Contemporary cultures – high and low – are riddled with dynamics of distinction. Although the canons and classifications of high cultures have been the extensively analysed, the distinction systems of popular culture have yet to be as thoroughly researched. In this book, popular distinctions are explored as means by which people jockey for social power, as discriminations by which players are both assigned social statuses and strive for a sense of self-worth. This perspective envisages popular culture as a multi-dimensional social space rather than as a flat folk culture or as simply the bottom rung on some linear social ladder. Rather than characterizing cultural differences as ‘resistances’ to hierarchy or to the remote cultural dominations of some ruling class, it investigates the micro-structures of power entailed in the cultural disagreements and debates that go on between more closely associated social groups. For example, youth construct elaborate scenarios whereby the superficial or belated activities of other young people act as a yardstick of the depth and style of their own culture. The social logic of these distinctions is such that it makes sense to discuss them as forms of subcultural capital or means by which young people negotiate and accumulate status within their own social worlds.
Media are fundamental to processes of popular distinction because media consumption is a primary leisure activity and because they are leading disseminators of culture. Media are so involved in the circuits of contemporary culture that they could be conceived of as being part of the material conditions of social groups, in a way not unlike access to education. In the case of youth, the difference between the ‘hip’ and the banal, honourable and trash culture tends to correlate with amounts and kinds of media exposure – 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.
This approach interrogates the ‘popular’ not just in terms of its etymological root, ‘of the people’, nor in the sense of being ‘prevalent’ or ‘common’, but specifically in the sense of being ‘approved’, ‘preferred’ and ‘well-liked’. In other words, issues of taste are essential to this conception of popular culture. Tastes are fought over precisely because people define themselves and others through what they like and dislike. Taste in music, for youth in particular, is often seen as the key to one’s distinct sense of self. Youth, therefore, often embrace ‘unpopular cultures’ because they distinguish them in ways that the widely liked cannot.
The implications of this approach for the politics of popular culture are contradictory and perhaps best clarified by taking a historical view. A broad comparison of two classic texts – Jock Young’s The Drugtakers and Dick Hebdige’s Subculture – offers just such a perspective on the politics of youth culture. The first of these books was researched in the 1960s and is haunted by hippie culture; the second, written during the 1970s, is dominated by the power of punk. Young’s book comes out of a tradition of deviance studies and criminology while Hebdige’s text, which owes its greatest debts to literary theory, is a contribution to what was then the fledgeling discipline of ‘cultural studies’. Both texts locate youth subcultures on the progressive side of the political arena but, in accordance with their disciplinary differences, they position the crux of youth politics in disparate aspects of youth culture.
Jock Young’s The Drugtakers: The Social Meaning of Drug Use is a sociological investigation which identifies the progressive potential of youth culture in its hedonism – its refusal to settle into work routines and conform to bureaucratic rules. Following in the tradition of Marxists like Herbert Marcuse, Young argues that some youth cultures (particularly drug-taking ones) go beyond the deferred gratifications of ‘leisure’ and enter the realm of pure ‘play’. In other words, they seek worlds of truly subterranean values which are not governed by latter-day versions of the ‘Protestant work ethic’ or some other ethos of productivity. Young sees this kind of youthful escape into ‘alternative forms of reality’ as a threat to the social order, to capitalism and conservatism (Young 1971: 136).
Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, by contrast, is a semiotic interpretation of post-war British youth subcultures which locates the progressive potential of youth culture in the way it flouts, and therefore makes visible, society’s aesthetic rules. Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes, Hebdige sees the clothes and music of Teddy Boys, mods, skinheads and rastas as challenges to the symbolic order, which paved the way for the even more aggressive confrontations of punk style. This kind of ‘semiotic guerilla warfare’ acts as ‘noise’ in the silent workings of dominant ideology. Subcultures therefore become a ‘form of resistance in which … contradictions and objections to this ruling ideology are obliquely represented in style’ (Hebdige 1979: 133).
Both Young’s and Hebdige’s definitive commentaries on subcultural politics take the ethos of the key youth movements of their day to their logical, theoretical conclusions. In researching and contemplating the club and rave cultures of the late 1980s and early 1990s, this book also explains the ideals and standards of a main youth movement of its time. With the benefit of historical hindsight, however, it was difficult simply to accept clubber and raver discourses about ‘radical’ escape and ‘revolutionary’ style, particularly as these discourses seemed to be entwined in complex ways with concerns for distinction.
Youthful interest in distinction is not new. One could easily reinterpret the history of post-war youth cultures in terms of subcultural capital. In a contemporary context, however, dynamics of distinction are perhaps more obvious for at least two reasons. First, unlike the liberalizing sixties and seventies, the eighties were ‘radical’ in their conservatism. Change was experienced as a move to the political right, while the left were effectively positioned as reactionary in their intent to preserve the past. Unlike Young’s hippies and Hebdige’s punks, then, the youth of my research were, to cite the cliché, ‘Thatcher’s children’. Well versed in the virtues of competition, their cultural heroes came in the form of radical young entrepreneurs, starting up clubs and record labels, rather than the politicians and poets of yesteryear.
The second reason that the pursuit of distinction may be more noticeable today is because sociological debates have shifted our vision of difference. For example, despite their many disparate opinions, both Young and Hebdige see the assertion of cultural difference as an essentially progressive gesture, a step in the right direction away from conformity and submission. Difference was cast positively as deviance and dissidence. If one believes that it is in the nature of power to homogenize – be it in the form of Young’s ‘consensus’ or Hebdige’s ‘hegemony’ – then difference can be seen as a good thing in itself. But if one considers the function of difference within an ever more finely graded social structure, its political tendencies become more ambiguous. In a post-industrial world where consumers are incited to individualize themselves and where the operations of power seem to favour classification and segregation, it is hard to regard difference as necessarily progressive. The flexibility of new modes of commodity production and the expansion of multiple media support micro-communities and fragmented niche cultures. Each cultural difference is a potential distinction, a suggestion of superiority, an assertion of hierarchy, a possible alibi for subordination. In many circumstances, then, the politics of difference is more appropriately cast as discrimination and distinction.
These shifting notions of the power of difference have informed the main arguments of this book. They have shaped the double-edged way in which I have considered the relations between the ‘mainstream’ and the subcultural. On the one hand, youth are rebellious in their opposition to the mainstream as a complacent, dominant culture. On the other, the characteristics of the mainstream they repeatedly disparage and subordinate in speech are those of a feminine working-class minority. Here, it is not possible to separate an embryonic critique of the status quo from ideas which express and support extant relations of power. They are two sides of the same coin. As Bourdieu writes, subcultural practices ‘produce paradoxical effects which cannot be understood if one tries to force them into a dichotomy of resistance or submission’ (Bourdieu 1991: 94).
These issues are clouded by the fondness that youth subcultures have for appropriating political rhetorics and frequently referring to ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’, ‘equality’ and ‘unity’. This can be seen as a strategy by which political issues are enlisted in order to give youthful leisure activities that extra punch, that added je ne sais quoi, a sense of independence, even danger. In the process of coming to grips with the existential and social circumstances of their lives, youth appropriate the ‘political’ as a way of making their culture more meaningful. As such, this is not evidence of the politicization of youth as much as testimony to the aestheticization of politics.
The two-sided nature of distinction also clarifies the politics of the youthful will to classlessness. At one level, youth do aspire to a more egalitarian and democratic world. On the other hand, classlessness is a strategy for transcending being classed. It is a means of obfuscating the dominant structure in order to set up an alternative and, as such, is an ideological precondition for the effective operation of subcultural capital. This paradoxical combination of resignation and refusal, defiance and deference would seem to be characteristic of youth subcultures.
The politics of youth are also complicated by the fact that subcultures adore rejection or condemnation by media that seem to represent the status quo, like Radio One and the Sun. I’ve discussed this in terms of the thrill of censorship and ‘moral panic’, processes unrivalled in their ability to authenticate transgression and therefore legitimate a subculture. But we shouldn’t assume the presence of political subversion just because a youth culture got a negative response from some part of the media. For, rather than operating with any imperative to repress or oppress, media are motivated by corporate agendas like generating sensational copy to keep up high sales or maintaining their image as a family-orientated public service. In other words, media react to phenomena which don’t actually threaten them, and youth cultures (unlike, say, Monopolies and Mergers Commission inquiries) are one such subject.
This is not to say that individual participants in club and rave culture are not active in the arena of Politics proper (rather than the politics with a small ‘p’ under discussion here) or that club culture has spawned no political movements. On the contrary, clubbers and ravers have been affiliated to two political projects – both of which were concerned first and foremost with the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure. The first was the ‘Freedom to Party’ campaign which was organized in anticipation of the private member’s bill outlawing ‘pay parties’ in 1990. Here the key MPs to voice support were from the far right, libertarian wing of the Conservative party. The second political venture was opposition to the Criminal Justice Bill which sought to go even further in outlawing gatherings of ten people or more which were accompanied by music dependent on amplification with a pronounced and regular beat. In this case, youth found themselves aligned primarily with Labour MPs. In both cases, the demonstrations organized to oppose these bills hardly constituted defining moments of club and rave culture. They were poorly attended peripheral activities which pale in comparison with the dance activities of any Saturday night.
Rather than de-politicizing popular cultures, a shift away from the search for ‘resistance’ actually gives fuller representation to the complex and rarely straightforward politics of contemporary culture. The distinctions examined through multiple methods in this book demonstrate the rich creativities and originalities of youth culture as well as their entanglement in micro-politics of domination and subordination. However, this economy of the ‘hip’ and happening is but one dynamic in a huge array of popular distinctions. In order to give a more comprehensive account of the causes and consequences of popular culture, future studies would do well to investigate the generation, evolution and dissolution of subcultural distinctions.