Subculture

The Fragmentation of the Social

Chris Jenks

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780761953715, 9780761953708
• eBook ISBN: 9781446230589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

`A polished piece of work which takes a cool and dispassionate look at subculture... Meticulous and insightful? - Jim McGuigan, Professor of Cultural Analysis, University of Loughborough

This illuminating book, which explores the idea of subcultures, traces the concept back to its foundations in the works of Tonnies and Durkheim and, to a lesser degree, Marx and Weber.

The discussion moves on to an analysis of subcultures in American urban sociology and criminology, through the traditions of the Chicago School, structural functionalism and systems theory. The ground-breaking work of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School is evaluated and a case is made for the continuing relevance of the concept for sociology and cultural studies.

The book provides:

" An unrivalled critical guide to subculture

" An assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the concept in the study of society and culture

" A sharp assessment of its relevance and application today.

Both an appraisal and a sustained critique of the concept of subculture, the book will be of interest to students of Sociology, Cultural Studies and Urban Studies.

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ONE Mapping the Concept

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The dividing line between ‘a culture’ and ‘subculture’ or ‘cultural variant’ has not yet been firmly staked out. (Kluckhohn and Kelley, 1962: 67)

Introduction

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At the beginning of the twentieth century there occurred a remarkable series of developments in the philosophy of the human sciences that has come to be known as the ‘linguistic turn’. Essentially, thinkers stopped regarding language as a neutral vehicle for the transmission of information or even simply as a behavioural form peculiar to the human species. Instead, and probably inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916), language moved to centre stage, it assumed the status of a powerful and wholly appropriate root metaphor for the understanding and explanation of human conduct. Grammar, competence and performance, and versions of deep and surface structure became the new and enduring meta-concepts for conveying a sense of what was fundamentally human but also what was essentially social. Although in a number of disciplines, including sociology, these developments were slow in making themselves felt, they are now deeply established in debates across the spectrum of social theory deriving from structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism, discourse theory, socio-linguistics and the sociology of language.

Though never quite superseding these formative developments, a second ‘turn’ has nevertheless occurred in the human sciences which, far from supplementing the core of the sociological tradition, has potentially threatened to destabilize its central concerns, its moral purpose and its methodological rigour. This de-traditionalization has been facilitated, in part, by what Chaney (1994) first referred to as the ‘cultural turn’ which many feel has contributed to the descent into, or at least the first teetering steps on the rocky road towards the postmodern. Culture has always been an important concept for sociology and anthropology but always in relation to a theory of social structure. Today, we might suggest, the idea of culture has gone feral and has become a soft resource for the description of meaningful human action without having to accept the responsibility of causality. Previously culture could be accurately understood from within a four-fold typology (Jenks, 1993b):

1. It was a cerebral or certainly a cognitive category; it was part of a general state of mind and it carried with it the idea of perfection, a goal of or an aspiration for individual human achievement or emancipation.
2. It was a more embodied and collective category; it invoked a state of intellectual and even moral development within a society.
3. It was a descriptive and concrete category; culture named the collective body of arts and intellectual work within any society.
4. Culture was a social category; it implied the whole way of life of a people.

Now culture, as an idea, has been both hijacked and adapted by the particular political agenda of cultural studies into a device for displacing the ‘social’ as a source of explanation (O’Neill, 1995). What does this mean? Well, let’s attempt to inventory that agenda. Here is a list of attributes deriving from Agger’s (1992) formulation of cultural studies as critical theory:

1. Cultural studies operates with an expanded concept of culture. It rejects the assumptions behind the ‘culture debate’ and thus rejects the high/low culture binary or, indeed, any attempt to re-establish the grounds for any cultural stratification. It adheres more closely to the anthropological view of culture as being ‘the whole way of life of a people‘, though it does not subscribe to the view of culture as a totality.
2. Following on from the above, cultural studies legitimates, justifies, celebrates and politicizes all aspects of popular culture. It regards popular culture as valuable in its own right and not a ‘shadow phenomenon’, nor simply a vehicle for ideological mystification.
3. The proponents of cultural studies, as representative of their age, recognize the socialization of their own identities through the processes of mass media and communication that they seek to understand.
4. Culture is not viewed in stasis, as fixed or as a closed system. Cultural studies regards culture as emergent, as dynamic and as continual renewal. Culture is not a series of artefacts or frozen symbols but is rather a process.
5. Cultural studies is predicated upon conflict rather than order. It investigates, and anticipates, conflict, both at the level of face-to-face interaction but also, and more significantly, at the level of meaning. Culture cannot be viewed as a unifying principle, a source of shared understanding or a mechanism for legitimating the social bond.
6. Cultural studies is ‘democratically’ imperialistic. As all aspects of social life are now ‘cultured’, then no part of social life is excluded from its interests – opera, fashion, gangland violence, pub talk, shopping, horror films, and so on ... they are no longer colonized, canonized or zoned around a central meaning system.
7. Cultural representations are viewed by cultural studies at all levels – inception, mediation and reception, or production, distribution and consumption.
8. Cultural studies is interdisciplinary. It acknowledges no disciplinary origin, it encourages work on the interface of disciplinary concerns and it acknowledges a shifting and sprightly muse.
9. Cultural studies rejects absolute values – it does what it wants.

Implicit here is a calculated commitment to a fragmentation of the concept of society and the moral and political framework within which it is a meaningful part.

This erosion or death of the social also figures as an acceptable part of contemporary rightist and centrist political ideologies, vaunting selfhelp, free will and the powers and responsibilities of the individual. So, for example, following the 15 years of Thatcher’s anti-‘social’ rhetoric in the UK, the alternative ‘New Labour’ movement elects for a ‘third way’, combining both public and private sectors, but also produces health and education as private rather than public goods. And although arising from a different place, within the academy, postmodernism’s critical imperative recommending the end of grand narratives is an invitation to dispense with the power/knowledge, truth and authority on which society, and, in many senses, the social bond, of yesterday were established. Furthermore, the multiple meanings on which the concept of culture is based, have both encouraged and enabled cultural studies to justify, legitimate, celebrate and politicize all aspects of popular culture, whether aesthetic, transgressive, transitory or even downright silly. At one extreme, cultural studies in its most liberal and populist iterations rejects ultimate values, as stated above, and, in most senses, dispenses with theory in favour of stylistics and method in favour of insight.

However, times change, new voices are waiting to be heard and we social scientists must at least contextualize if not move with, the Zeitgeist. It is important to resist the potential backlash towards essentialism and, as such, this book attempts to constitute a symbiosis with cultural studies and a constructive response to the appropriations of the postmodern. However, an acceptance of certain rapidly changing structural conditions does not necessarily lead to an abandonment of modernity’s project any more than it demands a slavish obeisance to its ageing aspirations. A new politic needs to emerge and to speak with sufficient authority to quell the indistinguishable polysemy of the popular surface. Treated as a mere dwelling place for all and any manifestation of difference in social life, the idea of subculture becomes no more than an opinion – everyone has one and, as the cliché runs, they are entitled to it!

Enter Subculture

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In this study, I will seek to establish that the cumulative contemporary fascination with culture itself has a social history. And, further, that the study of culture need not be exclusive, it does not demand the abandonment of the concepts of society and social structure. The debate will range from suggestions of integration to recommendations of contest, but it will essentially revolve around the necessity of interface. This discussion, I trust, will be timely as many humanities and social science degrees now incorporate the work of cultural studies and, indeed, cultural studies has quite successfully established itself as a part of many universities’ academic profiles.

The mediating concept selected to organize these sets of concerns is that of subculture. In a substantive sense this work might serve a further purpose, namely to stand in an historical and perspectival relation to Dick Hebdige’s milestone text Subculture: The Meaning of Style, first published in 1979. Hebdige’s excellent work, though in many ways historically specific, has evolved, ironically, into an orthodoxy. His ethnographic case studies of punks, mods, teds and rastas are clearly reminiscent of an earlier era and his conceptualization of the central analytic issues in terms of Gramsci via Althusser (with interventions from Situationism) have also been outstripped by more contemporary developments in social, cultural and political theory. As tends to be the way with orthodoxies, they assume a canonical status, so much so that contemporary students sometimes assume that Hebdige discovered subcultures, both practically and in classificatory terms! My aim here is not to modernize Hebdige and produce an up-to-date inventory of subcultures containing youthful resistance. Rather, I would like to demonstrate the place of subculture as a concept in the development of social and cultural theory, to point to the reasoning behind its selection as an analytical and descriptive vehicle, in a variety of locations, and to reveal its ambivalent and perhaps unintentional contribution to the deconstruction of the concept ‘society’. It is in this context that this work will confront its primary concern, that is, the politics of knowledge.

At its most straightforward we might suggest that following in the wake of Richard Hoggart’s neo-Leavisite representation of working-class England’s folkways and mores in The Uses of Literacy (1985), the scholars focused around the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) group mobilized the idea of subculture to articulate the unspoken, or perhaps unheard, voices of a populist proletariat within a critical vision and still with an eye to radical social change. The arrival of Stuart Hall provided the drive and the impetus of that group and his particular version of Marxism provided the theoretical framework. The whole Birmingham CCCS tradition (now abruptly concluded, see Chapter 6), however, seemed largely content to restrict the idea of subculture to the pastime and possession of youth and, for some of its indigenous critics (McRobbie, 1981; Gilroy, 1987), mostly male youth:

There have been studies of the relation of male youth to class and class culture, to the machinery of the State, and to the school, community and workplace. Football has been analyzed as a male sport, drinking as a male form of leisure, and the law and the police as patriarchal structures concerned with young male (potential) offenders. I don‘t know of a study that considers, never mind prioritises, youth and the family; women and the whole question of sexual division have been marginalised. (McRobbie, 1981: 111)

and perhaps even white male youth:

Its voices present not so much a phantom history of post-war ‘race relations’ but a substantive history of its own – a history that shows the necessarily complex relationships which have existed between blacks and the cultural and political institutions of the white, urban working-class communities that are transformed and reoriented by their presence. (Gilroy, 1987: 154–5)

In such a context the previously powerful device presented in the form of the concept ‘subculture’ begins to degrade. As such, it becomes interpretable as little more than the noise of white, male adolescence, irksome at times but reparable through maturation. This hardly seems to provide a forceful platform for the reconstitution of a modern society nor an important ground, other than in partial and developmental terms, for the critical address of stratification. We will hear much more of this body of work in Chapter 6.

But the concept subculture did not begin either with Hebdige or the Birmingham group. Subculture is a concept with a long, but largely forgotten, history. What I would like to achieve in this work is an archaeology of the concept ‘subculture’ that will trace elements of the idea even to within the classic sociological tradition. That is, I will excavate the devices employed by the founding fathers to reconcile the desired stability of the post-Revolutionary European society with the inevitable recognition of accelerative and compound social change wrought through modernity’s relentless progress. Thus, for example, Emile Durkheim’s vision of the multiple mechanisms of workgroups and guilds functioning as a microcosm for the overall interdependence of organic solidarity. This discussion will take place in Chapter 2.

At a different stage in the development of our discipline, the Chicago School in the USA made strenuous efforts to elevate the life-world of the ‘underdog’ into an intelligible, yet manageable, form through urban studies, biographical methods, social reaction theory, labelling theory, typification vignettes and essentially through the assembling device of the subculture. At its most modest the Chicago School (or what we might describe more accurately as the neo-Chicago School following George Herbert Mead and Everett C. Hughes) can be seen to employ the concept of subculture to highlight the symbolic normative structure of groups smaller than the society as a whole. This is a micro-sociology, or perhaps a microcosmic sociology, that gives voice to and directs our attention to the ways in which such groups differ in such elements as their language, belief systems, values, mannerisms, patterns of behaviour and lifestyle from the mainstream, larger society, of which they are also a part. The formative insights of Chicago’s long and influential tradition of sociology will be addressed in Chapter 3.

From a wholly different political position Talcott Parsons claimed the concept of subculture and incorporated it in a masterly fashion within the cybernetics and autopoeisis of The Social System so that all deviant and non-normatively oriented conduct could be absorbed within the scheme of central values. This was no simple diversion, it was this arresting appropriation of the concept of subculture that informed much of the positivist criminology and social pathology emanating from the USA and setting the ground rules for this sub-discipline up to the late 1950s. What we have here is a much more conflictual model. The subculture is not a part within a part within a whole. In the Parsonian universe, central values stay central and the concept of a subculture designates a group, an enclave, a cult or a distraction of antithetical values that are expressions of either frustrations with or interventions into the dominant structure of legitimation and control within society. These are usually realized in terms of the pathological relationship between social structure and personality and are largely viewed in a remedial manner. The Parsonian, East Coast, approach to subculture will be explained in Chapter 4.

The very idea of a subculture re-emerged in the British sociology of education (Hargreaves, 1967; Lacey, 1970) in the late 1960s, as we shall see in Chapter 5. Here it was mobilized as a way of accounting for working-class under-achievement, this model being an unhappy amalgam of Chicago and Boston (in the form of Parsons) seen above.

Modern Origins of the Concept ‘Subculture’

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Definitions and versions proliferate and origins are obscure. It has been argued by Wolfgang and Ferracuti (1967) that the term ‘subculture’, though not the concept (a fine distinction), was not widely employed in the social science literature until after the Second World War. Lee (1945) is cited as making the first use of the term closely followed by Gordon (1947), who gives the definition of subculture as:

a subdivision of a national culture, composed of a combination of factorable social situations such as class status, ethnic background, regional and rural or urban residence, and religious affiliation, but forming in their combination a functional unity which has an integrated impact on the participating individual. (Gordon, 1947: 40)

Another definition from around the same time states that:

The term ‘subculture’ refers ... to ‘cultural variants displayed by certain segments of the population’. Subcultures are distinguished not by one or two isolated traits – they constitute relatively cohesive social systems. They are worlds within the larger world of our national culture. (Komarovsky and Sargent, 1949: 143)

And so we evolve through: ‘A society contains numerous subgroups, each with its own characteristic ways of thinking and acting. These cultures within cultures are called subcultures’ (Mercer, 1958: 34) to ‘Such shared learned behaviors which are common to a specific group or category are called subcultures’ (Young and Mack, 1959: 49).

These examples are not isolated, the history of the concept comprises a vivid mosaic but each segment demonstrates a political move, and each exemplar reveals a step outside of the kernel sense of the social, for supportive or critical reasons, and the beginning of a gradient that leads through fragmentation towards agency. Of necessity, then, the concepts of identity, difference and selfhood will be addressed and from within a post-structuralist paradigm the politics of knowledge are now reviewed in terms of identity politics, affinity politics, standpoint epistemologies and the narratives of post-colonialism. Each of these moments is itself held in a tension with tenuous clusterings of the social, or rather the subcultural and we look to the heroic potentialities for liberation within the groupings of, for example, women, ‘queer’ folk, black consciousness, childhood or even cyborgs. The excavation of the tradition is not meant simply as an interesting but arcane history of an idea but rather as an argument for the necessity of a theory or mode of concept formation that enables what has come to be known as the middle range. That is, I will present a sociological argument for the place of an order of construct, like subculture, which retains the causal necessity of the social but overcomes the mysterious leap between, for example, Durkheim’s structural constraints (the outside) and an individual act of self-destruction (the inside). Such argument both retains the necessity of the social and relocates the subcultural.

As long ago as 1960, in the USA, Yinger wrote:

In recent years there has been wid...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Preface
• 1 Mapping the Concept
• 2 Trace Elements in the Classical Tradition
• 3 The Chicago School: The Missing Narrative I
• 4 Parsonian Systems Theory: The Missing Narrative II
• 5 Some Anomalous Cases
• 6 The Modern Concept: Birmingham CCCS
• 7 Conclusion: Identity and Dispersion
• Bibliography
• Index