Page 85 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

74 SUBCULTURAL CONFLICT AND WORKING-CLASS COMMUNITY

existence of communal space is reasserted as the common pledge of group unity
—you belong to the Mile End mob in so far as Mile End belongs to you.
Territoriality appears as a magical way of expressing ownership; for Mile End is
not owned by the people but by the property developers. Territorial division
therefore appears within the subculture and, in the East End, mirrors many of the
traditional divisions of sub-communities: Bethnal Green, Hoxton, Mile End,
Whitechapel, Balls Pond Road and so on. Thus, in addition to conflict between
subcultures, there also exists conflict within them, on a territorial basis. Both
these forms of conflict can be seen as displacing or weakening the dynamics of
generational conflict, which is in turn a displaced form of the traditional
parameters of class conflict.
A distinction must be made between subcultures and delinquency. Many
criminologists talk of delinquent subcultures. In fact, they talk about anything
that is not middle-class culture as subculture. From my point of view, I do not
think the middle class produces subcultures, for subcultures are produced by a
dominated culture, not by a dominant culture. I am trying to work out the
way that subcultures have altered the pattern of working-class delinquency. But
now I want to look at the delinquent aspect.
For during this whole period there was a spectacular rise in the delinquency
rates in the area, even compared with similar areas in other parts of the country.
The highest increase was in offences involving attacks on property—vandalism,
hooliganism of various kinds, the taking and driving away of cars. At the
simplest level this can be interpreted as some kind of protest against the general
dehumanization of the environment, an effect of the loss of the informal social
controls generated by the old neighbourhoods. The delinquency rate also, of
course, reflected the level of police activity in the area and the progressively
worsening relations between young people and the forces of law and order.
Today, in fact, the traditional enmity has become something more like a scenario
of urban guerrilla warfare!
There are many ways of looking at delinquency. One way is to see it as the
expression of a system of transactions between young people and various
agencies of social control, in the subcultural context of territoriality. One
advantage of this definition is that it allows us to make a conceptual distinction
between delinquency and deviancy, and to reserve this last term for groups (for
example, prostitutes, professional criminals, revolutionaries) which crystallize
around a specific counterideology, and even career structure, which cuts across
age grades and often community or class boundaries. While there is an obvious
relation between the two, delinquency often serving as a means of recruitment
into deviant groups, the distinction is still worth making.
Delinquency can be seen as a form of communication about a situation of
contradiction in which the ‘delinquent’ is trapped but whose complexity is
excommunicated from his perceptions by virtue of the restricted linguistic code
which working-class culture makes available to him. Such a code, despite its
richness and concreteness of expression, does not allow the speaker to make