Contemporizing ‘subculture’: 30 years to life

In May 2010 I was invited by Spanish curator, Aimar Arriola, to participate in a project entitled Style/As Resistance sponsored by the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm as part of their CuratorLab program. Aimar asked me to reflect on how my book, Subculture (first published in 1979) came to be written and ‘the current relevance of its main assumptions’ (Arriola, 2011). These reflections would take the form of responses to a set of questions posed by four individuals from different backgrounds and disciplines, each with different professional, intellectual and existential stakes in the designated topic: Esther Leslie, Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, University of London; Spanish philosopher and queer activist, Beatriz Preciado; Ina Blom, art critic and professor at the University of Oslo; and Lars Bang Larsen, an art historian and curator based in Kassel and Copenhagen. I agreed to the undertaking and the interview was published together with essays and photo-essays from more than a dozen European artists and activists in Style/As Resistance (Album, 2011). What follows is a ‘mash-up’ of that extended email interview and portions of another interview conducted in 2005 by LA-based artist and curator, Brad Eberhard, for a Bay Area art and poetry magazine called The Lonely Seagull, together with a few extemporaneous remarks thrown in to segue back and forth between the two (the interview questions are reproduced along with the interlocutors’ names in the appendix).

Subculture was thrown together on the run between 1977 and 1978 with events (e.g. UK punk) haphazardly unfolding and the publication deadline ominously descending so that, far from being freely chosen at leisure, the conceptual architecture of the book, such as it is – rickety, ramshackle, heterogeneous – was ‘over-determined’, as they used to say in the 1970s, at every turn by the context and the circumstances in which it was written, and by the necessarily limited resources available to me at the time of writing. I should add that at the time of writing I was in my mid-twenties, a recent first-generation university graduate from a working-class background with a Master of Arts degree from Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in a then just emerging interdiscipline called cultural studies.

At the time of writing I’d already left the Centre and was earning a living teaching part-time on a circuit of several provincial UK art schools while simultaneously performing various (poorly) paid chores for a funk, rock, ska and reggae sound system called the Shoop run by Mike Horseman, a friend, collaborator and sometime business partner in Birmingham. In other words, rather than being a salaried academic paid to do youth research in a university social science or humanities department, I’d joined the ranks of what I believe Richard Florida calls the ‘precariat’: the (over-)educated, precariously employed, post-industrial ‘creative class’ equivalent to Marx’s industrial proletariat.

To get a sense of how Subculture came to assume the shape it did with its mixed methodologies, its peculiar mélange of theories and stylistic tics, it might make sense 30 years on to specify in some detail the context and circumstances in which the book was written. First off, the book didn’t start as a proposal submitted unprompted to a publisher. It was commissioned by University of Cardiff English professor and editor, Terence Hawkes, as part of a series published by Methuen called ‘New Accents’, which was designed to introduce new theoretical and interpretive approaches to English-speaking students of ‘Literature’, broadly defined.

The ‘New Accents’ books were to be short, sharp and accessible. Hawkes approached Stuart Hall – then the Director of Birmingham University’s CCCS, which had historical and administrative links to the University’s English department – and asked him if he knew any recent graduates who could write an introductory text on the semiotics of youth subcultural style, and my name came up. ¹

During the two years I spent full-time at CCCS (1972–74) I’d been just one of a working group of graduate students that included Tony Jefferson, Angela McRobbie, John Clarke and Brian Roberts. Together we’d been developing a contextual, culturalist model of youth culture and consumption, building on the groundbreaking work done by Phil Cohen in the late 1960s on working- and lower-middle-class adolescent youths in London’s East End. ² The book contract for Subculture gave me an opportunity to further elaborate and test the model, to connect some of the concerns about youth culture, consumption and the politics of insubordination more directly to debates within aesthetics, semiotics, poststructuralism and so forth.

I was also interested in problematizing or at least bringing more nuance to some of the ideas about class, masculinity and ethnic identity articulated in the earlier work. There’d been a lot of what I thought were rather unexamined assumptions concerning working-class boys and violence, much of it carried over from the research of Anglo-American sociologists in the 1950s and early 1960s on urban gangs and juvenile delinquency, etc. that still resonated in the work in Britain on soccer hooliganism, working-class territorialism and so on. I thought that this warranted some elaboration and, perhaps, some qualification. So, coming at British youth culture as I did from a working-class dandy- ‘deviant’ perspective (‘deviance’ was a keyword in the late 1960s/early 1970s in the UK – the annual National Deviancy Conference was one of the principal hubs for the anarcho-Left-inflected new criminology, and the Social Deviants were an influential band on the early London psychedelic scene), as someone shaped in part by mod (I grew up in south-west London in the 1950s and 60s), and as someone with a continuing existential and quasi-professional stake in the fashion/music interface (e.g working for the Shoop sound system), I set out in Subculture to ‘queer the pitch’ as the English say, to put some spin on the ball – to use a term from two very English sports: snooker and cricket. ³

UK punk, which happened to take off at more or less the same time I signed the book contract in late 1976, and which could therefore serve conveniently as the real-time case study for whatever theories I wanted to throw at it, took the word ‘hooligan’ and put quotation marks around it. It tweaked the way that that 1970s buzzword ‘crisis’ was understood. Angela McRobbie’s critique of the masculinist bias in Subculture is spot on: the book is all about the boys though, of course, given the pantomime of male abjection that punk was then in the process of staging, British masculinity in the mid- to late 1970s was yet again in question (i.e. in crisis).

As Laura Kipnis (2006) has argued recently, with the post-Second World War decline of manual labour in the West, the rise of the service, finance and information sectors and the expansion of the full-time female workforce, by the late 1970s vulnerability (i.e. femininity) was by the late 70s already beginning to use Kipnis’s words to be more ‘equitably distributed across the genders’ so that in punk, 20 years before the media debut of the metrosexual some of the boys were, in a sense, well on their way to becoming the new girls. Either way, I wanted to expand the notion of crisis beyond class and capital–labour antagonisms (however culturally mediated) to incorporate gender trouble and questions of conflicted sexual, ethnic and national identity into the picture.

On the latter front, Terence Hawkes originally wanted the book to concentrate specifically on black youth culture. I said that as a white guy I did not feel comfortable speaking for black British youth, but would be interested in ‘racializing’ British youth subcultural studies indirectly, as it were, by framing the succession of spectacular British youth styles as a series of negotiated or symbolic responses to the black presence in postwar Britain. So there is a way in which Subculture could be read as both a celebration and a deconstruction of, on the one hand, (underclass) male narcissism, and on the other, ‘Englishness’ – although I’d have to add immediately that I wasn’t consciously thinking in precisely those terms at the time of writing.

The book also ended up introducing one variant of what is now referred to as the ‘Birmingham School cultural studies’ approach to a topical piece of contemporary British youth culture: i.e., UK punk that, thanks to the international media, fashion and music industries, eventually went global. For better or worse, the two British exports – spectacle punk and Birmingham School cultural studies – got sort of welded together in Subculture and the package went viral. This was good news for me of course: I’ve been travelling on the back of foreign language translations of that little book ever since – though some would no doubt say I did cultural studies proper a disservice by placing a gaudy, cartoonish wrapper on a serious activist and scholarly field of endeavour.

For my part, the hope was that the book’s openly ‘vulgar’ content and appeal might help to establish not just the legitimacy of ‘low’/‘popular’ or media culture as a highly charged/contested field of study, but also the value and utility of cultural studies in particular as a flexible, strategically morphing hybrid of critical approaches to emergent social formations and contemporary cultural phenomena. At the same time, my sense was that there was a potentially much wider, more diverse readership of media-savvy organic intellectuals out there than was being served by either the popular or academic presses. The aspiration was to blur the line a bit between specialized, discipline-embedded academic and intellectually curious subcultural, non-academic readerships. ³

As a beginning writer Subculture was, for me, an experiment rhetorically and conceptually. Looking back now, I think partly what I was trying to do was revisit what Richard Hoggart, who’d founded CCCS back in 1964, famously called in the title of his influential book from 1958, The Uses of Literacy. Hoggart had been concerned about the unmooring effect of Americanized 1950s mass media and early consumer culture on the very circumscribed, constrained but internally cohesive working-class lived culture of Britain in the interwar period. But what did it mean to be literate 20 years after the publication of Hoggart’s groundbreaking book? While Subculture came out long before the widespread availability of the kinds of immersive, digitally constituted, satellite-enabled mediated environments that most of us now routinely inhabit, the cultural, commercial, political and cognitive preconditions for the emergence of social networking technologies and information-sharing platforms like the internet, cellphone, Facebook and YouTube were just beginning to cohere and stabilize by the late 1970s.

Though again I wouldn’t have put it this way at the time of writing, I guess I was intuitively interested in tracking how social identities, politics and knowledge–power relations were being reshaped by converging social, economic and technological developments. Was it possible in the face of these changes to break out of the academic publishing ghetto – to demonstrate what some of the newer critical methods could do without either obscuring the topics under consideration or sensationalizing/trivializing them, without either introducing too much gratuitous jargon or compromising analytical rigour?

This was at the beginning of the Semiotexte era when French theory became, for a brief time in the 1980s, borderline hip in the Anglophone world. There was a growing sense that there was a sizeable untapped market out there of people who wanted to think seriously but playfully about vernacular and material culture. This new potential readership didn’t necessarily line up behind the culturally sanctioned youth and culture ‘experts’, critics and talking heads on TV and in the quality newspapers. Nor did the new visually and sonically attuned ‘readers’ necessarily buy into the traditionally preferred either/or big narratives of historical progress and cultural decline. They didn’t defer to the taken-for-granted bourgeois taste formations and critical canons of the established humanities-educated elites. In fact they didn’t defer to institutionalized authority period. A growing number of them cared passionately about music and/or street style/fashion.

Many of them wanted to think about contemporary culture from different, more ideologically smudged vantage points than the ones generally on offer (e.g romantic, modernist, anti-modernist, etc.), within what Raymond Williams called the ‘culture and society’ tradition. They wanted to think about culture horizontally as well as vertically, to think about it simultaneously from inside and outside, to rub up against the textures and nuances of subculture and (un)popular culture while deferring any rush to judgement. Rather than looking down on popular culture and subculture as bad objects or as purely sociological objects of analysis, or up to them as fetishized and alien exotica, they wanted to level with the (sub)cultures in which they found themselves as reflexively participating subjects.

So that’s why the book reads in the way that it does: I wanted the reader to be both closer and further away from low or ‘unsavoury’ material than tended to be deemed comfortable or proper in academic publishing circles at the time (which explains how that tube of Vaseline got into the first sentence). I wanted to keep the reader on the move-outside the normative stabilized positions prescribed within the critically condoned literature: the position of ‘detached outsider’, say, or ‘(dis)interested spectator’, ‘concerned citizen’ or ‘besotted fan’. Hence the book’s rhetorical-textual strategies, the shifting modes of address and the sliding scales of analysis (from particular to singular to societal, from insider-complicit to structuralist-detached and so on, and back again).

Hence, too, the mix of pop journalism and punk theory: the cutting and pasting from disparate, mismatched sources. That was a deliberate scavenge and repurpose strategy on my part, an attempt to talk through the topic rather than about it. There’s a saying in English: ‘You should cut your coat according to your cloth’, meaning that you should make your actions fit the circumstances and resources at hand. And that’s what I was trying to do: to make the most of the limited critical/rhetorical resources I had at my disposal in order to make some kind of sense of the topic in less than 150 pages (the other 50 or so pages in the book comprise notes, bibliography, index etc). And to do it in such a way that the book’s form (i.e. the writing and thinking style) could serve as an approximate match or mirror for the referential content (i.e. style in subculture): in other words, do-it-yourself bricolaged theory for do-it-yourself bricolaged culture.

In his S/Z phase, Roland Barthes often drew attention to the shared etymology of the words ‘text-ile’ and ‘text-ual – the weave of the text, ravelled and unravelled signifying and a-signifying threads and so on. I wanted literally to run with that connection, to literalize the cloth-cutting metaphor by trying out hybrid, emergent, unfinished critical approaches – semiotic approaches I had in no way mastered – on hybrid, emergent culture-in-the-making (e.g. punk-as-unfolding-action-and-event). Given turnaround times in publishing (then significantly longer than with today’s digital print technologies), I imagine I submitted the finished version of the manuscript at least a year before the book came out in only 78: i.e., some time before the arc of UK punk was fully played out, before punk could be classified as legitimate fodder for (sub)cultural historians and/or ‘I was there’ memoirists.

There was nothing particularly new about this strategy of contemporizing. It was more or less in line with the cultural studies mission, as I understood it at the time, at the Birmingham Centre. (After all, the word ‘Contemporary’ was there in the Centre’s title: a provocation to the primacy of historical retrospect, just as the ‘contemporary’ in ‘contemporary art’ functions simultaneously as a provocation to and a shifter away from ‘the modern’). The point, as Stuart Hall later put it, was not to perfect theory in a vacuum or to analyse culture for its own sake, but to produce compelling and persuasive analyses of issues of pressing contemporary concern that could connect to and become meaningful for broader more dispersed constituencies outside the academy.

Considered from another angle, the mix-and-match approach to theory was just another take on the old modernist injunction: ‘truth to materials’, though in this case the materials under consideration in punk just happened to include, inter alia, industrial junk, plastic, safety pins, sado-masochistic paraphernalia, noise, situationist graphics, swastikas, graffiti and speed. In other words, what I was aiming at was a low-tech, thrift store version of theory – a theory-in-rags approach – built around the recycling and repurposing of disposable ready-made artefacts, socially circulating signs, canonical and ‘minor’ texts, received wisdoms and ideas and critical theories recently translated into English from French.

Detournement would be one term for what I was trying to do, though to tell the truth, I learned more about the strategy from DJ-ing and watching DJs work than I ever did from the writings of Guy Debord. DJ-ing, then in its infancy as an art form in the disco-centric 1970s was – and no doubt still is – all about manipulating time and making space. It’s about building affinities of affect, mood and tempo across the breaks and flows that link and separate different serially layered tracks, beats, musical genres, lyrical themes and melodic structures.

Detournement is usually translated into English as ‘derailment’ whereas what I was aiming at, following the logic of the DJ model, was probably closer to ‘re-routing’ or re-channelling or, even at the risk of sounding pretentious, rhapsodizing theory (rhapsodize from the ancient Greek rhapsodein: literally, to sew songs together). It was through the connection with the Shoop, a legendary if now long defunct fixture on the Birmingham underground scene, that I began developing the DJ-based ethos and epistemology which is at the centre of my second book, Cut ‘n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music (1987), the first draft of which was written in 1978 more or less concurrently with Subculture. In the spirit of the accelerated history lesson supplied by early punk (e.g. that famous Sniffin Glue fanzine motto: ‘Here’s one chord, here’s two more, now form your own band’), brevity, velocity and compression were key to both books.

The aim was to try to pack as much content, detail and as many (sometimes contradictory) ideas into a constricted (pocket book-sized) space as possible within the deadline without wasting the readership’s time, forfeiting its attention or busting its bank account (although frankly, I have always thought Subculture was way overpriced). Instead of bemoaning Generation X, Y and Z’s diminishing attention spans, it seemed imperative to some of us in cultural studies at the time to get up to speed (and down to scale) if intellectuals were to exert even a minimal influence in the kind of open-source multi-platform media sphere that even then was forming up and threatening to make over the old school public realm. Of course, that transformation of the public sphere is now so far advanced – with micro-bloggers routinely posting quote-worthy 140 character tweets on their profile pages – that Subculture and Cut’n’ Mix probably appear to today’s downloading and texting multitudes as prolix, alien and archaic as a three-inch-thick Yellow Pages.

Part of my intent in Subculture at the time of writing, whether conscious or otherwise, was to claim a new, more provisional kind of authority for theoretically informed, existentially and politically invested analysis of contemporary cultural phenomena founded, on the one hand, in an ethics and aesthetics of immersion and on the other, in an analytics of detachment. The aim was to provoke thought, not to set an agenda. The point of writing, after all, I’ve always thought is to show your readers (yourself included) how you think – not to tell them what to think.

This applies even more when ‘giving a paper’ in front of a live audience. Working with visual artists – who are often conceptually adroit and original thinkers, but also just as often wary of and resistant to academic writing and academic modes of argumentation – I set out from the mid-70s on, when I first began teaching in art schools, to integrate sound, image and performative gestures into public presentations. I feel that as intellectuals and teachers rather than just scholars standing back and commentating on culture from some imaginary position outside, we need to use all the means at our disposal to affect the culture, to influence and shape it in ways that are congruent with how we want to imagine the world in the future. That doesn’t necessarily mean dictating the way that things ought to be in any explicit sense. Instead, I think we have to do what we can to involve the audience in the act of imagining, to activate the potential of everybody in the audience to think for themselves. In the end, what it comes down to is nothing less than learning how to refigure authority – including the authority of the podium. Not to obliterate it or try to pretend the authority’s not there, because it is: we live in the age of the Ayatollahs in the West as well as the East, on TV, in press conferences and chat shows not just in the churches, synagogues and mosques. But I think we have to reposition ourselves as thinkers and speakers in relation to the authority of the podium. We need to play with and in the space of being taken seriously, to find ways to authenticate our voices outside and against the exhausted or oppressive sanctified modes of delivering the Truth.

I think that this means using the power of found sound and imagery, learning to use language not just referentially or didactically or constatively, but affectively, effectively and suggestively, finding our authority there in those modalities rather than in the imperative/command mode. I like to try to make the audience work to piece the piece together on the spot, ‘live’, in the act of audition: not because I am holding anything back consciously, because i’m not and not because the arguments I’m making don’t all add up, though, of course they don’t but rather because the loose ends are left hanging there, in part, as provocations to the audience to pick them up and run with them in directions I can’t anticipate or control.

At the personal level, like the stereotypical art student-savant I’ve just invoked, I feel ambivalent towards people who are theoretically fluent. I prefer to have whatever message I’m trying to convey secreted in the mix. Generally speaking, I can’t summarize what it is I am trying to say anyway. When I first received these invitations to speak in public in front of strangers (after Subculture came out), I felt nervous and intimidated. Why would they pay me to travel thousands of miles and put me up in some hotel to ‘deliver a paper’? I could write a paper at home, print it out and send it to the organizers through the mail. In other words, the mail man is the person who should deliver the paper. I couldn’t see what my actual physical presence would add. At the same time, I also found – and continue to find – most academic conferences not only boring but highly inefficient as communicative events. I found I couldn’t follow what people were saying at conferences, even if it was not particularly complex, because I felt so alienated from the format.

So I decided, when accepting invitations to speak in academic contexts, to ignore audience expectations and the established conventions of scholarly delivery as much as possible, and to try to invent ways of presenting ideas and making arguments that I felt more comfortable with using: slides, audio and video clips, humour, rhythm, iteration, performative gestures and varied modes of address (switching between vernacular, scholarly, ‘personal’, analytical and incantatory styles of speech). Usually (in the pre-PowerPoint, analogue era), the formats I opted for placed pressure on the technical resources of the host institutions: typically, there would be long, sometimes tense exchanges with the organizers and back-up staff about the equipment I’d need, and the fact that I prefer DJ-ing or VJ-ing it all myself from the front to outsourcing it to a technical person hidden away at the back in a projection booth. I’ve found that oftentimes organizers would claim that it was logistically and technically impossible to set up a talk in this way, which is simply untrue: it just takes preparation, commitment, a little more work and, most importantly, a willingness to improvise.

But I’ve also found in many cases that these objections mask a more profound discomfort with, or resistance, to the conceptual or categorical implications of what I want to do. Professors are not supposed to be ‘manual’ hands-on labourers, techies, DJs and so forth. Universities are the last hideout for 19th-century knowledge/practice hierarchies, and the idea of a professor coming in and moving chairs and tables around to reconfigure and modify the space, and to directly alter what can be imagined and done inside it, is still often seen as improper. So when I would do these talks I’d try to allow time for the inevitable struggle over definitions of what constitutes a ‘talk’, over who or what gets to define and control the space of the auditorium and how it’s to be used. I think these issues of control over space and the temporary occupation and seizure of institutional spaces are all too frequently neglected political issues that need to be taken on more aggressively in cultural studies pedagogy and the culture of pedagogy.

Of course, in the digital era the integration of visuals, clips and recorded sound into ‘live’ presentations of whatever kind is no big deal, but in most instances outside of art and design schools that was not the case even 10 years ago. Personally, I held out against digital technologies for as long as I could (though carrying everything on a laptop or a flash drive is admittedly a lot more convenient): I still prefer audio and videotape to CDs, DVDs and digital files, and although I now routinely use it, I have an abiding aversion to PowerPoint: it takes the edges off of rough ideas and makes happy accidents and unintended conjunctions less likely than analogue forms of information storage and collage, which are more reliably prone to interesting forms of decay. Moreover, I’m superstitious enough to believe that analogue formats still carry what I call ‘the stain of the real’: that is, that they are still contiguously magical because they possess a direct physical or spectral link to the original source of the sound or image; unlike digital, which translates the world into code before delivering it back, cleaned up as ‘pristine’ reproduction. (In fact, I believe we face a growing crisis in the collective immune system because in general, as a species we don’t eat enough dirt.) In the end, I’d prefer what I do to be seen as an extension of the interruptive traditions of performance art and video art that come out of American conceptualism in the 70s, rather than to have it affiliated with the interpretive traditions that still underpin contemporary critical work in the humanities.

The composition of these presentations and the arguments purveyed within them can be as convoluted, messy and organic as the analogue archive on which they depend. For instance, at the end of the 90s I began working on what turned out to be a trilogy focusing on mid-20th century US music and culture. The first part is about the culture of spontaneity that Daniel Belgrad argues, pulled together the US intellectual and artistic avant gardes in the mid-1950s: so it’s about Jackson Pollock, the Beats, bebop and so forth. Part 1 also included extended asides on spontaneity as a sign of authenticity in American religion, and the origins and implications of planned and gated communities (i.e. suburban and ex-urban control architectures designed in a spirit consciously opposed to the improvisatory impulse).

In Part 2 (Becoming Animal: Race, Terror and the American Roots; Hebdige, 2007a) I looked at traditional American roots music and culture in the same time-frame and analysed how and why those traditions were made over in the 1950s in and through the vernacular modernisms of country and rockabilly. It’s concerned with social dynamics and race relations in the South as they get mediated through those musics and displaced totemically onto the semantically safer ground of pets/ livestock/ wild animals/ human–animal identifications and mergers. Following Jacques Attali, throughout the trilogy I’m interested in the idea of the prophetic potential of music and in tracing the sometimes buried links between the social, artistic and political landscapes of the US in the mid-20th century and America today. The two overarching questions binding the trilogy together are: ‘How did we get from there to here?’ and ‘Is it possible to engage the apocalyptic drama of American becoming in such a way that counternarratives/alternative futures can be found, obscured but potentially activatable in America’s past?’ But that makes the process sound overly linear and abstract, whereas my work process is actually more blind, more intuitive and obsessional. I’m always driven by an immersion in the materials themselves (particular music tracks, images, video clips, etc.), so that the ideas and larger themes grow from the bottom-up and from the inside out, not from the outside in or top-down: the arguments grow out of the examples, not vice versa.

So another way of describing the genesis of the ‘becoming animal’ idea is to say that it grew directly out of a tape that a friend of mine from London, Dennis Avis, made for me some years ago. Dennis designs retro portable sound systems and collects original mid- to late 50s US rockabilly, country boogie, R‘n’B and Jamaican ska vinyl singles. He samples his collection in London pubs under the DJ alias Mr Wheely Man, using a turntable and speakers built into a tartan shopping bag on wheels with Barbie doll go-go dancers attached to springs made from car aerials slotted into the edges of the console. Dennis’s tape put a lot of the animal audio meat into the mix of that talk: everything from hard-to-find 1950s esoterica like the McCormick Brothers’ ‘Billy Goat Boogie’ and ‘Red Hen Boogie’, Bernie Hess’s ‘Wild Hog Boogie’ and the Cadets’ ‘Stranded in the Jungle’ to more well-known numbers: such as, ‘The Monkey Speaks his Mind’, David Bartholemew’s simian-identified riposte to evolution theory. I added a lot of farmyard and jungle rockabilly samples – Don Woody’s ‘Barkin’ Up The Wrong Tree’, Hank Mizzel’s ‘Jungle Rock’, the Fendermen’s version of ‘Muleskinner Blues’ and Charlie Feathers’ ‘Talkin’ ‘bout Lovin’’. Then I built in a lot of Hank Williams-era honky tonk lore, laying that against accounts supplied by Richard Peterson in his book Creating Country Music (1999) of, on the one hand, the genesis of the Grand Ol’ Opry and, on the other, the campaign launched by Henry Ford in the late 1920s to promote Anglo-Saxon square dancing and fiddle music over what Ford characterized as decadent-primitive (‘black and Jewish’) jazz and blues. Then I began splicing in slides taken from the postcards of lynchings collected in the ‘Without Sanctuary’ exhibition, ⁴ slides of paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol’s Race Riot series, photographs of snake handlers taken from Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sand Mountain (2009), video clips from Night of the Hunter (dir. Charles Laughton, 1955), the Kate Smith Evening Hour (with live appearances by Hank Williams and June Carter), The Beverly Hillbillies (with guest appearances by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs), the duelling banjos scene from Deliverance (dir. John Boorman, 1972), video footage taken at a White Holiness church service in West Virginia, and an extract from a documentary about bluegrass, which shows Bill Monroe in St Francis of Assisi mode, whispering to horses and chipmunks.

Then, after I’d given the talk about four times, I read An American Insurrection (2003), William Doyle’s account of the ‘Battle of Oxford’, Mississippi when students and white supremacists from across the US joined forces on the night of 29 September, 1962 in an attempt to prevent James Meredith, a black ex-serviceman, from registering at the University of Mississippi. Doyle mentions that at the height of the rioting, which left two men dead and necessitated the deployment, at President Kennedy’s insistence, of more than 20,000 US combat infantry, paratroopers, military police and National Guard troops, witnesses recall the bloodcurdling battle cry of the assembled racists: the rebel yell, described by one commentator as a ‘cross between a banshee wail and a fox yelp’. So I went on the internet and tracked down a recording of a ‘rebel yell’ allegedly delivered in the 1920s by a 90-year-old Civil War veteran North Carolina Tarheel, recorded by a radio station in Tennessee. I downloaded the recording and incorporated it into a new section of the talk that situates the Battle of Oxford as simultaneously the last battle in the Civil War, and the first prophetic engagement in the War on Terror waged by federal US authorities against secessionist insurgents. Now when I do the talk – though it was added at the last minute, after the event, when I had already delivered a ‘finished’ talk four times), I think of that yell as the kernel of the whole presentation: the occluded point of origin, the black hole out of which ‘becoming animal’ emerges. It is that sense of time running back on itself, finding its centre behind the curtain and off to the side, that I’m aiming at in all this work.

I think this gives a more accurate picture of how I both write and put these presentations together, through a process of immersion and getting lost in materials, letting the materials dictate the shape, tone and direction of the piece. It’s very serendipitous, somatic and passive, it involves a lot of listening and taking dictation. It also involves cooperating and collaborating with your unconscious rather than seeking to stay in charge at all costs through the willed superimposition of prefabricated structures on the immanent unfolding of found materials. There is a kind of poetics involved, though I wouldn’t want to reduce poetics either to language or aesthetics. Also, it’s about telling stories and roping in the audience by stringing serial disjunct narratives together.

So, to use an overused phrase and an overused word, my process is ‘performative’. If I were to undertake a project like Subculture today, I wouldn’t propose the hard-and-fast distinction between subcultural performance and critical art practice that I tended to promote in the book; though of course I would not flatten the distinction either. When I wrote Subculture I didn’t know much about contemporary art and: my historical points of reference were limited chiefly to situationism, Dada and surrealism. (Greil Marcus went on to trace out the links between the various 20th-century avant-gardes and punk in a systematic way in Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century.) Of course, from the early 80s onwards, we’ve witnessed an explosion of so-called ‘identity art’. A slew of contemporary artists have worked their way through every conceivable permutation of representation and personal/ethnic/sexual identity bricolage and consumption to such an extent that at certain points in certain contexts (e.g., at big survey shows such as the Whitney Biennial in the early 1990s), the two fields – critical art practice and cultural studies – seemed almost to be mirroring one another.

But this wasn’t the case in the mid-70s. In the UK we were still assimilating the impact of Pop and, to a lesser extent Marcel Duchamp and conceptual art, while at the same time, various attempts were being made by academic artists such as Mary Kelly and Victor Burgin to annex critical art practice to theory (typically via psychoanalysis). However, as far as the Subculture project was concerned, art school/art world/ like rock/pop crossovers like David Bowie, the Velvet Underground, Throbbing Gristle and Genesis P. Orridge offered more immediately serviceable models of how art and art-in-performance could mess with normativity. The ‘Prostitution’ show, mounted by Orridge and Cosi Fan Tutte at the London ICA in 1976, not only shared punk’s transgressive cut-up SeM ethic and aesthetic, it also provoked shock-and-horror headlines and questions in parliament about arts funding that fed into and amplified the moral panic surrounding the Sex Pistols, launched in the same year by Malcom McLaren, Vivienne Westwood and Jamie Reid, the artist responsible for the Anarchy and God Save the Queen graphics.

Looking back, it’s not surprising I found Dada, surrealism and situationism appealing when I was writing the book, given the emphasis that I was placing on subversion, transgression, resistance, repurposing, the de-contextualization and re-contextualization of signs, etc. Dada, surrealism and situationism got routinely classified by art historians as the last expressions of the revolutionary impulse within a now-defunct Euro-American avant-garde art tradition (though we’ll see just how permanently defunct that impulse is). Either way, I wouldn’t segregate art from subculture or (pace Alan Kaprow et al) from everyday life for that matter, any more than the European avant-gardists did. With the fracturing of the formalist hegemony in art criticism, artworks are frequently characterized as contextual, interventionist and event-oriented (categories I reserved exclusively for subcultural performance in the book).

The fact is, if pressed, I’d probably dispense with many of the structuring oppositions around which the book is organized: authentic culture versus commerce, street versus market, resistance versus incorporation, event versus media representation etc. not because I no longer believe such oppositions and distinctions remain pertinent and valuable, (I believe they still are) but because they need to be qualified, updated and elaborated. To offer a more complex and adequate account of the state of play between emergent social formations and critical art practice today, I’d feel compelled to respond to at least some of the enormous amount of work on subculture, material culture, the politics of identity and consumption that’s been published in the interim – much of it directly or indirectly challenging the starkness of the binary frameworks on which the core arguments in Subculture rest. I decided early on I didn’t want to do that: as I’ve said, the book is absolutely of its time. To undertake a similar project today would mean responding to an entirely different conjuncture.

A moment’s reflection is enough to establish that despite some superficial similarities so much in fact has changed since 1979 that we might as well be living on a different planet. In the intervening decades we’ve witnessed–to list just a few tectonic shifts–the fall of the Berlin Wall, the World Trade Center and the organized Left; the spread throughout the west of Starbucks and public smoking bans; the rise of neo-tribalism, ethnic cleansing, fundamentalisms of every stripe and the Green agenda; the global spread of neo-liberalism and volatile, interlinked unregulated and deregulated markets; the surge of the Chinese and Indian economies; widespread outsourcing from the West and North to the East and South; the mass migration of labour in the opposite directions; the advent of the internet, cellphone, iPod, iPad, the Euro, video gaming, viral media, reality TV, celebrity culture, file sharing, Facebook, Twitter, AIDS, the ‘War on Terror’ and the rise and fall (for now at least) of complex financial derivatives, sub-prime loans and beyond-our-means, easy credit consumerism. And, during those same three decades we’ve also witnessed the stabilization to permanence of punk as a fashion (or anti-fashion) statement, as a (marginally) marketable music genre, Halloween costume cliche, casual leisure option and hardcore secessionist lifestyle choice.

And of course, art itself as commodity, spectacle and event, together with the art ‘world’ that sustains and nominally contains it are no longer what they were or where they used to be either. It isn’t just that we no longer have a unitary avant-garde aggressively claiming to kick start the future. The art market has simultaneously exploded and imploded. The end of the Cold War marked the globalization of the contemporary art market and its supporting institutions. There are now more than 250 biennials and international art fairs, cannily spaced out across the calendar every month on every continent. Contemporary art now plays a key role in the place-making and place-marking strategies that cities and regions resort to as they vie with each other to build economic and cultural capital, to attract bourgeois-bohemian residents, tourist revenue and corporate investment. As a result art is now positioned very differently in relation to fashion, popular culture and a massively expanded multi-platform media sphere. It’s no longer sequestered exclusively in galleries, museums, high-concept journals, high-end glossy publications or alternative, small distribution zines. Instead, it’s plastered virally across the face of the internet and sign-savvy retail culture.

In its more spectacularly commercial iterations, contemporary art today continues to serve as both luxury collectible and mass (sub)cultural identity marker, as copyrighted images are transferred to T-shirts, hats and Louis Vuitton bags. In some of its contemporary guises, art operates more or less directly as an accessorizing subdivision of the international fashion and entertainment industries. Today, in accordance with Warhol’s ‘Business Art’ model, the names of high-profile art stars such as Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, each supported by a small army of fabricators, agents and publicists, function as the hipster equivalent of global household brands. On 15 September 2008 at Sotheby’s in London – the same day that Lehman Brothers went bust and stock values everywhere went through the floor – Hirst auctioned off, in a 48-hour period, $200 million dollars worth of his trademark pickled animals, spot paintings, dead butterfly collages and jewel encrusted skulls with bids called in from, in addition to the usual suspects (including White Cube, the gallery that represents him in London), new collectors from locations as widely dispersed as Russia, China, India and the Middle East.

Such an over-exposed contest of value and inflated scale of return is beyond anything imaginable within 1970s punk, even within the hyper-capitalist ‘Cash from Chaos’ version of punk championed by Malcom McLaren. And despite the calculated impact that McLaren and the Sex Pistols had on the 70s mediascape (to my mind, to good situationist effect), the subcultural scene I was embedded in and writing about at the time still tended to be small in scale and very local. It was heterogeneous but intimate, both exotic and provincial, intensely grounded and territorially based. It was visually flamboyant and deafeningly loud but, nonetheless, underground. The transmitting media – the looks, sounds and posters – were low tech, do-it-yourself, rough-hewn. It was image-conscious, even image-obsessed, but these were the days when Polaroid and hulking reel-to-reel video Portapacks counted as cutting-edge recording technology, and digital downloads were not even on the horizon. The milieu was, in short, the very opposite of corporate. Any branding that took place was more like horse or cattle branding than corporate branding: the herd’s common identity was marked viscerally – hot metal applied direct to naked hide.

As I remember it, English language academic discourse on the body outside the biological sciences was pretty undeveloped back in the 70s. There were the ethologists, such as the aptly named Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, doing work on animal and human body language. There was kinesiology – some ethnomethodologists, for example, were using Rudolf Laban’s notational system to do movement analysis in dance. Cultural anthropologists and coffee table book photographers had exotic ‘tribal’ body decoration/body modification sewn up and consigned to the box marked ‘Them’ not ‘Us’. Beyond the work of original thinkers like Erving Goffman, Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas and Gregory Bateson, I think the body tended to be marginalized within the social sciences though feminism of course was putting socialization and gendered embodiment centre-stage. Foucault was not widely translated into English until the late 70s. In everyday culture and in the media, tattoos and cosmetic surgery were seen as strictly minority sports. Tattoos were firmly associated with the ‘rough element’ and carried a definite carny/convict/unrespectable aura. Cosmetic surgery – outside of war zones and burn units – tended to be reserved for wealthy socialites and celebrities. Orlan and Nip/Tuck were not even on the radar.

You could say there’s been a complete reversal since then. In the past 30 years we’ve seen an enormous amount of work – both literally body-altering and critical or analytical – on ‘straight’, gay, lesbian, queer, transgender and transsexual body stylings. Taken together these transfigurative procedures (cosmetic surgeries, tattoos, piercings, hormonal and genital modification, etc.) and new theories of embodiment centred on models of biopower, the cyborg, performativity and so on, form a kind of transformational grammar capable of conjugating and securing an apparently endless array of sexual and gender ‘niche’ identities, while at the same time opening up – literally, in some cases – the (somehow always more interesting) spaces in-between. One effect of both kinds of work – the surgical and the theoretical (e.g. Foucault, Judith Butler) – has been to undermine or throw into question the very idea of heteronormativity, though at the same time, predictably enough, they’ve generated powerful counter-reactions: viz the re-naturing of traditional gender roles and the elevation of reproductive over other kinds of sex promoted by the opponents of same-sex marriage.

However, though the Culture Wars battlelines keep getting drawn at the same angles across the same polarized terrain (at least here in the US, eg. married vs. single, normal vs. abnormal, heterosexual vs. homosexual, etc.) the fact is that the sand has shifted radically beneath our feet. The old 70s binary – ‘gay’ vs. ‘straight’ (with ‘bi’ floating somewhere in-between) no longer seems adequate to the complexity of the web-dependent, western world’s exfoliating, 21st century sex-and-gender ‘lifestyle’ spectrum (which is why the word ‘straight’ needs to be put in quotation marks.) The spaces within ‘straight’ and ‘gay’, let alone between them, have been stretched in all directions. These latter interstitial spaces have been made permanently habitable by those committed to building a home inside the trans prefix – in other words, to those committed to both/and not either/or, to the exploration of whatever other transitional options may lie out there beyond what Adam Phillips calls our congenital ‘commitment to commitment’. You only have to glance at the ‘miscellaneous romance’ categories on Craigslist, or at the plethora of blogs and journals now dedicated to gender studies and queer studies – sub-disciplines that didn’t exist 30 years ago, when women’s studies and gay studies were still the new kids on the block – to see how much has changed. Moreover, in popular culture, the mainstreaming of gay and lesbian lifestyles and the popular success and visibility of ‘out’ celebrities across today’s media culture suggest a real shift in public attitudes to sexual difference .The fact that the legalization of gay marriage is now being seriously debated in a nation where less than a decade ago in some states consensual anal sex was still on the statute books as an actionable offence (and was still on occasion prosecuted as such) indicates just how much has changed. Cultural studies has played its part in helping to create an intellectual and political environment in which such legal moves have become thinkable, arguable, and hence capable of implementation.

However, once you move beyond the problematics of identity and identity politics (to which I’d add 1990s ‘identity art’), the implications for political action of an emphatic focus on sexual difference and on the body as expressive medium demonstrative statement/performance research laboratory/hyper-mutable object etc. tend to get more complicated and more mixed. While the personal remains, of course, as the old war cry has it, political, neither politics nor the personal are what they were 30 years ago. In today’s control societies the right to privacy has been abrogated. Once we shrinkwrap politics to the contours of the embodied self (or come to that, the disembodied self), however conceptually expanded or ‘post-human’ those contours may now appear to be, we are also complying with the single superordinate diktat that such societies insist upon – our ‘voluntary’ internalization of the organizing protocols, priorities and goals (including self-‘development’, self-‘discovery’, self- ‘improvement’) which, in a globally wired capitalist culture and in an increasingly literal and pre-emptively coercive way, are now routinely programmed into the workaday creative applications that are currently reshaping the psycho-social genome. The scope of that techno-corporate-governmental demand for control is now universal in its ambition, spiralling outwards and inwards from the nano through the global to the interplanetary levels. But the economy of scale that really seems to count from the interested vantage points of the multitude of monitoring agencies that cluster on the internet is the individual consumer-citizen profile: the ‘cookie-cutter’ version of the individual ‘self’ as an online construct that is updated with each keystroke, download, posting, purchase, Google search or credit application. Viewed from the dark side of the two-way mirror of the computer or cellphone screen, the gay, lesbian, queer, heterosexual, ‘straight’ or neuter ‘sexual identity’ of logged-on user represents just one of a vast array of potentially signifying bytes encoded as a single ‘character’ to be selectively exploited, tracked and traded down the line at will. In other words, I’d emphasize the vulnerability to exploitation posed by indiscriminate disclosure against the emancipatory potential of ‘coming out’.

So I’m reluctant to draw unambiguous conclusions about the cultural and political implications of the discourse explosion that’s taken place around the body and sexual identity – especially in the age of what used to be called ‘new media’. Beginning with a piece called Hiding in the Light: Youth, Surveillance and Display (Hebdige, 1988[1981]), I’ve tried periodically to rethink the stance put forward in Subculture on issues of identity, resistance, transgression, visibility etc. In that essay I talked about the snare-and-baffle game that spectacular youth subcultures engage in: how they draw attention to themselves but refuse to be read according to the Book, ‘turning the fact of being under surveillance (by parents, teachers, marketers, police etc) into the pleasure of being watched’. Twenty years later I revisited the same tension between the will to disclosure and concealment in another essay (‘Even Unto Death: Improvisation, Edging and Enframement’, 2001), this time in the context not of youth subculture, but of the differential tactics adopted by anti-globalization protesters at the 1999 World Trade Organization summit in Seattle:

In retrospect the most prophetic innovation of Seattle in terms of North American identity politics may reside less in the photogenic carnival of difference and difference-transcended – eco-pagans and bare-chested lesbians marching alongside workers in hard hats! – than in the widespread erasure of the dissident face as more and more protesters opted not for coming out but for staying out (of range), choosing masking and concealment over self-disclosure. In a battle context, the self, monitored by corporations and the state from the cradle to the grave, and reduced to a visible and legible public ‘identity’ can constitute a real impediment to liberty. With a scarf pulled up to eye level, with an alias in place of the given name . . . the new breed of activist seems intent on kicking over every trace. It would be hard to find a clearer sign of the demise, at least profound mutation of the public realm – a zone identified in modernity with political agency and active citizenship, with representation, democracy, and the resolution of conflict-in-reason – than this will to disappearance construed not as flight but as commitment (perhaps, more accurately, as both): disappearance as a logical and principled response to an environment marked on the one hand by the catastrophic merger of the cult of celebrity, neoliberal economics, and professional politics, and on the other by the unremitting surveillance by any means available of a fractal mass of citizen-consumers by State and corporate interests. (Hebdige, 2001)

Since writing this, I’ve been trying to get a clearer sense of how this all operates systemically by analysing disparate phenomena – planned communities, disaster preparedness training centres, securitization technologies, dance music and raves, stadium rock light shows, the Disney corporation, the work of Takashi Murakami – using compound neologisms such as ‘dis-gnosis’, ‘porn-etration’ and ‘sado-cute’ to try to catch in language the accelerating pace of category mutation and merger that seems to be such a distinctive part of 21st century public (private) culture and the contemporary mediascape. I’ll give a brief gloss of what I mean by each of those terms. First, dis-gnosis is a combination of the prefix dis – meaning ‘opposite of, lack of’ and gnosis, ‘of or pertaining to knowledge’ (cf e.g. dis-honest). I use the term to point simultaneously, on the one hand, to a figuration of both (extended) childhood and ‘innocence’ that seems to me to be consistent across the entire spectrum of Disney products and texts and, on the other, to that larger process of infantilization that is integral to the functioning of control societies, and is therefore global in its scope and implications.

Dis-gnosis (Hebdige, 2005), meaning the opposite of knowledge, is related to older sibling terms like ‘ideology’, mauvaise foi, ‘amnesia’, ‘dumbing down’ and ‘false consciousness’, though it’s not reducible to any of them. To quote from the essay I wrote for an exhibition of Disney-influenced art that launched me on this track in the early 2000s, the term refers to:

those culturally valorized mentalities and institutional modes of sanction which bestow a positive value on and reserve practical and professional benefits for a disposition towards awkward (or inconvenient) knowledge that resists its acquisition, that suppresses its articulation, that does not just idealize childlike states and the myriad associated simulacra that support ad infinitum the intricate machinery of not-and-never-knowing, but actively rewards states of arrested development, denial, disavowal, and unacknowledgement. ⁵

Dis-gnostic states are founded on the suppression of the base and the origin, which is maybe why the classic Disney ‘(car)tooniverse’ is organized as an avunculate oddly free of parentage, as Armand Mattelart and Ariel Dorfman pointed out in 1972 in How to Read Donald Duck, their banned-in-the-USA critique of the Disney empire. In addition, as Neville Wakefield has argued, the prevalence of twins, triplets and neuter multiples in Walt’s world – Donald Duck’s nephews, Daisy’s nieces, the three little piglets, the seven dwarves, etc. – suggests a ‘preoccupation with cloning as the form of non-sexual genesis’ that, notwithstanding the corporation’s high-profile affirmative policies on gay and lesbian recruitment (employees are referred to as ‘cast members’), has the added dis-gnostic value of guaranteeing sameness and eliminating diversity altogether.

Porn-etration (Hebdige, 2007b) is the other, ‘darker’ side of the same coin, and is joined at the hip to dis-gnosis as its evil Siamese twin. Porn-etration refers to that penetration of the public sphere by pornography via the internet that so conspicuously marks post-millennial visual culture everywhere from downloadable celebrity sex videos to the display, more or less ubiquitous throughout the western world, of lower back tattoos and ‘I’m a Porn Star’ T-shirt slogans. In an essay on the Japanese anime and manga digital imaginary in 2007, I argued that the histrionic character of early 21st-century global media culture may be attributable in part to the historical contradiction produced when the chronic boredom and epidemic wanderlust engendered by our dogged commitment to monogamy (already under pressure in a disposable hypersexualized image environment) jams up against the absolute promiscuity of contact enabled by the web. In that same essay I suggest that it may be possible that some of the most profound and contradictory transformations of contemporary culture effected by the digital revolution can be traced to sudden accessibility by the technologically literate masses, in formerly unimaginable variety and volume, of porn and its associated spin-offs: eg., hook-up sex sites. A comprehensive list of such transformations would include, in turn, the reaction against porn and ‘pornetration’: the exponentially connected rise of reactive religious fundamentalisms and the documentation and circulation on an unprecedented scale (if we bracket images of Jesus on the cross) of sadistically eroticized humiliation rituals (eg., reality TV shows from Jackass to Jersey Shore, broadcast footage of bound and kneeling hostages videotaped by masked kidnapper jihadists and posted on the web, the US National Guard’s Abu Ghraib jpeg torture-porn picture gallery, etc.). It’s tempting to date the intensification of the push beyond what Marcuse called ‘repressive’ to what I call ‘expressive de-sublimation’ that (together with the commercial bottom line) drives this process of incremental ‘porn-etration’ in all its conflicted and contradictory guises, to the 1960s counterculture, as the Right routinely do. But I would argue that that intensification really takes off with a vengeance only with punk and especially with UK punk’s insistence that rubber, speed and nasty trumps tie-dye, cannabis and nice, particularly when you stir in English class antagonism, French situationist aesthetics and traditional English fetishism and bondage. This is where the smiley face – the sanitary totem of dis-gnosis – flips over to flash its other ‘dirty’ side as infantilization gives way to naked regression.

Sado-cute (Hebdige, 2007b) merges these two ostensibly opposed but deeply linked trends (controlled infantilization/out-and-out regression/simulated ‘innocence’/virtual-voyeuristic ‘experience’. As an emergent transnational youth-fixated sensibility, and a principal libidinal driver of the Japanese digital image economy, Sado-Cute straddles both sides of the fence, playing one side off against the other: the Good, the Bad and the Pretty. Rooted in the hyper-perverse but disarmingly cute-and-creepy iconography associated with Japanese anime, and the localized ‘freaky geeky’ otaku subculture that grew up with it, the ‘Sado-Cute’ matrix has been translated along with the software on which it’s inscribed into an exportable passive-aggressive structure of feeling, the defining tactic of which is the tease: the simultaneously calculated stimulation and baffling of desire.

Sado-Cute is part of a larger techno-cultural formation that mobilizes ambivalence as weapon and as scalpel, creating in the process new pathologies and pandemics (spikes in both male and female eating disorders, breakdowns in boundary maintenance, stalking, botox and plastic surgery addictions), new bodies (both super-sized/obese/hyper-gendered/worked out/worked on and super-flattened/androgynous), a new vocabulary of ambivalence, for example: ‘frenemies’, ‘bromance’, Facebook ‘frendz’, etc. Sado-Cute signals the apotheosis of girl power, especially in post-bubble economy salariman Japan, where the traditional gender hierarchy is now so far advanced that kawaii (cute) shojo (adolescent girls, usually in school uniform) have displaced alternative figures (the farmer, soldier or corporate male office worker) as the representative surrogate for the jomin (common people). If, as I posited in Subculture, resistance was the leading vector around which the youth subcultures of the late industrial and early post-industrial period were organized emotionally, rhetorically and stylistically (i.e. the teenage rebel cluster) then ‘sado-cute’ may be part of a broader societal shift toward a less openly antagonistic, more ambivalent, accommodated disposition towards authority, commodification and self-objectification: one that is more in keeping with the deferential norms of a corporate service economy.

The opportunity for me to track how far ideas about and attitudes towards youth and youth subculture, consumerism, the power of perversion, the value of negation, the politics of insubordination, sex and love have changed in the three decades since punk burst onto the scene came in 2006, when I was invited to write an essay for the catalogue accompanying a retrospective of the work of Takashi Murakami for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. In my contribution I argued that Murakami’s project entails in part a systematic exploration of the symbiosis between the pornuscopic immersion (over-exposure), sadistic voyeurism, emotional regression and simulated innocence alluded to above. One of Murakami’s concerns, as a critic of and advocate for the otaku sensibility, is to track, analyse, accelerate and expose the converging vectors of perversion and ‘dis-gnosis’ as they play out across the meticulously crafted surfaces of otaku’s digital imaginary.

I end the section by describing Sado-Cute as an insinuative, seductive and ultimately neutering succession of moves designed to throw the viewer into what Barthes called ‘the very fissure of the symbolic in which a certain disturbance of the person occurs – a shock of meaning lacerated, without the object’s ever ceasing to be significant, desirable’ and conclude with the following paragraph:

Despite the erotic floral décor arranged around its rim, this fissure into which the viewer falls is an opening up of (our latent disavowed desire for) death or rather nonexistence, rather than desire pure and simple (although when was desire ever pure or simple?) The regressions orchestrated in Sado-Cute do not return us to some familiar scene from childhood or adolescence rendered weird through irony (as in a Mike Kelley installation) or histrionics (as in a Paul McCarthy or Georgina Starr performance) but to the place of laceration itself, the sub- or super-human space, spooky rather than uncanny, sited in the wound within the wound of culture in the floating fetal time-space before sexes are assigned: the living undead space-time behind the trauma of the origin, set back before the trouble even starts. (Hebdige, 2007b)

It occurs to me now, on re-reading this, that it’s not that different in tone at least from the stuff I wrote on the ‘blankness’ of punk in Subculture, so plus ça change. The other blast from the past there in terms of the citation, is, of course, Roland Barthes, who remains for me – in translation, thanks to Richard Howard – an abiding inspiration. Barthes continues to offer a model one can only aspire to, through his unwavering commitment to perversity and delicacy as complementary values and through his insistence on the need for writers to constantly abjure (though not necessarily to retract, still less recant), to prevent language from becoming ‘a corpse in the mouth’ (as the 1968-ers used to say) by always finding new ways of framing the enduring questions.