Subcultures

Cultural Histories and Social Practice

Ken Gelder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415379526
• eBook ISBN: 9781134181261
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents a cultural history of subcultures, covering a remarkable range of subcultural forms and practices. It begins with London's 'Elizabethan underworld', taking the rogue and vagabond as subcultural prototypes: the basis for Marx's later view of subcultures as the lumpenproletariat, and Henry Mayhew's view of subcultures as 'those that will not work'. Subcultures are always in some way non-conforming or dissenting. They are social - with their own shared conventions, values, rituals, and so on – but they can also seem 'immersed' or self-absorbed. This book identifies six key ways in which subcultures have generally been understood:

• through their often negative relation to work: idle, parasitical, hedonistic, criminal
• their negative or ambivalent relation to class
• their association with territory - the 'street', the 'hood', the club - rather than property
• their movement away from home into non-domestic forms of 'belonging'
• their ties to excess and exaggeration (as opposed to restraint and moderation)
• their refusal of the banalities of ordinary life and in particular, of massification.

Subcultures looks at the way these features find expression across many different subcultural groups: from the Ranters to the riot grrrls, from taxi dancers to drag queens and kings, from bebop to hip hop, from dandies to punk, from hobos to leatherfolk, and from hippies and bohemians to digital pirates and virtual communities. It argues that subcultural identity is primarily a matter of narrative and narration, which means that its focus is literary as well as sociological. It also argues for the idea of a subcultural geography: that subcultures inhabit places in particular ways, their investment in them being as much imaginary as real and, in some cases, strikingly utopian.

Chapter 1
SUBCULTURES

A vagabond history

The Elizabethan underworld

THE BEST PLACE TO BEGIN a cultural history of subcultures (although medievalists may disagree) is in mid-sixteenth-century London, with the emergence here of an ‘Elizabethan underworld’ and the popularisation of a genre of pamphlet-writing loosely referred to as ‘rogue literature’, devoted to the chronicling of criminal types and criminal activities in and around the city. Criminal underworlds certainly existed before this time and in many other places. However, early modern London saw not only the rise of a myriad of discrete, underground criminal networks but also a proliferation of imaginative narratives about them. Gilbert Walker’s A Manifest Detection of the most vile and detestable use of Dice-Play, and other practices like the same (1552) was an ‘exposé’ of card and dice cheats, while John Awdeley’s Fraternity of Vagabonds (probably 1565) was an account of various criminal orders (‘Cozeners and Shifters’, ‘Knaves’) and criminal types (the ruffler, the whipjack, the forgerer, the ring-faller, and so on). We might also think of the playwright Robert Greene’s various ‘Cony-catching’ pamphlets from the 1590s, concerned with thieves and blackmailers and confidence-tricksters. Thomas Harman, a Justice of the Peace and author of A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors, vulgarly called Vagabonds (1567), is credited with coining the word ‘rogue’, a broadly applicable term describing vagrants and thieves who ‘used disguise, rhetorical play, and counterfeit gestures, to insinuate themselves into lawful and political contexts’ (Dionne and Mentz 2004:1–2). The term thus already carries with it imaginative possibilities: implying a kind of performative act, the creation of a fictional self, as well as linguistic display. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the sixteenth-century London rogue has attracted the attention of literary scholarship in particular, going back as far as Edward Viles and Frederick J. Furnivall’s The Rogues and Vagabonds of Shakespeare’s Youth (1880) and F.W. Chandler’s two-volume Literature of Roguery (1907). In 1930, on the other hand, an especially influential anthology of rogue literature was compiled by a Professor of the History of Education from King’s College, London: A.V. Judges’s The Elizabethan Underworld. ‘The tendency in literary criticism’, he complained, ‘has been, on the whole, to overlook the historical value of these descriptive writings. Historians themselves have hardly glanced at them…’ (Judges 1965: xiii).

Judges’s anthology of rogue literature, produced during the Depression in England, worked as a defence of the rogue and the vagabond, regarding them as victims of punitive Elizabethan social laws: ‘Tudor despotism’, as he called it. The word vagabond was given legal definition during Elizabeth’s reign, tied to idleness and vagrancy, crimes which elicited harsh penalties. Poor laws, along with enclosure laws and laws requiring proof of residency (a ‘principle of settlement’), underwrote an ‘elaborate system of central control’ (xxxvii), which excluded itinerant or displaced people from citizenship and in many cases treated them as nothing less than ‘enemies of the community’ (xv). At best, their relationship to the state was cast as parasitical, a feature strikingly expressed in William Harrison’s account of vagabonds in Description of England (1597) which had characterised them as ‘the caterpillars in the commonwealth’ who ‘lick the sweat from the true labourers [sic] brows’ and ‘stray and wander about, as creatures abhorring all labour and every honest exercise’ (cited in Dionne 1997:36). Even so, Judges wrote,

still they came, tramping singly or in groups along the country highways, sneaking into barns and hovels on the fringes of the towns, adapting themselves to city life to swell the ranks of the criminal classes of London…everywhere unsettling the common folk, and disturbing the conventions of an orderly regime.

(Judges 1965: xv)

Here is a powerful expression of the ability of underworld people to survive the legislation against them, form themselves into ‘classes’ and continue to ‘disturb’ the dominant social order. Judges’s long introduction to this important anthology was mostly devoted to the ways in which Elizabethans upheld and applied the law. In a later anthology of rogue literature, however – this time compiled by a literary critic – the focus was on the nature of those criminal classes and whether or not they might indeed be understood as subcultural. Gamini Salgado’s Cony-Catchers and Bawdy Baskets (1972) renewed interest in Elizabethan writings about cony-catchers (‘cony’ being a slang term for rabbit) and various other rogue types. But he also wanted to claim that the underworlds these people inhabited were not only organised but social:

Seen through the disapproving eyes of respectable citizens they were nothing but a disorderly and disorganized rabble, dropouts from the social ladder. But seen from within, they appear to be like nothing so much as a mirror-image of the Elizabethan world-picture: a little world, tightly organized into its own ranks and with its own rules, as rigid in its own way as the most elaborate protocol at court or ritual in church.

(Salgado 1972:13)

This remark is no doubt a reply to E.M.W. Tillyard’s influential book, The Elizabethan World Picture (1942), which conveyed a sense of the orderliness of Elizabethan life, real and/or imaginary, but had nothing to say about early modern underworlds at all. Salgado doesn’t reject orderliness, however. He retains Tillyard’s ‘world picture’, but now transfers it to the criminal underclasses themselves: they are just as orderly and hierarchical as the Elizabethan aristocracy. An important way of understanding subcultures is thus offered here, that even as they appear disorderly to outsiders they are from their own perspective ‘tightly organised’, their social worlds structured by rules and protocols.

Salgado went on to write a book called The Elizabethan Underworld (1977), using the same title as Judges’s earlier anthology. It evokes a sense of sixteenth-century London as overrun by underworld folk of various kinds, each of them inhabiting their own zones – the brothel districts, for example – but also flowing freely through the city: segregated in some respects, all too proximate in others. This is a picturesque (and picaresque) account, relishing its rogue characters or types which it describes at some length. But other disciplines were also interested in Elizabethan underworlds. John McMullan’s The Canting Crew: London’s Criminal Underworld 1550–1700 (1984) came out of criminology, a discipline which as we shall see has been of particular importance to subcultural studies. I have wanted to suggest that the Elizabethan figure of the vagabond is especially important to subcultural studies because it was understood in terms of its parasitical relations to labour and its rootlessness and the fact that it was not tied to property, even though it might be tied for a time to a particular place. Salgado calls the vagabond underworld a ‘society of the road’ (Salgado 1977:130), rather like gypsies who were also of concern to early modern legislators. For McMullan, the rootlessness of vagabonds and rogues was in fact directed at London itself, since the population of the city increased dramatically in the late sixteenth century. We shall also come to see (in Chapter 2 especially) that migration and immigration are so often the foundational events for subcultural identity, and this is certainly how McMullan saw it as vagrant groups moved into London to take advantage of its wealth, its size and its social complexities. Soon, London played host to ‘a myriad of diverse social universes’ (McMullan 1984:17). Criminal underworlds flourished, concentrating their skills and teaching them to new recruits. London’s geography might even be mapped out in terms of the various underworlds that thrived there: ‘Criminal areas came to possess an elaborate yet unofficial social world with its own criminal vocabulary, criminal technology, division of labour, apprenticeship system, criminal haunts, and style of collective life’ (157).

There is now, according to Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz, a sub-discipline of early modern historical research called ‘Rogue Studies’ (Dionne and Mentz 2004:11). Dionne argues that the rogue literature of the late sixteenth century played a major role in subcultural formation, helping to ‘reshape the image of the hapless vagabond into the covert member of a vast criminal underground of organised guilds, complete with their own internally coherent barter economy, master–apprentice relations, secret languages, and patrons’ (Dionne 2004:33). Dionne and Mentz are literary critics, however, and naturally enough they return our attention to the imaginative features of rogue literature. They criticise McMullan for ‘bestowing authenticity on characters and incidents’ from Elizabethan texts that are not necessarily realistic – or authentic. They criticise Salgado, too, for accepting these underworld narratives as real. But just how imaginary were the subcultures of Elizabethan London? Dionne and Mentz call for a ‘middle position’, one that combines fact with fiction and blends real documentation with imaginative effects – perhaps rather as the writers of rogue literature, like Robert Greene, did themselves: ‘The basic fact-or-fiction split – between reading the rogue as a historical figure who “reveals” something about the real social conditions of early modern England, or analysing this figure as a cultural construction who “represents” an imagined response to cultural stimuli – remains an active divide in studies of early modern roguery’ (Dionne and Mentz 2004:22). Subcultural studies can also be divided along similar lines, as later chapters will suggest.

Vagabondiana

The figure of the rogue and the idea of rogues’ communities – ‘canting crews’ – persisted in British writing into the Restoration and beyond. Richard Head’s The English Rogue and Other Extravagants (1665) begins to look fondly at the rogue, chronicling an ‘excessive’ lifestyle of brothel-cruising and deception. Extravagance becomes the thing that links the rogue to his aristocratic Restoration counterpart, the rake: this is the argument Harold Weber makes, for example, noting that both socio-literary types embodied a ‘refusal to accept conventional social restraints’ as they pursued financial gain and sexual license (Weber 1984:15). The rogue moves into picaresque literature in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century – a genre influenced by earlier Spanish models – and is usually cast as an individualised figure moving episodically and nomadically through the world, increasingly sentimentalised as the genre goes on. Other narratives about subcultural types were much less sentimental, however. The famous eighteenth-century English painter William Hogarth produced his well-known series of engravings, The Rake’s Progress, in 1735: eight plates which represented the rake’s rise in fortune and subsequent terrible decline. Hogarth had also produced an earlier set of engravings, The Harlot’s Progress: the narrative cycle of a prostitute, Moll Hackabout, from her migration into the city and the establishment of a social network through which her career could develop, through to her imprisonment and finally her death, presumably from venereal disease. For Sophie Carter, The Harlot’s Progress was not a unique work; rather, it reflected a cultural narrative about prostitution already available during the early eighteenth century, familiar but also fascinating enough for many people actually to want to buy the prints for themselves. There was, she writes, ‘an established and venerable framework for describing the life of the archetypal London prostitute in use in popular print culture since the late seventeenth century at the very least’ (Carter 2004:33). The prostitute is understood here in a particular way, vulnerable at first but also drawn to vice, an aberrant figure whose innate ‘deviance’ is all too easily revealed – and which works to condemn her at the end. Elsewhere, Tony Henderson has suggested that London’s prostitutes in the early eighteenth century were in fact networked and adaptable, retaining a certain amount of agency and choice in their work, preferring ‘the relative independence’ of streetwalking in pairs or groups (rather than alone, like Hogarth’s harlot) – heavily policed and always risking infection but experiencing, as their careers as prostitutes came to an end, ‘little difficulty in reintegrating into a part of society which the great majority of them had never really left’ (Henderson 1999:51). As we have seen with rogue literature, however, fact and fiction – narrative and reality – are not so easy to disentangle. And the persuasiveness of a culturally available narrative may indeed be great enough to make whatever realities one might uncover pale into insignificance.

Certainly the image of the prostitute as a figure migrating into the city and then inhabiting particular zones within it retained – and still retains – its cultural force. The prostitute here also parallels the narrative of the vagabond, a rootless character similarly understood as innately drawn to vice. Rogues and vagabonds preoccupied social legislators and moral crusaders in Britain throughout the eighteenth century and into the Regency period: a period which, as Donald A. Low remarks in his book, Thieves’ Kitchen: The Regency Underworld, might otherwise conventionally be associated with the novels of Jane Austen, that is, ‘with social poise…an ideal of elegance and moral alertness’ and a classical sense of order (Low 1982:1). Low’s account of the Regency underworld in London recalls Salgado’s account of the Elizabethan underworld in that city, as well as Kellow Chesney’s earlier popular study, The Victorian Underworld (1970). Each of these books provides a counter-narrative to any investment in a ‘world picture’ of metropolitan order and stability. Like Salgado, Low emphasises the rapid increase of London’s population at this time and the way it played host to large numbers of itinerant people. He chronicles a range of moral and legal concerns amongst respectable citizens and officials; but he also notes the ways in which rogues and vagabonds worked as a kind of spectacle, eliciting fascination just as much as repulsion. In 1817, the Keeper of Prints in the British Museum, John Thomas Smith, published Vagabondiana, or Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London. Smith wrote rather sternly about beggars in London as a public nuisance and worried in particular about how difficult it could be to distinguish ‘industrious’ beggars from ‘sturdy impostors’ – that is, reality from fiction – although he also characterised begging as a declining phenomenon, with new Vagrancy Laws designed to remove them from the streets. But he sketched them, too, in the already well-established tradition of what were called ‘Cries’, artistic renderings of urban outcasts and ‘anchorless’ people (see Shesgreen 2002), and his pictures conveyed a sense of the street-based beggar’s often quite elaborate costume aesthetics. Lionel Rose has suggested that beggars in Regency London were so ‘varied and raggedly picturesque…that a picaresque literary sub-culture grew up around them, a product of myth and folklore in which the “Jovial Beggar” was somewhat enviously depicted as the carefree antithesis of the work-bound “flats” (mugs) they preyed upon’ (Rose 1988:23). The gypsy, too, figured in this way, especially through the romantic autobiographical novels of the English linguist George Borrow, Lavengro (1851) and its sequel, The Romany Rye (1857), which see the author leaving London to go out on the open road to mix with gypsies and celebrate their wanderlust. The narrative emerging here is quite different to Hogarth’s representation of the eighteenth-century prostitute. It shows that the beggar and vagabond – as well as eliciting moral disapproval from many – could also find themselves inhabiting a certain kind of romance, built around one’s attraction to (or nostalgias for) a ‘carefree’ existence and a wandering life free from the duties of family and work.

Subcultures are sometimes sentimentalised, sometimes not; and the narratives they are given are therefore sometimes romantic, sometimes anti-romantic, depending on the case or, rather, depending on the uses to which a subculture is put and the investments being made in them. If vagabond and rogue communities are cast as largely parasit...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION
• Chapter 1 SUBCULTURES
• Chapter 2 THE CHICAGO SCHOOL AND AFTER
• Chapter 3 BAR SCENES AND CLUB CULTURES
• Chapter 4 LITERARY SUBCULTURAL GEOGRAPHIES
• Chapter 5 SUBCULTURES AND CULTURAL STUDIES
• Chapter 6 SUBCULTURE, MUSIC, NATION
• Chapter 7 ANACHRONISTIC SELF-FASHIONING
• Chapter 8 FANS, NETWORKS, PIRATES
• Bibliography
• Index