Page 86 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

ETHNOGRAPHY 75

verbally explicit the rules of relationship and implicit value systems which
regulate interpersonal situations, since this operation involves the use of complex
syntactical structures and a certain degree of conceptual abstraction not available
through this code. This is especially critical when the situations are institutional
ones, in which the rules of relationship are often contradictory, denied or
disguised but nevertheless binding on the speaker. For the working-class kid this
applies to his family, where the positional rules of extended kinship reverberate
against the personalized rules of its new nuclear structure; in the school, where
middle-class teachers operate a whole series of linguistic and cultural controls
which are ‘dissonant’ with those of his family and peers, but whose mastery is
implicitly defined as the index of intelligence and achievement; at work, where
the mechanism of exploitation (extraction of surplus value, capital accumulation)
are screened off from perception by the apparently free exchange of so much
labour time for so much money wage. In the absence of a working-class ideology
which is both accessible and capable of providing a concrete interpretation of
such contradictions, what can a poor boy do? Delinquency is one way he can
communicate, can represent by analogy and through non-verbal channels the
dynamics of some of the social configurations he is locked into. And if the
content of this communication remains largely ‘unconscious’, then that is
because, as Freud would say, it is ‘overdetermined’. For what is being
communicated is not one but two different systems of rules: one belonging to the
sphere of object relations and the laws of symbolic production (more specifically,
the parameters of Oedipal conflict), the second belonging to property relations,
the laws of material production (more specifically, the parameters of class
conflict).
Without going into this too deeply, I would suggest that where there is an
extended family system the Oedipal conflict is displaced from the triadic
situation to sibling relations, which then develops into the gang outside the
family. When this begins to break down the reverse process sets in. In the study
of the structural relations for the emergence of subcultures the implications of
this are twofold: first, changes in the parameters of class conflict are brought
about by advanced technology where there is some class consensus between
certain parent cultures, and that level of conflict appears to be invisible or acted
on in various dissociated ways; second, the parameters of Oedipal conflict are
becoming replaced in the family context but are refracted through the peer-group
situation. It is a kind of double inversion that needs to be looked at not only in
terms of a Marxist theory, which would analyse it simply by reference to class
conflict and the development of antagonistic class fractions simply syphoning
down vertically into another generational situation, but also in psychoanalytic
terms, through the dynamics of Oedipal conflict in adolescence. We need to look
at the historical ways in which class conflict and the dynamics of Oedipal conflict
have undergone transformation and have interlocked, reverberating against each
other.