The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies deserves our gratitude for having begun to locate the real areas of discussion.

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2 No one seriously interested in youth mass culture or style can afford to ignore this work. Stanley Cohen, The Times Higher Education Supplement The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies deserves our gratitude for having begun to locate the real areas of discussion. New Society... affords an authoritative perspective of society s subcultures amongst the young since the war. What it has to say about that legacy of rebellion deserves to be read by all involved with and seeking to understand young people ILEA Contact This revised and expanded edition of Resistance through Rituals includes a new introduction to bring the reader fully up-to-date with the changes that have happened since the work s first release in the double issue of Working Papers in Cultural Studies in The work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham has been noted as historically leading the field in new areas of enquiry within the field of cultural studies, and the papers from the Centre are canonical reading for many cultural studies students. This revised edition includes all the original, exceptional papers, and enhances these with the reflections of the Editors thirty years after the original publication. At a time when youth culture had been widely publicised, but few people understood its significance as one of the most striking and visible manifestations of social and political change, these papers redressed the balance. Looking in detail at the wide range of post-war youth subcultures, from teds, mods and skinheads to black Rastafarians, Resistance through Rituals considers how youth culture reflects and reacts to cultural change. This text represents the collective understanding of the leading centre for contemporary culture, and serves to situate some of the most important cultural work of the twentieth century in the new millennium. Editorial Group: John Clarke, Stuart Daniels, Jenny Garber, Angela McRobbie, Rachel Powell, Brian Roberts Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist who has contributed to key works on media and cultural studies, as well as politics. He was appointed Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1968 and wrote many influential works during his time at the Centre. Tony Jefferson is Professor of Criminology at Keele University and was a contributor to the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham.

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4 Resistance through Rituals Youth subcultures in post-war Britain Second edition Edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson

5 First published by Routledge in 1993 First published 1975 as Working papers in Cultural Studies no. 7/8 Eighth impression 1991, HarperCollinsAcademic This edition published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-library, To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge s collection of thousands of ebooks please go to Editorial Selection and material, Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson; Chapters, the authors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The authors assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Resistance through rituals : youth subcultures in post-war Britain / edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN (hardback : alk. paper) ISBN X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Youth Great Britain. 2. Subculture Great Britain. 3. Social classes Great Britain. I. Hall, Stuart, 1932 Feb. 3. II. Jefferson, Tony. HQ799.G7R dc ISBN Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: (hbk) ISBN10: X (pbk) ISBN10: (ebk) ISBN13: (hbk) ISBN13: (pbk) ISBN13: (ebk)

6 Contents Once more around Resistance through Rituals Introduction vii xxxiii PART I Theory I 1 1 Subcultures, cultures and class 3 JOHN CLARKE, STUART HALL, TONY JEFFERSON AND BRIAN ROBERTS 2 Some notes on the relationship between the societal control culture and the news media, and the construction of a law and order campaign 60 CCCS MUGGING GROUP PART II Ethnography 65 3 Cultural responses of the Teds 67 TONY JEFFERSON 4 The meaning of Mod 71 DICK HEBDIGE 5 The Skinheads and the magical recovery of community 80 JOHN CLARKE 6 Doing nothing 84 PAUL CORRIGAN 7 The cultural meaning of drug use 88 PAUL E. WILLIS 8 Ethnography through the looking-glass 100 GEOFFREY PEARSON AND JOHN TWOHIG

7 vi Contents 9 Communes 106 COLIN WEBSTER 10 Reggae, Rastas and Rudies 113 DICK HEBDIGE Appendix: Unemployment, the context of street boy culture 129 RACHEL POWELL 11 A strategy for living 131 IAIN CHAMBERS 12 Structures, cultures and biographies 139 CHAS CRITCHER PART III Theory II Style 147 JOHN CLARKE 14 Consciousness of class and consciousness of generation 162 GRAHAM MURDOCK AND ROBIN McCRON 15 Girls and subcultures 177 ANGELA MCROBBIE AND JENNY GARBER 16 A note on marginality 189 RACHEL POWELL AND JOHN CLARKE 17 The politics of youth culture 195 PAUL CORRIGAN AND SIMON FRITH PART IV Method Naturalistic research into subcultures and deviance 207 BRIAN ROBERTS 19 The logic-of-enquiry of participant observation 216 STEVE BUTTERS References 235 Index 248

8 Once more around Resistance through Rituals Thirty years ago last summer, Resistance through Rituals (hereafter RTR) was published as a double issue (7/8) of Working Papers in Cultural Studies, the annual journal of the old Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham University. Republished in book form by Hutchinson in the following year, it has remained in print ever since. Now part of the Routledge stable, it is being republished here in a new edition. Given this longevity and the continuing interest it has attracted over the years, it seems legitimate, and important, to ask, what was the RTR project? How has it been built upon, contested and critiqued since its publication? What precisely is its contemporary relevance? Section I: The project The original Introduction, which is retained here, usefully situated the volume in the wider work of the Centre. It also sounded some resonant notes. It identified the book s role in assembling between one set of covers a wide range of research from diverse hands (including that of many Centre graduate students like Paul Willis, Iain Chambers, Rachel Powell, Jenny Garber and Chas Critcher who were not regular members of the Sub-Cultures Group, and of several authors including Paul Corrigan, Geoff Pearson, John Twohig, Graham Murdock, Robin McCron, Simon Frith and Steve Butters who were never actually Centre members). It signaled the necessarily tentative, unfinished, work-in-progress character of the volume and its broad intellectual indebtedness. It marked the volume s relation to work that was ongoing elsewhere in the Centre and subsequently published, especially Paul Willis Learning to Labour (1977) and Profane Culture (1978), and pointed towards the connected but different emphases that resulted in Policing the Crisis (Hall et al., 1978). It underlined the collective nature of the Centre s intellectual practice and its attendant difficulties, which the volume amply illustrated, and its status as a loose, thematically organised rather than a single-authored monograph. Restating these qualifications are a way of re-contextualising the book for contemporary readers. Inevitably, as it has detached itself from a specific time and context and taken on a life of its own, RTR has been as is the fate of all texts of this kind selectively appropriated in ways that its authors sometimes have

9 viii Once more around Resistance through Rituals difficulty in recognising, and extensively critiqued, often within disciplines and discourses far removed from its original location. We make no complaint about this, which is an intrinsic part of discursive, interpretive work. However, authors, though no longer privileged interpreters, are not as dead as Roland Barthes once supposed and, therefore, are not precluded from entering the discourse again at another place, another link in an ever-unwinding chain. Institutionally, the Centre s sub-groups arose as an extension of the report-back sessions on on-going research originally known as work-in-progress seminars. The Subcultures Group was paralleled at the empirical research level by other research groups whose work was published in subsequent volumes of the Journal and in the Hutchinson series. The work of all these groups was framed by the broader theoretical debate on-going in the weekly Theory Seminar, where a wider programme of interdisciplinary reading and conceptual discussion was being vigorously engaged. The aim of the Subcultures Group was to provide a common point of reference for the grouping of the Centre s individual graduate research projects examining various aspects of the youth culture phenomenon. In RTR, subcultures are recognized as a particularly clearly structured aspect of this broader phenomenon. The Subcultures Group thus provided a space for discussion, debate and orientation for these projects; it collectivised background reading, helped to integrate the Centre s programme of work around common themes and facilitated a process of grounded theorising. This location of the Subcultures Group within the broader Cultural Studies project has tended to get lost in subsequent debate. The subcultures work was part and parcel of, though also a differentiated relatively autonomous element in, the evolution of a distinctive approach to Cultural Studies that was emerging in this period at the Centre. The rise of youth cultures seemed to us one of the most distinctive indeed, spectacular aspects of contemporary British culture, and thus of the process of post-war social and cultural change which was inscribed as a privileged object of study and theorising at the inception of the Centre s work. As it was widely phrased at the time, youth was a metaphor for social change. Spectacular youth subcultures raised questions about the necessarily contested and contradictory character of cultural change, and the diversity of forms in which such resistances might find expression. As many pieces in the volume made plain, especially the long theoretical overview Subcultures, cultures and class, the project was concerned both to examine, concretely and in depth, one region of contemporary culture and to understand how this could be connected in an explanatory, non-reductive way, to broader cultural and social structures. It was thus an attempt to connect the phenomena of youth subcultures to a general social and cultural historical analysis of the social formation. The former preoccupation surfaced in the project s attention to stylistic, or signifying, practices and symbolic meanings and the exploration of appropriate qualitative methods of analysis for capturing culture s meaning to its subjects, its lived experience. The latter is evident in the constant reference of the phenomenon to wider social relations and formations, the search for what

10 Once more around Resistance through Rituals (perhaps naively) we called, borrowing from Willis (1972), the homologies between them. Although Cultural Studies took culture as its privileged point of entry, and was in that sense a very early manifestation of the cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences, its aim was not to replace what Marx called determination in the last instance by the economic with cultural determination. The objective was to analyse and understand the relationships between those relatively autonomous but never mutually exclusive sets of relations designated as culture and society. Raymond Williams counter-positioning of the two terms in his early work (1958) proved, in that sense, pivotal for the Cultural Studies enterprise in its formative phase, though, as RTR makes clear, it involved doing very different kinds of work. Unlike more conventional sociological inquiries, however, RTR gave as much weight to the symbolic as it did to the social subcultures and style, as Dick Hebdige (1979: 1) succinctly put it and with theorising the complex linkages or mediations between them. Throughout, the subcultures project was shadowed by these larger conceptual questions already making waves in the Centre s theoretical universe: among them, Gramsci s hegemony, Althusser s relative autonomy and imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence, Barthes and Levi-Strauss bricolage. In this sense, RTR was a product of its (theoretical) time. Another way in which the subcultures project differed from both the dominant sociological understanding of society and a dominant literary or humanities conception of culture was in constantly returning to the nexus between culture and power. In what sense was generational disaffiliation a sign of broader social contradictions? What was the political significance and efficacy of cultural movements, when the political was given a much-expanded definition expanded, as it were, through the cultural? It was in this context that the different approaches in the book have, as a common underlying thread, questions about the political valency of resistance through rituals [our emphasis] the relationship of highly-stylised and culturally-elaborated social movements to class cultures and of cultural politics to other forms of social contestation. This was examined in, for example, the discussion in the theoretical over-view of the spectrum of negotiated and situated solutions, the question of subcultures as imaginary relations or, to use Phil Cohen s (1972: 23) term, magical resolutions. RTR has sometimes been read as the Centre s contribution to sociological inquiry. However, it is probably more accurate to see the project as the site of an extended engagement between Cultural Studies and the sociological traditions. This was already in process at the level of broader theorization. Key texts drawn from sociology and anthropology were contributory to the inter-disciplinary mix out of which the Centre s distinctive theoretical approach emerged. Weber, Durkheim, Mauss, the German verstehen tradition, Dilthey and Schutz, alongside Marx and Levi-Strauss, were among the founding texts of the Theory seminar. What was never on the cards was the incorporation of Sociology as a finished disciplinary enterprise whose methods one could then take over and apply. The underlying question always was this: how does this contribute to the development ix

11 x Once more around Resistance through Rituals of a distinctive cultural studies approach? Which aspects of this tradition of thought can be integrated, alongside other elements, into a wider, theoretical framework and with what analytic and conceptual effects? In short, this engagement was part of the search for a non-positivistic, qualitative, methodology and forms of inter-disciplinary social inquiry more appropriate to the domain of culture and the double-fitting required by a project fundamentally concerned with relating the analysis of cultural forms and social meaning to wider social relations. This demanded, not simply doing sociological work but trying to disinter and reconstruct for our purposes, and from a perspective to some extent outside the field, older traditions of sociological thought. These traditions had been largely submerged by the positivist, Parsonian and functionalist emphases of the American post-war sociological deluge. What the turn to subcultures particularly helped us to do was to discover the relevance for Cultural Studies of these questions and concerns as they had continued to evolve within the important but lesser qualitative tradition in contemporary American social inquiry. This tradition included a range of work: symbolic interactionist studies, influenced by G. H. Mead, which attempted to recover the subjective or symbolic meaning of action for actors; well-focussed, closely-observed ethnographic case studies, as developed in the urban sociology of the Chicago school and elsewhere; and the related methods of participant observation borrowed from social anthropology, which used informants and active participation by the researcher as a means of delineating cultural worlds from the inside. Many of these approaches had been deployed in studies of deviancy and delinquency or other forms of antisocial behaviour, largely as a correction to more positivistic approaches. In more recent years, these approaches had responded to the criticism that they altogether excluded the wider society, by incorporating societal reaction into the account, including the way so-called deviant behaviour had been given a particular meaning i.e. labelled by the media and regulating authorities and agencies. These methodologies were significant for a Cultural Studies approach to subcultures because of the attention to questions of meaning, and because they validated the experience and point-of-view of the actors, restoring to them a level of agency and empowering their accounts in ways which more objective methods precluded. American sociology at the time was fond of saying that the sociological problem was the problem of social order. However, these alternative approaches undermined the assumption that society was a consensual and normative order, from which only a small minority, for pathological reasons, deviated. Few of the case studies reported in RTR were the result of a sustained ethnographic or participant observation methodology; but the more ethnographic accounts in the study all borrowed from and adapted these methodologies for the purposes of what Geertz (1973) called thick description. The underlying methodological assumption was that meanings had to be closely observed and related to practices, and that cultural phenomena had to be understood concretely and in their full specificity before they could be double fitted with wider relations. A brief glance at the volume will substantiate the argument that what might be called the

12 Once more around Resistance through Rituals ethnographic level was of critical importance to the project, but that RTR could not accurately be described as an ethnographic study. xi Section II: Expansions, critiques and contestations In the years since its first publication, RTR has been a touchstone for much work on youth, and not only within the somewhat narrow field of subcultural studies. Indeed, it was first taken up within education, as a set text on E202, the Open University course on Schooling and Society. Not surprisingly, such interest has been accompanied by a body of criticism, the most recent of which has begun to declare itself post-subcultural (Muggleton, 1997; Muggleton and Weinzierl, eds., 2003). This is a large claim that poses many questions. Is the idea of subculture as presented in this volume past its sell-by date? Was it mistaken from the outset? Have subcultures changed in some fundamental way? Is the social world to which we were trying to relate subcultures very different now from what it was? Has the relationship between subcultures and society altered? Do we, in consequence, need a new, post-subcultural theoretical language to make sense of any or all of these changes? These are the large questions that underpin, more or less explicitly, wholly or in part, the critical responses to RTR. They will also provide the threads linking our attempt to overview here the main lines of enquiry opened up by such responses. Despite its problems, the discourse of subcultures has continued to be used. The second edition of The Subcultures Reader (Gelder, 2005) recently published by Routledge retains 30 (of the original 55) contributions from the first edition (Gelder and Thornton, 1997) and reprints 18 new chapters. Recently the media have been much preoccupied with the meaning of the hoodie as in the past they were concerned with the teddy boys, the mods, the rockers, the skinheads, and so on. Indeed, The Guardian s week-long examination of the phenomenon explicitly acknowledged this subcultural lineage. One of the journalists (McLean, 2005: 3) also turned to one of the original contributors to this volume, Angela McRobbie, for a comment. She was reported to have said: The point of origin is obviously Black American hip-hop culture, now thoroughly mainstream and a key part of the global economy of music through Eminem and others. Leisure- and sportswear adopted from everyday wear suggests a distance from the world of office [suit] or school [uniform]. Rap culture celebrates defiance, as it narrates the experience of social exclusion. Musically and stylistically, it projects menace and danger as well as anger and rage. [The hooded top] is one in a long line of garments chosen by young people, usually boys, and inscribed with meaning suggesting that they are up to no good. In the past, such appropriation was usually restricted to membership of specific youth cultures leather jackets, bondage trousers but nowadays it is the norm among young people to flag up their music and cultural preferences in this way, hence the adoption of the hoodie by boys across the boundaries of age, ethnicity and class.

13 xii Once more around Resistance through Rituals The run of this argument attempting to pin down the hoodie s point of origin ; analysing its stylistic elements; suggesting something of their significance (distanced from the world of work, projecting menace, defiance, etc.) feels as if still operating, broadly speaking, within the RTR tradition. In other ways, however, it goes beyond it: by suggesting, for example, that hoodie use crosses age, ethnic and class boundaries. This double-sidedness acknowledging the new without losing what may still be serviceable in the old seems to us to be a valuable motif to hang on to; it is, perhaps, to anticipate one endpoint, something our critics have not always managed to do. Biography/phenomenology/living through In one way or another, most of the problems in the resistance through rituals framework are to be found in the theory s third level: how the subculture is actually lived out by its bearers. The nagging sense here is that these lives, selves and identities do not always coincide with what they are supposed to stand for. (Cohen, [1980] 2005: 167) Stan Cohen was one of the first to complain about the mismatch between the intellectual pyrotechnics of our theories and the immediate emotional tone and satisfaction of the situated actions of our actors (Cohen, [1980] 2005: 168). This complaint has resurfaced regularly ever since, most recently in Jenks (2005: 128) idea that we exerted too much theoretic control of our youngsters lives, even though others have actually seen our work as based in ethnography (Redhead, 1997a: 2). Cohen s is an eloquent re-affirmation of the value of the ethnographic approach in validating and authenticating the perspective of the subjects. However, as we tried to explain earlier, most of our case studies were not conducted according to a strictly observed ethnographic methodology. In part the misconception flows from not making this distinction clearer in the book. In part, it may be because the RTR tradition is often seen to encompass the solidly ethnographic work of Willis (1977; 1978) which was indeed being conducted at the same time as RTR, although it was not part of the work of the Subcultures Group. As usual, some of the sternest criticisms have been in-house. A year after Cohen s critique, Gary Clarke s Defending ski-jumpers appeared as a Centre working paper. It berated [T]he subcultures as discussed in Resistance Through Rituals for being essentialist and non-contradictory, reified abstractions: Any empirical analysis would reveal that subcultures are diffuse, diluted, and mongrelized in form. For example, certain skins may assert values of smartness which are considered by the authors to be restricted to the mods. The anthropological analysis of unique subcultures means that descriptions of the processes by which they are sustained, transformed, and interwoven are absent. Similarly, the elitist nature of the analysis (that is, the focus on originals ) means that we are given no sense of how and why the styles become

14 Once more around Resistance through Rituals popular (and how and why they eventually cease to be in vogue) other than through a simplistic discussion of the corruption and incorporation of the original style. (Clarke, [1981] 2005: 170) The critical issue here is whether we tended to essentialise subcultures or were they in fact more cohesive movements then than they have since become? Perhaps both things are true (these are questions we explore further below). Certainly, the critique of essentialism offered here foreshadows later theoretical shifts. Subsequently, this became one of postmodernism s favoured criticisms, often combined with a plea for more grounded, empirical research (Muggleton, 1997: 167). Few studies have in fact gone beyond critique to conduct research into the subjective life-worlds of subcultural participants. We can think of three: David Moore s (1994) participant observation study of a small group of skinheads in Perth, Western Australia; Muggleton s (2000) neo-weberian interview-based study designed to test The Postmodern Meaning of Style ; and Hodkinson s (2002: 4 5) multi-method, ethnographic study of Goth, which utilises his critical insider status. Each is interesting, each is different and each ends up affirming some aspects of the older RTR approach as well as transcending it in new ways. The following broad finding in David Moore s (1994: 143 4) study nicely demonstrates the co-existence of both old and new elements: Being a skinhead involves a constant interplay between the subcultural level expressed in fighting, drinking and womanizing, and given explicit approval in judgements of authenticity and the personal level consisting of good laughs, quiet drinking and relationships with regular partners, and measured in terms of sincerity. Muggleton s (2000: 162 3) conclusion, too, manages to hang onto both old and new elements. Subcultures, he found, were neither the highly cohesive, groupcentred, working-class entities of post-war modernist linear time, nor the diffuse, cross-class, individualist, libertarian, amorphous hybrids of postmodern subcultural time. Rather, they are [M]anifestations of self-expression, individual autonomy and cultural diversity, and... these traits have an elective affinity with bohemian values that have increasingly come to define the experiences of sections of post-war working-class and lower-middle-class youth. In this sense, the emergence of a postmodern (or liminal) working class subcultural sensibility (and its convergence with middle-class values) can be traced back to the beginning of the 1960s. (ibid: 167) It may be putting it too strongly to trace a class convergence in subcultural sensibilities back to the 1960s a time when subcultures seemed still to be more xiii

15 xiv Once more around Resistance through Rituals clearly articulated to wider class cultures. Only post-punk, in the 1980s, do we see something like class and gender convergence, particularly in rave or club cultures. This being said, there is much in Muggleton s argument with which to agree. Finally, Hodkinson (2002: 196) found that his re-conceptualized notion of subculture stressing relative distinctiveness, the provision of a sense of identity, a degree of commitment, and the relative autonomy of its operation did characterize the Goth scene. Unlike Muggleton s bohemians, Goths were characterized more by their substance than by their fluidity (ibid). This might be seen as an endorsement of some of the old notions of subculture. On the other hand, Goths may, in this respect, be something of an untypical throw-back to the subcultural forms of an earlier period. However, his book also avoided engaging with what he himself recognized as key problems with traditional subcultural theory : the ideas of subculture as a spontaneous expression of shared structural contradictions ; the notion of resistance ; the false contrast between authenticity and media and commerce and profit motives. This is all interesting work, demonstrating both change and continuity between the old subcultures and the new post-subcultural world. They certainly all provided much fuller accounts of the lived experiences of their subcultural bearers than we did in RTR, thereby meeting the main thrust of the lack-ofethnographic-authenticity critique. But, beyond that, what do we learn of the larger picture? How well are these empirically grounded subcultures grounded in relation to the political, economic and socio-cultural changes of their respective times? The answer is not very well, if at all. This is not especially surprising because it is an endemic problem with ethnographic accounts. Generally, their main ambition is to tell it like it is. Lived experience told from within is taken to be the privileged level of inquiry and of explanation. Sometimes, indeed, they are positively opposed, on theoretical grounds, to the idea of making connections between lived experience and structural realities. Rightly or wrongly, this is exactly what Cultural Studies aspired to do, why RTR was not an ethnography and therefore why it is odd to see such a route proposed as a critical development of our project. In this respect, it is worth remembering that the work of Stan Cohen s which most powerfully influenced us the book on Mods and Rockers (Cohen, 1973) combined an ethnographic approach with a strong focus on labelling and societal reaction in the form of the police, the media and other disciplinary agencies. This combination was precisely the reason for its impact on our thinking (which led to certain key conceptual developments in Policing the Crisis). It is also worth recalling that Paul Willis much lauded ethnography of the lads in Learning to Labour was as successful as it was precisely because it went beyond earlier ethnographic work of educationalists like Hargreaves (1967) by attempting to answer a larger question, namely, why do working-class kids choose to do working class jobs? In other words Willis was attempting to understand the reproduction of social class by looking at the linkages ( homologies ) which schooling provided between the lived experience of the lads and the wider class structure and

16 Once more around Resistance through Rituals cultures. That his answer involved a theoretical contribution to the emerging debate about the interdependence of class and gender the lads rejection of the femininity of pen-pushing and office work in favour of the masculinity of heavy labour effectively secured their class fate is also, in this context, given less credit than it deserves. In any event, it is this much larger terrain that the Cultural Studies subcultural work was designed to address and which more recent ethnographic subcultural work lacks the ambition to occupy. By that token, much of it is not really addressing the RTR problematic. xv Class and subcultures: crude determinism or too indeterminate? Our theorisation of the relation between class and culture was one of the early objects of critique. Ros Coward (1977), for example, then a Centre member, accused us of adopting an expressive view of the relation between class and culture (i.e, the latter merely mirroring the former, which is determining), and therefore of not giving the cultural its own autonomy. Colin Sparks (also a Centre contemporary), on the other hand, accused us of the opposite sin : of abandoning an orthodox Marxist conception of economic determination for a more culturally inflected Marxism (Sparks, 1977). Either way reductively deterministic or too indeterminate the prominence we gave to class has remained a constant element in subsequent critiques. It may or may not be valid. Perhaps classarticulated cultures were both more visible and more consolidated at that time. Perhaps the reference to class was too unproblematically given in the theoretical resources being mobilised at the time, in ways which would not be the case now; theoretical shifts are subject to fashion swings too, and a veritable theoretical torrent has, after all, flowed under this bridge since the 1970s. Perhaps all these factors were in play, together. However, it has to be insisted that a simple class explanation of the subcultural phenomenon was never part of the project. Much of the theorising going on in the volume arose precisely as the result of a sustained effort to think and make connections between subcultures and class without simply reducing the one to the other. Moreover, many of the other dimensions whose elaboration generated much of the theoretical excitement of subsequent decades generation, race and gender found their way into the volume (some, like gender, as a the product of internal critique), though in what may seem now relatively under-developed forms. How do we see this issue now? How has this debate fared? Contemporary postindustrial societies have certainly become much more individualistic, socially fragmented and pluralistic since the 1960s and 70s with the result that class and culture are much more disarticulated than they were, and the whole subcultural field has become much more diffuse than it once was. The nature of class itself may also have changed, in the transition from late industrial to post-industrial societies. It is true that Britain seems to be on the move between an earlier form of class structure, embedded in the history of the social formation, and a more American or transatlantic form of class, more rooted in money and the

17 xvi Once more around Resistance through Rituals life-style it can purchase. Class can no longer be predicated as primary in the production or explanation of stylistic solutions. However, if we ask whether class has disappeared as a meaningful category in thinking about the social order, the answer has to be a resounding no. Class divisions not only exist but continue to exert massive influence on life-chances and opportunities in every sphere of life influences which are transmitted across the generations and become embedded in the social order. Indeed, class resurfaced in the 1980s, often as a way of thinking about social disorder. We have in mind here the debate about the underclass, what conservatives, broadly speaking, thought of as a subculture of non-work, criminality and illegitimacy (Morris, 1994: 86). It became one of the key terms in the discourses grouped around Thatcherism, the principal political force in the disarticulation of older class/cultural formations. Across the political spectrum and within lay and academic discourse the term became widely adopted as a vehicle for thinking about the new poverty and the widening inequalities that accompanied de-industrialization (Murray, 1984 and1990; Dahrendorf, 1985; Morris, 1994; Wilson, 1978 and 1987; Auletta, 1982). The details of that debate its historical origins, the links between structures and cultures and between race and class that under-pinned it cannot detain us here (but see Wacquant, 2002). Crudely, conservatives favoured cultural explanations and liberals structural ones. However, its relevance for us resides in the debate being an attempt to address the huge transformations of post-industrial society. Our concern with linking up subcultures to these changes would inevitably have involved an engagement with this debate and the new reality it attempted, however inadequately, to describe, understand and explicate. As McRobbie (1998: 3 4) succinctly put it, although class by the 1990s was a moving macrostructure of life chances, it still provided an overall map of opportunities, expectations and outcomes. Gender blindness and the missing girls One of the other recurrent criticisms of RTR was its gender blindness, something that, with the hindsight of contemporary feminism, now seems embarrassingly obvious. Despite efforts in this volume to address the issue (see McRobbie and Garber; also Powell and Clarke), it remains overwhelmingly the case that young women were seen as both marginal to youth subcultures, and to our efforts to theorise them. Neither gender nor, for that matter, sexuality was deployed as the structuring dimension that each subsequently became. This resulted in an almost exclusive attention to boys within subcultures and (relatedly) a failure to see how attending to boys and the largely leisure-based sites of their activities led us to lose the theoretical importance of the missing sites and with them the dimension of gender. We have since seen much more attention to young women in a range of public and domestic sites, as well as a properly gendered look at men and masculinities, both now comprising fields of work much wider than youth subcultural studies.

18 Once more around Resistance through Rituals xvii Quite early on, Dorn and South ([1983] 1999: 35) identified the need for the circumstances, cultures and consciousness of both boys and girls to be rethought in relation to [an enlarged notion of] the social division of labour. By this they meant an understanding which fore-grounded gender and included the private world of family, households, childcare and sexual relations, as well as the service sector and the informal economy. (It should not be forgotten, however (although we did at the time), that Phil Cohen s seminal early essay, which talked of subcultures as magical resolutions of class contradictions, also saw subcultures as generationally specific symbolic systems whose function was also to defuse intergenerational conflict within the, now nucleated, working class family (Cohen, 1972: 22).) Once feminist scholars generally began exposing the world of women to this new gender-sensitive gaze, this re-focusing of an earlier, narrower, subcultural approach was almost inevitable. It was impossible to make full sense of the lives of women without taking into account family relationships, childcare responsibilities, the world of domestic consumption and, increasingly, the entry into the wider economy and the feminisation of the work force. (It also made the study of men look different once this domestic dimension was included, of course, helping to precipitate the general shift in focus from women s studies to gender studies.) Within what might be called the field of youth studies, as opposed to subcultures, this wider re-orientation produced much excellent work. This included, for example, Christine Griffin s (1984) detailed look at young women in the transition from school to work (tracking Willis s (1977) classic look at the lads in Learning to Labour) and Bev Skeggs s (1997) fascinating inquiry into the class-based femininities of a group of working-class women. Within the specific domain of subcultural studies, the person who most persistently took up this challenge (posed originally by Garber and McRobbie in this volume) has been McRobbie herself. In the wake of that critique, she set out to explore what happens to the study of subcultures once sexuality, girls different (gender-defined) spaces and their different forms of resistance and accommodation are addressed. Initially, this entailed tracking girls within the domestic realm and the culture of best friends and bedrooms, rather than within the subcultural groupings, gangs and leisure arenas. McRobbie argued that their greater presence within the private sphere anticipated their futures as wives and mothers. The more restricted leisure opportunities of their mothers, later in the life-cycle, gets prefigured by the importance attached in adolescence to getting a boyfriend, spending evenings in with him, and saving for marriage (McRobbie, [1980] 1991a: 33). The discourse of romantic individualism (McRobbie, 1991b: 131) which she identified with securing and retaining the love of a good boy seemed, in this period, to be the ideological lynchpin of this traditional version of femininity: the ethos par excellence of the teenage girl (ibid; emphasis in original). This ethos was eloquently expressed in the popular girls magazine of the period, Jackie. She saw a related ideological component of teenage femininity as linked with the importance of retaining sexual respectability, with its implications for how girls should avoid excessive drinking or drug-taking (McRobbie, [1980] 1991a: 29).

19 xviii Once more around Resistance through Rituals These then provided some of the new coordinates of a gender-focussed approach home-based use of leisure time; the importance of friendship groups, romance and boyfriends; girls magazines which McRobbie opened up while still operating within shouting distance of the original RTR subcultures tradition. Initially, this still shared some of the focal concerns associated with the RTR project. Resistance, for example, was still an issue at least, to the extent it was possible in these materially and ideologically restricted spaces. However, McRobbie argued at this time that the culture of girls tended toward a celebration of just those aspects of femininity romance, fashion, beauty which were also a source of their oppression. Her later work was an expansion of such notions as well as an enlargement of her thinking and we return to it later (in Section III). Within the subcultural field itself, little else of significance on young women emerged in this period perhaps because, as suggested above, the important work had begun to emigrate elsewhere. (We have ignored, deliberately, the growing literature on riot grrrls (e.g. Gottlieb and Wald, 1994; Kearney, 1998; Piano, 2003) because, being middle class and overtly political, they constitute in our terms a counter culture and not a subculture.) However, within criminology, significant related work was done on girls and street gangs. The turn towards a gendered approach to the gang (an established focus in studies of delinquency) may have coincided with an evolution in the culture of some young, urban women away from the romantic and domestic focus McRobbie identified. However, we should remember that, in the US where much of this work was carried out, subcultural and gang theory has always been closely related. Albert Cohen (1955) formulated his classic general theory of subcultures in a book subtitled The Culture of the Gang. Cloward and Ohlin s (1960) response was subtitled A Theory of Delinquent Gangs. The focus in these girl gang studies is on street life, with questions relating to gendered behaviour and norms absolutely central. Is the behaviour of gang girls similar to, or different from, that of the boys? Does it reinforce or subvert conventional gender norms? What can it tell us about contemporary gender relations? In her pioneering early ethnographic study of girls in New York street gangs, Campbell (1986: 266) concluded that, although girls appear increasingly as sisters in the gang instead of as molls, they still remained an annex to the male gang, subject to restrictive, male control: [W]ithin the gang, there are still good girls and bad girls, tomboys and fallen women. Girls are told how to dress, are allowed to fight, and are encouraged to be good mothers and faithful wives. Miller s (2002a: 442) later study also found a distinct gender hierarchy, as well as many contradictory beliefs about gender equality. Most controversially, what gender equality meant, apparently, was crossing the gender divide, identifying with masculinity and thus becoming accepted as equal to male gang members (hence Miller s (2001) deliberately provocative book title, One of the Guys). Whether gang girls are doing masculinity (Miller, 2002a and b) or bad girl femininity (Messerschmidt, 2002), both notions point to important shifts in the nature of contemporary feminine culture and gender relations, as well as to the impact of contemporary feminism on studies of youth. However, very little comparative work of this kind was done in the UK. What in general terms this shift may signify

20 Once more around Resistance through Rituals is a re-appearance, and perhaps a deepening, of the divide in youth studies between the criminal, the delinquent and the anti-social end of the spectrum and a focus on a media-driven urban popular culture. Dick Hebdige long ago anticipated this when he spoke of two image clusters the bleak portraits of juvenile offenders and the exuberant cameos of teenage life which reverberate, alternate, sometimes get crossed (Hebdige, [1983] 2005: 295). For our purposes, what is missing from these girl gang studies is any serious interest in cultural questions and the symbolic meanings of gang style. xix Enter postmodernism: from subculture to club cultures McRobbie s comment that hoodie-wearing transcends the boundaries of age, ethnicity and class is in line with the post-subcultural idea that narrow, classbased subcultures no longer capture (if they ever did) the greater fluidity evident in contemporary youth groupings. Many attempts have been made to re-label these apparently less structurally bounded groupings: not subcultures but neotribes (Bennett, 1999); or part of new social movements (Martin, 2002). The most common idea was that subcultures had morphed into club cultures. According to Steve Redhead (1997b: x), a key advocate of this idea, sometime between the advent of punk in the 1970s and the emergence of rave culture in the 1980s, the moment of subculture passed into history. The new neo-liberal, individualist political environment inaugurated by Thatcherism, he argued, required the replacement of what he called CCCS s Marxist project with new, postmodern theorising. The resulting brew (Redhead ed., 1993a and b; Redhead, 1995; Redhead, 1997a and b; Redhead et al. eds., 1997) was an eclectic mixture rather than a systematic attempt to develop core notions (which had a habit of creeping back in to fill conceptual gaps). Thornton s (1995: 8) work on club cultures, widely admired and certainly the most comprehensive and theoretically-innovative look at the phenomenon, is an instance of trying out new concepts while remaining, broadly speaking, within a modernist framework. She did so because she found the theoretical framework bequeathed by Birmingham to be empirically unworkable. This was because her chosen empirical object of enquiry was committed attenders of dance clubs or raves, ad hoc communities with fluid boundaries (ibid: 3) not groups defined by particular styles. It was also because of the importance within that world of a shared taste in music (ibid). This led her, in a highly innovative move, to adapt Bourdieu s notions of cultural capital and distinction, and to reconceptualise subcultures as taste cultures. Within this new framework, subculture was used as a term that embraced those taste cultures which are labelled by the media as subcultures (ibid: 8) and the word subcultural [was used] as a synonym for those practices that clubbers call underground (ibid). This meant that [S]ubcultural ideologies are a means by which youth imagine their own and other social groups, assert their distinctive character and affirm they are not anonymous members of an undifferentiated mass (ibid: 10). In other words, to the extent that young people could successfully perform the practices ideologically associated

21 xx Once more around Resistance through Rituals with the subcultural elite being hip, in the know, knowing the right people, being different from the mainstream, etc. and could use them to mark their distinction from others, they could be said to possess and deploy subcultural capital (ibid: 11). However, because of the centrality of music to youth s subcultural worlds, and because [A]ge is the most significant demographic when it comes to taste in music, subcultural capital differs from cultural capital (as Bourdieu defined it) in being less tied to class, but also more tied to the media. Because of the shared interest in club cultures and in developing new concepts with which to understand these, there has been a tendency by postmodernist thinkers like Redhead to embrace Thornton s work as part of the same postmodernist critique. This seems to us to be a mistake. Thornton s turn to Bourdieu is conceptually adventurous, while keeping her work clearly within the modernist rather than the postmodernist camp. Moreover, it sets out to answer a different question from the one posed by the RTR tradition. Broadly, her question was: what are the social processes that produce and deploy subcultural value? Ours was: what do particular subcultural ways of life mean? Where the latter started from a more anthropological definition of culture (as systems of meaning and ways of life ), Thornton explicitly starts with the idea of subcultures producing something of value that can be used to mark distinction or create subcultural capital. Both are valid approaches, though generated by very different theoretical climates. They share an orientation to power-relations ours to subcultures in relation to macro power relations, Thornton s (through a detailed ethnography) to the micro-politics of one youth-based leisure arena or, to use Bourdieu s term, cultural field. What, then, are we to make of this moment of club cultures? What is new about it? How all-pervasive is it? Does it involve a paradigm shift? The postmodern theorising underpinning the work of Steve Redhead and colleagues in particular is good at unfixing fixities, breaching boundaries and collapsing categories. It alerts us to the new social fragmentation and processes of cultural diffusion, setting what we may call old subcultural questions in the multiply mediated nature of the contemporary world. It enables us to approach this kind of phenomenon afresh; to see things we previously missed. More significantly, it uncovers new truths. But ironically, in so doing, it also loses something. Cataloguing and describing the new fragmentation and cultural hybridity is certainly necessary, and we need new tools and concepts to do so (whether or not the term postmodern turns out to be the most conceptually-appropriate term for capturing these shifts). But, equally important is the attempt to answer questions about where these things come from, how and why they arise, and to what wider social and cultural processes they are related? Critics may think of these as classically modernist, grand-narrative, kind of questions. But they should beware of confusing a description of how the world is with how it is to be analysed and explained. Surely, some social processes underlie the historical shift towards these new, more fragmented, more diffused, more hybridised, more mediated cultural realities the shift that Thornton encapsulates as from class-based subcultures to taste-based club cultures? What precipitated this turn in urban youth culture?