Reflecting on resistance through rituals 50 years on

The year was 1972. I arrived at Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS or, simply, the Centre), fresh from school teaching, glad to give up my PE teaching ‘uniform’ (my tracksuit), my English teaching ‘uniform’ (my jacket and tie), and, belatedly, grow my hair. Adopting the new scruffy denim ‘uniform’ of a 70s student, I was like a kid in a candy store: wide-eyed and excited about the prospect (although I had no idea what to expect). Although I didn’t know it at the time, 1972 was a year freighted with significance beyond my wildest imaginings. It was the year when three boys from Handsworth committed a robbery that, the following year, produced the lengthy sentences that kickstarted the project that would ultimately become Policing The Crisis (PTC). It was the year of Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland, of the closure of the Saltley coke depot in Birmingham by striking miners, of the invasion of the Olympic village by the Palestinian terrorist group ‘Black September’, and of the heaviest bombing of the Vietnam war by the US: ‘by any reckoning an extraordinary year: a year of sustained and open class conflict. . .of shocks and seizures, violence and confrontation. . .the year in which society falls into deeply polarised sections, and consensus is put into a semi-permanent cold storage’ (Hall et al., 2013: 287). My leaving the Centre towards the end of the seventies coincided with the election of Margaret Thatcher and the birth of Thatcherism, the authoritarian populist attempt to create a new consensus from these multi-faceted polarisations.

I expected to meet Richard Hoggart, but encountered Stuart Hall (who I had never heard of). I intended to study underground (or countercultural) literature, but switched topics, not once but twice. I thought I would be busy but did not imagine managing two projects in addition to my PhD, a Masters that needed to be completed to be eligible for an ESRC grant, part-time teaching in local colleges and universities, and trying not to be an absentee father to my three young children. But none of it ever felt like work in the way that school teaching did. There was no more 4G on a Friday afternoon to cast a long shadow over the week (bored college students either slept at the back or stayed away); and there was a genuine sense of being part of a community that, whatever our political and other differences, was attempting, collectively, to do education differently: more radical, not mainstream. Perhaps not quite the red base that 1968 presaged for some, but an institution thoroughly infused with a progressive sixties ethos in all its manifestations.

Part of the sixties ethos was a commitment to informality, to the abolition of hierarchies, to the democratisation of everything. One result of which was the lack of objection to Ian Connell (a fellow postgrad from the year above me) and I commandeering Hoggart’s unused office. Another was the use of students to chair meetings, select the next student intake, propose readings to be studied, and make decisions about the running of the Centre (which was one reason it took me a while to identify who was Stuart Hall since my interview and first induction meeting were both chaired by students). This willingness to trust students, in the interests of an expansion of equality, was possibly the most radical of the Centre’s achievements as an educational institution. By enabling a level of self belief and confidence to develop in the student body to a quite unusual degree, extraordinary things were made possible; like a bunch of ‘wet behind the ears’ PhD students completing Resistance Through Rituals (RTR) and PTC, as side projects to their main work, albeit under Stuart’s charismatic leadership (which had always to be shared with all the other projects, inside and outside the university, with which he was also engaged).

It should of course be added that this level of trust in students’ ability to govern themselves and participate fully in the direction of the Centre took place in the context of another crucial, and innovative, educational practice: collaboration. Although all students had their own individual projects, these were also part of a larger, common project. As Stuart Hall (1971: 6) expressed it in the first edition of Working Papers in Cultural Studies (WPCS), ‘From its inception. . .the Centre has grouped these projects in such a way as to make them part of a common intellectual enterprise. This collaborative style of work has been expressed, over the years, in seminar work on common problems and issues in the field; in collective projects to which all Centre members have contributed’. Trust, a common intellectual project and collaboration made possible what a bunch of grad students, acting alone, could never have managed.

Before I arrived at the Centre, after my teaching duties had ended for the day, I had been burning the midnight oil soaking up what I could from a mixed body of literature variously informing my proposed PhD topic of countercultural literature: books like Playpower by Richard Neville, Revolution For The Hell Of It by Abbie Hoffman, Bomb Culture by Jeff Nuttall, The Mass Psychology Of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich,The Politics of Ecstasy by Timothy Leary, One Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse, The Divided Self by R.D.Laing, The Dialectics of Liberation, edited by David Cooper, and much else besides. But I had no idea how to evaluate the messages of these books, other than subjectively. What the Centre did was enable me to think about social reality as a whole and thus be able to read more objectively. The essence of this new way of thinking is best summed up for me by Stuart Hall’s pithy formulation that cultural studies is about power and how this relates to ‘everything else’. ¹ That is, of course, one way of thinking about how to understand a conjuncture, an activity that would come to define much of the Centre’s work. Certainly the projects I came to be involved with.

My arrival coincided with Hoggart’s permanent departure for UNESCO and Hall becoming the Centre’s Director. And with this changeover, came a shift from the humanities and literature, the Centre’s original intellectual bases, to an engagement with the social sciences, especially the disciplines of sociology and history. And, given Hall’s New Left background, this entailed grappling with Marx. Whatever the particular cultural object being studied, the overriding question was how to understand better the relation between culture and society. Since, in classic Marxism, the starting point for understanding capitalist societies lay in understanding how ownership of the means of production creates a dominant class of owners and a subordinate class of labourers, the key question for understanding culture within such a framework was how to understand the mediations between the existing class structure and the cultural object/event/way of life under scrutiny? How did the former affect the latter? Or, to go back to Hall’s economical formulation, how does the existing power structure (which, for Marxists in the 1970s, still effectively meant the class structure) affect ‘everything else’ ² ?

In many ways this is the question of the social sciences: how to understand the social totality: the relation between the part and the whole; the micro and the macro; the empirical and the structural; the seen and the unseen; or, to return to Marx, phenomenal forms and real relations. The key for Marx lay in the materially-based ‘real relations’; but there was no automatic fit with ‘phenomenal forms’. How to understand this ill-fitting relation was our project, in all its multiple manifestations. In general terms, this was known as the base/superstructure problem. And Althusser’s notion of ‘relative autonomy’ - the notion that the ‘real [economic] relations’ constituting the base [the class structure] determines what happens elsewhere, at the level of consciousness or ideas [in ideology, politics, culture, the law, etc., that is, the superstructures] but only in the last instance (which, like Godot, never comes) - was a significant reworking of the issue to which we devoted much time. More specifically, the Centre’s many subgroups, like youth subcultures, the media, literature and society, were variously attempting to explore what this meant concretely: what detailed empirical research might reveal about the relationship between determination and relative autonomy in any given cultural field of enquiry.

Being in the youth subcultures group because our intended individual PhD projects were to be on something to do with youth - in my case, originally, countercultural youth - the collaborative ethos of the Centre, combined with the common project to understand the relationship between culture and society, meant that the group developed a collectively-owned, common project to run alongside the specific PhD projects of each of us as individuals. That was the origin of RTR, which was published first as a double issue (7/8) of the Centre’s in-house journal, WPCS, in 1975. Being added to one of the Open University’s Schooling and Society Course Team’s reading lists led to its publication by Hutchinson the following year, the first of what would become a series of Centre books that replaced the journal WPCS.

Although RTR was an edited volume written by many different authors, not all of whom were in the subcultures group nor, in some cases, the Centre, the book’s theoretical core, the long introductory co-authored essay, ‘subcultures, cultures and class’ and John Clarke’s chapter on ‘style’, constitute write-ups of the youth subcultures group’s common project. Taken together, they address the two perennial concerns of the Centre: the immediate, apparent, ‘phenomenal’ forms [the various postwar youth subcultural ‘styles’]; and how such forms were related to the working of the social totality as a whole [cultures and class]. In other words, we were conducting a conjunctural analysis - an attempt to understand the present moment in its full complexity: economically, politically, culturally, ideologically - using youth subcultural styles as our particular point of entry. This approach, which starts with the visible activities of particular youth groups en route to the hidden relations these signify, would later be echoed by the overlapping but not identical PTC group, although the starting point for the latter project, the activities of the state reacting to youth, was different. But both were conjunctural analyses working from particular activities to the social formation as a whole. I have said enough elsewhere (Jefferson, 2021, chapters 2 and 3) about these books as conjunctural analyses and have no wish to repeat myself here. All I would add is that, as an analytical approach, a methodology, it has broadly informed my research work since. Of course there are times when the focus is on theoretical clarification or more on one side than the other of the particular/whole equation. But it has always been an orienting assumption. ³

If the aim of such work has always been, ultimately, a better understanding of the social totality, the degree to which that is possible will depend on the quality of the examination of the particularities of the phenomenon in question: the starting point. In the case of RTR, the youth subcultural ‘styles’, a concept that included the group’s whole way of being in the world as well as their more obviously visible appearance as mod, rocker, teddy boy, etc. And the best way of understanding that is via ethnography: spending time with the group as a participant observer; participating with them in their way of life in an attempt to ’walk in their shoes’ (to gain an ‘insider’ perspective); while also maintaining sufficient distance to continue to observe them from an ‘outsider’ perspective. Interviews with some group members can add a third perspective (hence the notion of triangulation to describe the whole process) which can help clarify what remains confusing or contradictory from the other perspectives. One of the central criticisms of RTR is that our work suffered from a lack of an ethnographic dimension. ⁴ Consequently, our ‘readings’ of the various styles, whilst imaginative, were somewhat imaginary: not sufficiently based in close, ethnographic participation and observation.

I do not intend here to try to defend our particular interpretations. ⁵ However, I do want to make a plea for what I call secondary ethnography. That is, ethnography based on a close examination of relevant secondary materials: journalistic interviews with members of the subculture, published ethnographic research on the subculture, documentary materials contextualising the subculture, and so on. ⁶ In other words, the (sometimes) vast existing material on the topic which, carefully sifted, can provide a range of information and insights that may prove more enlightening than spending time in the field. This is what we relied upon a lot in RTR (and in PTC). What I think of as primary ethnography - direct, fieldwork-based research - is only as good as the ethnographer conducting it. Depending on their own life experiences, ethnographers will have blind spots: things they cannot ‘get inside’ or ‘see’. They might be too sympathetic or not sympathetic enough: either way, their judgement will be clouded. I could go on but hope I have said enough to make my point that primary ethnography is not without its limitations: is not a guarantee of a successful rendition of a particular way of life. Secondary ethnography, on the other hand, being the work of many, has a better chance of one person’s blind spots being cancelled out by a better-sighted observer. At least one reviewer (Sumner, 1981: 28) of PTC thought that our attempt to construct an imagined biography of a black youth who ends up mugging was both realistic and strongly supported by Pryce’s (1979) four year ethnographic study of West Indian lifestyles in Bristol, conducted during the same time period we were working on PTC and published a year after PTC.

Finally, I want to discuss the politics of intellectual work, in the context of the atmosphere in the Centre in the 1970s, and the idea of RTR as a political intervention in the battleground of ideas. When I first arrived at the Centre, phrases like ‘the politics of intellectual work’ and ‘organic intellectual’ were new to me. It was a time, post-1968, when the harsh law and order backlash to the various rebellions of the1960s provoked a return to conventional politics amongst those formerly attracted to Timothy Leary’s ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ mantra and the apparent freedom of the hippy lifestyle. If Jerry Rubin’s ‘Yippy’ party was made up of hippies who had been hit on the head by a police baton, as he claimed, in the UK they were more likely to join the International Socialists, the Revolutionary Marxist Group, Big Flame, a Maoist group or others all variously claiming the Marxist label. The Centre was no exception and many were affiliated to one or other of the Marxist sects, including the Communist Party, constantly revamping itself in the light of its somewhat conservative present and the long, despotic shadow of its Stalinist past.

For Gramsci, all of us are potentially intellectuals by virtue of having an intellect; but only some of us have the function of intellectuals: of thinking, organising, educating. Of these functional intellectuals, he distinguished between ‘organic’ intellectuals, so-called because of their ‘organic’ connection to a fundamental social class for whom they provided intellectual leadership, and ‘traditional’ intellectuals, those whose allegiance was to their professional or scientific function rather than a fundamental class (although no thinking remains pure and outside the class formation). So far, so clear. What complicated matters was the role of the revolutionary party. Since the party has the function of intellectual leadership of the class, its members, workers and intellectuals alike, are by definition organic intellectuals, even if not necessarily intellectual equals. Which leaves slightly up in the air the question of non-party members. Can they be organic intellectuals if they are not also party members? The truth is that it is not entirely clear. Which was why there were some differences in the Centre about whether those without a party affiliation could call themselves organic intellectuals. Stuart regarded it as an aspiration. And, if John Lennon thought a ‘working class hero is something to be’, I felt the same about organic intellectuals: an organic intellectual is something to be. But, being constitutionally a non-joiner, although some of my best friends were members of one or other of the revolutionary parties (and presumably able to call themselves organic intellectuals), I simply aspired to the label.

If such concerns seem arcane in today’s world of all the ‘posts’, there remains the issue of ‘the politics of intellectual work’. Can intellectual work as such be political? Isn’t activism at the heart of political struggle? I can still remember the taunt, of some outside the Centre, International Socialist members perhaps, selling their newspapers on campus: ‘intellectual wankers’. (Ironically, the newspapers they were selling had articles not unlike those Centre members were writing, if a little more partisan and, hence, usually more reductive.) This disdain for intellectual work (particularly marked in the British context), as opposed to their virile activism, is, of course, based on a false dichotomy: doesn’t action require prior thought about its likely effectiveness; weighing up options; thinking through likely consequences, etc.? Nevertheless it is a continuous trope within politics that is not without its effects. Am I doing enough? Could/should I be doing more? ‘Doing’ in the formulations usually signifying action other than writing. As it happens, many in the Centre were engaged in such political actions - supporting picket lines, attending demonstrations, selling radical newspapers, etc. - as well as the intellectual activities of research, writing and teaching. In the mid-70s their was a university sit-in in support of a wage claim by cleaning staff. Many of us, including myself, were participants. Each of us chose the balance of political activities and intellectual work that suited us individually. But the Centre was itself a political project; more so under Stuart’s Directorship. It involved establishing a new area of study, cultural studies, with a new, radical pedagogy: student-centred and collaboratively-focussed, not university-managed and individually-focussed. That involved constant struggles, with existing disciplines and the university administration. That was important political work to ensure the Centre’s survival. Stuart Hall explaining to the Vice Chancellor why the Centre was so involved in the occupation in support of the cleaners was political work.

However, the heart of the Centre’s intellectual work was the idea that what we were doing was intervening in the battleground of ideas: reshaping the way that youth subcultures were thought about in RTR and likewise with ‘mugging’ in PTC. In the end, this, reshaping debates in ways that demonstrated the politics behind the teddy boy’s draped jacket and the skinheads bovver boots, and the demonisation and criminalisation of youth, seemed, and still seems to me ⁷ , to be an important thing to be doing. Politically. I take comfort from the fact that Marx probably spent more time in the British Library researching and writing Capital than he did on the picket lines; and Sartre likewise, said to have written an average of ‘twenty pages a day throughout his long life’ (Hayman, 1986: 1) - much of it at his mother’s kitchen table getting through a stack of pencils each day.

Let me end where I began, with Stuart Hall, the man who, when I started at the Centre, I had never heard of. By the time I left, around the same time Stuart also left for the Open University, I had come to know him very well. As the person who ended up keeping everyone to task on both RTR and PTC, I met with Stuart often. As well as these collaborative writing projects, he was my teacher, mentor, and friend. I learned enormously from these many interactions as he was an outstandingly gifted teacher, orator and thinker, as many have attested. Central to his pedagogic style, although mentioned less often, was the importance of listening and of being generous in criticism. Both stem partly from his democratic leadership style: what I call ‘leading from behind’. By not adopting a dominant style of leadership, by allowing others the floor first, by listening carefully to what a struggling student was trying to say, by acknowledging the strengths of what was being said before pointing out problems and how these might be transcended, he enabled students to ‘hear’ what they might otherwise have resisted. And it enabled him to learn something from those less knowledgable. This pedagogic style, which I discussed earlier in terms of trust and the self belief and confidence it engendered in us students, is, ultimately, what made RTR and PTC possible. ⁸ Stuart was far too busy with his many projects, multiple speaking and writing engagements, as well as running the Centre, to have personally managed everything himself. But his belief in the ability of students to be self-governing extended the reach of his intellectual leadership and enabled the Centre, which only had one half-time staff member to assist him at that time, to become considerably more than the sum of its parts.