Page 131 - Decoding Culture

124 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

for example, with that found in one of the best-known CCCS
products of the mid-1970s: Resistance through Rituals (Hall and
Jefferson, 1976). The lengthy theoretical overview which begins
that volume (Clarke et al. , 1976) is in no doubt about the centrality
of class to its project. 'In modern societies, the most fundamental
groups are the social classes, and the major cultural configurations
will be, in a fundamental though often mediated way, "class cul­
tures'" (Clarke et al., 1976: 13). As is well known, they go on to
conceptualize working-class youth subcultures in terms of domi­
nance and subordination, examining their double articulation in
relation to both the parent working-class culture and the 'hege­
monic' dominant culture. Ideology is drawn into the picture in
terms that owe a good deal to Althusser, in as much as subcultures
are seen to 'solve' problems of material relations in an 'imaginary'
way. This view is supported by the familiar passage from
Althusser's F o r Marx: 'in ideology men do indeed express, not the
real relation between them and their conditions of existence, but
the way they live the relation between them and the conditions of
their existence' (quoted in Clarke et al., 1976: 48).
Gramsci, too, is introduced in familiar terms. 'Hegemony works
through ideology, but it does not consist of false ideas, percep­
tions, definitions. It works primarily by inserting the subordinate
class into the key institutions and structures which support the
power and social authority of the dominant order. It is, above all, in
these structures and relations that a subordinate class lives its sub­
ordination' (ibid: 39). Note the emphasis on class here. Hegemonic
domination requires consent, secured in civil society through class
leadership, a process exemplified in 1950s Britain where it was
'the role of "affluence", as an ideology, to dismantle working-class
resistance and deliver the "spontaneous consent" of the class to the
authority of the dominant classes' (ibid: 40). On this cultural terrain
there is resistance, negotiation and struggle as well as dominance,

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