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working class, already in crisis, was the most ‘productive’ vis-à-vis subcultures;
the internal conflicts of the parent culture came to be worked out in terms of
generational conflict. What I think is that one of the functions of generational
conflict is to decant the kinds of tensions which appear face-to-face in the family
and to replace them by a generational-specific symbolic system, so that the
tension is taken out of the interpersonal context, placed in a collective context
and mediated through various stereotypes which have the function of defusing
the anxiety that interpersonal tension generates.
It seems to me that the latent function of subculture is this: to express and
resolve, albeit ‘magically’, the contradictions which remain hidden or unresolved
in the parent culture. The succession of subcultures which this parent
culture generated can thus all be considered so many variations on a central theme
—the contradiction, at an ideological level, between traditional working-class
puritanism and the new hedonism of consumption; at an economic level, between
a future as part of the socially mobile elite or as part of the new lumpen
proletariat. Mods, parkas, skinheads, crombies all represent, in their different
ways, an attempt to retrieve some of the socially cohesive elements destroyed in
their parent culture, and to combine these with elements selected from other class
fractions, symbolizing one or other of the options confronting it.
It is easy enough to see this working in practice if we remember, first, that
subcultures are symbolic structures and must not be confused with the actual
kids who are their bearers and supports. Secondly, a given life-style is actually
made up of a number of symbolic subsystems, and it is the way in which these
are articulated in the total life-style that constitutes its distinctiveness. There are
basically four subsystems, which can be divided into two basic types of forms.
There are the relatively ‘plastic’ forms—dress and music—which are not directly
produced by the subculture but which are selected and invested with subcultural
value in so far as they express its underlying thematic. Then there are the more
‘infrastructural’ forms—argot and ritual—which are more resistant to innovation
but, of course, reflect changes in the more plastic forms. I’m suggesting here that
mods, parkas, skinheads, crombies are a succession of subcultures which all
correspond to the same parent culture and which attempt to work out, through a
system of transformations, the basic problematic or contradiction which is
inserted in the subculture by the parent culture. So one can distinguish three
levels in the analysis of subcultures; one is historical analysis, which isolates the
specific problematic of a particular class fraction—in this case, the respectable
working class; the second is a structural or semiotic analysis of the subsystems,
the way in which they are articulated and the actual transformations which those
subsystems undergo from one structural moment to another; and the third is the
phenomenological analysis of the way the subculture is actually ‘lived out’ by
those who are the bearers and supports of the subculture. No real analysis of
subculture is complete without all those levels being in place.
To go back to the diachronic string we are discussing, the original mod life-style
could be interpreted as an attempt to realize, but in an imaginary relation, the