IN[]VISIBLE CULTURE
AN ELECTRONIC JOURNAL FOR VISUAL STUDIES
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Interrogating
Subcultures by
Amy Herzog, Joanna
Mitchell and Lisa Soccio ©1999
Subcultures have been
broadly defined as social groups organized around shared interests and
practices. The term "subculture" has been used to position specific
social groups and the study of such groups, in relation to various broader
social formations designated by terms like "community," the "public,"
the "masses," "society," and "culture." Use of
the term "subcultures" in academic subcultural studies has shifted
since the term was coined in the 1940s in the context of the Chicago School
of sociology and its liberal, pluralist assumptions. This loosely defined
interdisciplinary field has been altered and informed by Frankfurt School
analyses of mass culture and society, by debates in anthropology regarding
the methods and ethics of ethnography, by the critical synthesis of
perspectives developed in the 1970s at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies, and by subsequent critique and revision of these earlier
tendencies especially by feminist and poststructuralist writers. Subcultural
studies often involve participant-observation, and may variously emphasize
sociological, anthropological, or semiotic analysis in order to address the
organization and production of relational, material, and symbolic structures
and systems. The
term "subculture" usually designates relatively transient groups
studied apart from their families and domestic or private settings, with an
emphasis instead on voluntary, informal, and organic affiliations formed
either in the unregulated public space of the street, or conversely within
and against the disciplinary structure of enforced institutionalization.
Subcultures are generally groups that are perceived to deviate from the
normative standards of the dominant culture, as this is variously defined
according to age, sexuality, and taste in economic, racial, and gendered
terms. Subcultures are often positioned socially and analytically as
disenfranchised, subordinate, subaltern, or subterranean. Subcultures, and
academics who study them, often distinguish themselves as being oppositional,
alternative, and countercultural, as being defined against others, i.e.,
"squares" or "the mainstream." They also differentiate
within themselves and in so doing create hierarchies of participation,
knowledge, and taste. This
issue of In[ ]Visible Culture arose from a conference that took place
at the University of Rochester in March 1998. Organized by graduate students
in Visual and Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature,
"Interrogating Subcultures" strove to address a range of issues
raised by subcultural theory: the expanding discourse around previously
embattled and/or unnamed subjectivities and theoretical positions; the
location that subcultures and their study occupy within the academy; and the
practice of negotiating the affirmative and pejorative accounts of
subcultural studies. The
international group of participants hailing from Montréal, Toronto, Glasgow,
Lancaster, Basel, and cities across the United States, approached these and
other concerns from diverse positions and disciplines. The conference began
with opening remarks by Janet Wolff, director of the Program in Visual and
Cultural Studies, followed by a case study panel considering pedagogy and
subcultural studies involving faculty and students. Will Straw, program
director of the Graduate Program in Communications at McGill University and
director of the Centre for Research on Canadian Cultural Industries and
Institutions gave the keynote address. The day ended with the premiere
screening of Trancenational Goa: Travelling People, Parties, Images, a
1998 video by Swiss anthropologists and documentarists Roger Bergrich and
Andrea Muehlbach. Goa, located on the western coast of Southern India, has
become a locus for a transient community of international travelers who
participate in a "transnational party culture" centered upon a
specific type of psychedelic electronic music known as Goa trance. The video,
which provoked thoughtful discussion afterwards, engaged with anthropological
debates on transnationalism and deterritorialization by considering how Goa
is recreated and articulated outside of Goa in terms of a global flow of
people, symbols, and practices. The second day of the conference included
papers addressing race and sexuality in techno and house music, race and
masculinity in the suburban alternative music scene, hip hop culture in two
European cities, body politics and contemporary dance culture, sellout
debates and music subcultures, ethics and heroin use as represented in the
movie Trainspotting, and the economics of style and scale in
subcultures. Panels included interrogations of perceived movements in
marginalized and popular cultures, the contextualization and transformation
of subcultural practices in a global economy, and rigorous debates about the
productivity of subcultural models within and outside of academia. The
work presented, the productive discussions engendered, and the whole-hearted
participation of the attendees more than fulfilled expectations of the
organizers and resulted in this collection. The ejournal In[ ]Visible
Culture provides an effective forum for publicizing some of the thought
generated by the conference. We are pleased to present these excellent
representatives. In
"The Thingishness of Things," keynote speaker Will Straw asks about
the fate and significance of the detritus of subcultural commodities. He
reminds us that "[l]ong after objects have ceased to hold any
significant economic value, long after they have stopped being signifiers of
social desire, they continue to exist as physical artefacts." In
confronting the effect of things, Straw resists the tendency to reduce
subculture to an unhistoricized practice, where objects are signifiers
distinct and detached from their political or economic value. Taking the
traffic of 12" import records and used vinyl as one example, Straw traces
their lifecycles and "velocities" through the specific economy of
Canadian marketplaces and audiences. The challenge of examining such paths,
he argues, is "to consider the ways in which cultural artefacts exist in
the world, the ways in which they occupy space, and accumulate." Straw
pushes subcultural theory to critically theorize the varied existences of
things, from the mass circulated to the sediment of the out-moded, for their
movements and conglomerations work to define the larger "rhythms and directionalities"
of contemporary life. Geoff
Stahl of McGill University takes the conference title to heart, and
contextualizes many of the concerns Straw raises within the development of
the field as a whole. In "Troubling Below: Rethinking Subcultural
Theory," he interrogates the premises of contemporary subcultural theory
from its origins in the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
through the present day. Stahl challenges subcultural theorists to "move
away from the rigid, vertical and static models" established by the
CCCS, and to question the emphasis on the visual and the spectacular that
have characterized much of the work done on popular culture. Acknowledgement
of the complex movements of products, practices, and ideas, Stahl argues,
will produce theories that accommodate "a terrain that is so often
simultaneously here, there, and everywhere." He attributes a recent
opening in the field to "the emergence of computer mediated
communications and their effect on ... social spatial relations as well as
notions of community." The challenge, for Stahl, is to find a similar
means of expanding the terrain of subcultural studies, to develop a model
that "would facilitate the examination of the distributive and
connective functions of networks, alliances, circuits and conduits through
which people, commodities, the myriad forms of capital, ideas and technology
flow." Lisa
Soccio, University of Rochester, confronts the contested terrain of
grrrl/girl culture, examining instances of its occurrence in musical
subcultures and the mainstream. "From Girl to Woman to Grrrl:
(Sub)Cultural Intervention and Political Activism in the Time of
Post-Feminism" investigates the divergent approaches of Bikini Kill, L7,
and the Spice Girls in producing riot grrl/girl power discourses. Soccio
locates these discourses within the equally contested realm of contemporary
(post-)feminist political practices. She considers the alternatives of
production and performance, the differences between "antics" and
"tactics," and the significance of speech and action in
constituting feminist discourses. Her careful reading works to trace the
potentialities of such practices "in both grrrls' cultural activity, and
in a self-reflexive feminist cultural studies which is able to acknowledge
the multiplicity of social identities and political allegiances." David
Butz and Michael Ripmeester of Brock University explore the concept of
"Third Spaces." Within such spaces, which are both geographic and
discursive, power and subordination are integrated entities, and resistance
is often employed through indirect or "off-kilter" means. In their
paper, "Finding Space for Resistant Subcultures," they argue that
Third Space can be understood as an "ontological category," a model
through which all spaces can be theorized, and where resistance is
"comprised of hybridized, ambiguous, cautious, and often somewhat
accommodative practices." They choose instead, however, to focus upon
the concrete production of Third Spaces within particular practices and
locations. "Off-kilter" resistance here becomes a means of
survival, "a strategy particularly amenable to the circumstances of the
radically disempowered." Butz and Ripmeester offer two situations for
analysis of resistant strategies: the twentieth century village of Shimshal
in Northern Pakistan, and the Mississauga reserve in nineteenth century
Canada. Through these examples, they demonstrate how investigations of Third
Spaces allow for more productive understandings of resistance and power and
"help to bridge an unproductive dualism within resistance scholarship
between revolutionary social action and less ostensibly transformative
practices of everyday resistance." The
range of topics addressed in the papers first presented at the conference,
along with those represented here, indicates the vitality of current academic
work that engages with the concept as well as the practices of subcultures.
The publication in 1997 of The Subcultures Reader, edited by Ken
Gelder and Sarah Thornton, was a significant contribution to the articulation
of the historical and methodological framework within which subcultural
studies has developed, and thus has established subcultural studies as a
self-conscious and dynamic field that coheres as an object of study in itself
without being rigidly defined or proscribed. It was also the starting point
of the discussions that culminated in this project. It is hoped that the 1998
Interrogating Subcultures conference, along with this issue of In[
]Visible Culture that the conference inspired, will further contribute to
the critical and richly varied development of this field. Amy Herzog
and Lisa Soccio are doctoral candidates in Visual and Cultural Studies, at
the University of Rochester. Joanna
Mitchell is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University
of Rochester.
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