Subbaculcha

Big questions - but I think they're fairly key to what a lot of us do online so hopefully some kind of interesting debate will get going.

1) Crikey! I read that Hebdidge book when I was 17 and can remember bugger all about it. I've got it somewhere, I feel I ought to read it again now I know enough about its subjects to criticise it.

2) Well, I was/am vaguely an indie kid, does that count? I say NO as I hate most indie kids and have nothing in common with them.

3)Yes until 'rules' are established then it's downhill from there. Compare punk when brand new to punk after everyone knew what the 'rules' were (ie mohicans etc, yes I know old punks mostly didn't even manage spiky hair but that's the image).

4) a)Yes b)can't tell until you define what the dominant culture actually is.

5) Praise them, unless they're psychos like the obligatory weird kid in my class, AW, who shat his pants and spotted buses, probably at the same time.

2) Well, I was/am vaguely an indie kid, does that count? I say NO as I hate most indie kids and have nothing in common with them.

isn't loathing for your fellow indie kids the #1 defining characteristic of an indie kid?

So says IL* but in my experience the indie/alternative/whatever scenes I've known have been one big circle-jerk.

sounds fun!

Not literally - that would be hideous.

Um.. ew?!

1. like DG, I read "Subculture: The Meaning of Style" when I was high school. I loved it then, but probably more for the vicarious thrill of reading about the lives and costumes of mods & rockers & rudeboys than for any deep sociological insight. If there were deep sociological insights, I don't remember.

2. I thought so at the time, but in retrospect wearing used police boots and a Minor Threat t-shirt with inordinate pride for a couple of years in the mid-80's doesn't amount to much of a challenge to dominant culture. I don't know how internet communities fit, but I don't feel like a member of anything here.

3. I don't think they are always creative, positive and energetic, unless glue-sniffing, nordic church-burning and football hooliganism qualify as those things. Yes to the crutch question. Yes to dissuading relations outside the gang.

4. The idea implies a dominant culture. The rest of the question is a really good one that I can't answer off hand.

5. Aren't these the only people who need the crutch of the subbaculcha?

I feel like a student again. Okay:

1 - What "makes" a subculture is a fairly fluid thing, I think, insofar as that status only develops through necessity: either (a) the need for the members to organize their interests, or (b) the need for society at large to codify a trend within itself (because that trend is alarming or surprising or just numerically significant enough to warrant discussion). Probably not worth getting into just yet, but I do think lots of our mental distinctions between what qualify as hobbies, personality types, aesthetic tastes, political movements, etc. include lingering political thinking about the what the groups are asserting or demanding via their presence.

That said, I guess there are two lines to be drawn: what separates subculture from, on the one side, "people with similar interests," and on the other side a full-fledged portion of mainstream culture. The latter tends to be purely oppositional, and basically imposed by society as a whole: any trend which the mainstream of people find undesirable or disagreeable -- anything they cannot themselves see the point or the fun of, or maybe more generally anything they can't see themselves or their immediate peers as doing -- will be "subculture," along with anything the mainstream finds so minor and insignificant to be worthy of any attention whatsoever. The other side strikes me as tricky, but I suppose the division I would point to is the moment at which a group of people with common traits begin to develop conventions unrelated to that trait, especially conventions they're willing to uphold outside of the rest of the similarly-inclined group. Double once strangers can use this "cultural" framework in order to have discourse with one another: I think that may qualify as an official sign. I's boring, but may make sense in a second.

Another thing: maybe this is the curse of pomo thinking, but we tend to reject older culture-building differences when labeling things subcultures -- e.g. a cultural group based on geography is just "regional differences," which we expect. So on some level we expect subcultures to develop on some sort of macro scale based on a more general societal trend or event -- e.g. everyone initially rushing to marvel at the internet developing a culture.

2 - "Internet communities" as a whole, I think, do constitute a particular subculture -- possibly several. An individual "community" like this one can't qualify, insofar as any cultural traits around here (which amounts to a bit of slang and a few in-jokes, really) are drawn by all members straight from this source, and do not leave it.

But as a whole, Christ: there are plenty of journalists on it but I'm amazed there aren't actual anthropologists looking into internet culture, which -- like any good math/science based thing -- has such a complex heirarchy of roles and rules and significations and prescribed behavior that I imagine it's outstripped plenty of small-group indigenous peoples in terms of the sheer mass of culture it's generated.

3 - This brings us back, I think, to the pressures that actually create subcultures, which can range from the mainstream's rejection of a particular behaviour (causing people who behave that way to replace that social world) to the subculture itself's need to organize to further its own interests. The problem that emerges: once the subculture has begun to serve whatever purpose it has, the purpose begins to vanish. The job gets closer and closer to done, but the culture is already established, beyond which it rapidly becomes a liability.

Related theory: the two main, sort of paradoxical roles of a subculture are to (a) soldify the subculture against the mainstream's distaste or indifference, and (b) make the subculture thrive. This means that the end result of a successful subculture will always be an approaching moment at which the defining trait of the subculture ceases to be surprising or significant and, well, "crosses over." After that the subculture's no longer necessary -- it becomes in all senses an unnecessary crutch to one's thinking. You'd think this would absolutely suck for that last big wave of people on board, but then that's the whole idea: it's those people's entrance into the subculture -- those people for whom those defining traits don't require a culture to support them -- that brings the subculture to an end. Dilution, in some senses: the coalition gets broader and the "defining traits" get narrower and narrower until they're meaningless.

Cf THE STORY OF EMO, an aesthetic/cultural codification that shifted and oozed and went all over the place as the "membership" of the niche changed. End result: what 2002 people who call what they like "emo" listen to is practically completely unrelated to what 1994 people meant when they said the same thing.

4 - This depends on what we consider creative. Creative impulses coming from subcultures -- while they're still in a true subcultural place, still actively developing a "culture" to attach to whatever else brought them together -- are bound to be more creative in the sense of "creative" as deviating substantially from what's already been created. There's the other sense of creativity, however, in terms of being able to put the already-existing to creative use. If we assume people in subcultures to be just as good at that as people in the mainsteam, initial subculture periods are going to be hugely creative, yes: you have culture-creation combined with conventional creation. Beyond that we run into a lot of basically statistical and economic stuff about "creative" people and how subcultures can support them and provide them a social structure within which to keep pursuing certain ideas.

5 - Do we need to do anything to them? Let's admit that they're occasionally bothersome to our sensibilities because we don't have clear clues as to what they're all about. But surely this is a positive thing: plus it's been my experiences that people who don't fit into any one subculture -- but are not a well-pleased part of the "mainstream" -- tend to be that way because they have an eye on lots of different subcultures, and just don't feel it necessary to go out and subscribe to one in particular.

In an anthropology course in college I read a study that said chimpanzees could have social knowledge of about 60 others individuals at any one time. If they were forced to associate with or depend on more than this number, they would become confused and agitated and would become more withdrawn. The study also said that the estimated number of individuals a human could have knowledge of was about double this (I can't remember where I found this or who the author was, or even if this is a widely accepted theory). This immediately made me think of subcultures. I thought it was really interesting to think they might have a physiological as well as a cultural or political origin, and that their evolution could be a method of dealing with the large concentrations of people we all encounter on a daily basis.

oh crikey! that means there is a GOTH GENE!!

I have nothing to say other than to encourage more posts to this short thread.