Page 84 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

ETHNOGRAPHY 73

But there is another reason. Apart from its particular, thematic contradiction,
all subcultures share a general contradiction which is inherent in their very
conditions of existence. Subculture invests the weak points in the chain of
socialization between the family/school nexus and integration into the work
process which marks the resumption of the patterns of the parent culture for the
next generation. But subculture is also a compromise solution to two
contradictory needs: the need to create and express autonomy and difference from
parents and, by extension, their culture, and the need to maintain the security of
existing ego defences and the parental identifications which support them. For
the initiates the subculture provides a means of ‘rebirth’ without having to
undergo the pain of symbolic death. The autonomy it offers is thus both real (but
partial) and illusory as a total ‘way of liberation’. And far from constituting an
improvised rite de passage into adult society, as some anthropologists have
claimed, it is a collective and highly ritualized defence against just such a
transition. And because defensive functions predominate, ego boundaries
become cemented into subcultural boundaries. In a real sense, subcultural
conflict (greasers versus skinheads, mods versus rockers) serves as a
displacement of generational conflict, both at a cultural level and at an
interpersonal level within the family. One consequence of this is to foreclose
artificially the natural trajectory of adolescent revolt. For the kids who are caught
up in the internal contradictions of a subculture, what begins as a break in the
continuum of social control can easily become a permanent hiatus in their lives.
Although there is a certain amount of subcultural mobility (kids evolving from
mods to parkas or even switching subcultural affiliations, greasers ‘becoming’
skinheads), there are no career prospects! There are two possible solutions: one
leads out of subculture into early marriage, and, as we’ve said, for working-class
kids this is the normal solution; alternatively, subcultural affiliation can provide a
way into membership of one of the deviant groups which exist in the margins of
subculture and often adopt its protective coloration, but which nevertheless are
not structurally dependent on it (such groups as pushers, petty criminals, junkies,
even homosexuals).
This leads us into another contradiction inherent in subculture. Although as a
symbolic structure it does provide a diffuse sense of affinity in terms of a
common life-style, it does not in itself prescribe any crystallized group structure.
It is through the function of territoriality that subculture becomes anchored in the
collective reality of the kids who are its bearers, and who in this way become not
just its passive support but its conscious agents. Territoriality is simply the
process through which environmental boundaries (and foci) are used to signify
group boundaries (and foci) and become invested with a subcultural value. This
is the function of football teams for the skinheads, for example. Territoriality is
thus not only a way in which kids ‘live’ subculture as a collective behaviour, but
also the way in which the subcultural group becomes rooted in the situation of its
community. In the context of the East End, it is a way of retrieving the
solidarities of the traditional neighbourhood destroyed by redevelopment. The