The limits of subcultural theory

The emphasis the CCCS writers placed on style as a site of class-based struggle was indebted to their historical context. Britain during the 1970s was a society beset by social, economic and political conflict, and the rise of youthsubcultures like punk made it seem like the wider sense of crisis was being played out in the music and fashions of the time. And, generally, subcultural theory made a major contribution to the study of young people’s lives. Its importance lies not only in the way it established style and music as important realms of cultural meaning, and worthy of scholarly analysis. Subcultural theory also made a valuable challenge to assumptions that young people shared a common, generationally-based ‘youth culture’. Crucially, the CCCS authors highlighted the way socio-economic inequalities and relations of power had a major impact on youngster’s cultural experiences. Understandably, therefore, subcultural theory has been a major influence on a wide body of researchers worldwide. But, while many have taken up the themes and perspectives originally formulated by the CCCS, this has not been done uncritically. Many theorists have pointed to the shortcomings and oversights of the approach. Indeed, many of the CCCS team have, themselves, critically reflected on subcultural theory’s limitations.

The CCCS authors, for example, always acknowledged the limits to subcultural ‘resistance’. Confined to specific realms of social life — leisure, style, and media consumption - the subcultural challenge was always partial and tangential and, as Hebdige himself put it, ‘no amount of stylistic incantation can alter the oppressive mode in which the commodities used in subculture have been produced’ (1979: 130). For some, however, the heavy attention given to symbolic meanings was problematic. According to Hebdige, style could be analysed as an autonomous text, with ‘resistance’ taking place at a level independent of the consciousness of subcultural participants - and Hebdige conceded that it was 'highly unlikely’ that members of any subcultures would recognise themselves in his account (Hebdige 1979: 139). But this lack of attention to the actual intentions behind young people’s creation of style provoked criticism. ‘It seems to me’, Stanley Cohen conjectured, ‘that somewhere along the line, symbolic language implies a knowing subject, a subject at least dimly aware of what the symbols are supposed to mean’ (2002: Ivii—Iviii). In relying on an ‘aesthetics which may work for art, but not equally well for life’, Cohen warned, subcultural theory risked ‘getting lost in the forest of symbols’ (Cohen 2002: lx).

The CCCS theorists’ focus on issues of social class also drew criticism. The polarity constructed between working-class subcultures and middle-class countercultures, for example, could oversimplify groups whose composition was often complex and varied. According to Peter Clecak, for instance, the 1960s counterculture was composed of diverse movements and ideas that allowed people from a mixture of social backgrounds ‘to find symbolic shapes for their social and spiritual discontents and hopes’ (Clecak, 1983: 18). Gary Clarke, meanwhile, pointed to the contradictions between Hebdige’s emphasis on punk’s ‘working-class creativity’ and the movement’s origins among London’s artschool avant-garde (Clarke, 1990: 86); and Sheryl Garratt highlighted the heterogeneity of Britain’s late 1980s acid house scene, arguing there was a degree of truth to the oft-repeated cliche that ‘bankers were dancing next to barrow boys’ (Garratt 1998, 160).

The CCCS model was also criticised for allowing social class to overshadow other systems of power relations. Angela McRobbie (1981), for example, was quick to draw attention to the gendered assumptions of much subcultural theory. McRobbie was, herself, affiliated with the Birmingham group, but she was critical of the way some of her colleagues’ work rendered the category of ‘youth’ as unproblematically masculine. Indeed, the studies produced by many subcultural theorists seemed to marginalise young women, concentrating almost exclusively on male experience. Subsequently, it was an omission addressed in a wide body of research focused on girls and young women (see below).

For many critics, the CCCS view of subcultures as ‘authentic’, unmediated expressions of identity was also flawed. Focusing their analysis on what they saw as the creative ‘“moment” of originality in the formation of style’ (Clarke and Jefferson, 1976: 148), the CCCS theorists tended to equate intervention by commercial business with the ‘neutralisation’ of an authentic subculture — so that market intercession was seen as returning once meaningful and ‘oppositional’ subcultural styles to the fold of bland consumerism. As John Clarke and Tony Jefferson put it:

The ‘main stream’ youth cultural response represents ... the ‘incorporated’ version of the ‘deviant’ style: the version that has been bought up, sanitized, ‘made safe’ and resold to the wider youth market: the ‘deviant’ lifestyle become consumption style: the commercial version of the ‘real’.

(Clarke and Jefferson, 1976: 148)

This model of ‘commercial incorporation’, however, has been seen as problematic. For some theorists, the relationship between subcultures and the commercial media is not a simple, linear progression that begins with ‘grass-roots authenticity’ and ends with ‘sanitised product’. Instead, it can be seen as a more ‘circuitous’, symbiotic process of mutual interaction. The account of subcultures offered by the CCCS is analogous to a ‘biological’ narrative that starts out with ‘birth’ (authentic innovation) and concludes in ‘death’ (commercial incorporation). But, in reality, the ‘lives’ of subcultural styles are more complex and multifaceted — they are endlessly recycled, regenerated, and re-embedded in new temporal and geographic contexts. Moreover, from their outset, the crystallisation and dissemination of youth subcultures relies on intervention from the media industries. Cohen’s (2002) study of British mods and rockers during the 1960s, for instance, highlighted the way media coverage gave greater form and definition to subcultural formations that were initially vague and indistinct (see Chapter 4). The theme was developed in Sarah Thornton’s (1995) analysis of Britain’s 1980s rave culture. Like Cohen, Thornton argued that the representational power of the media was crucial in shaping the rave scene’s identity and its members’ sense of themselves. Subcultures, Thornton explained:

... do not germinate from a seed and grow by force of their own energy' into mysterious ‘movements’ only to be belatedly digested by the media.

Rather, media, and other cultural industries are there and effective right from the start.

(Thornton, 1995: 117)

While acknowledging the media’s role in the development of rave culture, however, Thornton still emphasised how ravers, themselves, had been ‘active and creative participants in the formation of club cultures’ (Thornton, 1995: 161). Although ‘authentic’ subcultures were, in essence, media constructions, Thornton argued they remained powerful sources of meaning and self-identity for their participants. Here, Thornton borrowed from French theorist Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘cultural capital’. For Bourdieu (1986) ‘cultural capital’ denoted the forms of knowledge, artefacts, and modes of behaviour that bestowed prestige and social advantage on those social groups that possessed them. Adapting the concept, Thornton argued that ‘s„/>cultural capital’ represented the knowledge, tastes, and artefacts that conferred status in the eyes of subcultural members. ‘Just as books and paintings display cultural capital in the family home’, Thornton explained:

... so subcultural capital is objectified in the form of fashionable haircuts and well assembled record collections ... Just as cultural capital is personified in ‘good’ manners, so subcultural capital is embodied in the form of being ‘in the know’, using (but not over-using) current slang and looking as if you were bom to perform the current dance styles.

(Thornton, 1995: 11—12)

Generally, distinctions between ‘meaningful’ subcultures and ‘incorporated’ media fabrications have been difficult to sustain. As cultural theorist Simon Frith noted in an early critique, attempts to elaborate a clear-cut divide between the ‘subcultural’ and the ‘mainstream’ have invariably led to a ‘false freezing of the world into deviants and the rest’ (1978: 53). Moreover, relatively few youngsters ever enter the ‘authentic’ subcultural scenes described by the CCCS team. As Gary Clarke pointed out, subcultural theory was preoccupied with the spectacular and focused only on the ‘stylistic deviance of a few’ (Clarke, 1990: 75). And the CCCS theorists, themselves, conceded that ‘the great majority of working-class youth never enters a tight or coherent subculture at all’ (Clarke et al., 1976: 16). Indeed, rather than making a wholehearted commitment to a subcultural lifestyle, most youngsters adopt only a limited range of subcultural trappings or insignia (perhaps wearing a ‘mod’ jacket, or buying a ‘punk’ record). As social theorist Steve Redhead wryly observed, ‘“authentic” subcultures were produced by subcultural theories, not the other way around’ (Redhead, 1990: 25).