The Rules of Disorder

Peter Marsh, Elizabeth Rosser, Rom Harre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134812660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Violence on the terraces, anarchy in the classroom: the popularly held view of youth as reported in the media. Rules of Disorder challenges this view, which is taken to be a misconception of contemporary youth.

1
Themes and Anticipations

Introduction

The ostensible subject matter of this book is violence and disorder. Our settings are classrooms and the terraces of football grounds. Our dramatis personae are the people who inhabit these places and the people who speak about them in various public ways. Many people believe that there are schoolrooms and football grounds where civilized order is forever on the verge of breaking down. How have they come to believe this? Certainly not by direct experience, for few who ‘know’ about schoolroom or football violence have been present at its manifestations. Newspaper, radio and television reports are intimately involved in the formation of our images of the places beyond our immediate experience, and the pictures we form of the places featured in our study are no exception. Such reports suggest, often in the choice of vocabulary as much as in overt statement, that classrooms and football grounds are the settings for scenes of anarchy and disorder. But more than that they imply a specific theory about the genesis of social violence. It is the theory that in these special places gaps widen out in the texture of order and without that order uncontrollable impulses lead to meaningless and violent behaviour.

Set against this picture and parallel to the theory that accompanies and supports it is the idea of the possibility of order as a creation of social instruments ordained for that very task, namely teachers, police, social workers, and perhaps, in the last resort, parents.

As we will show, almost nothing of this popular conception survives a thorough examination of the day-to-day practices and the explanations that are vouchsafed for them in vogue among the folk who inhabit these notorious places. Life, as it is lived in classrooms and on the terraces, has almost none of the characteristics of anarchy and impulsiveness that are often attributed to it. As Paul Corrigan shows (Corrigan, forthcoming), even the street corner, as a social place, is not what it seems from a passing vehicle. Not only do we reveal a different interpretation of what is happening but we propose a very different psychological basis for this activity. We have come to see it through the eyes of the people who take part in it. They see their social life as a struggle for personal dignity in a general social framework that daily denies them this dignity. Far from valuing disorder, they are engaged in the genesis of significance for their lives and an order in their actions that is their own. The struggle begins when they see many of the things that seem routine to the rest of us as ways of devaluing them. The official forms of order can seem anomic to those who are systematically treated as non-persons, since, as they pursue their lives, they have no stake in the society for whose maintenance that order exists. If they are to have any significance, their lives must be self-constructed and made significant with the use of homemade materials.

Apprenticeship to Sociality

In what company do people acquire their sense of and competence in the social? The immediate family and the experiences of family living must play a considerable role. But it is certainly not the only locale nor the only company in which competence in and knowledge of the social world is acquired. Talcott Parsons has proposed the very influential theory that of all other available institutions it is the classroom that above all converts an incomplete person into a member of the kind of society Parsons takes for granted as natural, that is, a kind of society where to be social is to be interested in achievement.

At the basis of Parsons’s theory is a contrast between family life and school life. School life is lived in a society that is constituted in the course of lessons. The form it takes is very much in accordance with structuring principles imposed by the teacher. In the family, as in the classroom, there is a dominant role player, usually the mother. The central person is revealed by identifying the sources of rewards and privileges. At home rewards are ‘ascriptive’, depending on who one is rather than on what one does. What is given as a satisfying offering from the dominant person is roughly related to needs. In the classroom, on the other hand, getting and giving is more nearly related to achievement. Effort is the source of good things, if only one can get one’s efforts recognized by the dominant person in the situation. In these ways, despite differences, schoolroom and home are continuously related to one another as social places. But since there are much larger numbers in relation to the dominant person in the schoolroom than there are at home a distinct psychological break is experienced in the transition from one to the other. Parsons believes that in the schoolroom the children acquire their attachment to the larger social order of adult society which is reflected in the methods of giving and getting encouraged in school. As schooling goes on there is a progressive revelation of the selective role of the school vis-à-vis the labour market, bringing children into an asymptotic relation to ‘real life’, for which it provides the apprenticeship. According to Parsons, criminality arises in the feral life of the playground.

We would turn this picture upside down. The social structure of the society of the classroom seems to us as well adapted to be the nursery of crime as it is of ‘good’ behaviour. The distinction between real and apparent achievement, if only it can be concealed from the teacher, and suitably managed by a child, provides the opportunity for rewards to be received just as well for cheating as for genuine achievement. The possibility of achieving the semblance of virtue by working at standing high in the teacher’s estimation, seems to us a perfect nursery for the acquisition of the criminal or exploitative view of the social world.

Parsons has socialized the official theory of the school and schooling without enquiry into its legitimacy or exclusiveness as a social theory of school.

But if the commonsense understanding of schooling is bracketed and belief suspended, another reality emerges, the life of the playground. There, we believe, are constructed fragments of society the reality of which is unquestioned by the children who are its constructors and who know how to maintain it. It is a world of compacts and bargains, of the control of present and future by ritual, a world dominated by the absolute power of words once spoken to bring order to the world of actions and social relations, an order which needs other words to dispel. Here, if anywhere, lies true sociality, and the place of apprenticeship, for here oaths are really binding and rules need no sanction for their consent. Here there can be no crime for it is a world built by all for all. Deviation is managed and progressively denied by continual renegotiation of the social reality against which it is set off. In the chapters to come, contrast if you will the demanding world of the schoolroom, as our participants see it, with the world of ritual and formal genesis of a respected self in the putting on the regalia of the club that reigns on the terraces.

Attributions: The Multiplicity of Rhetorics

A complex society usually includes a number of microsocieties whose ways of assigning meaning to their actions are not universally nor even very widely shared in the community. In such a situation the possibility exists for attributions of meaning to be made to the deeds of members of the microsociety which bear little resemblance to the meanings attributed by the members themselves. An intuition that this is indeed so may be very difficult to substantiate if the attributions made by members of the dominant society are very loud and very visible, and those of the members of the microsociety hard to come by, perhaps because those members are not easy to contact. There are many examples of this situation in contemporary Britain, such as the case of some schoolchildren, many gypsies and almost all football fans. We shall distinguish attributions as external when made by members of the dominant society to the deeds of members of the microsociety, and as internal when attributions are made by members to deeds of their own or of other members of the microsociety to which they belong.

External attributions may take two forms:

1. That there is no meaning to be attached to the members’ actions. An article in the Oxford Times of 18 May 1976 describes an encounter between a householder and a group of rather tiresome young people who had chosen his street frontage as a meeting place. Trouble grew between the family whose house was beleaguered each night and the unwelcome street visitors. We shall be drawing upon this case further, but for the moment we want to draw attention only to the way in which the reporter, by a particular choice of descriptive vocabulary, conveyed the impression that the actions of the group were meaningless. They were described as ‘shouting and screaming’. While one may reasonably ask what someone shouted, it hardly makes sense to ask what it was they screamed. So the conjunction of these two words effectively prevents the raising of the question as to what it was that they were saying. Their vocalizations are consigned to the category of mere noise.
2. That the activities of some young people, particularly adolescents, are not to be explained in terms of the ordinary, rational rule-following upon which we pride ourselves, but as springing from primitive, almost animal-like impulses and drives. In this mode of attribution young people are not spoken of as having tragic love affairs, rather it is said that ‘they can’t cope with physical sexual experiences’. On the following page is a newspaper report as an illustration of this mode of attribution.

Girl who dies ‘could not cope with sex’

A girl pupil at Millfield School began having sex at 14, an inquest was told yesterday. But early maturity led to her killing herself.

Mr. Daniel Williams, the coroner at the inquest at Honiton, said Joanna Burrell, aged 15, could not cope with her physical sexual experiences ‘divorced from any continuing permanent affection’.

She had lain on her bed at her farmhouse home on January 2 and put a double-barrelled shotgun to her head.

Recording a verdict that she killed herself, Mr. Williams said: ‘She was an affectionate girl, and a girl who needed affection. She was a young and sensitive girl growing up, and she found things too much for her.’

The sentence ‘Early maturity led to her killing herself’ suggests an organic disorder, rather than a human tragedy. Had we had her account available our guess is that it would have been expressed in such a way as to suggest a quite different kind of story, where personal rather than biological matters were at issue.

The same sort of attribution, of urges out of control, is a recurring theme in the reporting of school violence. Here we can turn to a report by Tim Devlin in The Times of 6 May 1975. A teacher is reported as speaking in the following way: ‘Two huge girls were fighting. I was really frightened they would hurt each other. I could not stop them, so I rather let them get on with it….’ This could be read equally as ‘Two huge bears were…’ and the picture would not be essentially different. No sense of a sharing in the social meaning of what was going on emerges, and we daresay the unfortunate teacher, with whose plight we do indeed sympathize, did not have the faintest idea what was afoot. But what was afoot was not an encounter between natural forces, or even animals, but people.

The same rhetoric appears with great frequency in the description of the football scene. Here are some examples:

Soccer Hooligans Run Riot

Violence erupted at the…Public House…the landlord said ‘It was terrifying’.

Fence Them In

British soccer’s first spiked steel fence will form an impenetrable barrier to unruly…fans next season.

Where Were the Tartan Terrors?

The loudly heralded Tartan Terror on the road to Wembley failed to show up yesterday. Londoners discovered that despite the dire predictions, the Scots might look a bit terrifying, but they were more interested in the goings-on at Wembley.

Smash These Thugs

Rees pledge after soccer terror trip.

Clobber Boys on the Rampage

However, some reporting is more sophisticated. Under the heading ‘Wild Ones of the Terraces’, a typical piece of the standard rhetoric, a fan was allowed to speak for himself. ‘We fight for the pride of our ends’ he explained. ‘What’s so marvellous, is that these kids who are doing bum jobs, and are said to be idiots, can get themselves organized like this, and set up a fabulous military strategy that goes into battle.’

We shall show that, contrary to popular opinion, the ‘kids’ are knowledgeable about their situation and the meaning of their actions, and are capable of deploying a high standard of theorizing about their activities. They show considerable linguistic and conceptual sophistication. In short, they have an explanatory rhetoric at their command. But it is different from that of the media. The latter both reflects and influences the speech forms and the conceptual resources of those who describe what are essentially alien lives from the outside. The existence of two rhetorics, of two different systems of understanding and explanation at such odds with one another, leads to a situation in which the lives and aspirations, wishes and needs of each company become more and more opaque to each other.

A contrary point of view has been maintained in a very popular sociolinguistic theory which has had considerable recent currency. This is Bernstein’s theory of restricted and elaborated codes (Bernstein, 1971). Roughly, the theory claims that ‘working-class’ children, those with whom we have been speaking in preparing this study, are suffering from a linguistic and cognitive defect vis-à-vis their ‘middle-class’ counterparts. According to Bernstein, the very conditions of their upbringing lead to their being linguistically crippled. Their language is a restricted code, so they will not be able to formulate and hence will not be able to understand many of the things which middle-class children can formulate and understand. Mental horizons will be restricted because linguistic resources are restricted.

The distinction between a restricted and an elaborated code is based on language studies carried out by middle-class investigators who entered the social world of ‘working-class’ children from the outside and without credentials valid in that world. Not surprisingly, communication was simplified and rudimentary forms dominated the interactions, as those imposed upon adopted the time-old tactic of retreating into inarticulateness to conceal what goes on within their life-world. This social tactic leads to the idea that linguistic deficit has been established empirically. The theory was rounded off by the idea that the structure and content of the curriculum as practised in any school whatever, formal or free-form was to the advantage of those capable of indefinite linguistic and conceptual elaboration. It will become clear in the course of our exposition that our studies do not support this theory. There is no evidence of linguistic deficit. Everything depends upon the situation in which talk and theorizing takes place, and between whom it is created, and what it is about. There are, however, great differences in linguistic style between academically and non-academically oriented children.

We are forced to conclude that each microsociety has its own elaborated code, capable of indefinite extension, but that it presents an opaque front to the confrontation surfaces of other micro-societies. Opacity is a social creation, a device of resistance, achieved by the closing down of speech till it has all the appearances of a restricted code. In the rudimentary forms of communication which are the only survivors of the closing-down process, very few issues indeed can be addressed.

A striking example of the growth of opacity is to be found in the story we have already referred to, as reported in the Oxford Mail. The episode as reported, involved a confrontation between a family, let us call them the Joneses, and a number of young people. These young people, much like a flock of birds, settled along the Joneses’ street frontage. The newspaper reports the affair wholly within the rhetoric of the Joneses. We have no record in the newspaper of an account from the point of view of the ‘kids’. Their rhetoric is not represented.

Our interpretation of the predicament of the Joneses is simple. Each side generates a discourse that is powerless and almost meaningless in the linguistic world of the other. Mr Jones’s attempts to control the situation by speech, his speech forms being in all probability in the mode of command, are reported as leading amazingly rapidly to the offer of violence. Can this have been the opening phases of the interaction? Hardly. Mr Jones’s reported ‘telling-them-to-go’ belongs in a mode of speech instantly recognizable by the folk of the flock as part of the rhetoric of the very world they are closed to. No doubt there was speech addressed from them to him-speech he now glosses as ‘greeting with abuse and swearing’. How could this situation fail to develop if he ‘failed to stop the nuisance by appealing to the parents of the young people’? It is just their dignity as selves that is at issue, and Mr Jones has chosen the most powerful humiliation of all, that is treating them as within the social control of their parents.

At this stage nothing remains but that each should present an opaque front to the other. Mr Jones issues orders—the kids offer simplified abuse. Each has achieved opacity by progressive restriction of their modes of communication. The kids see Mr Jones as incapable of anything but command, Mr Jones sees the kids as incapable of anything but abuse. The newspaper reporter fails both sides to the dispute by adopting the rhetoric of only one of them, that of Mr Jones. But then Mr Jones has access to the reporter and to the apparatus of public statement in a way that the kids manifestly do not.

We are not suggesting that it was a good thing that a flock of kids roosted on Mr Jones’s garden fence. They must have been a bloody nuisance. But the situation was not as the newspaper led its readers to believe, that is the articulate Mr Jones and the feral flock of savages locked in primitive combat. Two cultures confronted one another, each, as we shall show, capable of elaboration within.

Sometimes a theory is forcibly ‘shared’, either by reason of the rhetorical power of its promoters, or more rarely by exacting physical penalties from those who demur. Outside the imaginations of well-meaning social scientists and novelists that sort of situation is rare. Mostly master and slave share a theory. And the reverberations of that shared theory may last for a very long time, long after the institution which was its natural concomitant in day-to-day social practices has gone. A striking example of this is the passive ‘loser’ social style of many American black people, the style that black militants have tried with some desperation and success to redress. It reflects a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Themes and Anticipations
• 2: Trouble In School
• 3: Life On the Terraces
• 4: The Interpretation and Control of Action
• 5: Aggro As Ritualized Aggression
• Bibliography