]VISIBLE CULTURE
AN ELECTRONIC JOURNAL FOR VISUAL STUDIES
IN[
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Still 'Winning Space?': Updating Subcultural Theory
by Geoff Stahl ©1999  Subcultures represent noise (as opposed to sound): interference in the orderly sequence which leads from real events and phenomena to their representation in the media. We should therefore not underestimate the signifying power of the spectacular subculture not only as a metaphor for potential anarchy 'out there' but as an actual mechanism of semantic disorder: a kind of temporary blockage in the system of representation.[1] Subcultures as noise: a metaphor that possesses a deep,
romantic and poetic resonance for many scholars. The heroic rhetoric
of resistance, the valorization of the underdog and outsider, and the reemergence
of a potentially political working-class consciousness are all embedded
in discourses that have shaped the theorization of subcultures in the past
twenty years. The work of Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall and others connected
with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham,
through which these conceits evolved, remain a backdrop for many contemporary
theories of subcultures. Studies such as Subcultures: The Meaning
of Style and Resistance Through Rituals drew their theory from such diverse
sources as Gramsci's theories of hegemony, Levi-Strauss's notion of bricolage
and homology, Eco's semiotics and Marx's theories of class, ideology and
commodity fetishism.[2]
The sartorial splendor of Teds, Mods, Rockers and Punks became emblematic
of a "semiotic guerrilla warfare" that took objects from the dominant culture
and transformed their everyday naturalized meaning into something spectacular
and alien. Style became a form of resistance.
This discourse of style has outlasted many other
aspects of their work, recuperated through recent attempts to situate subcultural
practices within a postmodern milieu. In this context Baudrillard's
implosion of meaning, the blurring of fantasy and reality through the aestheticization
of everyday life and the supremacy of the image in an ocularcentric culture
become tropes that consign subcultural practices to a narrow notion of
spectacle. Social and cultural practices, condensed to mere processes
of signification, are consequently viewed through theories inadequately
predisposed to consider the complex intersection and layering of institutional,
industrial, material, social, spatial and temporal dimensions and relations
that facilitate and circumscribe a given social formation's operation.
The discussion that follows questions the efficacy
of subcultural theory as it has been understood since the work of the CCCS
rejuvenated an interest in the field. A reconsideration of the corpus
will necessarily explore the gaps and limits that undermine the relevance
and theoretical potency of the work of Hebdige and others. To illuminate
the blind spots of subcultural theory, the spaces, and specifically the
global contexts and local circumstances in which certain cultural practices
unfold, a thicker description of the multiple forces and vectors that shape
them is required. The (retreat to the) spectacularization of subcultures
offers ineffective descriptive tools and often obscures the complexity
of current cultural practices that constitute, and are constituted by,
the aleatory effects of a globalized cultural economy. As a corrective,
the notion of "space", an aspect of their work which has only recently
been reclaimed, will be addressed in more detail.
The exploration of globalized cultural sensibilities
and their coalescence into what will be loosely denoted here taste cultures,
requires a conceptual framework that is also amenable to describing reconfigurations
of spatiality and their effect on social relations. I will take tastes
here to be defined, after David Chaney, as a "social vocabulary, a symbolic
repertoire of membership and reference affiliations as a discourse that
can be endlessly modified and renewed in the imagery and narratives of
mass culture"[3].
Tastes, alongside dispositions, preferences and affinities, all systems
of classification and organization[4],
are terms used throughout to denote social activities and attitudes that
influence as much as they are influenced by the spaces where they reside.
They suggest a rhetorical move away from rigidly vertical models that rely
upon universals such as class and enable a nuanced examination of individual
identity and group dynamics and how they are articulated (often unevenly)
to large scale cultural arenas.
An emphasis on the specificities of local and regional
cultures understood in a global setting, where spaces become sites fraught
with competition, negotiation and accommodation occurring on multiple and
intersecting planes, undermines any notion of a single determinant, often
cast in essentialist terms (class, ethnicity, age, gender), which might
exist as the overarching structuring principle of contemporary cultural
practices, preferences and formations. The contexts that are most
affected by globalization are the products of the circulation of ideas,
texts, styles, and people (as migrant labour, consumers, tourists, refugees)
around the globe, a process that has been elided in subcultural theory.
The institutional and infrastructural mechanisms that enable this mobility
have led to networks, circuits and alliances, all modes of communicative
and community action, which traverse the globe. An analysis of their
role in the creation of geographically dispersed audiences will be
a central component of the following discussion.
Phil Cohen's landmark project, "Subcultural Conflict
and Working-Class Community," exemplifies the approach taken by many of
the CCCS theorists. It foreshadows their focus on post-World War
II social transformations as wrought by a reinvigorated industrialism,
renewed urbanization (as well as the "explosion" of suburban development)
and the accelerated consuming habits of the young.[7] Taking the members of
the working-class of East End London as his object of study, Cohen proposes
that their position in newly urbanized spaces had become one of exclusion.
In these renovated spaces the working-class was subjected to middle-class
ideology with its valorization of property and individual ownership, a
stark contrast to the working-class ideal of communal ownership.
The fractures that ran through the East End section under scrutiny were
economic, ideological and political, all of which combined to a greater
degree among the working class youth. The generational conflict that
resulted gave rise to new subcultures that operated in opposition to the
parent culture. Consequently, Cohen notes, "one effect of this was
to weaken the links of historical and cultural continuity, mediated through
the family."[8]
Face-to-face contact with family members becomes abstracted to symbolic
relations that are mediated through the activities of other members of
a subculture. The subculture, a symbolic structure, then tries to
"magically" resolve the contradictions that exist (latent or manifest)
in the parent culture. (The subculture, although a symbolic structure,
depends upon territoriality to anchor individual members to a collective
reality.) The contradictions of the parent culture remain irresolvable
because "it merely transcribes its terms at a micro social level and inscribes
them in an imaginary set of relations."[9]
This is not meant to suggest the futility of subcultural activity, however.
Even as it expresses its autonomy from the parent culture, it simultaneously
maintains parental identification, which often manifests itself through
a ritualized defense against the transition into adulthood.
John Clarke, Stuart Hall et al, also view youth subcultures
through the prism of class and suggest they are doubly articulated to a
parent culture (the working-class) and the dominant culture. Subcultures
are defined here as "smaller, more localized and differentiated structures,
within one or more of the larger cultural networks."[10] There is a distinction to
be drawn, however, between subcultures and other resistant or alternative
cultures: Working class cultures are the home of subcultures, while middle-class
cultures create counter-cultures.[11]
This class-based correlation can be made because subcultures must be understood,
foremost, in relation to the hegemonic forces of the dominant culture.
Gramsci's notion of hegemony illuminates how a fraction of working-class
culture, youth, comes to have its expressive elements curtailed and its
lived reality circumscribed by the operation of hegemony. Society
can never be one-dimensional and as such the working class is never completely
absorbed by the dominant class. The occupation of these lacunae is
understood as "winning space," a negotiated version of the dominant culture's
values that the working-class has appropriated as an alternate moral system
permitting legitimization of their means of expression. This space
was won by being made, a creative response to their alienation and disenfranchisement.
As Cohen's work illustrated and as these authors
reiterate, subcultures must be understood in relation to their parent class.
In the case of working-class youth they are seen as a generational fraction
of the parent working-class culture. The generational specificity
that marks youth is seen through the prism of education, work and leisure.
Youths experience class conflict differently than their parent culture
due to the gaps between generations, a process that results in the creation
of a generational consciousness.
The authors extend Cohen's work on symbolic structures,
particularly modes such as dress, music, ritual and argot. The resulting
discourses of style are an attempt to examine the relations struck between
the subculture, the parent culture and mass culture. Through the
semiotic reconfiguration of objects, specifically the commodities of the
dominant class, the members of a given subculture invest them with particular
meanings, further strengthening its inner relations through symbolic gestures.
The unity of the modes binds the expressive elements of the subculture
together, crystallizing into a set of cultural practices that develop their
own history and structure, ones which are detached from the symbolic and
social firmament of the dominant culture.
Class, at least for Dick Hebdige in his study of
British punks in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, is only one dimension
of subcultural formation. Hebdige's work occupies a central place
in the subcultural oeuvre, offering a persuasive integration of modernist
literature, semiotics, anthropology and structuralism in what has become
a canonical study of the emergence of punk style. Hebdige's examination
of punk music and culture historicizes its antecedents (reggae, the Teds,
Mods, rockers) in a highly charged class-stratified milieu (where the even
the working class is fraught with racially motivated anxiety and blame-casting).
Hebdige offers an examination of the process of cross-pollination, hybridization,
contamination and appropriation that occurred among subcultures in post-war
Britain:
How they come to resist this process is understood
by Hebdige as taking shape through a variety of practices, most of which
recall the earlier formulation of ritual, argot, music, and dress.
The subculture defines itself through a number of stylistic forms: intentional
communication, bricolage, homology and signifying practice. Intentional
communication is an ironic gesture, where visual ensembles are understood,
at least by members of the subculture, as fabricated and function as forms
of display. Bricolage, a term borrowed from Levi-Strauss to describe
a science of the concrete (of the everyday, of the banal) is a descriptive
tool employed to account for the reconfiguration the naturalized meaning
of an object. Elevated through the rhetoric of style, the détournement
of objects takes on another layer of cultural value, acquiring a new symbolic
resonance and meaning subject to the discourses and visual idioms specific
to the subculture.
Hebdige also borrows from Levi-Strauss the notion
of homology to explain the connection between seemingly disparate cultural
practices. Homology is understood as the "symbolic fit" between a
subculture and the lifestyles and attitudes it acts out. There was
an order to the chaos in punk subculture that, to the initiated, made it
appear as a coherent and meaningful whole. There was an internal
structure and an organic fit between various parts, which to the uniniated
appeared as disparate and non-sensical. The objects that circulate
through that culture acquire a resonance that has deep affective value,
suitably arrayed in the subcultural imaginary as a reflection and expression
of explicit and implicit values. An extension of bricolage, homology
is a term deployed to explain the consistency of a subculture and its attachment
to various material practices (record buying, clothes wearing, scooter
buying).
Bricolage and homology are both terms that describe
a set of signifying practices. However, subcultures embody a number
of contradictions which most semiotic theory is inadequately predisposed
to accommodate. Hebdige stresses instead the polysemy of signifying
practices, in which structure and system are discarded for the more febrile
idea of subject position and the process of meaning making (which is ultimately
bound up in the dominance of the signifier over the signified). He
borrows from Julie Kristeva the notion of radical signifying practices:
those which disturb rationality and order and semantic coherence.[14] Punk for instance "cohered
elliptically through a chain of conspicuous absences. It was characterized
by its unlocatedness -- its blankness."[15]
Members of a subculture are not always fully aware of the
significance (in semiotic terms at least) of their own practices. The
level of commitment to a subculture differs for many individuals. It can
be escape or distraction but there must be a common language, or "it must
say the right things in the right way at the right time."[16]
Using Kristeva's concept of poetic language to describe a form of disturbed
syntax, Hebdige proposes that punk expresses itself through semantic rupture.
Punk's refashioning of language is positioned in contrast to other subcultures
that might be seen as simply and 'magically' resolving the contradictions
of living under the regimes of industrialized capitalism. From swastikas
as accessories, to safety pins puncturing cheeks and to wearing bin liners
as clothes, punks were construed as literally inscribing and embodying
those contradictions. The first criticism has been (somewhat awkwardly)
rethought in the context of postmodernism; the latter criticisms have been
highlighted by the visible and invisible effects a globalized cultural
economy, combined with the related interest in rethinking notions of space
and spatial relations. These criticisms emerge primarily as a result
of the shifting parameters circumscribing the spaces in which cultural
practices unfold. First, there is the tension between local circumstances
and global contexts, or more specifically, between dispersed and geographically
disconnected sites of production and consumption. Second, the movement
of ideas, objects, people and texts through that globalized cultural economy
and its febrile apparatuses (including computer-mediated communication
technologies) undermines the notion of a single trajectory or determination
shaping individual identity and group affiliation. These latter criticisms
will be covered in greater detail in the last portion of this discussion,
however their bearing on analyses of subcultural practices requires an
examination of the dominant role the "discourse of style" has played in
limiting past and some present, accounts of subcultures.
The belief that subcultures are a common stylized
solution for disenfranchised youth remains vague on the connection between
structure and the problem-solving option as well as undertheorizing notions
such as choice and belonging. Gary Clarke asks "how do we analytically
leap from the desire for a solution to the adoption of a particular style?"[17] Group organization and
individual desires are subtler and much more ineffable than Hebdige allows.
Hebdige fails to describe where and when style is intentional and when
it is unconscious, also ignoring the question of how, when, where and why
individual identity begins and ends or when group affiliation starts.
What are the internal and external factors, or the individual dispositions
and group dynamics, that shape a subculture?:
By bracketing out macropolitical forces, the authenticity
of the subculture is valorized by theorists such as Hebdige and Hall, often
at the expense of considerations of the paradigm shifts impinging on the
contexts in which cultural practices, including style, are realized.
What portions of their work can be applied today, given that Hebdige and
Hall were working within post-war capitalism and a still overwhelming modernist
conception of culture? How do we begin to account for the shape and
scope of subcultural groups and practices under the current capitalist
regime? How, for instance, do we begin to discuss style as the preeminent
signifier of subcultural allegiance in contexts that are continually subject
to the changing shape of relations of production? In a world moving
away from post-industrial modes to post-Fordist and finally to disorganized
modes of production, signaling a marked transformation of social and geopolitical
relations, how do we begin to even map out the context for a singular analysis?[20] There are a number of changes
that must be taken into account, not the least of which is a much more
modest appraisal of what might be occurring in this new global economy.
It is often taken as given that the vertical disintegration of transnational
corporations, through outsourcing and flexible specialization, has resulted
in highly reflexive productive capabilities. Their success is contingent
upon the willingness or resistance of the places in which they might be
operating. In other words, there is contextual variability that determines
how effective their operation might be. This could possibly create
a scenario in which the articulation of individual to larger reference
groups participating in a global arena becomes a highly charged site of
negotiation, compromise and opposition.[21] What this model of vertical disintegration
does not differentiate between is the different types of cultural industries
and their specific logics of practice.[22]
In many respects, this same criticism can be directed at the CCCS.
For both the flexible specialization and subcultural theorists, cultural
industries are conflated into functional arms of the dominant hegemony,
part of the apparatus of the controlling culture. The divergent interests,
motives and organizational capacities of cultural industries such as radio,
television and other media (often at odds with one another) are neglected
and remain a significant gloss in both areas of research. By highlighting
the spectacular consumption of subcultures, Hebdige, Hall and others overemphasize
the significance of reception among subcultural formations, bracketing
out larger, multifarious institutional and industrial forces, such as new
modes of production, that operate on a scale that often obscure their subtle
yet unavoidable influence.
Some of those theorists repositioning cultural production
along the lines of flexible specialization are grappling with larger social
and cultural issues as well (it has proven difficult to discuss post-Fordism
without raising the spectre of postmodernism). The most recent attempts
to realign subcultural studies alongside the vector of postmodernism appear
premature. David Muggleton (1997) has extended many of the premises of
those earlier, and decidedly modernist, studies of subcultural practice,
recalibrating them to suit a postmodern milieu.[23]
Writing on the post-subculturalist, he places particular emphasis on style
and the encroachment of the visual into the everyday. In the aestheticized
hyperreal setting of everyday life there are no commodities left for subcultures
to appropriate, just signs, the logical conclusion of a move away from
use-value (authentic-modern) to exchange-value (manufactured-modern) and
finally to the apotheosis of sign value (postmodern). Subcultural
styles become simulacra, copies with no originals.[24]
Accordingly, there is no longer space for originality, as referents have
been displaced or disappeared and the "real" has been reduced to the play
of surfaces, an infinite series of signifiers signifying more signifiers.
Creative practices such as fashion, art and music become depthless manifestations
of postmodern pastiche, where any potentially radical politics (identity,
resistance or otherwise) is eviscerated.[25]
If there is no originality there is no authenticity:
Muggleton's account of current cultural practices focuses
on rootlessness and play, where any hope for the ruptures that characterized
the CCCS model of subcultural practice is seen as impossible and void of
political potency. Cut adrift in a free-floating, inauthentic and
valueless ether, post-subculturalists are interpreted as mindlessly genuflecting
in awe at the postmodern, millennial sublime:
As a corrective to this, Grossberg has more convincingly
characterized the postmodern as a disarticulation of affect and ideology,
where maps of meaning and mattering maps become disengaged and reengaged
in new places.[28]
By affect is meant a structured plane of effects (investment) which offers
the possibility of agency (of acting willfully), a term describing "observable
differences in how practices matter to, or are taken up by, different configurations
of popular discourses and practices -- different alliances (which are not
simply audiences)."[29]
And although affect waxes and wanes within everyday contexts, authenticity
has not disappeared; as a discursive form it remains crucial to processes
of differentiation, but has been modified in ironic fashion:
Contrary to Muggleton's assertion, "rules" still exist
within the spaces of everyday life, albeit in very provisional and ad hoc
forms. The unequal exercise of power (and its uneven distribution)
in any given context negates claims many postmodern theories make about
a cultural leveling and the disappearance of boundaries. Boundaries
are continually shifting and being redrawn, the contexts of cultural activity
habitually reconstituted by new and longstanding power relations and lines
of continuity or cultural logics (as manifest in traditions, mythologies,
various forms of media and the circulation of commodities) which course
through them.
The means by which these boundaries are reasserted and
maintained through processes of social differentiation and distinction
have been taken up by Grossberg and Sarah Thornton. They have each
challenged the CCCS's unspoken assumption that cultural practices unfold
in discrete, self-contained spaces. Grossberg does this by problematizing
the notion of the mainstream (in relation to the postmodern); Thornton,
by inserting the media into the very origins of subcultures.[31] For Grossberg the mainstream,
or more correctly the popular, exists as a social pastiche where fragments
from the margins are incorporated and fragments of itself are excorporated
back into the margins: "a structured distribution of practices, codes and
effects."[32] The
intersection of margin and mainstream produces a space where practices
of social and cultural differentiation also unfold and overlap, whereby
the mainstream can no longer be seen as unified or monolithically Other.
The researchers at the CCCS construed the media as an
after-the-fact response to subcultures, allowing them to see more "uncontaminated
homologies" and make claims on their uncorrupted unauthenticity.
They saw the media as instrumental to the success of the dominant hegemony,
an integral part of the apparatus (the control culture) which constructed
"folk devils" (punks as Other) and "moral panics." Subcultures were
consequently theorized as "transparent niches in an opaque world as if
subcultural life spoke an unmediated truth."[33]
Thornton suggests, in a contrast to the CCCS formulation of media as a
subculture's demonized Other, that the media (television, radio, magazines,
zines, pamphlets, virtual media such as the Internet) are integral to the
formation of subcultures, playing a significant role in both their origin
as well as prolonging their lifecycle.
Broadly speaking, the media exist as systems of communication
critical to the circulation of ideas, images, sounds and ideologies that
bind culture(s) together. Rather than dismissing the media out of
hand, Thornton reminds us that some media legitimate while others popularize,
some preserve the esoteric while others are seen to sell out: "As
subjects of discussion and sources of information, media are deliberate
and accidental determinants of cultural hierarchy."[34]
The media function in this last instance as a central network for the movement
and distribution through cultural and social hierarchies of what Thornton,
borrowing and reworking from Bourdieu, has called "subcultural capital."[35] Various types of capital (cultural,
economic, social, symbolic) are acquired and distributed according to a
logic specific to the field in which they are active components.
Economic capital is distributed through the field of economics, educational
capital through an educational field, and so on. Fields (of cultural
production, of economics, of education) are hierarchies structuring the
social spaces where struggles over capital and various resources are played
out. The overarching field, of which these narrower fields are subsets,
is the field of power.[36]
Cultural capital, a form of knowledge acquired through education and upbringing,
is dispersed throughout the field of cultural production, where individuals
and groups struggle to acquire and reinvest it to maintain social status.
Bourdieu's taxonomy of capital effectively describes
the hierarchies of value and social status that underlie the (conscious
and unconscious, subjective and objective) construction of individual preferences,
tastes, and how they might then be articulated to, and by, social formations:
Subcultural capital is an important part of the field
of subcultural production, a subfield within the larger field of cultural
production. According to Bourdieu, the field of production is composed
of two differing fields: the field of restricted production and the field
of large-scale production. [41]
The former is germane to this discussion as it describes the "negative
existence" of this field in relation to the latter. Externally, the
sub-field of restricted production is opposed to the bourgeois or dominant
economic order ("the mainstream"). Internally, the sub-field of restricted
production is structured by the opposition between what Bourdieu calls
the consecrated avant-garde and the avant-garde: an opposition between
those who have the power to consecrate and those who are trying to acquire
that power (i.e., newcomers). The activity within the field of restricted
cultural production is more characteristically defined as production for
producers. In this context, where market forces are integral to the
formation of the field, notions of autonomy become paramount. Authenticity,
usually expressed in the vernacular as "selling out," is a term that becomes
part of those rhetorical strategies that are used frequently to define
and justify who or what might be in or out in an economy of cool.
Bourdieu's notion of fields as "spaces of possibles"
emphasizes the contested and conflicted activities of individuals vying
for positions and resources in several fields and given sites. In
these differing contexts, his notion of accruing and investing various
types of capital (social, cultural, intellectual, etc., but not discounting
the economic) is a valuable way to describe systems of exchange and distribution
that are not reducible to a simple monetary economism. The field
of cultural production exists as a field of "possible forces" which organizes
and is organized by the agents operating within it:
To maintain its multivalent potency and currency (or
cultural worth) subcultural capital must flow through channels of communication,
which themselves operate with, and are subject to, varying degrees of restriction.[44] In globalized fields of cultural
production and consumption these channels form part of a global infrastructure
composed of networks of exclusion and inclusion. Within these channels
state and institutional power is exerted (through cultural policy, protectionism,
etc.) and individuals that have strategically reinvested their capital,
subcultural or otherwise, consolidate positions of power. These agents,
or agencies, act as gatekeepers, cultural custodians and intermediaries
who can oversee, evaluate, sanction, or consecrate, and thereby legitimize,
certain cultural forms and practices.[45]
In this capacity, they actualize discourses, such as those attached to
notions of authenticity, constructing an (ideological) opposition between
mainstream and margin that remains integral to the distinctions that differentiate
individuals and their social groups from others (which can often be in
the same field).
Grossberg employs Bourdieu's notion of sensibility to
describe the intersection of these discursive practices and human actors.
Sensibilities "empower cultural practices to work in certain ways, and
they empower individuals to enact them in certain places. Sensibilities
define the dialectical production of active audiences, everyday practices
and productive contexts."[46]
As Appadurai states, these productive contexts are interrelated to other
contexts, not only by discursive practices:
While Grossberg may overemphasize the localized context,
Appadurai links interrelated and interdependent contexts to global processes.
Appadurai speaks of mobility and mediation of both objects and ideas as
having profound effects on the shape of contexts of production and consumption.
New modes of communication and new means for distributing information assist
the circulation of the various forms of capital, while simultaneously reconfiguring
the contexts in which cultural production and consumption take place.
Forms of knowledge such as cultural capital can also be subject to global
forces, distributed according to the organizing principles of a given spatial
configuration.[48]
Because the political, social, economic and cultural transformations occurring
on a global scale are necessarily fluid, chaotic, arbitrary and uneven,
resulting from the influence of mobile and mobilizing forces, Appadurai
and Grossberg offer another contrary to the CCCS's paradigm where social
movement is restricted to vertical ascent or descent. The movement
and distribution of people, ideas, money and technologies through this
global cultural economy takes hold of the imaginations of individuals as
well in concrete contexts. The very novelty and synergistic charge
of this phenomena can produce opportunities for subjective reinvention
and cultural innovation. In other words rapid change. At the
same time, the flow of commodities through these networks is subject, much
like capital, to local restrictions that limit access. This suggests
that there are lines and forms of continuity that are more likely to slow,
resist or halt that rapid change. Combine the resulting tensions
with the differential access to commodified objects, information and cultural
capital and it becomes apparent how much work is needed to determine and
examine the form and spectrum of experiences that are possible in a given
space.
We are left then with a caveat: "Spatial patterns cannot
be said to interact, only the social objects present within one or more
such spaces interact."[49]
To avoid fetishizing the spatial, it remains critical to distinguish a
given space from the flow of goods and objects through that space.
The initial entropy and subsequent organization that characterizes the
distribution of goods, services, ideas, capital and people are contingent
upon the structure of the spaces through which they flow. The spaces
where they come to rest and develop can be sites in which different and
competing value systems (and systems of evaluation) produce conflict over
access and distribution of these resources, a struggle structured by an
already existing arrangement of indigenous social hierarchies. The
intersection of social spaces and social relations shifts emphasis to the
greater global contexts and the smaller local circumstances in which social
and cultural activities unfold. To this end, John Urry suggests that
"there is no simple space, only different kinds of spaces, spatial relations
or spatialisations," where space is not neutral.[50]
Urry recalls Lefebvre's theoretical structure for the analysis of the production
of space that is composed of three elements: spatial practices, representations
of space and spaces of representation.[51]
Spatial practices include individual daily routine as well as the concretization
of zones and regions, through urban planning, etc. Phil Cohen's work
on East End London neighborhoods touches on those elements of spatial practice,
such as property and (economic) capital, that serve to demarcate difference
in physical locales. Representations of space include the forms of
knowledge and practices that organize and represent space in particular
forms. Spaces of representation include the imaginative construction
of collectively experienced sites: "These include symbolic differentiations
and collective fantasies around space, the resistances to the dominant
practices and resulting forms of individual and collective transgression."[52] It is this third element that
has the most rhetorical force. As Appadurai has suggested with regard
to the processes of globalization, there has been a notable return to the
imagination persisting as a repository of nostalgia, engendering and preserving
collective experiences constituted through mythology, and guaranteeing
the promise of individual agency. The imagination "has become an organized
field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labour
and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites
of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility."[53]
As both Urry and Appadurai understand them, all three
of Lefebvre's spatial ingredients highlight the multiple layers that compose
social spaces. They are themselves shaped by multiple vectors (economic,
political) providing contexts for enactment and engagement at the micro-level
of individual imaginings. These individual events and moments are
also articulated within and to large scale global forces. Each vector
simultaneously extends and limits the horizon of the imagination, the flow
of ideas, capital and commodities. Even Cohen's neighborhoods need
reconsideration in the context of global scale forces:
The neighborhood remains a powerful metaphor for the organization
and variety of lived spaces in contemporary cultures, illustrating connections
between geographical area, physical structures and social organization.
Neighborhoods exist as productive contexts for subjectivities, where meaningful
activity is initiated, enacted, performed and reproduced. This productive
activity, however, often extends beyond the narrow confines of the neighborhood
and its kinship systems, making connections and finding affinities with
neighbouring as well as distant contexts. A notion of neighborhood that
depends upon a territorial imaginary (such as Cohen's) needs to reconsider,
for example, the emergence of virtual neighborhoods, electronically produced
and connected spaces. New media, such as the Internet, build unique
social links, creating conduits for the transmission of ideas, money and
information, which in many ways also transform the lived spaces of neighborhoods
in which the participants live.
The emergence of computer mediated communications (CMC)
systems and their effect on the intersection of social and spatial relations
and their bearing on notions of community is worthy of some consideration
here. Every new development in technology has offered hope for the
realization of new forms of community and connectivity, promising to form
spaces that will allow the free flowering of proper democratic exchanges
and pluralistic togetherness, recapturing some notion of gathering and
interactivity that, for whatever reasons, have since been lost. Surrounded
by the rhetoric of prophecy, "assumptions about technological change tell
us what we believe the technology is supposed to do, which in turn reveals
much about what we believe we are supposed to do."[55]
The ascent of CMCs has also emphasized the distinctions
drawn between what James Carey has called the view of communication either
as "transportation" or as "ritual."[56]
A view of communication as transportation tends to be dedicated to explaining
the domination of time and space through the transmission of signals (in
the form of information, for instance). This type of communication
is tied to notions of control and power, a mastery of time and space through
new, efficient and accelerated forms of dissemination. On a broader
scale, it is still framed by discourses of frontierism, colonialism, mercantilism,
expansionism and the desire for leaving behind older communities and creating
new ones.[57]
The ritual view of communication, in contrast, is still
very much an overlooked way of conceptualizing social interaction and movement.
It is, as Carey states, "directed not toward the extension of messages
in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of
imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs."[58] Carey and Steve Jones, the latter
employing these terms in discussing cyberspace and its relation to community,
both advocate this view of communication.[59]
In its evocation of a prelapsarian cultural moment it retains a connection
between community, commonness, and communion that positions it as the desirable
and proper directive behind communicative action.[60]
That desired action itself assumes a dramaturgical function as information
becomes part of a socially sanctioned staging, the portrayal of "an arena
of dramatic forces and action" allowing for sites of physical and imaginative
enactments and performances.[61]
In its ritual mode communication becomes a powerful tool that organizes
individual desires and dreams of belonging by representing a certain range
of experiences, thereby offering the possibility for deep, affective investment
among a community of like-minded others.
The pursuit of this ritualistic notion of communication
may appear as a much sought after ideal. It remains, however, a particularly
problematic and highly contested one. As Jones suggests, most discussion
surrounding the emergence of new communities founded through computer-mediated
interactions fails to consider the "concomitant conceptualization of space
and the social, the inquiry into connections between social relations,
spatial practice, values, and beliefs."[62]
In this sense, and without a greater examination of issues surrounding
access, motivations and levels of participation, the recent analyses of
virtuality and digitally connected individuals and groups share common
absences and elisions with certain aspects of subcultural analyses.
Both old and new communications technologies, which can
be understood as types of networks, aid the movement and dispersal of individuals
by connecting and organizing them in various contexts as audiences, markets
and publics. Given both the ritualistic and transportation view of communications
and their effect on the relations between time and space, any attempt to
supply a cartography of consumption requires a provisional model of taste
cultures that cannot be understood as localized in any site-specific sense.
Analyses of the flow of capital, information and people connected and mediated
through communicative apparatuses that span the globe offer suggestive
entry points into an account of the similarities that exist between dispersed
consumers and their respective shared cultures. No longer hermetically
sealed or self-contained, the spaces of culture should, instead, be understood
as organized through a series of interconnections. Doreen Massey
has suggested that cultures (and she speaks here of youth cultures specifically)
could be understood as a "particular articulation of contacts and influences
drawn from a variety of places scattered, according to power relations,
fashion and habit, across many different parts of the globe."[63] Social relations, in this capacity,
are often constellations of temporary and ad hoc coherence embedded in
a social space that is the product of relations and interconnections from
the very local to the regional and transregional.[64]
The local structures (social and spatial) that determine the duration of
these constellations as well those that inflect the reception and transmission
of goods, images and people from distant contexts are interconnected through
a series of networks. These networks function in the same capacity
as networks of exclusion and inclusion, serving as channels for the transmission
of people, ideas, objects and images that link one context and taste culture
to another.
In their levels of sociality, participation and symbolic
interaction, these networks can be thought of in terms of ritual modes
of communication, forging affective alliances or networks of empowerment,[65] intercultural affinities,[66] pathways,[67]
or scapes.[68] Print
media, broadcast media and the Internet serve as links that mediate between
dispersed individuals and groups that are neither geographically specific
nor dependent upon face-to-face contact, existing instead as loosely "imagined
communities." Benedict Anderson in his discussion of the rise of
print capitalism and its relation to nation building suggests three ways
in which a community is imagined.[69]
First, though many of the members will never meet face-to-face with others,
"in the minds of each lives the image of their communion."[70] Second, this community is limited,
because it has "finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other (communities)."[71] Finally, it is imagined because
"regardless of the inequality...that may prevail in each, the (community)
is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship."[72] Mass-mediation (and Anderson
is writing specifically about print capitalism), particularly electronic
media and CMCs, enable these imagined communities to transcend some of
the limits of local, regional or national space, activating what Appadurai
has called a "community of sentiment," an articulation of individual sentiment
onto a broader social plane of belonging:
Whether it be in contexts, neighborhoods or communities
(concrete, imagined, or virtual), increasingly the quotidian rhythms of
life are refracted through the localized effects of these translocal forces.
At the level of the everyday, greater consideration must be given to how
individuals operate within demarcated spaces situated in a global cultural
economy. Grossberg's own work is useful for mapping out the lines
that distribute, place and connect cultural practice. The everyday
here is meant to convey a sense of a "structured mobility", constructing
a space that includes "specific forms and trajectories of movement (change)
and stability (agency)."[75]
Although the field and habitus (which share an affinity with "structured
mobility") are spaces shaped by these trajectories, recast in a global
framework, Bourdieu's terms cannot remain uncontaminated by the changing
shape of social spaces in this context. As Appadurai suggests, the
habitus, no longer simply a realm of reproducible practices and dispositions,
has instead become "more an arena for conscious choice, justification,
and representation."[76]
As a schema for the appreciation and perception of cultural goods, even
Bourdieu's habitus must be broad enough to incorporate the larger scale
social universe in which tastes and fields are subject and object of the
glacial drift of global forces.
An examination of the mechanics of solidarity can highlight
the diverse forces circumscribing each one of these links, illustrating
how these processes of exclusion and inclusion function to arrange social
and cultural practices in complex, interrelated, arbitrary and opaque configurations.
Cultural practices, whether dominant or subordinate, rarely unfold in hermetically
sealed or geographically discrete contexts. The parameters that define
cultural practices, industries and institutions have been blurred, stretched,
exploded, erased and redrawn through the complex and arbitrary effects
wrought by the machinations of globalized cultural apparatuses. It
is among the shifting origins and destinations of cultural production,
distribution and consumption that an analytic model more flexible than
that offered by subcultural theory must be found to describe the elasticity
and fluidity that confounds any notion of self-contained cultural practices.
The preceding discussion is one attempt at offering provisional amendments
to subcultural theory through the elaboration of a cartography of tastes
and desires. In the end, it points towards instances of cultural
practice which necessitate a remapped theory in order to, however provisionally,
describe the various navigations through a terrain that is often simultaneously
here, there, and everywhere.
Notes
1. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning
of Style (New York: Routledge, 1979), 90.
2. Hebdige; Stuart Hall and Tony
Jefferson, Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London: Hutchison, 1976).
3. David Chaney, "Authenticity and
Suburbia" in Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory, eds. Sallie Westwood
and John Williams (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp.140-151: 149.
4. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press), 1984.
5. Colin Sumner, The Sociology of
Deviance: An Obituary (New York: Continuum), 1994.; also Taylor, Watson
and Young, 1974; Mike Brake and Paul Kegan, The Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures (Boston: Routledge), 1984.
6. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and
Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and Rockers (Oxford: Martin Robinson), 1980.
7. Phil Cohen, "Subcultural Conflict
and Working Class Community," in Working Papers in Subcultural Studies
2 (University of Birmingham: Centre for Cultural Studies), 1972.
8. Phil Cohen, "Subcultural
Conflict and Working-Class Community," in eds. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton The Subcultures Reader (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 90-99: 94.
13. See Stan Cohen, Folk Devils
and Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and Rockers (Oxford: London), 1972.
14. Julia Kristeva, The Revolution
in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Walker (New York: Columbia University
Press), 1974 (trans. 1980).
17. Gary Clarke, "Defending Ski
Jumpers: A Critique of Theories of Youth Subcultures" (originally published
1981) in The Subcultures Reader, eds. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp.175-180: 176.
18. Stan Cohen, "Symbols of Trouble"
in Gelder and Thornton, pp.149-162: 158.
19. Lawrence Grossberg, "Re-placing
Popular Culture" in The Club Cultures Reader, eds. Steve Redhead, Derek Wynne
and Justin O'Connor (Malden: Blackwell), 1997, pp. 217-237: 226.
20. Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies
of Signs and Space (California: Sage), 1994; see also Amin and Ash. Post-Fordism:
A Reader (Blackwell: Cambridge), 1995.
22. David Hesmondhalgh, "Is This
What You Call Change? Flexibility, Post-Fordism and the Music Industries"
in Popular Music: Style and Identity, eds. Straw, Johnson, Sullivan and Friedlander (Montréal: CRCCII), 1995. pp. 141-148; Bernard Miege, "The
Logics at Work in the New Cultural Industries" in Media, Culture and Society 9 (1987), pp. 273-289.
23. David Muggleton, "The Post-Subculturalist"
in The Club Cultures Reader, eds. Steve Redhead, Derek Wynne and Justin O'Connor (Malden: Blackwell), 1997, pp.185-203.
25. See also Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism
or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review, 146, pp.
53-92.
28. Lawrence Grossberg, "Another
Boring Day in Paradise: Rock and Roll and the Empowerment of Everyday Life"
in Popular Music 4 (1984): 225-258; "Is Anybody Listening? Does Anybody
Care?: On 'The State of Rock', in Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth
Culture, eds. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (New York: Routledge), 1994,
pp.41-58.
31. Grossberg, 1984, 1997; Thornton,
1996.
36. Pierre Bourdie, The Field of
Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, (New York: Columbia University
Press), 1993; Holly Kruse, "Fields of Practice: Musical Production, Public
Policy and the Market" in Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary
Theory, eds. Thomas Swiss, John Sloop and Andrew Herman (Malden: Blackwell), 1998.
47. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at
Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press), 1996: 187.
48. Nigel Thrift, "Flies and Germs:
A Geography of Knowledge" in Social Relations and Spatial Structures (London:
Macmillan Publishers), 1985, pp.123-135: 132.
49. John Urry, Consuming Places
(New York: Routledge), 1995: 65.
55. Steven G. Jones, "Understanding
Community in the Information Age" in Cybersociety: Computer-mediated Communication
and Community (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications), 1995, pp.10-35: 27.
56. James Carey, Communication as
Culture (New York: Routledge), 1992.
63. Doreen Massey, "The Spatial
Construction of Youth Cultures" in Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures, eds. Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine (New York: Routledge), 1998, pp.121-129:
124.
66. Mark Slobin, Subcultural Sounds:
Micromusics of the West (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press), 1993.
67. Ruth Finnegan, The Hidden Musicians:
Music Making in an English Town (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
69. Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities (New York: Verso), 1992.
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