ABSTRACT
SUBCULTURAL STUDIES GAINED some clarity and defi nition in the early 1970s through graduate student research into British subcultures at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) and the subsequent publication of two remarkably infl uential books: Stuart Hall and Tony Jeff erson’s edited collection, Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (1975), and Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). The CCCS was established in 1964 under the directorship of Richard Hoggart, with money from Sir Allen Lane of Penguin Books; and it is where British Cultural Studies is also generally said to have formally begun. Cultural Studies has written and rewritten its own history as a discipline over and over – compulsively, it can sometimes seem – and this is not the place to rehearse that history all over again. My focus, however, is on subcultural studies, which means this chapter’s approach to CCCS commentaries will be a little diff erent. The key to British Cultural Studies in the 1970s is class, and specifi cally the working class or proletariat; but as we have seen, subcultures are often positioned outside of class, closer in kind to Marx’s lumpenproletariat, lacking class consciousness, self-absorbed or self-interested, at a distance from organised or sanctioned forms of labour, and so on. Subcultures were therefore a problem for British Cultural Studies, but also a kind of symptom, an eff ect. The focus on class both caused that problem, and seemed to help explain it.
