Counter Culture, Subculture and Punk Culture (aka CMN 2180B - Fall 2018 - Class 9)
Well 💩… the semester is over and I still have about a dozen of blog posts to put up pertaining to the popular culture course that I taught (and am still grading for) this Fall. Prioritization was definitely key to getting through the semester and finishing off some major work projects and papers and the blog took a back seat. However, I’ll be teaching popular culture again this Winter and finishing up these posts is an opportunity to keep the material fresh.
So, that begs the question, where did we leave off last? Well… to bring you back to the purpose of my CMN 2180 Course, it’s to show how popular culture is more than just entertainment - it’s a series of carefully constructed images and performances that influence our perceptions, our identity and ultimately our behaviour. In my last blog post about my course, we looked at some of the ways that our identities can be understood - politically, socially, culturally and economically - and we focused primarily on our social and cultural identities.
Like identity, there are lots of ways to under culture and subcultures, which is the focus of this blog post and the next lecture in my popular culture class.
Subcultures, like many terms that we look at in academia, is one that is misused and overused. It can be imprecise and include everything from summer camps to university faculty to youth groups. In order to begin to understand the meaning of subculture, we must first consider where it comes from.
The highest level of culture is national culture (although this is, arguably, and outdated concept with globalization and the erasure of national borders). Generally speaking, when we speak of a national culture, we are speaking about cultures that are associated with a nation-state. It is a permanent fixture in society. In contrast, a group culture is transient - it doesn’t set up patterns or expectations for all social interactions but rather guides behaviour in one part of our lives. Office settings are good example of a group culture; it’s a setting that has specific norms and expectations that we can leave behind when we leave the office for the day. A subculture is more permanent, more wholistic than a group culture. It exists in parallel to national culture, sharing common values with it, and provides a network of groups and institutions that extend throughout a person’s lifetime.
Counter cultures exist in value conflict with national culture (or mainstream society), so much so that they reject the norms and values that unite the dominant culture. They’re long-lasting and viable for more than one generation, which permits for the values of the group to be passed down. This is in contrast to contra-cultures which are not self-sufficient or long-lasting but still run in opposition to mainstream society.
If counter cultures arise because of a value conflict and the rejection of the norms and values of dominant culture, what kinds of values are significant enough to have this happen?
It’s important to note that a thriving culture requires variation. Every culture has to have members who engage in different types of behaviour - after all not everyone can be a doctor or lawyer, we need teachers and servers, dogwalkers and cashiers - and it has to be more than just personality differences. What we’re really talking about when we’re talking about value conflicts are values that are central, integral, to a culture. Roberts (1978) considers this from the perspective of distributive justice, which he defines as “how goods, services, power, status, and respect are divided up in a society” and all of the values that go with it. He examines three models of distributive justice - ascription (inheritance), achievement (merit/work), and communitarianism (equality) - and finds that a value conflict emerges between a dominant culture and a subculture, thereby making it a counterculture, when there is greater variation between the two groups than within them.
Roberts then goes on to identify four different types of countercultural groups, which he positions along two axes: system of action (how sufficient a group is) and extent of institutionalization (how connected the subculture is).
Once we’ve identified that a subculture exists, and determined that it is in fact a counter culture because of the presence of a value conflict, then we can examine other characteristics of the group to determine what type of counter cultural phenomenon. This is important because it allows for the prediction of group behaviour and group longevity, as well as cross-cultural comparisons.
In order to develop a better understand of the Roberts’ theory and classification system, we apply it in a tangible, testable way, by considering whether “punk” is a subculture or counterculture. Punk rock first emerged in the 1970s, where it was understood as a site of resistance against a specific political system. Punks represented youthful anger, against both their parents and mainstream institutions. They expressed this anger in their lyrics, in their performances and use of shock tactics, and in their notable visual appearance and style. But what if ‘subculture’ isn’t the right word to describe punks?
Scholarly work in the 1990s experimented with other terminology to describe the punk phenomenon: “neo-tribe” and“post-subculture” continued to place emphasis on face-to-face interactions and visual style; “scene”, according to Bennett and Peterson, allowed for a more varied range of fan practices and locations, while better encapsulating the experience of older punks.
In his study of older punks, Bennett (2006) found that they placed less emphasis on visual associations with punk culture. They adopted smaller fashion accents and accessories like tattoos and sew-on patches and more subtle haircuts instead of brightly coloured mohawks. This shift reflected, among other things, increasing responsibilities and time demands as punks transitioned into adulthood. It also spoke to the internalization of ‘punk values’ rather than their visual representation. Similarly, older punks de-emphasized quantitative face-to-face interactions, preferring larger festivals with high quality artists than attending many local performances.
What Bennett found was a shift in the perception of what it means to be “punk” that coincides with age and maturity. Punk, and being punk, has to be negotiated in the context of our everyday life - the demands of which shift and evolve over time. Punk effectively becomes a lifestyle for older punks, a set of beliefs and practices so ingrained and internalized that they do not need to dramatically reconfirmed through striking visual displays of commitment.
Bennett also compared the relationship and interactions between younger punks and older punks that took place at concerts. He found that older punks occupied a privileged space in these places - they no longer got involved in the mosh pits but rather sat on the periphery, observing and taking the entire show. They were perceived as and even thought of themselves as forefathers to the contemporary punk movement, having beers with younger punks and passing on the stories, the history of the punk movement.
Now that we’ve first come to understand what a counterculture is and what a subculture is, and we’ve examined different aspects of punk culture, we’re finally ready to answer the question… is punk a counter-culture?
Punk first emerged as a counterculture - it was a site of resistance and rebellion that was in value conflict with mainstream society. It, like both subcultures and countercultures, has a publicly articulated identity, is multi-generational, and is easily identifiable through its visual style and iconic leaders. However, as mainstream society has also become more resistant to dominant institutions, punk culture has become more mainstream. Thus, punk culture could now be classified as subculture because it runs parallel to and shares values and norms (think tattoos or the ongoing frustration with the dominant political regime and its leader, as an example) with mainstream society.
When punk fails as both a subculture and a counterculture is with the absence of women in punk. It’s largely a male-dominated sphere, and the women who do participate have a tendency to be hypersexualized. This, though, is a topic for another day…