Abstract
Looking at the blurbs on the back cover of Profane Culture, you get a first glimpse of why this book deserves to be discussed almost 40 years after the date of its first publication. The celebratory testimonies by Jeffrey Alexander, Mitchell Duneier, and three European scholars of cultural studies (Mats Trondman, Anna Lund, and Stefan Lund) point to the confluence of three intellectual schools that have grown apart as the study of culture has become institutionalized: cultural sociology, with its attention to cultural structures in the generation of practices, selfhood, and meaning-making; careful ethnographies of working-class and deviant subgroups and their idiolects; and the normative study of cultural autonomy among dominated subcultures and their creative use of dominant culture. Part of the explanation for this happy convergence is the attention Paul Willis dedicates to two subjects that have become central to the sociological study of culture in recent years: processes of embodiment and the role of materiality in everyday life. From this vantage point, the book develops a particular theory of how social groups and cultural objects interact and the potential avenues through which this happens. Far from the one-to-one attribution of meaning of the Durkheimian school, Willis masterfully shows how objects and selves interact, indicating to one another the available paths to follow.
Willis is part of the second generation of British cultural studies, having worked with both Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. His work can be read as concerned with some of the classic coordinates of this school, emphasizing the change in focus in the study of cultural practices from the realm of highbrow to lowbrow and concerned with a dialectical version of culture that shows what those from below do first with the culture produced by the elite and then with mass culture. His work also signals a second movement in the study of culture, leaving behind literary analysis and interpretation in favor of ethnographic experimentation. In that displacement, Willis applied and extended the close reading techniques he learned in Cambridge and combined them with a humanist interest in the creativity of subaltern groups to constitute themselves within capitalist power relations. To do so, he adopted the anti-intellectual posture of subordinate groups with the hopes of developing concepts sensitive to the lives of the populations under study. His thick-layered interpretation of the cultures of hippies and motor bikers is not about the investigator “reading” and saying “here we have a cultural form and there is society; this is how they relate,” but rather about what practitioners themselves report in terms of which cultural materials play a role in determining how subjects constitute themselves.
The book is set up as a comparison between two cases, one working class (the motor bikers) and the other mostly middle class (the hippies). In exploring culture from the sixties, with its promise of heralding a new set of open and democratic human relations, Willis shows that what both groups share is the quest to achieve “authenticity,” though they differ greatly in the meanings they attach to that concept, the styles of selfhood they envision, and the cultural devices they mobilize. Willis shows, through which versions of selfhood they achieve, that the politics of style allow subjects to construct variations on the mainstream via the use of mass culture, and he explores the role of cultural items in constituting these lifestyles.
For the biker boys it was a “masculine” style based on simulated versions of aggression, on moving quickly and with confidence, and in opposition to qualities perceived as feminine, like delicacy and artificiality. They aimed to achieve ontological security in the muscular style of early rock ‘n’ roll. Despite the potentially anachronistic character of the attachment, biker boys made the music resonate with their lives. Being active and affirmative was so important that even linguistic choices—as when negative opinions are expressed as actions, or descriptions are carried in the form of onomatopoeia—follow consequently.
On the other hand, for the hippies authenticity is achieved through the rejection of traditional middle-class career-meritocratic values: meaningful living is based on the search for experiences. The self was organized around spirituality, via fuller states of awareness, emphasizing the “now” of temporality over long-term planning. In line with the romantic roots of British Marxism, Willis describes the hippie lifestyle as confronting the devaluation of everyday life because of technological rationalism. Hippies achieved a powerless omniscience through identification with underprivileged groups and the pursuit of organic and natural styles, carefully crafted through the disorganization of fashion as seen in their long hair, the music they listened to (progressive rock), their drug use, and the randomness of their object choices. To summarize, for Willis, in symbolizing their conditions, bikers and hippies create forms of culture made out of particular objects and ways of acting and carrying themselves in the world.
The evidentiary pillar that Willis’s research is based on is long-term ethnographic immersion in these groups, emphasizing the sensuous and lived character of cultural production with a focus on the body, both in how it operates in the production of sensibility and in how the ethnographer’s own body is a tool for producing data, a research instrument for exposing himself to the same conditions and issues experienced by the people he is studying. Willis’s ethnographic perspective also anticipates technical and rhetorical devices common nowadays in some of our best-known qualitative studies: the role of reflexivity, using participant perceptions of the ethnographer as a source of data; and the role of recordings. He used the latter in two different ways. First, he used tape more as a way to capture the elusive quality of time as it passes than as a tool to establish the one-on-one correspondence between fieldwork and its inscription as data. Second, Willis played his own music records for the hippies, hoping to record what kinds of reactions they elicited.
So, what is in this book for sociology? Or, more pointedly, how does the book contribute to our contemporary understanding of culture? In Learning to Labour we gathered lessons about the autonomous character of working-class culture and its complicit and paradoxical role in class reproduction. Here we learn about how cultural materials participate in the production of selves and groups. Willis’s theory of culture provides additional lessons to the new sociological debates on the culture of poverty; instead of imagining the cultural and social autonomy of the world of subaltern populations as a given, the book shows how the “feeling of us,” of groupness, is always precarious, something to be achieved. It is constructed both through relationships with others (for example, the police, schoolteachers, migrants) as much as with other members of the same social class who choose other cultural materials to make sense of who they are (in the case of the bikers, the mods, for instance). The relationships also include gendered associations with women: in one case, women constitute an inverted mirror of what is to be achieved (an assertive masculinity and an action-oriented perspective on the world for the biker boys), and in the other women are an organic component of the culture to be aspired to (as when hippies consider women closer to nature).
Groups are always thought of as relationally constituted. The links between groups and objects, and between some cultural items and other cultural items, are built as homologies. But instead of an arbitrary character of meaning attribution, and of a one-to-one relationship between social positions and the items that are used to express them imagined by Durkheimians and structuralists, Willis proposes to study what it is that those materials actually afford. How do they lend themselves to be used to express the forms of masculinity, authenticity, and spirituality I have described? How do they help people to feel that they are taking part in a group and to convert their structural conditions into everyday concrete practices?
Combining the analysis of cultural structures via homologies with a Marxist focus on experiences through the notion of style, Profane Culture advances its argument in two parts: first, how the “feeling of us” is distinctly achieved for hippies and bikers; and second, the indexical, homological, and polyvalent role of objects and the meaning possibilities they hold for those who use them. Regarding the first, the book highlights the ontological security and integrity provided to bikers by the beat of their music, their way of handling themselves, the use of words as actions, and the restless movement that is a constant in their lives. If the bikers were able to subvert industrial and bourgeois time thanks to their steady state of being, hippies, on the other hand, subverted time by avoiding plans and schedules as much as they could, as well as by aiming to have “experiences,” dissolving the diachronical movement of the clock. Hippies found a confirmation of themselves in the exploration of what made each and every one of them unique, as well as in their common work toward achieving community, which was considered something to be accomplished, always precarious, not taken for granted. Uniqueness was achieved through big gestures; being a “head” was all about speaking in a way that involved surprise and movement. It was also about using drugs and listening to music that disregarded the classical bar structure. Now, let me expand on this last point further.
Willis studies the use of cultural items like music and drugs, paying close attention to the polyvalent relationship between groups and objects. While the meanings are culturally constructed, the construction, nevertheless, derives from the “objective” possibilities of the cultural items themselves. This phenomenon can be studied at the level of the homological—as I have already discussed—but also at the “indexical” level, by examining the frequency with which certain cultural materials are “indexed” into a group. If drugs offered to hippies the opening up of time and the paradoxical achievement of freedom through a lack of autonomy, the music—artists and groups like Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, or Van Morrison—resonated with them by allowing for logocentrism to be kept at bay by the unobjectified complexity of the music’s sonic explorations. The subversion of the tonal structure, the overthrowing of harmony as the basic musical skeleton, and the advent of the concept album further allowed for explorations with time and consciousness that were closely in line with what hippies wanted to feel. Music, being an “experience,” also allowed hippies to escape the determinations of their class.
For biker boys, music provided an avenue to authenticity and masculinity. The key was the muscularity and physicality of the beat in early rock ‘n’ roll (e.g., Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly), but the format also mattered, with 78s preferred to 45s. Biker boys also entered into a symbiotic relationship with another material: the motorbike. Willis shows how the boys adapted and subverted a technological device, emphasizing the anthropomorphization of the machine and how its strength and movement matched the secure nature of the boys’ world. Handlebars, to point to another cultural item, provided a sense of style but also increased the ability to handle the bike with ease, giving the feeling of being one with the motorcycle, almost like a modern centaur.
Willis shows how a group cannot choose just a random cultural item, and neither can a cultural item attach itself to just any group. And, to show how cultural relationships are deepened over time, he explores the processes of “substantiation” and “accumulation,” underscoring how items become increasingly and extensively transparent in their meaning. In respecting the materiality of cultural objects, the book is, to a certain extent, an investigation of popular music and its uses from a sociological perspective as much as an aesthetic analysis of popular music and its sociological consequences, making sure not to let one perspective supersede the other. The book showed for the first time music in action and had the subjects “themselves establish the connection between music and social life” (DeNora 2000:6).
Unfortunately, after a start where cultural materials were ethnographically presented as enablers of lifestyles and forms of consciousness (beyond Willis, think of the work of Dick Hebdige [1979]), cultural studies has slowly moved into a combination of first-person testimonies, analysis of literary texts as representative of social groups, and content analysis of lyrics and texts instead of interrogating consumers about what different works mean to them and about the performances through which consumers have built a relationship with these works. Cultural sociologists, on the other hand, have smartly moved away from this cultural studies tradition in which the process of signification is erroneously equated with and reduced to content analysis. Unfortunately, some other subdisciplines have adopted the cultural-studies legacy, moving further and further away from the insights of books like Profane Culture. Instead of exploring the actual work and how it produces engagement, like Willis, many have moved away from studying what people do with things and more into content analyses where they assume class/race/gender as the taken-for-granted explanation for the cultural object and its effects. The real promise of reissuing this book for cultural sociologists is in helping us to move beyond the reduction of culture to a pre-structured intersection (or its resistance) and to refocus on the symbolic work people perform on commodities in ordinary life.
In his just-published memoir, anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano wonders, “Must we punctuate the past only with pain? Can we organize it around pleasurable moments? . . . Would a pleasure punctuated life be less vibrant?” (2015:96). Profane Culture has opened up an avenue to explore how we can study what is pleasurable in life, even among those who might seem, at first glance, the most subject to domination and suffering. I hope a new generation of scholars reads this updated edition and aims to follow its path.