music as social practice that always grounds its objects in time and space. At the level of definition, a music subculture might be described as an identifiable group of musicians, audiences, and participants with shared identities and values. However, it is more meaningful to say that to employ the term “subculture” in research contexts is to call into being a way of looking at music as social practice. Conceptually, subculture theory requires that the object of study be understood as occupying a cultural space in which a number of cultural fields intersect and dynamically interact. 1 The continued usefulness of contemporary subculture theory is further demonstrated by the quite recent studies that draw on versions of it: Tony Mitchell’s “Australian Hip Hop as a Subculture” (published in 2003), Brian Wilson’s work on Canadian rave cultures (2002), and Susan Luckman’s Party People, a study of Australian “doof” culture (2002). Firstly, subcultures are enunciated through particular symbolic practices and forms of communication: specific styles of dress, music, speech, textual production, and deportment. Indeed, it is the symbolic features of subcultures that allow us to recognise them as subcultures in the first place. Membership entails particular modes of engagement with these texts and practices (for example, Malbon structures his analysis of the clubbing experience around the “dancing, ecstasy and vitality” of his subtitle), and those modes of engagement require certain cultural competencies. Secondly, each subculture can be demonstrated to speak from and to a particular locus of social identity: a class position (as in “classic” subculture theory), an age “group”, an ethnic group, a particular gender position, or, more often, a complex and multiple formation of these. Thirdly, subcultures emerge at particular kinds of geographic locations and material spaces, and engage in particular uses of those spaces. This last point is important: subculture theorists have moved beyond the dualistic notion of spatiality whereby the concrete or material combine with imagination or representation to create social space, and now are careful to account for the practice and lived reality of spaces (Lefebvre 38-40). Connell and Gibson point out that: Music does not exist in a vacuum. Geographical space is not an ‘empty stage’ on which aesthetic, economic and cultural battles are contested. Rather, music and space are actively and dialectically related. Music shapes spaces, and spaces shape music” (Connell and Gibson 192). That is, subculture theory (especially where it is concerned with club and rave cultures, as in the work of Andy Bennett, Malbon, Wilson and Thornton) takes into account how the lived practices of a space transform it, and how sonic and social practices are called into being by the spaces and places in which they occur. Of course, the concepts of space and place mean little without an accompanying understanding of temporality. Subcultures emerge and make sense out of particular moments in history, and reflect or react to the processes of cultural or social change occurring at such moments. Further, Will Straw has cogently described the ways in which the logics of political and aesthetic value have a temporal dimension: Different cultural spaces are marked by the sorts of temporalities to be found within them – by the prominence of activities of canonization, or by the values accruing to novelty and currency, longevity and ‘timelessness’. In this respect, the ‘logic’ of a particular musical culture is a function of the way in which value is constructed within them relative to the passing of time. (Straw “Communities and Scenes” 495-96) Most important for a cultural studies analysis, of course, is the idea that subcultures are ideological: they are structured by and enunciate shared aesthetic, ethical, and political values. As researchers, it is by making sense of these values that we can make sense of the symbolic, social, spatial, and temporal elements of subcultures, without either falling into the trap of class reductionism, or merely describing the style of a particular subculture. While the concept of “resistance” has become suspect in that it recalls a structuralist account of cultural politics, it has been transposed into contemporary subculture theory as a discursive feature of the relations between the particular constructions of value within subcultures and those in the surrounding culture (the separation between the two is, of course, a discursive move in itself). The articulation of the values of the subculture answer, for its participants, some kind of lack in the surrounding culture, to which is ascribed a set of “mainstream” values (Thornton 101). The “meaning” of a subculture, then, is a map of the relations between these relations: in other words, to use less fluid terminology, the temporary unity of the subculture, and the relations of the subculture to the world ‘outside’ its imagined boundaries. It is important to account not only for the instances in which these relations appear harmonious or unified, but also for the ways in which they appear to reflect external tensions and contradictions. Works cited 1. Thomas Hines, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, New York, Avon Books, 1999 2. Thornton S., Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Wesleyan University Press, 1996 3. Jenkins, R. Lads, Citizens and Ordinary Kids: Working Class Youth Lifestyles in Belfast, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London., 1983 4. Jenkins, R. Pierre Bourdieu, Routledge, London, 1992 5. Jenkins, R. Social Identity, Routledge, London, 1996 6. Bennett, A. Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place, Macmillan Press, Basingstoke, 2000 7. Cieslik, M. (2001) ‘Researching youth cultures: some problems with the cultural turn in British youth studies’, Scottish Youth Issues Journal, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 27–47. 8. Malbon, B. (1999) Clubbing, Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality, Routledge, London. 9. Cohen, P. & Ainley, P. (2000) ‘In the country of the blind?: youth studies and cultural studies in Britain’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 79–95. 10. Hebdige, D. (1974) ‘The Style of the Mods’, Stencilled Occasional Paper, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham 11. Bourdieu, P. (1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, Polity Press, Cambridge 12. Bourdieu, P. (1996) ‘Understanding’, Theory, Culture And Society, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 17–37. 13. Gitlin, Todd. "Who Communicates What to Whom, in What Voice and Why, About the Study of Mass Communication?" Critical Studies in Mass Communication 7 (1990): 185-196. 14. Budd, Mike, Robert M. Entman, and Clay Steinman. "The Affirmative Character of U.S. Cultural Studies." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 7 (1990): 169-184. Read More