Hi Paul
Thanks for this clip. I don't know about you but I totally rely on You Tube for clips to help my teaching and lecture sessions? I'm not sure what you mean by the obvious criticisms - the middle-aged cheer-leader in the midst of a crowd of pre-pubescent gym girls, maybe?? But yes this 80s vid is a curious one in many ways, cos it is definitely part of McLarens' mission to popularise subcultures (one of the others being the Walkman?) but this virtuoso playground practice does have claims to be a WC black culture of resistance through 'skill' and 'space', before its packaging. Which does raise the issue of the virtuoso performance or demonstration of skill or manual dexterity as a continuous arena of contestation within cultural hierarchies, where the discourse of high is challenged from below, however simplistic that might sound. For me, as a researcher into metal subculture, the value of the skilled manipulation of sound and rhythmic complexity is a valued indicator of SC status up and against higher cultural capital, especially when allied with the loud signifier, which indicates distortion and interruption of the value register?
Andy

*********
Dr. Andy R. Brown
Senior Lecturer in Media Communications
Department of Film and Media Production
School of Humanities and Cultural Industries
Bath Spa University
Newton Park
Newton St. Loe
Bath
BA2 9BN
T-01225 875833
[log in to unmask]
http://www.bathspa.ac.uk/about/profiles/profile.asp?edit=active&user=academic\broa1
________________________________________
From: List for study of youth style subcultures [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Sweetman P.J. [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 09 April 2010 09:48
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: 2nd Posting: a critical examination of the new intro to RTR

Dear All

I guess one could write a thesis or two on how Malcolm McLaren complicates the RTR thesis.

In the meantime (and despite the obvious criticisms):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt6Co7EMNCU&feature=related

All best

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: List for study of youth style subcultures [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Andy Brown
Sent: 31 March 2010 23:00
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: 2nd Posting: a critical examination of the new intro to RTR

Hi, this is my second posting which, as promised, offers some points of debate concerning:

Resistance Through Rituals: Youth subcultures in post-war Britain, 2nd edition, with a new introduction by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, 2006

I am aware that this is probably not a good time for many. If you are a UK based academic you are probably on Easter break, most likely accompanied by a pile of scripts to mark; if you are US based, you are preparing work for the coming semester. If you are based elsewhere, I'm sure you have similar demands on your time (and I really hope that this list is not wholly to be centred in any particular zone or regime of academic seasons. But clearly these macro and institutional structures do affect our 'agency'). Anyway, here I offer some points of commentary about Hall and Jefferson's intro to the new edition of RTR, with the hope that they may stimulate conjecture, debate and comment.


 1.  Ok, I know this was published four years ago and with the current pace of academic life, is old news. But, is it just me or has there been little in the way of discussion or commentary on it ? (other list members may want to submit relevant review links or otherwise indicate how I am mistaken in this view). I say this because, as Hall and Jefferson remind us on the opening page - and they have lost none of their characteristic eloquence over the years - RTR, since it was first published in 1976, has remained in print ever since. So, why the need for a new edition, given that the text remains the same? Well, the editors claim the 30th Anniversary of the original Working Papers (7/8, 1975), as the pretext to assess its impact. But it clearly also was an opportunity to address the critics - of which there have been many over the years - but perhaps, most of all that there has been a flurry of work, most recently, that claims to have severed the link from this and other texts that defined the CCCS approach (texts such as, Profane Culture, Working Class Youth Cultures, Subculture: the meaning of style, Learning to Labour and maybe, Policing the Crisis). Certainly, the academic hegemony that this approach has held over the field can be gauged by the fact that, Thornton's approach, in Clubcultures, was self-consciously defined as 'post-Birmingham', Redhead, Muggleton and others claimed a 'postmodern' meaning of style; then we had volumes entitled, The Post Subcultures Reader, After Subculture, Beyond Subculture and Youth Cultures: Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes.
 2.  The first thing that strikes you about the new edition is the cover illustration - two dark silhouettes of hooded figures in white trainers: (working class?) hoodies (or 'chavs'), no less! This initially could seem like a simple case of an inappropriate cover - very much like the one on the 1976 edition: some playground toughs, in 70s baggies and open-necked shirts, giving a 'swot' (the hapless boy in school blazer and tie) some aggro and intimidation - which seemed to have nothing to do with the proclaimed 'spectacular' youth styles identified in the pages of the book.  But it turns out that this new cover image is absolutely central to the argument that 'bookends' the assessment and defence of the CCCS 'method' of analysis, by Hall and Jefferson in the new intro.
 3.  One of the criticisms that Hall and Jefferson are acutely aware of in the opening pages of their survey of the impact and critique of the CCCS approach, is the one to do with the absence of 'ethnographic' evidence from subculturalist youth. The way they deal with this it seems to me is highly noteworthy. In acknowledging this criticism they go on to identify only three pieces of research that address this imbalance: David Moore's (1994) PO of skinheads in Perth, Western Australia, David Muggleton's (2000) interview-based study with subcultural stylists and Paul Hodkinson's (2002) 'insider' ethnography of Goth. Does this really exhaust the range of ethnographic or PO accounts of subculture, post CCCS?
 4.  And, while they are very complimentary of these different pieces of research, they end up calling them short on their lack of ambition to tell us anything about the wider structures - political, economic and ideological -  that could make sense of: the meaning of subcultural style in the current conjuncture.
 5.  It seems to me that this criticism is highly significant in the defence of the RTR approach, that Hall and Jefferson offer, and also a challenging point directed at current subcultural or post-subcultural work in our field. And while I am aware that they range over a number of important issues in the rest of the piece - girls, femininity and feminism, ethnicity, masculinity, postmodernism, clubcultures and neo-tribes - it is this aspect I want to focus on.
 6.  For me, the absolutely crucial bit in the piece is when they argue:
'The underlying methodological assumption [of the RTR approach] was that meanings had to be closely observed and related to practices [the rituals of the title], and that cultural phenomena had to be understood concretely and in their full specificity before they could be 'double fitted' with wider [economic, political and ideological] relations (2006: x). Thus the "ethnographic" level was of critical importance to the project, but the RTR could not accurately be described as an "ethnographic study" (op cit, xi). I invite comments on this gloss or summary defence of the CCCS approach, which seems to fit Evans, well known criticism of recent media audience ethnographic work, as 'terminological usurpation' i.e. borrowing the label without the accompanying contents?

7.      And it is here that the discussion of the 'hoodie', which I have argued 'bookends' the piece, becomes very significant. Certainly Hall and Jefferson are right to pick up on the UK media exposure of the figure of 'the hoodie', as a representation of current class-refracted anxieties of social order and social control, concerning images of  'threatening' youth, in the conditions of what the current UK Conservative opposition defines as 'broken Britain'. But it is the analysis of this representational figure, by the authors, that is highly indicative of the manifest weaknesses of the CCCS 'method' of analysis and its claims to offer something that current subcultural theory and research lacks.

8.      Having established, to their satisfaction, that the figure of the hoodie is a contemporary example of a youth subculture: that is a stylistic expression of a subordinate, working class culture (subordinate by fact of economics and therefore an expression of the culture of the subordinate, the working class), the authors go on to offer an analysis of the phenomenon. They do so by quoting a 'vox pop', offered by Angela McRobbie, for a journalistic 'week-long' expose, covered in the UK broadsheet, The Guardian. Here they note how McRobbie is able to trace the stylistics of the youth cultural form to some point of origin in the experience of the subordinate, but also how the expressive form - a composite of hip-hop and other mediated youth stylistics - moves beyond such an origin in being shared by both male and female, white and black youth - participants.

9.      For Hall and Jefferson, this 'method' of 'reading the meaning of style' is justified by the fact that they are, at the end of the piece, able to show how the hoodie is also an item of clothing that is fashion identified, in the pages of Vogue, as the 'next must-have fashion item' (xxxii). Therefore, despite the fact that 'the hoodie' does not entirely fit the model of an expression of a coherent working class culture of resistance, much of it still does (it expresses resistance of youth, via appropriation, bricolage and homology, resulting in a visible style culture which is then diffused/defused, subject to media moral panic, and finally incorporated). Their conclusion is that it is necessary to bridge the 'new' and complicating characteristics of contemporary youth practice - the focus on music and 'club' like association, cross-class, gender and ethnic dynamics - with the 'old' subcultural method of 'reading' of how youth style cultures challenges current hegemonic relations and are therefore the 'spectacular' focus of social anxiety and control.

10.   In conclusion, I think that Hall and Jefferson are entirely right to focus on the media discourses surrounding the 'hoodie' and 'chav' figure as symptomatic of the 'superstructural' lines of tension involved in the popular management of hegemonic relations in the 'current conjuncture' (although they fail to reference any of the theorists who have investigated this, Bev Skeggs and Sue Lawler, for example). But what does their analysis actually rest upon, given the claim that 'cultural phenomena had to be understood concretely and in their full specificity before they could be 'double fitted' with wider [economic, political and ideological] relations' (2006: x)? Now it could be countered that Hall and Jefferson are merely employing this current media example as an illustration of the general approach of the CCCS method. But it seems to me, re-examining RTR, that this is exactly the kind of analysis that forms the 'empirical' basis upon which the CCCS then claimed a 'reading' of the forces of hegemony that are 'conjunctural' at a particular moment. In other words, they 'read back' from available media accounts, a coherent class-basis to youth phenomenon, as Clarke and later Thornton have argued, 'not searching for 'proof' of the perfect answer, but the best, most plausible and most convincing 'fit', given what was known' (Hall and Jefferson, 2006: xxx).  It seems to me that  a 'reading' that abstracts a phenomena from media coverage is speculative at best and ideological to the extent that they believe (without any empirical verification whatsoever) that 'media exposure' or 'media distortion' must presuppose an original 'un-mediated' phenomenon that contains 'pure' indicators of class politics, albeit symbolic ones. Especially if such 'readings' are not based on any research project intended to establish empirical materials concerning the group, participants or phenomena. It is surely more likely that the 'meaning of subcultural style' is only available and present in a youth phenomenon when it has achieved a degree of visibility and density to be picked up on and subject to media 'codification' (including lists, features and pathologies)? It is also most likely that it is only at this point of germination that it has anything important to tell us about the 'meanings' of contemporary youth practices?  The academic research choice at this point of visibility is surely to either pursue (a) a media analysis of the representational and editorial practices involved in this construction or (b) to explore the ethnographic or other basis of collective meaning and participation in such a collectivity?



I very much hope that these strategic points of criticism will provoke defence, agreement, contestation or an entirely different frame of analysis.



Best

Andy


*********
Dr. Andy R. Brown
Senior Lecturer in Media Communications
Department of Film and Media Production
School of Humanities and Cultural Industries
Bath Spa University
Newton Park
Newton St. Loe
Bath
BA2 9BN
T-01225 875833
[log in to unmask]
http://www.bathspa.ac.uk/about/profiles/profile.asp?edit=active&user=academic\broa1