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SUB-CULTURAL THEORY: VIRTUES AND VICES
I have outlined the general problems which a realist criminology must answer. What is necessary is to put some flesh on the bones of such an analysis. Although realism points to the partiality of much criminological theory, it does not insist on a severance from the traditions of criminological thought. Far from it, there is much to be learnt from the past. In particular from the creative ferment that occurred within the discipline as a response to the twin crises of aetiology and penality. No more has thus been so than in the development of subcultural theory and in its debate with the labelling perspective. Here the influences of Durkheim and Merton became melded with the work of Edwin Sutherland, whilst learning from the phenomenological perspectives which accrued around labelling theory. And this first wave of American subcultural theorization became reinterpreted within a Marxist rubric in the extraordinary fertile developments in subcultural theory centring around work at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Britain in the seventies. Subcultural approaches to crime and deviance have a long history; to talk of criminal subcultures and to graphically describe their activities and values was commonplace amongst Victorian writers such as Mayhew, depicting the 'dangerous classes', the underlife of nineteenth century London. Central to this type of analysis is that crime is normal behaviour, it is not a product of lack of socialization and culture but of different cultures and values. In the Twentieth Century, for example, Walter Miller talks about the focal values of lower working class culture, 'toughness', 'excitement', 'fate', 'trouble', etc. and relates these to crime. What is distinctive about early subcultural theorization, however, is its purely descriptive nature. It describes values, it argues how these are transmitted in a normal process of socialization, but it does not explain their origins. It is the combination of explaining both the origins and transmission of deviant subcultures which is the hallmark of what I will term 'mature subcultural theory'. Such an approach commenced with the pioneering work of Albert Cohen and Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin in the late fifties and early sixties. Mature subcultural theory attempts to deal with the fundamental problems of social analysis: how to relate the subjective meanings of actions to an objective assessment of their situation, how to relate the individual actions to the values of his or her group, how to relate the macro-structure of society to the microcosm of human action, how to understand the voluntarism of human action in determinate circumstances, how to tackle problems of rationality and irrationality, of social organization and disorganization and how to relate the past to the present predicament. In attempting this project individual subcultural theorists frequently are unable to adequately straddle these dichotomies. For example, they grant actors creative freedom, but end up describing them as acting out a prescribed cultural essence or they are fascinated by human subjectivity but project on their subjects their own preoccupations. I will start by looking at the promises of subcultural theory, but I will also point to the pitfalls. The Concept of Subculture David Downes, in his study of working class delinquency in Stepney and Poplar, invokes the definition of culture formulated by CS Ford, namely: 'learned problem solutions'. That is subcultural responses are jointly elaborated solutions to collectively experienced problems. Deviant behaviour is viewed as being a meaningful attempt to solve the problems faced by a group or an isolated individual - it is not a meaningless pathology. It is necessary, therefore, to explore and understand the subjective experience of the actor. Thus Downes writes: 'Whatever factors and circumstances combine to produce a problem derive from wither the individual's frame of reference - the way he looks at the world - or the 'situation' he confronts - the world he lives in and where he is located in the world, (1966,p.6). To achieve this aim it is necessary to delineate how new situations - and with them new problems - are assessed from the point of view of the culture that the individuals already embrace. In short: subcultures emerge from the moral springboard of already existing cultures and are the solutions to problems perceived within the framework of these initial cultures. Culture is seen as the ways people have evolved to tackle the problems which face them in every day life. It includes language, ways of dress, moral standards, political institutions, art forms, work norms, modes of sexuality - in sum all human behaviour. That is, people find themselves in particular structural positions in the world; their age, class, gender, race, for instance, and in order to solve the problems thus posed, certain cultural solutions are evolved to attempt to tackle them. That is, people in each particular structural position evolve their own subculture. And, of course, the major structural axes are those of age, class, ethnicity and gender. Thee shape people's levels in the context of the particular space they occupy (e.g. the inner city, or rural) and the particular time and country we are talking about. Thus the structural predicaments which give rise to problems for particular groups are varied and stratified throughout society. Subcultures, of course, overlap, they are not distinct normative ghettos: the subculture of young black working class men will overlap a great deal with their female counterparts. But there will also be distinct differences stemming from the predicaments of gender. And, of course, people in the same structural position can evolve different subcultures and these will change over time. Mods, rockers, teds, punks, may all be varieties of attempts by working class youth to deal with similar problems. For subcultures are human creations and can vary as widely as the imagination of the participants involved. All human beings create their own subcultural forms and although we tend to use the term for the young and the deviant, it is important to note how this is just a matter of focus. Policemen and Army Officers, for example, form their own subcultures which are in their way as developed and exotic as those that exist in the underworld. In order to see clearly how this perspective differs from more conventional approaches to human deviance, I will look at five contrasts. And closely associated with these contrasts are the dichotomies which the theory of subcultures attempts to transcend. (1) The Meaning of Discontent: The Subjective and the Objective, The Rational and the Irrational In subcultural theory deviant subcultures are viewed not as pathological groupings of maladjusted individuals who lack culture, but rather as meaningful attempts to solve problems faced by the individuals concerned. What it is juvenile vandalism or the latest teenage style, cultural responses are meaningful rather than meaningless. A whole series of terms have evolved which, rather than explaining deviant behaviour, in fact attempt to explain it away. Terms like mob, psychopath, undersocialized, hyper-active, primitive, animal, mindless (as in 'mindless' violence), immature, mad - all serve one purpose. They take the observer's values as obvious and 'normal' and they castigate other people's values as not meaningful alternatives but a lack of value, meaning and rationality. In contrast subcultural theory would argue that human behaviour is fundamentally meaningful and differences in behaviour represent the different problems and solutions to these problems which particular subcultures have evolved. A riot, for instance, is not a situation where a mob of people have taken leave of their senses, but a response understandable in terms of the subculture concerned. This is not to say that it is necessarily the most effective method of achieving the aims of the individuals, but rather it makes sense given their limitations and their understanding of the situation. It is, in fact, a common method of voicing protest by relatively powerless groups. As the social historian Eric Hobsbawn commented (1964, p.379): "No other European country has so strong a tradition of rioting as Britain; and one which persisted well past the middle of the nineteenth century. The riot, as a normal part of collective bargaining, was well-established in the eighteenth century." Or take a different type of behaviour. An outstanding study of classroom misbehaviour by Paul Willis (Learning to Labour) dismisses all pathological interpretations such as 'hyperactivity' but analyzes how the lower stream of the class - 'the Lads' - realize that they are destined for low skilled jobs where academic achievement is irrelevant. Their structural problem is that they are being asked to compete against middle class standards for which their own background ill prepares them, in order to achieve academic qualifications irrelevant to their future jobs. They culturally 'solve' the problem by playing up in the classroom, rejecting the teacher's discipline, by despising 'swots' - 'earoles' - whilst at the same time evolving a subculture which gives high status to manliness and physical toughness. That is, they begin to evolve a culture which rejects standards which threaten their self-esteem and more relevantly fits their future work as labourers. They turn their misfortune into a virtue. Similarly Ken Pryce, in his study of young blacks in Bristol (Endless Pressure), notes how a proportion reject 'shit work' - they evolve a leisure culture which helps them survive unemployment, racism and the few and menial jobs available to them. Thus explanations of classroom behaviour which reduce the activities of kids to the defects and failings of individuals are rejected. These can be, and of course often are, phrased in quasi-scientific language (e.g. 'hyperactivity', 'underachievement', 'low IQ') and they can be at times associated with progressive, caring views (e.g. lead poisoning in the inner cities). None of this makes them, from a subcultural point of view, any the less suspect. In all these instances subcultural theorists, instead of viewing deviant behaviour as pathological, irrational or lacking in meaning, are interpreting it as a socially evolved activity with a definite meaningful rationality. To start with the theorist is seeing the problem through the eyes of the people in the subculture. That is, he or she is granting the group being analyzed a subjectivity instead of invoking spurious 'objective' notions of pathology or sickness unrelated to their interpretations of their situation. But this does not imply a rejection of an objective assessment of the situation. rather to disagree with much of what passes as objective accounts - they are in fact most often attempts to belittle subcultures of discontent. By denying the meaning and reason they are unable to to encompass the vital component of human subjectivity necessary in the explanation of human behaviour in contrast to explanations of animal behaviour or inanimate movement. But to take the opposite viewpoint and elevate the particular actors subjective interpretations of a situation without objectivity also poses enormous problems. Are we to say, for instance, that a Pentecostalist, a Rastafarian or a Primitive Methodist have, in fact, grasped the nature of the world they live in a correct fashion? This is the road to relativism; however 'democratic' it might seem to put the actor's interpretation on a par with that of the theorist, it has obvious pitfalls. At the very least, for instance, the three groups above would conflict about the same social predicament. They would argue vehemently about what is happening around them. It is important therefore not to take subcultures at face value - one must start from these values but put them in a more objective context. One must never lose the values - for unlike animal behaviour or inanimate movement - it is impossible to explain human action without retaining their values. But these values have to be interpreted or - 'read' - from a wider objectivity. Therefore, to understand present day Rastafarianism or 19th century Methodism one must understand the concepts that the devotees of both religions use - but we would be wrong to limit our study of them to these terms alone. And riots, for instance, represent a collective response to particular predicaments facing groups of individuals; they must be understood in terms of the alternative ranges of responses available to the, but they are not understood merely by interviewing rioters as to the assessments of the motives expressed by them at the time. You cannot understand the revolution of a riot without subjectivity, but equally you cannot make a shibboleth about the views of the participants. Subcultural theory then attempts to bridge the problem of subjectivity and objectivity - it grants its actors meaning within a world of choice and probability which can be objectively assessed. (2) The Shape of Discontent: The Present and the Past Discontent can take on a myriad of shapes, and these forms may change during the biographies of individuals or the social trajectories of groups. It can involve the self-debasement of hard drug use, the elaborate style of a deviant youth culture, the studied pose of the hustler, the other-worldliness of the religious cult, the obsessive nationalism of the fascist, the dedication of the revolutionary, the spontaneous rebellion of the oppressed. From a subcultural perspective these responses are neither an obvious result of the present predicament of a group nor are they a simple reflex of its past cultural tradition. Subcultures constantly change under the impact of circumstances and they constantly reinterpret circumstances. Tradition brings a series of interpretations to the present but the present itself changes and, in turn, changes tradition. Black rioting in Brixton, London, for example, is not an 'obvious' response to their predicament as one writer has suggested (D Widgery, Socialist Worker, 1981), nor is it part of a tradition of anti-colonial struggle carried over from the West Indies as another commentator would maintain (P Gilroy, 1983). It is a response to the present predicament from the perspective of a particular cultural tradition (which is why many other immigrant groups were in low profile at the riots). And it is also the creation of a form of rioting in a specific situation with particular motives which are in no way an identikit replay of events in Kingston, Jamaica three decades ago. Similarly, crime is not - as I have argued - a simple and obvious response to the problem of being poor irrespective of culture, nor is it part of a working class tradition as some writers, such as Walter Miller, would presume. To take the reductio ad absurdum of the two instances, suddenly becoming poor and facing the immediate predicament of poverty may often result in a hangover of honesty and even being desperately poor for six generations in certain foolhardy cultures may result in a remarkable constancy of respect for the law. 'Identical' conditions become different conditions when viewed through the social spectacles of a particular subculture. What is poverty for a resident of Haarlem is wealth for a citizen of New Delhi. And the 'pains of imprisonment' depend on what group is experiencing the prison. Thus Ward and Kasselbaum, in their study of women's prisons (1966), show how women and men experience greatly differing problems when imprisoned. And the often remarkably contrasting inmate subcultures which occur in male and female prisons are a response to the problem of the regimentation of life in a total institution as experienced from a male and female perspective. What we must understand is the cultural trajectory of a group, how their material circumstances change (or remain constant) and how their understandings of their situation fluctuate (or have an air of consistency). (3) The Causes of Discontent: Creativity and Determinism Much discontent is a product of relative not absolute deprivation. This notion of causality is at the heart of subcultural theory. Sheer poverty, for example, does not necessarily lead to a subculture of discontent - it may, just as easily, lead to quiescence and fatalism. Discontent occurs when comparisons are made which suggest that injustices are occurring which are artificial when contrasting one group to another which is comparable. If the distribution of wealth is sen as natural and just - however disparate it is - it will be accepted. An objective history of exploitation, or even a history of increased exploitation, does not explain disturbances. Exploitative cultures have existed for generations without friction - it is the perception of justice - relative deprivation - which counts. A key influence here is, of course, Mertonian anomic theory and the notion of the disjunction between culturally induced aspirations and the structurally limited opportunities of achieving them experienced by a particular subgroup. That is, people experience relative deprivation in terms of consensual goals and their actual rewards. The concept of relative deprivation manages to capture the creative and determined parts of the process of being human; it refuses to compromise in terms of either moment. That is, it is totally opposed to simple deterministic ideas of crime. These theories suggest that he or she is criminal because of circumstances, so that one could, with enough effort, come up with laws of human deviance like one can come up with natural laws of the physical universe. Of course, many positivist writers, such as John Bowlby, pronounce such laws. Thus broken homes are said, because of the material deprivation that they involve, to lead to delinquency. And these statements are made as if they were natural laws like, say, Boyles Law. But from the perspective of subcultural theory such statements are implausible - and, indeed, impossible - because they miss out the human factor. For however objective one may be about the figures for broken homes and the statistics of the incidence of delinquency (and many criminologists quite rightly would dispute the 'objectivity' of both of these), a subjective factor interposes itself in between the two facts: namely how do particular individuals and groups experience, and interpret, their broken homes. For one child a broken home may be a bit of luck: an unwitting escape from domestic violence and tyranny. For the other it may involve the loss of a parent who would have been a civilising influence on its life. Each child must (and will) creatively make something of this fact - it is not a determinant shove that pushes a human being in an ineluctable direction. But what of the high correlation that occurs between broken homes and delinquency? Is this not proof of such simple determinacy? No, for two reasons: firstly, it may be true that for a specified period a sizeable proportion of human beings placed in particular circumstances make similar choices. But this is not the same as a physical law. Tables do not choose which way to go when they are pushed: consciousness does not intervene in the process - human beings do. Secondly, and more subtly, the process of collecting criminal statistics involves human subjectivity. I have discussed in an earlier chapter how the whole concept of what is crime or delinquency is a subjective decision. And undoubtedly the vandalism of lower working class kids (who have a greater proportion of broken homes) is more likely to be considered delinquent than the vandalism of middle class youth. Thus, spraying 'Sex Pistols' on a wall may be delinquent whilst painting 'Peace Now' - both graffiti, involve equal cost to remove - may be seen as an unfortunate but understandable lapse due to political idealism. Now, all agencies of social control: the police, social workers and the courts, are inundated with offenders. There are too many delinquents and not enough people to cope with them or places to put them. Decisions have to be made in order to distinguish who is a 'real' delinquent from a kid who is merely experimenting or acting atypically. In order to make these decisions social control agencies use theories of delinquency - a particularly potent one being Bowlby's theory of material deprivation. That is, when confronted with a youth who has committed an offence, they decide whether he or she is a 'serious' case by utilization of case history reports in which a broken home is a crucial factor in making the decision whether to proceed with the case or, indeed, incarcerate the youth. In short, if we apply subcultural theory to control agencies, we are able to see how social workers confronted with their work problems make decisions about the classification of juvenile misbehaviour based on a theory which has become part of their culture in this period which would self-fulfil the correlation between juvenile delinquency and broken homes. All of this, involving human subjectivity, both in the commission - or not - of delinquent acts or the classification - or not - of acts as delinquents - the fundamental dyad of realism - is far removed from the formation of physical laws of inanimate objects. (4) The Social Context of Discontent: The Individual and the Social Subcultural theory attempts to place the behaviour of people in the context of the wider society. It does not explain human action in terms of the propensity of particular individuals (e.g. he is violent because he is a 'psychopath', she has a large number of sexual partners because she is a 'nymphomaniac', he is greedy because he is 'evil'). Rather it suggests that individuals can only be understood in terms of the subcultures of which they are a part. As an instance let us look at the explanation of the relatively high level of drug addiction amongst physicians: "Take the example of the doctor who faces the problem of overwork combined with a painful gastro-intestinal disorder. As a member of the subculture of medicine he has a considerable knowledge of drugs, both in terms of their effects and also in terms of their required prescription. He also has high accessibility to a multitude of drugs. Secretly, therefore, he prescribes himself daily shots of morphine. He does not see himself as likely to become addicted, as his expertise in medicine equips him with the belief that he can control its use. He will take the opiate in order to pursue ends compatible with his profession (i.e. to continue working) rather than for pleasure as with the lower-class addict. If he becomes, eventually, dependent on morphine the addiction will be shaped, timed, administered and resolved in terms of his culture. All in all, therefore, the solution to his problem is understandable only in terms of the subculture of medicine to which he belongs." (J Young, 1971, p.92). Note that the physician addict, in contrast, say, to the street junkie, acts as an isolated individual, yet his or her response is explicable in terms of belonging to a medical subculture. Similarly, the isolated suburban housewife addicted to valium or experiencing persistent domestic violence may not know that their situation is comparatively common, yet will interpret what is happening to her from the perspective of the subculture of middle class femininity to which she belongs. Both the isolated individual and the individual in a group evolving collective norms must be understood in terms of their subculture. And behaviour 'objectively' identical becomes dissimilar, depending on the context. Thus, to explain the addiction of the street addict, one must turn to the particular lower working class culture to which he or she belongs. It is only this way the extremely contrasting life-styles of two groups who are both heavily addicted to opiates (the doctor usually much more so than the street addict, incidentally) can be explained (see Young, 1987). I will explore this argument further in Chapter Seven. (5) The Global Context of Discontent: The Macro and the Micro: Consensus and Diversity Thus subcultural theory focuses on the group rather than the individual; but it then places the group in the context of the total society. The delinquent gang are not to be understood in terms of the values of an isolated group somewhere in the ghetto: but the gang must be understood in the ghetto and the ghetto within the culture, politics and economy of an advanced capitalist society. And Punk is not just an interesting youth style evolved out of the blue in the early eighties, but related to and was caused by, the particular problems of unemployment and disillusionment in Britain at that time. All the three dimensions, discussed above, are given relevance by this insistence on viewing the micro-level (subculture) within the context of the macro-level (the total society). Thus the subcultural meanings given by the actors - the subjective level - become more capable of being seen objectively from the viewpoint of the total society. The history of a subcultural group has to be viewed as the trajectory through a changing wider social order. And the subcultural group is creative within the compass of a surrounding and determining totality. Subcultural theory argues that people are satisfied or dissatisfied dependent on the comparisons they make. The relationship between the total society and the group is crucial here. People simply do not make comparisons and say 'that is just', 'that is unfair' on their own. as it were. Rather the standards and comparisons are structured by forces arising at the level of the wider social order, which not only provides universal criteria by which to make comparisons, but actually on which people are grouped together in terms of physical proximity. That is, the social order facilitates or obfuscates - either intentionally or, more usually, unintentionally - this process. And, if we turn once again to the topic of crime, that a fundamental irony is that what is seen as the most basic example of anti-social behaviour is itself a product of the dominant values and economic pressures of conforming to society. Crime, then, can only be understood in the context of the wider society: it is a product of forces within the totality; at times it epitomizes values which stem from the most law-abiding virtues of that society. At others contra-cultural values are seen as a product of reaction to the wider values. In this way consensus and diversity of value are seen to intimately relate to each other. Subcultural Theory: Its Virtues and Its Views Without a doubt subcultural theory represents a significant advance in the study of crime. As a way of viewing juvenile crime and youth cultures, in particular, it has had enormous influence. In the act of granting the offenders meaning, it has dominated progressive criminology over the last two decades and become, often unwittingly, the staple reflex in the modern journalists' depiction of, say, the meaning of punk ('dole queue rock') or the new romantics ('escaping the drabness of modern life'). From the New Musical Express to Marxism Today, from the Sunday Times Colour Supplement to Race and Class, from pop journalist to the committed socialist, all social commentators vie with each other to give a 'reading' of the latest form of youthful deviance. As we have seen, mature subcultural theorization occurred in two major waves: a liberal current in American sociology of the early 1960s and a Marxist version, particularly in Britain, in the late 1970's. Both remain considerable influences today. The American work was pioneered by writrs such as Albert Cohen, Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin. The British work was epitomized by the writings stemming from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Examples of the latter work are Policing the Crises (S Hall et al) and Resistance Through Rituals (S Hall and T Jefferson,[eds]). In the Table below I have chronicled - admittedly pretty selectively - the development of subcultural theory. TABLE X; THE DEVELOPMENT OF SUBCULTURAL THEORY; FIRST WAVE -------------------------------------------------------------------------- U.S. 1955 Albert Cohen Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang U.S. 1960 R Cloward & L Ohlin Delinquency and Opportunity U.K. 1964 JB Mays Crime and Social Structure U.K. 1966 David Downes The Delinquent Solution PERIOD OF SYNTHESIS AND CRITICISM U.S 1964 David Matza Delinquency and Drift U.S. 1964 Albert Cohen 'The Sociology of the Deviant Act' U.S. 1966 David Matza Becoming Deviant U.S. 1966 D Ward & Kassebaum U.S. 1968 C Valentine Culture and Poverty U.K. 1971 Jock Young The Drugtakers U.K. 1972 Stan Cohen Folk Devils and Moral Panics SECOND WAVE U.K. 1976 Phil Cohen 'Working Class Youth Cultures in East London' U.K. 1976 John Clarke et al Resistance Through Ritual U.K. 1977 Paul Willis Learning to Labour U.K. 1978 S Hall et al Policing the Crisis U.K. 1978 P Cohen & D Robins Knuckle Sandwich U.K. 1979 Paul Corrigan Schooling the Smash Street Kids U.K. 1979 Dick Hebdidge Subculture: The Theory of Style U.K. 1979 Ken Pryce Endless Pressure U.K. 1980 Mike Brake The Sociology of Youth Culture Canada 1984 Gord West Young Offenders and the State U.S. 1985 H & J Schwendinger Adolescent Subcultures and Delinquency --------------------------------------------------------------------------- In Chapter Three I noted how the new Marxist subcultural theories tended to see themselves as radically different from the 'bourgeois' structural functionalist theories which preceded them. In particular I pointed to the remarkable similarities between Albert Cohen's 1965 book, Delinquency: the Culture of the Gang and Paul Willis' Learning to Labour, written at the beginning of the Marxist second wave, eleven years later. But whilst there were important differences, there were core similarities. As Stan Cohen astutely noted: "When new subcultural theory appeared in Britain at the beginning of the seventies it was concerned to show how radically it differed from tradition. And it could hardly have looked more different. It was not just the switch from functionalist to Marxist language but the sense conveyed of why this switch 'had' to take place. The context was light years away from America in the mid-fifties: a sour, post welfare state Britain which had patently not delivered the goods; the cracking of all those interdependent myths of classlessness, embourgeoisement, consumerism and pluralism; the early warnings of economic recession and high (particularly juvenile) unemployment; the relative weakness of recognizably political resistance..... History and political economy became open rather than hidden; the 'problem' of the working class adolescent was seen not in terms of adjustment, or providing more opportunities to buy a larger share of the cake, but of bitter conflict, resistance and strife. The delinquent changed from 'frustrated social climber' to cultural innovator and critic. What was really happening on the beaches of Brighton and Clacton - as well as earlier at the Teddy Boy dance halls and later on the football terraces and punk concerts - was a drama of profound symbolic resonance. Subculture was, no less, a political battleground between the classes..... It is worth noting, though, that for all its obvious novelty and achievement....the new theory shares a great deal more with the old than it cared to admit. Both work with the same 'problematic'....growing up in a class society; both identify the same vulnerable group: the urban male working-class late adolescent; both see delinquency as a collective solution to a structurally imposed problem." (S Cohen,pp.iii-iv). I have, hopefully, made clear this common core of both subcultural theories in terms of the attempts to encompass the five dichotomies of subjectivity and objectivity, present and past, creativity and determinism, individual and social, micro and macro levels of analysis. Such an analysis which attempted to give meaning, rationality and voluntarism to deviant actors within a determinate world stands apart from a host of more conservative understandings of crime, youth and delinquency. As Cohen puts it: "These common assumptions must be emphasized precisely because they do not appear in the rhetoric of moral panics or in conventional criminology or in the official control culture." (Ibid, p.iv). But, as with many a theory, its virtues led to its vices. For the attempts to encompass the dichotomies often lead to a fake emphasis on one pole at the expense of the other. And just as the two waves of theory had common, though concealed, similarities, they not surprisingly had the same failings. Thus Marxist subcultural theory tends to unwittingly replicate the mistakes of bourgeois subcultural theory. All of this would be of simply theoretical importance, but these weaknesses have extremely relevant resonances in radical thinking about crime and delinquency whether in the academy, journalism or socialist policies in this area. Let us examine the problems: (1) The Problem of Over-Rationality In attempting to grant the human actor a sense of making his or her history in a determinate world not of their own choosing there is a tendency to bestow over-rationality on them. That is, to see the subcultural project as necessarily involving much reasoning, or distancing from the determining circumstances which surround the individuals involved is making an optimistic assumption. All too often what happens is an unreflective bouncing off the conditions which beset them. This can range from being so beset by circumstances that the person allows his or her self to give way to them. He or she is, in David Matza's phrase, "free to drift" (Delinquency and Drift, 1964). The alcoholic gives in to his alcoholism, the petty criminal robs the next door neighbour's gas meter, the kids hang around on the street trying to survive. All of this might involve reason, and often a subcultural context, but the rationality may be simply borrowed from the more predatory portion of conventional reason and what is more, it may simply not work. For to grant rationality is not to maintain that the activities which ensue are particularly tenable (I shall develop the concept of tenability in Chapter 6). They may keep things going for a while, they may purchase survival at the expense of others in the same fate or they may, in fact, make matters worse. Rationality may be encumbered: so that people act as if they were determined actors, rationality may be borrowed from the meanest conventions of society, and it may undermine the possibilities of genuine freedom for oneself and others. Take street crime as an instance: pimping does not create freedom for the sister, dealing in hard drugs does not aid the brother on the streets, burglary does not help the problems of one's neighbour on the block. And as for the hustlers themselves? Malcolm X put it, when writing about his old fellow-hustlers in Haarlem: "Hearing the usual fates of so many others. Bullets, knives, prison, dope, diseases, insanity, alcoholism....so many of the survivors whom I knew as tough hyenas and wolves of the streets in the old days now were so pitiful. They had known all the angles but beneath that surface they were poor, ignorant, untrained black men; life had eased up on them and hyped them. I ran across close to twenty-five of these old-timers I had known pretty well, who in the space of nine years had been reduced to the ghetto's minor, scavenger hustles to scratch up room for rent and food money. Some now worked downtown, messengers, janitors, things like that." (The Autobiography of Malcolm X). There are two tendencies in Marxist views of crime, both of them prefigured in Engel's Conditions of the Working Class in England. For Engels the working man could be so brutalized as to become a determined creature: "as much a thing without volition as water" (p.159). For: "There is no cause for surprise if the workers, treated as brutes, actually become such." (p.144). Where volition does occur, it is the rationality of the market place: "In this country, social war is under full headway, everyone stands for himself against all comers, and whether or not he shall injure all the others who are his declared foes, depends upon a cynical calculation as to what is most advantageous for himself." (Ibid,p.161) Against this, Engels recognizes that some forms of crime can in fact be a primitive form of protest - a proto-revolutionary act. It was not clear to his mind why he, who did more for society than the rich idler, should be the one to suffer under these conditions. Want conquered his inherited respect for the sacredness of property, and he steals....That was the most primitive form of protest." (Ibid.p.240). As he notes, even in this last instance: "Crime did not help matters. The criminal could protest against the existing order of society only singly, as one individual; the whole might of society was brought to bear upon each criminal and crushed him with its immense superiority." (Ibid,p.240). But these two Marxist perspectives on crime have remained with us: on the one hand, crime as a product of demoralization, a reflection of capitalism, a determination of the market, where rationality, at its best, follows that of individualism which is sooner or later an untenable enterprise; on the other crime as a pre-figurative form of rebellion, the Robin Hood or 'Primitive Rebel', who has seen through the fakeness of society and inarticulately creates his own destiny. If, furthermore, in the first case rationality is either absent or limited, in the second it is the criminal who is the rational minority amongst a mass of people who are irrationally and automatically accepting oppression. On the one side the notion of the lumpenproletariat; on the other the romantic hero. And, of course, even outside of Marxism such a contradiction also exists. The appeal of the working class professional criminal as a hero is enormous: witness the media attention given to the Krays in this country and the American romanticisation of the Mafia in The Godfather. I shall return to this theme later; let us note that such a contradiction remains unresolved. For the moment Steven Marcus's comment on the discussion is extremely pertinent in its application to crime and to subcultural theories of deviancy in general: "An inescapable part of the meaning of crime is its essential failure. It is insufficiently rational and excessively, or too purely, symbolic and symptomatic. Most of all, in it the criminal remains socially untransformed: he is still an isolated individual pursuing activities in an underground and alternate marketplace; if he is successful, he is a small-time entrepreneur; at best he is a member or leader of a gang. In no instance is he capable of organizing a movement to withstand the institutional forces that are arrayed against him. He lives in a parallel and parasitic world whose horizon is bounded and obscured by the larger society upon which it depends." (1975,pp.223-4). (2) The Problem of Overcoherence Constantly in subcultural theory there has been a tendency to draw a picture which was much more coherent than reality. For by granting full subjectivity to the actors involved in a deviant enterprise they tended to present this subjectivity as of necessity coherence and non-contradictory. It is as if one were completing one of those games in a children's comic where you join up all the dots to make a face. In the comic all the dots are there; they are all equally emphasised and there is only one face. But in terms of a subculture, the researcher in reality finds that some of the dots are missing, some are extremely feint and there is often more than one face. The temptation, however, is in the interests of granting the actors a culture: to find a face to depict a coherent, well thought out, non-contradictory subculture where nothing of the sort exists. To the question, then, what are delinquents? the American theorists would talk about "the delinquent subculture" with well-drawn codes of honour based on "rep" and the mobilization of violence. Whilst the British theorists describe punks, teds, mods or what have you, with a clear definition of their style which ignores the lack of clarity of the actors themselves. One of the few subcultural theorists to recognise this is Paul Corrigan, in his study of Sunderland kids. Thus he writes: "For most kids where it's at is the street; not the romantic action-packed streets of the ghetto, but the wet pavements of Wigan, Shepherds Bush and Sunderland. The major activity in this venue, the main action of British subculture is, in fact, 'doing nothing'. What sort of thing do you do with your mates?
DUNCAN: Just stand around talking about footy. About things. Do you do anything else? DUNCAN: Joke, lark about, carry on. Just what we feel like really. What's that? DUNCAN: Just doing things. Last Saturday someone started throwing bottles and we all got in. What happened? DUNCAN: Nothing really. All these activities come under the label of 'doing nothing' and they represent the largest and most complex youth subculture....In fighting boredom the kids do not choose the street as a wonderfully lively place, rather they look on it as the place where there is the most chance that something will happen. Doing nothing on the street must be compared with the alternatives: for example, knowing that nothing will happen with Mum and Dad in the front room; being almost certain that the youth club will be full of boredom. This makes the street the place where something might just happen, if not this Saturday, then surely next." (1976,pp.103-4). In the area of crime and delinquency the problem of overcoherence leads to a blindness towards the sporadic and drifting nature of much deviancy. In particular it encourages an overestimation of the level of commitment of the actors involves. But it is not only in the dilemmas of half-heartedness that such mistaken assumptions are made. More seriously there is a tendency to ignore the fact that crime and delinquency can occur where there is genuine social breakdown. As I have argued previously: "The new deviancy theorists accused those who operated with notions of social disorganisation of belittling, or denying the authenticity, of alternative forms of social organization developed in pursuit of other than dominant goals. However important this accusation may have been in pointing to the plurality of social organizations in a divided society, the fat remains that certain...areas are disorganized; and that this disorganization relates both to the external and ) forces acting on such ares (for example, on skid-row, or in 'hippie' communities)...And it is absurd to deny that phenomena like marital breakdown are irrelevant, at the micro-level of interaction, in the aetiology of deviant behaviour. To accord subcultural solution authenticity is not equivalent to endowing it with health." (1975,p.73). Ken Pryce, in his study of the West Indian area of Bristol, castigates those who confuse social disorganization with the notion of an alternative community: "The lack of community in St Paul's is often not apparent to strangers visiting the area for the first time, especially students and intellectuals with their tendency to romanticize the deviant and the exotic. Diverse groups with vastly dissimilar backgrounds do mingle freely in close physical interaction in St Paul's. But this is deceptive, for mingly of this kind does not automatically create a sense of conformity, consensus, and vigilance about community standards. The only unity is an external one, in the form of common services utilized by all." Beneath the romantic's illusion of a tight-knit, friendly, organic, warm, harmonious community, the divisions are deep. There is much suspicion between groups. The very fact that in St Paul's people are 'not fussy' (which is what attracts middle-class students n intellectuals), the very fact that there are no constraining community standards, no overriding considerations that people are forced to adhere to, is one reason why St Paul's is a shanty town. The social heterogeneity of the neighbourhood and the suspicion reigning between groups, especially different ethnic groups, gives rise to a sort of 'anything goes' atmosphere, in which one group tends to view members from other groups as easy prey and fair game for exploitation. There is no melting-pot morality combining disparate elements into one." (1979,pp.29-30). The "community" which occurs, Pryce notes, echoing Simmel, is "bound only by commerce" - social behaviour is united only by the silver threads of the market place. Once again, a virtue of subcultural theory: its emphasis on creativity, authenticity an alternative forms of organization creates a blindness about the absolute opposite. To distinguish the two moments: that of the generation of alternative norms and that of the disintegration of social behaviour is extremely difficult. But distinguish them we must. Drug use and sale may, for example, be part of an apathy which has spread through a community. It may proselytize in a fashion that creates around it further demoralization and generates organized crime and predatory criminality. It may, on the other hand, be part of a positive culture which is affirmative of the community, of enjoyment and of the need for change. It may be inconsequential, it may have profoundly negative or important positive effects on the community. It is thus an extremely, easy task to project onto a subculture an organized system of values where there are none, or one which ignores crucial contradictions or ones which are, in fact, the very opposite of reality. I shall further explore the latter point in the next section. (3) The Problem of the Existence of Contracultures A classic distinction in subcultural theory is between subcultures and contracultures. A subculture, strictly speaking, is in the case of youth, for example, one which arises out of the concerns of young people (eg. mating, dating), but does not isolate the central values of society. A contraculture - or counterculture - has as its central concerns values and behaviour which are oppositional to the status quo. In the first wave of subcultural theory in the United States, such oppositional cultures were seen as centring around delinquency and gang violence. Thus, a youth belonging to such a contraculture, saw stealing and violence as a central part of his lifestyle (compared to the 'honesty' and 'docility' of the wider American Society) and he acted out such values as a member of a gang. Crime which was seen as, by definition, an anathema to American Values became thus celebrated in the oppositional values of youth. And in order for these conflicting mores to survives in the honest and antagonistic wider society, a gang was a necessary social structure to maintain them against encroachment. The only problem was where were these gangs? Criminologists looked everywhere but they could not find them. They existed in the movies, of course, and there we even a few actual sightings of fighting gangs with closely delimited structures. But these solitary few, whether they were in New York City or Glasgow, wee found invariably to have structured themselves and worked out their spiel after the journalists from the mass media had incited them! It was into this controversy that David Matza's book, Delinquency and Drift entered as an important counterbalance to the excesses of subcultural theory. We have already seen, in our discussion of rationality, how Matza counterposed to the notion of the well worked out subcultural project the concept of drift. Often the delinquency merely drifted, sporadically into crime, neither have the ideas been well formulated, nor is any great distance achieve from conventional values and situations. He developed this further; the subculture of delinquency, he argues, is: "facilitated and perhaps even dependent on support and reinforcement from conventional sources. (It) is buttressed by beliefs that flourish influential sectors of the normative order. These views...include the professional ideology of criminology, psychiatry and social work, an emergent ideology of leisure...the cult of cowboy masculinity in the mass media." (1964,p.62). The subcultural theorists are in agreement with more orthodox views on crime on one thing. That is that crime is carried out by criminals who positively embrace illegality. For the conservative theorist it is because the person is either wilfully evil or lacks a sense of legality; for the subcultural theorist it is because a culture has emerged which elevates criminality to a virtue. Both of these are - in the vast majority of instances - wrong. If delinquent youth cultures were genuinely contracultural then crime would be justified in terms of a conflict with propertied society, as a redistribution of wealth or even as a means of hitting out at the system. In fact, such a situation is rarely come across. There are, of course, youths and adults who have committed crimes for explicitly political reasons. Socialist and nationalist groups from the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the century to the Provisional IRA at the present time have in a disciplined fashion, robbed banks to raise money for such purposes as the purchase of arms. They have been explicit in their criminality: they have also invariably been scathing in their attitudes to petty crime and anti-social behaviour within their own communities. But the average offender - whether youthful or adult - is far from radically articulate about their infractions. The way in which the bind of law is neutralized is, in fact, as Matza argues, in strictly conventional terms. That is where violation of the law is brought about paradoxically because of concerns about legality. There are two ways in which an initial commitment to legality leads to the breaking of laws. The first - and the most immediate - is where the individual feels wronged by others because of their illegal actions towards him or her. An act of domestic violence occurs towards a wife and she hits back; a person steals from his friend an he or she seeks redress in a fight; trust is broken - the police are seen to be ineffective in acting on behalf of the person concerned - so he or she acts in order to restore the balance of justice. Here a commitment to legality leads directly to illegality. There are, however, more indirect, yet extremely significant ways which such a commitment an lead to its opposite. The role of the police is crucial here. The police are the most obvious and intrusive representatives of law and order in the community. As I have argued throughout, one of the most decisive events in the breaking of a young person's bond to the status quo is the experience of illegal and unjust activities by the police. Police violence, arbitrary arrest, prejudiced and abusive behaviour create the conditions by which young people are able to detach themselves from the ranks of the orderly. Bad policing leads to crime. But it leads to crime, not because of some contraculture which has evolved out of the blue or, in the case of black youth, some culture carried over unchanged from the West Indies. Rather it is a culture of discontent which righteously foments over the violation of its rights and whose rhetoric centres around legality. It is not couched, like a Socialist Worker editorial, in terms of the sham of bourgeois legality: rather it is the palpable violation of civil rights which are prized and esteemed which fuels the rebellion of youth against authority. It is not a commitment to illegality but a violation of legality which precipitates the individual into crime. Nowhere is this seen more blatantly than in the instance of young blacks. Police racism so palpably violates notions of equality under the law which black youth manifestly and quite rightly demand. It is the degree to which they identify themselves as citizens, with rights which have been violated, rather than alien immigrants which fuels this anger. I have traced the fashion in which people drift into crime and I have been severely critical of those theorists who see crime as a product of alternative values of contracultures. Rather we have seen that both the causes of crime and the circumstances which facilitate the commission of crime are closely related to conventional values. Furthermore, the eventual values which the criminal embraces are a caricature of convention. I wish to argue that in the second, radical, wave of subcultural theory precisely the same error occurred. For if it were true that we live in a class divided society, then it was to be expected that certain segments of the population would experience this most acutely. Thus, just as with the first wave, the focus became on working class youth culture. Here,whether it was with Punks or Skinheads, or Rastas, the contraculture was to be found. In the second wave, such a contraculture would be constructed not around anti-social events such as gang violence, but around more radical "insights" into the world. The new subcultural theorist then had as a task "reading" the varied youth styles in a fashion which revealed the underlying radical symbolism of its adherents. On one level the virtue of subcultural theory of stressing human creativity and meaning produced some amazingly perceptive insights into the world of deviant youth. On the other, the vice of a blindness to determination and conventionality was frequently evidenced. The relationship of youth culture to the straight world is thus played down and downright examples of conservatism interpreted as radical. As Stan Cohen shrewdly notes, there is a: "constant impulse to decode the style in terms only of opposition and resistance. This means that instances are sometimes missed when the style is conservative or supportive: in other words, not reworked or reassembled but taken over intact from dominant commercial culture. Such instances are conceded, but then brushed aside because - as we all know - the style is a bricolage of inconsistencies and, anyway, things are not what they seem and so the apparently conservative meaning really hides just the opposite." (1980,p.xii) The degree of commitment of youth to their deviant cultures is given precious little consideration. Much of youth culture involves 'bricollaging', borrowing from the available cultural stock in order to lever out an identity of difference. But this difference is not necessarily a qualitative one. The white youth wearing a Che Guevara sweatshirt is not necessarily yearning to fight in the sierras. The black youth with dreadlocks is probably not a fully fledged and committed Rastafarian. As Cashmore and Troyna put it: "The street-corner gang member may have lived at home quite satisfactorily in comfortable domestic circumstances; he may have attended black discotheques yet have had a white girlfriend; he may have hung around with others who disregarded the educational systems and still carried on at school or college; he may have criticised the oppressive white dominance of Babylon, but still have worked as an electrical engineer in a white-owned company from 9 till 5. He may, as one youth we knew, have held very vehement views on the exploitative structures of white control until that day, yet continue to work sedulously taking advantage of government training schemes to improve his professional qualifications. Basically, our point is simple: young blacks always had an still have, their fingers in a number of cultural pies and to assign them to specific lifestyles...is tantamount to freezing a frame and studying it while the movie is still running - you miss the interesting bits. Our investigations indicate that black youth did not and does not adopt one cultural lifestyle but mix many. So it would be feasible to expect the ostensibly docile bakery worker to be a hostile critic of white society, a part-time pimp, a Pentecostalist church member and the organiser of an all-black, self-help group. He does not have to belong to one culture; he may belong to many." (1982,p.27). For there is much "posing" in youth styles. They, as Simon Frith puts it, "pass through groups, change identities and play their leisure roles for fun." (1978,p.53). This process of overplaying the contracultural nature of a phenomenon, can be seen on various levels. We do not examine the contradictions in the most vivid examples of youth rebellion: that is in their conventional as well as their radical motifs. We think that such examples are typical of the mass of youth. Thus John Rex notes in terms of West Indian youth: "One hears a great deal about the homeless, unemployed West Indian youth often affecting a Rastafarian lifestyle, and there is no doubt that such youths are crucial to the understanding of the cultural situation of black minorities in Britain. Nonetheless it is important to recognise that this is not the lifestyle as yet, at least, of the majority. The West Indian majority are 'respectable' working-class people, many of whom go to church and are strongly committed to British Cultural values." (1982,p.64). And finally, one does not capture the drifting, testing - or perhaps a better word is 'tasting' - of youthful commitment. The most obvious danger of such a plethora of subcultural forms is that it presents the theorist - whether sociologist or journalist - with the maximum possible potential for projecting his or her own preconceptions. It also allows for the radical and fake optimism as to the revolutionary potential of the future. But, in the area of crime, the effect on young people themselves is more dramatic. Because, as conventional wisdom on both left and right stresses commitment, it over-emphasizes the criminal identification of youth. That is, it sees people who commit offences as criminals and acts towards them with commensurate severity. The reality is the opposite: commitment only occurs as a result of prolonged social reaction to the offender, itself a product of such beliefs. 4. The Problem of Consensus and Diversity The problem of the relationship between a pointed dominant culture and the subcultures of subordinate groups is central to sociology. Studies of working class culture have debated the area vigorously, seeking, like criminologists, and equally varily. for genuine apportional cultures (see N Abercrombie et al, 1980; F Parkin, 1972; M Mann, 1973). The debate about the culture of poverty is beset with identical problems (see C Valentine, 1968). As we have seen, the contraculture of the gang was not to be found. Even worse, contracultures occurred in all the wrong places. In youth culture it was the middle class hippie, not the working class delinquent who formed the more genuine contracultures. Whilst in studies of class consciousness rather than the working class embracing Marxist ideas, it was middle class intellectuals. And it is not amongst the most hardly pressed women at the bottom of the social structure that radical feminist ideas arose, but amongst relatively well off professional women. None of this, in fact, contradicts the relative deprivation theory, the message of which is that discontent is greatest where relative inequalities are most visible and blocked opportunities are most apparent. (I shall develop this further in Chapter Seven). More importantly, it points to the relative rarity of well thought out contracultural values. As Abercrombe et al point out in their discussion of the search for alternative ideologies amongst the working class: "[These writers] demand what would seem to be unreasonably straight conditions for the rejection of the dominant ideology. [They seem] to be unaware that the possession of a coherent, well-formed and clearly articulated philosophy is a rarity even in the dominant class, and is probably found only among certain intellectual groups." (1980,p.141).
Instead they argue that what occurs is the partial rejection and embracing of dominant ideas, the contradictory nature of class consciousness and the inarticulate and non-abstract nature of much opposition. Charles Valentine, in his parallel analysis of the culture of poverty, comes to very similar conclusions: "One further consideration has received little attention in the relevant literature, probably because the stress on subcultural distinctiveness has inhibited its exploration. This is the possibility that commitment to values, norms, and other cultural themes may often involve ambiguity, ambivalence, and the simultaneous holding of alternative or contradictory beliefs. Some of these possibilities are suggested by Rodman's ingenious idea of "value-stretch". Lee Rainwater has recently followed this up by exploring thoughtfully how "conventional society manages somehow to inculcate its norms even in those persons who are not able to achieve successfully in terms of them," including groups who are thought to live within a poverty subculture, (16). This consideration needs empirical development through ethnographic field work so that we may see more clearly how subcultural elements and total-system universals can coexist as simultaneously available alternatives."
Later in his book he contrasts his model of the culture of poverty with both those versions that see the culture of the poor as an underclass lacking culture and thus of an unremittingly anti-social nature, or those which see it as a distinct, alternative culture which is a positive, social response to aggression: "The lower-class poor possess some distinct subcultural patterns, even though they also subscribe to norms of the middle class or the total system in some of the same areas of life and are quite nondistinctive in other areas; there is variation in each of these dimensions from one ethnic group to another. The distinctive patterns of the poverty subcultures, like those of the other subsocieties, include not only pathogenic traits but also healthy and positive aspects, elements of creative adaptation to conditions of deprivation." There is much that criminological subculture theory can learn from this and, indeed, it is a position which key critics of subcultural theory, particularly David Matza, have pointed us towards. But a further problem remains, for if diversity is a less obvious phenomenon than would appear at first, so too is consensus. The notion of a dominant ideology embraced by the population and endorsed by both Parsonian Functionalist and Marxist theorists has been roundly criticized by Nicholas Abercrombie and his associates. Consensual values as a social cement which binds society together applauded by Functionalists and lamented as the prime source of false consciousness by Althusserian Marxists, simply exaggerates the coherentness and over-emphasizes the non-contradictory nature of dominant values in advanced capitalist societies. Further, to this I would add (1) it over-emphasizes the level of which élite values which percolate down to subordinate groups and under-emphasizes the fashion in which the values of subordinate groups rise up; (2) it puts too great an emphasis on the role of ideas as moulding people's consciousness and too little on their everyday experience of material reality. I shall return to this theme more extensively in the next chapter. Mechanisms of Transmission In the absence of a Medieval Church setting down the dominant ethos of Christendom or the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union formulating the basic precepts of a socialist society for the Soviet Bloc in the post-war period prior to the disintegration of world communism, the West in a 'free' society, has to rely for the transmission of dominant values on a series of institutions, all of which have, at least partial, and, at times, significant autonying from centralized control. Important transmission belts are the school, the criminal justice system, the institutions of the welfare state, the market, and the mass media. I will concentrate, in this section, on the latter. The mass media has a central role in the propagation of dominant values and in the origins, depiction and reaction to criminality and the images of criminal justice system. Briefly, its influence exists in the following areas of the square of crime: (1) The Causes of Crime. The mass media provide a major information source as to the consumer and lifestyle awards indicative of success at various levels of the class structure and the basic line consumer levels of the average citizen. They pinpoint both the glittering prizes and the staple commodities. This occurs, both in advertising and in general features such as 'soaps' and sitcoms'. They thus have an influence on what it is normal to improve to for various levels of success. They also indicate the possibilities of mobility and achievement and then provide stories of success and failure with implicit or explicit notions of whether these occurred fairly or otherwise. To the extent they have influence, the media are, therefore, a source of aspiration and a means of evaluating the fairness of one's own rewards in life. Because of this, when the rewards are not forthcoming, they are a potent source of discontent. Contrary to the beliefs of members of the Frankfurt School, the mass media are as likely to cause disenchantment from the system as they are incorporation and quiescence. (2) The Image of Crime. Crime stories are a staple of Western media, both in the form of news and documentaries and in fiction. The mass media carries images of the qualitative nature of crime (the 'typical' burglary, etc) as well as quantitative indicators of the amount of crime and changes in the crime rate. They detail the typical offender and the typical victim. In such they are an influence on the public's fear of crime and in their notions of appropriate penality. (3) The Image of the Criminal Justice System. Like crime, the police, the course and the prisons are a commonplace media focus. The effectiveness of crime control measures, the regime of the prison, the procedure of the courts, are all depicted with regularity in the mass media. Abercrombie et al are certainly correct that the mechanisms of transmission of dominant values and themes in modern society are much more developed than in previous societies. Furthermore, that e have the paradox of less coherent dominant values, yet better means of dissemination. The mass media have expanded to take up a greater part of the leisure time of the modern citizen and, contrary to Marshall McLuham, each type of media - television, radio, and the printed word - have increased their purchase on contemporary consciousness. It is not that mass means of transmission did not previously exist. As Zygmunt Baumann nicely put it: "Television, the radio and the mass-circulation newspaper are all recent discoveries; which is not to say that media of mass communication were unknown to earlier ages. It is believed correctly - that the peculiarities of these media consist in the following: (1) the communication of the same unit of information to very many people at one and the same time, with no differentiation introduced into it according to the status of the addresses; (2) the communication of this unit of information in one irreversible direction and the virtual exclusion of the possibility of an addressee to reply, leaving aside any discussion on an equal footing a sharp polarization of the system of communication into those sending the information and those receiving it; (3) the remarkable persuasiveness of the information being passed on, based on exalted social authority of the sources, their semi-monopolistic position and the conviction, of much psychological significance, that 'everybody' is listening - and listening with respect - to the same message. It will readily be noted that all those things were enjoyed by, for example, the Catholic Church - that great broadcasting centre of medieval Europe, with the pulpits of its parish churches playing the part of television sets. The landowner, the serf and the craftsman would all attend the same mass; the same words of the sermon would be spoken to them all, and the same appeal addressed to all. The flow of information was decidedly one-directional and no more reversible than that in present-day television. And as for authority and the universality of reception, even the most clever of television experts would find it hard to compete. Nonetheless, the Church failed to produce a mass culture. Not only the ways of dress and ways of life, but also the ideals and moral standards, and even beliefs which are the least dependent on one's position in life - all remained diversified among the public the Church had. The words spoken from the pulpit were the same for all the faithful, but apparently the ears of the listeners were covered with different kinds of adhesive, designed to absorb different kinds of substances, with the result that to every pair of ears different contents adhered. The chemical composition of the adhesive had first to be standardized for the messages that were uniform when broadcast to become uniform also when received. Culture began to acquire a mass character...when the branches of the same broadcasting system began to reach a mass audience, but when certain conditions of life and social situations became the lot of the masses - when these conditions and these situations, no longer diversified, ceased to diversify the selectivity of reception." (1972,pp.64-65). Baumann's parallels between the Medieval Church and modern day mass media and on his insistence of the effect of the mass media being dependent on the existence of a mass culture and, in turn, a massification of structural situations are extremely useful. Both statements are undoubtedly correct theoretically, but their empirical basis has severe shortcomings: (1) There is a qualitative difference between contemporary systems of mass media and any hitherto mass dissemination of ideas, whether it is from the pulpits of Medieval Europe in the newspapers of early capitalism. The sheer amount of consumption alone is staggering. Estimates vary, but perhaps the average adult in Britain spends 45% of his or her 'waking' week in contact with the mass media (Turnstall, 1983). After work, sleep and shopping, there is scarcely else. No pulpit outside of monastic orders could demand such an allegiance. We have, thus, a large amount of information provided by various routes, delivered to the modern public. To this extent there is a reality to the notion of the modern period being a 'knowledge society' (Ericson et al, 1987) and involving an 'information revolution' (Smith A, 1980). And in this process journalists have a particularly important role as the active transmitters of such knowledge. Rather than merely reflecting news, they have a role of interpreting reality of funny 'facts'into news stories. (For a full discussion of this see Cohen and Young, 1981, Part One). As Richard Ericson and his associates put it: "A case can be argued that journalists' power of transforming knowledge into the common sense gives them a special place and influence in the contemporary knowledge society. The news worker is not merely 'an information broker to society' and news is not simply 'a library of human activity' (Smith, 1980:11). Journalism is much more active than this. Journalists are not only a hub and repository, but are active agents of organized life. As linkers and transformers of knowledge in its most elementary forms, journalists offer perpetual articulations of organized life: its problems and prospects, its excesses and successes, its sense of failure and promise of progress. Thus, journalists and their news products have a central place in the knowledge society. Commentators on the knowledge society have stressed the increasing power of those with specialist knowledge (e.g. Gabel, 1984; Böhme, 1984), but they have ignored the very significant power available to those, such as journalists, who are in a position to transform specialized knowledge into the common sense." (1987,p.347). There may not be a Central Committee of the Bourg...which controls the flow of information to the population, but there is a motley of journalists who daily seek to interpret events. As far as criminology is concerned, we have seen that crime and the criminal justice system is a staple news commodity. Furthermore, that the range of possible mass media influences embraces, not only the images of crime and its control, but carries powerful notices of aspiration and reward which link closely to the causes of crime itself. (2) Baumann, as a mass cultural theorist, overemphasises the mass nature of modern society. In part this is simply a problem of level of analysis. Of course, it is true that modern society places enormous numbers of people in very similar structural positions. Traditional differences of region, gender and class are transformed by the situation of the mass market in labour and consumer goods, common - although not equal - positioning in work and administrative bureaucracies, the massification of dress, culminary preferences and marital and sexual practices. Modernity sweeps all before it in the long sweep of history and irons out many regional and cultural differences. The present bringing together of Europe is a case in point, where, despite a wide disparity of tongues, the same language of mass bureaucracy and the market place generates a common European identity. On a structural level, the entry of women into the work force in the post-1945 period is a phenomenon of extraordinary significance. This being said, a diversity of structural positions exist generated by precisely the forces which have transformed the relatively isolated cultural patchwork of feudal and early capitalist societies. In the present period we can note the diverse nature of employment, the marginalized class on the edge of the market, the dual work role of women, the emergence of the adolescent role, the rise of a very sizeable elderly, retired population, the plethora of ethnic groups brought together by mass immigration, etc. On one level, the world is brought together with common notions of basic citizenship - embracing ideas of base line levels of consumer involvement, political rights and social mobility. On the other, we have a diversity of structural positions. It is a paramount feature of subcultural theory that subcultures emerge out of the interaction between common cultural concerns and diverse subcultural perspectives and that the latter perspectives are a product of the diverse material predicament in which subgroups find themselves. Such a subcultural analysis illuminates the perennial debate on the effects of the mass media. For too long this has been expressed, often implicitly, in positivistic terms. Does the portrayals of violence increase the amount of violence in society, does the glamorization of crime, does pornography generate sexual violence, etc? The important stress in subcultural theory is how the values of the subgroup determine the type of media consumed, their interpretation of the media and its effect. For those who have a culture which abhors violence on television, whether it is gangster films or news about the Gulf War, merely increases their abhorrence of violence. In the latter instance, in early 1991, the Peace Movement was understandably revitalized by the photographs of violence, however sanitized in military jargon - 'carpet bombing',
In the case of pornography, radical feminists such as Andrea D... (1981) and conservative moralists such as Mary Whitehouse (XXXX) are obviously not driven to sexual deviance by their much higher than average consumption of such material. Rather, they are revolted and repelled - their moral crusades against pornography are fuelled by their experience of pornography. All of this underscores the fact that, anyone attempting to make correlators between violence in the mass media and violent behaviour, will be bedeviled by the fact that the same material will have negative effects on some groups of people and positive effects on others, whilst on others it will simply have no effect at all. To add up the scores and try to make correlations, let alone impute causality, is an exercise in nonsense. This is not to suggest that the mass media has no effect; rather it is to argue that effect of the mass media is, of necessity, interpreted through subcultures. And just as the effects of the pains of imprisonment varies with the subculture experiencing imprisonment (e.g. men vs. women in prison, Jews compared to Jehovah's Witnesses in German concentration camps), the messages of the mass media are selectively interpreted, absorbed or rejected by the subgroup of the audience concerned. But the material predicament of the subculture, the
GAP 5.The Problem of Objectivity "I sometimes have a sense of working-class kids suffering an awful triple fate. First, their actual current prospects are grim enough; then their predicament is used, shaped and turned to financial profit by the same interests which created it - and then - the final irony - they find themselves patronized in the latest vocabulary imported from the Left Bank.2 (S Cohen, 1980,pp.xxviii). Subcultural theory insists on being "appreciative" of taking the subjective meanings that criminal values have seriously. Their account, it is argued, is a vital part of the explanation. First, give your actors the chance to speak for themselves and then place their beliefs in the objective centre which the theorist has worked out. The irony is that what often happens is that the subjectivity which the theorist recounts to the reader is, in fact, very largely a projection of his own "objective" vision. That is, just as too much coherence is teased out of subcultures, so often this teasing is very selective and creative on the part of the theorist. Sometimes, the actors themselves cannot understand the interpretation. It reminds one of Genet's rueful comment that he could not understand a word of the biography that Sartre wrote of him. Stan Cohen puts this point well: "This leads on to the vexing issue of consciousness and intent.... Now it would be as absurd to demand here that every bearer of symbols walk around with structuralist theory in his head, as it would be to expect the oppressed to have a detailed knowledge of dialectical materialism. It seems to me, though, that somewhere along the line, symbolic language implies a knowing subject, a subject at least dimly aware of what the symbols are supposed to mean. To be really tough-minded about this, our criterion for whether or not to go along with a particular symbolic interpretation should be Beckett's famous warning to his critics: 'no symbols where none intended'." (Ibid,pp.xiii-xiv). This problem is one of methodology involving the "dangers of the forest of symbols without a method". (p.xvii). Thus, Cohen takes issue with Dick Hebdidge's assertion that the use of swastikas by punks was really not a sign of Fascist inclinations - for, in fact, they tended to support the anti-Fascist movement. That is, the symbol was 'read' the opposite of its usual meaning. This, he points out, goes:
"right against widespread findings about the racism and support for restrictive immigration policies among substantial sections of working class youth....We are given no clue about how these particular actors manage the complicated business of distancing and irony. In the end, there is no basis whatsoever for choosing between this particular sort of interpretation and any others: say, that for many or most of the kids walking around with swastikas on their jackets, the dominant context is simple conformity, blind ignorance or knee-jerk racism." (Ibid, pp.xvii-xviii). There is a danger that such groups become sort of subcultural Rorschach blobs onto which the theorist projects his or her own private definitions of objectivity. At the very least, then, one must proceed with an adequate methodology. It is a pity that we have so soon forgotten the demand so frequent in the sixties that sociological research should be fed back to the subjects of investigation to see if they recognized themselves in the accounts of the social scientist. Very often - they cannot; and very often, as David Matza has indicated, they protest, in very conventional terms, over the manner in which their behaviour was being interpreted. 6. The Problem of Causality In the process of giving history to a particular subculture the present ongoing events often become overwhelmed by the causality of the past. The delinquent gang thus acts out an essence formed in the past: black youth are given plenty of causality in the past (for example, in their African roots), but that causality in the past is seen to override t he present. This is cultural essentialism, which is very similar in form to Freudianism. It is not that it denies causality - far from it - but it puts it in the past where the mould has formed. Events after that become merely precipitating circumstances. For example, the importance of changes in policing is underestimated in the causality of alienation. In some of the theories the kids seem to replay the problems of their parents as if they were characters in an Ibsen play. The focus on subculture as already caused as an essence that unfolds, often loses sight of the importance of the ongoing trajectory. The way in which administrative agencies can impact and change the path of a subculture. And the way in which subcultures can creatively change. It is as if the subculture was granted creativity by the theorist when concentrating on the first causes, but thereafter is denied it. The focus on subculture not only denies the impact of administrative agencies, it also denies the structural reality of the agencies themselves. That is, there is no symmetry in the understanding of the world. The subcultural actors exist in a different order of existence than the agencies of control that surround them. thus, for example, a subcultural approach to the police would note how the police - like juvenile delinquents, for example, exist in a particular structural pattern in the world which carries with it certain problems. (The problem of dealing with what is perceived as rising street crime, for instance). The police evolve a subculture which attempts to understand and solve these problems. The material problems change over time and so does the police subculture. It is this perspective that I have attempted to utilize throughout this book, as I chart changes in police practice and the feedback and consequences of this on the police and public. Such an approach attempts to both see police practices in the context of shifting beliefs and practices. It parallels and interacts with the analysis of delinquent subcultures themselves. It is rarely attempted in subcultural literature which tends to approach the police from an extraordinarily unsophisticated angle. That is, causality is seen as being extremely distinct, very obvious and ineluctable. It is the needs of capital which generates an ineluctable swing towards the strong state. Policing is one vital part of such a movement. But once such an unexplicated, disconnected, ex cathedra causality has been briefly hinted at - then a full-blown voluntarism becomes the order of the day. Chief Commissioners supposedly act out the logic of capital with a precision which would be the envy of any economist. It is causality which generates major problems for subcultural theories. Here all its virtues, all its attempts to transcend the dichotomies of subjectivity-objectivity, past-present, creativity-determination and the macro and micro-levels seem to come adrift. I will deal with the more serious of these problems, all of which centre around the tendency towards cultural essentialism. that is, seeing a subculture as a fixed essence which unfolds rather than one which is a continuous human creation. Essentialism occurs in all the sciences which deal with human behaviour. In subcultural theory in ironically parallels genetic essentialism which views people as playing out the destiny of their genes; we are all only too aware of this tendency in fascist thought, and it has re-emerged recently in the work of various right-wing psychiatrists. (I don't know if I've put the first part of this sentence in the correct order). Subculture as a Non-Static State A.K,. Cohen is one of the most perceptively critical articles on subcultural theory, written in 1965, notes the assumption of discontinuity implicit in its present formulations. "It treats the deviant act", he writes, "as though it were an abrupt change of state, a leap from a state of strain or anomie to a state of deviance." Thus it deals with initial states and eventual outcomes, but neglects the interactive process that occurs between these stages. Instead: "Human action, deviant or otherwise, is something that typically develops and grows in a tentative, groping, advancing, backtracking, sounding-out process. People taste and feel their way along. They begin an ct and do not complete it. They start doing one thing and end up by doing another. They extricate themselves from progressive involvement or become further involved to the point of commitment." (1965,p.5). This type of analysis is in the tradition of the labelling theorists such as Becker and Lemert; and it is this notion of a gradual process that must be wedded to anomie theory and which is a major task of this article. Merton, for example, moves from anomie to delinquency in a sharp discontinuous fashion, intervening variables determine the form of the deviancy it is true, but these are once and for all interventions which are not considered in processual terms. Cohen's innovation was to formulate a framework for analyzing the nature of such a process described above by utilising the Mertonian notion of opportunity structure, but giving it a new flexibility suitable for an interaction theory. "The history of the deviant act", he writes, "is a history of an interaction process. The antecedents of the act are an unfolding sequence of acts contributed by a set of actors. A makes a move, possibly in a deviant direction; B responds; A responds to B's response, etc...." Now: "The disjunction between goals and means and the choice of adaptions depends on the opportunity structure. The opportunity structure consists in or is the result of, the actions of other people. These, in turn, are in part reactions to ego's behaviour and may undergo change in response to that behaviour. The development of ego's action can, therefore, be conceptualised as a series of responses on the part of ego, to a series of changes in the opportunity structure resulting from ego's actions. More specifically, altered responses may open up, close off, or leave unaffected legitimate opportunities for ego, and they may to the same to illegitimate opportunities." (1965;pp.9-10). Thus the interaction process between the ego and the environment can be seen in terms of changes in the opportunity structure which the environment presents to the individual. That is, the disjunction between the aspirations and possibilities (i.e. anomie) of the actor, will fluctuate as both the aspirations of ego and the possibilities presented by the environment change. For example, anomie can lead to deviant action which can, because of societal reaction, reduce the existing possibilities of realisation of ego's aspirations, causing an increase in the anomie of the actor and a spiral of increasing deviance of the sort:- aspirations of ego greater than possibilities | | | deviant behaviour | societal | reaction in | response to ------------------------------| deviancy of | ego | | | | reduced possibilities for ego | to real|ise aspirations | | positive | | feedback | | | | | |----increase in---------------------increased deviancy societal reaction Thus we have a model where the degree of anomie of the actors in a particular structural position is in flux. Such a situation, similar to the particular diagram above, is suggested by Lindesmith and Ganon in their critique of subcultural theory: "The use of drugs is supposed to reduce or eliminate the inner strain resulting from anomie. Yet it is clear that the primary effect of addiction is to widen substantially the gap between aspirations and the means of achievement and to intensify rather than resolve inner anomie-generated conflict." (1964,p.6). This movement in the degree of anomie experienced by individuals may, of course, proceed in either direction, dependent partly on the configuration or opportunities available to the actor. I have chosen examples where anomie is intensified merely for illustrative purposes. Labelling theory studies the building up of deviant behaviour in the form of a process; I am postulating that inherent in this very process is the varying degree of anomie of the action which is, in turn, a function of the interaction system. Thus what occurs in reality is a constant interaction between the actions of the deviant individual and the societal reactions of his or her environment. Solutions to particular initial problems create new problems, generated internally by the inherent contradiction existing in the emerging subculture, and externally by the nature and degree of societal reaction which the solution has evoked from society. New solutions create new contradictions and social responses, and the change in the latter represents a new environment - and therefore problems - for the group. Groups evolve hypotheses as to the nature of their situation and the likely solutions to their problems; they test these hypotheses out in praxis, and, in the conflict between them and the wider society, re-view their situation and formulate alternative hypotheses - however inarticulate - which are, once again, applied to their situation. At an articulate level, the movement of the ghetto American black from the hedonistic culture of the 'cat' and the 'hustle', to the disciplined puritanism of the Muslims, to the revolutionary stance of the Black Panthers and beyond to a further regroupment after the onslaught of the FBI, is a paradigm instance of this process. |
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