The Subcultural Imagination

Theory, Research and Reflexivity in Contemporary Youth Cultures

Shane Blackman, Michelle Kempson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138484931
• eBook ISBN: 9781317549710
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Subcultural Imagination discusses young adults in subcultures and examines how sociologists use qualitative research methods to study them. Through the application of the ideas of C. Wright Mills to the development of theory-reflexive ethnography, this book analyses the experiences of young people in different subcultural settings, as well as reflecting on how young people in subcultures interact in the wider context of society, biography and history. From Cuba to London, and Bulgaria to Asia, this book delves into urban spaces and street corners, young people's parties, gigs, BDSM fetish clubs, school, the home, and feminist zines to offer a picture of live sociology in practice. In three parts, the volume explores:

• history, biography and subculture;
• practising reflexivity in the field;
• epistemologies, pedagogies and the subcultural subject.

The book offers cutting edge theory and rich empirical research on social class, gender and ethnicities from both established and new researchers across diverse disciplinary backgrounds. It moves the subcultural debate beyond the impasse of the term's relevance, to one where researchers are fully engaged with the lives of the subcultural subjects. This innovative edited collection will appeal to scholars and students in the areas of sociology, youth studies, media and cultural studies/communication, research methods and ethnography, popular music studies, criminology, politics, social and cultural theory, and gender studies.

Part I

History, biography and subculture

1 From here to modernity

Rethinking the Youth Question with C. Wright Mills

Phil Cohe n

Introduction

There is a long history of representations of youth as either a period of careering about or as a form of apprenticeship. Today neither career nor apprenticeship provide a coherent framing narrative, and both have undergone radical transformation in a way that sends mixed and often contradictory life-historical messages. Meanwhile the codes of vocation and inheritance, once marginalised, have made a comeback bid, albeit in perverse forms dislocated from their original spiritual and material meanings. In Chris Dunkley’s (2013) The Precariat, the central character, Fin, a budding NEET, decides to become a ‘chip off the old block’ and follow in his Dad’s footsteps into contingent labour within the hidden economy, rather than be paralysed by an aspirational discourse which has no bearing on his real circumstances and opportunities. He has apprenticed himself voluntarily to a condition of permanent precarity, and as a member of this shadow workforce he embraces his forced servitude to the whims of the market as a special vocation, albeit one which will probably be registered in the form of a criminal career.

In this chapter I am going to be arguing two things: first, that ‘youth’ is no longer a discrete and transient stage of life associated with certain styles of ‘storm and dress’; it has become either a sign of chronic precarity shared by many age groups, or a transferable physical cum existential attribute, desired above all by pre-teens who have bought their way into ‘youth subculture’ at an early age and affluent third agers who have invented their own version of the ‘adolescent moratorium’ as a period of structured irresponsibility.

Second, in order to grasp what is now at stake in the Youth Question, and how these stakes have shifted, we have to take a leaf out of C. Wright Mills’ book, and exercise our sociological imaginations. Mills defined the sociological imagination as ‘the capacity to shift from one perspective to another – the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self – and to see the relations between the two of them’. He did not think that the sociologists of his day were equipped with the suppleness of thought or subtlety of interpretation required to develop this imaginative faculty, obsessed as they were with quantitative methodologies. Moreover, subsequent generations of social scientists, while they frequently refer to, and sometimes even defer to, C. Wright Mill’s mission statement for their discipline, have found it no easier to achieve its goals. Instead, the sociological imagination has gravitated to the visual and performance arts, to the novel and to poetry. Yet such a multi-standpoint epistemology, moving in scope and scale from the abstract to the concrete and back again, is mandatory in regard to the Youth Question.

Bruno Latour’s (2005) critique of the sociological tool kit, with its clunky binaries (macro/micro: structure/agency) and reified conception of social causality as a kind of glue binding us together behind our backs, suggests one reason why it has been so difficult to practise what Mills preached. At the same time, the gulf between public and private matters of concern, and the collapse or hollowing out of narratives that connected collective and individual aspiration to each other through struggles of long duration, have meant that the general capacity to imagine alternative social structures has greatly diminished and is confined to utopian or dystopian literature. Yet clearly the Youth Question (the set of issues posed for and by a culture about how it constructs ‘youth’ discoursively as a specific bio-political category and how this impacts empirically on the lives of those to whom it is applied) is a suitable case for the Wright Mills treatment. Here at least biography cannot be divorced from history.

‘Generation Rent’

If the Youth Question has recently re-emerged as a hot topic around the notion of ‘Generation Rent’, this is not just because a particular cohort of young people who had middle class expectations of secure jobs and housing are finding themselves trapped in various kinds of precarious circumstance; rather the contemporary Youth Question dramatises the fact that the life-historical paradigms that hitherto connected biographical trajectories to historically sedimented structures of family, work and community, ain’t what they used to be; the principles of periodicity that hitherto defined and regulated existential predicaments associated with adolescence have become as unstable for middle class young people as they have long been for their working class peers. ‘Generation Rent’ may turn out not to be merely an ethno-demographic construct, a way of attributing political and/or cultural meaning to a specific population, but an element of psycho-geography, defining a certain form of liminality in which states of transient or conjunctural precarity associated with glamourised forms of risk taking become chronic and take on structural and site specific connotations. ‘Generation Rent’ serves as a generic term for the denizens of urban edgelands thrown up by the impact of globalisation on local housing and labour markets making hopes of lifetime dwelling and jobs redundant.

So are we talking here about a new kind of ‘youth subculture’, one which embraces NEETS (a person not in education, employment, or training) and wannabe hipsters in a common idiom linked to socially expressive but highly individualistic forms of ‘venture capitalism’? If by ‘subculture’, we mean certain shared codes of dress, music, talk, feeling, belief and life style which evolve in response to marginalisation, and where the dominant narratives of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity are subverted through a play of symbolic substitutions to create a halo of ‘deviance’ or insubordination, then the answer is decidedly no. We might, for instance, talk about gay subculture, or rather subcultures, organised around certain sexual preferences and their various ways of queerying the gender codes of straight (que patriarchal) society. Equally we might hail ‘Chavs’ as the worthy successors of skinheads, (not least in their demonisation) and recognise Emo Boys as postmodern Mods. The point about subcultures as sites of self identification is that they advertise, celebrate and fetishise their difference, and indeed often pursue what Freud (1929: 84) called a ‘narcissism in respect of minor differences’ while their forms of insubordination remain dependant on their ‘parent’ cultures as their primary reference point, even as they proclaim their autonomy from it. It is only when they become politicised, as happened with gay subcultures in the context of the AIDS crisis, when subcultures depart their real or imagined stylistic ghettoes to engage with the wider body politic, that they become fully fledged counter-cultures, cultures which challenge the hegemony of the dominant codes (in this example, of heterosexism).

‘Generation Rent’ is not a counter-culture in this sense. It has a different genealogy. It began as a rallying point in the campaign against austerity politics and quickly became a major referent in public debates around housing. It raises issues of civic entitlement, structural inequality, contingent labour and what one generation owes to or can demand from another. The term’s resonance addresses the changing status and meaning of adolescence as a distinctive mode of ontological precarity within a life course whose signposts have been radically altered. The fact is that the maps of growing up relayed by all those institutions charged with so doing no longer correspond to the territories that young people actually occupy. This is not just a matter of broken or deferred transitions from family or school, to full time work and independent living, or the changing balance of economic power between different generations. Rather it is a question about how ‘generation’ as such, is lived as a retro-prospective construct, as both an imagined community in the making and as an invented tradition. Or to put it another way, the Youth Question dramatises a wider crisis of representation in the life course which in different ways affects all ages across much of the class spectrum in the era of late capitalist modernity.

Nothing is more symptomatic of this shift than the fate of the ‘youth wage’. A wage form which used to apply to 14–18 year olds, trapping them in blind alley jobs, and was supposed to cover their subsistence needs on the premise that they continued to live at home and were subsidised by the family wage paid to the (male) head of household, has lost its age specificity along with its patriarchal anchorage; today the principle is not only applied to latter day apprentices, trainees and interns but is generalised to most categories of insecure, casual low paid work concentrated in the hidden, pop up and secondary economies. While ‘youth’ remains relatively fixed as a legal category of dis/qualification, its sociological oscillation between a state of chronic precocity (12 year old school kids who are too sexy for their iPads) and chronic precarity associated with the transition from voluntary to forced contingent labour means that its boundaries are inherently unstable. ‘Youth’ is not so much a stage in the life cycle as a stage upon which its crisis of representation is performed. But before we can get that shift into perspective we need to tell some of its back story.

Youth as an angel of history

It was Marx who first drew our attention to the dialectic of generations in which biography and history intersect. In The German Ideology he wrote:

History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all the proceeding generations. And this, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances, and on the other modifies the old circumstances with completely changed activity

(Marx, 1845/1970: 57)

Marx, typically, dialecticises the notions of tradition and modernity, without abandoning their anchorage in the idea that each generation possesses a collective biography that gives it historical individuality. Tradition is here regarded as a kind of inheritance or legacy handed down from one generation to the next but it is also, according to Marx, an apprenticeship to the past interrupted by history itself. From this optic, a generation is a special kind of imagined community based on inventing shared traditions linked to formative experiences associated with a particular life/historical conjuncture (1968, or 1989, for example). It is a retrospective construct even though those who identify themselves in this way may see it in entirely prospective terms. And because each so-called ‘generation’ is engaged in creating its own traditions to mark its advent as a historical subject, it tends to ignore or reject the invented traditions of its predecessors. There are no ‘generational cycles’ in history. And perhaps we need to emphasise that ‘generation’ in itself is primarily an ideological or ethno-demographic construct, which only in special circumstances becomes a social or economic force. When people belonging to particular age cohorts speak and act as if they represent a generation for and to itself, this is usually in order to create a platform from which to mobilise a form of quasi-oedipal politics directed against particular power blocs, especially where these are associated with the exercise of patriarchal authority

In relation to ‘youth’ and modernity the discovery of adolescence as a distinctive stage of the life cycle is intimately bound up with its association with modernity and the shock of the new. The notion starts by being firmly located within the Romantic Movement, and its cult of ‘Sturm und Drang’. What was so stormy about adolescence, and so stressful for the parents of adolescents, was the fact that it marked a hiatus between the position of the young person considered as an object of legal, moral and pedagogic surveillance, and that of the adult, considered as a fully enfranchised citizen of the state, with all the rights and responsibilities that flowed from it. Into that gap were concentrated all those aspects of human behaviour that could neither be rationalised or sentimentalised in the then current schemas ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introducing the sociological and the subcultural imagination
• PART I History, biography and subculture
• PART II Practising reflexivity in the field
• PART III Epistemologies, pedagogies and the subcultural subject
• Index