Reflections on Researching and Living in Subcultures
Dr. Douglas Kellner — Author, critical theorist. Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Education, Gender Studies, and Germanic Languages at UCLA.
In response to the first question of the “Problems of choosing a research path in studying a subculture,” I would suggest that one way to study subcultures is to choose a subculture that one is familiar with and participates in, as is the case with the first book on subculture that I many years ago engaged, which is Dick Hebdige’s 1979 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Hebdige participated in youth and punk subcultures in Britain in the 1970s and wrote his books from his own experience. Hebdige argued that a subculture is a form of opposition to the dominant culture and thus is a form of subversion and resistance to mainstream culture. Accordingly, for Hebdige, subcultures were perceived as negative by the dominant society because of their criticism and opposition to the hegemonic culture, society, and way of life.
Moreover, Hebdige argued that subcultures bring together like-minded individuals who feel oppressed by societal standards and allow them to develop a sense of identity, often based on style, as in punk subculture which was defined by its rebellious music and style that featured long-spiky hair, rings through facial orifices, and anti-middle class fashion clothes and behavior. Subcultures bind individuals together in shared identities, in which they can distinguish themselves from mainstream culture.
Further, Hebdige’s work on subculture should be read and interpreted in the context of the work of the Birmingham CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) which initially focused its research agenda on youth culture, and then media culture, later developing British Cultural Studies (Kellner 2020). Members of this group, like Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, Angela Robbie, Paul Gilroy, and others affiliated with the Birmingham CCCS, argued that subcultures involve forms of resistance to the dominant culture. In their collective study, Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (Hall et al 1993), society is seen as being divided into matrixes of class, race, gender, and other forms of power. From their perspective, differing social classes like the working class and the dominant middle and upper classes, all have their own class culture, with middle-class culture being dominant. Different subcultures resist dominant British culture through a bricologe of different cultural industry goods, fashion, and style to communicate and express their own identity and group affiliation, as different subcultures of mods, rockers, hippies, and punks emerged in UK subcultures in the 1960s and 1970s (Hall et al 1993).
Subcultures weaken identity with dominant classes and provide new forms of collective identification expressing symbolic resistance against the mainstream culture and developing rebellious countercultural identities. For Hebdige, subcultural identities and resistance are expressed through the development of a distinctive style which uses cultural industry goods such as fashion, hair styles, music, and societal behavior to communicate and express one’s opposition to mainstream culture. Yet the cultural industry is often capable of re-absorbing the components of such a style, transforming them into consumer goods and fashion. At the same time, the mass media, while they participate in building subcultures by broadcasting and circulating their images, also weaken them by depriving them of their subversive content by normalizing them, or by spreading a stigmatized image of subcultures, such as associating punk culture with drugs and violence.
While Hebdige and the researchers at the CCCS studied youth cultures in which they were part, immersing themselves in subcultural experience, and writing from the standpoint of being part of a subculture, earlier schools of sociology tended to study subcultures from outside, as in the Chicago School 1940s studies of deviance and delinquency. Robert E. Park and his associates developed Social Disorganization Theory, claiming members of subcultures that deviated from society’s norms lacked proper socialization into the mainstream culture and adopted alternative axiological and normative models which were labeled as forms of deviancy and delinquency. Park, Ernest Burgess and Louis Wirth noted that there were social enclaves and spaces where deviant groups concentrated, often outside the boundaries of conventional society and culture. Howard Becker added that they were seen by the dominant society as outsiders and were thus subject to deviant labelling (for an overview of the Chicago School see Bulmer 1984 and Kurtz 1984).
Hence, the earlier Chicago school used generally negative concepts to describe subcultures as deviant outsiders to the dominant society, while British cultural studies tended toward positive valorizations of resistance and subversion of the dominant society which were part of the cultural and political revolutions of the 1960s subcultures.
As subcultural study developed, different schools came up with different approaches. Bourdieusian sociology studied subcultures in terms of “distinction” and the “cultural capital” that one received from being in a subculture different from the mainstream (Bourdieu 1984). Fine (et al 1979) used social interactionist approaches, while other researchers use Bruno Latour’s (2005) “Action Network Theory” (ANT), or Michel Maffesoli’s (1996) studies of subcultures as tribes, an approach taken up in the Trump era to describe powerful divisions within U.S. society.
Hence, while one can distinguish between subculture research that takes place inside or outside the subculture, i.e. from an internal-participatory standpoint, or as an outsider observer trying to objectively describe and interpret subculture, there are now many approaches to subcultural study, so researchers in the 21st century have a variety of approaches at their disposal. Likewise, normative valorization of subcultures range from celebrating the subversive-oppositional nature of subcultures of resistance (Hebdige et al), or the distinctive laudatory features of some subcultures with a high degree of cultural capital (Bourdieu), to derogatory depictions of subcultures of crime, delinquency, and lawlessness. Further, there are multiple approaches to thematizing subcultures, ranging from studies of dance or fashion subcultures to crime and drug subcultures. Some subculture research reinforces dominant societal norms whereas other subculture research valorizes groups that subvert or resist dominant cultural norms, thus subculture research is a contested field with multiple and complex political discourses and valuations.
Now if I was going to research a subculture that I was familiar with, it would probably be the 1960s anti-war, New Left, oppositional student culture that I participated in when I was a graduate student in Columbia University in New York. First, I wondered if the academic life I’ve participated in as a University Professor for the last 50 years, with about 25 years in the University of Texas at Austin and 25 years at UCLA, could be considered a subculture, but I concluded that it was rather a professional culture embedded in mainstream culture since, as a culture, it was not subversive, or oppositional, as it served to educate students for mainstream American culture. No matter how critical and oppositional our own personal opinions, politics, teaching, and writing were, still, we were part of an academic professional culture.
However, the 1960s New Left counterculture that I participated in perceived itself as, and was perceived in turn by the media and establishment, as a subversive and oppositional subculture, so this is the subculture I would research if that was my assignment and that indeed I will discuss in the next section.
Thus, in response to the second question concerning the “Plan of researching a subculture: from the idea to the completion of the research, from mythological and religious to scientific and philosophical worldviews, I would follow Hebdige and British cultural studies and deploy an autobiographical or auto-ethnological perspective where the author participates in the subculture and describes one’s own experiences. I should note that this is just one method of studying subcultures that has been quite effective. There are other ethno-sociological studies of subcultures in which, like anthropologists, the researcher studies cultures foreign to himself or herself. In the hands of a genius like Margaret Mead, the great American anthropologist who I studied with at Columbia in the 1960s, this could create brilliant insights and capture features of the culture, that people living in the society had not perceived or articulated –- although Mead’s anthropological studies were questioned when later researchers interviewed some of her subjects who laughed and told the researcher that they were telling Mead stories and exaggerating certain practices. Hence, it is very hard for an outsider to comprehend and document subcultures, or in Mead’s anthropological example, to objectively and accurately describe cultures that one is not part of — an anthropologist’s dilemma that is shared by some subcultural research (see the critique in Singer 1999).
Hence, in general, to study a subculture you need some immersion in the subculture if it is a subversive and oppositional one, since such a subculture will quite likely only be friendly and open to, and allow entry to, their own participants. Before beginning my discussion of the 1960s New Left subculture, I should note that not all subversive and oppositional subcultures are progressive, cool, or beneficial to society. There are also rightwing oppositional subcultures like the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, or groups that flourished under Trump and attacked and occupied the U.S. Capital like the Proud Boys, Oath Takers and other racist, anti-Semitic and thoroughly deplorable groups, so I do not want to romanticize subversive and oppositional subcultures tout court as transformative and emancipatory, though some may be.
The New Left 1960s anti-war and countercultural subculture that I participated in can be described as a group of individuals within U.S. culture who differentiated ourselves from the parent and mainstream culture in which we grew up in. An oppositional subculture such as 1960s radicalism developed its own norms and values, styles and behavior, regarding cultural, political and sexual matters. We opposed the militarist political culture of the country that at the time was taking our generation to Vietnam and Southeast Asia and making us fight wars that we wanted nothing to do with and that we thought did not serve U.S. interests, but were part of a Cold War competition with the Soviet bloc which we opposed – we were for peace and detente.
I was part of the SDS segment of the New Left subculture who identified as “Students for a Democratic Society” (SDS) and opposed both American capitalism and imperialism and Russian communism and imperialism, instead supporting radical democracy and a form of democratic socialism, like Bernie Sanders supports today in U.S. society. I had become a socialist a couple of years before and participated in socialist subcultures when I spent a year at the University of Copenhagen in 1963-64 where I discovered socialism at the foreign student club where my attempts to defend U.S. capitalism and democracy were soundly thrashed by students criticizing racism, inequalities, and imperialism in the US, a critique I soon came to embrace.
While in Copenhagen, a bad flu and free medicine and medical care taught me the rationality of socialized medicine; hearing that college education was free in Denmark convinced me that socialism was thoroughly rational and beneficial; and the Danish family I lived with was funded by a pension from the state for the working class father and family. While the family would be categorized as lower-middle class by U.S. standards, they had a decent standard of living, a little garden house for weekends, and yearly vacations and constantly extolled to me the virtues of their socialist society. I also learned the emancipatory possibilities of free love in Denmark the first time I asked out a Danish woman and after seeing Bergman’s The Silence and having a couple of beers, she explained she would like to sleep with me, but was tired and had to get up early for school classes, so I should come to her house the next day in the early evening. Since then I have been a partisan of socialism, liberation, free love and rational relations ever since then.
In fact, a popular characterization of the American counterculture was that it was defined by sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and I would not deny any of those dimensions, although for my cohort in the subculture, it also involved being involved in the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, and later the feminist movement, and gay and lesbian movements. There were, to be sure, both political and apolitical wings of the U.S. countercultural scene and while I was a graduate student in philosophy and a member of the New Left, my cohort also was immersed in the music culture, and sex, drugs, and rock and roll culture, although I and other also gravitated toward the folk music scene with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and others and thus espoused peace, love, and non-violence which put us against other segments of the New Left subculture such as the Weather Underground, which was formed at Columbia University out of sections of SDS and other groups which advocated armed struggle and a violent overthrow of the existing society.
In 1968, I was studying for my philosophy comprehensive exams at Columbia and teaching my first course, when a student uprising erupted, with SDS radicals occupying the President’s Office, while black radicals occupied another campus building. A series of protests during 1968 combined into a series of protests and then dramatic student occupations of key buildings at Columbia University. A student activist with the Students for a Democratic Society, Bob Feldman, discovered documents indicating Columbia’s institutional affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) and it was also discovered that Columbia University professors were doing research for the CIA and aiding in the Vietnam war effort. There were on-going protests as well concerning Columbia’s plan to take city park land bordering on Harlem and turning it into a gymnasium, in which the bottom half would be open to Harlem residents while the top half was reserved for students and members of Columbia (for an overview of the Columbia 1968 occupation with contributions from participants, see Cronin 2018).
On April 23, 1968, students attempted to enter the main administration building, Low Memorial Library, were rebuffed, marched to the Harlem gym site, where they clashed with police, and then returned to the Columbia campus to occupy Hamilton Hall, which had both classrooms and the offices of the Columbia College Administration.
In the protests and occupation of Hamilton Hall, the SDS students were joined by members of the Student Afro Society (SAS) group. To the surprise of SDS and white students, the African American students in Hamilton told the white students to occupy another building since their agendas were different. After both groups deliberated, the SDS group and other white students decided to take over Low Library, which housed the President’s office, while the Black students occupied Hamilton Hall. Since the occupation closely followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, which resulted in riots throughout the country, including New York, the administration was reluctant at first to use force to evict the students and a dramatic standoff and media circus followed.
Other student groups took over other campus buildings at Columbia in one of the first and most dramatic student insurrections of the era. The Grateful Dead came on campus to give us a free concert, and one day Stokley Carmichael, R. Rap Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, and other Black radical leaders came on to campus us to tell us we needed to get serious and join with Blacks to carry out a real revolution, and not just a campus shutdown.
In retrospect, the Columbia occupation of the President’s office and other campus buildings anticipated the Occupy movement of 2011, and helped generate a wave of campus occupations in the decades to come, continuing into the present. As I was beginning teaching in Columbia College, I joined a group of professors, some from the Great Books program in which I was teaching, as well as some of my professors from the Philosophy Department, who began meeting and immediately decided to ring the occupied buildings to protect the occupiers from getting beat up by conservative groups of mostly jocks and frat guys who were themselves converging on the occupied building threatening to physically remove the students within. At first, my faculty group confrontation with the right-wing students, who adopted the name “Majority Coalition,” was tense, with the short-haired conservative students declaiming that they wanted to “kill the long-haired pukes” who had taken over the campus. However, the faculty and liberal students who joined our ranks quickly convinced them that the radical students had the right to protest policies with which they disagreed, and perhaps the respect that conservative students had for faculty and authority led them to step down in their threats.
After a few days of drama and accelerating media attention, in the early morning hours of April 30, 1968 the New York Police Department (NYDP) violently crushed the demonstrations, using tear gas and then attacking both Hamilton Hall and the Low Library. Ironically, Hamilton Hall was cleared peacefully as the SAS students had assembled lawyers and media observers, and a largely African American group of police officers peacefully led the African American students out of Hamilton Hall. The buildings occupied by white students however were cleared violently as hordes of police wielding clubs and threatening with guns, beat up scores of students and some faculty members who tried to stop the police assault with approximately 132 students treated for injuries while over 700 protesters were arrested.
The night of the raid, I was at home sleeping, as the faculty group I was participating in organized in 12 hour shifts to protect the students. As I approached the campus in the early dawn, I noticed commotion and roar of voices, hurried to the campus, and encountered my Philosophy professor Sidney Morgenbesser with a bloodied head, holding white bandages to stop the blood flow. Sidney described how the police had stormed Low Library, how he and other professors attempted to stop the police, and how they proceeded to beat up and arrest students and faculty alike.
Classes were suspended for the spring semester at Columbia in 1968, and we were happy to receive A’s even though we didn’t have to write final papers; many of our professors joined us in the demonstrations, so a closeness between students and professors, rare in U.S. academia at the time, emerged. Yet, one of my Professors, Paul Oskar Kristeller, said he was worried about the student demonstrations because he had seen Nazi student demonstrations previewing the rise of fascism in Germany in the 1930s, but I assured him that the Columbia students were neither fascists nor communists. Kristeller also told me that Martin Heidegger had gotten him a scholarship to study Renaissance philosophy in Italy during the Nazi period, which saved Kristeller’s life because he was Jewish.
In the euphoria of the accelerating protests of 1968, we had the feeling that we were at the heart of revolutionary upheavals in the U.S. and globally when a representative from France came and told us of the French student and worker uprising that was shutting down the whole of Paris and briefly was erupting throughout France in May 1968. The gym in Morningside Park which offended the Harlem residents and black radicals was never built, Columbia severed its relations with the IDA, and many of us experienced the euphoria of radical upheaval, and were radicalized by the experience.
During this time, the Vietnam War was raging and many of my generation were being sent over as cannon fodder for a cause that we did not understand or support. One day around 1968 I went over to Barnard College and heard a packed lecture by Noam Chomsky. Chomsky, at the time a Professor of Philosophy at MIT, was known to philosophy students for his controversial philosophy of mind and linguistic theory, but proved himself a brilliant public lecturer, providing an entire history of post-World War II Vietnam, the National Liberation Movement that drove out the French, the raging Civil War in the country, and how the US intervened against the Communist North in support of a corrupt South Vietnamese government, providing a sharp critique of U.S. interventionism and imperialism. I walked away with a much deeper understanding of the dynamics of Vietnam and great respect for Noam Chomsky who I would later meet and whose writings had an impact on my view of media and politics.
The next year in 1969, there was an abortive attempt at a replay of the 1968 demonstrations which quickly dissipated and some of the disillusioned SDS members formed the Weather underground which became notorious after some bombings in which their leaders literally went underground. During the student occupation of Columbia, we organized reading groups where some professors, graduate students like myself, and others proposed courses organized around topics or books, and I organized a reading group focusing on One-Dimensional Man. I remember sitting outdoors on the lawn at Columbia with a small group of students, including Nancy and Steve Fraser (Nancy became famous later as a leading Feminist-Marxist philosopher and a close comrade of mine, and her then husband Steve became a successful editor for a big publishing house). Anyway, the close reading and passionate discussion of the text One-Dimensional Man sealed the deal convincing me that Marcuse had the most radical and pertinent critique of contemporary US culture and society of the era that best captured its dynamics.
At Columbia in May 1969, I heard Herbert Marcuse lecture one evening, and talked with him for the first time the next day during a reception in the Philosophy Department. We were asking Marcuse about Heidegger and his study with him, and what he thought of Heidegger today. Marcuse joked that he heard Heidegger was chiseling his philosophy in stone in Germany, highlighting what he took as the reactionary and archaic nature of Heidegger’s thought which he expounded upon for a whole. We then asked him about Adorno, and he replied that “Theodore W. Adorno is one of the most important thinkers of our time,” and expounded upon some of Adorno’s ideas. None of the philosophy professors showed up at the reception, and at one point Marcuse asked me and other graduate students to escort him to the West End Bar where earlier Alan Ginsberg and the Beat poets and writers like Jack Kerouac hung out, and where at the time my fellow graduate students also ate, drank, and discussed philosophy, politics, and other issues of the day, constituting a form of leftwing intellectual counterculture.
As I crossed with Marcuse the campus in front of the Philosophy Department, some major militants in the Weather Underground approached me and said “we want to rap with Marcuse.” So I asked Herbert and he agreed, and we all sat down on the grass, and one of the Weather Underground dudes explained that they planned to burn down the office of a Columbia Professor who was doing research for the US government that facilitated certain heinous practices in the Vietnam war. Almost immediately, Herbert said that he thought this was not a good idea, that it would probably backfire and bring on major repression, and argued that the University should be used as a site to recruit and train revolutionaries, going on to say that the University was a relative utopia in U.S. society where one could read and study, develop critiques of US capitalism and imperialism, could organize radical groups, and prepare for the revolution. He was quite passionate and convincing on this point and after a brief discussion, the Weather Dudes got up, thanked Marcuse for his advice and got up to leave. As they were parting, Marcuse joked, “Now if you were planning to burn down a bank, I might not be so negative” — and shortly thereafter, the Bank of America in Santa Barbara was burned down, the subject of a Newsreel documentary, and the Weather Underground took credit.
In conclusion, I want to discuss how subcultures participate in the mainstream cultures in which they are embedded and are often coopted, absorbed, and brought back into the mainstream culture in which they were participating. Dick Hebdige went from being a member of the rebellious punk culture of the UK to becoming a Professor and even head of arts schools in the U.S. and is now a Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara – as I became a Professor at the University of Texas and University of California at Los Angeles.
It was widely discussed how mainstream culture absorbed the style of 1960s counterculture as businessmen and women grew long hair, smoked dope and did other drugs, listened to Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and Rolling Stones, and went to their concerts, as did I and my friends. Sexual mores loosened up and in U.S. University culture in the 1960s and 1970s, and sexual mores were as open as liberated as in the University of Copenhagen and other European Universities. Hollywood absorbed New Wave and radical filmmaking and the music industry made fortunes promoting the most radical and rebellious music. Even advertising and television absorbed countercultural motifs so by the 1980s the U.S. counterculture was part of the mainstream culture, just as I was a Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and becoming a member of the academic establishment.
Also, many members of the subculture I knew in New York didn’t make it through the University and disappeared. After several years studying at Columbia, I got scholarships to study two years in Germany and one in France, and when I returned in 1972, I found that many of my comrades had dropped out of school and that some were victims of drugs and other excesses of the 1960s. Hence, some countercultures have their victims as well as those who found countercultures nurturing and productive.
Yet, as I noted before, subcultures that were subversive and oppositional can be absorbed by mainstream culture, although I like to believe that those of us who participated in 1960s counterculture and managed to survive, continue to advance, live, and teach its most progressive values, and continue to oppose war, militarism, and repression in all its guises while defending civil liberties for all and the values of a progressive democratic society and polity.
References
Bourdieu, Pierre (1984). Distinction. New York and London: Routledge.
Bulmer, Martin (1984) The Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, Diversity, and the Rise of Sociological Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cronin, Paul, editor (2018) A Time to Stir: Columbia ’68. New York: Columbia University Press.
Fine, Gary Alan and Sherryl Kleinman (1979). «Rethinking Subculture: An Interactionist Analysis». American Journal of Sociology. 85 (1): 1–20.
Hall, Stuart, Tony Jefferson, et al (1993) Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (Routledge.
Hebdige, Dick (1979). Subculture: the meaning of style. London: Routledge.
Kellner, Douglas (2020) Media Culture. Second Edition (completely revised), New York and London, Routledge.
Kurtz, Lester R. (1984) Evaluating Chicago Sociology: A Guide to the Literature, with an Annotated Bibliography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Latour, Bruno (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford.
Maffesoli, Michel (1996). The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. (London: Sage Publications.
McKay, George (1996) Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties. London: Verso.
Singer, Peter (1999) A Darwinian Left. New Haven: Yale University Press.