Resistance Through Rituals

Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain

Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134346530
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Praise for the first edition:

'No one seriously interested in youth mass culture or style can afford to ignore this work.' - Stanley Cohen, The Times Higher Education Supplement

'The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies deserves our gratitude for having begun to locate the real areas of discussion.' - New Society

'…affords an authoritative perspective of society's subcultures amongst the young since the war. What it has to say about that legacy of rebellion deserves to be read by all involved with and seeking to understand young people.' - ILEA Contact

This revised and expanded edition of Resistance through Rituals includes a new introduction to bring the reader fully up-to-date with the changes that have happened since the work's first release in the double issue of Working Papers in Cultural Studies in 1975.

The work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham has been noted as historically leading the field in new areas of enquiry within the field of cultural studies, and the papers from the Centre are canonical reading for many cultural studies students. This revised edition includes all the original, exceptional papers, and enhances these with the reflections of the editors thirty years after the original publication.

At a time when youth culture had been widely publicised, but few people understood its significance as one of the most striking and visible manifestations of social and political change, these papers redressed the balance. Looking in detail at the wide range of post-war youth subcultures, from teds, mods and skinheads to black Rastafarians, Resistance through Rituals considers how youth culture reflects and reacts to cultural change.

This text represents the collective understanding of the leading centre for contemporary culture, and serves to situate some of the most important cultural work of the twentieth century in the new millennium.

Part I

Theory I

1 Subcultures, Cultures and Class

John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, Brian Roberts

Our subject in this volume is Youth Cultures: our object, to explain them as a phenomenon, and their appearance in the post-war period. The subject has, of course, been massively treated, above all in the mass media. Yet, many of these surveys and analyses seem mainly to have multiplied the confusions and extended the mythologies surrounding the topic. By treating it in terms of its spectacular features only, these surveys have become part of the very phenomenon we want to explain. First, then, we must clear the ground, try to get behind the myths and explanations which cover up, rather than clarify, the problem. We have to construct the topic first – partly by demolishing certain concepts which, at present, are taken as adequately defining it. Necessarily, this exercise of penetrating beneath a popular construction must be done with care, lest we discard the ‘rational kernel’ along with its over-publicised husk.

The social and political meaning of Youth Cultures is not easy to assess: though their visibility has been consistently high. ‘Youth’ appeared as an emergent category in post-war Britain, one of the most striking and visible manifestations of social change in the period. ‘Youth’ provided the focus for official reports, pieces of legislation, official interventions. It was signified as a social problem by the moral guardians of the society – something we ‘ought to do something about’. Above all, Youth played an important role as a cornerstone in the construction of understandings, interpretations and quasi-explanations about the period. As the Rowntree study of the Popular Press and Social Change suggested:

Youth was, in both papers [the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror] and perhaps in the whole press of the period, a powerful but concealed metaphor for social change: the compressed image of a society which had crucially changed, in terms of basic life-styles and values – changed, in ways calculated to upset the official political framework, but in ways not yet calculable in traditional political terms …

(Smith et al., 1975)

It would be difficult to sustain the argument that a phenomenon as massively present and visible as ‘Youth Culture’, occupying a pivotal position in the history and consciousness of the period, was a pure construction of the media, a surface phenomenon only. However, Gramsci warned us that, ‘in studying a structure, it is necessary to distinguish organic movements (relatively permanent) from movements which may be termed “conjunctural”, and which appear as occasional, immediate, almost accidental’. The aim must be to ‘find the correct relation between what is organic and what is conjunctural’ (Gramsci, 1971: 177). The ‘phenomenal form’ – Youth Culture provides a point of departure, only, for such an analysis. We cannot afford to be blind to such a development (as some ‘sceptical materialists’ of the old left have been, with due respect to the recent debate in Marxism Today) any more than we can afford to be blinded by them (as some ‘visionary idealists’ of the new left have at times been).

A. Some Definitions

We begin with some minimal definitions. The term, ‘Youth Culture’, directs us to the ‘cultural’ aspects of youth. We understand the word ‘culture’ to refer to that level at which social groups develop distinct patterns of life, and give expressive form to their social and material life-experience. Culture is the way, the forms, in which groups ‘handle’ the raw material of their social and material existence. ‘We must suppose the raw material of life experience to be at one pole, and all the infinitely complex human disciplines and systems, articulate and inarticulate, formalised in institutions or dispersed in the least formal ways, which “handle”, transmit or distort this raw material, to be at the other’ (Thompson, 1960). ‘Culture’ is the practice which realises or objectivates group-life in meaningful shape and form. ‘As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce’ (Marx, 1970: 42). The ‘culture’ of a group or class is the peculiar and distinctive ‘way of life’ of the group or class, the meanings, values and ideas embodied in institutions, in social relations, in systems of beliefs, in mores and customs, in the uses of objects and material life. Culture is the distinctive shapes in which this material and social organisation of life expresses itself. A culture includes the ‘maps of meaning’ which make things intelligible to its members. These ‘maps of meaning’ are not simply carried around in the head: they are objectivated in the patterns of social organisation and relationship through which the individual becomes a ‘social individual’. Culture is the way the social relations of a group are structured and shaped: but it is also the way those shapes are experienced, understood and interpreted.

A social individual, born into a particular set of institutions and relations, is at the same moment born into a peculiar configuration of meanings, which give her access to and locate her within ‘a culture’. The ‘law of society’ and the ‘law of culture’ (the symbolic ordering of social life) are one and the same. These structures – of social relationship and of meaning – shape the on-going collective existence of groups. But they also limit, modify and constrain how groups live and reproduce their social existence. Men and women are, thus, formed, and form themselves through society, culture and history. So the existing cultural patterns form a sort of historical reservoir – a pre-constituted ‘field of the possible’ – which groups take up, transform, develop. Each group makes something of its starting conditions – and through this ‘making’, through this practice, culture is reproduced and transmitted. But this practice only takes place within the given field of possibilities and constraints (see Sartre, 1963). ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx, 1951: 225). Culture, then, embodies the trajectory of group life through history: always under conditions and with ‘raw materials’ which cannot wholly be of its own making.

Groups which exist within the same society and share some of the same material and historical conditions no doubt also understand, and to a certain extent share each others’ ‘culture’. But just as different groups and classes are unequally ranked in relation to one another, in terms of their productive relations, wealth and power, so cultures are differently ranked, and stand in opposition to one another, in relations of domination and subordination, along the scale of ‘cultural power’. The definitions of the world, the ‘maps of meaning’ which express the life situation of those groups which hold the monopoly of power in society, command the greatest weight and influence, secrete the greatest legitimacy. The world tends to be classified out and ordered in terms and through structures which most directly express the power, the position, the hegemony, of the powerful interest in that society. Thus,

The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control, at the same time, over the means of mental production, so that, thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it … Insofar as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch … they do this in its whole range, hence, among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.

(Marx, 1970: 64)

This does not mean that there is only one set of ideas or cultural forms in a society. There will be more than one tendency at work within the dominant ideas of a society. Groups or classes which do not stand at the apex of power, nevertheless find ways of expressing and realising in their culture their subordinate position and experiences. In so far as there is more than one fundamental class in a society (and capitalism is essentially the bringing together, around production, of two fundamentally different classes – capital and labour) there will be more than one major cultural configuration in play at a particular historical moment. But the structures and meanings which most adequately reflect the position and interests of the most powerful class – however complex it is internally – will stand, in relation to all the others, as a dominant social-cultural order. The dominant culture represents itself as the culture. It tries to define and contain all other cultures within its inclusive range. Its views of the world, unless challenged, will stand as the most natural, all-embracing, universal culture. Other cultural configurations will not only be subordinate to this dominant order: they will enter into struggle with it, seek to modify, negotiate, resist or even overthrow its reign – its hegemony. The struggle between classes over material and social life thus always assumes the forms of a continuous struggle over the distribution of ‘cultural power’. We might want, here, to make a distinction between ‘culture’ and ‘ideology’. Dominant and subordinate classes will each have distinct cultures. But when one culture gains ascendancy over the other, and when the subordinate culture experiences itself in terms prescribed by the dominant culture, then the dominant culture has also become the basis of a dominant ideology.

The dominant culture of a complex society is never a homogeneous structure. It is layered, reflecting different interests within the dominant class (e.g. an aristocratic versus a bourgeois outlook), containing different traces from the past (e.g. religious ideas within a largely secular culture), as well as emergent elements in the present. Subordinate cultures will not always be in open conflict with it. They may, for long periods, coexist with it, negotiate the spaces and gaps in it, make inroads into it, ‘warrenning it from within’ (Thompson, 1965). However, though the nature of this struggle over culture can never be reduced to a simple opposition, it is crucial to replace the notion of ‘culture’ with the more concrete, historical concept of ‘cultures’; a redefinition which brings out more clearly the fact that cultures always stand in relations of domination – and subordination – to one another, are always, in some sense, in struggle with one another. The singular term, ‘culture’, can only indicate, in the most general and abstract way, the large cultural configurations at play in a society at any historical moment. We must move at once to the determining relationships of domination and subordination in which these configurations stand; to the processes of incorporation and resistance which define the cultural dialectic between them; and to the institutions which transmit and reproduce ‘the culture’ (i.e. the dominant culture) in its dominant or ‘hegemonic’ form.

In modern societies, the most fundamental groups are the social classes, and the major cultural configurations will be, in a fundamental though often mediated way, ‘class cultures’. Relative to these cultural-class configurations, sub-cultures are sub-sets – smaller, more localised and differentiated structures, within one or other of the larger cultural networks. We must, first, see subcultures in terms of their relation to the wider class-cultural networks of which they form a distinctive part. When we examine this relationship between a subculture and the ‘culture’ of which it is a part, we call the latter the ‘parent’ culture. This must not be confused with the particular relationship between ‘youth’ and their ‘parents’, of which much will be said below. What we mean is that a subculture, though differing in important ways – in its ‘focal concerns’, its peculiar shapes and activities – from the culture from which it derives, will also share some things in common with that ‘parent’ culture. The bohemian subculture of the avant-garde which has arisen from time to time in the modern city, is both distinct from its ‘parent’ culture (the urban culture of the middle class intelligent-sia) and yet also a part of it (sharing with it a modernising outlook, standards of education, a privileged position vis-a-vis productive labour, and so on). In the same way, the ‘search for pleasure and excitement’ which some analysts have noted as a marked feature of the ‘delinquent subculture of the gang’ in the working class, also shares something basic and fundamental with it. Sub-cultures, then, must first be related to the ‘parent cultures’ of which they are a sub-set. But, subcultures must also be analysed 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 subcultures 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. (We believe this goes some way towards meeting Graham Murdock’s call for a more ‘symmetrical’ analysis of subcultures. See his article below.)

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. The famous Kray twins, for example, belonged both to a highly differentiated ‘criminal subculture’ in East London and to the ‘normal’ life and culture of the East End working class (of which indeed, the ‘criminal subculture’ has always been a clearly identifiable part). The behaviour of the Krays in terms of the criminal fraternity marks the differentiating axis of that subculture: the relation of the Krays to their mother, family, home and local pub is the binding, the articulating axis. (Pearson, 1973; Hebdige, 1974).

Sub-cultures, therefore, take shape around the distinctive activities and ‘focal concerns’ of groups. They can be loosely or tightly bounded. Some subcultures are merely loosely-defined strands or ‘milieux’ within the parent culture: they possess no distinctive ‘world’ of their own. Others develop a clear, coherent identity and structure. Generally, we deal in this volume only with ‘subcultures’ (whether drawn from a middle or working class ‘parent culture’) which have reasonably tight boundaries, distinctive shapes, which have cohered around particular activities, focal concerns and territorial spaces. When these tightly-defined groups are also distinguished by age and generation, we call them ‘youth subcultures’.

‘Youth subcultures’ form up on the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Once more Around Resistance through Rituals
• Introduction
• Part I Theory I
• Part II Ethnography
• Part III Theory II
• Part IV Method
• References
• Index