Broadcast on a Saturday morning music video show back in the (analogue) days
before MTV, this clip is the ur-moment of hip hop in Australia‹a cargo cult
event in which the future washed up on antipodean shores, offering a
glimpse into a cultural density and a range of performative
options‹breaking, writing etc‹that was taken up in Monday morning
playgrounds with an urgency and sense of mission. Astounding.
On 12/4/10 9:48 AM, "Andy Brown" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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
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