the concept of subculture in contemporary literary and...

The Concept of Subculture in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies: A Review of Origins and

Relevance to Current Debates

Randa Abou-bakr

Written 2004

© 2013 Randa Aboubakr

Randa Aboubakr

Professor of English and Comparative Literature Faculty of Arts- Department of English Cairo University Orman Giza- 12613 Egypt

Work Tel.: (+202) 3567- 2536 Priv. Cell.: (+2) 0122 344 1334

E.mail: [email protected]

http://cairo.academia.edu/RandaAboubakr

Concept of Subculture

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The Concept of Subculture in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies: A Review of Origins and Relevance to Current Debates

Randa Abou-bakr In addressing an issue as multi-faceted as ‘subculture’, one finds oneself continually

being pulled between two poles. On the one hand, there is the rigorous conception of

the term, drawing from its status as a sociological/anthropological field of research, in

the work of key institutions such as the Chicago School of Sociology (especially from

the 1920’s until the 1960’s), and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at

Birmingham University (from the 1960’s until the 1980’s). On the other hand, there is

the less rigorous view of ‘subculture’ as a fluid concept informing contemporary

perceptions on culture, and shaping approaches to a great number of issues underlying

contemporary debates in the humanities in general. One thus eventually ends up

exploring not only the meaning and scope of the term at each of those two poles, but

also a rich area in between where its relevance to contemporary debates in the

humanities is manifest. This survey will consequently move from specific disciplinary

conceptions of ‘subculture’ to an investigation of how these initial conceptions are

operative in shaping contemporary views on, and approaches to, culture and literature

in general.

Part I examines basic assumptions about the concept and major attributes and

common characteristics of subcultural groups, as well as theses put forward to explain

the emergence and growth of subcultures. Part II reviews the early emergence of

subcultural studies as a term of disciplinary investigation. It surveys the work of the

Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Chicago and of the

Centre for Contemporary and Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. It also

outlines later developments in the study of subculture away from the approaches of

these two institutions. Part III is a survey of varieties of subculture that have attracted

most attention and generated research primarily in the United States and Britain, but

also in other parts of the world. Part IV examines the revisions the concept of

subculture has more recently gone under, and reviews critiques that have developed

towards traditional approaches to its study. This part also highlights the relative

withdrawal of rigorous conception of the term. Part V examines how basic assumptions

about subculture can be seen to inform conceptions of other varieties of culture,

particularly mass, popular and folk cultures. Part VI examines the relevance of basic

assumptions underlying the conception of subculture to major debates in contemporary

cultural and literary studies. Part VII is the conclusion of the article and points out the


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future directions the concept of subculture is moving into. It highlights how the

concept continues to influence major debates in cultural studies, as well as in related

fields.

I Basic Conceptions of Subculture: Major Features

Appearing as a term of disciplinary investigation at the hands of sociologists at the

Chicago School of Sociology at the University of Chicago during the 1920, the concept

of subculture was further revitalised during the 1970’s (and onwards) by the work of

researchers at Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Research

(henceforth CCCS). Though each of these two academic institutions had its own

conceptualisation of the term, as well as its approaches and tools of investigation

(discussed in detail in Part II), they can both be said to share a common conception of

subculture. An initial and broad conception of subculture sees that the ‘culture’ in

‘subculture’ refers to “maps of meaning”, which make the world intelligible to a group

of persons, while the ‘sub’ connotes “notions of distinctiveness and difference from the

dominant and mainstream society” (Barker, 2000: 322). What distinguishes subcultures

from the more accessible term ‘community’ is that the latter suggests a more

permanent population that is tied to a certain neighbourhood and that takes the family

as a key constituent. Subcultural groups are usually studied in their transient state and

apart from familial connections (Thornton, 1997a: 2).

A number of key factors can be derived from the preceding general definitions.

First, there is the idea of ‘difference’ or ‘distinction’. Clarke et al. see that “subcultures

must exhibit a distinctive enough shape to make them identifiably different from their

‘parent’ culture” (Clarke et al., 1975b: 100). This produces an awareness of difference

in members of subcultures, which, according to Sarah Thornton, is vital to a

construction of subcultural identity:

The defining attribute of ‘subculture’ … lies with the way the accent is put

on the distinction between a particular cultural/social group and the larger

culture/society. The emphasis is on variance from a larger collectivity who

are invariably, but not unproblematically, positioned as normal, average

and dominant. Subcultures, in other words, are condemned to and/or enjoy

a consciousness of ‘otherness’ or difference. (Thornton, 1997a: 5)


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Those disenfranchised, subordinate social groups are not distinct on the basis of social

class alone. Class, race, ethnicity, gender and age are all determining factors. This sets

them apart from the ‘official’ culture of a society and makes them “dismissed as

insignificant by most disciplines in the humanities” (Thornton, 1997a: 4).

This emphasis on ‘distinctiveness’ highlights the role of stereotyping in

identifying subcultural groups. Stephen Hallmark sees that ‘distinctiveness’ entails

stereotyping. His view of subcultures focusses on their ‘stereotyped’ behaviour:

Called “minorities” or “interest groups” by political scientists,

“microsystems” by the new behavioural theoreticians, a subculture is any

group whose shared, mutually reinforcing sets of expectations have led to

stereotyped behaviour distinct enough to warrant separate entries within

the literature. This stereotyped behaviour may range from lifestyle to

clothing or language. It must encompass some sense of distinctive group

identification. (Hallmark, 1971: 7)

The binary opposition of marginal/dominant also entails the value-judgement-

informed notion of a ‘debased’ or ‘deviant’ variety measured against a ‘superior’ norm

(Clarke, 1981: 178). Another central notion in the perception of subculture that

emerges from these broad definitions is that of ‘resistance’. Because subcultures are

identified and studied in relation to a hegemonic ‘official’ culture, it follows that the

idea of resistance is central to any approach to subculture. In Resistance Through

Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (1975), generally considered the

manifesto of CCCS’s approach to subculture, Clarke et al. analyse youth subcultures in

Britain during the three decades following the Second World War in relation to their

subversive behaviour and their ability to articulate protest and resistance on the level

of style and fashion (Clarke et al., 1975a). Within that context of resistance,

subcultures are involved in a process of negotiating their status. They are continually

engaged in a process wherein their members collectively “work through, contest or

resolve issues related to their social station” (Thornton, 1997a: 4). Here the

distinctiveness and stereotyped character of a subculture is used in a process of

“(re)negotiation of status, and a subversive effort to reach a solution” (Cohen, 1955:

47).

In Comparative Youth Culture: The Sociology of Youth Cultures and Subcultures

in America, Britain and Canada (1985), Mike Brake sees that subcultures in general and

youth subcultures in particular arise as a means of resolving collectively experienced


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problems of existence, especially with a ‘parent’ culture. In that sense, Brake argues,

subcultures evolve common identities, out of which an individual’s identity is

constructed (Brake, 1985). The stress is less on the difference per se than on how that

difference is lived and expressed (Clarke et al., 1975a). In addition to highlighting this

problem-solving function of subcultures, Brake identified some more general functions:

providing ‘magical’ solutions to socio-economic problems, developing collective

identities, articulating alternative experiences and activities, and, ultimately, furnishing

solutions to dilemmas of identity (Brake, 1985).

Various propositions have been put forward to explain the mechanisms through

which subcultures evolve and grow. Albert Cohen has suggested that a subculture

emerges when a number of actors with similar problems of adjustment are brought in

effective interaction with one another. Among the solutions available for the collective

crisis is at least one that is culturally ‘non-conformist’. If the group embraces such a

solution, it then starts to mould its character as culturally deviant/defiant (Cohen,

1955). Paul E. Willis, adopting a more deterministic view, sees that subcultures arise

when members of a social group, sharing similar basic structural properties, and

subject to similar ideological assumptions, are faced with similar problems of

adjustment. A ‘pool of styles’ is generated in response. Out of this, choices are made in

various settings. This explains how subcultural reactions remain distinct, while sharing

broader affinities (Willis, 1977: 121-129).

In spite of the propositions put forward to explain the rise and growth of

subcultures, it is still acknowledged that the study of subculture often tends to enforce

somehow rigorous outlines on fluid activities such as those of subcultural groups. In

other words, a reason why subcultures arise in the first place would be that we as

observers label them so and that members of subcultural groups are not aware of their

status as such. However, this suggestion is often played down, in favour of

underscoring notions of ‘resistance’ and tactics of subversion (Thornton, 1997a: 5). In

“Notes on the Status of the Concept Subculture”, John Irwin, dealing with subcultures

in the American society, argues that a prerequisite for a subculture to grow is for its

members not only to be conscious of themselves as a subculture, but to comprehend

the difference between them and other subcultural variation in society (Irwin, 1970).

Crucial to the formation of a subculture is, moreover, what Ken Gelder refers to

as “a subculture’s creative engagement with a particular place” (Gelder, 1997b: 315).

Gelder maintains that the earlier ‘romantic’ view of subcultures as homeless or nomadic


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has been replaced with a preoccupation with the politics of place in subcultural studies.

This does not mean that subcultures are easily defined by their ‘localness’, but that the

affiliation between a subculture and territory can often reveal much about the

dynamics of that subculture. Gelder sees that subcultural relations to place can be

formulated in a number of ways:

through hierarchically arranged internal distinctions or stratifications,

through contestation or territorialization, through alignments or interactions

with wider formations, and through hybridization which sends traces of

place-based structural forms into quite different kinds of location. (Gelder,

1997b: 319)

The ‘locale’ in question could be as confined as the hospital/asylum, the live music

stage or the football stadium terrace. It can also be a whole city or a large part of a

city as East London or the Mexican-American barrios of East Los Angeles1.

II Outlining the Subcultural Terrain: The Emergence and Evolution of the

Concept ‘Subculture’

Although one can imagine that interest in the “hidden underworld of the ‘vulgar

classes” (Gelder, 1997a: Forward) goes back a few centuries, the emergence of

‘subculture’ as a term of disciplinary investigation dates back to the early decades of

the twentieth century. This part of the article is concerned with outlining the early

phases of development of the term, which can be traced in the research on subculture

conducted at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of

Chicago (from the 1920’s to the 1960’s) and at the CCCS at Birmingham University

(from the 1960’s to the early 1980’s). While researchers and scholars at both

institutions have provided the disciplinary foundations of the study of subculture in the

United States and Britain respectively, the two schools have largely determined the

shape and scope of sociological, anthropological and cultural studies of subculture

throughout the whole world.

The Chicago School:

Established in 1892 at the University of Chicago, the Department of Sociology and

Anthropology hosted scholars and researchers who were involved in studying the

interrelation between society and culture (Thornton, 1997b: 11). Although such studies


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attempted to “map the social world” of “discrete populations or social groups”, as early

as the first decade of the twentieth century, the term ‘subculture’ was coined to refer

to such groups only during the 1940’s (Thornton, 1997a: 1).

Researchers of the Chicago School relied primarily on ethnographic methods of

research, and on empirical data in studying the diversity of human behaviour in an

urban environment. In “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior

in the Urban Environment”, Robert E. Park gives the rationale for the centrality of this

urban investigation in studies of subculture. The city, he maintains, is “a state of mind,

a body of customs and traditions, and of the organised attitudes and sentiments that

inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition” (Park, 1915: 16).

Particularly stressed in this urban context (which largely meant an American city) was

the ‘ghetto’, or “areas of population segregation” preserving and intensifying “the

intimacies and solidarity of the local (sic) and neighborhood of groups” (Park, 1915:

18).

Work on subculture at the Chicago School emphasised the relation of that

‘ghetto’ culture to a ‘national’ culture. The investigation of this subdivision of a

‘national’ culture, however, needed to escape the seemingly simplistic binary

oppositions of sub/national, and thus other angles of examination were developed. It

was, therefore, deemed insufficient to simply refer to black (or ‘Negro’) subculture, but

to “southern, rural, lower-class Negroes” or “North, urban, middle-class Negroes”

(Green, 1946: 354). Although this further specification still promoted binary

oppositions, specifying the domain of analysis allowed for the investigation of

subcultures as “cohesive systems of social organisation”, where social class and

territorial considerations, rather than race alone, are involved (Gordon, 1947: 41).

Following the integration of ‘criminology’ within the study of subculture during

the 1940’s, the work of the sociologists of the Chicago School combined psychological

perspectives with their sociological/anthropological methodology in the study of

subcultures. Although this tendency appeared primarily in relation to questions of

delinquency, it was operative in shedding light on key issues in the study of subculture

in general, such as the idea of a shared frame of reference, the mechanisms of conflict

resolution and the creation of enemies through the process of ‘protective provocation’

(Cohen, 1955).


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Other early sociologists of the Chicago School tended to focus on specific social

processes, subjecting them to their empirical scrutiny. Studying subcultural groups

usually considered morally objectionable or simply ‘deviant’, researchers such as Paul

Cressey and Howard Becker provided a reconstructed vision of notions such as

‘deviance’ and ‘moral decline’ through a symbolic analysis of subcultural behaviour.

Cressey examines the career cycle of the ‘taxi-dancer’ or ‘hired-to-dance-with-girl’, with

the purpose of demonstrating how it represents a drift to ‘downward mobility’

(Cressey, 1932). Becker, examines the cultural values of groups of musicians who

perform in public places, arguing that their ‘moral code’, otherwise considered banal, is

an expression of disdain to commonly accepted social norms (Becker, 1963).

Towards the end of the 1960’s, the work of the Chicago School already

reflected the expansion in range the concept of subculture and its investigation had

undergone. Meanwhile, the nucleus of the Chicago School had grown and expanded in

myriad other academic institutions. Though its initial impact continued to inform

research in other places, it became difficult, after the early 1970’s to trace work on

subculture back to one single school and one unified methodology. In 1971, Jock

Young, a sociologist from the Chicago School published his seminal work, The

Drugtakers: The Social Meaning of Drug Use where, drawing on Freudian and Marxist

thought, he approached subculture not only in relation to social class, but to

capitalism. He viewed subculture as existing beyond the ethos of productivity,

highlighting subterranean values and practices such as ‘hedonism’, ‘disdain for work’

‘spontaneity’ and ‘carnival’ as counteracting work values such as ‘deferred gratification’,

‘high control over detail’ and ‘conformity to bureaucratic rules’ (Young, 1971).

Departing from the Chicago School’s liberal politics and embracing “late Frankfurt

School paradigms” (Thornton, 1997b: 15), Young can be considered a bridge between

the work of the Chicago School and the CCCS- the two principal currents in research on

subculture.

The CCCS at Birmingham University:

The establishment in 1964 of the CCCS at Birmingham University already ushered in

‘Cultural Studies’ as an independent academic discipline. During the early decades of

its establishment and until the early 1980’s, the Centre was also engaged in analysing

variations of subculture. Focussing primarily on post-war Britain, the Centre is

generally considered to have fused and developed two scholarly traditions in its


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dynamics. On the one hand, there was the pioneering work of the Chicago School

concerning ‘deviant’ human behaviour in an urban setting. On the other, there was the

influence of the Frankfurt School2 in its interest in studying culture in relation to mass

society and industrial development. Applying less rigorous tools of analysis than the

socio/anthropological empirical methods of the Chicago School, yet conscious of the

need to study subcultural groups at a closer distance than the Frankfurt scholars, work

at CCCS, nonetheless, reflected a fusion between the liberal pluralism of the former

and the critical Marxist stance of the latter. The empirical work of the Chicago school

was also seen to have given way to a structuralist-Althusserian framework in the CCCS

approach to subcultures (Startton, 1985: 181).

Pioneering work at the Centre was concerned with analysing the relationship

between ideology and form manifested by subcultures. In that sense, subcultures were

viewed as negotiated versions of dominant systems (Parkin, 1971), particularly in their

relation to a ‘parent’ culture. Here emerges the centrality of the notion of ‘resistance’ to

the study of subculture. Since ‘resistance’ presupposes ‘dominance’, and since

‘dominance’ entails ‘subordination’, work at CCCS heavily drew on Antonio Gramsci’s

notion of ‘hegemony’ (Gramsci, 1968) and investigated strategies of transgression,

through a reliance on notions of ‘style’, ‘bricolage’ and ‘carnival’.

In their path-breaking collection, Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures

in Post-War Britain (1975, 1993), Clarke et al. investigate post-war youth cultures in

Britain in relation to the issue of class. Drawing on Raymond Williams’ postulation

concerning the existence of three cultural formations in a society: the dominant, the

residual and the emergent (Williams, 1977), the authors ascribe a ‘residual’ function to

class in that it continues to shape the experiences of youth despite the vitality of

‘emergent’ cultural forms. Youth subcultures, the authors argue, must be situated in

relation to both a ‘hegemonic’ dominant/national culture and a working-class ‘parent’

culture. The latter is itself subordinated to the former. The authors of Resistance

Through Rituals, moreover, show a more sympathetic view towards mass culture than

that adopted by either the Frankfurt School or scholars of CCCS itself, such as Richard

Hoggart. Clarke et al. stress the potential of creativity and resistance inherent in the

adoption of mass-produced cultural forms3.

The relation of youth subculture to class is another angle of investigation for

CCCS scholars. Phil Cohen suggests that youth subculture is an attempt to resolve the

issue of class through an effort to escape from the designation of class per se, and


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inhabit a less well-defined space. Subculture is here seen to perform the dual function

of expressing and trying to resolve contradictions in the parent culture. Attempting to

integrate a psychoanalytic perspective, Cohen also suggests that the ‘gang’ in youth

subculture is a ‘negotiated solution’ for an Oedipal conflict with the family. The gang

resolves the triadic Oedipal conflict into dispersed “sibling relations, which then develop

into the gang outside the family” (Cohen 1972: 13). Paul Willis, employing a more

anthropologically informed methodology, also investigates class in his Learning to

Labour (1977). Contrasting the ‘lads’ – the nonconformist students - to the ‘ear 'oles’ –

the more integrated ones – in British West Midlands schools, Willis concludes that

social class predetermines students’ relationship to the school (Willis, 1977).

Proposing a gendered perspective on subculture, scholars such as Tom Wolf

(1968) and Angela McRobbie (1976 and 1978) represent a departure from CCCS’s

emphasis on class as a determining factor in the evolution of subcultures. They analyse

working-class girls’ culture in terms of its relation to patterns of ‘male’ subcultures such

as the ‘mods’, the ‘rockers’, and the ‘teds’4. Yet those studies still show the integration

of class and gender in their overall perspective on subculture. Although work on

‘gender’ in subculture was not very influential during the early decades at CCCS, it

developed in the 1980’s, and 1990’s by merging into the feminist discourses in cultural

studies and deriving from psychological and philosophical perspectives5.

The work of Dick Hebdige can be seen to represent another breakthrough in

CCCS’s research on subculture. It represents a shift of focus from investigating the

factor of class per se to an emphasis on a variety of factors. Introducing a plethora of

foci, Hebdige’s work foregrounds ‘ethnicity’, ‘consumption’ and ‘otherness’. In his

classic work, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), drawing on the structuralist

notion of ‘bricolage’, Hebdige defines subculture as ‘noise’, and foregrounds ‘style’ as a

marker of distinction and resistance. He attempts to read such ideas in the light of

Henri Lefebvre’s views of ‘consumer culture’ (Lefebvre, 1971) and Roland Barthes’

views of otherness (Barthes, 1972), where ‘difference’ is either denied, i.e. reduced to

‘sameness’, or emptied of its meaning and used as ‘curiosity’. Subcultural subversive

practice for Hebdige is a symbolic war, with subcultural style parodying the consumer

society it lives in. This is achieved through the inversion and distortion of images

cherished by the dominant culture (Hebdige, 1975).


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Developments After the Early 1980’s:

From the early 1980’s onwards, research in subculture has departed from both the

empirical approach of the Chicago School and the Structuralist-Althussierian methods

of CCCS. In terms of the terrain of study, it can likewise be observed that studies of

subculture have expanded their boundaries by encompassing much more than ‘deviant’

and working-class subcultures, and by undertaking an investigation of consumer

cultures and the mass media. During the 1980’s, subcultural studies started to show a

tendency towards multivocality, the blurring of genre boundaries and a more radical

perception of cultural difference in keeping with the postmodernist, deconstructive

spirit of the times (Barker, 2000: 130-160). In addition to the opening up of new vistas

in cultural studies, subcultural research during this phase engaged in a lively debate

with classical texts such as Clarke et al.’s Resistance Through Rituals (1975) and Dick

Hebdige’s Subcultures: The Meaning of Style (1979).

In Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers,

appearing first in 1972 and later revised in 1980, Stanely Cohen criticises CCCS’s

methodology of starting off with subcultures that have well-defined boundaries and

shapes, and then working ‘backwards’ to investigate their class base. Cohen proposes

a reversal of the strategy, which, he argues, would reveal more diversity of

social/cultural responses stemming from a shared class base. Analysing the violent

behaviour of ‘teddy boys’, ‘mods’, ‘rockers’, ‘skinheads’ and other working-class youth

subcultures, Cohen argues that subcultural patterns of behaviour are not only symbolic

gestures in the face of frustration and subordination, but “historically informed

responses mediated by the class culture of the oppressed” (Cohen, 1972, 1980: 154).

Favouring Paul E. Willis’ ethnographic methodology, Cohen criticises the CCCS’s

structuralist bent, which tends to ascribe meaning to subcultural behaviour a priori and

in isolation from empirical investigation.

Other scholars have developed criticisms of the same nature towards the

CCCS’s emphasis on ‘spectacularity’ and ‘resistance’. In “Defending Ski-Jumpers: A

Critique of Theories of Youth Subculture” (1981), Gay Clarke points out the need to

turn to what subcultures actually do, rather than making hypothetical ‘symbolic’

assumptions about them along the lines of Clarke et al. and Hebdige (Clarke, 1981). A

similar critique is articulated by Chris Waters, who sees that CCCS’s lack of interest in

the mechanisms of subcultural evolution and maintenance has generated a rigid and

static view of a dynamic phenomenon (Waters, 1981).


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The ‘static’ character of CCCS’s conceptions of subculture as examined by

Cohen, Clarke and Waters is viewed in more concrete terms in the works of John

Stratton. Stratton’s treatment of subculture-in-mobility represented by his studies of

‘surfies and ‘bikies’6, highlights a shift in the study of subculture away from territorial

concerns to the study of subcultures ‘on the move’ (Stratton, 1985). Stratton refuses

CCCS’s implicit assumption that all subcultures have the same structure. In that

respect, he contrasts American ‘surfies’ and ‘bikies’, whom he sees as commodity-

oriented, to the British ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ who are holistic and spectacular (Stratton,

1985). Investigating the role of mass media in the development of subcultural

formations, Stratton suggests that mass media can change a subculture from

commodity orientation to spectacularity. He thus asserts the dynamic character of

subcultures and their resistance to rigid formulations regarding their origin and

structure.

The attention given to the role of mass media in the development of subculture

is indeed distinctive of the literature on subculture produced from the 1980’s onward.

New styles of music and dance, television shows and soap operas, popular journalism

and sentimental novels are but some of the forms of mass media analysed by studies

of subculture. This orientation has opened up the debate around the relation of

ideology to the media. Simon Frith sees that

the question common to studies of all media- and at the heart of the

formalism/realism dispute- concerns ideology. How do different media work

ideologically? What are their ideological effects and how are they achieved?

At issue here is the concept of signification: how do different media

organize the meanings with which and on which they work? (Frith, 1980:

58)

The realism/formalism debate, which is at the heart of theories of mass media and

mass culture, also informs another debate central to subcultural studies: that of

passive/creative consumption. In tackling this issue, Frith compares views developed

by the Frankfurt School, particularly those of Adorno and Horkheimer (1944/1973)

regarding mass culture in general and pop music in particular with Walter Benjamin’s

more sympathetic attitude towards mechanical reproduction (Benjamin, 1968)7. In his

celebration of ‘punk’ as a musical form opposing commercial culture and ridiculing both

‘pop’ and ‘rock’ conventions, Frith points out the centrality of the notion of

consumption and calls attention to the importance of redefining that concept in cultural


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terms (Frith, 1980).

Frith’s contribution to the recent scholarship on subculture can be seen in two

points. The first is his adoption of a view that does away with a rigorous demarcation

of the terrain of subculture. Although in his work subcultures stand as independent

entities, they are always studied in relation to other cultural manifestations such as folk

culture, mass culture and popular culture. Frith is thus highlighting a yet further

development that subcultural studies will undergo during the heyday of

postmodernism8. The other point concerns Frith’s touching upon questions of canon

formation which are of particular relevance to an assessment of the cultural life of a

society and which are relevant to the direction cultural studies has taken in recent

years. It is at this point that research in subculture is seen to transcend its narrow

disciplinary boundaries and link with wider issues in cultural studies in general. The

issue of canon formation is in its turn linked to the postmarxist notion of ‘cultural

capital’ (rooted in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, 1984, 1986, 1991 and Barbara

Herrnstein-Smith, 1988, and elaborated by John Guillory, 1993)9. The relevance of this

notion of ‘cultural capital’ to the concept of subculture is not made very obvious in

most scholarship on subculture, yet the work of Sarah Thornton makes use of the

premises of the notion of ‘cultural capital’ in developing her own coinage ‘subcultural

capital’ (1995a). Subcultural capital, Thornton maintains, is

[t]he linchpin of an alternative hierarchy in which the axes of age, gender,

sexuality and race are all employed in order to keep the determinations of

class, income and occupation at bay… Subcultural ideology implicitly gives

alternative interpretations and values to young people’s, particularly young

men’s, subordinate status; it re-interprets the social world. (Thornton,

1995a: 207-8)

In the contexts of club culture that she studies, subcultural capital is convertible to

economic capital and is closely associated with class alignments.

The views outlined in this last section are meant to highlight the direction

subcultural studies have developed in after the 1980’s. It is hoped that such a survey

has already demonstrated the opening up of boundaries and expansion of the range of

the study of subculture, so that it is seen to have developed from a separate, narrowly

defined academic discipline into a multidisciplinary field of investigation that interacts

with a few other fields of study. This expansion of the boundaries of its study has gone


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side-by-side with an opening up of the concept itself and of its implications and

relevance. The views outlined in this section are also meant to highlight the relation of

the concept to other related concepts in cultural studies. It has now become

exceedingly difficult to analyse subcultural formations in isolation from concepts such

as mass, popular and folk culture, so much so that the term ‘subculture’ itself seems to

have gone out of use, giving way to a more fluid conception, where ethnicity, race,

gender, class, linguistic practices and issues of consumption and power are

highlighted. Moreover, some of the scholars whose work is outlined in the preceding

sections such as Stuart Hall and Angela McRobbie have developed their views

concerning subculture into more elaborate theories of cultural studies in general. Part

VI of this survey will be concerned with the ramifications of the concept in the field of

cultural studies and the relevance it bears to contemporary debates in the humanities

in general. Part III which follows will be concerned with outlining varieties of

subculture commonly targeted by subcultural research.

III Outlining the Subcultural Terrain: Varieties of Subculture:

As has already been demonstrated in the preceding two parts of this article,

subcultures emerge in response to problematics felt and experienced by groups of

people who share common properties that make them ‘different’ from other cultural

formations in a society. Since it often expresses itself in various forms of

deviance/defiance, that ‘difference’ is usually viewed negatively by the ‘parent’ and

‘dominant’ cultures. The expression of deviance/defiance, moreover, usually operates

on a semiotic level, producing a set of signifying practices that can then be registered

and analysed by scholars. The behaviour of subcultural groups usually helps to further

shape a stereotyped conception of that subculture. Whether in its American/Chicago or

British/CCCS versions, subcultural studies has largely been concerned with the

‘emergent’ culture of urban, middle-class youth who embody notions such as

‘resistance’ and ‘style’, a combination of which is underscored in Clarke et al. (1975)

and Hebdige (1979).

What follows is a survey of varieties of subculture that have mostly attracted

attention and generated a huge body of research. Although ‘youth’ is central to an

understanding of subcultural resistance, subcultures can also be seen to fall into broad

categories, depending on whether they seek to highlight their ‘difference’ through


15

fashion, music, sports or other ‘signifying practices’. They can also be examined in

relation to whether they are clustered around unifying denominations (such as race,

ethnicity, gender, territory) or transcend such categorisation. Oftentimes, it will be

seen that most of these factors merge and help shape the distinctive character of a

subculture. The varieties of youth working-class subcultures outlined below can be

seen to perform the functions ascribed by Phil Cohen to subcultures in general: “to

express and resolve, albeit ‘magically’, the contradictions which remain hidden or

unresolved in the parent culture” (Cohen, 1972). Though subcultural styles usually

overlap, what follows is an attempt at categorisation, which, nonetheless, takes into

account the overlapping of categories as well as the various name proliferation.

Subcultures and Fashion:

The relation of subculture to fashion is central to a perception of subculture as

resistance. Dick Hebdige’s (1979) work on ‘style’ in subculture has laid the grounds for

such a perception. Elements of dressing, hairstyle, makeup and body ornaments have

often been combined with other subcultural styles such as music, dance and sports to

produce a subculture’s character. Moreover, elements of fashion give a visible

expression to an individual’s sense of belonging to something, which compensates for

the lack of individuality the dominant culture dictates (Gelder, 1997: 373). Aspects of

fashion are thus examined as ‘signs’ that have both semiotic and political functions.

The black hairstyle known as ‘Afro’ is, for instance, seen to constitute an ethnic

signifier and symbolise a link for the African diaspora (Mercer, 1994).

Various styles of dressing are investigated in the light of their relation to a

‘parent’ culture. Working-class imitations of elegant styles of dressing such as the

Mexican-American 1950’s style of ‘zoot-suiters’ (Turner and Surace, 1956) and the

British styles of ‘rockers’ and ‘mods’ (Cohen, 1972) are viewed as spectacular solutions

to bourgeois consumerism, to upper working-class aspirations and to the problematic

of adaptation to a ‘parent’ culture. British ‘teddy boys’ or ‘teds’’ reworking of Edwardian

styles of dressing is examined in the light of their upper working-class origin and their

bent towards upward mobility (Clarke, 1981 and Stratton, 1985). In contrast, the racist

orientations of ‘skinheads’, their style of dressing and musical preferences, have been

seen as representing the ‘lumpen’, or what could be termed ‘downward mobility’

(Cohen, 1972 and Hebdige, 1979).


16

Subcultures and Music/Dance:

As has already been pointed out above, most of the subcultures already outlined do

not depend on fashion alone in creating their ‘style’. With the exception of perhaps the

‘mods’ and ‘zoot-suiters’, subcultural fashion style is often combined with other styles.

‘Voguers’ for instance, represent a mixture of a particular style of clothing (following

the fashion magazine Vogue) and a casual dance, performed at youth gatherings and

public places. ‘Vogueing’ as a subcultural style usually combines two otherwise

opposed features, such as ‘poverty and glamour’ or ‘Africanness and gayness’. In that

respect, Becquer and Gatti argue, it does not highlight ‘hybridity’ but ‘syncretism’. The

latter does not stand for the fusion of varieties, but rejects synthesis, and interrupts

the closure of identities (Becquer and Gatti, 1991: 446-7). Subcultural music styles

(such as ‘punk’ ‘disco’, ‘rock’, ‘rap’, ‘hip-hop’, ‘rave’ and ‘indie’ i.e. ‘independent) can,

according to Simon Frith, be viewed as constituting resistance, even though they are

‘consumed’ in the field of leisure (Frith, 1980). Aspects of the Black music scene in

Britain, ‘reggae’, the West-Indian music associated with protest of the poor, the ‘blue

beat’ and ‘hip-hop’ are studied in relation to ethnicity, the dynamics of diaspora

displacement and the logic of capitalism (Gilory, 1987).

The subculture of Mexican-American music fans in the United States is also

analysed in relation to Chicano socio-cultural conditions, and viewed as “a conscious

cultural politics” that works through invisibility rather than spectacularity. Drawing on

Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, George Lipsitz maintains that Chicano/barrio music

subcultures in the United States survive “by ‘floating and hovering’, never quite existing

and never quite vanishing”. Lipsitz argues that this might be done at the expense of

the Chicano musician’s physical and political invisibility; yet “it provides the ultimate

camouflage for the difficult work of building a historical bloc” (Lipsitz, 1990: 359).

Subcultures On-the-Move:

In addition to the two broad categories outlined so far, there is yet another

‘spectacular’ subcultural style which can be termed: ‘subcultures on-the- move’. This

represents subcultures associated with the use of light vehicles and other motion

devices. The stress here is on the use of such devices as indicative of ‘difference’, as

constituting a disruption of rules and customs of motion and as indicator of social

status. Though ‘mod’ is already discussed as a style of fashion, ‘mods’ are also

distinguished by the use of scooters and motorbikes. So are ‘rockers’. Though the


17

former represents an attempt at upward mobility, while the latter celebrates working-

class values, they are both seen as “spectacular solutions to British upper working-

class aspirations” (Stratton, 1985: 183).

Two American ‘mobile’ subcultures can be compared to the British ‘mods’ and

‘rockers’, namely ‘bikies’ and ‘surfies’. Those two subcultures are generally considered

the product of post-war society in the United States. ‘Surfies’ use Malibu boards to

mount the waves while ‘bikies’ ride big motorcycles. Both subcultures are those of war

veterans who were no longer satisfied with civilian life after their return from the

battlefront. These two ‘subcultures on-the-move’ represent solutions to issues of post-

war life in the United States (Irwin, 1973 and Thompson, 1966).

Other smaller-in-range subcultures on-the-move such as ‘parkas’ or scooter

boys combine elements of dress and music in their style, and are viewed only as a

transitional stage between the emergence of two more powerful subcultures (the

‘mods’ and ‘skinheads’ in the case of ‘parkas’) (Cohen, 1972). It should be noted here

that in all the three major varieties of subcultural style outlined above the issue of

consumerism can hardly be ignored. Those subcultural formations can be viewed both

as a product of the change towards consumerism in post-industrial societies and as a

reaction to consumerist culture10.

‘Delinquent’ Subcultures:

Though research on subcultural formations has generally been wary of equating

subcultures with forms of delinquency, there are varieties of subculture that are closely

associated with outlawed behaviour. Once more, boundaries overlap here. Some of the

subcultural styles outlined above are associated with law violation. Thus, the socially

censured ‘violent’ behaviour of Mexican-American ‘zoot-suiters’ has resulted in the

zooters’ costume itself emerging as a sign of delinquency (Turner and Surace, 1956).

Most of the members of music and dance subcultures (also referred to as ‘club

cultures’) have been involved in rioting and clashing, not only with members of

mainstream social formations, but with other subcultural groups as well. ‘Teds’ in

London have attacked Cypriot café owners, ‘skinheads’ all over Europe continue to

attack foreigners, especially South-East Asians, while ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ have

attacked each other. Football hooliganism has also been studied as a subculture of

delinquency (Marsh et al., 1978 and Pearson, 1983). These forms of nonconformist

behaviour are seen as a reaction against social control and an assertion of an


18

alternative ethics. This also applies to elements of mild drug use, which most of the

subcultural varieties outlined above partake of. Forms of male and female prostitution

have also been examined in the light of the notion of ‘downward mobility’ (Cressey,

1932) and that of the carnivalesque (Stallybrass and White, 1986).

Studies of delinquent subcultures radically depart from mainstream sociological

discourse on delinquency. In Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972, 1980), Stanely Cohen

gives a critique of delinquency theory, rejecting ‘symbolic’ explanations of criminal

behaviour and stressing the need for an investigation into how the struggle against

subordination is lived out in the everyday rituals of delinquent subcultural groups

(Cohen, 1972). Another reaction to traditional approaches to delinquency can be seen

in Dick Hebdige’s later work. Borrowing from Michel Foucault’s views on power,

incarceration and surveillance, Hebdige views deviance as the corollary of an imagined

‘norm’ that produces and objectifies deviance in order to ensure its own continuation

(Hebdige, 1983).

Subcultures, Race and Ethnicity:

The above survey has hopefully demonstrated that subcultural styles such as fashion

and music are by no means mutually exclusive. While each element of style has been

selected as the most salient feature of a subculture, other elements are combined and

together determine the essence of a subculture. Among those determining factors are:

ethnicity, gender, territorial identification, sexual orientation and relation to one or

more forms of mass media. Issues of race and ethnicity are also operative in

determining a subcultural style, as has been demonstrated in the discussion of ‘Afro’

hairstyle, of ‘reggae’ music, and of ‘vogueing’. As early as the 1930’s, Paul G. Cressey

investigated the relevance of issues of race to the evolutionary process of the taxi-

dancer (the hired dance partner in the Chicago 1930’s nightclubs). Cressey has

proposed that the taxi-dancer’s mixing with black American customers is a plunge from

the prestige she achieves by mixing with ‘Oriental’ (i.e. Filipino) customers at the

beginning of her career (Cressey, 1932).

Race is an important constituent of subcultural identity since it is one of the

basic areas that produce a sense of distinction, in addition to its being a vital element

in subcultural resistance. The ‘zoot-suiters’ are identified by their Mexicanness in

addition to their style of clothing and the scooters they use. Mexican Americans are

also studied in relation to their musical preferences (Lipsitz, 1990). The combination of


19

music and ethnic origin is also investigated by William Foote Whyte, who studies the

music subcultures of ethnic Italian youth in the city of Boston during the 1930’s

(Whyte, 1943).

Subcultures and Territory:

Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) highlights the relevance of

race and ethnicity to subcultural mechanisms, with particular stress on the experience

of immigration in the diaspora cultures. This concern with diaspora cultures

underscores the centrality of the issue of territory in the mechanism of subcultural

formations. This includes music subcultures originating and growing in the barrios of

Los Angeles (Lipsitz, 1990), the subculture of Italian youth in Boston’s North End

(Whyte, 1943) and the ‘black club scene’ in Britain (Gillory, 1987b). Such studies,

however, do not privilege a view of subcultures as ‘ghettos’. A study of subcultural

ethnic or territorial specificity cannot be undertaken unless within a perspective of its

relation to the bigger ‘dominant’ culture (Gillory, 1987b). This interest in the ‘space’

inhabited by a subculture is also translated at the level of micro-space, where small

and confined venues are examined. There is thus great interest in highlighting the

politics and ethics of interaction in narrow spaces occupied by members of a

subculture. The territorial arrangements in such places are then seen as symbolic of a

subcultural internal organisation. An example of such studies is Marsh et al.’s analysis

of the terraces occupied by Oxford United Football fans (Marsh et al., 1978) and

Wendy Fonarow’s study of the spatial organisation of ‘indi’ music gigs (Fonarow,

1995).

Fan Cultures:

The varieties of subculture outlined so far demonstrate that subcultural groups share

some territorial unity and class or ethnic affiliations. What has come to be known as

‘fan cultures’, however, does in fact depart from such common assumptions about

shared properties. Fan cultures cut across race, territory and class, as members of a

fan group could be coming from all kinds of background. They are, moreover, a kind of

‘virtual’ subculture; they do not necessarily meet with each other and are not analysed

in terms of a common goal or a problem-solving strategy. In the last two decades, a

reconstructed vision of fandom has evolved in cultural studies, and fans are no longer

viewed as ‘mindless’ consumers, but as participants in the production of meaning


20

(Sconce, 2000). This modified approach to fan subcultures has involved an integration

of a psychological dimension in the study of fandom (Ang, 1993) and a reevaluation of

the Frankfurt School (Adorno-Horkheimer) position towards mass culture (Hills, 2002).

The approach to subcultures informing the research outlined above is both

broad and eclectic, drawing on a host of disciplines: sociological, psychological,

anthropological and cultural. Since subcultural studies originated in the United States

and proceeded to full bloom in post-war Britain, the bulk of work on subcultural groups

has till now focused on those two societies. A considerable amount of work on other

‘First World’ societies (European, Canadian, Australian, Japanese) has also been

produced11. Such studies either remain sociological studies employing traditional

methodology of sociological research or heavily rely on the methodology and

approaches of CCCS. Lengthy studies of subcultural groups in the ‘Third World’

(particularly the Middle East and South East Asia) are relatively lacking, yet are

informed by a less eclectic, more politically informed approach, which sees the study of

subculture as “a useful starting point for a noneconomic understanding of evolving

societies” (Said, 1971:7). This approach shares some basic notions about subculture

with more dominant (Western) conceptions of the term, such as their subversive role,

the centrality of the issue of power and the agency of social change. It is, nonetheless,

concerned with the cultural and social settings of developing countries, challenging

notions of development and posing subcultures as vehicles of political change

(Hallmark, 1971: 11).

Protagonists of Change: Subcultures in Development and Revolution (1971)

names varieties of subcultures in the Middle, Near and Far East. Existing at the

margins of society, those subcultures are seen to challenge the ideas of national

identity and of the nation-state. Such varieties include students who predominantly

belong to the lower-middle class. Luiz Simmons maintains that in developing countries,

students represent a challenge to national identity by casting off demands of social

conformity (Simmons, 1971: 28-31). Another subcultural variety is represented by the

‘political exiles’ who take the challenge to the sovereignty of the nation-state a step

further (Coloumbis, 1971: 32-40). Surprisingly, Irving Louis Horowitz names the

military among those subcultural groups. He proposes that in Third World countries

there is a process of militarisation of civilian sectors. Such militarised sectors, however,

remain distinct from more conformist military institutions. They act as a subculture


21

even when the military rules (Butwell, 1971: 64-72). This view is also shared by Hazen

and Mughisuddin (1975), who see that the military in Third World countries, especially

in the Arab World, is a subculture that emphasises “the historical role of the military

but not its absolute power”. Those subcultures define themselves in isolation from

governing regimes, and “consider themselves the pioneers of national liberation and

social reform for the entire nation” (Hazen and Mughissuddin, 1975: 80).

Although a hypothesis naming the military as a subordinated subculture is

difficult to conceptualise, as indeed some of the categories outlined in the two book,

the contribution of Protagonists of Change (1971) and Middle Eastern Subcultures

(1975) is meaningful in as far as it represents a shifting of focus from Eurocentric

approaches to the study of subculture in pre-industrial, developing societies. Said and

Farzanegan maintain that subcultures in the Arab World represent a “mosaic of

subcultures within subcultures (Said and Farzanegan, 1971: 83), naming ‘students’,

‘the military’ and ‘guerillas’ among them. The role of military subcultures is also picked

on in Richard Butwell’s analysis of Asian and Southeast Asian subcultures. Butwell

focusses on the military, the immigrants, the Buddhists and the ‘communicators’, by

which he refers to journalists (Butwell, 1971: 64-72). Why those groups are singled out

is not made clear, yet it is obvious that Butwell views subcultures as groups of ethnic

core identities dispersed in South and Southeast Asia. Along the same lines, Harold E.

Davis (1971: 52-63) and Anthony Oberschall (1971: 100) view subculture as having

strong ethnic and linguistic backgrounds in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa

respectively.

IV Negotiating the Subcultural Terrain: Critique and Further Developments

With all its varieties and different approaches to it, outlined in the three parts above,

subculture emerges as a relatively stable concept, and a well-defined field of study.

However, in recent years, mainstream approaches to subculture have fallen under a

wave of criticism, stemming from several directions and informed by different

arguments. Taking into consideration the centrality of the notion of ‘subversion from

within’ in subcultural thought, it is not surprising that most of this criticism/revision has

come from subcultural researchers and theoreticians themselves. Some of these

debates, ensuing in the early 1980’s, have been outlined in Part II. The continuation of

these debates in more recent years has contributed to the development of the


22

meaning of the concept, in addition to influencing the direction of its development into

the future.

The varieties of critiques of the discipline of subcultural studies which follow

can be initially viewed as part of a wider critique of cultural studies as a whole. This

critique sees that cultural studies’ age-old emphasis on resistance and on producing an

alternative discourse outside hegemonic institutions should be supplemented with a

reinstatement of ‘cultural policy’ in cultural studies (Barker, 2000: 366-379). This also

entails moving away from ‘textual analysis’ and adopting a more pragmatic approach.

What is foregrounded here is ‘political economy’ both through an investigation of how

the production of culture is inseparable from economic relations, and by working with

institutions that produce and administer mainstream cultural forms, such as museums

and educational institutions. In other words, emphasis is laid on the issue of ‘how the

economic and political are also cultural’ (Bennett, 1992 and Barker, 2000). Other

critics of cultural studies have, from a postcolonial stance, called attention to the

importance of re-emphasising issues of ‘race’ and ‘global capital’ in contemporary

cultural studies (Sparks, 1996). This can be seen as a call to bring Western cultural

studies back to its political agenda. Thus, critiques of ‘global cultural studies’ have

become articulate (Stratton and Ang, 1996), and have been combined with an

emphasis on regional/national cultural specificity (Ross, 1989). This has led some

cultural critics to espouse the cause of resisting the hegemony of Western-centric

cultural studies and call for ‘culture-specific’ cultural studies in the Third World, to act

as an assertion of identity in a globalised world (Žižek, 1997 and San Juan, Jr., 2002).

This critique of cultural studies as a ‘grand narrative’ does not only come from Third

World perspectives. North American cultural critics have criticised the Eurocentrism of

cultural studies (Zine, 2000), while British cultural critics have lamented the

appropriation of British cultural studies by American academic institutions, which has

stripped the former of its political commitment (Hardt, 1996).

This critique of contemporary cultural studies has strong bearings on the study

of subculture, since issues of class and consumerism are at the heart of subcultural

research. A tendency to re-examine the origin of the term can be seen in Stuart

Redhead and Sarah Thornton, who argue for an anti-representational politics, which

would stop subcultures from drifting into mere representations of ready-made labels. It

would also challenge the underlying assumption that subcultures behave the same way

everywhere (Redhead, 1990 and Thornton, 1995a).


23

Another point of contention with subcultural studies in recent years is its

emphasis on consumption and the huge role it assigns to mass media. If subcultures

emerge as a response to a hegemonic bloc, then their drift towards ‘spectacularity’ and

‘consumerism’ could be viewed as an escape from that political goal and an adoption of

the values they originally set out to challenge. Sarah Thornton, providing a thorough

critique of youth subculture, sees that, contrary to what mainstream cultural studies

has maintained, (youth) subcultures are formed within and through the media

(Thornton, 1995b). In that sense, their opposition to the dominant culture is

weakened. Similar views are formulated by Michael Green (1997a) and E. San Juan, Jr.

(1995 and 2002). The latter sees that subcultural studies has departed from its project

of constructing a historical bloc as a result of its “fixation on articulation, contingency,

… and local power resistance” (San Juan, Jr., 2002: 244).

Critiques of consumerism and spectacularity can also be viewed within the

larger frameworks of youth subcultures and the politics of resistance. Later revisions of

the concept of resistance have advanced the argument that in subcultural studies, the

term has been romanticised and therefore reduced to mere rhetoric. In some

instances, it has become merely a question of ‘style’ (as in the work of Dick Hebdige,

1975, 1979, 1983), and in others, it was conflated with ‘difference’ so that its

subversive potential has diminished (Thornton, 1995a). According to Chris Barker, this

means that subculture is no longer about the “politicisation” of subcultural groups, but

the “aestheticisation of politics” (Barker, 2000:335).

This radical questioning of the notion of resistance also meant that commonly

conceptualised binary oppositions are called into question. It is Sarah Thornton, again,

who indicates that such binaries as ‘domination-subordination’, ‘hegemony-

transgression’ and ‘parent-dominant’ are not always sustainable, and thus constitute

illusory categories (Thornton, 1995b). It was also difficult to reconcile the subcultural

emphasis on closed boundaries and unified, homogenous groups with the

postmodernist notions of hybridity, the crossing of boundaries, multiple subject

positions and discursive practices (Green, 1997b). This is what led Stuart Redhead to

announce that the concept of subculture, with its unified vision of youth cultures is no

longer appropriate (Redhead, 1997: x).

Another critique of subcultural studies underscores a major duality in thinking

about subculture. This mainly concerns gender-informed research. Critiques of the

masculinist, misogynist attitudes of working-class youth subcultures and the


24

foregrounding of masculinity in the study of subculture have meant the marginalisation

of issues of gender. Yet, as Charlotte Brunsdon argues, the issue of gender has

interrupted early mainstream (Marxist) subcultural studies in the same way it was itself

interrupted by the introduction in cultural studies of issues of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’

(Brundson, 1996). Thus, gender issues have, only up to a point, subverted the Marxist

agenda of cultural studies in general. With the emergence of ‘identity politics’12 in

cultural studies, issues of ‘gender’ and ‘race’ are themselves only seen as starting

points, rather than destinations.

Such criticism, however, has not resulted in a deconstruction of the concept of

subculture per se. Its major thrust can be seen in its deconstruction of subcultural

studies’ essentialist framework, making room for a more radical discourse to replace

emphasis on class and capitalism, while taking account of altered socio-economic

conditions in contemporary life. This is why Michael Green sees that from the early

1990’s onward, youth subcultures have been relatively fading, “due to complex

changes in class structures, patterns of employment and unemployment and in the

organisation of ‘leisure’ industries” (Green, 1997b: 523). Though subcultures as

rigorously defined social groups have fallen out of favour with cultural studies, the

concept itself has not disappeared. What happened in the last two decades is an

opening up of the concept, which facilitated its dynamic interaction with other concepts

such as ‘folk’, ‘popular’ and ‘mass’ culture. Basic to an understanding of the nature of

any of those terms is their underlying attributes of marginality and subversion shared

by those who participate in them. This, according to Michael Green, urges those

participants to “make their own sense of the worlds in which they live, through various

cultural forms with complex relations of power” (Green, 1997b: 524). It is the aim of

Part V to investigate the relevance and continuation of the concept of subculture in

those other ‘marginal’ forms of cultural expression.

V Filling up the Subcultural Void: Opening up the Concept

If the presence of a subculture, no matter how narrowly or broadly the term is defined,

presupposes the presence of an official, mainstream culture, then the idea of ‘sub’ can

also be attributed to other cultural varieties in a society. Defined against a ‘national’

culture, varieties such as mass, popular and folk culture, can be found to partake of

the initial counter-hegemonic character of subculture. Raymond Williams’ postulation


25

concerning the coexistence of three cultural varieties in a society: ‘dominant’, ‘residual’

and ‘emergent’ (Williams, 1977) is an assertion of the power of the latter two ‘sub’

varieties to subvert the centrality of the former. Moving a step further, a link could be

made between ‘residual’ culture, to which Williams assigns the function of carrying

through older cultural forms, and what is known as ‘folk’ culture. On the other hand,

the ‘emergent’ cultures, with their novelty and commerciality can be represented in

both the mass and the popular varieties of culture.

In Modernity and Mass Culture (1991), Patrick Brantlinger and James Naremore

make a similar distinction between official and marginal varieties of culture in a society.

Though they do not refer to cultural groups as such, they name six ‘artistic cultures’ in

a society: ‘high art’, ‘modernist art’, ‘avant-garde art’, ‘folk art’, ‘popular art’ and ‘mass

art’. Brantlinger and Naremore’s ‘artistic’ categories are defined in socio-economic

terms, so that the first three belong to the “domain of those who have cultural capital”,

while the latter three are “accessible to the general population” (Brantlinger and

Naremore, 1991: 10).

The concept of subordinated subcultures thus lives on in those forms of folk,

popular and mass culture, and it is what constitutes cultural resistance to hegemony.

Though each of the three varieties works in a direction differing from and stresses

values that are at variance with the other, those three concepts continue to challenge

the hegemony of a ‘unified national culture’ and strive to effect a change in the cultural

status quo carried out through human agency. In Understanding Popular Culture

(1989), John Fiske sums up the political and social disruptive functions of those

nonofficial forms of culture in a society:

The motor of social change can come only from a sense of social difference

that is based on a conflict of interests, not a liberal pluralism in which

differences are finally subordinated to a consensus whose function is to

maintain those differences essentially as they are… Despite nearly two

centuries of capitalism, subordinated subcultures exist and intransigently

refuse finally to be incorporated. (Fiske, 1989: 19)

Fiske’s account of popular culture, however, tends to blur the lines between mass and

popular culture as well as between those two and subculture per se. For an analysis of

each a certain degree of differentiation is required. This does not necessarily mean

that the three categories are dichotomous.


26

The idea of subculture can be seen to partake of the other two. The emphasis

on race and ethnicity highlights the link between subculture and popular culture, while

the former’s reliance on the media to attain visibility links it more to mass culture. On

the other hand, mass and popular culture can be seen to carry strong affinities to each

other, since they both partake of the properties of leisure and consumption. What

follows is an attempt to outline basic properties of the three main subordinate

subcultural formations in a community, namely mass, popular and folk culture in an

attempt to highlight where they intersect with the basic idea of subculture.

Mass Culture:

The concept that appears closest in nature to that of subculture is mass culture. Mass

culture refers broadly to mass-produced cultural forms (Mukerji and Schudson, 1991).

While this has traditionally included media such as music records, television, popular

novels, the cinema, journalism and some items of fashion, it now encompasses ‘new

media’ such as the internet, the satellite receiver, forms of wireless communication,

theme parks and even mass disseminated religious tracts (Eickelman and Anderson,

1999). On the formal level, the study of mass culture requires

anthropological/empirical methods similar to those used in the study of subculture,

such as participant observation and statistics. Both mass culture and popular culture

presuppose the existence of a ‘high’ variety of culture. In The Political Unconscious,

Fredric Jameson sees that at the turn of the 19th century there emerged “two distinct

literary cultural structures”, namely mass culture and high culture (Jameson, 1981:

10). This distinction between ‘high’ and ‘mass’, together with the basic notion that

mass culture is the product of capitalism, are at the heart of conceptions of mass

culture. Both enemies and sympathisers proceed from that distinction.

It was from the Frankfurt School that uniform criticism of mass culture came.

Here the emphasis was on how mass culture was ideologically manipulated for

influencing the public. In Dialectics of Enlightenment (1944/1973), Theodor Adorno

and Max Horkheimer’s attack on mass culture sprang from what they perceived as its

evocation of conformity and its targeting of ‘libidinal’ needs (Adorno and Horkheimer,

1944, 1973). Adorno also attacks and dismisses jazz as repetitive, imitative and stylised

(Adorno, 1955, 1982). Arguments about ‘mass deception’ and ‘capital discipline’

formulated by Adorno and Horkheimer are likewise essential to perceptions of mass

culture. In 1957, Dwight MacDonald links mass culture to consumerism and launches


27

an attack on its attributes of levelling, conformity, and homogeneity. MacDonald

extends his critique to mass consumers whom he sees as unrefined, undiscriminating

and passive subjects (MacDonald, 1957: 59). Such arguments have in recent years

developed into questions of meaning and ideology. The debate centres around

whether the subordination of mass culture and the passivity of its consumer can allow

for a space for the creation of meaning, or whether mass culture’s ‘resistance to

meaning’ continues and calls for a new kind of literacy (Vincent, 1999). The ‘mass

culture debate’ as it has come to be known has radically shaped thinking on mass

culture. Andrew Ross celebrates popular culture’s appeal to “authenticity and self-

respect”, while he rejects mass culture’s imposition upon a “passive populace, like so

much standardized fodder, doled out to quell unrest and fuel massive profits” (Ross,

1989: 4).

The other side of the argument is that the standardisation and mechanical

(re)production of mass culture do in themselves constitute challenge to the dominant

culture, by generating another sense of what is ‘real’ (as in photography, the television

and the cinema), or by engaging consumers in what has come to be known as ‘creative

consumption’. Meaning is here seen not as lodged in the cultural artifact, but in its

usage (Willis, 1990). In other words, the consumer becomes a ‘bricoleur’, dislodging

the sign in a new context and investing it with a new meaning (Hebdige, 1988) and

Chambers, 1990). This argument, in its turn, is challenged on the grounds that the

pleasures of consumption leave very little space for criticising anything or for the

emergence of alternative visions (McGuigan, 1992), and that the creativity of the

consumer does not necessarily constitute a challenge to hegemony (Silvertsone, 1994).

At the end of the day, creative consumption can be an assertion of the power of

capitalism and hence of the status quo.

Arguments for the creativity, visibility and ubiquity of mass culture can be

traced back to the work of Walter Benjamin, which, though bearing strong affinities to

the work of the Frankfurt School, celebrates the disruptive potential of art in ‘the age

of mechanical reproduction’. Since in dealing with mass culture, the notion of

‘authority’ is of less significance that the act of consumption itself, Benjamin celebrates

a certain democratic principle inherent in the act of consumption of mass cultural

product. In other words, its ideological significance resides with consumption, rather

than with production (Benjamin, 1968). Along the same lines, Bertold Brecht, a close

friend of Benjamin’s, conceives of a ‘radical aesthetics’ taking the place of the tradition


28

of high modernism. This ‘radical aesthetics’ incorporates mass culture as one of its

constituents (Ridless, 1984). However, Theodor Adorno, a contemporary of both, and

one who remains the most adamant critics of mass culture, criticises the apparent

romanticism informing such views. In a letter to Benjamin, he reminds him that after

‘tradition’ “comes not post-capitalist art but ‘mickey mouse’” (in Ridless, 1984: xvi).

In Ideology and Art: Theories of Mass Culture from Walter Benjamin to

Umberto Eco 1984, Robin Ridless outlines the development of the argument about

creative consumption and ‘meaning-producing practices’ in structuralist/

poststructuralist and semiotic thought. He foregrounds Roland Barthes’ stress on

signification, and his restoring of structural analysis to mass cultural products as an

argument for the creative nature of mass consumption. He also uses Umberto Eco’s

emphasis on the multiplicity of the sign in a ‘semiotic guerilla warfare’ as advocating

mass culture’s anti-hegemonic character. Consumers here generate their own

interpretation of the sign through a “tactic of decoding” (Eco, 1976, in Ridless, 1984:

86).

Theodor Adorno might have been severely dismissive of mass culture by

summarising it into ‘mickey mouse’, but he was also too indulgent in celebrating so-

called ‘tradition’. Whereas in our (post)modern world, cultural studies has little

tolerance for a hegemonic culture subordinating other voices, less official varieties of

culture are at times blindly embraced and celebrated. What I would like to propose in

conclusion to the discussion in this section is that mass culture, whether viewed with

sympathy or hostility, can not automatically be regarded as a counter-hegemonic

subculture. It can at times be another side of dominant/official culture. In other words,

the subjugation of mass cultural products to the sponsorship of the official cultural

institution can produce a mass culture that is stripped off its subversive power. The

Ideological State Apparatus operating in the so-called ‘democratic’ world as much as

anywhere else, can domesticate mass culture by stylising its images and emptying

them of any revolutionary potential. Mass culture here becomes a vehicle for capitalist

enterprise- an arena for mere consumption. This hegemonic dimension of ‘official mass

culture’ cannot be more clearly seen than in the flooding of markets all over the globe

with products of American mass culture. With its capitalist logic, mass culture can not

only standardise culture in a particular society, but also impose alien parameters on

societies the world over.


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Popular Culture:

The difference between mass and popular culture appears at times to be only a matter

of naming. There are indeed various instances in cultural research where the two

terms are used interchangeably. Popular culture, however, is a broader concept than

mass culture; and in cultural research it is the cultural variety that comes closest to

Raymond Williams’ notion of culture as a ‘whole way of life’ (Williams, 1980), or Stuart

Hall’s notion: ‘culture is ordinary’ (Hall, 1997). This view of popular culture as a

democratic notion referring to culture as shared by everybody in everyday life and not

as the property of a particular sector in society can be traced back to T. S. Eliot’s

definition of culture. It is a people’s ‘way of life’ and, since it is not confined to

industrial products, is wider than the conception of mass culture:

Culture… includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people:

Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, The twelfth of August, a cup final, the

pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into

sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches, and the

music of Elgar. (Eliot, 1948: 31)

Although cultural studies has proceeded a long way from Eliot’s more

conservative conception of culture, the democratic principle celebrated here continues

to inform views on popular culture. Mukerji and Schudson see that the concept popular

culture encompasses both concepts of mass culture and folk culture. Trying to rethink

popular culture in terms of its relationship to other cultural manifestations, as well as

to commercial and political relations, they see that the term refers to

the beliefs and practices, and the objects through which they are

organized, that are widely shared among a population. This includes folk

beliefs, practices and objects rooted in local traditions, and mass beliefs,

practices and objects generated in political and commercial centers.

(Mukerji and Schudson, 1991: 3)

Simon Frith (1997b) identifies three parameters for the description of popular

culture that highlight its unofficial character. First, it is the culture ‘produced’ for the

‘people’. ‘Produced’ here does not necessarily refer to ‘industrial’ production, but

suggests cultural commodities, while the ‘people’ are sectors of the larger market of

cultural commodities. The second attribute of popular culture is that it is the culture of

the people. Though it emphasises mass production, it is tied up to the concerns of

ordinary people and is rooted in particular (usually working-class) social processes


30

(Hoggart, 1958). This distinguishes it from mass culture. The ‘people’ of popular

culture are not the anonymous masses of mass culture. They are social groups with

common social beliefs and practices. They are also wider and more varied than

members of traditional subcultures (Frith, 1997b). Though popular culture differs from

‘high’ culture in that it is, in Richard Bulliet’s terms, “intrinsically local and socially

circumscribed” (Bulliet, 1998: 41), it is still deemed capable of transcending class,

linguistic and racial barriers (Fishwick, 1974: 1).

The third parameter Frith names highlights most strongly the shared affinities

between mass culture and subculture. This concerns popular culture as the culture

produced by the people. It is simply “what people do” (Frith, 1997b: 416). An analysis

of popular culture involves an analysis of how cultural texts, that is to say objects and

symbolic practices, give shape to popular values and beliefs (Frith, 1997b: 415).

However, Frith argues for the validity of the opposite assumption. Popular culture is

not only produced by the people; commodities, activities and symbolic practices are

what produce the people, with people here meaning “a particular form of collective

identity and values, a particular sort of recognition, a particular sense of belonging”

(Frith, 1997b: 416).

It is evident in Frith’s meticulous attempt to outline the boundaries of popular

culture, particularly in relation to mass, folk and subculture, that the categories

merge and overlap. That is why an understanding of the nature of popular culture is

better achieved by investigating its relation to other cultural varieties. Walter Armbrust

sees that popular culture is informed both by folkloric elements, which he terms ‘pre-

modern’, and by mass culture which is ‘low-brow’ (Armbrust, 1992: 525). This

formulation is, however, not totally convincing. The designation ‘pre-modern’ is vague,

since modernity is in itself a problematic notion. On the other hand, ‘low-brow’ culture

can describe both the products of mass culture and the manifestations of folk culture.

Since Armbrust is primarily interested in studying popular culture in Third World

contexts, the designations ‘pre-modern’ and ‘low-brow’ appear here to be part of a

cultural paradigm, formulated in a different cultural contexts and informed by differing

conceptions of ‘modernity’ and ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures.

Armbrust, however, provided some useful insights into conceptions of popular

culture by linking it to the use of the vernacular- a link also made by Fishwick (1974).

This affiliation with the use of the vernacular is seen to enhance popular culture’s

subversive potential and underline its capacity for resistance. While investigating the


31

relevance of Mikhail Bakhtin’s legacy to cultural studies, Ken Hirschkop argues that a

common language is one of the primary goals of a democratic society in the modern

nation-state. Hirschkop maintains that access to the vernacular is tantamount to access

to political power. The vernacular allows popular culturalists to “participate in the

deliberative process whereby social values and priorities [are] determined” (Hirschkop,

1989: 1). Popular culture here becomes the site of political power.

Not quite like the case of mass culture, popular culture has been one side of a

conflict in academic institutions with what can be referred to as ‘canonical’ culture (i. e.

texts, particularly literary, accepted as representing mainstream, official culture)13. It

can hardly be denied that the cultural revolution of the 1960’s in Europe and the

United States and the populist bent characterising cultural studies from the 1980’s

onward have radically made academic circles more sympathetic towards populist and

non-elitist artistic forms. Nonetheless, resistance to introducing non-canonical syllabi in

educational institutions can be seen almost everywhere. Mukerji and Schudson argue

that

[t]here is a chip on the shoulder of anyone in the academic world who

dares take popular culture seriously because he or she does so always in

the face of a tradition of high culture and is invariably reckoned by many

colleagues alternately shallow or subversive. (Mukerji and Schudson, 1991:

24)

This conflict with the institutions of high culture in academic circles is but a

reflection of popular culture’s more than implicit opposition to the establishment. This

highlights the role of cultural politics. The political establishment and its affiliated

institutions are keen on preserving an ‘elite’ image that would better secure

acquiescence on the part of the masses who are deprived of cultural capital. This,

argues Mukerji and Schudson, is what made popular culture emerge as a terrain of

social and cultural conflict and a weapon of political mobilisation in the last two decade

of the twentieth century (Mukerji and Schudson, 1991: 1).

The notion of resistance at the heart of all conceptions of subculture is central

to an understanding of popular culture as well. In Understanding Popular Culture, John

Fiske, outlining a theory of popular culture in capitalist societies, views popular culture

as performing a double act of resistance: one against the hegemony of the elite

establishment and the other directed towards the hegemony of mass cultural products

(Fiske, 1989: 19-20). In that, he is in line with Michel de Certeau (1984) who views


32

popular culture as representing resistance to the hegemony of both capitalism and

mass culture (de Certeau, 1984). Fiske suggests three approaches to the subversive

practices of popular culture. One is offered by democratic (elite) humanism, which

views popular culture as complementing the cultural life of a society, and indeed

representing its ‘true’ essence. The second situates popular culture within a model of

power and assesses its involvement with other cultural forms. The third approach,

adopted by Fiske sees

popular culture as a site of struggle, but, while accepting the power of the

forces of dominance, it focuses rather upon the popular tactics by which

these forces are coped with, are evaded or are resisted. Instead of tracing

exclusively the process of incorporation, it investigates rather that popular

vitality and creativity that makes incorporation such a constant necessity.

(Fiske, 1989: 20)

Fiske, moreover, sees an inherent ambiguity in popular culture. Because it partakes of

some of the properties of mass culture by relying on industrial/mass production,

popular culture incorporates what it sets out to resist in the very act of resistance to it.

It becomes an expression of both “domination and subordination, [of] both power and

resistance” (Fiske, 1989: 5). This contradictoriness, Fiske argues, is what gives popular

cultural practices their polysemy and semiotic richness.

Two basic criticisms can be made to the assumptions about popular culture

outlined in this section. The first of these concerns the distinction between high and

popular culture. The primary conception of popular culture stems from a rejection of

modernism’s high/low, or elite/popular dichotomy in dealing with artistic works.

Rejecting that dichotomy does not mean a rejection of the designations ‘high’ and

‘popular’ per se, but of the act of placing them in opposition to each other as well as of

the value judgments attached to each. It is not, however, always possible to decide

which artistic works belong where in that polarity. Popular and elite cultures do

possess elements of each other14. Enthusiasts for popular culture might resist the

indifference with which a popular cultural product, for instance a song, is received, but

if the lyrics are taken from the work of a Poet Laureate, they might not accept the

classification of a song as popular in the first place. A second and related criticism is

that while popular culture rejects the value- judgment inherent in the high/low

dichotomy, it imposes its own conception of value, which is, because of popular

culture’s partial reliance on commercial production, ‘market’ value. This point leads to


33

the third and last criticism. Popular culture can be hegemonic.

Folk Culture:

The third and last concept I wish to analyse in relation to the concept of subculture is

that of folk culture. In comparison with mass and popular culture, folk culture appears

the least problematic concept. Its boundaries are better defined, and it is less the site

of conflict over power. The concept of folk culture derives its origin from the emphasis

in anthropological studies, particularly in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, on myth,

religion and rituals. It refers to a community’s development through time. Among its

salient features, Simon Frith lists

the oral transmission of songs, tales and history; aesthetic authorization by

tradition; the integration of nature and culture, body and mind; expression

through ritual, in collective deployment of symbols. (Frith, 1997a: 200)

It is therefore more closely related to the ‘stable’ romanticised past than to the

turbulent present. The ‘people’ it refers to are larger in number and more diverse than

members of subcultural groups, than the social groups ‘producing’ popular culture, and

than the anonymous consumers of mass cultural products. It is also a people that

share a vast geographical location and have developed together through history. In

that sense, the concept is vital to the generation of an image of ‘national culture’ and is

an important constituent in nationalist discourses. Frith in fact links the development of

European national identities in the nineteenth century to the flourishing of folk music

and folk music collecting, and the revival of folk dances and folk songs at the hands of

European composers (Frith, 1997a: 200).

The fact that it is not directly tied to mass production and mass dissemination

of cultural products makes it the least active in matters of resistance and subversion.

Comparing it to popular culture’s multi-faceted subversive character, Sarah Thornton

refers to folk culture’s flatness and acceptance of social hierarchy (Thornton, 1995a).

Contrary to Thornton’s views, Raymond Williams does not deem folk culture totally

passive. In his conceptualisation of ‘dominant’, ‘emergent’ and ‘residual’, folk culture

occupies the space of the ‘residual’. It is the culture that belongs to the past, but

persists in shaping cultural perceptions in the present. Though Williams attaches the

most potently subversive role to emergent culture, he does not deem residual cultural

forms totally devoid of disruptive potential (Williams, 1977: 125).


34

The traditional approach to folk culture, developed by anthropologists, has

been both elaborated on and challenged by Marxist thought. Folk culture as a pre-

industrial, pre-market and pre-commodity phenomenon (Frith, 1997a: 200), has been

traditionally seen by anthropologists within “a critique of industrial societies developed

by Romanticism” (Shiach, 1989 in Frith, 1997a: 200). Marxism, Frith points out, has

made use of the idea of folk culture in constructing working-class consciousness. The

folk represented the proletariat in its exodus from the countryside to the industrial city,

while manifestations of folk culture represented the ‘pure’ form of working-class

culture, untouched by the seduction of commerce (or amplification)” (Frith, 1997a:

200).

An important distinction between folk culture on the one hand and mass and

popular cultures on the other is the authenticity of the former. This point is usually

viewed by anthropologists in relation to popular culture’s commerciality and blandness

(Mukerji and Schudson, 1991: 3). This authenticity is, in part, the outcome of folk

culture’s reliance on orality and collective memory. Mukerji and Schudson qualify this

position from a typical cultural studies’ anti-essentialist stance. They argue that

authentic folk traditions might not always be those of ‘the people’. They could have

their “metropolitan or elite roots” in the same way that mass culture is often

“’authentically’ incorporated into ordinary people’s everyday life” and thus partakes of

the properties of folk culture (Mukerji and Schudson, 1991: 3).

That folk culture might have ‘elite’ influences is indeed a plausible hypothesis.

Yet the argument that mass cultural products are ‘authentically’ incorporated into

ordinary people’s daily practices sounds more like mere play on words. Mass culture’s

alliance with commercial considerations will, more often than not, constitute a barrier

in the face of authenticity. In other words, mass cultural products might become part

of ordinary people’s everyday life, but such an imposition can hardly be considered

‘authentic’ incorporation. Contrary to Mukerji and Schudson’s claims regarding the

authenticity of mass culture, Richard W. Bulliet puts forth the view that advancements

in technological mass cultural production offsets folk culture. Comparing pop music

industry in the West (especially in the United States) to similar currents in Egypt and

India, he concludes that the attempts to live up to standards of technological quality

set by the West has often resulted in the submergence of folk cultural representations

in non-Western societies (Bulliet, 1998: 46). Bulliet’s argument only hints at the

subversive potential of folk culture. Because folk cultural elements such as folk songs,


35

folk beats, dance movements and plastic representations are usually incorporated in

mass and popular cultural products, folk culture does participate in the subversive

effort of those ‘emergent’ forms. The subversive potential of folk culture as involving a

critique of modern societies and an implicit attack on capitalist appropriation of

working-class values can indeed be utilised by those other sub-varieties of culture.

Otherwise, folk culture remains an instance of ‘tourist attraction’ or ‘local colour’ used

and abused by dominant discourses on ‘national culture’.

The survey undertaken in this part has aimed at highlighting features in

common between the basic conception of subculture outlined in the preceding four

parts of the article and other ‘subordinated’ cultural formations. It sought to highlight

conceptions of subcultural formations, such as mass, popular and folk culture, as

representing groups sharing common ‘maps of meaning’ and conceptions of the world,

and striving to attain visibility and negotiate solution to epistemological problems.

Those subcultural formations, moreover, are partially defined by their mechanisms of

resistance to a dominant culture, be it a ‘parent’ culture or a ‘national’ culture. They

are also seen by cultural critics to be in the forefront of opposition to hegemonic

discourses of ‘national culture’ (Smith, 1990 and Featherstone, 2002). They shift the

focus from notions of a unified national culture, which could mean the marginalisation

or total submergence of difference, to emphasis on what Benedict Anderson names

‘imagined communities’ formed at the margins of a nation-state (Anderson, 1983). The

interest in such subcultural formations has given rise to what in cultural studies has

come to be known as the ‘politics of difference’15.

I would like to argue here that though critiques of nationalist discourses have

constituted a strong current in contemporary cultural studies, national culture can also

be viewed from a different and more sympathetic perspective. Not only in third world

countries but in societies all over the globe, what in cultural studies is referred to as

‘hegemonic national cultures’ can be viewed as in themselves instances of subcultural

formations within the context of current movements of globalisation and political and

cultural hegemony of the world’s only super power. As local subcultures do, they strive

for visibility, negotiate solutions and seek to carve out spaces for themselves in a

standardised, globalised ‘world’ culture. It was Raymond Williams again who suggested

that some cultural forms can articulate the ideology of the ‘dominant’ but embody

‘residual’ or ‘emergent’ strategies (Williams, 1991). National cultures, though deemed


36

‘dominant’ in their own national context, are also subordinate, and hence subversive,

within the context of ‘global culture’ and global everything. National culture here

becomes, ironically, an instrument of resistance.

VI Subculture and Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies: The Legacy

Continues

This part attempts a critical survey of the relevance of some key concepts and debates

in subcultural studies to contemporary cultural and literary debates. The survey

focusses on key concepts in subcultural studies and literary and cultural studies, and

highlights underlying assumptions in subcultural studies that are expanded and

elaborated in contemporary approaches to literature and culture. Subcultural studies

(and cultural studies in general) is a relatively young field. As a product of the

twentieth century, it has reacted to and interacted with major twentieth-century social,

economic and political phenomena such as industrialisation, capitalism, urbanisation,

the formation of nation-states, and ethnic mixing. Some of the key concerns of

subcultural studies (especially those concerning youth subcultures) intersect with basic

issues in cultural studies per se. These include the centrality of aspects such as class,

age, gender and race/ethnicity as classificatory categories. Added to those are issues

such as the centrality of the role of the media and technological (re)production,

questions of consumption, notions of hegemony and resistance, cultural capital as well

as issues of difference. This strongly manifests itself in contemporary cultural studies’

interest in re-reading cultural and critical theory and re-interpreting/re-evaluating the

ideological ‘subtexts’ embedded in them. On the other hand, subcultural studies can be

linked to literary studies through the latter’s attempt to interpret literary texts within

the framework of power relations and from the points of view of subcultural/dissident

groups such as ethnic minorities, socially deviant groups and women16. Such issues

have expanded to form the web of interrelations characterising contemporary literary

and cultural studies. What follows is an investigation of some of the manifestations of

these interrelations.

The Politics of Difference: Identity, Postcolonialsim, Feminism:

One of the central issues in contemporary cultural studies is that of identity. The

emphasis in subcultural studies on viewing the subject as a product of more than one


37

category (race, class, age, gender ..etc) has paved the way to anti-essentialist

approaches to identity. The notion of anti-essentialism in relation to issues of identity

in cultural studies is strongly linked to the name of the British cultural critic, Stuart Hall.

The influence of modern psychoanalytical theory, feminism and poststructuralist

theories of language evidently constitutes the basis of Hall’s views on cultural identity

(Barker, 2000: 176). Hall perceives of cultural identity as continually produced and

never stable, and of the knowing (and knowable) subject as a discursive construction

(Hall, 1990, 1996a and Hall and du Gay, 1996). Hall’s thoughts on subordinated

cultures in general evince the influence of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and

his views on popular culture and subaltern movements as the site of ideological

struggle. Meanwhile, it is largely indebted to Michel Foucault’s deconstruction of

essentialist notions of identity and his notion of the subject as a function of discourse

(Barker, 176-180). In addition to foregrounding the discursive nature of identity, Hall

also emphasises its political character (Hall, 1990). This does not only mean that

identity is produced and not given, but that it is formed in relation to issues of power.

Here emerges the role of ‘identity politics’. The term in cultural studies has come to

refer to the emerging discourses on identity and to collective work by groups sharing

common values. The role of collective social movements is also to alert their members

to injustices accepted as fate and to culture “taking the place of nature” (Rorty, 1995:

126 in Barker, 2000: 189).

Identity politics is based on a politics of difference. Yet the question of

difference in cultural studies is an ambiguous, evasive one; approaches to it can be

seen to centre around either one of two possibilities. The first celebrates a politics of

difference while also cherishing, in Edward W. Said’s words, “‘mixing’ … crossing over…

stretching beyond boundaries, which are more creative human activities than staying

inside rigidly policed borders” (Said, 1984: 43). Among the major exponents of this

approach to identity in cultural studies are Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Stuart Hall. The

other approach to difference recognises in it the potential of constructing a ‘national’

culture mostly as a tool of resistance to neo-colonialism and global hegemony. This can

be seen in the work of the Filipino-American cultural critic E. San Juan, Jr. (1992, 1995,

1998, 2002) and the Ghanian-British Kwame A. Appiah (1985, 1992 and 1995), but can

also be traced back to the thought of Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon.

Liberal pluralist politics, however, largely ignores or downplays the frightful

power imbalance in today’s world, and has thus recently come to be seen as an


38

imaginary solution to problems of identity. This alternative approach to difference in

cultural studies has indeed developed into an articulate critique of multiculturalist

ideology and the politics of difference. A powerful critique of anti-essentialist

conceptions of identity sees the debate around it as generated and maintained on

intellectual and theoretical levels that remain separate from the actualities of everyday

life of the people living them out. Kwame A. Appiah suggests that although arguments

about the discursiveness of identity (here African identity) are valid, this does not

mean that the (African) people do not identify with pan-Africanism “as the means for

political change and improvement” (Barker, 2000: 191).

In Racism and Cultural Studies (2002), E. San Juan, Jr, articulates his critique of

multiculturalist ideology and the politics of difference, viewing them as affirmations of

the capitalist status quo. He points out the inability of such supposedly democratic

principles to secure justice to a people’s identity and worth. Instead of reading ‘positive

hybridity’ and enriching ‘crossing-overs’, he reads in it “conformity to a monolithic

pattern of conduct” (San Juan Jr., 2002: 8). He argues that

[m]ulticulturalism in its diverse modalities has indeed become the official

policy designed to solve racism and ethnic conflicts in the North.

Contextualized in the history of transnational capitalism, however,

multiculturalism tends to occlude, if not cancel out, the material conditions

of racist practices and institutions. (San Juan, Jr., 2002: 9).

Quoting Slavo Žižek (1997), San Juan, Jr. bravely argues that “multiculturalist respect

for the Other’s individuality … is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority” (San

Juan Jr., 2002: 8).

Another point that can be taken against multiculturalist and anti-essentialist

ideologies is that downplaying or deconstructing essentialist notions of identity might

lead to confusion and distortion of those categories before their dismissal is achieved.

Chris Barker’s espousal of Hall’s anti-essentialism is everywhere manifest in his

presumably objective exposition of the identity debate. Barker points out the need to

qualify a phrase such as ‘British identity’ with one or more defining terms such as

Black, Asian, Chinese, Polish (Barker, 2000: 176), thus admitting the very contingency

of nationalist, rather than merely ethnic denominations. However, it is not

understandable how ‘Jewishness’ has come into his qualifying terms, nor does he

elaborate on the bases of his perception of Jewishness as a national/racial/ethnic

category. This assumption is evident again in Barker’s classification of Jews as an


39

instance of racial diaspora within his critique of the discourse on the nation-state

(Barker, 2000: 197). It also remains unclear why Barker never refers to other religious

communities as making up racial/ethnic diaspora communities anywhere else in the

world.

The critiques of Appiah and San Juan, Jr. and others are those of prominent

cultural critics coming from non-metropolitan backgrounds, and they do indeed

constitute an act of subversion from within. They dare articulate what can in

contemporary mainstream cultural studies be branded ‘racist’, ‘nationalist’ or simply

‘essentialist’ views towards identity. A less dismissive critique of identity politics is

offered by Brunsdon and Gillory. They maintain that anti-essentialist notions can only

act as starting points for interpretation. While they reorganise perceptions in a more

tolerant and flexible manner, they cannot act as conclusions to political debates

(Brunsdon, 1996).

The politics of difference and multiculturalist ideology intersect at so many

points with contemporary thinking on race and the nation-state. The European concept

of the nation-state, formed in the age of Enlightenment and revolution (Anderson,

1983: 15) has been subjected to various critiques by cultural critics. In a pluralist,

postmodernist world, the nation-state has come to stand for suppression of difference

for the sake of projecting a unified national identity and national character. Subcultural

groups who are prevented from cultural expression and participation thus form

‘imaginary’ communities which can represent their subjecthood (Guillory, 1993: 278).

Multiculturalism then emerged as a call for all ethnic and gender groups to be

represented in mainstream culture. This liberal pluralist solution, however, is not

always hailed as a way out of a complex issue. Homi Bhabha has suggested that

cultures are meeting places with loose boundaries, where hybridity rather than purity is

the key agent (Bhabha, 1994), yet he has also pointed out that liberal pluralist

discourses are stricken with internal contradictions, and usually experience the

“fragility of principles such as ‘tolerance’ and ‘equal respect’” (Bhabha, 1996: 54). In

other words, the practical test of these ‘ideologies’ does not always reveal their

validity.

The nation-state as a political, ideological apparatus is also seen as allied to

racial practices. Here again, the legacy of the basic conceptions of subculture appears

to influence contemporary debates on race and ethnicity. Stuart Hall has argued that

race is more a matter of representation than an essential attribute (Hall, 1990, 1996b


40

and 1997). Henry Louis Gates, Jr. argues that race is “a metaphor for something else

and not an essence or a thing in itself” (Louis Gates, Jr., 1986: 402). The two

overlapping concepts of race and ethnicity, when taken as signifiers, reveal their

“elasticity and emptiness” (Gillory: 1987b: 39). Thus, instead of embracing difference,

they can turn into mechanisms of exclusion. The anti-essentialist approach to identity

finds itself walking the fine line between fulfilling its task of linking with others and

remaining ‘different’. The politics of difference replacing racism finds itself, as Tzvetan

Todorov argues, threatened with both “excessive universalism and excessive

relativism” (Todorov, 1986: 373).

The politics of difference and the nation-state debate are central issues in

postcolonial discourse. The two key concerns of the latter, identified by Williams and

Chrisman as ‘domination/subordination’ and ‘hybridity/creolisation’ (Williams and

Chrisman, 1993), intersect with issues of race, ethnicity, subjectivity, power and

difference. The liberal pluralist bent in postcolonial discourse has been severely

criticised from what could be described as a militant ‘anti-colonial’ standpoint. Here

postcolonialism is singled out as the ideology of global capital and hence neo-

imperialism. According to San Juan, Jr., it represents a “fetishisation of otherness” and

offers

a metaphysics of legitimation for those groups who stand to benefit from

the predatory economics of uneven development, namely, transnational

corporations and their compradors, including their retinue of postcolonial

rationalizers. (San Juan, Jr. 1998: 14)

Just as the notion of difference was essential to developing multiculturalist,

anti-essentialist discourse, it is also a principal assumption in feminist discourse.

Gender as a marker of difference and a constituent of subcultural identity started to

occupy a visible place in subcultural studies from the 1970’s onward (Brunsdon, 1996).

Works by Angela McRobbie and Charlotte Brunsdon, reviewed in Part III above, have

highlighted a qualitative shift in the scholarship of CCCS from concern with youth and

class to an interest in the role gender plays in the mechanisms of subcultural evolution.

Notions of the discursive character of identity, and of multiplicity of subject-positions

has also influenced (and been influenced by) gender studies’ endeavour to destabilise

gender and stress multiplicity (Kristeva, 1986 and Kaplan, 1992). Although CCCS

scholarship remained till the end less preoccupied with gender than with youth and


41

class, gender as a formative factor in subcultural identity has become exceedingly

perceptible from the 1980’s onwards (see McRobbie, 1991, Brunsdon, 1996, Gelder

and Thornton, 1997 and Barker, 2000).

Cultural Capital, Canon-Formation and Carnival:

A central issue in the debate over ‘national culture’ is the usual division of a society’s

cultural life into ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. ‘High’ culture is elite, avant-gardist culture- the

variety of culture believed to represent the entire nation-state, while ‘low’ is the culture

of ‘less enlightened’ groups, often viewed as superficial and vulgar. The high/low

distinction in assessing cultural products at the heart of conceptions of subculture has

been operative since the project of modernity in Europe (as in Matthew Arnold, 1960)

took over the task of celebrating ‘high’ art as the guardian of social values.17 With the

democratic bent of cultural studies, debate over value sought on the one hand to

deconstruct notions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ in culture and art, and on the other to question

the very concept of value. This latter point has been investigated by postmarxist critics

such as Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, who relates the issue of value to socio-economic

considerations, rather than seeing it as a Kantian universal idea. This view introduces

value as ‘contingent’. Smith’s critique resembles critiques of national culture but for the

fact that Smith’s point of departure is ‘community’ rather than the nation-state (Smith,

1988). However, whereas, the nation-state encompasses a hybridity that cannot be

integrated within mainstream national discourse, a community’s communal definition of

value does by necessity exclude other participants.

Assessing the issue of value from the point of view of political economy, Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak links it to the politics of canon formation, while admitting that

literary critics are often reluctant to make that link (in Guillory, 1993: 271). The debate

over canonical revision, advocating democracy and plurality of values is, in its turn,

informed by the postmarxist notion of ‘cultural capital’. Cultural capital means that

matters of taste and judgment reflect class affiliations and social and economic

relations of power. Capital is then operative in legitimising certain works because (1)

they reflect the superiority of the social class which upholds them, (2) they endorse the

hegemonic and ideological values of that class (Bourdieu, 1984). Because most

societies are not yet ready to fully acknowledge subcultural formations as part of

mainstream culture, the artistic production of such groups remains ‘uncanonical’.


42

In an educational context, the canon is translatable into ‘the curriculum’. John

Guillory (1993) has viewed the process of literary canon formation in the light of the

notion of ‘cultural capital’. He sees that liberal pluralist discourse has argued for a

process of curricular revision, which has meant either “the canonization of formerly

noncanonical works” or “the development of … separate noncanonical programs of

study” (Guillory, 1993: 3). Guillory sees that both options have created an impasse by

the very institutionalisation of the categories of canonical and noncanonical. Liberal

pluralism is then seen to perpetuate and reinforce the very notions it sets out to

deconstruct. Guillory, moreover, criticises liberal humanism’s reduction of the political

to the cultural. This, he argues, is nowhere more evident than in the canon debate.

The canon as a cultural construct remains an arena where identity politics are

operative (Guillory, 1993: 3-9). Guillory’s own solution for the canon debate rests on a

‘sociology of judgment’ where matters of taste and value are linked to socio-economic

factors, while emphasisng “the ideological notions which inhere in the context of

institutionalised representations of the works, i. e. the way these works are taught”

(Guillory, 1993: ix).

Speaking about canonical revisions, one naturally thinks of the huge body of

literary works written in the ‘less prestigious’ variety of the official language in almost

every culture. The place of such works often remains marginal as value judgment

interferes and the whole issue of cultural capital is resurrected. The two classic

alternatives offered by liberal pluralist discourse do, as Guillory maintains, reinforce the

very dichotomy they set out to deconstruct. Yet, how practical is the solution offered

by Guillory himself? A sociology of judgement allied with an investigation into the way

non-canonical works are taught might indeed shed light on the political/economic side

of the problematic, but how it would ultimately contribute towards the

institutionalisation of those non-canonical works remains yet to be divined.

I would like to argue here for what can be termed a ‘carnivalesque’ canon. One

is reminded that Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of carnival is a key to understanding the

mechanisms of subcultural resistance. Indeed some subcultural critics argue that while

carnival as a festive ritual has withdrawn from European popular culture, it emerges in

academic discourse as an epistemological category (Stallybrass and White, 1986). A

‘carnivalesque’ canon would allow for the coexistence of cultural ‘opposites’ and

therefore practically challenge the high/low division. Linking the use of the vernacular


43

in non-canonical works to resistance would also be a reinstitutionalisation of the

concept of carnival in the process of canonical revision. The democratic principles of

carnival would allow various works to coexist, interact and comment on each other in

what is referred to in a slightly different context as the ‘literary field’ (Jacquemond,

2003). This process of interaction of opposites could ultimately generate a new

synthesis.

Future Directions: Conclusion

In an attempt to assess the current state of subcultural studies, David Muggleton and

Rupert Weinzierl (2003) argue that with the “rapid proliferation of images, fashions

and lifestyles, it is … becoming increasingly difficult to pinpoint what ‘subculture’

actually means”. Emphasising the diversity of subcultural formations in today’s world,

they stress the need for reassessing “outdated notions of ‘subcultures’” in the twenty-

first century (Muggleton and Weinzierl, 2003: Foreword). The authors argue for two

basic endeavours. The first involves a radical questioning of notions of ‘style’ and

‘spectacularity’ as key shapers of subcultural expression. The second focusses on

strategies of ‘connectedness’ that subcultural groups in today’s fragmented world are

constantly evolving. While the first endeavour has already been manifest in subcultural

studies since the early 1980’s18, the attempt to approach subcultures comparatively

and in relation to shared preoccupations that transcend racial and territorial boundaries

is a more novel proposal. The stress here is on the fragmentation of culture in the

modern world and on an attempt to capture subcultures in their continuous flux. It

remains to be said that the notion of ‘connectedness’ introduced by the book remains

restricted to Western, postindustrial societies and thus perpetuates a ghetto-like

conceptualisation of cultural studies that the book is supposed to dismantle.

The project of viewing subcultures in an ‘international’ context, and the

emphasis on examining their relation to the changing face of politics in today’s world

had emerged in cultural studies during the last two decades of the twentieth century.

In the 1980’s the concept of ‘New Times’ (Hall and Jacques, 1989) appeared as a

major issue in cultural studies. The project of ‘New Times’ is preoccupied with charting

out the transformations of social and economic processes generated by the unstable

nature of class structure charactersing the postmodern world as well as the influence

of globalisation on concepts of culture. It stands for the sum total of “new


44

configurations of production, politics, consumption, life-styles, identities and aspects of

everyday life” (Barker, 2000: 103). Stuart Hall, whose name is most strongly linked

with that concept, argues that with the conditions of ‘new times’, cultural studies will

be more closely allied to political activism as a means of combating the ongoing

process of institutionalisation of culture, particularly in the United States (in Morely and

Chen, 1996). It is precisely this stress on politically engaged intellectual action which

seems to me to indicate the path cultural studies is likely to move in in the future.

Since its onset, cultural studies has espoused a political agenda. It sought to

recover working-class culture and empower subalterns, while at the same time

synthesising progressive traditions in Western intellectual history (Grossberg et al.,

1992). Confronted with globalisation and global capital in economics and a resurrection

of racism in present-day politics, the Utopian agenda of cultural studies and the effort

to build a ‘historic bloc’ is gradually turning into a dream. Realists have thus come to

see cultural studies as “offering temporary anodyne to the inhabitants of an

administered racial polity” (San Juan, Jr., 2002: 245). Resurrecting and centralising

cultural studies’ political agenda is deemed by some cultural critics as a step away from

the centrality of issues such as class, gender and race to an espousal of political

activism. This, argues E. San Juan, Jr., can be achieved when

a historicist “cultural materialism” first outlined by Williams … can be

renewed by recovering and adapting to new contexts the principles of

“national liberation struggles” espoused by Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James,

Lu Hsun, Amiclar Cabral, Che Guevara, Aimé Césaire, and others. Cultural

Studies practiced by those committed intellectuals can be a revolutionary

way out of the current impasse. (San Juan, Jr., 2002: 244)

By trying to resurrect those figures of anti-colonial struggle, San Juan Jr.’s call might

sound outdated. Yet, it points towards a new direction subcultural studies can take if

the whole discipline is to prove itself ready, capable and willing to respond to the new

conditions of power in the world. Thus the resistance to hegemony informing the

mechanism of subcultural groups is enlarged and transferred to a global context,

where members of every community can form a counter-hegemonic bloc in the face of

a new world-order. Extending the Gramscian metaphor further, the subculturalist,

whether as part of a narrow subculture or a participant in one of the new fronts of

resistance, can assume the role assigned by Gramsci to the ‘organic intellectual’

(Gramsci, 1971: 9-10), who can challenge the hegemony of legitimisation. In both the


45

narrow context of subcultures within a society and the global context of national

liberation struggles, the organic intellectual will need to question some of the ‘givens’

of cultural studies such as liberal pluralism and the blurring of boundaries for the sake

of resisting attempts at either exclusion or annexation of deviant/defiant conceptions

and practices.

Stuart Cunningham is another advocate of the shift to ‘cultural policy’ in cultural

studies, yet with a different agenda. Cunningham advances the view that shifting

attention to the political in cultural studies would constitute a new ‘command

metaphor’, yet with a view on substituting social action for militant resistance. This, he

argues, will lead to an emphasis on the link between cultural activities and political

institutions, and will foreground issues such as democracy, equality and citizenship.

Cunningham envisages that this ‘reformist’ command metaphor will be constructed on

the basis of a shift

away from the rhetorics of resistance, oppositionalism and anti-

commercialism on the one hand, and populism on the other, towards those

of access, equity, empowerment and the divination of opportunities to

exercise appropriate cultural leadership. (Cunningham, 1993: 137-8 in

Barker, 2000: 371)

Cunningham’s proposal remains vague with respect to what he envisages as a

substitute for both resistance and populism, and to whether empowerment and cultural

leadership do not by themselves presuppose resistance. Yet, this new ‘command

metaphor’ reflects an awareness of cultural studies’ present impasse and the need to

develop new strategies.

The emphasis on incorporating political considerations in cultural studies,

whether in San Juan Jr.’s call to renew national liberation struggles or in Stuart Halls’s

‘New Times’ project, points out a tendency to challenge Euro/American-centrism in

both cultural studies and politics. Because cultural studies is basically a product of

Western (British and American) societies’ socio-economic conditions, its underlying

assumptions about subcultural groups remain informed by the structures of those two

societies and of Western societies in general. American and British cultural studies are

strongly informed by notions such as ‘race’ and ‘difference’ for the very reason that

those are pressing issues in the cultural life of those societies where immigration and

racial mixing have always been active. Applied to other cultural settings, these issues

do not necessarily have the same centrality and weight, and could have radically


46

different meanings. One of the by-products of the project of ‘New Times’ seems to be

that it has made the need for culture-specific cultural studies paramount.

An attempt to remedy Euro/American-centrism in cultural studies has shaped

Euro-American cultural studies itself in the last few years. This had earlier appeared in

the stress on ‘multiculturalism’ and on investigating cultural interrelationships. It has,

for instance, emerged in American academic institutions in the form of a concern to

introduce Americans to literary traditions in other parts of the world, and has been

accompanied with an active movement of setting up programmes for the study of the

literatures of the world within comparative frameworks (Standley, 1997: 353). It is still

questionable whether this approach to multiculturalism really works towards a cultural

democracy or simply remains an instance of ‘other-fetishisation’ meant to alleviate the

guilt of prejudiced ignorance and hegemony. A great deal has yet to be said about

how such literary works are presented and dealt with and about what kind of discourse

evolves in their academic institutionalisation. In recent years the reaction against

Euro/American-centrism in cultural studies has also manifested itself in the interest in

studying the cultural formation of ethnic and religious minorities within Western

societies (Zine, 2000 and Wilson, 2002). This radical, politicised view of subcultures

investigates how successful the discourse on multiculturalism is in the face of racist

social orders and internationally legitimised structures of power.

The volume of research on subcultures in non-Western societies has indeed

been minimal. This can be attributed to the fact that the conception of subculture as

basically representing working-class youth revolt is derived from the specificity of the

Western postcapitalist societies where academic interest in subculture was evident.

Conceptualisation of subcultural groups as well as the methodology used in

investigating them has consequently remained Western-informed. However, the recent

developments the concept of subculture has undergone have emphasised the need to

evolve conceptions to subcultural formations and approaches to their study derived

from the local specificity of culture and which serve the needs of subcultural formations

in different cultural settings.

To take the Middle East as an example, in recent years there has been a

growing interest in studying mass and popular culture as representing new voices in

social, literary and political debates. In New Media in the Muslim World, Dale F.

Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson survey mass culture in the Middle East and Islamic

societies and the role it plays in (re)shaping concepts of gender, authority and politics.


47

(Eickelman and Anderson, 1999). This is also related to the investigation of mass and

popular cultures in Middle Eastern societies and their relation to entertainment,

consumerism and state power (Stauth and Zubaida, 1987 and Armbrust, 1992). The

growing interest in studying subcultural manifestations in Middle Eastern societies does

not automatically represent a shift in the ‘command metaphor’. For one thing, such

studies proceed from gross overgeneralisations about the ‘Middle East’, which also

facilitate looking upon an area so diverse in cultural and political character as

monolithic. Moreover, those studies remain largely informed by Western-conceived

approaches and methodologies, and, because of their a priori conceptions of the

cultural life of those societies, end up presenting what can be described as a ‘neo-

orientalist’ discourse. A good example is Walter Armbrust’s Mass Culture and

Modernism in Egypt (1996). Armbrust uncritically embraces the conceptions of both

‘modernism’ and ‘mass culture’ in American discourse on culture, without attempting to

test the validity of those assumptions in relation to the radically different cultural

context in Egypt. The result is an account running the risk of distortion, particularly as

its emphasis on the use of the vernacular, national narratives and the cinema is

conducted by a scholar who has a very limited access to either the classical Arabic or

to any Egyptian colloquial variety. Other studies of Egyptian subcultures challenge the

tyranny of Western theory and do quarrel with some of its basic postulations. Those

studies, however, are primarily sociological and remain confined to the discipline

informing them19. A more progressive outlook on subcultural formations and their

relations to issues of social, literary, cultural, economic and political power are still

predominantly lacking.

The foregrounding of local identities does not mean that cultural studies is

advocating segregation and thus turning against its democratic charter. Opposing the

cultural hegemony of globalisation might indeed suggest that. Yet, this stress on the

specificity of cultural identities, particularities of fate and historical trajectories can be

viewed as a balancing act. Subcultural studies will remain the study of subaltern

formations; yet it is the concept of ‘subaltreity’ itself that will acquire different

meanings in today’s world. It will possibly be the job of subcultural studies to turn

attention to the specific conditions of subaltreity in different societies and to study the

mechanisms such societies evolve to negotiate solutions to their conditions of

subordination and to the crisis of identity in a hegemonic new world-order. Localised

cultural studies are called in20.


48

Endnotes

1 See discussion of ‘Subcultures and Territory’ in Part III. 2 The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory was established in Frankfurt, Germany in

1930. It operated in exile during the forties, then reopened in Frankfurt in 1950. 3 See discussion of mass culture in Part V. 4 Detailed description of such subcultural formations follow in Part III. 5 See ‘The Politics of Difference: Identity, Postcolonialism and Feminism’ in Part VI. 6 For more details, see ‘Subcultures On-the-Move’ in Part III.

7 The mass culture debate is outlined in more detail in Part V. 8 The relation of subculture to mass, folk and popular culture is the subject of Part V. 9 The canon debate and its relation to the idea of ‘cultural capital’ are outlined in Part

VI. 10 The relation of subculture to consumption will be discussed in more detail within

discussion of mass culture in Part V. 11 See for example the study of Australian female university students (Roiphe, 1993),

of suburban dissent in Canada during the 1930’s (Irr, 1993) and of Canadian university students (Axelrod and Reid, 1989). Youth ‘cultural revolution’ in some European countries is also studied in a comparative framework (Marwick, 1998). The Basque culture in Spain has been the subject of study (de Valle, 1994), while Japanese delinquent and ghetto subcultures have also been analysed (Wagatsuma, 1985 and Nakagami, 1999).

12 For a discussion of the place of identity politics in subcultural studies, see Part VI. 13 See discussion of canon formation in Part VI below. 14 Mukerji and Schudson observe that jazz is an example of popular art that has

moved into ‘elite’ art with the passage of time. They also see that Handle’s Messiah on the other hand, a work of ‘high’ art, has slipped into the popular realm (Mukerji and Schudson, 1991: 35).

15 The ‘politics of difference’ is discussed at length in Part VI. 16 Such was the project of ‘cultural materialism’ in Britain since the early 1970’s. Major

works in that direction include Johnathan Dollimore (1984) Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Alan Sinfield (1971) The Language of Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’, Catherine Belsey (1985) The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama.

17 The debate over high/low distinctions is outlined in Part V. 18 See ‘Development after the Early 1980’s’ in Part II. 19 See for example Volpi and Abdel-Motaal (1997), Wichering (1991), Abdel Kader

(1986), and Hanna (1982). 20 I am grateful to Ola Hafez and Hala Yosri for their comments on the final draft.

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