Page 83 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

72 SUBCULTURAL CONFLICT AND WORKING-CLASS COMMUNITY

conditions of existence of the socially mobile white-collar worker. While the
argot and ritual forms of mods stressed many of the traditional values of their
parent culture, their dress and music reflected the hedonistic image of the affluent
consumer. The life-style crystallized in opposition to that of the rockers (the
famous riots in the early sixties testified to this), and it seems to be a law of
subcultural evolution that its dynamic comes not only from the relations to its
own parent culture, but also from the relation to subcultures belonging to other
class fractions, in this case the manual working class.
The next members of our string—the parkas or scooter boys—were in some
senses a transitional form between the mods and the skinheads. The alien elements
introduced into music and dress by the mods were progressively de-stressed and
the indigenous components of argot and ritual reasserted as the matrix of
subcultural identity. The skinheads themselves carried the process to completion.
Their lifestyle, in fact, represents a systematic inversion of the mods—whereas
the mods explored the upwardly mobile option, the skinheads explored the
lumpen. Music and dress again became the central focus of the life-style; the
introduction of reggae (the protest music of the West Indian poor) and the
‘uniform’ (of which more in a moment) signified a reaction against the
contamination of the parent culture by middle-class values and a reassertion of
the integral values of working-class culture through its most recessive traits—its
puritanism and chauvinism. This double movement gave rise to a phenomenon
sometimes called ‘machismo’—the unconscious dynamics of the work ethic
translated into the out-of-work situation; the most dramatic example of this was
the epidemic of ‘queer-bashing’ around the country in 1969–70. The skinhead
uniform itself could be interpreted as a kind of caricature of the model worker—
the self-image of the working class as distorted through middle-class
perceptions, a metastatement about the whole process of social mobility. Finally,
the skinhead life-style crystallized in opposition both to the greasers (successors
to the rockers) and the hippies—both subcultures representing a species of
hedonism which the skinheads rejected.
Following the skinheads there emerged another transitional form, variously
known as crombies, casuals, suedes and so on (the proliferation of names being a
mark of transitional phases). They represent a movement back towards the
original mod position, although this time it is a question of incorporating certain
elements drawn from a middle-class subculture—the hippies—which the
skinheads had previously ignored. But even though the crombies have adopted
some of the external mannerisms of the hippy life-style (dress, soft drug use),
they still conserve many of the distinctive features of earlier versions of the
subculture.
If the whole process, as we have described it, seems to be circular, forming a
closed system, then this is because subculture, by definition, cannot break out of
the contradiction derived from the parent culture; it merely transcribes its terms
at a microsocial level and inscribes them in an imaginary set of relations.