Youth Cultures in the Age of Global Media

Sara Bragg, Mary Jane Kehily, D. Buckingham

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349435517, 9781137008145
• eBook ISBN: 9781137008152
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the impact of globalisation and new technologies on youth cultures around the world, from the Birmingham School to the youthscapes of South Korea. In a timely reappraisal of youth cultures in contemporary times, this collection profiles the best of new research in youth studies written by leading scholars in the field.

Part I
Theorizing Youth Cultures

1

‘What Time Is Now?’: Researching Youth and Culture beyond the ‘Birmingham School’

Christine Griffin

Introduction

In the second half of the 1970s, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (hereafter CCCS)¹ at Birmingham University produced a series of highly influential texts on the relationship between (predominantly white, male, working class, heterosexual, British) youth and popular culture. Texts by Hall and Jefferson (1975), Hebdige (1979), Willis (1978) and McRobbie (1978) were to prove formative for what became the new field of youth sub/cultural studies. Work linked to ‘the Birmingham School’ attempted to represent youth sub/cultures ‘from the inside’, employing ethnographic methods and drawing on versions of New Left/Marxist and feminist theory. This work took young people’s cultural practices seriously, in opposition to the then contemporary academic and popular orthodoxy that viewed working class youth in overwhelmingly negative terms.

As someone who worked at CCCS in the early 1980s, I have always been surprised by the speed with which this diverse and profoundly oppositional body of work came to be constituted as a uniform approach and even as an orthodoxy.² The ‘CCCS approach’ was never a unified set of ideas or a common framework: it was forged in and through contestation, although only some debates were reflected in published texts (e.g. Clarke, 1981; Frith, 1983; McRobbie, 1980; McRobbie and Garber, 1975; Mungham and Pearson, 1976; Powell and Clarke, 1975). These could be heated disputes, but they reflected a passionate engagement with theory, research and politics. Despite their differences, many of those involved in the early youth sub/cultures project were grappling with a common set of politically informed theoretical debates, which contributed to a sense of coherence, as did the collective working practices from which much of this work emerged.

Resistance through Rituals: The youth sub/cultures project and post-war Britain

The youth sub/cultures project³ was formed at a particular historical, cultural and political conjuncture, as referenced in the sub-title of Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (Hall and Jefferson, 1975; hereafter ‘RTR’). This period was characterized by the emergence of ‘teenagers’ as an increasingly visible social group with more disposable income, a growing market geared to youth consumption and an expanding media culture industry focussed around this distinctive ‘youth’ market (Griffin, 1993). Its wider context was the loss of Empire amid the post-war era of apparent affluence, embourgeoisement and consensus. The youth sub/cultures project treated (primarily white, male, heterosexual, British) working class youth cultural practices as potentially creative, imbued with meaning and political significance and as worthy of study in their own terms. The work also aimed to understand working class youth sub/cultures via a mediated view that explored the cultural and political significance of youth styles, music and popular culture. Youth sub/cultural theory politicized (working class) youth style.

The youth sub/cultures project also aimed to document what John Clarke and colleagues termed ‘the stubborn refusal of class to disappear as a major dimension and dynamic of the social structure’ in post-war Britain (Clarke et al., 1975, p. 25, original emphasis). ‘RTR’ put class at the centre in theorizing the lives of young people, viewing working class youth cultures through a lens of power and challenging the predominant generational perspective of the period (Clarke et al., 1975). The youth sub/cultures project aimed to understand how young working class people reproduce, negotiate and transform their material conditions through signifying cultural practices, but (to paraphrase Marx) not in circumstances of their own making (Clarke, 2009). Working class youth subcultures were therefore viewed both as responses to the ‘material and situated experience’ of (primarily white, male, heterosexual) working class young people and as attempted solutions to those problems, or ‘magical resolutions’ as Phil Cohen put it (Cohen, 1972). ‘RTR’ did not dismiss such ‘magical resolutions’ as forms of ‘false consciousness’ (like traditional Marxists), or ‘juvenile delinquency’ (like those working in the sociology of deviance), nor did it valorize them as the key to revolutionary change as some subsequent critics have argued.

One of the most valuable contributions of the youth sub/cultures project was the recognition that such sub/cultural ‘magical resolutions’ could never deliver on what they appeared to offer working class young people. The ‘magical resolutions’ offered by youth sub/cultural practices could operate (in part) as forms of creative cultural resistance with radical political significance (Hall and Jefferson, 1975), but the tragedy for working class youth was that these sub/cultural practices also operated as a trap, locking them into the very conditions from which they strove so hard to escape (Willis, 1977, 1978). Youth sub/cultural styles appeared to promise a route out of the boring drudgery of poor education, low-paid work, unemployment, limited money, and for young women, a lifetime of unpaid housework and childcare. Early contributions to the youth sub/cultures project drew attention to the grim conditions in which many young working class people were growing up in 1970s’ Britain, and demonstrated how such promises of escape could constrain them into an obsession with fashion and the rapidly changing market for youth-oriented consumer goods (e.g. Hebdige, 1979; McRobbie, 1978).

The youth sub/cultures project has tended to be judged (and found wanting) according to the values of subsequent political moments, especially where the intersections of ‘race’, gender and sexuality are concerned. Its (neo-)Marxist foundations tended to overlook gender, ‘race’ and sexuality; according class a primary that eclipsed the potential impact of other important sets of social relations. However, this was the focus of sustained critique from the start (Amos and Parmar, 1981; Jones, 1988; McRobbie and Garber, 1975; Race and Politics Group, 1982), and the force of more recent critiques sometimes obscures the battles of those who were involved in the youth sub/cultures project during this formative period.

Following ‘RTR’: Post- and anti-subcultural critiques of ‘the Birmingham School’

By the 1990s, the work of ‘the Birmingham school’ had become the focus of more sustained critique. This was partly a consequence of postmodernist debates about representation, politics and resistance (e.g. Baudrillard, 1983; Maffesoli, 1986), but also a reflection of the shifting terrain of youth sub/cultures in the UK and elsewhere (Sharma et al., 1996; Blackman, 2005). Postmodern theorists challenged the notion that people’s political, social and psychological perspectives could be read off from their structural locations in any straightforward way, and subsequent work criticized the overly simplistic, even romanticized perspective of the ‘CCCS approach’ (Bennett and Kahn-Harris, 2004; Hodkinson and Diecke, 2007). Critics also addressed the apparent reluctance of CCCS researchers to recognize that many sub/cultural forms involved young people from a range of class locations and trajectories, incorporating considerable internal diversity and contradiction (e.g. Clarke, 1981; Jenkins, 1983). Recent critiques of the youth sub/cultures project prefer to designate their approach as ‘post-subcultural’ – or even ‘anti-subcultural’ (Hodkinson and Deicke, 2007). However, much of this ‘post-subcultural’ work has failed to engage with the complex shifting terrain of class in British society during and after the 1980s (although see Brown, 2003, 2007, for one exception). As I have argued elsewhere, many ‘post-Birmingham’ youth sub/cultural researchers have had a difficult relationship with the theorization of class (Griffin, 2011).

Youth sub/cultures in the UK undoubtedly changed and dissolved as the rave and party scenes expanded into a global phenomenon during the 1980s and ’90s (Blackman, 2005; Malbon, 1999). Aspects of feminist and gay/lesbian culture were incorporated into mainstream popular culture (McRobbie, 2009; Bell and Valentine, 1995), and urban youth became increasingly diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality and culture (Sharma et al., 1996). The 1990s brought a shift towards more complex constellations of youth cultures that bore little resemblance to the more clearly demarcated, classed, gendered and racialized youth sub/cultural groups of the immediate post-war period. These were ‘Thatcher’s children’, partying on the other side of what Hall and Jefferson termed ‘the fault line of the 1980s’ (2006, p. xxix). Youth culture had also become increasingly commercialized, and the yellow smiley face trope of early acid house music became a ubiquitous symbol in mainstream popular culture, much to the horror of its early adherents (Thornton, 1995). The growth of electronic dance music culture and emerging technologies forged faster and more complex relationships between popular youth cultural production and consumption (Riley et al., 2010; Wilson, 2006). The ‘CCCS approach’ began to appear increasingly outmoded.

Sarah Thornton’s Club Cultures (Thornton, 1995) was a particularly influential attempt to explore the cultural and political significance of electronic dance music culture, engaging with postmodern theory via a critique of youth sub/cultural theory (see also Malbon, 1999). She identified ‘the Birmingham school’ as being of minimal value for understanding club cultures, positioning her work as ‘post-Birmingham’ on several grounds. Thornton drew on Bourdieu’s work on distinction and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984) to develop the alternative concept of ‘subcultural capital’, in which sub/cultures were reconceptualized as ‘taste cultures’. She argued that ‘subcultural capital is not as class-bound as cultural capital’, since class ‘does not correlate in any one-to-one way with levels of youthful subcultural capital’ (Thornton, 1995, p. 12). Thornton interpreted this as evidence of the lessening relevance of class in the lives of clubbers, although as I have argued elsewhere, her work could equally be viewed as reflecting the heightened significance of class in post-Thatcherite Britain (Griffin, 2011).

Thornton’s work shifted youth sub/cultural studies towards a fuller engagement with rave and dance culture and the economic, political and cultural changes of the late 1980s and ’90s. Her exploration of ‘subcultural capital’ emphasized the significance of diversity within youth sub/cultures, in contrast to some earlier work in the CCCS mould. Club Cultures also explored the implications of late modernity for youth culture, especially the expanding role of the media culture industries and the increasing importance of consumption. Much subsequent work in the arena of ‘post-subcultural’ youth research engaged in detailed debates about the most appropriate way of conceptualizing youth’s relationship to culture: via notions of ‘(neo-) tribe’ (following Maffesoli, 1986; see Bennett, 1999); ‘scene’ (Redhead, 1993); ‘lifestyle’ (Jenkins, 1983; Miles, 2000); ‘taste cultures’ (Lewis, 1992; Thornton, 1995) or ‘none of the above’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2005). I have not engaged with this work in any detail here, partly because it has been discussed at length in a range of other texts (e.g. Bennett and Kahn-Harris, 2004; Hodkinson and Deicke, 2007; Pilkington et al., 2010).

‘Symptomatic readings’ and ‘conjunctural analyses’: The core of the youth sub/cultures project

A key basis for critiques of the youth sub/cultures project rested on objections to the ‘theory-driven’ Marxist perspective that dominated early work at CCCS. Critics argued that such arguments would be unsettled or even dissolve when working class youth sub/cultures were subject to the close rigorous scrutiny involved in more in-depth ethnographic research (see Hodkinson, 2012, for recent review). However, the youth sub/cultures project was not primarily concerned with the specific experiential aspects of sub/cultural practice for young people themselves: it set out to explore a much broader terrain.

As Hall and Jefferson pointed out in their introduction to the new edition of ‘RTR’ thirty years after its initial publication, the identification of particular youth sub/cultural forms was never the primary aim of the youth sub/cultures project. Rather, it aimed to develop a ‘symptomatic reading’ within the frame of a ‘conjunctural analysis’ (Hall and Jefferson, 2006). As Hall and Jefferson indicate, a conjunctural analysis would lead us to ask ‘why now?’, and to understand youth sub/cultural phenomena in relation to the ‘political, economic and socio-cultural changes of their respective times’ (p. xiv). Hall and Jefferson suggest that a ‘symptomatic reading’ of contemporary developments would mean asking ‘what is the postmodernism in [contemporary youth] subcultures symptomatic of?’ (p. xxi), rather than (as Thornton and others have done) representing the shift from class-based youth sub/cultures to taste-based club culture as an indication of the redundancy of the CCCS approach.

What CCCS did next: The legacy of the ‘Birmingham School’

Furthermore, the CCCS work on youth culture did not end with the class-based analysis of ‘RTR’. The texts discussed below share the emphasis on conjunctural analysis, and while several of them come from what might be called the ‘second generation’ of CCCS, not all of them would immediately be associated with the youth sub/cultures project. These lesser known texts reflect the legacy of the youth sub/cultures project according to the definition offered by Hall and Jefferson above.⁴ Some of this work emerged in a spirit of critique and dialogue with ‘RTR’ and early youth subcultural studies; some attempted to understand the nexus of youth, culture and class (and gender, ‘race’ and sexuality) following the faultlines of

the 1980s in the UK and elsewhere; and some did both. Many of these texts moved beyond examinations of young people’s music-based leisure and style groupings to explore the formation and significance of youth sub/cultural practices in the domains of education, the labour market, family life and the domestic sphere.⁵

One important strand of work linked to the ‘Birmingham School’ attempted to trace new formations of ‘race’ and ethnicity as these intersected with class and gender in 1970s and ’80s Britain, sometimes via a focus on black youth. The Empire Strikes Back, edited by the Race and Politics Group at CCCS, was an influential contribution to these debates (Race and Politics Group, 1982). Emerging shortly after the CCCS text Policing the Crisis (Hall et al., 1978), the core argument of the book was that ‘the construction of an authoritarian state in Britain is fundamentally intertwined with the elaboration of popular racism in the 1970s’ (Solomos et al., 1982, p. 9). The Empire Strikes Back did not explore the lives of Afro-Caribbean and Asian youth⁶ in Britain in terms of their involvement in specific youth sub/cultures, but examined how ‘new’ racist ideologies were shaping the representation and treatment of black youth in education, the labour market, family life, policing and the criminal justice system. The primary focus was therefore on white society, ‘new’ racist ideologies and the role of the state, rather than the sub/cultural styles of black youth.

This work examined the significance of the uprisings⁷ that took place during the early 1980s in cities across the UK in the context of dominant representations of black (i.e. Afro-Caribbean male) youth as ‘criminal’, black families as ‘inadequate’ and black cultures as ‘deprived’, all of which formed part of a new racism based around the mobilization of racist ideology as ‘just common sense’ (Lawrence, 1982). This work continued the focus of the youth sub/cultures project on understanding dominant representations of ‘youth’ (and particular groups of young people) as reflecting wider social formations and economic conditions (Griffin, 1993). This examination of the wider representational context in which (working class) young people were growing up is also found in Paul Gilroy’s chapt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Rethinking Youth Cultures in the Age of Global Media
• Part I Theorizing Youth Cultures
• Part II The Global and the Local
• Part III Media and Consumption
• Part IV Participation
• Part V Politics
• Conclusion: Elusive ‘Youth’
• Index