Page 97 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

STUART HALL, CULTURAL STUDIES AND MARXISM 85

in the object of study. This very often remained the same as before and the
rethinking had to be done within and against the existing body of work.
We can illustrate that by looking at one of the best developed of the
projects in the Centre during that period: the study of subcultures. The
collective working on this produced a considerable body of material which
attempted to relate the conditions of existence of young, mostly working-
class, people to aspects of their taste in dress, music, behaviour and so on.
This was not a new theme for the Centre, having been the subject of
considerable work in the 1960s. The account of the origins of youth styles
remained within the expressive framework of the earlier period:
The ‘culture’ of a group or class is the peculiar and distinctive ‘way of
life’ which realises or objectivates group-life in meaningful shape and
form…. The ‘culture’ of a group or class, the meanings, values and
ideas embodied in institutions, in social relations, in systems of
beliefs, in mores and customs in the uses of objects and material life.
Culture is the distinctive shapes in which this material and social
organisation of life expresses itself…. Culture is the way the social
relations of a group are structured and shaped: but it is also the way
those shapes are experienced, understood and interpreted.
(Clarke et al., 1976:10–11)

There is nothing in such a passage which could not have been written
fifteen years earlier by Williams or Hoggart, and neither of them would
have balked at the insistence that subcultures were the expression of the life
experiences of subordinated groups and classes which can be distinguished
from, and are often in opposition to, the culture of the dominant class.
The originality of the new material lay in the semiotically-inspired
‘reading of the style’ as a magical resolution of the real dilemmas faced in
the lives of working-class communities. There was a stress upon the ways
in which the objects and practices which mark out the subculture are
identified as a coherent and internally articulated style:

The various youth sub-cultures have been identified by their
possessions and objects…. Yet, despite their visibility, things simply
appropriated and worn (or listened to) do not make a style. What
makes a style is the activity of stylization—the active organisation of
object with activities and outlooks, which produce an organised
group-identity in the form and shape of a coherent and distinctive
way of ‘being-in-the-world’.
(Clarke et al., 1976:54)

The task of the analyst of youth culture was thus to attempt to understand
what we might term the ‘stylizing practice’ of different youth groups as an